UT Austin MSTC Commencement Speech
Today I had the honor of congratulating the 2017 graduating class of the UT Austin Masters in Science and Technology Commercialization. This was the first time I’ve given a commencement speech, but my message is the same one I’ve had for student entrepreneurs since I first started teach Longhorn Startup many years ago. The text is included here now and a video should follow in a few weeks.
Thank you Dean Limberg and Director Thurman, it’s an honor to be here with you today.
Congratulations to the MSTC class of 2017!
This unique degree is one more example of the entrepreneurial spirit of UT Austin and the McCombs School of Business. It also highlights the vision that Laura Kilcrease and George Kozmetsky had more than 20 years ago to create the first program like this of it’s kind.
I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur.
My friend Troy Parkinson recently reminded me of a conversation we had when we met the first week of college. He asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated and I told him that I wasn’t sure, but I thought I wanted to work for myself.
When I look around my family I’m surrounded by entrepreneurs.
None of them ran big businesses, mostly small retail operations, but they were almost all entrepreneurs. In fact, my parents are sitting here in the audience with us today. My father was a wedding photographer. He ran a small studio out of the basement of our home. My mom was a school teacher but she also sold wedding invitations to my dad’s clients. It truly was a family business.
I am so thankful to my mom for teaching me that I could be whatever I wanted in life and my dad for inspiring me to think and work for myself. My wife Amy has picked up the torch and always encourages me to pursue my dreams and push my own limits even though that often comes at the expense of her convenience.
I’d like to share with you the story of how I started my first company in college.
I wish I could say that invented a new technology or cured some disease, But it was nothing that clever.
Like many college kids I had more time than money. But software and music both still cost money back then. I could download mp3 music for free from Napster, but most of the software I wanted was not open source yet and had to be purchased.
The only way to get free software was to apply for beta programs, which were not open to the public back then and usually required that you sign an Non-Disclosure Agreement.
I really wanted to get the web server for the Mac called WebSTAR so that I could host websites. That was the software that everyone wanted at the time.
I went to fill out the form on the website and noticed right next to it another form for a program called ListSTAR. I didn’t know what ListSTAR was but the form asked the same questions so I filled it out, too.
As I said, everyone wanted the get beta access to WebSTAR, so I was denied. After all, it was obvious that I was just a college kid who would never purchase the software. But apparently not enough people applied for ListSTAR, because they let me in.
So then a box arrives in the mail. Because that’s how software used to get delivered. With a manual. And CD-ROMs. Because you couldn’t download software yet.
Again, I had more time than money so the first thing I did was crack open the manual and read it, front to back. Apparently nobody else read the manual, so I was immediately very popular on the beta program discussion forum. Every day I would answer people’s questions just for fun.
One day Tom Biddulph, the CEO of StarNine Technologies, reached out to me and asked if I’d like a job as an intern, answering questions on the forum. Paying me for what I was already doing.
I took the job.
It was a fun job and over the next year they flew me out to conferences and Tom mentored me about business. He took me under his wing and was incredibly transparent about how things worked. I kept answering questions on the forum but also started speaking at the trade shows and conferences and hanging out with the sales and marketing team, because that’s who goes to the conferences.
Most good sales people are coin operated. They will figure out tricks to help them close deals and make more money. One day a salesperson at StarNine was trying to close a deal and the customer wanted a small custom script to make it work for their needs.
The savvy salesperson said, “we have this intern, and I bet if you buy him a pizza he will customize it for you.”
So he introduced me to the customer, I wrote the script, and they bought me a pizza.
Soon, the other salespeople caught on. Before long, I had a small consulting business going on the side, writing custom scripts for ListSTAR, and an endless supply of pizza.
I started going out on other email forums and answering people’s questions — the simple ones anyway. If it was a hard question that would take some time to figure out or require some custom code, I would offer my consulting services.
One day David Rogelberg, a frequent customer, called me because his server had crashed. After I fixed it, he asked me what at the time seemed like a revolutionary question.
“Instead of calling you urgently every time my server crashes and paying you $50 to fix it, how about you run my email on your server and I just pay you $50/month?”
Now today that might not seem that revolutionary, in fact you would expect to get most internet services by paying a monthly fee — but back then everyone ran their own servers.
If you wanted a website, you needed to run website software on a computer and hook it up to a dialup that used a phone line 24/7. If the phone line went down, your website went down.
Well this whole idea of getting paid a monthly fee sounded pretty awesome to me. After all, I was running it on the computer my parents bought me, in my fraternity house, hooked up to the school’s internet connection. I had no costs!
Disclaimer: I would not recommend operating a business on the UT Austin’s school network. I’m pretty sure they will shut you down in seconds! This was 1996 and let’s just say that these best practices were not established yet.
Of course being both naive and an optimist, I assumed nothing would go wrong and I would have an extra $50/month of beer money. And for the most part this was true.
And one by one, $50 and $100 at a time, I grew my client base over the next few years. I created a website and added a line to my email signature that said, “I can host your email lists”. I incorporated a business and started hiring my fraternity brothers to do tech support. By the time I graduated, we were doing a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue. It was the beginnings of a scalable business.
I bootstrapped that business for 10 years before selling it. I never received an investment because I had no idea that it was even possible. Why would anyone give me money?
While that worked out for me in the end, both financially and many other ways, it wasn’t on purpose. There was no big plan. I didn’t invent anything. I just learned a lot about something and worked hard and opportunities presented themselves.
A Chinese proverb tells us that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
You may never be in a better position than you are today to find co-founders for a new company than you are as a student at UT Austin.
You are at one of the largest and best universities in the country. Everyone around you is sorted, categorized, organized, ranked, scored and graded in every possible dimension.
If you want to find programmers, we’ve got em. Engineers? we’ve got em. Design thinking? Biomechanical? Driverless Cars? We got em. Whatever it is you are into, if it’s world changing, it’s happening here at UT.
This place is crawling with world class researchers. You can just walk up to a lab and start asking questions. There is technology waiting to be commercialized all around us! You can find the next great idea that is waiting to change the world.
For many of you, it will never get any better than this. Take full advantage of it while your network is fresh. Make the most of this degree not just by leveraging what you know, but who you know and the powerful network that you are now part of for the rest of your life.
As life goes on, it will never get easier to start a company.
Life’s obligations seem to pile up over time. As more and more people become part of your life, you have more birthday parties and weddings and important events to attend. Your circle grows and so do your commitments. You join churches, synagogues, teams and clubs. Each one takes time and focus.
Some of you may already have a family, some of you may not. As your family grows, the commitments at home do as well.
You understand this already just as a virtue of being in this program. This isn’t just any graduate degree. This is a degree designed for working professionals to take on top of their other responsibilities. You already understand what it means to make sacrifices to push yourself forward.
Unfortunately, I’ve got some bad news for you. The sacrifices aren’t over. Now is the time to take full advantage of the skills and network that this degree and has given you and turn that into a new business.
It’s only going to get harder to turn away from all of the things tugging at you and demanding your time. It’s only going to get riskier to give up the security of a job and a paycheck and become an entrepreneur. It’s only going to get easier to say, “I’ll do that tomorrow.”
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
So where do you start?
Getting inspired about a startup idea is kind of like falling in love. You can do things that will increase your chances, but you can’t force it to happen. Here are three things I would suggest to anyone who is interested in starting their own company.
- Become an expert at something
- Meet someone new every day
- Work your butt off
If you do these three things, you’re very likely to stumble across an opportunity that you fall in love with.
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg weren’t experts when they started their companies, but most startup founders are. Usually you need to know a lot about a problem before you come up with an innovative solution.
The Internet has opened up so many new doors for teaching yourself new things and self-advancement. Wikipedia is a great place to start. In addition to social media and the news, you can find message boards where experts are discussing niche topics and scholarly papers that get published online. If you’re interested in learning new skills, there are a variety of online video courses, certificates and degrees.
You might not know where to start.
What industry or problem should you focus on? What should you learn a lot about? Rather than spending a lot of time and energy thinking about the best place to start, just pick something and focus all of that time and energy there.
You can start out learning about artificial intelligence, read everything that you can find, and take an online programming course. Try that for a month, and if you don’t really feel it then switch to Virtual Reality. If that doesn’t feel right you can switch to something else.
It’s a lot easier and faster to rule something out than to predict which one is perfect.
Try to meet at least one relevant new person every day.
Once you pick an industry, theme, or problem, then you want to meet a lot of people. While you are looking for inspiration, you want to be exposed to many different ideas and perspectives. Each person you meet can connect you to other people you should meet. Follow the chain.
Leverage all of the connections you already have. Talk to your family and friends. Talk to your professors and other students. Talk to the person you see at the corner store every day and talk to the Ride Austin driver who is giving you lift. Talk to the person sitting next to you today.
You have to have a fire in your belly.
Entrepreneurship is not for the timid or lazy. As an entrepreneur, all of the odds are against you. You need to work smarter, harder and longer than everyone else. If you can’t be passionate about what you are working on, then you need to find something else.
But if you do these three things:
- Become an expert at something
- Meet someone new every day
- Work your butt off
Then I’m confident you will find the opportunity that you’re looking for.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
What starts here, changes the world.
Congratulations.
