
Hybrids & NetSquared

I’ve been meaning to write about a John Markoff NYT piece from a few weeks back — it’s on the intersection of technology innovation & social mission. The featured company in the article is TechSoup (formerly Compumentor), and Mozilla features in the article as well.

I was really happy to see Markoff write this piece — it’s clear from here that there’s a new type of organization emerging in the world that we term “hybrid” — mission-driven companies like Mozilla and TechSoup, but who compete in the market with products and services. It seems to me that this is happening because the barriers to collaboration are falling precipitously — it’s easier and cheaper than ever to get together with a group of like-minded folks to work on changing the world. So people seem to be doing it, which is wonderful.

TechSoup is hosting the 3rd annual NetSquared Conference today (and blogging it here). The conference is outstanding, and was incredibly helpful to the PCF/Miro team last year, resulting in some long-lasting relationships.

NetSquared is a great gettogether of lots of organizations like this, and hopefully a preview of things to come, with more social mission organizations in the world. The TechSoup folks deserve a lot of praise for this sort of foresight and investment.
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