Sponsors for Educational Opportunity San Francisco went on to serve five to seven times as many Bay Area students after its board brought in new leadership. Jean-Pierre Conte sits on that advisory board. He wrote about the change in a June 2025 column for Forbes Business Council.
Jean-Pierre Conte is the founder and managing partner of his family office, Lupine Crest Capital, and has decades of experience in private equity. His column opens with a line from that world: “Modern businesses have a primary goal: Maximize shareholder value.” For a nonprofit, he argued, the equivalent is impact, judged by the quality of its services and the number of people it reaches.
A Leadership Change at SEO San Francisco
SEO Scholars San Francisco was founded in 2011. Bay Area students receive eight years of mentoring and support that carries on once they reach college.
At one point, new leadership was brought in. The decision, Conte wrote, “wasn’t an easy call.”
Big donors shouldn’t sit those moments out, in his view. They’ll be involved in decisions like that one, he wrote, and they’ll want to be.
Investment Habits Applied to Giving
“As with any investor, no matter how much money you have, capital is always finite,” Conte wrote. “Spreading capital around without a vision significantly reduces the impact one can have on meaningful causes.”
Look hard before committing, he advised. He told readers to study an organization the same way they’d study a company they were about to buy. “Just like with investing, a smart philanthropist should always do their due diligence.”
“I also look for organizations where I know that I can have an outsized impact on furthering a specific mission,” he wrote in the Forbes column.
Why Education Comes First for Jean-Pierre Conte
Education sits at the top of his list. “My interest in education is rooted in my family’s story,” Conte wrote.
Conte is a first-generation college graduate himself, and he has supported Bay Area programs that help students reach and finish college.
What Donors Who Track Results Report
Sixty-two percent of the donors the 2025 Bank of America Study of Philanthropy classifies as experts track how effective their giving is, compared with just 20% of affluent donors overall, and 76% of those experts said their giving was having its intended effect, compared with 40% of affluent donors as a whole.
The study was produced with the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. It found that affluent volunteers gave about two and a half times as much as donors who didn’t volunteer.
How Jean-Pierre Conte Measures Long-Term Support
Conte came back to education in another column. One of his recommendations to business leaders: “Focus on systems, not individuals.”
Results should be tracked well after the first gift, he urged, from graduation rates and employment to how careers progress once students leave college.
He has also pushed executives to show up in person in addition to writing checks. “A single conversation can change someone’s perception of what’s possible,” he wrote.
Jean-Pierre Conte’s philanthropy column includes this line: “As a donor, I believe hands-on involvement and insistence on measurable outcomes are the foundation of maximizing impact.”
