-: Well, first of all let me just say good evening, welcome,
thank goodness it's not raining right now.
We're very, very happy about that
after the excessive rain we've had.
But I really want to welcome you tonight
to the Dr. John and Tammy Allen lecture
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
I am Dr. Beth Theiss-Morse,
the interim dean of the College of Arts & Sciences,
and I'm just thrilled to have everybody here tonight.
Tonight's event is the first in a series of lectures
that will bring talented entrepreneurs
who have liberal arts backgrounds
onto campus to meet with students, faculty,
and people from the community.
We'd like to take this opportunity,
just to start off with, to thank Dr. John
and Tammy Allen for their generous support
for the college's partnership efforts,
which include a whole bunch of things,
but especially tonight for their support
for the lecture series.
Our collaboration ensures that the college's
liberal arts students and faculty
have the opportunity to engage with and talk to
and learn lessons from other liberal arts people
who have gone on to be a success in life,
and so we're thrilled to have this opportunity.
Dr. John and Tammy Allen
began their education in liberal arts,
so hence their interest in the College of Arts & Sciences,
and then they went on to get degrees in medicine
at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
As an aside, I'm very pleased to note
that Dr. John Allen is an alumnus
of the College of Arts & Sciences here at UNL.
The Allens are accomplished entrepreneurs
and their foundation in liberal arts
has led to incredible success
and a philosophy of lifelong learning,
something that we very much appreciate
in the College of Arts & Sciences.
Please welcome to the stage Dr. John and Tammy Allen
as we give them a token of our appreciation.
(audience applauding)
A gift for you.
-: Thank you.
-: Thank you so much.
-: Thank you very much.
-: Thank you.
(audience applauding)
-: Hello, I'm Dr. Dan Hoyt.
I'm the interim associate dean
for Research and Partnerships
in the College of Arts & Sciences
and I have the privilege tonight of introducing
our guest speaker, Dr. Michael Zimm.
Dr. Zimm received his PhD in Classics from Yale University
and used the research skills and knowledge that he developed
and writing skills that he developed in this context
to move into the world of writing, working in digital media.
He became the manager of the digital media
project at Digital Surgeons.
I'm not sure I'm saying it exactly right, but--
Michael: Close enough.
(laughing)
-: And he's written quite a bit about the experience
of moving from training in classics into the digital world,
and the work that he's written has been published
in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Wall Street
Journal, and Inside Higher Education amongst others.
I'm very privileged to have the opportunity
to introduce Dr. Zimm to talk with you about his experiences
and how and why he moved from the classics
into the world of high tech.
(audience applauding)
-: Thank you so much.
Thank you all for having me.
This is my first time visiting Nebraska
and there are all sorts of stereotypes
about Nebraskan hospitality, I'm , it's all true.
It's really remarkable,
especially coming from the Northeast
where people don't quite have your warmth.
I also want to send my thanks to Doctors Allen,
to the family, because they endowed this lecture series,
and it's really about not just the value
of the liberal arts in today's world,
but job opportunities for that,
which I think is one of the most important questions
facing the liberal arts today.
Where I think we both share a common bond as well
is that our background in the liberal arts gave us
the confidence that we can take on any challenge.
How that fact pertains to them, they'd have to speak to.
Today I want to talk about how that pertained to me
in my own story and where I am today and how I apply it.
But I guess to frame this,
I want to begin with one fundamental question.
Why would someone who wants to pursue a career
at a tech startup decide to study the liberal arts?
Even before I got the invite to come and give this talk,
I've been thinking about that for a long time.
In today's talk, there are gonna be four parts to it.
Part one, I want to discuss how I got into liberal arts,
particularly how my passion in Greek and Roman history
and, yes, ancient Greek and Latin, arose.
Part two is gonna discuss my transition from an academic
life into where I am today, into digital marketing.
In the third part I want to discuss briefly
some opportunities for partnership
between the liberal arts and the private sector.
And in part four, I want to also give advice
to the business community on why,
particularly the tech community,
why they should recruit liberal arts undergrads.
So where do I begin?
Let's start about 17 years ago.
When I was an undergrad, like many of you,
I did my undergraduate degree in New York University.
I was a history major because I loved history,
I loved studying the lessons of the past.
The problem was, for the first three years,
I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with myself,
which I'm sure many undergrads here hear.
What are you gonna do with that degree?
How are you gonna market it?
How are you gonna use it?
And the advice I got was probably similar
to advice that many people get, study something marketable.
Do something that can get you a job.
But I fundamentally took issues with that
because I wanted to determine what is marketable.
I don't need someone to tell me what I can do with a degree.
I felt like that was always a very
unimaginative answer to receive.
I'll determine what is marketable
and I'm gonna use that for my own
career goals, whatever those may be.
The transform moment in my undergraduate career
occurred when I spent a semester studying abroad
in Florence in the spring of 2004.
So I've just aged myself, I go back a way.
And for some reason, I decided to take a trip,
in Easter of 2004, this would've been in April 2004,
I took a trip to Sicily.
I went to the, ancient and I said,
this ancient city that I've heard of called Syracuse,
I want to visit it and see what it's all about.
At one time Syracuse was the most powerful city
in the western Mediterranean,
and I heard there was some really interesting ruins there.
And when I went, I visited the great Theatre of Syracuse,
which you can all go, if any of you happen to be in Sicily,
I strongly recommend you go visit it and see it to this day.
And I sat in the theater
and I remember it was a beautiful spring day,
the smell in Sicily is so powerful.
It's just the smell of almonds, of lemons.
It really touches all the senses.
And I sat down in the theater, where the plays of Aeschylus,
the great Greek Athenian playwright,
Sophocles and Euripides were once performed.
And I looked at the theater and I knew it was a ruin,
it wasn't being taken care of,
yet I was in awe of the beauty
and wonder of this seemingly decrepit theater.
By chance, a few months earlier, where I happened to live
at that time in Central Florida, I had driven by a Kmart.
How many people who know what Kmart even is?
(audience laughing) Okay, yeah, so.
They used to be at one point almost as common as Walmarts.
But I drove by a Kmart that happened to fall into disrepair,
went out of business, as many would eventually,
and within two years it looked like a piece of rubble
that was just an eyesore on the highway.
And I asked myself why is it the Greeks,
and Romans for that matter, could build these theaters,
and they fall into disrepair and yet I'm still
in awe of them over 2,000 years later,
yet we build buildings and then after a short time,
they look terrible, they ruin our neighborhoods,
and I said there is grandeur here, there is beauty.
I want to study the Greeks and the Romans,
I want to know everything about them.
And I started to dive deeper and deeper into the history
over the course of that summer
and developed an utter fascination
with Greek and Roman literature,
Greek and Roman philosophy, and Greek and Roman history.
The problem was I didn't know Greek or Latin.
I knew I wanted to get a PhD.
All the undergrads here are probably ahead of me,
'cause I was almost done with my undergraduate career
and I didn't know what to do with myself
but I just knew I wanted to get a Classics PhD
and I wanted to be an educator,
I wanted to be like a professor,
and I wanted to take the lessons of the Greeks and Romans
and apply them in today's world
'cause I thought that the lessons I was reading
from the works of Plutarch, Thucydides,
and Herodotus, they have value today
and I wanted people to be able to take that
and use it in the private sector.
I always had that vision for myself.
But I didn't know any Greek or Latin
so I went home that summer, I got myself a Latin book,
and I taught myself intensive Latin just through a textbook.
But I wasn't good enough to get into a PhD program.
So I graduated, wasn't sure what I wanted to do with myself,
and I enrolled in UCLA for a year
and did a post-baccalaureate program in Classics
and intensively studied the language for one year.
And I applied to grad school saying, okay,
I'm gonna get in, my career is all set.
Everything's gonna be very linear, it's gonna be great.
My first big hurdle, I got rejected in 2006.
And over the course of my travails
trying to get into grad school,
I realized that I had several values that I discovered
that are worth their weight in gold in the world today
but I didn't realize how much value
they were actually worth at the time.
And that was my first interaction with grit
'cause I got rejected and I think a lot of people
would've given up at that point, I said okay,
I just need to learn more Greek and Latin.
So I moved to Israel for three years
and did a master's at Tel Aviv University
studying Greek and Latin for three years.
And in 2007, I got rejected,
and once again in 2009, I got rejected,
which is demoralizing, three successive years of failure.
And I failed, without question.
But I didn't give up and I said
I knew at that time I had this thing called grit,
I'm not gonna give up yet, I know it has value,
I'm just not entirely sure what that value is.
And as I read more and more Greek text,
I realized I had something else
and that was an unquenchable curiosity.
Curiosity is worth a lot.
Curiosity is the doting sibling of innovation.
Great innovations and discoveries are made
because people are simply curious.
Being curious for the sake of being curious
is often a trait that I look at when I meet
new people and I can figure out
whether or not they have something unique.
Do they ask questions just for
the sake of asking the question,
or do they wanna learn just for the sake of learning?
That was a second value that I learned at the time.
And as I was reading those ancient texts,
I became quite comfortable
with not getting a straight answer.
We know often in our world, someone reads something,
and they just wanna know what's the answer.
I became very comfortable with saying
I don't know the answer.
It could be this, it could be that.
That could be one way of interpreting this political event
in 425 in Athens, this could be another way
of interpreting that political event.
But regardless, I was okay with that
and ambiguity is one of the,
we're taught so many skills in school,
and we're often taught that if we learn something,
it will have a one to one
linear correspondence to what we do.
It's not really how the world works.
I sort of hypothesized that at the time,
but now that I'm in this startup world, it's very true
because you're constantly dealing with ambiguity.
And in situations where, what's the answer?
I don't know.
Let's test this out, let's try that.
But if you're looking for a very straight playbook,
that's not existence as I understand it.
And finally, in the spring of 2010 though,
I got into grad school at Yale
and I thought it'd be smooth sailing at that point.
I spent six years structuring my PhD,
and it was my first big interaction
with what I call project management,
'cause that's really what a PhD is.
Usually though when you do project management,
you do it on a much smaller scale,
you do it the one to two months to maybe a year or two.
With a PhD, it can be a six year process
and you have all these milestones you have to hit
like you have to pass your qualifying exams,
you have to pass, your prospectus has to be approved.
As I was going through each one, I sort of made notes
to myself, okay I'm hitting my milestones,
I didn't think it was possible to really plan something
that takes six years but it was a very rewarding
experience being able to pull that off.
And by 2016, so what about 12 years since I
had sat in that theater in Syracuse,
I at last I walked across the PhD stage
at Yale and I received my doctorate.
Unfortunately, I also didn't have a job.
So the joy of getting my PhD
was unfortunately counterbalanced
by what seemed like unemployment at that time.
My ambitions came to a screeching halt.
There were a couple ways I realized
I could handle that adversity,
one was you just keep on trying, you apply in the academic
job market again, you try to get another
tenure track job, you apply for postdocs.
I said I can do that but I don't think
that's a good use of my time, of my earning power,
and my wife, who works at Yale now, she had a very good job
and at the time I had a one year old son,
I didn't want to uproot them,
I didn't want to do that to my family.
And I said now I'm gonna make a career transition.
To what?
I was a Classics PhD, and when I first got advice on it,
I was asking people what should I do?
What should I do with myself now?
One of them, the two most common answers,
go to law school, which is basically
kicking the can down the road,
(audience laughing)
or become a high school Latin teacher.
Utterly safe advice, utterly respectable advice,
and utterly unimaginative is the way I saw it.
There was no vision there, it was all very trite
as I saw it when I got that advice.
And I said no to the advice I was getting
from family, from loved ones who had my best interest
at heart and when I looked around, for a series of reasons,
bit complicated to go into it right now,
I got fascinated by technology.
New technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality,
mixed reality, blockchain technologies,
cloud-based softwares, it all fascinated me.
At the time I realized, well if I've used my knowledge
to get really deep into Greek and Latin for years,
and for those of you, anyone here who's never studied
Greek or Latin, they're very intense langauges.
It's almost a misnomer to call a computer language
a language 'cause that implies that a human language
is logical, they're actually not.
So ancient Greek is unusually,
is a very complicated language and I knew,
whether other people knew that or not,
that if I could conquer this, I could conquer everything.
Why not?
It can't be too complicated.
And at first, everyone said Mike, you're not gonna enjoy
a technology company, you don't have the background.
You're not a coder or designer,
I was like that's exactly why a technology company wants me.
How many classicists do you meet at a technology startup?
They're rare, you never meet them, to be honest.
I think I'm one of the only ones,
there are a couple out there but there aren't
that many so that'll make me a novelty.
To any curious organization,
they're gonna just simply wanna have a conversation,
find out well what is a Classics PhD
because 99% of the people on the planet,
especially outside of the university,
have no idea what Classics is but that's an asset.
If you frame it right, it is a tremendous asset,
or as I had it in my disposal
whether or not other people realize that or not.
And I realized that I did the math in my head,
well the chance of me getting any one job
are quite low, but statistically if I play the numbers game,
I'll eventually get something, they're quite high.
It's the same strategy I use for dating.
You ask out a lot of people, eventually one will say yes
and that person's my wife, to this day.
(audience laughing) So, there you go.
Play the numbers, it'll eventually work out in your favor.
And as I started to reach out to companies,
I was often hearing crickets, I heard nothing.
'Cause I was applying online, I was very naive,
I was like huh, I'm not hearing anything.
And I knew the risk HR is filtering me out.
And I understood why, because they probably have software
that says you need to check off certain skillsets.
Well Greek and Latin was not one of them.
They weren't asking for that.
And I was getting filtered out of the system
so I said okay, I'm gonna circumvent the system.
Ignore HR and just reach out directly to CEOs
and to hiring managers, get their emails and contact them.
And, if you can't contact them, then just show up
and say I'm here, do you wanna talk?
Which led to some really interesting encounters.
And as I was exploring, I did get down at points
'cause sometimes you hear crickets,
but again I knew like I'm eventually gonna get something,
I'm gonna bring value to some place.
And one day, as I was driving along I-91
which is one of the main highways that goes
through New Haven, Connecticut, where I live today,
and it goes from New Haven all the way up to Canada,
I went by this building that said Digital Surgeons.
It looked very cool.
I had no idea what they did.
Which is fair 'cause they had no idea where I did, either.
So, I knew we were gonna have an immediate bond.
(audience laughing)
And I sent an email to them saying hey,
I'm a liberal arts PhD, I'd love to find out what you do.
And I don't know.
I didn't really know anything, actually no,
let me be careful, I didn't know anything about marketing,
zero, let alone digital marketing.
I'm fairly certain that everyone in this room,
at that, if going back a few years,
knew more about marketing than I did,
it just wasn't even part of my vocabulary,
I didn't know what it was.
And I said um, I sent an email and before I knew it,
a couple days later, this CEO, whose name is Pete Sena,
he sent, I got an email saying our CEO Pete Sena
would like to meet you so I said okay,
he said come in the next day and I wasn't sure
what I was gonna talk about and I said the normal thing
to do, if there's a normal thing,
would be to read about what the company does and to learn
about marketing, that's not how I operate though.
What I know really well is I know rhetoric.
I've studied it for years and I know that rhetoric
is powerful, rhetoric is how you control a crowd,
rhetoric is how you communicate
with people, figures of speech.
And the Greeks and the Romans, the best.
The best at persuasion, I've been studying this for year,
if you read the speeches of Cicero,
you're gonna very quickly pick up on all these
rhetorical techniques for connecting with an audience.
So I said that's what I need to channel
in the 24 hours I have right now
at my disposal before I meet him.
Because I want to be unapologetically me,
I'm not gonna be anything other than me.
And one of the most powerful figures of speech is metaphor.
We think in metaphor, we do not think
in terms of complicated language,
we think in terms of simple language
and if you really want to connect with someone,
always use the metaphor rather than
complicated language to express an idea.
And when I got in, I sat down and Pete asked me
why do you wanna go, like I don't even know
anything about academia, why would you wanna go
from academia to a tech startup?
And what, what, why?
And I told him about the quilt of knowledge.
He was like what's the quilt of knowledge?
And I said well there's this quilt of knowledge,
and on that quilt are individual tiles,
there's a tile for computer science,
there's a tile for classics, there's a tile for history,
each one of those tiles represents
a particular domain of knowledge.
And from my perspective as an academic,
I was getting very very deep into the threads
of a particular tile and what I always wanted to do
was to find ways to move from one tile to the next
and find ways for them to interact with each other
and to show their value, that really it's all one,
these are not, these tiles all connect in their own way,
it's one big quilt when you stand far enough back
and that everyone should be studying different parts
of the tile rather than just focusing on one.
And I want to take what I have learned
and apply it at a company like yours
and talk to coders and designers, show them why
they should care about Greek and Roman history
and find ways to drive value.
And then, for the rest of the talk, I went on about
the origins of Greek tragedy and the god Dionysus.
And, after 30 minutes, Pete said I have no idea
what you'll do here but man, do I see a why.
He says you're one of us, I was like am I?
He's like yeah, you are.
I was like I don't know what you do,
he's like it's okay, we'll figure that out.
(audience laughing)
He says I'm gonna give you an assignment.
I was like what's the assignment?
And he says I want you to do a website audit
of one of their clients and I'm to be
a big e-commerce brand, now I'm fairly certain
that he was trying to beat the system of Google
'cause when I Google website audit,
I had no idea what it was.
And I asked him for clarification,
I was like what's a website audit
and he says you have a PhD in Classics, figure it out.
Okay, and then he's like and by the way,
in the tech world and the startup world,
things move fast so you have about 24 hours.
I was like okay.
So I went home and once again, I said,
I looked at the company and it's amazing
how valuable writing is a skillset in our world today.
You're in a university right now so you're surrounded
by great writers, rest assured when you go into the world,
you will see that writing is an in demand skillset.
It's very hard to come across it
'cause I've seen Fortune 500 companies have websites
where I have no idea what they're talking about.
How could a publicly traded company
have a website where the language is that bad is beyond me.
But that's the world that we live in.
And I went in, I had no idea what this company did.
And what I did was I said well I've read lots of Thucydides,
lots of Tacitus, was a Roman historian,
lots of Cicero, lots of Demosthenes,
so I'm pretty good at rhetoric at this point
and I know the value of anaphora,
assonance, asyndeton, these were all
powerful rhetorical figures of speech.
And if you don't know what they are,
go take a rhetoric class 'cause they're
very cool and they're very powerful.
So why don't I use that to come up with
my own interpretation of what a website audit is
'cause clearly I'm not getting, Google has failed me.
And I spent 24 hours giving a list of recommendations
of what I thought a website audit was.
And a recommendation for how this company,
this powerful e-commerce company,
could improve their web presence.
I got that back and literally 24 hours later,
my apartment was burglarized, which was very depressing.
I remember, distinctly remember coming home,
my laptop was gone, pictures were gone,
and I was dealing with the insurance company,
I almost forgot that I had sent this back to Pete.
And while I'm dealing with the insurance companies,
I get a phone call and I answer, I'm like hello,
he's like hey Mike, this is Pete.
I was like oh, hey Pete, and he's like,
he's like how are you doing, I said I'm not
in a great state of mind here,
my apartment was just burglarized.
I'm not, what's up?
And he's like oh, I'm really sorry to hear that.
And he said, listen I just want to tell you,
I read your website audit, this is awesome.
We could use someone who knows Greek and Roman history.
Come here, come join us 'cause you didn't know
anything about digital marketing but you
gave me this, and this is better than a lot
of the stuff I see from digital marketers.
Come here, come join us, come work for us for three months,
if after three months, Pete says,
like if after three months you hate me,
I'll help you find another job.
I don't think you're gonna hate me,
I think you're gonna love me,
I think we're gonna do wonderful things together
but you are one of us.
I was like well what will I do?
He's like that's not as important,
we're gonna figure that out, we'll figure that out together,
we're a startup, he says we have to, we're always growing
and we have to figure out new revenue sources
so come here, we'll figure that out.
I was like alright.
And so I get there and as we're talking,
I was like we need to figure out what you're gonna do
'cause we do have a bottom line.
And what do you like?
And one is I told him about was I said I love history.
What history is is taking data
and you synthesize that into a narrative.
So if you can take data, whether it's from 5th century
Athens or from 1st century BC Rome
and synthesize that into a coherent narrative,
then I can do it with website analytics,
that was my assumption, at least, at the time.
I was like well, I look at data and what I've been doing
for years is really just creating a story about that
and he says okay, let's do,
you're gonna do that for clients.
How?
And he's like through analytics.
What are analytics?
He's like I'll show you.
It was very much a handholding process
for about six months where I did make mistakes,
I deleted some folders I shouldn't have,
we were able to recover the client, don't worry
but that was the kind of process it was training me.
And over time, I got very interested
something called search engine optimization,
that is the science of how one ranks on Google
'cause Google is just based on all sort of different
algorithms that rank a website based on different features.
And if you know them, you can help
a company improve its digital presence.
And then the other thing that I took upon myself
was to become the digital media go to guy
in our company, the digital media manager.
It didn't exist when I came but I realize
that being a startup was not that different,
in many ways, than being in academia
where you're constantly, no one really tells you
what to do, you just know you have to make money.
You have to create value.
It's like when someone comes up with a research paper,
no one usually tells them what to do,
you have to figure that out for yourself
and then come up with something that's valuable
after that research experience.
And for me, I went through the company and saw that,
I looked at areas where I thought that the company
could grow just based on where the revenue was.
And that's where I am today in the company
is a digital media manager, I work with things
like Google AdWords, that's the advertising system
for Google, most people do not know this
but 90% of Google's revenue comes from their advertising.
And very few people have asked me
how does Google make money?
They're gonna just throw up their hands?
It's through this incredibly complicated
something called the Google AdWords system
which I work with.
I am privileged to work with the people that I work with
in my company today, being in a tech startup
transformed my view of the liberal arts and its value.
It didn't negate it, it's helped me reimagine it.
Not a day goes by where I don't get an invite
to discuss something with the ancient world.
Our creative director, James Dowd,
we just finished covering Greek history
over 20 lunches and god knows how many beers.
One of the best coders that I know,
his name is Jake Burden, he is a philosophy major,
he's a phenomenal job of script developer
and, in our spare time, we don't talk about business,
we talk about philosophy, he love when we talk about Plato
and we talk about life and I asked him once,
I said do you regret majoring in philosophy
because allegedly that's not that valuable of a major.
And he says first of all, I don't need to major
in computer science to be a great coder,
he's like I just do it on my own
and I'm, he just he loves hacking.
But he feels like this helps me live a good life,
studying philosophy and I apply it every day.
Another one of the great coders, his name's Adam Sofer,
he's a training musician, a musician
who decided to become a great coder afterwards
and he is now he works with Ethereum development,
he's a blockchain developer which is very comp,
it's a very complicated form of computer programming.
But what all the people have in common in my company,
including the CEO to the account managers
to the designers is love of knowledge
just for the sake of knowledge.
And not necessarily demanding what you might expect
perhaps from someone who's more of a linear mindset
of well how's this gonna make me money?
Sometimes great ideas come from the conversations
about history, about literature.
And from that, we create value.
And even now, as I look at the tech world,
I'm not a day goes by, not a day goes by
I do not learn about some entrepreneur,
y'know, again, if you ask most people,
and this was my perspective before I went to tech,
what's the background on all these tech entrepreneurs?
You immediately assume a software engineer,
that's sort of the perception we have in mind.
But let me just rattle off a few names
to give you a catalog of some of the people
that are great tech entrepreneurs today
that do not have tech back,
they have liberal arts backgrounds.
Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Slack,
the fastest growing B to B enterprise software company.
He has BA in Philosophy then he got his MPhil in philosophy
from Cambridge University, he did not go into academia
'cause he was told there weren't that many academic jobs.
But he then decided to start a startup
and he is one of the most successful entrepreneurs
in the Valley today and they say if you go
to a Slack boardroom meeting, it's not unusual
to listen to them talk about Plato and riff on that.
Reid Hoffman, the COO, the Chief Operating Officer
of Paypal, he then became the CEO of LinkedIn.
Everyone here should know what LinkedIn is.
And he is a philosopher by trading.
He says he's actually just an applied philosopher,
that's how he describes himself.
He created a powerful company
with his liberal arts background.
Alexa Hirschfeld, who went to, who got a BA in Classics
and is the co-founder of Paperless Post,
which is an e-card company.
So everywhere I looked, I realized that in the tech world,
and I sort of had this hunch, that people there
are interesting, they're gonna appreciate
someone like me and my liberal arts background.
And that hypothesis has only been proved true
as time has gone on and I consider myself
incredibly fortunate to be a part of a company like that.
And all of the skillsets that I cultivated,
which at the time I didn't realize what their value was.
It's value only became apparent to me once I went
into the tech world where the value of curiosity.
Being curious just for the sake of being curious
and not as asking what's your ROI of that curiosity?
What's the return on investment there?
Curiosity just for the sake of curiosity
can lead to amazing innovation.
The value of grit, that's a tough one
to for HR to filter for.
I was talking to my COP about it,
he still has no idea where they had to,
how do you find people that have this quality called grit
because it's incredibly important,
especially when you're working late nights
and you're trying to push through a project,
that is worth its weight in gold.
And three, being comfortable with ambiguity,
being able to say wait this is one answer
and that could be another answer
because in the world I'm in today,
there often aren't straightforward answers.
Let's try this as a solution and it doesn't work,
you don't just give up, they're like okay
and we can find something else.
This could work, that could work.
Let's test it out and see what happens.
So I've learned quite a bit about how those values
can drive growth for a tech startup.
For the students here today, I know many of you
probably get advice from your parents
on when you study something marketable.
I live in a world where what it means
to do something marketable almost means nothing.
'Cause everyone has an unusual background.
But those are people I like to surround myself with
at this point 'cause I get so many good ideas from them
and we are growing something special together.
I would encourage, I want to give some advice
to the professors here, too, because I know
there's so many attacks on the liberal arts today.
I'm sure there are calls to cut the liberal arts
here in Nebraska, there are calls for it across the board,
doesn't matter what university you're at,
whether private university or public university.
Build connections with the private sector.
Reach out to local startups, reach out to them.
Tell 'em, like hey just build that connection,
say hey I just want to have a conversation with you
and could you find a potential internship opportunity
for a student of mine?
Because I feel like, especially for businesses,
I don't know if there's anyone with a business community
here but when I was beginning my search to leave academia,
one of the best pieces of advice that I gave
was someone says Mike, you don't want a job.
I was like I don't, they said no you want an internship.
I was like what do you mean?
He said you need to get professional experience,
that's your passport into the business world today.
Because it's so risky for a business just to hire someone
right out of the gate, no matter how many,
no matter how qualified they are for the job,
takes about three to six months to find out
whether or not someone is a secure hire.
Again, they can check off every box on the wish list,
then they go there and for whatever reason
it doesn't work out, so for businesses,
if they can be incentivized, in a way,
to hire someone and perhaps get a tax credit,
maybe get a tax credit or a tax deduction,
whatever it is from the state for hiring a liberal arts
undergrad for a summer internship, that will one,
the business can give the, it can solve some pressing
business need for them.
Two, it allows them to test out a candidate
'cause if they like you after three months,
I got news for you, they're not gonna let you go,
they're gonna want to hire you full time.
And three, it's a great opportunity
for professors and the university
to build relationships with the local community.
Especially at Digital Surgeons, the co-founder
of Digital Surgeons along with the founder, Pete Sena's
co-founder, Dave Salinas, they were very strong believers
in local startups and local businesses.
We're sick and tired of hearing about
everyone going to New York, Boston,
or San Francisco to start a company.
Think about it, you have all this great talent here,
all these great minds yet it's almost a tease.
After four years, they often tend to leave,
they tend to go somewhere else.
What if there's a way to capture that talent here
and keep it to help one, it's great for the local economy
here in Lincoln, we sorta think this way in New Haven,
creating a startup culture to help grow the New Haven
community but also the Connecticut economy.
But it'd be a great way to try and keep someone here
after they graduate and retain it
and help grow the Lincoln economy.
Particularly through technology startups
'cause I have already looked online,
I can tell you have your tech startups here
but how many people here have actually reached out
to those businesses and say hey,
I have a student who's a great writer
and I've looked at your website and it's awful.
But he can come and he can do a lot of writing,
he can write white papers and he can find ways
to help you improve your organic search writing
simply through writing, it's as can be as valuable to you
as a coder who knows Javascript.
That's the reality so I'd encourage that,
the professors try to find ways just to take some time
and reach out to those businesses.
And two, cultivate a LinkedIn profile and presence.
LinkedIn is your, it's your professional footprint
today in today's world and when I left,
I didn't have a LinkedIn profile, I had to build one up
but it's been an enormous tool for me
just to connect with people, other liberal arts PhDs,
other people that have my background
and we connect all the time on LinkedIn
and I built these special relationships with people
through this, it's a great tool for building a community,
particularly in the liberal arts to find ways
of generating those relationships.
And also, stay in touch with, it's a way to for you
to stay in touch with your former students.
If you have a student who goes off, to say,
work in the business world or work in the tech world,
invite them back, let ask them, I mean I was,
I came here to talk about my own experience
but there are many other people just like me,
ask them to come to your classroom
and talk about how their liberal arts training
plays a role in their job today.
Students will love that.
How many students would love to hear that?
Former majors to come and to talk
about which their training is pertinent
to what they do to this very day.
I use my classics all the, it's hard to explain
but take my word in it, I use it all the time in my company.
They know it, they call me Professor Zimm.
I'm the prof at my company.
Every company should have at least one,
probably no more than two in house classicists.
(audience laughing)
I'm a strong believer in that.
I get one of the most common requests
is people love to ask me about Greek and Latin
etymologies, that is the origin of words.
That has value, I'll have one of my friends
will come over and say hey we have a client,
they have this product,
what's a good Latin word we can use for it?
And I go through and I think, okay, this could be good,
that could be good, unless you think that's an anomaly,
I want to share with you a story
of another Classics PhD who graduated in the late '70s
and he left academia around the year 1980
and he decided to transition to the private sector
and he eventually became a programmer
and he helped build a startup which was eventually
bought out and he did very well for himself.
But he was telling me that during his transition period,
this would have been, yeah, 1980, 1981, he did some,
shall we say branding consulting using his Latin background.
And the brand manager for who represented
a big automobile company approached him
and said to him hey we have this new car coming out
and we want a cool name, could use your Latin to help out.
Said he okay, well what's the car?
And he said well the car is about luxury,
it's gonna be about you should feel very safe in it,
it's gonna be a luxury line of car.
He said he thought about it and he said
well there's a Latin word cura, means care,
can also mean anxiety, and there's a preposition in Latin
called a or ab, it means away from, absent of.
He's like so you combine ah and cura, you get acura
and the brand man, this manager said hmm,
I like it but let's call it Acura
and he's like no you're not accenting it correctly.
(audience laughing)
But they had an argument and the brand manager,
he won, he's like well you know what,
sorry but Acura's gonna stick with the public.
So that's the origin of the name Acura
and he told me he's a bit frustrated
'cause it only took him like two hours to come up with that
but he didn't get any residual royalties in the brand name.
But these are the stories you can find
of people in the private sector today, in my case,
of course there are non-profits, there are all sorts
of different organizations one could join.
My own passion are startups, that's where I love
and that's where I love to be in and I get
tremendous pride, I can take my education
and every day apply it in my company.
And I want to conclude with this,
there's this tendency to think that data can only be handled
by people that are data scientists or coders.
That's actually not true.
I think a data scientist, or a programmer,
they might look at data and look for very clear outcomes
from that, they're gonna look more narrowly but look at
very actual things you can do very quickly from that.
Someone with a liberal arts background
is gonna look at that data and think big, big picture.
And it's not like one is better than the other,
you need both 'cause when you combine those two people
together, the programmer and the liberal arts person,
you start to get something approaching wisdom, in my view.
And at the end of the day, you will all get advice
but if anyone ever, if any parent or anyone else
ever knocks your decision to study the liberal arts,
don't sweat it and just remember that
there's eventually a startup out there that may hire you.
That's concluding that, thank you.
(audience applauding)
And I'm happy to take any questions
anyone may happen to have in the time we have left.
Yeah, what's your name?
Miles: Miles. -: Miles.
Woman: Miles, come here,
I want you on so we can get you on video.
No pressure.
Miles: So what does Digital Surgeons actually do?
-: Great question.
We do digital marketing, we do digital consulting,
but among the things we do, we do website redesigns.
We do web analytics, web analytics is the practice of,
it's the use of data, there's so much data out there
and when you structure that data, you can figure out
things along the lines of how many,
how long someone's on the page for a website for,
what is the average number of page visits.
It goes on and on and on, it's really incredible
the amount of data that we have out there now
and part of what I do is actually limiting the data,
figuring out what's meaningful and what's not to the client.
I'm, on my end I work on the search engine optimization,
the consulting part of the business.
So that is, again, it's looking at the back end
of a website and seeing, for example,
I see here on your websites, you are lacking
this particular feature, your website's not secure,
it's not HTTPS, you're being penalized by Google for that.
And the algorithms are gonna lower you
in the search rankings, and as you know, no surprise here,
most people, for example, I think 90 something percent
stop on page one of Google so the difference
between being list, being ranked number 10 and number 11,
it's worth a lot of money to a business.
And the way Google works is all based on keywords.
You Google leather shoe, what's gonna show up for leather
shoe or what's gonna show up for Lincoln, Nebraska?
You'll see a Wikipedia 'cause Wikipedia happens to have
a very high domain authority out there in the eyes of Google
meaning everyone links to that website
and therefore that algorithm, the famous
Page algorithm developed by Larry Page
says increase that website's presence.
And therefore when someone Googles it,
show them number one because again,
most of us also won't go beyond the top four,
the very top of the real estate
of the search engine results page.
So, that's a very complicated process to work with a client,
figure out how am I gonna improve your process.
And help you rank for the value keywords
that are gonna make money for you.
Where I work on, which is tricky to explain,
is the Google advertising system
which is perhaps one of the most complicated
business advertising tools ever developed.
Google developed this advertising system.
Just to give you an idea, if you don't know
what you're doing, do not use it under any circumstance.
It is very easy for you to put an extra zero
instead of five or $50, you're doing 5 $50
and presto, a month goes by, you've spent $14,000.
Good luck getting the money back from Google.
It's a very complicated toolset.
But the bread and butter, I'd say,
is a lot of website redesigns, helping websites improve,
making sure they're optimized for search
along with these other features like search engine
optimization and paid digital media.
But I do all that there.
But just to answer, I knew nothing about
any of this before I joined, zero.
But in my mindset, I said well if I can,
I was pretty good at ancient Greek,
I still am pretty good at it um where I left
but if I can do that, I'm sure I can figure this out.
Yeah?
Woman: What exactly, so your presentation
is that you're a very creative mind
and you also were willing to think outside the box
and these were really what got you in the new sector.
How do you think universities, especially liberal arts
programs, could really capitalize on those
to really emphasize creativity as well as
thinking outside the box but through
as part of the training, as part of the program
rather than just creativity abroad.
-: I wrote an article fairly recently,
I think it was in the Chronicle of Higher Education,
about a professor from I think it was a state university
in Texas and she was thinking about that exact
same question that you asked yourself
and she was wondering how can I use my English class
to build a relationship with local companies?
And I think what she, if I recall what she did
was she encouraged all of her students
to take an internship but then to, I think,
formulate the internship into a story
which they then had to present to the class.
And was, I think it was a great idea
'cause it combined the potential for a student
to get an internship and to really learn
and to practice what they were getting from that class
but to also get work experience.
And for them, they themselves, to take what they're learning
and say ah, this is what I'm getting out of the class.
That could be one, I think, creative way
in which professors could try and encourage students
to reach out to local communities
and find local businesses or local communities
and find ways to connect the skillsets that they're getting
in that class with those business needs.
It's a win, as far as win, that's a win for everyone.
'Cause we all know that oftentimes, businesses will say
what's the value of the liberal arts?
And that all does not come from a bad place,
sometimes a genuine question like what is the value of this?
It doesn't necessarily require defensiveness.
That's a, you should hit that out of the park,
that's a home run question, let me show you the value of it.
You hire this person for free for two or three months,
it's not really for free because they're getting credit
out of it but the business is gaining as well
and they're gonna see what they're getting out of,
say an English major 'cause I think it's fair to say,
and you can tell from my background,
you don't need to preach the value of it to me.
What I get a lot of joy out of today
is meeting people that might be skeptics
but then at the end, most people I know don't
question the value of classics anymore, they love it.
As they say, they get a free education because of me.
Woman: What's one thing that you wish
someone with a more typical background
in software would take it to heart,
something that maybe bugs you that you've seen a lot
with software engineers or the like?
-: I'm sorry, what's your name?
Woman: I'd prefer not to say.
Because we're recording.
-: But it's a great question but here's my answer
to that, with software engineers, I seldom encounter
any negativity, I just tend to get a lot of creativity
from them and curiosity, they ask me quite a bit
about part of my renewed passion for liberal arts
has come from these interactions with software engineers
who just love to hear about this and talk philosophy,
talk history, talk natural history.
I had an entire discussion about the development
of the whale's ear, we didn't bill a client for it
but it was a great conversation.
If there was one thing that they could take from it,
is that I tell them you think in terms
of computer languages but if you really wanted
to push yourself, try ancient Greek or Latin or Sanskrit
or any of these ancient languages
because it'll actually make you rethink the entire concept
of a language or we're increasingly thinking of
Javascript, of PHP, C++, these are all computer languages
as languages but when you study an ancient,
a language, whether it's dead or living,
it's very, it's a, it's an eye opening experience
and it makes you look at culture differently.
Man: We had a conversation at lunch
and just talking about the process of,
like, automated positions, right?
So, losing occupations to automization.
What kind of advice might you give to people
that are fearful that these positions
aren't going to exist 'cause computers can run them?
I mean, I can self prescribe myself with WebMD
and we don't need doctors anymore, so.
(audience laughing)
-: I'm more worried about the positions that exist today
rather than the ones that are 10, rather than 10 to 20
years down the road, the ones we don't know exist.
A lot of the advice that I got in the past,
and friends of mine have suffered for this advice,
was through good intentions, they would get advice
of study this because it's valuable in today's world
but the reality is 10 to 20 years from now,
we don't know what the world really needs.
And some of my friends who made decisions based on
what worked well in the '80s and early '90s,
now found themselves trapped in positions
and they are trapped due to debt
from the graduate schools they went to.
They've told me, I asked them would you give that advice
that say your parent gave to you to your child
and they said absolutely not, no way.
Do not do that.
I think that the world is certainly changing rapidly
but I'm a strong believer that if you're open-minded
and you're willing to always retrain yourself
and take on new skillsets, then it's your oyster.
Because I wasn't trained to do what I was doing,
technically, the very technical skillsets I didn't know
but I was open to taking on new skillsets
and I'm always open to learn new things,
I'm trying to learn Javascript right now just for fun.
For no other reason other than fun.
And I hope in five to 10 years I'm not doing exactly
what I'm doing right now 'cause I view life
as just a, it's a constantly moving stream.
It strikes me as boring for me to imagine
myself doing the exact same thing
I'm doing now five years from now.
I like this form of existence
where I'm constantly doing new things.
So if you're open to adapting, and I really believe
the world is belongs to those that are willing to adapt,
you will constantly be able to do new things.
I'm more worried about people that might train themselves
for very set skillsets and then it's not clear
in 10 to 20 or even 30 years
what's the nature of that job gonna be?
As someone who's very open to take on new things,
I'm quite, even if my job happened to be automated
in five to 10 years, I'll learn something new, rest assured.
Woman: Honestly just mimicking your question, so,
my name is Regina, I think one of the things
that is very clear is that one of the reasons
why you have been able to be this successful
is you have a PhD, which by definition means
we are extremely good at learning a lot
of new stuff very quickly and communicating it to other.
Doesn't really matter what the PhD is in,
that's what the value of a PhD is most of our students
will earn a four year degree and not go on
so they're gonna be in a slightly different position.
What advice do you have for those of us
who teach undergraduates who may not go on
to a graduate school and how to improve their outcomes?
Is it the same advice?
-: I wanna correct you.
My PhD was a liability.
You'd be amazed at how often it worked against me.
I wish I just had a four year degree
and that says I'm very proud of my PhD
'cause of where it's a personal goal in my life.
I was amazed at how many people dismissed me for my PhD.
They're like uh, he lives in the clouds,
he doesn't know how the world operates,
he invested six years in that, no way, we're not hiring him.
And even in my company, among us I'm still close
but I was told that when they hired a Yale PhD,
the reaction was oh, they're so pretentious, why?
Why are we hiring someone like that?
To which I say that's not me, I'm pretty down to earth,
I'm not like that, that's not who I am.
And my people in my company, they know that now,
they look at me differently and as PhDs differently
but there's certainly an assumption
that a PhD can live, can perhaps think as better,
he or she is better than the rest of us
and that's not me so I feel like
and maybe it was probably easier
for a liberal arts grad than it had been for me.
And just to give you another anecdote showing
an example of a liberal arts major
who was able to pull off a position in a startup.
There was, I think I said this over lunch
but I'll mention it again, there's a restaurant technology
coming in Cambridge area called Toast
and read a fascinating article about a girl
who was a English major and she wanted to get
a break into the startup world and she secured a meeting,
I think with a manager at Toast,
which is a fast growing, it was a fast growing restaurant
technology company, had I think over 400 restaurants
using this technology, but she didn't have
any technical background and it was a company that was
scaling so they really it was very little room for fat.
And they asked themselves what
are we gonna do with an English major?
But she did something that no one else
in the company ever thought of.
When she secured the meeting with the manager,
she took that morning to go around the Cambridge
and Massachusetts area and she visited
a bunch of different restaurants and she asked
to speak with the chefs and said hey,
what do you think of this technology?
And she got their insights, she wrote it down,
and she very quickly synthesized a PowerPoint presentation,
all of this within a few hours, and then when she
went into the meeting, she met with this manager
and she said hey, I got some input about your technology
and here are some problems with it, they were blown away.
'Cause no one in that company had ever thought
of asking local chefs what they think of this technology,
their end user, no one thought about it.
And she did that and they said within a short amount
of time, the board said we gotta hire this person.
And I think she's currently now the head of growth
for the company but that being example of someone
who, like my had a liberal arts degree
and was able to articulate the value
strictly through critical thinking,
just thinking like well no one's probably
asked that question, they probably need that,
so let me synthesize that.
And they clearly saw value there
'cause they hired her quite quickly.
Woman: There's time for one more question.
Just for you.
Coach: Hi, am a career coach in the College
of Arts and Sciences so I talk about these kinds of things
with students all of the time
so I'm probably excited that you're here.
We had taught a career development course
last semester and early on in the course,
one of our really just like bright, very accomplished
students asked us, well what if you don't have a passion?
And passion and curiosity, these are course words
we use frequently when we're talking about the liberal arts
and career development and things like that
and she said well what if I don't have a passion
and that sort of has kicked me off on this
whole long sort of journey of discovering
well what does passion mean, how do we define that,
how do we talk about it, what is its relationship
with curiosity and all of that so I'm just wondering
how you might respond to that student.
-: That's a tough question.
Coach: I know.
-: It's interesting question I think a lot of people
that are in the liberal arts or are majoring
have already found that, they've already reached that point
where they have some passion there and they're doing it.
No one majors in Classics for fun.
It just, or you're trying to coast, doesn't exist, okay?
That's not why someone studies Classics, for sure.
You're out of your mind if you take Classics
for an easy A, it's not gonna happen.
I think, for myself, let me reverse engineer that
a little bit, that question, because when I left,
some people said you're leaving your passion.
My wife talking to her and when I said
I think I want to leave academia, she was crying
'cause she said I don't want you to leave your passion.
And I said I'm not leaving my passion,
I'm simply redirecting it and taking the passion I have
and gonna appropriate it for some technology startup.
That is what I'm gonna do with it.
And it's very much, it's constantly metamorphosizing
within the company itself where I get interested
in new things, it can be hard for people,
I understand, to find what it is that
they're passionate about but the one way,
I think the easiest way to find it is look around
and don't stop, read, read articles,
I'm constantly reading articles in the Atlantic,
the New Yorker, is there any value?
Pure interest, that's it, and finding that.
And I constantly develop new passions through just being
open minded enough to try different things.
And sometimes that passion that I have now,
it didn't exist a few months ago but I discovered it
and passion's very much, it's a process of discovery.
And they shouldn't feel, no student should feel like
well I don't have a passion and therefore it's not there,
you can often discover it,
just be open minded and look for it.
If it's not there right now, it's okay.
Just keep on looking around, keep on reading,
and you will eventually find something.
Coach: Kinda like, kind of what you said like
if you said passion, you kinda said passion is a process
so it's active, it's not one static theme in time.
It's a skillset that you use to approach
different things that can come from life,
so it's a very active process.
-: Very much so.
In fact, I call the CEO, I ask him what's my,
I was like Pete, what's my biggest skillset
and he's like your passion, Mike.
He's like that's, like I like your passion.
Woman: So, I just want to say thank you so much,
Dr. Zimm, this has been absolutely fantastic.
We have a lot of curiosity and passion
in the College of Arts and Sciences
and we love to have people be able to talk through
and think through what their life is going to be like
so thank you so much for your talk.
-: Thank you for having me.
(audience applauding)