Things got busy at One Degree, and we’re just now getting a chance to talk about our experience in Y Combinator’s Winter 2014 batch. (For our friends who don’t know what YC is, it’s Silicon Valley’s premier startup accelerator typically for for-profit ventures, but they admitted a few nonprofits recently.)

At Y Combinator’s Demo Day, the capstone event, some of our batchmates raised millions of dollars in a matter of hours, and, in contrast, I’ve had long drawn-out conversations with the same foundation for over two years. But at heart, the for-profits and nonprofits are more similar than different.

It was an exhilarating experience pitching in front of an amazing room of hungry investors and press, and we felt like fish out of water. As part of the first batch of nonprofits accepted to YC, we were promoting our solution to break the cycle of poverty, while our for-profit peers were pitching technological services that could someday make billions of dollars. Both challenges are monumental.

Imagine being a part of a group of over 150 type-A, competitive overachievers (our batch) and regularly getting access to some of the best technical and business minds of our generation. YC was an incredible experience because of this level of access. It was access to support, advice, and people we never would have interfaced with in the nonprofit sector. YC didn’t treat us nonprofits any differently than our for-profit counterparts, and we also held ourselves to the same standard as for-profit businesses.

Being in YC helped us grow our user base and learn from them because YC encouraged us to focus all our energy on our users. We spent dozens of hours in the community talking to our users — which I loved!

We also joined YC to help raise the funding we need to prove and scale our solution. We’re borrowing some of the same concepts as our for-profit brethren. We like that, in the for-profit world, founders raise money in a time-limited round, and then get back to work. We want to get back to work as quickly as possible, too, and so we’ve launched our own “philanthropic seed round” — our goal is to raise enough funding to keep our organization going for the next 12-18 months. This way we’ll be able to prove our concept here in San Francisco, scale our service to impact 100,000 families all across the Bay Area, and pilot earned income strategies so that our organization is on the path to sustainability.

A lot of the conversation around inequality in the Bay Area has pitted the tech sector vs. everyone else. It’s true that the tech sector needs to do its part because our ecosystem and society are deeply interconnected. (Check out our recent mention in Kim-Mai Cutler’s comprehensive TechCrunch article about the Bay Area Housing Crisis.) Our YC experience shows that we can leverage the intellectual and social capital from the tech sector against breaking the cycle of poverty.

I think YC’s modest $17K investment in nonprofits is a good first step (and we’re glad they’re investing more for future batches). It’s just the start of the conversation, and I believe we’ll begin to see the social sector and the tech sector working together more meaningfully to solve our society’s most intractable problems.

We’re excited to be part of this conversation as YC continues to pour its energy and resources into innovative nonprofits.