Crystal Springs Uplands School, a 569-student private day school located on the peninsula between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, still plans to throw a gala this year, but it isn\u2019t the main draw for raising money. The fundraising, increasingly, comes from somewhere else.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Crystal Springs is one of a small but growing number of Silicon Valley private schools that have built what amount to miniature venture capital funds. The funds are capitalized with donations from the school community, guided and overseen by parent-investors from well-connected firms such as Lightspeed, Notable Capital, and Sequoia, and are aimed at early-stage, pre-IPO companies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The approach was originated by Saint Francis High School in Mountain View, where a $15,000 pre-IPO investment in Snap returned $34 million when Snap went public in 2017. Nearly a decade later, with the IPO market heating up, a handful of schools are sitting on private portfolios whose value won\u2019t be known until the companies go public or have other liquidity events.\u00a0<\/p>\n
SpaceX\u2019s June debut on the Nasdaq\u2014the largest IPO in history at a valuation north of $2 trillion\u2014signaled that the era of massive tech companies staying private indefinitely may be ending. Anthropic and OpenAI are widely expected to follow SpaceX founder Elon Musk into the public markets. For schools with pre-IPO stakes in companies of that caliber, even a small check written years ago could produce the kind of windfall that Saint Francis saw with Snap.<\/p>\n
By any measure, we\u2019re a long way from a bake sale.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A mini VC fund<\/h2>\n
The mechanics are fairly straightforward, although the access and expertise required to make these funds work are anything but. A school sets aside a small pool of capital\u2014donated from parents or alumni, and never drawn from tuition revenue or the operating endowment\u2014and a committee of volunteer investors vets potential investments and decides how to proceed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At Saint Francis, the vehicle is called the growth fund. Barry Eggers, co-founder of Lightspeed Venture Partners, has chaired the advisory board for years, even though his own children have long since graduated. The fund was started in the 1990s by two parents in the venture capital industry who contributed about $250,000 in seed money. Today, the fund is overseen by more than half a dozen investors from firms including Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Meritech Capital Partners, and Sequoia, as well as Lightspeed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a mix of people who have early stage and late-stage deal flow,\u201d said Eggers, \u201cAnd we put it together, and we built a fund.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eggers generally asks each member to bring one deal a year. The fund invests in roughly 10 companies annually at $25,000 to $50,000 apiece. He estimates the fund has seen roughly $50 million in cumulative lifetime returns, but like other trustees and school officials, he declined to share specific investments.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe look a lot like an early stage VC fund,\u201d said Eggers. \u201cWith a little bit of growth investing mixed in.\u201d<\/p>\n
The schools have a major advantage over a typical fund because the time and treasure required to man the investments are donated. Most venture funds have management fees and pay investment professionals a share of the profits\u2014known as \u201ccarried interest,\u201d or \u201ccarry\u201d\u2014that\u2019s based on long-term returns. \u201cThere are no fees and carry here,\u201d said Eggers. \u201cWe\u2019re volunteering our time, and we\u2019re not taking any carry.\u201d<\/p>\n
And because Saint Francis and other similar schools are 501(c)(3) nonprofit entities, they don\u2019t pay capital gains tax on the returns, meaning their net returns are likely higher than what you would see in a typical fund.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Crystal Springs has adopted a similar structure with its Crystal Growth Fund, said Brian Talbott, the school\u2019s chief financial and operating officer. \u201cWe\u2019ll take the money that the donors have given us and invest it through the parents\u2019 or alums\u2019 funds into those pre-IPO investments,\u201d said Talbott.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Parents at venture firms can also donate money or direct small portions of their personal investment allocations in deals to the school. The Crystal Springs fund is only a few years old, conceived by a parent who proposed the structure. According to Crystal Springs\u2019 public records, through fiscal 2023, Crystal Springs held no private investments. By June 2025, it carried approximately $1.75 million in private equity investments out of a total $61.1 million that includes investments in mutual funds, treasury bills, and equities. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey are providing access for us that we likely would not have otherwise,\u201d said Talbott.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Menlo School, a private college-prep school in Atherton with about 800 students, has its own version of the model. The school\u2019s most recent 990 filing, covering the year ended June 30, 2025, shows a Menlo Venture Capital Endowment comprising approximately 36 individual investments in venture capital partnerships and early stage companies. The MVCE totals less than $1 million\u2014a fraction of Menlo\u2019s $122.6 million endowment\u2014invested through established managers and the school\u2019s 23-member investment oversight board. The board includes school leaders and trustees from Bessemer Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, and Sobrato Capital.<\/p>\n
For the schools, the expertise among the parents and alumni are key. Jason Curtis, president of Saint Francis, notes that he is an educator, not an investor. \u201cThat\u2019s not my skill set,\u201d said Curtis. He relies on the committee to vet investment deals, although he meets regularly with the group and school leaders and stays abreast of their investment agenda. (Saint Francis is a nonprofit but the IRS classifies it as a subordinate, which means it doesn\u2019t file 990 reports.)<\/p>\n
Curtis\u2019s focus is on where the returns go and how the program can benefit students, teachers, and the school community. The primary needs are tuition assistance for families that need it, which always gets the largest share; compensation for educators, including bonuses that help teachers afford to live in Silicon Valley; and innovative new programs or facility improvements, Curtis said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The mini VC fund approach also creates a bridge between the companies the schools are investing in, the VCs sourcing the deal flow, and students who might be interested in learning about the entrepreneurship and investments that happen in Silicon Valley. Curtis has brought students into growth fund meetings, and invited the portfolio companies to campus.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe opportunity to expose our students to people in business they might never meet, or might not know anything about, is really remarkable at this age,\u201d said Curtis. \u201cAnd then to actually have students interact with them is enormously important.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Saint Francis Snap investment is now Silicon Valley lore. In 2012, the Saint Francis growth fund invested $15,000 in Snap at Eggers\u2019 urging. His firm, Lightspeed, had been one of the company\u2019s first outside investors, and he noticed his own children sending snaps on the app. When Snap went public in March 2017, the school\u2019s stake was worth about $34 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSnap was an anomaly\u2014a happy anomaly\u2014for us,\u201d said Eggers. \u201cWe made over 2,000 times our money on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Simon Chiu, who was president of Saint Francis at the time, stepped into what he described as a fortunate inheritance. The school\u2019s leadership quickly agreed the bulk of the Snap windfall would go into the endowment and a dedicated pool was drawn up to fund retention bonuses for teachers. Saint Francis also recently completed a multi-million capital campaign that included gains from the Snap investment.\u00a0<\/p>\n Courtesy of HMC Architects and Saint Francis High School<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n One of the major barriers to replicating the venture-fund-within-a-school approach is that schools run on annual budgets while venture returns often follow a J-curve with years of negative cash flow before positive gains emerge. \u201cIt could be five years, it could be eight years before you see returns,\u201d Eggers said. \u201cA lot of schools find that hard, because they have to focus on the here and now.\u201d<\/p>\n The institutional challenge requires thinking in chunks of decades rather than school years. \u201cIt requires a lot of patience,\u201d said Curtis. \u201cAnd the truth is, all of us as schools, we have immediate needs.\u201d<\/p>\n And of course not all investments pay off. Eggers noted the system isn\u2019t perfect, but said the point is to take calculated risks\u2014which is why the checks are relatively small.\u00a0<\/p>\n The second barrier is the deal flow itself. Committees need access to high quality, vetted investment opportunities, which means they need access to some of the most successful VC funds.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf a deal is good enough for Sequoia, Meritech, Battery, Mayfield, or Lightspeed, then it\u2019s good enough for Saint Francis,\u201d said Eggers. The peer group is its own control, but it also makes the model easier to replicate in metro areas that have reputable firms like Los Angeles, New York, Connecticut and Chicago.\u00a0<\/p>\n The VC approach is part of a broader shift in private schools\u2019 fundraising practices. Some have begun moving away from annual event-based fundraisers like galas, said Laura McGarry, managing principal at the nonprofit fundraising consulting firm Graham-Pelton. The return on investment for galas\u2014which are expensive to put on\u2014is significantly lower than other forms of fundraising, and it often requires one or two staff members spending a significant portion of\u00a0 their time working on the event, instead of focusing on education. Schools are also reckoning with the signal a high-priced ticket to a gala sends, when all members of a community can\u2019t afford to attend.\u00a0<\/p>\n Crystal Springs, for instance, has turned to a once-yearly ask from donors to help fundraise for the school, noted Talbott.\u00a0<\/p>\n Schools aren\u2019t the only nonprofits reaping gains from IPOs. When Figma went public in July 2025, the largest selling shareholder was the Marin Community Foundation, a Bay Area nonprofit focused on affordable housing that had received about a third of cofounder Evan Wallace\u2019s shares before the offering. The nonprofit made $440 million at the IPO.\u00a0<\/p>\n None of the investments in Crystal Springs\u2019 nascent portfolio have yet gone public, said Talbott. He declined to name the companies the school has invested in but acknowledged that some may be approaching the public markets. \u201cSome of the investments are likely closer to potential IPOs than others,\u201d said Talbott.\u00a0<\/p>\n Eggers said schools from the East Coast to Los Angeles have called asking how to replicate the Saint Francis model, and others schools in the Bay Area have explored it.\u00a0McGarry has seen the most interest in New York and Connecticut, where a higher concentration of families work in finance and private equity.<\/p>\n Eggers tells all of them that opportunistic one-offs like Snap are great, but the real value comes from building something permanent, particularly as more companies stay private for longer.\u00a0\u201cI\u2019m talking about trying to build a fund that is ongoing,\u201d said Eggers. \u201cThis is a way for high schools to take advantage of that, and really participate in it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Forget #gala #Silicon #Valley #schools #run #venture #capital #funds<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most American private schools … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2118,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1696,1683,3109,2247,4170,37,4172,473,65,2488,4171,3592,771,3593,3100,889],"class_list":["post-2117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-capital","tag-charity","tag-education","tag-forget","tag-fundraising","tag-funds","tag-gala","tag-philanthropy","tag-run","tag-schools","tag-sequoia-capital","tag-silicon","tag-silicon-valley","tag-valley","tag-venture","tag-venture-capital"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"exterior](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/SFHS_3445011000_N11_HMCArchitects_ac7eb2-e1786485588771.jpg?format=webp&w=1440&q=100\"\/)
<\/div>Patience pays off<\/h2>\n
Waiting for companies to \u201cgraduate\u201d in an IPO\u00a0<\/h2>\n