Impact Insights

The newly minted Winklevoss School of Business is being supported in part by a $4 million Bitcoin gift from its namesake. It was the first digital currency donation in the College’s history.

During a ceremony celebrating the naming, Winklevoss shared his Grove City College story, which began 60 some years ago at Penn State, where Winklevoss intended to enroll after high school. His poor grades, largely due to him putting his time, effort, and ingenuity into restoring a 1932 Model A Ford instead of his studies, disqualified him.

“I said, ‘But I built a hot rod from the ground up.’ They said, ‘We don’t have a major in hot rods,'” Winklevoss said. Looking for an alternative, he turned to Grove City College, where he was accepted. “I said, ‘Have you looked at my transcript?’ They said, ‘Yeah, but you built a car…maybe you’ll build something else.’ And I did,” he said.

Being at Grove City College fostered Winklevoss’ entrepreneurial spirit. He was inspired by courses taught by Dr. Hans Sennholz, a leading voice for Austrian economics. “I fell in love with freedom, capitalism, and everything the Austrian school is about,” Winklevoss said. He worked to pay his way through school, turning a job selling pots and pans door-to-door into a mini cookware empire.

At Grove City College, he earned a degree in Accounting and met his wife Carol (Leonard ’65) before graduate school and a decade in academia that included teaching actuarial science at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. His groundbreaking book Pension Mathematics with Numerical Illustrations revolutionized the industry and led him to found multiple ventures, including Winklevoss Consultants and Winklevoss Technologies, which builds software for the actuarial consulting community. Winklevoss Technologies was acquired by Constellation Software for $125 million in 2023.

In recent years, Winklevoss has become a Bitcoin advocate. The digital currency is the answer, he said, to a longtime Austrian school problem: Money. Bitcoin, he said, is solid money that is independent of government. “It gives me great pleasure to donate the world’s soundest money to the school that first taught me about these concepts 60 years ago.”

Grove City College, he said, stands in contrast to other highed education institutions and is poised to play a significant role in the future. “We don’t have to make Grove City College great again. It already is,” Winklevoss said. “I think the world of this College. Not because of what it has done, but what it can do.”

Winklevoss’ twin sons, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, spoke about their father’s affinity for the College and how the ideals and values learned ‘mid the pines shaped their family and their understanding of economics, which they both studied at Harvard. The twins, who founded the digital currency exchange Gemini, said their father’s story demonstrates the value that the College places on students as people, not just transcripts. ” Grove City College is a special place for individual learners. It is a bastion of independent thought,” Tyler Winklevoss said. “This school gave our father a shot,” Cameron Winklevoss said. “It saw something in our father.”

The Winklevoss School of Business offer 15 majors in Accounting and Finance, Management and Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and the College’s distinctive Austrian School Department of Economics, along with master’s degree programs including Master of Business Administration, Master of Science in Accounting, Master of Science in Business Analytics, Master of Arts in Economics and more than 20 minors to augment undergraduate degrees.

The Haynes family suffered a great loss in 2009 when Rod passed away far too young at age 60. Desiring a meaningful way to honor his memory, Brandon and Shawna chose to establish the Rod Haynes ’71 Family Memorial Scholarship at Grove City College to assist eduation majors from Erie County. In a way,  the recipients of Rod’s scholarship are carrying on his legacy, too. He would be thrilled to know that his family is helping to make possibe for other students the same life-changing education about which he was so passionate.

In 2022, Brandon and Shawna’s daughter, Anna, also chose Grove City College and became the third generation of Rod’s family legacy at GCC. She is on track to graduate in May 2026 with a degree in Exercise Science, having taken many classes and labs in iconic Rockwell Hall. When Brandon and Shawna learned of the renovation and modernization of Rockwell Hall as part of the Impact 150 campaign, they decided that naming an Exercise Science lab on the ground floor and a classroom on the first floor of the new building would be the perfect way to honor their daughter and continue the family’s legacy of giving back.

“We believe in the foundation of Grove City College, in what it stands for, in the biblical grounding. It stands as a light for the Lord. The most important thing is a relationship with Him, and we just want to share the opportunity of a Christ-centered education with as many students as we can,” Shawna said.

Brandon, a managing partner of Allegheny Financial Group, Ltd., and Shawna, who retired from teaching and now works in the office at Eden Christian Academy, have made their home in the northern Pittsburgh area for over 25 years.

Brandon says, “We know first-hand that the mission of Grove City College results in lives being transformed. Developing future leaders for a world that desperately needs them, honoring my father’s legacy, and celebrating our daughter’s decision are all reasons we have made the College a priority in our philanthropic giving.”

One might say they’ve started a legacy all their own.