Marc Andreessen just talked about donating $27.5 million to Stanford University’s hospital (where my son was born, where Maryam’s mom had brain surgery). I have a video with one of the doctors at the hospital who also works in IT there. Inspiring people all around and great work is done there — the research that’s done there is shared around the world because it’s a teaching/research hospital.

Does this donation affect lives? Very directly. Thank you Marc and Laura, you could have taken this money and done plenty of other stuff with it. I’ve seen other rich geeks in the valley buy yachts, or expensive homes around the world, or other such toys that really don’t give back much, if anything, to the world. This directly impacts tons of people and the learning that gets done there will make an impact around the world.

Last night I was at the Tech Museum’s award show, where they honored geeks around the world who were making a major difference to communities through their technology developments. Very inspiring. Hope to have some videos up soon about that show on PodTech (we were a media sponsor).

One thing both of these do is to challenge me to do more. I don’t have $27.5 million. I’m not a technologist. But, I can donate some time. Say 40 hours by the end of the year.

Where would you donate 40 hours of time? I’d like to bring Patrick along too to teach him there’s more to life than the next cool tech product that’s coming out.

I’m thinking of helping out a food bank with its Thanksgiving meals. What do you think?