Philanthropy

Amy and I just funded all of the unfunded DonorsChoose projects in Alaska as part of the annual DonorsChoose #BestSchoolDay event. As part of the #BestSchoolDay program, your donation is matched. In all of the Alaska projects, Aspect Ventures matched our donation. Huge thanks to Jennifer Fonstad, Theresia Gouw, and team! Amy grew up in Alaska and we have a house in Homer, which is what motivated us to support Alaska this year on #BestSchoolDay. As I was supporting projects, I saw one in Homer and a few Sphero and littleBits requests which made me smile. ...

A little over a year ago I wrote a post about a feature film Amy and I were helping fund called For Here or To Go . The movie is about a set of Indian software developers in the US on H1-B visas. The main character wanted to start a company, or join a startup, but couldn’t make either happen in the context of the current H1-B visa constraints. It felt relevant when we helped fund it. It seems even more relevant today. It’s an excellent movie and my punch line from the blog post a year ago was: ...

Over the weekend, our Monthly Match for the National Immigration Law Center raised over $47,000, . For everyone who contributed, thank you! In the emails I got, one stood out. It pointed me at an Indiegogo campaign for a documentary done by American Muslim Storytellers . The timing of the email was particularly good as I had just read a Washington Post Story about American Muslims raising money to repair vandalized Jewish cemetery. ...

Fred Wilson , Joanne Wilson , Amy , and I are doing our second Monthly Match. This one is in support of the National Immigration Law Center . We will be matching $20,000 of contributions that our respective communities make to NILC. We’ve made it easy to contribute – simply go to this page on Crowdrise . Any level of contribution is super helpful. Since we are matching 1:1, each dollar you contribute gets NILC another dollar. ...

One of the philanthropic activities that Amy and I have been doing is helping fund documentaries around issues that we care about. A breakout documentary from 2015 was CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap . We got to know Robin Hauser , the director and producer, through the process and thought she was awesome. When she told us last summer about her new documentary called Bias, Amy and I jumped on the opportunity to be the executive producers. The sizzle reel is out and was shown at Mark Suster’s Upfront Summit. Take a look (click through to watch on Vimeo.) ...

Sunday morning Fred Wilson put up the following blog post: A $20,000 Match Offer On ACLU Donations Today . Joanne Wilson put up a similar post titled A $20,000 Match Offer On ACLU Donations Today on her blog. It came after a flurry of emails that started with one from me at 7:41am. “Inspired by Chris Sacca, Amy and I are considering doing an ACLU grant with a 100% match” ...

I recently joined the Defy Ventures board . If you aren’t familiar with Defy Ventures, here’s a post that I wrote after my first prison trip with them at the end of last year. Early this morning, on my run in Melbourne as I tried to shrug off jet lag, I listened to a Reboot podcast that Jerry Colonna did with me and Cat Hoke, the CEO of Defy Ventures , a few weeks ago. ...

Several months ago I agreed to be part of a funding campaign for Gaza Sky Geeks. This is an organization that we had previously supported through the Techstars Foundation , which is how I was introduced to them. The goal was simple – provide enough funding for a generator for the organization. I can’t remember what the first goal was, but I think it was around $60,000 total. The support for this effort has been awesome and the campaign has expanded as it blew through the original $60,000 goal. The handful of initial supporters has expanded to a now impressive list, that includes recent support from Marc Benioff . ...

In September, I joined the board of Kauffman Fellows . If you aren’t familiar with the Kauffman Fellows Program, it recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. I was around at the beginning, spending a day a month in Kansas City with the Kauffman Foundation as an entrepreneur-in-residence when the program was originally created by a team at the Kauffman Foundation to identify, develop, and network the next generation of global leaders in the venture capital industry using a two-year apprenticeship program. In 2003, it was spun out of the Kauffman Foundation into a separate non-profit but, at the 20th reunion in Kansas City, the Kauffman Foundation made a new gift to the Kauffman Fellows Program to accelerate the midwestern venture capital ecosystem . ...

When I woke up this morning, I wondered which non-profit that I should highlight today on #GivingTuesday . After reading Sallie Krawcheck’s article in Fortune titled A Letter to My Daughter, Post-Trump , I immediately decided the organization of the day is Path Forward . Fundraising Websites – Crowdrise Path Forward began as a program at Return Path, a data-solutions company with more than 500 employees in 12 offices around the globe. The company’s CTO, Andy Sautins, came up with the idea of an internship program aimed at women who were interested in returning to work after a career break. The program began in 2014 with just one participant. Under the leadership and guidance of Cathy Hawley, VP of People, the company brought in six women in January 2015, four of whom were hired. The program expanded later that year to include a larger cohort at Return Path and also to bring in partners who also wanted to create return to work programs. The first partners were PayPal, SendGrid, ReadyTalk, Moz, and MWH. Along with Return Path, these companies assembled a cohort of nearly 40 women and men. From this, the idea to create a nonprofit focused on bringing return to work programs to even more companies was born. ...