Silicon Insider: High-Tech Philanthropy

Nov. 19 -- There are times when you are ecstatically happy to be wrong.

For years, the knock on high-tech entrepreneurs has been that they are cold-blooded misers. That they are classic self-made men and women, who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and believe they owe neither society nor good fortune any credit. That they will never donate a dime to charity until they are old, guilty and bored.

This has proven to be quite an enduring myth, one to which even most of us in Silicon Valley have long subscribed. I've done my own share of stories over the years comparing today's high-tech tycoons to the Robber Barons of the past — the Carnegies and Vanderbilts and Rockefellers — who either became philanthropists to buy a last-minute ticket to heaven, or put off the charitable work to the softer second generation.

Counter-examples, when they appeared, were often written off as cynical exercises by the rich and powerful to recruit employees, stave of union organizers or distract the Justice Department. Thus, employee stock options, which created more wealth than all the government programs in history, were seen merely as a clever hiring and retention tool. Ditto with company scholarship programs.

When a company like Applied Materials kept scores of local charities and arts programs alive with its donations and loaned executives, or when hundreds of high-tech companies donated tons and tons of items to the Second Harvest Food Bank, or when numerous Valley executives wrote checks to save crippled local United Way… well, that was just good PR after all, a clever investment against future zoning violations or property tax hikes.

Lately, however, it's getting harder and harder to buy into the old myth of Tightwad Tech.

Hewlett and Packard's Prediction Comes True

Before they died, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard warned us cynics that we were wrong. And, as with most things, we should have taken their wisdom to heart.

Hewlett, as it happened, was asked a few years ago why, given that he and Dave were among America's greatest and most admired philanthropists, hadn't their Silicon Valley successors fallen suit.