Who in Technology is NOT a jerk?

And would you believe a company can top both the jerk and not-a-jerk lists?

If a company does the right thing, they deserve recognition. And, in the Bay Area, where the profits are large and the size and number of companies are growing, influencing more companies to do the right thing could have unbelievable positive impact. So, let me tell you about AngelHack — a company that has received a lot of negative attention lately, from issues related to their former CEO.

The story begins last December, when Trevor Neilson (full disclosure: my boss) wrote an article for Huffington Post titled “The Bay Area Bubble that Must Burst.” The piece called out a couple of jerks, highlighting the narcissism and short-sightedness of Greg Gopman’s now infamous rant against San Francisco’s homeless and Balaji Srinivasan’s techno-utopia proposal called “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit.” Trevor then tweeted this:

Trevor and I work at Global Philanthropy Group (GPG), a philanthropy advisory firm. We have worked with many in the Bay Area who are passionate and dedicated to making the world a better place. So we were disappointed to see a vocal but foolish minority undermine the spirit of what both the worlds of technology and philanthropy are about: innovating to improve the world.

Within minutes of the above tweet, a staff member of AngelHack reached out with a thoughtful response, distancing themselves from Greg’s comments and outlining their commitment to social impact, including:

“All of us are inspired by social impact and the idea that we can help build a better future through technology. I’m extremely proud to work with the team we have now, most importantly being Sabeen, our current CEO, who I’ve included here.

I’m eager to hear what you think we can/should do, as we’re in the process of planning an event we’re calling Hack for A Cause in order to learn more/educate about homelessness and potential technology solutions more in depth.”

It was a nice email, and they probably could’ve stopped there. But they didn’t. Following this exchange, we connected the AngelHack team with Mark Horvath, a filmmaker, storyteller and documentarian who himself was formerly homeless, and works to change attitudes and opinions about homelessness through social media and film (watch the trailer for his latest documentary here).

Just three days later, the AngelHack team (pictured here) joined Mark to learn more about the issue of homelessness and to meet with local organizations providing services to people experiencing homelessness in Silicon Valley, including including EHC Life Builders.

We also continued the conversation with AngelHack about how to leverage hackathons (their core business) for good. We had just finished working on #CHIMEHACK, a hackathon created by Gucci’s CHIME FOR CHANGE campaign (hosted at Twitter HQ), designed to build mobile apps to support girls and women, so we had lots to discuss.

Even prior to the Greg Gopman debacle, AngelHack had a track record working on cause-related hackathons including Opportunity Hack and #Hack2Help. On January 15th, they asked us to join them at a “Code for a Cause” roundtable, where they invited local community members and nonprofit leaders to discuss how a hackathon could help create change in San Francisco. Since then, Code for Cause has initiated a project where they will be pairing developers with nonprofits that need tech support.

More and more tech companies, large and small, are emerging with business models that integrate philanthropy into the core of what they do. Another interesting example is the Salesforce Foundation’s 1/1/1 Pledge, which invites companies to pledge to donate 1% of their time, 1% of their product and 1% of their equity to social change. While a one-size-fits-all model doesn’t makes sense for every company, it’s great that these efforts seek to integrate philanthropy broadly across the tech sector. And if more American companies followed the 1/1/1/ Pledge, we would all feel the difference.

So thank you AngelHack. I hope to share more such stories in the future. It speaks uniquely to the power of mediums like Twitter and other technology platforms to connect corporations, nonprofits and general do-gooders— who may otherwise never have found each other— to partner up and create change. Email us with your story if you think it would inspire others.