An Open Letter to the Bay Area’s Business Community

This month, The Sobrato Organization was named among the Bay Area’s Top Corporate Philanthropists for the 14th consecutive year. We’re grateful and proud, but the ranking was never the point. The region is.

We are living through one of the most transformative wealth-creation moments in the Bay Area’s history. The AI companies going public this year — and the founders, executives, and employees who built them — are generating prosperity at an unprecedented pace and scale.

The Bay Area’s prosperity is extraordinary — and extraordinarily uneven. Last year, our region captured $126 billion in AI venture funding, roughly 60 percent of global AI investment. Yet over one in four Bay Area working families, approximately 27 percent of households, struggle to cover basic needs, and 98 percent of those households include at least one working adult. AI will continue to widen that divide unless this generation of leaders chooses otherwise.

What concerns us most: at the very moment the need is greatest, many funders are pausing or worse, disinvesting from the communities where they prospered. For nearly 70 years, The Sobrato Organization has demonstrated that business success and community investment reinforce one another. Our family business has powered three generations of philanthropic commitment with over $1.7 billion invested in this region. We hold fast to a simple conviction: achieving success in a place carries a responsibility to that place. You can’t thrive in a region you’re not invested in making stronger.

We’ve learned that responding to what our local communities truly need, and remaining accountable for outcomes over decades works. We’ve also proven that partnerships scale impact, which is why we invested in the Bay Area Housing Innovation Fund, a public-private partnership that is accelerating affordable housing across the region; why our collaboration with Tipping Point Community is helping prepare Bay Area workers and families for an AI-driven economy; and why we’ve stepped up alongside Silicon Valley Community Foundation to champion the Community Lifeline Fund, helping local nonprofits sustain people’s access to food, healthcare, and shelter as federal support recedes. No single institution can do this alone.

So, to the founders, executives, investors, and employees creating unprecedented wealth in this moment: one of the most consequential decisions you will make is how you invest in the communities that made your success possible. We’re asking you to step forward boldly and invest where you live, where you built your companies, where your employees live, and where the effects of this transition are already visible.

The Bay Area’s next great achievement should be proving that extraordinary technological advances can create extraordinary opportunity for everyone who calls this region home.

We invite you to join us in building that future.

This letter was originally published in the San Francisco Business Times and the Silicon Valley Business Journal.