Broadcom Corp. co-founder Henry Samueli, who helped launch the Irvine high-tech company while on leave from teaching and quickly amassed a $4-billion fortune, announced Tuesday that he and his wife are giving a record $20 million to UC Irvine's engineering school.
Samueli and his wife, Susan, also are handing over $30 million to UCLA's engineering school, the second-largest single cash gift to the university that granted him a leave from teaching so he could help launch the successful chip maker.
"It's payback time," Samueli said. "UCLA has been very understanding about my starting a company. I hope to help promote the next guy who is going to start a Broadcom."
Samueli's donation reflects a growing trend among the technology elite who are shedding their stingy reputations and beginning to approach civic duty with the same entrepreneurial spirit that made them billionaires.
For Samueli--whose net worth has exploded from "comfortable" in 1995 to more than $4.3 billion today--such philanthropy also represents smart business. The UCLA and UCI engineering schools are two places where Broadcom competes for top engineering graduates.
Over the last five years, Broadcom has lured 80% of the electrical engineering graduates of UCLA's integrated circuits group to its Orange County headquarters.
In exchange for the gifts, the highly ranked UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science and UCI's School of Engineering will bear Samueli's name. Both schools will offer Samueli scholarships to undergraduates, Samueli fellowships for graduate students and endowed Samueli chairs to perhaps a dozen of the most promising faculty.
UC Irvine, often overshadowed by such education powerhouses as Stanford and UCLA, is emerging as a little-known hot spot for turning out good engineers. Broadcom and cross-town rival Conexant Systems Inc. of Newport Beach both recruit heavily from there, and Silicon Valley companies are starting to follow suit.
"[The schools] have become an amazing, untapped resource of talent," said Terry Holdt, chairman and chief executive of Entridia, a small chip maker also in Irvine. "For years, everyone else was running straight to Stanford. But people are starting to understand that there's a lot of very talented people right here in Southern California."
Samueli's interest in helping UCI is shared by Broadcom co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III. Earlier this year, the company's gregarious chief executive gave $1.28 million to UC Irvine's Intercollegiate Athletics Department to support the crew program.
