Josh Birkholz

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.”

See NY Times article here

Scientists are developing a computer that can read vast amounts of scientific literature, make connections between facts and develop hypotheses.

To be useful, a computer would need to trawl through the literature in the same way that a scientist would: reading the literature to uncover new knowledge, evaluating the quality of the information, looking for patterns and connections between facts, and then generating hypotheses to test. Not only might such a program speed up the progress of scientific discovery but, with the capacity to consider vast numbers of factors, it might even discover information that could be missed by the human brain.

Read the article here

We are entering an era of personal analytics where we can take control of our own data, display it in a dashboard, and use it to inform better life decisions, according to Martin Blinder, founder and CEO of Tictrac, speaking at Intelligence Squared’s If Conference.

Read more here

(via careeralchemist)

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