Orlando Bravo Gives $100 Million for Entrepreneurship in Puerto Rico

San Francisco financier Orlando Bravo is putting $100 million into his family foundation to develop a number of programs to support Puerto Ricans who want to start their own businesses and to promote entrepreneurship on the island more broadly.

Bravo co-founded Thoma Bravo, a private-equity firm in Chicago and San Francisco that invests in technology services and software companies. He was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, and still has family there. He came to the U.S. mainland as a teenager, attending high school here for a short time, and then returned to Puerto Rico to graduate. He returned to the mainland to attend college, earning two bachelor’s degrees from Brown and law and business degrees from Stanford.

The programs Bravo plans to develop through the foundation will primarily focus on helping young people out of college start technology-related businesses since that’s his area of expertise, he said in an interview with the Chronicle. He added that the foundation is open to considering other types of businesses as long as they have some kind of technology component, which in today’s world, said Bravo, is not unusual.

“The main criteria is how much can we help them and how much will their business help the local community in Puerto Rico,” said Bravo.

Fostering Talent

The first of the programs the money will back is Rising Entrepreneurs, an effort starting this summer that will support early to midstage technology entrepreneurs who are far enough along to create successful technology companies in Puerto Rico.

The program will encourage business creation among recent college graduates and young professionals of Puerto Rican heritage who are already living on the island or who are willing to move there. It will initially focus on technology service or product-development efforts and the fundamentals of how to run a business. The foundation will provide seed money, and Thoma Bravo will offer mentoring and other assistance through the Bravo foundation’s office in Mayagüez.

“We want to foster entrepreneurship in individuals, particularly on the western coast of Puerto Rico, where I grew up,” said Bravo. “I see the innate talent, skills, and vitality of so many young people who thirst for opportunity but are held back by poverty and debilitating macroeconomic forces. By identifying, funding, and mentoring entrepreneurs, we will help lay the foundation for long-term economic success on the island.”

Giving Spree

Bravo has been on a giving spree lately. In April, he contributed $25 million to Brown to start the Center for Economic Research and enable the university’s economics department to expand its data-driven research efforts. Bravo earned bachelor’s degrees from Brown in economics and political science in 1992.

Through his Bravo Family Foundation, he gave $10 million in October 2017 to help survivors of Hurricane Maria, a massive storm that hit the island that September. The grant established Podemos Puerto Rico, a program that created a supply chain from the U.S. mainland to transport supplies via air and sea to the remote western coast, where survivors’ needs were greatest.

That program also provided ongoing support to Puerto Ricans long after the initial recovery period. At the time, Bravo’s parents lived on the island, and he couldn’t reach them for several days.

Lack of Investment

Bravo said he decided to devote such a large sum to his latest philanthropic effort because Puerto Rico doesn’t get a lot of philanthropic investment.

“We started the foundation for Maria relief; that’s what got us into philanthropy in Puerto Rico. It was the catalyst,” he said adding that once relief efforts were winding down he started to think about a permanent way to help Puerto Ricans over the long term.

He said he decided the best way he could create and foster a more just society on the island would be to use his expertise in a way that could help talented young people, regardless of their background, start their own businesses and help them become profitable.

“I come from the world of private equity,” he said, “so I thought why don’t I use what I’ve learned buying 200 tech companies and apply that expertise and know-how to help talented college graduates.”