Brendan said the university was an inspiration to him, a place where he forged lifelong relationships, and he wanted to give back to students who are studying, and will study, computer science. Charity truly begins at home!
Excerpt from the Washington Post
Brendan Iribe dropped out of college during his freshman year at the University of Maryland to join a throng of young entrepreneurs hoping to shake up the world with high-tech start-ups.
Iribe’s brief tenure in College Park was followed by extraordinary successes in video-game technology, as he held key positions in companies that sold for millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. His latest venture, Oculus VR, which developed the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset, sold to Facebook for $2 billion this year.
On a recent visit to U-Md. — where Iribe first met his business partner, Michael Antonov, in a freshman dorm in 1998 — the 35-year-old Californian attended a school-sponsored “hackathon,” in which students use technology to solve a problem in a short amount of time. He met with professors and spoke to hundreds of students, impressed with their energy. But walking into the computer science center on campus, he said he found the facility “depressing” and “a lot worse than I remembered it.”
So Iribe, originally from Montgomery County and a graduate of Atholton High School in Howard County, has pledged $31 million to the University of Maryland to fund scholarships and a new computer science building on the College Park campus, a record donation for the school. The gift is scheduled to be announced Friday.
Most of the donation — $30 million — will support plans for a $140 million computer science center, to be named after Iribe, near the university entrance at Route 1 and Campus Drive. The school’s previous donation record — $30 million — was reached three times in separate gifts announced in 2005 for various projects in engineering, bioengineering, biomedical devices, business education and performing-arts programs.
