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PayPal co-founder to deliver Commencement address
By Brian Sobotko ’16
March 10, 2016
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Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, will deliver the 2016 Commencement address on Sunday, May 22.
David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, will deliver the Baccalaureate address the day before. Thiel and Ferriero will both receive honorary degrees, as will Indra Nooyi, the chairman and CEO of Pepsico, and Michael Shapiro ’71, who is the director emeritus of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
Thiel co-founded PayPal in 1998 and sold the company to eBay in 2002 for a reported $1.4 billion. Jack Selby ’96, an alumni trustee of the College, was the senior vice president for corporate and international operations at PayPal. After the sale Thiel and Selby started Clarium Capital Management, a hedge fund where Selby is currently the managing director. In 2004 Thiel became the first outside investor of Facebook, where he is currently on the board of directors. Thiel has provided investment to LinkedIn, Yelp, SpaceX and Airbnb. Thiel and other alumni of PayPal have been called the “PayPal Mafia” because of their influence on a wide variety of tech companies.
Thiel made waves in the education community in 2010 when he created the Thiel Fellowship, a program that gives college-age students $100,000 to drop out of school to pursue other work such as a business, start-up or social movement. Thiel has been critical about the trajectory of higher education, specifically rising prices that leave students in debt.
“A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” Thiel told TechCrunch in 2011. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”
Thiel has a B.A. and a J.D. from Stanford University.
Ferriero was named the tenth Archivist of the United States in 2009. The Archivist runs the National Archives and Records Administration, which preserves and makes public the records of the U.S. Government. During Ferriero’s tenure, The George W. Bush Presidential Library became the thirteenth Presidential Library under NARA’s administration. Prior to becoming the archivist, Ferriero was the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Library. While there, Ferriero worked to integrate four research libraries and 87 branch libraries, making the NYPL the largest public library system in the United States.
Nooyi joined PepsiCo in 1994. She became president and CFO in 2001 then CEO in 2006. She is a Successor Fellow at Yale Corporation and serves on the board of directors of several organizations, including Motorola, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the International Rescue Committee and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In 2007 and 2008, Nooyi was named on Wall Street Journal’s list of 50 Women to Watch, as well as Time’s 100 Most Influential People in The World.
Shapiro, a Hamilton alum, has a Ph.D from Harvard and a Master of Arts from Williams. He specializes in 19th and 20th-century painting and sculpture. Shapiro was the Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr. Director of the High Museum of Art from March 2000 to July 2015. While there, Shapiro worked to expand the museum’s collections and develop partnerships with national and international art institutions.
Commencement will be at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, May 22 in the Margaret Bundy Scott Field House. The College expects nearly 500 students will receive bachelor’s degrees.