Everyone's drooling over new donors. Carlson said the grantees he'd interviewed saw old and new givers as apples and oranges. Bill Somerville, president of the Philanthropic Ventures Foundation, remembers he made a speech about grantmaking and risk taking at Stanford's business school, and a student commented that his talk sounded just like a venture capitalist's lecture a few days earlier. The phrase was born. That was in 1985.
Venture capitalists take great risks, and they expect great returns.
The same should be true for foundations. Seems to me it will be a two-way street for a while. Let's keep the momentum going.