What did the Rockefeller Foundation do to help launch IAVI?
The concept of public-private partnerships in the health area really hadn’t gone very far by the early ’90s. The foundation really believed having a private sector point of view was critical to what they were doing. Veteran biotech venture capitalist Paul Klingenstein was working with the foundation then because they were trying to bring in private-sector people to think about how that might intersect with what was going on. But it was clear with this particular problem that one needed to bring the public and private sectors together to solve it, so we began the process of trying to think through that. The foundation was supportive of it as a big concept, but also was quite concerned and cautious about doing it because it was a new area. So we did a very thorough workup of the issues around it – holding meetings, putting out reports, getting consensus from a large number of people – before we finally launched it. And the foundation’s role in all of this was to be the convener and to fi
