Twitter Co-founder Ev Williams Nebraska Commencement Address

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05/06/2017 Added

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Ev Williams, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter and co-founder and CEO of Medium, delivered the University of Nebraska-Lincoln undergraduate commencement address May 6, 2017 at Pinnacle Bank Arena. He told of his journey from Nebraska farm kid to successful internet entrepreneur and offered advice to the graduates. http://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/twitter-co-founder-to-deliver-commencement-address/

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[00:00:00.595](audience applauding)
[00:00:04.274]Good morning faculty, families, friends,
[00:00:09.437]and everyone who's helped these graduates reach this day.
[00:00:13.064]Congratulations to you and the Class of 2017.
[00:00:16.212](applauding)
[00:00:24.632]This is a very humbling opportunity for me
[00:00:28.656]and a humbling honor, I really appreciate it.
[00:00:34.154]I think it's gonna be a little confusing for my kids,
[00:00:37.140]why, when we went to Nebraska this time and visited Grandpa,
[00:00:41.292]Dad became a doctor.
[00:00:43.657](audience laughing)
[00:00:47.328]Right, guys?
[00:00:48.699]But I'm gonna make them call me that around the house,
[00:00:51.640]so I think they'll (audience laughing)
[00:00:53.647]get used to it.
[00:00:57.198]I've been asked to speak for less than 10 minutes
[00:01:00.231]so this won't be too long but for me,
[00:01:03.663]that's like 50 characters worth of tweets,
[00:01:06.100]so it's pretty generous. (audience laughing)
[00:01:09.555]I might go a little bit over that, too, we'll see.
[00:01:12.836]Though I really appreciate the introduction,
[00:01:15.824]I don't really feel like a Silicon Valley guy,
[00:01:18.418]especially being back here.
[00:01:20.516]'Cause at heart, I'm a Cornhusker.
[00:01:23.822](audience cheering)
[00:01:29.507]And I mean that quite literally.
[00:01:34.072]I did grow up on the farm near Clark's
[00:01:36.234]about 90 miles northwest of here
[00:01:39.064]and one of my many summer jobs was to go pick
[00:01:41.695]and husk the sweet corn for dinner.
[00:01:44.942]Some of you may be familiar with that
[00:01:47.648]and I had fond memories of growing up on the farm.
[00:01:50.753]I'm very proud to be from here
[00:01:54.360]but I didn't really feel like a Clark's guy
[00:01:56.306]when I was there, I always felt a bit different
[00:02:01.070]than those around me.
[00:02:03.728]I knew I wanted to go out and be part of something big
[00:02:06.770]and make my mark, I just didn't know what that was.
[00:02:10.792]So, like you, I enrolled here at U.N.L.
[00:02:16.814]And though I thought about not going to college at all,
[00:02:20.298]I never thought about going anywhere else.
[00:02:23.208]As Chancellor mentioned, both my mother and father went here
[00:02:26.049]and met here while attending.
[00:02:29.187]My older brother and sister came here as well
[00:02:33.139]and speaking of being part of something big,
[00:02:36.290]from the perspective of a farm kid,
[00:02:39.491]this is pretty damn big.
[00:02:41.632](audience laughing)
[00:02:44.943]Even scary.
[00:02:48.365]And I figured if this were really the place
[00:02:54.811]where the boys were the squarest
[00:02:56.068]and the girls were the fairest,
[00:02:59.645]not only would I fit right in,
[00:03:02.084]I'd have something to look forward to.
[00:03:04.110](audience laughing)
[00:03:08.218]So, I loved my year and a half here
[00:03:10.484]but I didn't find what I was looking for
[00:03:12.913]and I was in a hurry to get to go do something else
[00:03:18.371]so I kept searching and one day, I found a clue
[00:03:23.851]in, of all places, the Conastoga Mall in Grand Island.
[00:03:28.772](audience lightly clapping) True story.
[00:03:32.804]So it was there I picked up a copy of Wired Magazine
[00:03:38.219]and I'd never seen this magazine before, most people hadn't.
[00:03:41.206]It was the second ever issue
[00:03:44.091]and I picked it up thinking it must have
[00:03:46.681]something to do with computers,
[00:03:49.082]which I was kind of interested in
[00:03:52.430]but it turned out to be about ideas.
[00:03:56.091]Ideas like connecting every brain on the planet.
[00:04:01.669]One of the essays read, "Words have been de-coupled
[00:04:04.302]"from paper, transforming the world
[00:04:07.131]"as profoundly as the printing press did 500 years ago."
[00:04:12.942]Of course, it was talking about the internet,
[00:04:15.851]which I knew a little bit about.
[00:04:17.144]We had it here at school, even in the early 90s
[00:04:21.223]but it wasn't yet a part of our lives.
[00:04:24.822]Maybe it was because I grew up on that farm
[00:04:27.919]with so many ideas in my head
[00:04:30.937]and so few people to share them with
[00:04:33.910]but I couldn't think of anything more exciting
[00:04:36.942]than a system with the potential to connect brains
[00:04:40.081]from all over the planet,
[00:04:43.853]a giant idea-sharing machine, as I saw it.
[00:04:48.839]I've spent my life ever since working on that machine,
[00:04:52.893]connecting brains and helping people share ideas
[00:04:55.991]in easier and better ways.
[00:05:00.207]That work did not start smoothly.
[00:05:02.831]I founded my first internet company here in Lincoln,
[00:05:06.990]we had an office down at 14th and O,
[00:05:10.098]which is a great location for going to the bar.
[00:05:13.689](audience laughing)
[00:05:15.577]Which we did plenty of.
[00:05:18.539]The company itself was a complete disaster,
[00:05:22.566]I had no idea what I was doing
[00:05:24.601]and learned many painful lessons but it did serve a purpose
[00:05:29.007]and that was to fuel my interest in the internet
[00:05:32.110]and prompt me to consider moving to California,
[00:05:36.493]which was an even scarier journey to contemplate
[00:05:39.972]than coming here from the farm.
[00:05:43.981]My concept of California at the time was a vague montage
[00:05:46.912]of Baywatch, earthquakes, hippies,
[00:05:52.778]and what I had read about Silicon Valley,
[00:05:55.762]a wondrous place where super-geniuses
[00:05:58.125]were actually building that brain-connecting,
[00:06:00.662]idea-sharing, money-making machine called the internet
[00:06:06.099]and I wanted to be a part of it.
[00:06:09.269]But it was scary because with my first business failure
[00:06:13.028]fresh in my mind and no real training or education,
[00:06:17.584]unlike yourselves, I didn't know
[00:06:20.628]if I was gonna be able to compete in that world.
[00:06:25.464]Nonetheless, I harnessed my ancestral pioneer spirit
[00:06:32.043]and I headed west.
[00:06:42.695]I was saddened at first to learn that there's nothing
[00:06:45.832]in San Francisco that remotely resembles Baywatch.
[00:06:50.119](audience laughing)
[00:06:51.691]For you students, that's a television show from the 90s.
[00:06:55.136](audience laughing)
[00:06:58.976]But I was relived to find
[00:07:00.079]that there was nothing to be afraid of
[00:07:03.008]except the hippies.
[00:07:04.884](audience laughing)
[00:07:07.527]What I realized quickly
[00:07:08.989]was that the people in Silicon Valley
[00:07:10.401]weren't smarter than I was,
[00:07:12.009]they were just in the right place
[00:07:13.070]to do what they were good at.
[00:07:16.408]Well, that's not entirely true.
[00:07:17.857]Some of them were way smarter than I was
[00:07:22.603]but I came to discover that if you focused
[00:07:24.308]on adding value, they were more interested in collaborating
[00:07:28.552]than competing, that we could connect our brains together
[00:07:32.962]and come up with better ideas.
[00:07:37.303]So, that's what I did and the first thing I did that worked
[00:07:40.333]was called Blogger, which I created with my friends,
[00:07:42.569]Meg and Paul, also a U.N.L. alum.
[00:07:47.745]We didn't invent blogging and we certainly didn't perfect it
[00:07:51.480]but driven by our own needs and a hunch
[00:07:53.477]that others would find it useful, we made it easier to do.
[00:07:59.197]And it turns out, that's enough.
[00:08:02.985]In fact, that's basically all the technology does,
[00:08:06.931]it makes things that people wanna do easier.
[00:08:10.992]Very often, this is a good thing, not always
[00:08:16.506]but making things easier is the key.
[00:08:20.818]Another key is realizing that ideas only get you so far.
[00:08:26.025]Success almost always requires working hard for a long time.
[00:08:32.500]Four years after I started that company,
[00:08:36.348]years that included running out of money,
[00:08:39.476]laying off all my employees, and spending countless nights
[00:08:43.123]on the office sofa, I sold Blogger to Google.
[00:08:50.376]That was a tiny deal by Silicon Valley terms
[00:08:53.043]but it was a huge deal for me.
[00:08:56.872]Not least of all because it meant I got to go join Google
[00:09:01.314]and work with the smartest people I'd ever met.
[00:09:06.493]Even after that success, many people were still skeptical
[00:09:09.347]of a concept I had come to believe deeply.
[00:09:13.054]The normal people have worthwhile ideas
[00:09:16.267]to share with the world,
[00:09:18.406]at least worthwhile to someone in the world,
[00:09:22.889]someone who might not reside in their same tiny town.
[00:09:28.299]With Twitter, some friends and I followed another hunch
[00:09:31.254]and made it easier still.
[00:09:33.740]Unleashed from our computers, you could now share an idea
[00:09:36.364]anytime, anywhere, as long as it was 140 characters or less.
[00:09:44.353]Now at first, people were even more skeptical of this
[00:09:46.742]than they were of blogging, 140 characters?
[00:09:51.538]I'll admit, it was a strange concept
[00:09:55.495]but I was convinced that we were enabling
[00:09:57.098]the grand promise of the internet,
[00:09:59.949]the open flow of information
[00:10:02.337]and that this was definitely a good thing.
[00:10:06.262]In fact, I thought this was the key
[00:10:08.013]to making the world better.
[00:10:10.620]Free idea exchange meant more good ideas,
[00:10:13.645]eradicating the dumb ideas that bring society down.
[00:10:18.509]Everything would be better, I thought,
[00:10:20.086]if we just got rid of the information gatekeepers
[00:10:22.406]and let people talk.
[00:10:26.555]I'll admit those of us in Silicon Valley
[00:10:28.143]sometimes think this way
[00:10:30.321]like we're Prometheus stealing fire
[00:10:33.167]from the selfish gatekeeper gods
[00:10:35.383]and giving it to mere mortals.
[00:10:40.697]What we tend to forget is that Zeus was so pissed
[00:10:43.290]at Prometheus that he chained him to a rock
[00:10:47.671]so eagles could peck out his guts for eternity.
[00:10:52.816]Some would say that's what we deserve
[00:10:55.914]for giving the power of tweets to Donald Trump.
[00:10:58.569](audience laughing)
[00:11:00.708]Some would say that, I'm not...
[00:11:02.573](audience applauding) People have said that.
[00:11:11.362]I was nervous about that joke in Nebraska.
[00:11:14.154](audience laughing)
[00:11:20.771]I now know that more people putting their ideas
[00:11:22.935]out into the world
[00:11:24.854]does not automatically make the world smarter.
[00:11:28.372]Many amazing things have come from this
[00:11:30.660]but like Zeus sending us Pandora with her box,
[00:11:34.349]we've unleashed not only good ideas but bad ones
[00:11:38.508]and it's very hard to sort through the noise.
[00:11:42.840]Storytelling may be as old as human language
[00:11:45.160]but so are arguments, insults, and fake news,
[00:11:50.082]or as we like to call it in Nebraska, bullshit.
[00:11:54.682](audience laughing)
[00:11:59.500]Turns out, the internet is not a silver bullet,
[00:12:02.409]it's just a tool, kind of like the two-way radios
[00:12:05.475]we used to use back on the farm,
[00:12:07.701]just with a little broader range.
[00:12:10.847]It's a tool that reflects us.
[00:12:13.739]It's just as good or as bad as we are
[00:12:17.335]but despite this, or actually because of it,
[00:12:20.051]I'm an optimist.
[00:12:22.800]Optimists, I find, are more pleasant to be around
[00:12:25.560]than pessimists, so I encourage you to be one, too.
[00:12:30.531]But you should know that it is more work
[00:12:33.004]because if you believe it's possible to solve problems,
[00:12:36.520]you feel obligated to try
[00:12:40.311]so I'm gonna keep working on this idea-sharing machine.
[00:12:44.701]I'm still as excited about it
[00:12:45.889]as when I picked up that copy of Wired.
[00:12:48.583]I still think we can connect our brains together
[00:12:50.420]for better and better outcomes,
[00:12:53.315]we just have some kinks to work out with the system,
[00:12:56.285]some bugs to squash.
[00:12:59.713]The same could be said of our government, our schools,
[00:13:02.797]our health care system, our economy,
[00:13:04.630]and so many important, worthy areas
[00:13:06.716]where you can apply your ideas and efforts.
[00:13:12.200]I'm sure you've already thought a lot about that
[00:13:13.908]since today you're graduating to beta.
[00:13:19.675]You may also still have some kinks to work out, we all do,
[00:13:24.401]but in addition to your degree,
[00:13:26.782]you have unlimited amounts of flexibility and potential.
[00:13:32.442]I saw in the top of a hat walking this way,
[00:13:34.987]"Anything is Possible," absolutely.
[00:13:38.755]The question is what will you do with it?
[00:13:42.250]I've tried to share parts of my story
[00:13:43.415]from which I've derived important lessons,
[00:13:46.731]lessons that would've been valuable to me
[00:13:48.202]as a young Nebraskan
[00:13:51.319]but since this is a commencement address
[00:13:54.654]and since many of you are probably hungover,
[00:13:57.108](audience laughing)
[00:13:59.936]let me finish by boiling it down to some succinct advice.
[00:14:06.233]First, genius plans and eureka moments are overrated.
[00:14:10.216]Follow your hunches.
[00:14:12.722]Try things and be open to where your gut
[00:14:14.972]tells you to go next.
[00:14:17.669]You don't have to set out to change the world,
[00:14:20.597]just find a way to make something worthwhile
[00:14:24.042]easier for other people
[00:14:25.965]and you just might change the world along the way.
[00:14:30.565]Second, no matter where you are,
[00:14:32.747]never doubt that you can be a part of something big
[00:14:36.010]and make an impact.
[00:14:38.844]There's no such thing as a flyover state anymore.
[00:14:42.510]You're just as connected as anyone else.
[00:14:46.865]I know you're just as smart
[00:14:49.575]and as Nebraskans, you actually have some advantages:
[00:14:53.928]realness, resilience, and fairness
[00:14:56.577]are values we were probably all raised with
[00:14:59.630]and in my experience, they go a long way in the real world.
[00:15:04.646]Third, work hard for a long time
[00:15:08.804]and focus on your growth, not your status.
[00:15:12.452]It's cliched advice but the truth is
[00:15:14.760]most people are not willing to do it,
[00:15:17.127]so it's still an advantage.
[00:15:20.409]And fourth, be an optimist,
[00:15:23.837]even though it will obligate you
[00:15:25.698]to try and solve problems, it's worth it.
[00:15:31.567]Commencement speakers tend to talk about graduates
[00:15:34.845]as our idealistic young saviors but having met a few of you
[00:15:40.580]and having employed and worked with some of your peers,
[00:15:43.485]I can't help but place a great deal of hope in you.
[00:15:47.428]The world needs your ideas and your hard work.
[00:15:51.562]We live in amazing times, for better and for worse.
[00:15:56.289]I know you're up for the challenge.
[00:15:58.914]I can't wait to see what you do.
[00:16:01.172]Congratulations and the greatest of luck.
[00:16:04.371]Thank you. (audience applauding)

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Twitter Co-founder Ev Williams Nebraska Commencement Address

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