On February 8, entrepreneur Phil Hayes, a Harriton graduate, spoke to students about his experiences working at Twitter, developing his own company, and keeping up with graduate school classes.

Gavin Gartenberg, a Harriton senior, invited Hayes as part of Gartenberg’s new organization, HYPE LM (Harriton Young Professionals and Entrepreneurs of Lower Merion), which will bring LMSD alumni to speak about their start-ups to current students. The next speaker is to be determined, but he/she will likely visit in March.

Hayes started off with a short slideshow and then opened the floor for questions. Students asked about his work experience and the paths he took to arrive at Twitter and at data science.

Four years ago at Harriton, Hayes was active in TSA and took IB. He fondly remembers and still uses the web design skills and project-based learning of TSA and the critical thought in IB’s Theory of Knowledge.

Unlike many of his fellow students at New York University, Hayes left high school not knowing what job he specifically wanted. Midway through college, he realized that business combined with technology were his fields. He had plenty of space to grow in the international atmosphere of New York and its “incredible tech scene”.

Today, he works at Twitter as a data scientist. This job combines statistics, programming, and business – Hayes processes and presents likes, reposts, and other types of user interaction. One student asked him to comment on the likely expansion of tweets from 140 characters to up to 10,000. Hayes, an enthusiastic personal Twitter user, acknowledged the 140-character limit as both confining and empowering – it allows a user to delve deeper into an issue from an initial beginning, he said.

Hayes gave multiple pieces of advice to Harriton entrepreneurs-to-be over the course of the talk. Most importantly, he urged, students looking to launch their own businesses or simply succeed in any field should keep working on their projects and ideas. Failure can provide a learning experience about yourself, who you like to work with, and what environments are best for you to succeed.

Hayes is currently hoping for success with his own business, code_fortheplanet, a coding school mostly aimed at college students. He plans to launch it in Dublin and San Francisco soon. His stop at Harriton on February 8 was just one part of an entrepreneurial life that changes every day.