I spent this past week at the SOCAP conference. Aside from being in beautiful San Francisco, the conference brought about some unexpected results. Or to speak in the parlance of the conference, it paid some excellent dividends (oh yes, I’m very versed in VC speak now. Ha!) I attended the conference because the Bush Foundation paid for a number of us who were selected by a committee from SOCAP to attend. It’s certainly the kind of thing that I would never have invested in for myself. Initially, I was overwhelmed by the size and scope of the conference–nearly 3,000 attendees from all over the world with many people working on…