Serial entrepreneur and author Steve Blank
gave the commencement speech at the University of Minnesota. His advice
is relevant for anyone starting up.
Editor's note: This speech was given at the University of Minnesota and then appeared on steveblank.com.
I am honored to be with you as we gather to celebrate your graduation.
This school has a distinguished roster of graduates... Earl Bakken, the founder of Medtronic, was an Electrical Engineering grad; and Bob Gore of Gortex and your current president are both alums of your Chemical Engineering program.
In fact, I feel very connected to another one your grads. I’m sure you’ve heard of Seymour Cray;
he built a supercomputer company in Chippewa Falls that made the
fastest computers in the world. These were very expensive
supercomputers. They cost tens of millions of dollars and filled two
tractor-trailers worth of space.
Back in Silicon Valley, I co-founded a company that built desktop
workstations powerful enough to compete against Cray. We bid against
them in a sale to the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center... and lost. I
never forgot that loss because instead of buying hundreds of our small
computers they spent $35 million on that Cray. My startup never
recovered and soon after went out of business.
Fast-forward 15 years. Now retired, I noticed that the Pittsburg
Supercomputer Center had put their Cray for sale on Ebay. Yep--the $35
million machine was now for sale for $35,000 dollars.
I bought that Cray... honest... you can Google “Cray on eBay” and there I am. I had it shipped to my ranch and kept it in the barn next to the cows and manure.
It was closure.
But the story about Cray is also a story about success and failure.
If I can keep you awake, I’m going to tell you why--while you may have
thought today was the end of your education--it’s really only the
beginning. And while you might be moaning about that thought, pay
attention because what I’m about to share could make a few of you very,
very successful.
First day of your life
For most of you, college was the first day of your own life. The
morning you stepped onto campus you were no longer just a child of your
parents. College was the first place you could taste the freedom of
making your own decisions--and in some of those mornings-after--learn
the price of indulgence and the value of moderation.
Here at school you had your first years of taking responsibility for
yourself. While it may not be obvious to you yet, your college years
were a transition from having your parents make decisions for you to
making decisions for yourself. But now you face a new chapter that--if
you’re not careful--could result in having companies make decisions for
you.
Career Choices
It might turn out that graduating from college and getting a job may
be just an illusion of independence. If you’re not careful you’ll simply
end up having others tell you what to work on, how to spend your time,
when to show up and when to go home. In fact, working in a company
could be the adult version of listening to your parents tell you what to
do... only the pay is usually a whole lot better than your allowance.
For some of you, that may be exactly what you are looking for. Many
of you are going to take what you learned here, get a good job, get
married, buy a house, have a family, be a great parent, serve your
community and country, hang with friends and live a good life. And
that’s great. Minnesota is a wonderful place to hunt, fish, canoe, raise
kids, and pursue lots of interests other than just your job.
All of you will ultimately make a choice... a choice about whether
you “work to live” or you “live to work.” This should be a conscious
choice. Don’t get trapped into the daily routine of showing up and just
getting by.
Diverging Interests
While you’re excited about your first “real” job, recognize that your
interests and those of your employer are probably not the same. Having
your employer tell you what a great job you’re doing and rewarding you
for it is not the same as discovering your passion, and figuring out who
you are, and what’s rewarding for you.
What I am saying is, “Don’t let a career just happen to you.” And as
much you love, respect and honor your parents, don’t live their lives.
Your obligations to meet their expectations ended the day you became an
adult.
At the end of the day, you can decide whether you want to be an
employee with a great attendance record, getting promoted to ever better
titles and working on interesting projects--or whether you want to
attempt to do something spectacular--this be or do should be a question
you never stop asking yourself--for the next 20 years, and beyond. Be?
or Do?
Let me share with you the day I faced the Be or Do question.
Big Company versus Startup
Out of the military, my first 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, NSA, and National Reconnaissance Office. 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 the U.S. to build weapons previously thought
impossible or impractical. The technology was amazing, and somehow in
my 20’s I found myself in the middle of all of it.
Building these systems required resources way beyond the scope of a
single company. A complete system had spacecraft and rockets and the
resources of ten's 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 in startups worked 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 figured out how to solve the
problem and ten’s 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.
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 Run the World
Engineers used to be the people who made other peoples 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 fit 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 peoples’ 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 finished 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.
Only In America
University of Minnesota Science and Engineering alumni have founded
more than 4,000 active companies, employing over ½ million people and
generating annual revenues of $90 billion. These alums 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... 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.
Passion
I predict that 78 percent of all commencement speeches this year will
have advice about “pursuing your passion and doing stuff you love.” But
they don’t 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 is 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 your 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. There’s a big difference between being an employee at a great
company and having the guts to start one.
You don’t get grades for resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity.
You just get successful.
Failure
The downside of starting something new is that’s it’s tough, because
unlike the movies--you fail a lot. For every Facebook and Google,
thousands never make it.
Like Rocket Science Games,
which was my biggest failure. 90 days after showing up on the cover of
Wired Magazine I knew the game company where I raised 35 million dollars
was headed for disaster.
We’d believed our own press, inhaled our own fumes and built lousy
games. Customers voted with their wallets and didn’t buy our products.
The company went out of business. Given the press we had garnered, it
was a very public failure.
We let our customers, our investors, and our employees down. I
thought my career and my life were over. But I learned that in Silicon
Valley, honest failure is a badge of experience.
All of you will fail at some time in your career... or in love, or in life.
No one ever sets out to fail.
But being afraid to fail means you’ll be afraid to try. Playing it safe will get you nowhere.
As it turned out, rather than run me out of town, the two venture
capital firms that had lost $12 million in my failed startup actually
asked me to work with them again.
During the next couple years... and much humbler...
I raised more money and started another company that we were ultimately
able to take public, and those patient investors more than made up for
their earlier loss--many times over.
Hypothesis Testing
As scientists and engineers, you know about failure. You know that
virtually no experiment works the first time. And in a new company all
you have is a series of untested hypotheses. You learned something vital
in school--to test your hypotheses by designing experiments, getting
accurate data, analyzing the results, and then modifying your initial
hypotheses based on those results. This is the scientific method, and
surprisingly we found the exact same method works for startups.
Because failure is a part of the startup process.
In Silicon Valley, we have a special word for a failed
entrepreneur--it’s called experienced. Our country and our
entrepreneurial culture is one of second and third chances. It’s what
makes us great. You don’t have to change your name or leave town.
Entrepreneurs in America know that they get multiple shots at the goal.
Be or Do
Someday several of you in this graduating class will be worth a $100
million dollars. And a few of you might change the way the world works.
I want you to look around you. Go ahead. Take a few seconds and give it a look...
While most of you were looking around wondering who this was going to
be, I hope a few of you were feeling sorry for the rest of your
classmates, knowing that the most successful person in the audience is
going to be you.
These days I write a blog about entrepreneurship. At the end of each
post, I conclude with “lessons learned"--a kind of Cliff Notes of my
key takeaways. So that’s how I’ll finish up today.
Here are the two lessons that I’d like to pass on to you.
Your science or engineering degree gives you tremendous choices--you, and no one else gets to decide two things:
whether you choose to be or you choose to do
whether you “work to live” or whether you “live to work”
Remember… live your life with no regrets. There’s no undo button.
And congratulations--you’ve earned it!
Thank you very much.
SOURCE: www.inc.com
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