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MobileWorks was one of the few companies that joined YC with an explicit social agenda tied up with our commercial goals. Our idea's always been that you can
by anandkulkarni 14y ago
MobileWorks was one of the few companies that joined YC with an explicit social agenda tied up with our commercial goals. Our idea's always been that you can get much higher-quality results than Mechanical Turk by treating people better, paying more fairly, and focusing on the worker -- the opposite of Turk's anonymous high-volume approach.
Still, it's funny to see how surprised crowd workers are when they first find a crowd platform that takes their interests into account more than Turk, even through small steps like maintaining a friendly community of workers and a gentle onboarding process. One guy told us that "going from Mturk to MobileWorks is like going from a seedy motel to a 5-star hotel".
- rdl 14y agoPretty awesome that YC will fund businesses which both have a commercial goal and a social agenda. IMO that's more useful than pg et al donating a percentage of their carry to charity (although that's great too). Of course, the businesses have to make sense commercially as well, but MobileWorks doesn't seem to have a problem with that.
- anandkulkarni 14y agoI expect they're used to this. Successful businesses in YC often have hugely positive social outcomes even if it's not part of their initial value proposition: Airbnb has helped folks earn enough to avoid losing their homes, Ridejoy reduces atmospheric pollution, etc. For us, it was fortunate that the commercial opportunity was directly linked with our social mission -- doing the right thing by workers makes more business sense in crowdsourcing than treating people anonymously and paying them lousy wages.