Laura’s rethinking

CULTURE & SOCIETY

by THE OLBIOS TEAM

Ms. Arrillaga-Andreessen wants to expand the definition of the philanthropist to include people who give time or expertise, not just money. She also argues that philanthropy should be more professional, by borrowing strategies like research and evaluation from Silicon Valley’s profit-making businesses. These strategies include using technology to make things more efficient, inventing new ways to do business and financing nimble upstarts. As you already know, the tech super-rich have indeed been giving their money away for a while. Early tech entrepreneurs, like Bill Hewlett and David Packard of Hewlett-Packard, Gordon Moore of Intel and Bill Gates of Microsoft, started big and influential foundations. The tech boom of the late 1990s spawned new types of giving, like commercial philanthropic investing, practiced by the Skoll Foundation and the Omidyar Network, both started with eBay money. The eBay Foundation was formed with pre-initial public offering stock, a groundbreaking idea at the time; the Salesforce.com Foundation now earns its money by selling discounted products to nonprofits and schools. The newest generation of entrepreneurs is more philanthropic while they are young, thanks largely to Ms. Arrillaga-Andreessen’s work. The concept of younger people giving while living has come a lot more to fruition in recent years. And today’s tech entrepreneurs are looking at other new ways of giving, including by marrying their professional and philanthropic activity in a way that previous generations did not, said Ms. Arrillaga-Andreessen, who teaches philanthropy at Stanford. Zynga, for example, has given $10 million to nonprofit groups from the sale of virtual goods in its games. With Groupon s G-Team, nonprofits can raise money or recruit volunteers using the same model that businesses do to sell coupons. Certainly philanthropy goes on all over the country, but it doesn’t tend to come from entrepreneurs so much as established families who have inherited wealth or bankers. Silicon Valley is unique in its sense of the world and how to use entrepreneurial activities to make it better. Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen_homepage Web site:http://laaf.org/

 

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