Gambling on Education
An oil-company founder places a bet on Denver’s needy students
By Ben Gose
Denver
Tim Marquez co-founded an oil company, Venoco, with $3,000 in 1992, and turned that investment into a personal fortune now worth more than $500-million. He discovered a profitable niche by milking oil fields that bigger companies had all but abandoned, used the implosion of Enron to buy 100 percent of his own company on the cheap, and successfully fended off a lawsuit from the firm that employs the activist Erin Brockovich.
Mr. Marquez (pronounced “Markus”) attributes his business success to “calculated gambles” — and he’s now using that philosophy in his philanthropy. Last November, he and his wife, Bernadette, both 48 years old, pledged 2.5 million shares of Venoco stock (currently worth more than $40-million) to the Denver Foundation to start the Denver Scholarship Foundation, which promises to provide full tuition college scholarships to low- and lower-middle-income students who graduate from Denver public schools.
He also has put an equal number of shares in the Marquez Foundation, and the newly established family foundation is expected to support a variety of charities, although it has yet to make its first grant.
If the scholarship fund is as successful at creating a college-going culture in Denver as Mr. Marquez and education leaders here hope it will be, the fund will eventually spend $20-million per year. The foundation will need an endowment of $200-million to $400-million to support the grants.
Filed under: Community Assistance, Connecting Neighbors, Education
