Many early dot-com boom winners have gone on to use their enormous financial gains to make their mark on philanthropy. That includes major billionaire founders we’ve all heard of, but also extends to early employees and investors who got in at the ground floor. For example, there’s Nick Hanauer, the first nonfamily investor in Amazon, and Rao Remala, Microsoft’s first South Asian hire, who focuses on work in India and stateside.
When Jeff Wilke joined Amazon in 1999 to oversee operations, the company was doing about $2 billion of revenue a year. Today, Amazon makes over $1 billion in revenue per day. Like the Remelas, Jeff Wilke and his wife Liesl, an author and playwright, are also philanthropic givers, having established the low-profile Wilke Family Foundation in 2007.
In a recent year, the foundation held more than $50 million in assets and gave away over $2 million. The Wilkes recently made our list of Seattle area philanthropists to note, with an interest in areas like education and disease research — particularly Lyme disease — a condition that Liesl Wilke has struggled with for more than a decade.
I recently caught up with Liesl, just back stateside from London after launching a new musical. In our conversation, I found out more about how the couple first decided to formalize their philanthropy in the aughts, their personal interest in causes like STEM education and health, their commitment to give the majority of their wealth to charity, and how the couple’s two daughters are becoming more involved in the future of the foundation.
A Princeton start: How the Wilkes met and ended up in Seattle
“Normal,” a play by New Jersey-born Liesl Wilke, tells her story of living in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the wake of busing and other social changes in the 1980s. She says that she and Jeff both came from upper-middle-class families, but also ones that fractured, which affected them economically. Liesl ended up working all through high school and college to fill in the gaps and landed back in the Garden State at Princeton thanks to scholarships and fellowships. Jeff, who she met on campus in the late ’80s, has a similar story, she said. The two soon married.
“We started out deeply in debt,” Liesl said, with a laugh. Before her writing career, Liesl got a law degree and started working as a lawyer, while Jeff completed MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations program. She recalls the two celebrating the day they realized they were finally out of debt.
By 1999, things would change even more when Jeff would take his operations-focused skillset to Amazon in Seattle as the company’s vice president and general manager for operations.
“We were super fortunate. Right place, right time,” Liesl said. “Jeff is a brilliant thinker; he studied at MIT Manufacturing. But it was, I would say, more about process and how organizations, warehouse[s], things like that — how they function well and how they don’t.”
Estate planning and the tackling the mystery of Lyme disease
Jeff Wilke had a multidecade run at Amazon before finally retiring in 2021 as CEO of Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer business. The Pittsburgh native is now cofounder and chair of Re:Build Manufacturing. But in the early aughts, Jeff and Liesl still were settling into their new life in Seattle. “All of a sudden, we had this wealth and had to stop and understand what that meant, how to deal with it… and sort of who we wanted to be — what kind of parents — what kind of people,” Liesl said.
One of the biggest conversations the Wilkes had took place when they started planning their wills as a young family with two daughters. She recalls her Princeton days, when she was surrounded by generational wealth, which some kids didn’t necessarily handle well. The Wilkes wanted to strike the balance of providing but also allowing their children to find their own path and not leaving them with too much. “Honestly, it turned out to be easier, I think, because we lived in Seattle and Seattle is a sort of down-to-earth place,” she added.
In 2007, the Wilkes established the Wilke Family Foundation. They started the foundation with an initial large gift, but upon their passing, it will receive another large portion of the family’s wealth. The foundation’s longstanding focus has been Lyme disease, along with a broader interest in underfunded health issues.
Liesl’s own Lyme journey began in 2008 and continues today, even as she has experienced remission. “There’s a lot of sort of odd political stuff around Lyme disease,” Liesl said. “It’s just not very well understood … There’s money involved, there’s ego involved, there’s stubbornness, there’s religion, there’s all these things that can get in the way.”
The Wilkes connected with the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) in Seattle, which harnesses big data to tackle complex diseases like Lyme. In 2015, ISB launched the Wilke Cohen Lyme Disease Project in concert with the Steve and Alexandra Cohen Foundation, focused on using a systems biology approach to tackle the complexities of Lyme disease.
“The strength of computers these days is that if they have enough data points, like millions and millions, then they can sort through all the noise and find correlations and find things that would just be almost impossible in a usual lab experiment set up,” Liesl said.
Since working with ISB, Liesl has found other Lyme organizations with which to partner, including the Bay Area Lyme Foundation. Not unlike long COVID, there’s still disagreement on whether the brain fog, joint pain and other symptoms associated with Lyme manifest because of an ongoing infection, some sort of lingering immune response, or a mix of the two that could vary from person to person. But while Liesl mentioned improvements to testing, she emphasized that a lasting vaccine is still elusive. “I think it’s important that some money has been put behind research for Lyme disease… There’s sort of a stigma around it sometimes and I would rather have things be studied and looked at carefully,” Liesl said.
The Wilkes’ support for STEM and Native American education
Before she got sick, Liesl was a trustee for many years at American Indian College Fund, another longstanding Wilke Family Foundation grantee. The story here goes back to her mother, who was a steady supporter of the organization; Liesl’s maternal grandfather traces his lineage back to the Blackfeet Nation in Montana.
Located on or near reservations, tribal colleges and universities serve everyone from single mothers to students, and have a direct impact on communities and future generations. “A big part of it is preserving language and culture, which is something that’s been, for those populations, just attacked and denigrated over time so many times, it’s really heartbreaking,” Liesl said.
In addition, the Wilkes support a computer science initiative at the American Indian College Fund, with the goal of having computer science professors present at every tribal college and university, including in rural and remote areas. The Wilkes also realized with this work that they would have to support additional infrastructure, including strong broadband service for these communities.
Deepening computer science skills in Native communities also allows residents to create their own digital systems and have ownership over them, rather than outsourcing this work. “They can use their own homegrown talent to set up better systems in hospitals, or for agriculture, and to preserve language and things like that. It’s been very exciting,” Liesl said.
Unsurprisingly, Jeff Wilke is strongly interested in STEM education and brings that perspective to the couple’s philanthropy. One of his main charities is Code.org, focusing on women and other underrepresented groups.
At University of Minnesota, meanwhile, the Wilkes launched the Wilke Family Scholarship fund at its Science and Engineering school, headed up by Jamaican-born dean Andrew G. Alleyne, a Princeton alum.
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Liesl Wilke’s backing for theater and film, and looking ahead
As an author of novels, stage plays, screenplays and short stories, Liesl Wilke’s interests are reflected in the couple’s giving for the arts, with recent foundation grantees including Village Theater in Issaquah outside of Seattle; Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, D.C.; and Playwright Horizons, an off-broadway theater in New York producing works by contemporary American writers, composers and lyricists.
“I don’t think theater can survive without philanthropy.” Liesl said, citing the huge cost to produce a show and make sure everyone is paid a liveable wage. “There’s just no way. There’s no model in which ticket sales can support all of the work and all of the people.”
Away from the foundation, Liesl has also put money behind socially impactful film projects. She’s yet another donor who is interested in “filmanthropy” – backing film to entertain, inform and change hearts and minds. She mentioned supporting projects about a trans lacrosse player in the Los Angeles area and a civil-rights-era story called “The Rebel Girls.”
Through the years, Liesl said she’s gotten better at taking in requests and better at understanding an organization’s mission. Sometimes projects fail, but she said that as long as an organization is set up for success and doing something meaningful, she has no regrets.
Reluctant to speak for her two daughters, Liesl said that they make their own gifts to their own organizations separately, but via the foundation, are starting to allocate funds to causes they are passionate about. Going forward, Liesl said that they are aware that they will take full reins of the foundation one day and are totally fine with the idea that the majority of the family wealth will go toward the foundation.
“They are both very smart and research their own organizations… We won’t even leave any direction for them,” she said. “They appreciate what they have from us and want to make their own lives and see that money do some good. That’s going to be the family tradition.”
