Find a Wave and Ride It

I try to be a student of the game. When I was a student here, I wanted to really learn about the different students I was interacting with. I had friends that were in the medical school, I had friends that were in law school, I had friends in the business school. One of the things I came to understand in learning about the history of Silicon Valley is that the Valley is built on a set of successive waves. And one of the waves was the PC wave. So one of my core messages for the group, we’ll probably get to it a little bit later, is if you did nothing - I know most of you here are for master's programs, there might be some undergraduates in the audience also - as you're thinking about what you want to do when you leave this room, the number one thing I would advise you that would be smart to do is to figure out how to find a long wave, some immutable trend that is going to permeate most of the tenure of your career; the next 15 to 30 years. If you sat down and said, what are the big long waves that are going to happen during my lifetime, jumping on one of them as a professional will probably be one of the smartest moves you'll ever do. Because if you did nothing but jump into the computer business in the last '70s, early '80s, even maybe all the way up to the Microsoft IPO, you had a phenomenal run; 20-something years, maybe 25 years where you had a very high chance, much higher chance, than the average person of achieving a higher position, perhaps more material income and just being in a better place than if you had chosen, for example, Detroit. So I think you got to think about what wave you're on and how do you get on the wave that makes sense for you both from an interest perspective, a geography perspective, what you want to do with your life. I decided that this was going to be a very long wave. This will probably be the most impactful wave. You can imagine what the other ones are. It's easiest to see them right here on campus because if you go ...