When Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph ’80 first pitched the idea that would one day become the worldwide streaming service to his wife, she told him: “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

In his lecture, “That’s the Stupidest Thing I’ve Ever Heard...And Other Lessons Learned from 40 Years as an Entrepreneur,” Randolph had a key piece of advice about the world of business: “Nobody knows anything.”

Randolph and his future Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings cycled through hundreds of ideas while carpooling to work each morning. Some ideas stuck—but most of them were discarded. Even though so many ideas failed, Randolph and Hastings kept working toward finding an idea worth pursuing.

On April 14, 1998, they found that idea in a company called Netflix, which started as a video rental service before it moved to streaming.

For Ashley Ramcharan ’20, what began as a late night conversation with friends about being a racial minority on campus turned into a 10-week long research project.

“I used to talk to my friends all the time about the experience of being a minority,” she said. “As a person of color, it’s not always easy to transition to an institution like Hamilton. It affects everything that I do—from the way I feel to my interactions with others on campus.”

In these conversations, Ramcharan noticed that she wasn’t alone in her experience. “That face to face communication was really important to me because I noticed similarities tying together all these experiences. Even though everybody’s life and individual identity is different, there’s still a thread that ties all of our experiences together.”

She followed that thread all the way to her Emerson research project, titled “Studying the Transition to College for People of Color.” For her research, Ramcharan is interviewing and surveying students on campus to explore the college transition experience for students of color.

“Had it not been for Bill steering me toward Hamilton, none of this would have been possible,” Ted Pitcher ’68 explained recently in a conversation about his gift endowing a scholarship in honor of Bill Hoyt ’59. The William L. Hoyt ’59 Scholarship is dedicated to an alumnus who devoted his life and career to secondary education and made significant contributions to national and international educational development.

Pitcher and Hoyt first crossed paths when Pitcher was a student at Stoneham High School where Hoyt was an assistant principal and football coach. Hoyt said he was “very impressed with Ted as a person, as an athlete, and as a student.” As his own junior English teacher had done for him years before, Hoyt saw to it that Pitcher traveled to Hamilton to see the campus and meet with the admissions department. “That’s what teachers do,” he explained on why he made the effort.

Hoyt was an English literature major at Hamilton and co-captain of both the football and lacrosse teams (and most valuable player in football in 1958). After graduation he was hired by Mike Scarpitto ’33 to teach at Stoneham and at the age of 26, he was promoted to assistant principal, and four years later principal. Ultimately, as Scarpitto had done before him, he became superintendent of the Stoneham School District. Along the way, he earned a doctorate in educational leadership from Boston University. Throughout his teaching and administrative career, Hoyt continued to direct talented high school students to Hamilton.