We’re delighted to have Mr. Blank with us this evening, to present his commencement address your parents will be happy, 3 of you will make 100 million dollars。Please join me and welcoming Mr. Steve Blank.

Thank you.

I’m honored to be with you as we gather to celebrate your graduation.As you know, this school has distinguished roster of graduates…Earl Bakken, the founder of Medtronic, was an Electrical Engineering grad,and Bob Gore of Gortex, and your current president are both alums of your Chemical Engineering program.In fact, I feel very connected to another one of your grads.I’m sure you all have heard of Seymour Cray. He built a supercomputer company in Chippewa Falls that made the fastest computers in the world.

My startup never recovered and soon after went out of business.Now fast-forward 15 years, now retired,I noticed that the Pittsburg Supercomputer Center had put their Cray for sale on eBay. Yep, that 35 Million dollar machine was now on sale for 35,000 dollars.I bought that Cray, Honest… you can Google “Cray on eBay” and there I am… I had it shipped to my ranch and kept it in the barn next to the cows and manure.It was closure. Thank you.

These were very expensive supercomputers. They cost 10 of millions of dollars and filled into 2 tractor-trailers worth of space.Back in Silicon Valley, I co-founded a company that built desktop workstations to compete against Cray. In fact, we bid against them in a sale to the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center and we lost. I never forgot that loss because instead of buying hundreds of our small computers they spent 35 Million dollars on that Cray.

But the story about Cray is also a story about success and failure. So if I can keep you awake, I’m going to tell you why – while you may have thought today was the end of your education. it’s really only the beginning. And while you might be moaning about that thought, pay attention because what I’m about to share could make a few of you very, very successful.For most of you, college was the first day of your own life,the morning you stepped onto campus you were no longer just a child of your parents ,college was the first place you could taste the freedom of making your own decisions,and in some of those mornings-after – learn the price of indulgence and the value of moderation.Here at school you had your first years of taking responsibility for yourself. While it may not be obvious to you, your college years were a transition from having your parents making decisions for you to making decisions for yourself. But now you face a new chapter that if you’re not careful, could result in having companies making decisions for you.It might turn out that graduating from college and getting a job may be just an illusion of independence. If you’re not careful you’ll simply end up having others tell you what to work on, how to spend your time, when to show up and when to go home. In fact, working in a company could be an adult version of listening to your parents tell you what to do… Only the pay is usually a whole lot better than your allowance.For some of you, that may be exactly what you are looking for.

Many of you are going to take what you learned here, get a good job, get married, buy a house,have a family, be a great parent, serve your community and your country, hang with friends and live a good life and that’s great. Minnesota is a wonderful place to hunt, fish, canoe, raise kids,and pursue lots of interests other than just your job.But all of you will ultimately make a choice… a choice about whether you “work to live” or whether you gonna “l(fā)ive to work.” That should be a conscious choice. Don’t get trapped into the daily routine of showing up and just getting by While you’re excited about your first “real” job, recognize that your interests and those of your employer are probably not the same. Having your employer tell you what a great job you’re doing and rewarding you for it is not the same as discovering your passion, and figuring out who you are, and what’s rewarding for you.What I am saying is, “Don’t let a career just happen to you.” And more importantly, as much you love, respect and honor your parents, don’t live their lives. Your obligations to meet their expectations ended the day you became an adult.At the end of the day, you can decide whether you want to be an employee with a great attendance record, getting promoted to ever better titles and working on interesting projects or whether you want to attempt to do something spectacular this choice between be or do should be a question you never stop asking yourself — for the next 20 years. Be? or Do?

Let me share with you the day I faced the Be or Do question.Out of the military, my first job in Silicon Valley was with one of the most exciting companies you never heard of. By the time I joined it was a decade old, and no longer a startup. Our customers were the CIA, the NSA, and the National Reconnaissance Office. Our CEO, Bill Perry eventually became the Secretary of Defense.In the 1970’s and ‘80’s the U.S. military realized that our advantage over the Soviet Union was in silicon, software and systems.These technologies allowed our country to build weapons previously thought impossible or impractical. he technology was amazing, and in my 20’s I found myself in the middle of it.Building these systems required resources beyond the scope of any single company. A complete system had spacecraft and rockets and the resources of ten’s of thousands of people from multiple companies.If you love technology, these projects are hard to walk away from. It was geek heaven.

While I worked on these incredibly interesting intelligence systems,my friends were in startups working on new things called microprocessors. They’d run around saying, “Hey look, I can program this chip to make this speaker go beep.” I’d roll my eyes, comparing the toy-like microprocessors to what I was working on which was so advanced you would have thought we acquired it from aliens.But before long I realized that at my company, I was just a cog in a very big wheel. A small team had already figured out how to solve the problem and ten’s of thousands of us worked to build the solution. Given where I was in the hierarchy, I calculated that the odds of me being in on those decisions didn’t look so hot anytime.In contrast, my friends at startups were living in their garages fueled with an energy and passion to use their talents to pursue their own ideas, however unexpected or crazy they sounded.

“Really, you’re building a computer I can have in my house?”For me, the light bulb went off when I realized that punching a time clock is not the way to change the world.I chose the path of entrepreneurship and never looked back.Engineers used to be the people who made other peoples ideas work. Today, they change the world..We live in a time where scientists and engineers are synonymous with continuous innovation.

We don’t think twice as our phones shrink, our computers fit in our pockets, our cars run on batteries, and our lives are extended as new medical devices are implanted in our bodies. Scientists and engineers no longer work anonymously in backrooms. Today we celebrate them for improving the quality of peoples’ lives.