The commencement speech emphasizes that while many life moments seem significant, only a few are truly consequential. The speaker advises graduates to focus on navigating these moments by choosing optimism, tackling hard challenges, and pursuing what genuinely excites them to build a fulfilling life.
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President Levven, Provos Martinis, trustees,
trustees,
senior class presidents, thank you for
the invitation to address you today. And
to the distinguished class of 2026, congratulations.
congratulations. [cheering]
[cheering] [applause]
I must warn you all, this is only the
second commencement speech I've ever
given. The first was literally in my
backyard. It was the spring of 2020,
right in the middle of CO and lockdowns.
We were filming a YouTube commencement
for the graduates who couldn't have
their own celebrations like this one.
When I look back on it, I see a time of
great anxiety.
I see the empty space where there should
have been an audience.
I see the haircut I gave myself right
before filming.
In fact, I really wish I could unsee it.
Today, what I see in front of me is how
graduation should be. Graduates
celebrating together and with the people
you love who have supported you on your
journey. Your parents, relatives,
friends, professors, and everyone who
helped you reach this milestone. Let's
give them another round of applause.
I know not everyone you care about could
be here. Many of you came from other
parts of the country and the world as I
had. And it's not always possible for
families to travel. In fact, this is the
first time my mom and dad are attending
a graduation ceremony I'm a part of. So,
let me say a special thanks to them and
I know today is about giving you all
advice, but people have also been giving
me a lot of advice on what to say.
Actually, it's been the same advice and
it's about what not to say.
People thought it would be really
difficult for me. It's the last two
letters of my last name after all.
In all honesty, the topic is truly
immaterial to what I want to share with
you. The most timeless advice I've
learned is technology agnostic. It's
about you, the life you want to build
for yourself, and the choices that help
you pursue that life. Some of you know
what you're pursuing already. Congratulations.
Congratulations.
Enjoy closing down the Rosen Crown. Now,
it gets tougher with a day job.
Many of you may have absolutely no clue.
That's okay, too. I remember feeling
uncertain on graduation day. the sense
that life was a series of really big
moments and the pressure I felt to get
them all exactly right. This is
especially true for a group of high
achievers who have sweated every grade,
every paper, every exam, who have
focused on having the right mix of
activities, athletics, internships, and
now your first jobs. I'm going to let
you in on a little secret.
While these things matter in the moment,
they are much less consequential than
you might think. You could have failed
that biology test, skipped a class,
never learned to play the tuba, and
you'd still probably be here today. Let
me tell a story of how I started to
learn this for myself.
When I was a student here, I had a
classmate named Pat. He was from Long
Beach, had an earring in one ear, which
I thought was really edgy at the time,
and a white two-door Honda Prelude convertible.
convertible.
One Wednesday morning in January, my
first winter quarter, we were on our way
to class. He was like, "Do you want to
go to Vegas instead?" I had never
skipped a class. I had never definitely
taken a road trip before. In fact, this
is the first time my parents are hearing
of it.
And yet I said, "Sure." So we went back
to our dorm rooms, grabbed some things,
and set off. You have to cut through the
mountains to get there. As we drove
through them, it started to snow. I had
never seen snow before. I stuck my hand
out to grab it. I couldn't believe the
softness of the flurries.
Pat stopped the car so I could get out.
It was really beautiful. A moment I'll
never forget.
9 hours from when we set out, we arrived
in Vegas with the night lights on the
horizon. I didn't know what to think.
Pat taught me how to play blackjack. I
started with $5 and did manage to win
about 15 more and was like, I'm out.
We didn't have enough money to stay
long, so the next day we started the
drive back. No one seemed to notice that
we had missed class. For the first time,
I realized the world won't end if I
relaxed a little. You're going to face a
lot of moments in your life. Only a few
of them are really important and you
need to get them right. Picking a
partner, choosing whether to start a
family, a bigger carrier pivot. Those
decisions require time and intention.
However, you will face many more moments
in your life that only seem really big.
Thousands of them, in fact, and very few
of them are make or break. your first
job out of college, the city you move to
next, whether to take that road trip.
While those moments add texture to your
journey, they rarely determine the
course of your life. But if you're able
to filter the signal through the noise,
you can nudge your life in these moments
into having the impact you want. So
today, I want to share three simple
filters I've applied to my own life.
three filters that have helped me get
more moments right than wrong and took
some of the pressure off. First, choose
optimism. This might not ring true to
you at this moment. The world is going
through a lot. Global conflicts,
economic anxiety, a rewiring of
technology, information overload, all at
a fast pace. It's easy to look at the
news of the day and think that we are
living in uniquely challenging times.
For me, it's helpful to remember that
each generation has faced hard hardship
in their own way. We don't get to choose
the world we graduate into, but we do
get to choose how we frame our circumstances.
circumstances.
This was something my parents instilled
in instilled in me at a young age. I
grew up in the vibrant city of Chennai,
India. It was a comfortable life for the
most part. But in those early years, we
had some challenges. We worried about
severe drought and whether the water
trucks would arrive in time. And for us,
technology came slowly. We had to wait
years to get a telephone, a TV, a
refrigerator. E changed our lives in
meaningful ways. My parents never let
the constraints limit my imagination of
what was possible. It's the reason I
even let myself dream I could one day
work in a farway place called Silicon
Valley. When the call from Stanford
came, my father spent the equivalent of
a year's salary to buy my ticket. It was
my first time on a plane. When I landed
in California, it wasn't exactly as I
had imagined. I remember that first
drive down 280 coming from the airport
with my host family. If you're not from
here, California is advertised as being
really lush and green. But when I looked
out the window, it was more brown. I
guess I said this out loud. I'm not sure
why. My host, Mrs. Jane Earl, gently
corrected me. We prefer to call it
golden, she said.
And that's exactly what I mean by
choosing optimism. It's about reframing
for the positive. Where I saw brown, she
saw golden. This slight change of
perspective had a huge ripple effect on
how I thought about the world around me.
Lush forestry wasn't all that was
misadvertised, if I'm being honest. The
ocean looks warm and inviting on the
brcher. A Stanford professor even
emailed me before I accepted and used
the beautiful beaches as a selling
point. So the first time I went to the
beach in Santa Cruz, I ran fully into
the water. It was not warm. I've since
learned that the Atlantic can be warmer,
which by the way is the only reason
Stanford joining the ACC makes any sense
at all.
Despite the brown hills and the cold
ocean, it seemed like almost everyone I
encountered had a generally positive
outlook on life. Maybe it's because you
can wear shorts all year. I don't know.
I found myself adopting this California
optimism and it helped me navigate one
of my bigger pivots during my time at
Stanford. I came here fully intending to
get my PhD and to move into academics.
Life had other plans and I needed to get
a job sooner. So I left my doctorate
program and Stanford was generous to
offer me the chance to fulfill the
requirements for a master's. I could
have seen it as the end of a dream but
thanks to Mrs. Earl I was able to see
that particular brown hill as golden. In
that moment I chose optimism.
The second filter is to gravitate
towards working on hard things. I'd love
to tell you I was an immediate success
after leaving Stanford. I was in even a
decade later I felt like I wasn't on the
right path and took me a while to find
my footing until I applied to Google. I
had my final interview there in 2004. It
was April Fool's Day and the day Gmail
launched. So when my interviewer asked
me about it, I wasn't sure if it was a
joke or a real product. That's because
at the time 1 GBTE of free storage for
everyone felt super ambitious and almost impossible.
impossible.
A couple years into the job, I got my
chance to work on a seemingly impossible
problem too. It was around this time
that the internet was moving into a new
phase. The web was evolving from simple
web pages to rich applications. There
was a group of us that felt we could
reimagine the browser to be much better
and faster. And we had an early
prototype that we thought was pretty
good. Internally, there was a consensus
that building a browser would be
incredibly difficult, requiring hundreds
of engineers. We had a group of about
10. The consensus was right. It was
going to be really hard. In some ways,
we were naive. And it's good to be a bit
irrational when you approach new things.
And in 2008, we launched what we thought
was a great browser. We had 8 million
users in the first 24 hours. And the
reviews were really positive. And then
user growth stagnated.
After a year, we had around 2% share. I
remember Steve Balmer, the CEO of
Microsoft, made fun of Chrome in an
interview and called it a rounding
error. It could have been demoralizing,
but with that California optimism, I
told the team that the fact he went out
of his way to dismiss us meant we were
doing something right. We kept going,
setting highly aggressive stretch goals
to keep the team pushing. We rapidly
iterated shipping the browser every 6
weeks while others shipped one maybe
every 6 months to a year. Success began
to follow. Working on hard things has
taught me a lot. It typically attracts
other great and optimistic people. And
even if you miss meeting the high goals
you set, you will still achieve
something great. So when you have the
choice to work on something hard, say yes.
yes.
And the third filter I use when all else
is equal, do the thing that excites you.
For me, there has always been access to
technology. The more access my family
had, the better our lives got. I didn't
have much access to a computer until I
came to Stanford. So, you can imagine my
surprise when I walked into Sweet Hall
and saw rows and rows of computers that
I could use anytime I wanted. It was
1993 and the internet was being built
literally all around me. I saw it as a
fundamental enabler of human progress.
The idea that I could be a part of
bringing it to as many people as
possible was exciting. It's why I took
the offer at Google, why I jumped at the
chance to work on projects like
Chromebooks and Android later on.
Several years ago, I remember meeting a
group of women in rural India using
Android smartphones for the first time
to learn new trades, to speak with loved
ones far away. And I remember visiting a
classroom in Pittsburgh and seeing
students from different backgrounds
learning through the products I helped
to build. Seeing computing change
people's lives as it had changed mine
was the most exciting thing in the world
to me. So, as you look at your own path,
don't focus on the thing your parents
want you to do or the thing all your
friends are doing or that society
expects of you. Instead, think about the
things that keep you chatting excitedly
with your roommate late into the night
and go do those things.
Class of 2026, [snorts] I genuinely
believe you're the most capable class in
history, at least until next year's
class. That's how progress works.
You have thousands of moments ahead of
you. The important thing isn't to get
them all right. It's to find a way to
keep moving forward. Sometimes we end up
somewhere wonderful like a beautiful
snowcap mountain. Other times we end up
in well Vegas. Both are a gift. You
already have the California optimism to
see life's golden hills and a Stanford
diploma proving you can do hard things.
Now go out and set your heart ablaze. Congratulations
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