Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, who founded and runs a foundation that advises and educates people on philanthropy, took the stage to say that this generation has a unique opportunity and approach to philanthropy given its entrepreneurial mindset.
“There’s this convergence with a new generation of entrepreneurship and a new generation of social consciousness,” she said at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. “We’re seeing that business models and philanthropic models are not mutually exclusive.”
Arrillaga-Andreessen, who teaches at Stanford, has a course on philanthropy at Coursera and has written a book on philanthropy called “Giving 2.0,” said she describes a philanthropist as “anyone who gives anything — time, resources, expertise, networks, influence, passion or money — in any amount.”
“In today’s world, there is an extraordinary spectrum,” she said.
Arrillaga-Andreessen is a born-and-bred native of the Valley. Her father John Arrillaga is arguably the Silicon Valley’s most important commercial real estate developer, is one-half of Peery Arrillaga, the firm that built out many of the low-slung office parks that became home to the region’s biggest giants of the 1970s through 1990s. (Today, however, these suburban office parks face-off against older buildings in San Francisco that are adaptively re-used as tech offices for companies like Twitter, Square and Uber.)
Her husband is Marc Andreessen, who has made the pledge to give away at least half of his lifetime earnings as a venture capitalist along with Andreessen Horowitz’s other general partners.
She says that the youngest generation of tech companies include “social good as part of their business models.”
Arrillaga-Andreessen advised Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan on their $100 million gift to the Newark school system, which was criticized for its lack of effectiveness by a piece in the New Yorker earlier this year. She says she was involved in the decision to make the gift, but not its actual deployment.