Most American private schools still raise money the old-fashioned way: silent auctions, annual giving, and a yearly gala with canapés. A handful of Silicon Valley institutions have quietly built something more powerful.
The model that started it all
Saint Francis High School in Mountain View originated the approach. A $15,000 pre-IPO investment in Snap returned $34 million when the company went public in 2017. The vehicle is called the growth fund, and it was seeded in the 1990s by two parents in the venture capital industry who contributed roughly $250,000. Today the fund is overseen by investors from Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Meritech Capital Partners, Sequoia, and Lightspeed.
Barry Eggers, co-founder of Lightspeed Venture Partners, has chaired the advisory board for years — even though his own children graduated long ago. The fund invests in roughly 10 companies annually at $25,000 to $50,000 apiece. Eggers estimates cumulative lifetime returns at roughly $50 million.
'We look a lot like an early stage VC fund,' Eggers said. 'With a little bit of growth investing mixed in.'
The structural edge
The economics are unusually clean. Volunteer investors donate their time and deal flow. There are no management fees and no carried interest. 'We're volunteering our time, and we're not taking any carry,' Eggers said.
Because Saint Francis and similar schools are 501(c)(3) nonprofit entities, they pay no capital gains tax on returns — a structural advantage that a typical fund cannot replicate. Net returns are therefore likely higher than what a conventional vehicle would produce on identical investments.
Crystal Springs joins the model
Crystal Springs Uplands School, a 569-student private day school on the peninsula between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, has adopted a similar structure with its Crystal Growth Fund. Brian Talbott, the school's chief financial and operating officer, said the fund was conceived by a parent who proposed the structure. 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 portfolio that includes mutual funds, treasury bills, and equities.
'They are providing access for us that we likely would not have otherwise,' Talbott said.
Parents at venture firms can donate money directly or direct small portions of their personal investment allocations in deals to the school — a pipeline that a traditional endowment office could never replicate.
The IPO window reopens
Timing matters. SpaceX's June debut on the Nasdaq — described as the largest IPO in history at a valuation north of $2 trillion — signaled that the era of massive tech companies staying private indefinitely may be ending. Anthropic and OpenAI are widely expected to follow into the public markets. For schools already holding pre-IPO stakes in companies of that caliber, even a modest check written years ago could produce a windfall on the scale of the Snap trade.
CEO Times take: This is free enterprise working exactly as it should — private capital, volunteer expertise, and zero taxpayer subsidy producing outsized returns for institutions that serve their communities. The model asks nothing of the administrative state and owes nothing to it. What it does demonstrate is a principle the broader nonprofit world would do well to study: when you remove fees, remove bureaucracy, and align incentives around long-term results, capital compounds. The gala is optional. The deal flow is not.
