november-2011

PHOTOGRAPH BY TOBY BURDITT
bright ideas
Head
in the
Cloud
At 29, Jeff Hammerbacher
has been a pitcher, a poet, an
autoworker, an investment
banker and a Facebook
wunderkind who walked
away from a fortune. His
next project? Curing cancer.
BY PETER COHAN
JEFF HAMMERBACHER is a man of
varied interests. The son of an auto
assembly-line worker from Kalamazoo,
Mich., the 29-year-old has
tried his hand at poetry, philosophy,
psychology, venture capital, baseball
and, yes, automaking. He began his
academic career as an English major,
but ended up graduating from Harvard
with a degree in mathematics.
As a teen he’d been a star pitcher and
looked set for a career in the major
leagues; he ended up working as an
analyst at Bear Stearns. You could
call him hopelessly sca ered, or you
could say he’s a genius. Frankly, it’s a
tough call.
In 2006, with his stint at Bear
Stearns but a memory, Hammerbacher
was hired by Facebook
founder Mark Zuckerberg (fi ingly,
in a friend-of-a-friend scenario),
and developed a wondrously efficient
system to handle the massive
amounts of data coursing through
the website. Not only was Hammerbacher
fast becoming an important
player in the rarefi ed world of Silicon
Valley, but he was also on his way to
becoming very well-off .
Then, in 2008, he chucked it all.
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM • NOVEMBER 2011 59