Venture Capitalists Are Investing in Educational Reform
Venture Capitalists Are Investing in Educational Reform
Venture capitalists of Silicon Valley, who have backed hundreds of high-technology entrepreneurs, are eagerly financing a new group these days: schoolmasters.
"We give education entrepreneurs money to start or to speed up building their companies," said L. John Doerr, who over 26 years has helped start dozens of ventures, including Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com and Google. He help found the New Schools Venture Fund in San Francisco six years ago for a new breed of entrepreneur — the kind who doesn't have to produce a profit.
Unlike Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm where Mr. Doerr is a partner, New Schools does not earn the standard three to five times its investment in five years. It earns nothing, because it is "a philanthropy held accountable by the rigors of venture capital financing," as Mr. Doerr describes it. The financial professionals of the fund oversee the business operations of the schools it backs.
Recipients of the fund's investments are not whiz kids eager to become the next Bill Gates. Mainly, they are public school teachers with a passion to improve the ways poor children are taught. The companies they form are nonprofit charter school management organizations, capable of running publicly financed elementary and secondary schools that are freed from some rules and regulations in exchange for producing educational results better than those of the large urban school district. Almost all their students are eligible for free or reduced-price breakfasts and lunches...
posted by Whitney Tilson at 11:38 AM
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