Another Tech-Fueled, Multibillion-Dollar Foundation. Have You Even Heard of It?

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Between a karate studio and a shuttered dessert shop called Sweet Orchid is a Menlo Park, California, branch of the UPS Store that holds the mailbox, and main public address, for one of the largest foundations in the United States — and a case study in two notable trends in the sector.

The H&H Evergreen Foundation has a larger endowment than well-known old-money outfits like the Heinz Endowments or the Doris Duke Foundation, and it gives out much more in grants each year. Yet it has no website, no full-time staff and only the faintest of digital footprints.

It is also growing fast. The foundation reported $2.8 billion in assets in its most recent IRS filing. That increased to $4.2 billion at the end of last year, based on early data released by the IRS, and that sum has likely grown still further, given its extensive holdings of Apple stock, according to John Seitz, founder and CEO of FoundationMark. That would likely put the foundation among the top 40 largest in the nation.

H&H is among a growing set of mega-philanthropies that operate almost entirely off the radar. A prime example is Google cofounder Sergey Brin’s $3.4 billion foundation, which names a contractor’s office as its address. Listing PO boxes and bookkeepers on their tax forms has long been a common practice among smaller foundations. Yet in recent years, IP has noticed a growing number of foundations that have billions in the bank, often thanks to the tech industry, but barely any public presence, online or off. H&H prefers doing philanthropy in “a quiet way,” said Eric Hu, a foundation representative.

The H&H Evergreen Foundation is also one of a number of billion-plus-dollar funders, usually overlapping with the under-the-radar giants, that send the bulk of their annual payout – sometimes nearly every penny – to donor-advised funds. Donors like Google co-founder Larry Page, Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang and hedge fund billionaires like Paul Singer and Stephen Mandel Jr. have 10-figure operations that fall into this group. Individual DAF accounts have virtually no disclosure or distribution requirements, unlike private foundations.

Based on an analysis performed for IP by Helen Flannery, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and director of research at its Charity Reform Initiative, the number of foundations giving 100% of their grant dollars to national DAFs nearly doubled between 2018 and 2022, and the number that gave 90% to 99% rose by just over 50%. The overall numbers are relatively small — 319 and 179 foundations, respectively — but the trend has been upward and it includes big funders. Foundations that gave more than $10 million to such accounts also nearly doubled over that span, reaching 58. 

H&H’s recent giving puts it in that category. Last year, the foundation sent $183 million to a DAF at Schwab Charitable, accounting for 99% of its grants. In 2022, some $160 million went to the DAF, accounting for 89% of that year’s grants, and two years before, the DAF received 99% of its payout, or a total of $55 million. (The IRS has not publicly posted a copy of the foundation’s 2021 990-PF filing.)

Yet DAFs have not always played such a huge role in H&H’s grantmaking. Founded in 2014, the foundation used to send tens of millions of dollars annually to Stanford University, regularly cut million-dollar-plus checks to a handful of major Bay Area hospitals and service providers, and sprinkled six-figure awards across California and the nation. Yet in 2020, nearly all such grants stopped appearing on its public filings. Whether such funding is now routed through the DAF or if these gifts have now halted is unclear. 

The leader behind H&H is Duan Yongping, a Chinese billionaire tech mogul and investor, who has been one of two board members at the foundation since its 2014 launch. Attempts to identify the other board member, Xiaoyun Zhu, who receives $48,000 a year in compensation versus $0 for Duan, were unsuccessful. 

Duan is presumably also the donor behind H&H, but we can’t be absolutely sure. Nearly all contributions to the foundation have come from a complex array of holding companies, funds and charities across Hong Kong, the British Virgin Islands and China. Duan reportedly lives in Palo Alto. The situation calls to mind Wellspring Philanthropic Fund and Sequoia Climate Foundation, which count Frederick Taylor, a hedge fund cofounder, as a trustee, yet have historically received funding from LLCs. Taylor and his business partners were revealed to be major donors by a 2014 Bloomberg News investigation. 

So while the paper trail is limited, here’s what the public record can tell us about Duan and his philanthropy.

Who is Duan Yongping?

Duan has a Wikipedia page and has been called the “godfather” of China’s smartphone industry, an entrepreneur whose mobile empire “toppled Apple in China.” He also got a lot of press in 2006 for spending a then-record $620,100 to have lunch with Warren Buffett, to whom he is compared in his home country. 

Yet he generally avoids the spotlight. He has been dubbed “reclusive” by the BBC and “secretive” by Bloomberg. When the latter spoke to him in 2017, he said it was his first interview in 10 years. 

Duan made his wealth by founding BBK Electronics, which moved from the compact disc and MP3 market into smartphones. Its brands Vivo and Oppo overtook Apple in China by opening sleek stores in rural markets and offering better prices and performance, according to Bloomberg. 

Media outlets typically call Duan a billionaire, but it is hard to put a figure to his wealth. Neither Forbes nor Bloomberg include him on their lists, while the 2023 Hurun China Rich List, produced by a research agency, estimated his fortune at $1.2 billion.

That may be a severe undercount. He owns a California-based company called H&H International Investment, LLC, headquartered on Palo Alto’s Bayshore Drive. Its latest quarterly report shows $14 billion in holdings. The two biggest bets? His old competitor, Apple, and Berkshire Hathaway, the firm of his long-ago lunch date. 

H&H is not the only foundation linked to Duan. He founded the Enlight Foundation with his wife, former photojournalist Xin Liu, in 2004, though in recent years, she has run it alone as the sole board member and CEO. Enlight, which IP profiled in 2020, has funded a variety of education, voter participation, health and Bay Area causes. The foundation is based in Palo Alto, which is reportedly where the couple and their family live.

Duan and Xin have also been major university donors in China. In 2006, they donated $37 million to Zhenjian University, where Duan studied engineering, and several years later, gave $30 million to their alma mater, Renmin University. Xin is also the director and cofounder of the China-based Xinhe Foundation.

Who does H&H support? 

It is hard to say who has benefitted from H&H’s grantmaking in recent years, or even if its funds have reached working charities, since, beginning in 2020, most of H&H’s charitable dollars have been dropped in a DAF at Schwab Charitable. Such accounts are essentially black boxes, with almost no disclosure or distribution requirements.

Based on its filings, though, H&H has consistently granted millions of dollars beyond the mandated foundation minimum annual payout of 5%, which suggests it is not merely using the DAF to meet that requirement.

Among beneficiaries, data from prior years of grantmaking shows one institution stands above the rest: Stanford University. Stanford received the foundation’s single-largest award every year between between 2016 and 2019, collecting nearly $72 million, or nearly 70% of all grant dollars. 

That’s not the only family connection to the university. Xin serves as an advisory board member at Stanford PACS, which many readers will recognize as the publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The university is a top grantee of the Enlight Foundation.

H&H has just a few other major grantees. One recurrent recipient has been the Glide Foundation, a San Francisco-based antipoverty group, which has received at least $25 million over the last seven years. That includes a $19 million award in 2022, which was one of the only major grants made through the foundation in recent years. Duan’s relationship with the group dates to one of his most public acts of philanthropy: It received the money he donated in  2006 to eat with Buffett.  

Before 2020, other seven-figure checks went regularly to institutions like UC San Francisco, Lucile Packard Children’s Fund and Palm Beach-based Nicklaus Children’s Health Care Foundation.

Why does H&H send so much money to DAFs?

Hu, who is listed as H&H’s program manager and as the chief compliance officer for H&H International Investment, declined to specify why the foundation shifted to sending such a large share of funding to DAFs. But in a short phone call, he repeatedly expressed concern about the possibility of publicity for the foundation.

“Some people want to put their name on things,” he said. “We’re not trying to gain any kind of reputation. We hope to continue to pursue this kind of philanthropy without any kind of inconvenience.”

Ray Madoff, a law professor at Boston College Law School, where she directs the Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good, sees a common attraction among donors who use DAFs.

“A lot of it has to do with confidentiality,” said Madoff, who has advocated for DAF reform. “They don't want reporters writing about it and that type of thing. The problem is that it directly contravenes the structure of the private foundation rules.”

The key law governing foundations, laid down in 1969, requires them to release a list of their donors and grantees annually. That was considered a tradeoff for the substantial tax benefits that these new institutions received, which Madoff — who specializes in estate planning — said can reach 70 cents for every dollar donated. By sending grant money to a DAF, foundations can meet their 5% payout requirement — another rule established by that law — while sidestepping that disclosure. 

“Nobody prohibits people from giving privately,” Madoff said. “But… if you want to put money in a private foundation, get all the tax benefits today and have the money not come out until some indefinite time in the future — Congress doesn't let you do that, at least on paper.”

Where does H&H’s funding come from?

There are a couple constants when it comes to the entities listed as contributors to H&H: First, Duan’s name is never among them. Second, most are based outside the United States.

In the early years of the foundation, most contributions came from a Hong Kong-based entity called Apex Strategy Investment Limited, including a gift of 3,000,000 shares of Apple stock in 2016, the largest single award to the foundation. Valued at $289 million at the time, those shares — since split 4 to 1 — would be worth $2.6 billion today.

Later, donations (totaling $62 million) came from a couple charities — Thrive and Siempre — in the British Virgin Islands. Subsequent major donations ($45 million) came from two similarly named holding companies in Chang'an Town, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta. 

The foundation’s most recent large contributions ($20 million and $45 million) came from a pair of entities, Vistra Trust and Luck Come Limited, that share an address in the British Virgin Islands, according to the data from Seitz.

A variety of individuals have also granted large amounts to the foundation, including seven-figure contributions from people in both Nanjing, China, and Palo Alto, California, but none from Duan himself. 

The most likely explanation, aside from the individual contributions, is that all these partnerships, charities and trusts are controlled by Duan. But we can’t say for certain, just as it’s unclear what happens with the hundreds of millions of dollars the foundation has put in a DAF.

In sum, H&H is just the latest example of a tech-fueled foundation that is overtaking the old philanthropic guard, and using new tools to stay well under the radar. As a result, what we know about this philanthropy and many of its fellow giants is far less than their potential power and influence seems to warrant.