Transcription
You can choose a life of ease and comfort, or you can choose a life of service and adventure. Which one of those, when you’re 90 years old, are you going to be more proud of? Achieving your potential is the quest of the ordinary. Conquering the impossible is your destiny.
If you want to be successful, I would encourage you to grow a tolerance for failure. This time, I was not disappointed in myself for failing to be the person they thought I should be. Their dreams and my dreams were different; I would never confuse the two of them again. These people had one thing in common; you know, they knew they had it in themselves. They knew they could be something beyond where they were. They were willing to put their time, their energies, to better themselves.
Today, I want to share what I’ve learned about our generation and the world we’re all building together. I remember that night I launched Facebook from that little dorm in Kirkland House. I went to noes with my friend KX, and I remember telling him clearly that I was excited to help connect the Harvard community, but one day someone would would connect the whole world. The thing is, it never even occurred to me that that someone might be us. We were just college kids; we didn’t know anything about that. There were all these great big technology companies with all these resources, and I just assumed one of them would do it. But this idea was so clear to us that all people want to connect, so we just kept working on it day after day after day.
And I know that a lot of you are going to have your own stories just like this: a change in the world that seems so clear that you are sure someone else is going to do it, but they’re not. You will. I’m here to tell you that finding your purpose isn’t enough. Purpose is that feeling that you are a part of something bigger than yourself, that you are needed, and that you have something better ahead to work for. Purpose is what creates true happiness.
Let me tell you a secret: no one does. When they begin, ideas don’t come out fully formed; they only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started. If I had to know everything about connecting people before I got started, I never would have built Facebook. Movies and pop culture just get this all wrong. The idea of a single Eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate because we feel like we haven’t had ours yet, and it prevents people with seeds of good ideas from ever getting started in the first place.
When I was young, I I uh I didn’t really know what I was going to do uh when when I got older. Um, people kept asking me, and and um, but then eventually I thought that the idea of inventing things would be would be really cool. The reason I thought that was because um I I I read a quote from oy which said that a um sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and and that’s really true. Um, if you think if you go back say 300 years, the things that we take for granted today uh would be you you’d be burned at the stake for um you know being able to fly. Um, that’s crazy. Uh, being able to see over long distances, being able to communicate having um effectively uh with with the internet uh a a a group mind of sorts um and having access to all the world’s information instantly from almost anywhere on the earth. Um, this is this is stuff that that really would be magic or would be considered magic um in in times past. In fact, I think it actually goes beyond that because there are many things that we take for granted today that weren’t even imagined in in times past; they weren’t even in the realm of magic, so it actually goes goes beyond that.
No matter how good we are, we can still be better. You can always be better. Customers have a divine discontent, and they teach you if you listen to customers. So we watch for that, and we see patterns, and we can find places where it’s not working; something’s going wrong. And that’s really how I get the feedback is from customer input. Uh, and often, you know, in all caps: “Angry! You ruined my child’s birthday because the gift didn’t show up on time!” And we take that, and what you really want to do is you take that—it’s an anecdote, it’s a single example—but you need to find the root cause. What went wrong deep inside the system? How did this happen? Because then you can fix it for everyone so that particular problem will never happen again. You don’t just fix the symptom; you have to fix the root cause. And that’s been the secret to our operational success for 20 years.
There are a lot of things that are a waste of time, you know, when you think about your life. I think I I often tell people um that I work with, if if you can get—cuz people people have very high standards for how they want their work life to be—and uh and I said, look, if you can get your work life to be where you enjoy half of it, that is a home run; that is amazing. Because very few people ever achieve that. Because the truth is, everything comes with overhead; that’s reality. Everything comes with pieces that you don’t like. You could be a Supreme Court Justice, and there’s still going to be pieces of your job you don’t like. You can be a university professor, and still going to be—you have to go to committee meetings, and you have to do th you know, every job comes with pieces you don’t like, and we need to say that’s just how—that’s part of it—uh and and and not resent those pieces, or try not to—but also try to minimize them.
The first lesson is courage, and I I have seen it in a whole lot of you. Nobody has ever achieved anything big in business or in any walk of life without courage. Of course, whenever you do anything big, you do feel a little scared, but you’ve got to conquer fear to discover the hidden hero within you. With courage, with self-belief, and the can-do spirit, you overcome any adversity. [Music] Sah.
The second lesson I have learned is feel empathy. Empathy means caring and sharing with every human being in our organization and the world at large. The more more we care, the higher we grow as human beings. I understand empathy as D doat: it is the wealth of your heart; the more you spend it on others, the more wealthy you become.
The third lesson I have learned is to have absolute faith in technology and talent. In every business we have started, we have always embraced the latest technology and have attracted the best talent. When top technology and talent work together, they produce unbeatable creativity, innovation, and invention. Um, at the core of our company’s uh success is innovation. Now, a lot of companies say innovation is important to their company; invention is important to their company; however, I don’t believe you can fundamentally say that innovation—that you want as a CEO to nurture the spirit of innovation, to encourage innovation—unless you have a culture of risk-taking. We have to encourage our our engineers, all of our employees, to take calculated risks. In order to encourage them to take calculated risks, first of all, you have to teach them how to do that; that’s a skill, a matter of skill. Then the second part of it is a matter of courage. Most people hate to fail; are you guys—do you guys agree with that? Unless you guys want to be successful, let me say it the positive way: if you want to be successful, I would encourage you to grow a tolerance for failure; to develop a tolerance for failure. Now, when I mean a tolerance for failure, I don’t mean what Jensen just told me is: “sleep in until noon, okay, don’t do any of my homework, flunk out of all my classes,” because that defines failure, right? That’s not what I said. What I said is—what I’m trying to say is that I want you to try things even though it is impossible to calculate precisely that it would lead to success. That your instincts, your intuition, is something you ought to follow. If it wasn’t because of following my own instincts, or the founders’ instincts, or many of our employees’ instincts, why would we be where we are today, and why would we have invented things that the market’s never had before, the world’s never had before? So you have to have this this culture or tolerance for risk-taking.
I put together a plan to start my own company that way I could completely control my work environment. My goal was to create the perfect job for me, a job I truly loved. Hired the most talented software engineers in Silicon Valley. We assembled an all-star team of gifted programmers who were among the best in the world at what they did. That team plus one crazy idea gave birth to a giant company. I call it a crazy idea because at the time everyone told me it was a crazy idea. And when you start telling people that all the experts are wrong, w-r- at first they call you arrogant, and then they say you’re crazy. When people start telling you that you’re crazy, you just might be on to the most important innovation in your life. The idea was to build the world’s first relational database, and IBM was building a prototype in their research labs, but back then the collective wisdom of computer experts was that while relational databases could be built, they would never be fast enough to be useful. This was one of those times when the experts were wrong. Arrogance and insanity turned out to be innovation in disguise.
As the information age moved from dawn to the full light of day, technology horizons were constantly shifting, revealing a brave and exciting world of new possibilities and new opportunities. Oracle doubled in size year after year after year for 10 years. I had set out to create the perfect programming job for me; instead, I created a job where I had to stop programming altogether. I I attempted to create an environment that I could completely control; instead, I was running a company with thousands and thousands of people that was growing so fast that it was impossible for anyone to control.
The greatest pleasure I’ve had is trying to do something that everybody says could not be done. I’ll just share perhaps perhaps a a moment in time which I will always cherish. I decided that India could produce its own car. Everybody, my friends overseas in the automobile business, said that this couldn’t be done. We had to go through a collaboration to get know-how, get technology, but we undertook to produce this car. You saw images of it in the video; it was called the Inda, and we produced it in India, totally of Indian content. As we as we got close to putting it in the market, uh, my friends in India somewhat distan themselves from me, otherwise known as distancing yourself from failure. And when the car came out, I suddenly felt that I didn’t have a friend in the world, and that all the warnings that people had given me were probably going to come true. But the car did come out; it did earn a 20% market share, and we showed that we could do something. Throughout throughout the time I’ve been involved in business, there hasn’t been anything that has equaled the excitement, the reward, and the exhilaration that the car industry has provided and can provide. It gives, as has been said earlier, an opportunity to test new technologies, new building methods, but above all it has helped in the transformation of the Indian economy to a mobile economy. What you really could do with more skills—it it’s just remarkable.
So I I would like to just tell you a couple of short stories, and we’ll draw maybe a couple of lessons from them. Uh, I would like to tell you of two women uh that each sold a business to Berkshire Hathaway uh to me actually for many many many millions of dollars. Both of them started with $2,500; by a coincidence it was the exact same amount; it was everything they had in the world. And one of them was a woman who landed in Seattle in 1977, couldn’t speak a word of English. One further fact about her: she could not read or write. And she went into a furniture business, and she didn’t bring anything in unique in furniture, but she brought a determination to succeed. She knew she could outwork anyone else; she knew she cared about her customers. She worked at very low gross margins, but she built this incredible business. And I saw one woman who did a similar thing with $2,500. I paid her hundreds of millions of dollars for her business.
Henry Ford, as you may know, failed twice before he started the Ford Motor Company in 1903. I mean, the the test isn’t whether you get the greatest business idea in the world the first time out; the test is whether you keep learning as you go along, what your strengths are and what you can do for your customers, what you can bring especially to the par party. And to do that uh you need you need the education that that I know you’ve received uh through 10,000 small businesses, but you need a genuine a genuine desire day in day out to delight the customer. I’ve never I’ve never seen a business, and I’ve seen a lot of businesses, but I’ve never seen one that delights the customer that that doesn’t succeed. I mean, what you want is that customer the next day when they think, “Do I want to rent a car, or do I want to buy some furniture?” What goes through their mind? You know, it’s the place where they’ve had a great experience.
Well, I love my work. The work of the foundation is super interesting. I get to meet with the scientists; I get to go out in the field. I do think your habits are sort of set in your 20s and 30s, and by my standards of the 20s, you know, I didn’t believe in weekends back then—not to mention vacations—so I’m, you know, fairly lazy compared to myself in my 20s, where I was a true uh fanatic. Uh, you know, all I believed in was working on software night and day, and and for my 20s that was perfect. I didn’t have a wife or family uh at all, and my role was very hands-on role. You know, know I I’m very lucky that my foundation work, the part-time work I do for Microsoft, I see that extending you know for decades into the future and having an understanding of innovation uh you know, I think shaping innovation in many of these areas uh there is a unique role that I can I can help play.
I always tell them we don’t do marketing because marketing is against what a company like us should do. Because marketing—what is marketing? Marketing is to analyze what the customer wants and then try to follow what the customer is looking for and uh test what you create following these strs and try to to do it. We do completely differently. We create new products, and sometime it’s fails, but when it’s successful the customers follow. So the marketing is not for us part of the product creation. So marketing is after; so marketing is when uh we have these products—how with this products which people want—maximize the desire. Because our business—you ask a question about luxury—luxury for for me is how can you create desire. The most important word in in our business is desire: how to create desire. And when you have the product, then you have to create good environment in the shops, and you have to present it well. You have to do well good films if it’s a perfume; good advertisement either in the magazine or in the internet if it’s a if it’s a product. That the way I I see and we see in in my group, the way to the way to put product in contact with the to Consumers. I tell senior executives you should have the least stress. You know, there’s this weird—I think false—uh idea that CEOs—I’m a CEO—there’s this false idea that CEOs are under the most stress. Well, I look at that; I’m like, “Why? You’re in charge; why don’t you delegate the stress? It’s your choice.” And um so it’s you have to to figure out how to set up your life in such a way that you can minimize the things, and I find people don’t dislike hard work; what people dislike and is being um out of control.
I searched and I searched, but I just could not find a software engineering job that that I loved as much as I loved sailing, so I tried to create one. I don’t believe you can fundamentally say the innovation that you want as a CEO to nurture the spirit of innovation, to encourage innovation, unless you have a culture of risk-taking. I think the the overarching point I want to make is that um you know you guys are the the magicians of the 21st century. Don’t let anything hold you back; imagination is the limit, and um go out there and create some magic. Thank you. [Music]