Word: valley
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...started this revolution is a beefy football jock who dropped out of college because he didn't think he was learning enough. Kirila grew up working the family farm in the shadow of the struggling steel mills of Pennsylvania's Shenango Valley, 60 miles north of Pittsburgh. He was as fascinated by manufacturing as some teenagers are by cars. In high school he was devising weight machines for his football teammates. An injury sidelined him in 1984, and he dropped out of Youngstown State University to get into the fitness-machine business. With a $500 deposit from a customer...
Pittsburgh venture capitalists wanted nothing to do with it. Despite Kirila's charisma and his successful start-up, they saw in him a college dropout from a depressed steel valley. He faced an age-old paradox: his idea was too big to get funded, but he couldn't prove its worth unless he had the millions to start building stuff...
...still the highest level in 28 years. Why? For many years, the multimillionaires of the booming technology industries didn't feel very secure in their newfound wealth and weren't at a point in their lives where they thought much about their legacies. Now that's changing. Silicon Valley CEOs, along with other newly rich Americans, are finally stepping up to the collection plate. And just as they've transformed American business, members of this new generation are changing the way philanthropy is done. Most are very hands on. They do lots of research before giving. They demand accountability...
Clark is critical of some of his Silicon Valley brethren who haven't been as generous, despite their multibillion-dollar net worth. He hopes his gift will spur other tech billionaires to action, particularly Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, who don't discuss specifics of any giving they may have done--and who Clark believes have been too frugal. "These guys actually ran the Yahoo servers out of Stanford," says Clark. "They should be giving something back. These guys are young, but they've got more money than me. Or take Larry Ellison; he should be doing more...
...company, wearing their Sears suits and begging for an investment from clench-jawed venture capitalists wearing Brioni: there is a version of this scene in the founding myth of almost every tech firm from Sun Microsystems to eBay. Venture-capital financing is as embedded in the culture of Silicon Valley as integrated circuits and $750,000 tract houses. So perhaps it's not surprising that this form of financing--and its results-oriented assessment of potential investments--has made its way to the nonprofit sector...