John Arrillaga Sr., the actual property developer who bodily reworked Silicon Valley into tech workplace parks from orchards and become a big donor to Stanford College, died on Monday in Portola Valley, Calif. He was once 84.
His daughter, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, introduced his dying in a submit on Medium. His circle of relatives declined to quote the motive.
Beginning within the Nineteen Sixties, Mr. Arrillaga evolved Silicon Valley’s bucolic farmland right into a sprawling community of company campuses. On the time, the semiconductor business was once starting off within the Santa Clara Valley, with firms like Intel rising as temporarily as they may to find structures to enlarge into.
To satisfy that call for, Mr. Arrillaga and his industry spouse, Richard Peery, purchased up 1000’s of acres of farmland round California cities together with Mountain View, Sunnyvale and San Jose. Even earlier than they secured tenants, they created trends of low-slung concrete structures that had been affordable and simple to construct.
They in the long run built greater than 20 million sq. toes of industrial actual property. Lots of the ones trends housed tech firms, amongst them Intel, Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Google.
Mr. Arrillaga and Mr. Peery become billionaires as the worth of the houses soared. Forbes pegged Mr. Arrillaga’s web price at $2.5 billion.
Because the tech business grew and Silicon Valley’s inhabitants multiplied, some citizens started voicing opposition to construction. A number of of Mr. Arrillaga’s tasks bumped into hindrances: Citizens protested the peak of proposed 100-foot workplace towers in Palo Alto and disagreed with the positioning of a brand new library in Menlo Park.
Later in lifestyles, Mr. Arrillaga additionally bodily reworked Stanford, which he had attended on a basketball scholarship. He donated cash for over 200 tasks and structures on the college, together with no less than 9 structures and rooms bearing his circle of relatives’s identify and 57 scholarships. In 2013, he pledged $151 million to the college, the biggest reward to Stanford from a unmarried residing donor.
Mr. Arrillaga was once born on April 3, 1937, in Inglewood, Calif. His father, Gabriel, was once a certified football participant who later become a laborer in a Los Angeles produce marketplace. His mom, Freda, was once a nurse.
In 1955, Mr. Arrillaga enrolled at Stanford, the place he studied geography. At 6 toes 4 inches tall, he captained the basketball crew whilst juggling jobs to hide his bills.
After graduating in 1960, he in short performed skilled basketball — in step with an editorial in Fortune, he was once at the roster of the San Francisco Warriors for 6 weeks, despite the fact that there’s no report of his having gotten right into a recreation — earlier than going into industrial actual property.
In 1966, he and Mr. Peery began the actual property company Peery Arrillaga. Their partnership lasted 5 a long time. In 2006, they offered round part in their 12 million-square-foot portfolio for $1.1 billion to an actual property funding department of Deutsche Financial institution.
In 1968, Mr. Arrillaga married Frances Marion Cook dinner, a 6th grade instructor and fellow Stanford graduate. They’d two kids. She died of lung most cancers in 1995. In 2003, he married Gioia Fasi, a former attorney from Honolulu.
She and his daughter continue to exist him, as do his son, John Jr.; two sisters, Alice Arrillaga Kalomas and Mary Arrillaga Danna; a brother, William Arrillaga; and 4 grandsons.
Mr. Arrillaga’s ties to the tech business become even nearer in 2006 when his daughter, who’s a lecturer on the Stanford Graduate Faculty of Trade, married Marc Andreessen, a challenge capitalist and a founding father of Netscape.
Mr. Arrillaga started making small donations to Stanford simply after graduating. Through the early 2000s, his donations to the varsity, basically to its athletics division, had soared to over $80 million. In 2006, he gave $100 million to Stanford, which was once the biggest sum by means of a unmarried donor till he eclipsed that along with his 2013 donation.
For 30 years, Mr. Arrillaga rebuilt and gave cash to the majority of Stanford’s athletic amenities, together with Maples Pavilion in 2004 and Stanford Stadium in 2005 and 2006. The Arrillaga identify is ubiquitous on campus, discovered at the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Middle, the Arrillaga Circle of relatives Eating Commons and each campus gyms.
Mr. Arrillaga, who have shyed away from media protection and avoided interviews, evolved a name for consideration to element in his building tasks.
Whilst rebuilding Stanford’s soccer stadium, “he decided on each and every unmarried palm tree, labored out the most efficient shape for each and every structural part and created his personal designs for the seating,” Ms. Arrillaga-Andreessen wrote in her Medium submit. She added that he was once recognized for “in my opinion choosing up each and every unmarried piece of trash he noticed and rearranging unmarried stones in fountains around the campus.”
