Since the launch of the World Wide Web, Hamiltonians have been at the forefront of digital entrepreneurship, creating and funding a number of tech companies — perhaps you’ve heard of a few.
Illustrations by Patti Blau
Even at Hamilton, Marc Randolph ’81 was a serial entrepreneur — launching a new outing club, starting a humor magazine, and staging a freshman class play. “It was the kind of place where you could take those creative risks and still have a dorm bed to go back to,” he said. “I learned how to ask for money and enlist people to help me. By the time I started doing it for real, I’d already been doing it for four years at school.”
Randolph went on to cofound the streaming platform Netflix, one of the most successful digital companies today. He’s one of dozens of Hamiltonians who have parlayed their liberal arts education into a technology startup or venture capital firm as digital entrepreneurs from the earliest days of the web to the new frontiers of artificial intelligence. Alumni have played roles in launching and growing Zillow, LinkedIn, PayPal, Peloton, Spotify, Grammarly, and other popular apps on our home screens, as well as other lesser-known digital entities.
“As our late great economics professor Sidney Wertimer used to say, ‘Hamilton trains you for nothing and prepares you for everything,’” said Dan Nye ’88. Skills developed on College Hill — such as resourcefulness and adaptability — are ideal for the innovation economy, which is constantly changing and growing as new technology platforms come online. Nye started working at Dell when it was just a startup in Austin, Texas, before going on to become an executive at Intuit and Advent Software. In 2007, he took on the role of CEO of LinkedIn. Over five years, he transformed the company from a résumé-posting site to a vibrant business-oriented social network.
“I felt well equipped to understand and engage with technical issues because I’d been prepared to break down problems and think critically and analytically,” Nye said. “Every organization needs people who can communicate clearly and concisely and persuasively, and that’s especially needed in a technical environment.”
As a Hamilton trustee, Nye has been a prime mover behind a new $50-million, 41,000-square-foot innovation center set to open next to Burke Library in 2027. The bright and airy building will provide a dedicated home for the Computer Science Department as well as makerspaces and technologically advanced classrooms. In addition to meeting the explosion of student demand for technology classes, the center will encourage faculty to integrate computing and artificial intelligence into lessons from biology to art history, better equipping the next generation of digital entrepreneurs to follow in the footsteps of alumni who already have shaped the industry.
Birthing a Revolution
“I just happened to be at the right place at the right time, and took advantage of it,” said Blake Darcy ’78, who was working at brokerage firm DLJ in the late 1980s when one of the first internet browser companies, Prodigy, came calling. Darcy, who saw how difficult it was to get customers’ information about the market in real time so they could make informed decisions, immediately recognized the internet as a way to do that. The problem was convincing the rest of the financial industry of the wisdom of giving customers the wheel.
“They thought you should really have a broker who understood the market and used the research of the firm — the idea someone was going to place a trade over a personal computer seemed far-fetched,” he said.
Darcy persevered, founding DLJdirect and offering real-time brokerage information to customers through Prodigy and later America Online (AOL); by the time the web came along in the mid-1990s, other financial companies were scrambling to catch up, starting an advertising war, and Darcy’s firm pivoted to the high end of the market. Its initial public offering (IPO) in 1999 was the second largest internet IPO at the time.
Darcy credits the communication and critical thinking skills he learned in English and philosophy classes at Hamilton, as well as a semester he spent in Washington, D.C., as a government major, with helping him make the positive case for his pioneering online brokerage firm, which set the stage for E*Trade, Robin Hood, and other firms to follow.
“Who would have said I was going to run the largest online commerce company in the country?” Darcy said — after all, when he came to Hamilton, online commerce didn’t even exist. “What you need to succeed is flexible persistence, because things change quickly, and you have to be able to move from one thing to another, but at the same time stick with your vision.”
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