By Lily Mae Lazarus
Publication Date: 2026-08-13 10:42:00
Good morning. Reporter Lily Mae Lazarus pinch hitting here today for Andrew.
Apparently, the PTA has a better portfolio than you.
Silicon Valley private schools are trading silent auctions for cap tables with a handful of Bay Area campuses now running miniature venture funds steered by parent-investors from Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Battery. The programs have become somewhat of Silicon Valley lore, Fortune’s Amanda Gerut writes. Saint Francis High School’s parent-run growth fund turned a $15,000 bet on Snap into roughly $34 million at IPO.
With SpaceX just pulling off the biggest IPO in history and Anthropic and OpenAI widely expected to follow, these school funds could be sitting on the next windfall.
Here’s what else moved tech and money today.
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Nvidia wants your pension fund in the AI trade
Nvidia announced partnerships this week with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to build financing platforms aiming to mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure—with the cash coming largely from “third-party investors” rather than Nvidia’s own balance sheet. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed it as treating AI compute like “productive infrastructure,” even offering residual-value support of up to 25% on some deals to sweeten the pitch.
Wall Street mostly likes it—Morgan Stanley and Bank of America both called Nvidia’s chips unusually…
