Five Stanford MBA Students Honored as 2010 Siebel Scholars

Five accomplished second-year MBA students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business have been named 2010 Siebel Scholars.

They join an elite group chosen by a faculty committee based on academic achievement, leadership, and citizenship within the Business School community during their first year at the School. The honor includes a tuition grant of $35,000 from the program, established in 2000 by the Siebel Scholars Foundation to recognize the most talented students at the world’s leading graduate schools of business and computer science.

The five Class of 2010 Stanford MBA students are: Ashley Evans, Kenneth Hammond, Andy Martin, Matthew Skaruppa, and Iain Ware.

Ashley Evans spent five years before business school working in finance. At the Carlyle Group’s U.S. Buyouts team, she executed private equity transactions in the industrials sector, and at Morgan Stanley’s Investment Banking Division, she advised on financing alternatives, mergers, and acquisitions for financial and industrial companies. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard, summa cum laude, in the study of religion, and an MPhil from Cambridge, First Class, in classical philosophy. At Stanford, she has been involved in the Arbuckle Leadership Fellows program that develops presentation, facilitation, and coaching skills among first-year students as part of their leadership curricula. She has also been a member of the Board Fellows Program through which she worked with the nonprofit board of Rebuilding Together Peninsula. She spent the summer at Orbis Investment Management researching equity investment opportunities in the media sector.

Prior to Stanford, Kenneth Hammond worked as an associate at private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice in New York where he played a key role in the firm’s investment in U.S. Foodservice. Before joining CD&R, he spent two years in the Leveraged Finance group at Goldman Sachs. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a degree in economics. At Stanford Business School, he serves as career chair of the Finance & Investment Club, and as co-president of the Golf Club. He spent the summer as a fixed income analyst at Symphony Asset Management in San Francisco, where he evaluated investment opportunities within the leveraged loan, high-yield bond, and convertible bond asset classes.

Andy Martin, a product manager at the Seevast family of internet advertising brands before coming to Stanford, is passionate about finding solutions to energy- and environment-related problems. During the summer of 2009, he interned at EnergyHub, a Brooklyn-based home energy management startup, where he worked on developing the company’s marketing and product strategy. The previous summer, he served as an intern product manager at TerraPass, a carbon offsets and green consumer products retailer. At Stanford, he has been on the leadership team of the Environmentally Sustainable Business Club and was one of the leaders of the inaugural Service Learning Trip to China to study energy and the environment. He earned his undergraduate degree from Stanford University, with distinction, in symbolic systems.

Matthew Skaruppa spent four years working as a management consultant at Bain & Company in Chicago before starting at Stanford Business School. At Bain, he worked on performance improvement initiatives primarily for companies in the real estate and health care industries, and performed due diligence for private equity clients. A summa cum laude graduate of Northwestern University, where he was awarded a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation scholarship for academic and extracurricular excellence, Skaruppa received his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering. At Stanford Business School he served as a member of the View from the Top speaker series leadership team and the Distinguished Teaching Award selection committee. His management interest in energy and entrepreneurship led to a summer internship at an energy-related startup company.

Iain Ware is cofounder and CEO of Ballast Energy Systems, a startup focused on aggregating and intelligently managing distributed energy loads. Prior to business school, Ware helped launch the North American private equity business at 3i Group, where he worked in the New York office, completing three investments totaling $750 million in equity. He began his career at McKinsey & Company, working on strategy and marketing projects for clients across various industries. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale with an undergraduate degree in economics. Ware served the Stanford Business School community as a member of the Schwab and FOAM committees; he serves the community as a member of the board of directors of a local nonprofit organization.

During the past nine years the Siebel Scholars Program has created a community of more than 450 scholars that fosters personal leadership, academic achievement, and the collaborative search for solutions to pressing societal problems. As future leaders in the fields of business and computer science, these students will have the opportunity to directly influence the technologies, policies, and economic and societal decisions that shape the future.

Siebel Scholars are key advisors to the Siebel Foundation, guiding the development of innovative programs the Foundation initiates.