Josh Birkholz
Posting on analytics, technology, visualizations, fundraising, and other unrelated things I find interesting like Doctor Who, sci fi wierdness, crazy new ideas, and interesting people.
Author of Fundraising Analytics
Principal at Bentz Whaley Flessner
Founder of the analytics group donorcast
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HAS EVERYONE SEEN THIS
NO
WELL THEN WATCH IT
#amymeetsabed -
This GameFly Commercial is too HILARIOUS!
A MUST WATCH!
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Game Of Thrones
i like games like this
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If you were a successful young entrepreneur, what percentage of your net income would you give to philanthropic causes?LAURA ARRILLAGA and Marc Andreessen are practically a royal couple around here. But when they met, on a New Year’s Eve date in 2005, Ms. Arrillaga didn’t care that Mr. Andreessen had made a fortune in Silicon Valley.
She cared whether he was giving money away. “One of the first questions I asked him on the night we met was what he was doing philanthropically,” she recalled.
Not your usual flirtation, but also not your usual romance. She is the daughter of a real estate billionaire and ended up marrying an almost-billionaire: Mr. Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape.
Yet the question she posed that evening still resonates. She is encouraging tech titans like her husband to become as famous for giving money as they are for making it.
Stars here often get rich in their 20s, but the tech industry over all has been criticized as being stingy when it comes to public charity. Some executives, like Bill Gates, wait until they retire to become active philanthropists. Others, like Steve Jobs, may not give much publicly during their lives. And while there is evidence that the valley is more philanthropic than it seems, Ms. Arrillaga-Andreessen, 41, says more could be done.
“The word ‘philanthropy’ brings up an image of somebody who’s had an illustrious career, has retired and is giving to highly established institutions that may or may not have ivy growing up their walls,” she says. “I personally have felt the need to give philanthropy a reboot.”
While attending the Stanford Graduate School of Business, she created a business plan for an organization that would teach philanthropy and make grants using strategies borrowed from the venture capital industry. The group, SV2, now has 175 donors who have financed 35 early-stage nonprofits over 13 years and last year gave away almost $500,000.
Ms. Arrillaga-Andreessen has taught a Stanford class on strategic philanthropy for 11 years and is on the board of her parents’ foundation. She started a center at Stanford to connect academics and nonprofits, and this fall published a book, “Giving 2.0: Transform Your Giving and Our World.”
