Let me share with you the day I faced the Be or Do question. Out of the military, my fi rst job in Silicon Valley was with one of the most exciting companies you never heard of. By the time I joined it was a decade old, and no longer a startup. Our customers were the CIA, the NSA, and the National Reconnaissance Offi ce. Our CEO, Bill Perry eventually became the Secretary of Defense. In the 1970"s and 80"s the U. S.military realized that our advantage over the Soviet Union was in silicon, software and systems. These technologies allowed our country to build weapons previously thought impossible or impractical. The technology was amazing, and in my 20’s I found myself in the middle of it. Building these systems required resources beyond the scope of any single company. A complete system had spacecraft and rockets and the resources of tens of thousands of people from multiple companies. If you love technology, these projects are hard to walk away from. It was geek heaven.
While I worked on these incredibly interesting intelligence systems, my friends were in startups working on new things called microprocessors. They"d run around saying, "Hey look, I can program this chip to make this speaker go beep."I"d roll my eyes, comparing the toy-like microprocessors to what I was working on which was so advanced you would have thought we acquired it from aliens. But before long I realized that at my company, I was just a cog in a very big wheel. A small team had already fi gured out how to solve the problem and tens of thousands of us worked to build the solution. Given where I was in the hierarchy, I calculated that the odds of me being in on those decisions didn"t look so hot anytime. In contrast, my friends at startups were living in their garages fueled with an energy and passion to use their talents to pursue their own ideas, however unexpected or crazy they sounded.
"Really, you"re building a computer I can have in my house"For me, the light bulb went off when I realized that punching a time clock is not the way to change the world. I chose the path of entrepreneurship and never looked back. Engineers used to be the people who made other people"s ideas work. Today, they change the world. We live in a time where scientists and engineers are synonymous with continuous innovation.
We don"t think twice as our phones shrink, our computers fi t in our pockets, our cars run on batteries, and our lives are extended as new medical devices are implanted in our bodies. Scientists and engineers no longer work anonymously in backrooms. Today we celebrate them for improving the quality of people"s lives.
George Bernard Shaw once said, some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
Engineers like you have the capacity to move the world forward by continually asking"why not"It"s your special"doing"gene that empowers us to do better. You invent. You imagine. You see things that others don"t. Where others see blank canvases, you"ll see fi nished paintings. You hear the music that"s not written, you see the bridges that have yet to be built. You envision the products and companies that don"t exist yet.
University of Minnesota Science and Engineering alumni like you have founded more than 4，000 active companies, employing over half million people and generating annual revenues of $90 billion. These alumni chose not to take the safe road but instead to push beyond their boundaries and DO. At some time you might decide that you want to become the master of your own destiny that you want to take an idea, and start your own company. And all of you sitting here just earned a degree that gives you choices that very few other professions have.
Entrepreneurship is not something foreign, it"s built into the DNA of this country. America was built by those who left the old behind. Not too many generations ago your family packed up what they had, got on boat and came to America. They struck out across the country and ended up here in Minnesota. And what"s great about the United States is that no other country embraces innovation and entrepreneurship quite like we do. You don"t have to stay in one job, and it"s really, really hard to starve to death. Now I predict that this season 78%of all commencement speeches are gonna have advice about"pursuing your passion and doing stuff you love."But no one actually tell you why. Well here"s the secret-if you"re going to spend your career in a company, doing stuff you enjoy will help you keep showing up. But if you want to do something, something entrepreneurial, just loving what you do isn"t enough. You"re pursuing ideas you can"t get out of your head. Ideas that you obsess about. That you work on in your spare time. Because that fearless vision and relentless passion are what it takes to sustain an entrepreneur through the inevitable bad times. The times your co-founder quits, or when no one buys, or the product doesn"t work. The time when everyone you know thinks that what you are doing is wrong and a waste of time. The time when people tell you that you ought to get a"real"job. By the way, every year I remind my students that great grades and successful entrepreneurs have at best a zero correlation and anecdotal evidence suggests that the correlation may actually be negative.
