Daniel Petre says he knows exactly what many old, rich men in Australia – his words – think of him. “They reckon I’ve given up on venture capital because I got too old, or it got too hard,” he says. “They think this is some kind of weird little thing I’m playing at . . . they just don’t get that I’m as passionate and energetic about this as any job I’ve ever had.”
Petre, a former executive for Bill Gates at Microsoft and then for Kerry Packer, last year scaled back his role at Airtree Ventures, the venture capital fund he co-founded in 2014. And the weird little thing he’s playing at? His long-running campaign to boost the amount that wealthy Australians give away to charity – sometimes by cajoling and sometimes outright shaming, crunching the numbers to show how the growth in philanthropy in this country is not keeping pace with the growth in wealth.
