A Look at Venture Capitalist Burt McMurtry’s Bay Area Philanthropy

Burton J. McMurtry was a Silicon Valley venture capital investor whose firms supported companies like Microsoft, Visio, Synopsys, Sun Microsystems and SpectraLink. He was also known for serving on the Stanford University board of trustees and for being committed to higher education and the arts. He passed away in 2018 at the age of 83. Years earlier, in 2003, McMurtry and his family created a charitable foundation, largely to support organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here are some details about the McMurtry Family Foundation to guide Bay Area nonprofits, since this funder has very limited transparency and accessibility.

Four top categories of focus

McMurtry was a longtime supporter of Stanford University and funded work at the school across a wide range of subjects from engineering to the arts, medicine and economic policy research. Even now after McMurtry’s death, higher education continues to be a top cause for this funder, and not only at Stanford: The Berkeley Engineering Fund is a recent recipient of McMurtry grants.

The arts have always been important to the McMurtry family — the founding couple loved classical music and visiting local art fairs. They backed the Stanford Arts Advisory Council, Cantor Arts Center Bing Concert Hall and the McMurtry Building for the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford. Recently, the foundation supported the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archives.

Aside from these two main focuses, the foundation has also awarded grants to health and human service organizations. It recently supported the Canary Foundation, which works to advance early cancer detection solutions, and CareMessage, which uses technology to help safety net organizations provide basic services to people in need.

What gets funding and where

The McMurtry Family Foundation frequently supports the same familiar organizations year after year. Most recent grants have been in the $10,000 to $200,000 range. The foundation often awards grants for general operating support to nonprofits and institutions that have close connections to family members.

Annual grantmaking totals are typically just under $2 million per year. Although the foundation is based in Venice, Florida, giving is mostly centered on the Bay Area of California. Local grantees are based in San Francisco, San Jose, Menlo Park, Stanford and San Carlos.

Approaching the foundation for support

Even for groups in the Bay Area, McMurtry can be a challenging funder to establish a relationship with. The foundation doesn’t have a website and maintains a low public profile. According to recent tax records, it does not accept unsolicited requests for grants and only funds preselected organizations. McMurtry family members, mostly based in California, serve as foundation trustees, but there is no full-time staff at the foundation.

Read more about this foundation and others that give locally in IP’s Bay Area and Northern California grants for nonprofits guide.

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