Michelle Moquin's "A day in the life of…"

Good morning!

Any girl who creates programs and teaches philanthropy (Stanford University), and convinces billionaires to donate much of their earnings to support social causes, is considered a Wonderful Woman of the World in my book. Especially if one of those billionaires is Zuckerberg. Anything good that keeps him from pushing his money to influence the repub party.

Reading Vogue magazine ( Yes, there are some good articles in this magazine besides, how to look chic), I discovered this write.

When Facebook and Twitter Give Back: A New Philanthropy Guru and Her Silicon Valley Mission

Philanthropy guru Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen is guiding the titans of Silicon Valley to new heights of charitable giving.

One day in the summer of 2011, Brian Chesky, cofounder of the residence-sharing company Airbnb, paid a visit to the Atherton, California, home of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The two sat by the pool discussing whether Andreessen’s firm should lead the start-up’s next round of funding. Chesky, who was not yet 30 and had gone from maxed-out credit cards to more money than he knew what to do with, mentioned that he was interested in philanthropy. “I’ve got someone for you to meet,” Andreessen said. “My wife, Laura.”

They were introduced at the Allen & Co. media-and-technology power retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho. “I have a bit of a reputation there for cornering people to talk with them about philanthropy,” says Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, who hit it off with Chesky right away. Afterward, she visited Airbnb’s San Francisco headquarters and argued that philanthropy should be fundamental to the company’s mission.

The visit struck a chord. Airbnb’s engineers developed a tool to match people who want to donate shelter with those left homeless by natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy. The company also embarked on what’s become an annual community-service project in which all Airbnb’s employees may volunteer to spend a workday cleaning up parks and schools in San Francisco. To Arrillaga-Andreessen—a Stanford lecturer who has become a philanthropy guru in Silicon Valley—it is gospel that a young, idealistic workforce wants to create social good as much as it wants perks like free meals and dry cleaning. “She’s unconstrained in her view of what’s possible in the world,” says Chesky, who intends to announce philanthropic plans of his own later this year. “Other people try to find reasons things can’t happen. Laura tries to find ways that they can.”

With gold-rush fortunes being made up and down Silicon Valley, the face of philanthropy in America is changing. The list of top gifts compiled by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, while still crowded with bequests and old East Coast families, is now punctuated by West Coast entrepreneurs and people in their 40s or younger. Arrillaga-Andreessen is the one persuading this new generation of tech tycoons to give their riches away. Look behind several of the most meaningful philanthropic gestures of recent years and you’ll find her pulling the strings. She has Chesky’s ear. She’s guided the giving of Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan; she’s close friends with Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, another serious player in philanthropic circles. A typical evening in the Valley finds her and Anne Wojcicki, cofounder of the DNA-testing company 23andMe, conspiring over drinks about how to change the world—and gossiping about sitting next to Kevin Spacey at a black-tie dinner.

“Laura has an uncanny ability to walk alongside entrepreneurs and say, ‘OK—what’s next?’ ” Powell Jobs says. “ ‘How will you link your passion and your intellect to make an even greater impact in the world?’ She does this with charm, charisma, and just the right touch of persuasion.”

Laura’s persuasive charm is on full display when I meet her for coffee in the lobby of the Rosewood hotel in Menlo Park, California. Willowy and ethereal, she is dressed in a Gucci motorcycle jacket, an Alexander McQueen dress, tiger-striped tights, and thigh-high suede Robert Clergerie boots. Around her neck are two Tiffany crosses she always wears, one a gift from her husband (“my beloved”), the other a reminder of her late mother. After settling into a seat by the fireplace, she tells me she is preparing to break it to Marc that she wants to cancel their vacation to Hawaii. “I haven’t told my beloved yet,” she says. “But what I really want to do is work.” Among her occupations: teaching undergraduate and business school classes, running Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and heading a philanthropic-innovation lab called the Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation.

Her best-selling 2011 book, Giving 2.0, distills her research and thinking. People at all income levels derive satisfaction and meaning from donating time or money, she argues. Any expression of generosity should be accompanied by an embrace of the same risk-taking ethos and analytic rigor that drives start-up culture. “Moving from Giving 1.0 to Giving 2.0 is a transition from being reactive to being proactive, from emotionally based giving to strategically based, from isolated to collaborative,” she tells me. “So it’s not so much about what you give but about mitigating the risks of time, of money, of whatever portfolio of assets you’re choosing to invest.”

Her ideas have taken on added urgency since conflict between the have-littles and the have-everythings burst into the open around the Bay Area. On several occasions this winter, San Francisco activists have blocked the path of private shuttle buses that ferry tech workers to Apple and Google. The protests aimed to demonstrate that tech workers exist in a privileged bubble, untouched by the social problems of the community at large. “Some citizens of San Francisco still see Google as extracting value, and we need to change that,” says Marc Benioff, the cofounder of the software giant Salesforce.com. In 2010 he gave $100 million to build the new UCSF children’s hospital. “That’s why Laura’s work is so important. Tech companies and entrepreneurs need to be looked at as allies and not adversaries in the effort to make the world a better place.”

It was Arrillaga-Andreessen who advised Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan—relatively recent converts to philanthropy—on their $100 million gift to education in the city of Newark, New Jersey, in 2010. Since then, Zuckerberg and Chan have become the country’s largest charitable donors, giving $1 billion to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which supports social causes in the Bay Area. “Laura helped us create a framework of how to evaluate different opportunities and how to choose the ones that were actually meaningful to us,” Chan says. “She taught me how to hone in and focus on certain changes in the world we wanted to see happen—and empowered me to say no to things that weren’t going to help us in our core mission.”

Laura and her husband have become close friends with the Zuckerbergs, who come over for regular movie nights—usually pizza and a thriller chosen by Marc. She has also grown close to Zuckerberg’s friend and fellow Facebook founder Dustin Moskovitz, who at 29 has also become serious about giving away much of his estimated $6 billion net worth. Moskovitz’s wife, Cari Tuna, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, has taken Arrillaga-Andreessen’s Stanford course. The couple’s new foundation, Good Ventures, applies Laura’s ideas on evaluation and institutional effectiveness. Unusual in the world of philanthropy, it highlights its own mistakes.

Catching the attention of young billionaires isn’t hard. Laura has an ease and informality—and her flowing strawberry-blonde hair and gray-green eyes give her the look of a Pre-Raphaelite maiden. She also stands out in a place most people come to from somewhere else; she’s a true “daughter of the Valley,” as Powell Jobs puts it. Her father, John Arrillaga, Sr., is a commercial real estate developer responsible for much of Silicon Valley’s physical infrastructure. Hers was a normal, even “humble,” childhood, she says—“one pair of pajamas, one jacket from the Sears catalog, one hour of TV on weekend mornings.” The house she was raised in was a Mission-style single-story ranch—ordinary for Palo Alto. Her first car was a $750 used Honda. She says she had no idea that her parents were wealthy until junior year of high school, when her father could no longer keep his name off the Forbes 400 list, and the story got picked up by the local paper. Philanthropy, she learned, was a family tradition. Her father, who grew up poor outside Los Angeles and attributes his success to a basketball scholarship to Stanford, began with a two-figure contribution to the university when he graduated in 1960. In 2013, he gave $151 million. The family’s name is on six buildings around campus.

Laura struggled with dyslexia as a girl and compensated by developing outsize interpersonal skills. She now calls it a gift. “I learned not to sleep much and to develop an amazing memory and absorb information in a different way than other people,” she says. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything.” Another compensating mechanism, instilled by her father, was to be furiously detail-focused and goal-oriented. She writes two-, five-, and ten-year strategic plans for everything.

Three weeks after Laura was accepted to Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1994, her mother, Frances—never a smoker—was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was 52. Instead of starting school, Laura moved back home. “My mother was my best friend and soul mate,” she says. “We were inseparable. She and I did everything together.” Frances had committed her life to community-service organizations and founded two of them herself; when she died, 20 months after her diagnosis, her daughter was deeply changed. Instead of launching a start-up, Laura turned her focus to effective giving.

She met Andreessen at a New Year’s Eve dinner in 2005 hosted by their mutual friend Greg Waldorf (who, appropriately enough, became CEO of the matchmaking site eHarmony soon after). “Marc and I talked to nobody else for the next six hours straight,” she says. She, of course, wanted to know about his interest in philanthropy, and the fact that he sat on the board of Stanford Hospital passed her test. Eight months later, they were married.

The two have much in common, including a good deal of charming eccentricity. She takes her own coffee—Taster’s Choice hazelnut-flavored instant—wherever she goes. Both have had the same favorite restaurant for years: the plastic-menu diner chain Hobee’s, where Andreessen has permanently reserved a table. They display their affection unabashedly in public. “My partner Ben [Horowitz] will tell you that I was an unhappy, grumpy, irascible character before I met Laura,” Andreessen says. “My life was pretty different.”

Laura persuaded the six partners in the venture capital firm her husband and Horowitz founded in 2009—one of the Valley’s most successful and connected—to donate 50 percent of what they earn to charity. With early investments in companies like Instagram, Groupon, Zynga, and Pinterest, that amount is likely to figure in the billions.

“She was influential in how we should think and talk about it, how it will add meaning to the things we’re doing,” says Horowitz. “A lot of it was about how to make Silicon Valley a better place to build a company. She was very good at expanding that idea and saying there are a lot of people here who aren’t in these tech companies—the people who are taking care of kids, who are cutting grass. What did we think of their contributions to what we did? She made it seem ridiculous that we wouldn’t have a pledge like that—to get six guys to give away half their money.”

Laura’s other great love is modern art: She was recently flagged in tabloid captions as Kim Kardashian’s “philanthropist pal” when the two had a private tour of the James Turrell exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. An art-history major at Stanford, she collects work by American artists from the fifties, sixties, and seventies: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman, and Agnes Martin, six of whose poetic, monochromatic paintings she and her husband own.

One of her closest friends is Pace Gallery president Marc Glimcher. The two visit museums, galleries, and art fairs together in New York and London. “She’s the kind of collector that dealers dream about,” he says. “She has real expertise, and she collects in depth. It’s not about ticking off a box. It’s about getting deep in there with what the artists are doing at the highest level.

“The art world can be debilitatingly cynical these days—you can really lose hope about what you’re doing,” Glimcher continues. “I have to say, Laura has played a big part in turning that around for me, restoring the idea that what you’re doing has real meaning.”

There are many of these “Laura changed my life” stories, not just from her husband and friends but also from former students. Several work in her office. When we arrive after breakfast, she greets everyone with a hug. “We completely blur the lines between personal and professional, and I love each one of our team members like a family member,” she says. She begins a meeting by handing out books as holiday gifts and reading a Billy Collins poem aloud. Then she serves a lunch she made herself: an avocado-and-orange salad, an organic green salad, and grilled chicken. She provides career advice for dozens of her alumni, who constitute a network of social entrepreneurs at innovative nonprofits like Kiva, Ashoka, Anjna, GuideStar, GiveWell, and Google.org, as well as the California-based Hewlett, Gordon and Betty Moore, and George Lucas Educational foundations. Still mostly in their 20s, her idealistic graduates are passionate about changing the world through philanthropy, and changing philanthropy through technology.

Over lunch, her former students discuss the use of drones for climate-change monitoring and an open-source disaster-relief model developed by the data-visualization start-up Ushahidi. One, Alexander Berger, talks excitedly about the organization GiveDirectly’s use of mobile payments to recipients in Kenya.

“What seems so powerful to me about this model is that you have the personal engagement that drives two-thirds of giving,” Laura says.

Berger enthusiastically agrees and imagines the way the model might evolve. “You can double a family’s income for $200, and they can send a text thanking you. It’s like donor crack.”

Afterward, Laura invites me for a walk around Stanford. It is a bright, cold day, and she looks like a rock star, or a very chic witch, in aviator sunglasses, a Rick Owens blistered-leather jacket, Givenchy motorcycle boots over suede leggings, and a Saint Laurent hat—all black. She shows me her favorite buildings, many of them erected by her father.

After about an hour, we end up in front of the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, a building donated in memory of her mother. She shows me the garden in back, where she and Andreessen were married in a small ceremony.

The memories of her mother are still fresh, and there’s a catch in her voice as she talks about her. “She was an extraordinary advocate for those in the community who had no voice of their own,” she says. The months she spent caring for her have remained present in her mind. “It was the greatest privilege of my life,” she says. “That was the first time that I lived completely outside of myself, completely in service of another human being. Once I’d experienced the powerful, just overwhelming beauty of living in service, I knew that I could live no other way.”

*****

Readers: If you want to find out more on Arrillaga-Andreessen, and her mission, visit her website. As Arrillaga-Andreessen states, “A philanthropist is anyone who gives anything—time, money, experience, skills or networks—in any amount to create a better world.”

What do you contribute to create a better world? Whether your impacting one life or many, it’s all important. Blog me.

Howie: Thank you. It’s good to know you have our backs.

Alycedale: Happy to hear you are doing extraordinarily well. And I stand corrected. Yes, no doubt when a man is trying to put his hands on you without consent you are an insane man hating bitch. I know I would be too.

Ingrid: Sorry you had to go through that and glad that you got your due justice. As far as the wife, in my opinion, she should’ve thanked you. One can only imagine how many other women you saved from rape from this sick sorry ass husband of hers.

In my opinion, any woman who has been put in the horrific situation of being raped and was able to kill the bastard, is a Wonderful Woman Of The World. Because once a man rapes and gets away with it, he will most likely rape again. And a dead man won’t have the chance to harm another woman, ever. I HOPE I am never faced with having to defend myself like that, but if I am, there is no way he is getting away alive.

Peace out. 

Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.

Gratefully your blog host,

michelle

Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)

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“Though she be but little, she be fierce.” – William Shakespeare Midsummer Night’s Dream 

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