Original subtitles

i applaud the graduates

for taking a much more direct route to

your degrees

i'm just happy that the crimson called

me harvard's

most successful dropout i guess that

makes me valedictorian

of my own special class i did the best

of everyone who failed

but i also want to be recognized as the

guy who got

steve ballmer to drop out of business

school harvard

was a phenomenal experience for me

academic life was fascinating

i used to sit in on lots of classes that

i hadn't even signed up for

and dorm life was terrific i lived up at

radcliffe

in queer house because everyone knew

that i didn't worry

about getting up in the morning that's

how i came to be the leader of the

anti-social group

we clung to each other as a way of

validating our rejection of

all those social people radcliffe was a

great place to live

there were more women up there and most

of the guys were math science types the

combination

offered me the best odds that's where i

learned the sad lesson

i love learning company courses and

things so i love being a student they

cannot take a book of information

and say pass an ap test that's a

solvable problem but it's a knowledge

representation problem

you know i've always wanted to solve

that problem uh i'm jealous

that maybe one of you gets to work on

that i'm you know unlikely to go back

and be

in that way but it's the juiciest

problem ever i've thought about it for a

long time

then the idea of okay it would be very

different the software you needed the

way the industry would work

skip athletics that i'd go in overnight

that i'd

you know leave the house sometimes that

i wanted to go work

for company writing software so they

were great about

allowing that to be my hobby learning

company courses and

and things so i loved being a student

and

there were smart people around and you

know they fed you

and they gave you these nice grades that

made you feel smart

so i i feel it was unfortunate that i

didn't get to stay there

but i don't think i missed any knowledge

because

you know whatever i needed to learn i

would i was still in a

a learning mode it's true i could have

gone bankrupt

but you know i had a set of skills that

were highly employable

and in fact my parents were still

willing to let me go back to harvard and

finish my

education if i wanted to the only the

thing that was scary to me wasn't

quitting and starting the company it was

when i started hiring my friends

and they expected to be paid and so then

i got this incredibly conservative

approach that i wanted to have enough

money in the bank to pay

a year's worth of payroll even if we

didn't get any

any payments coming in when i started

microsoft

i didn't think of it as all that risky i

mean i was so excited about what we were

doing

and you know i'm almost true to that the

whole time we have about 10 billion now

which is is pretty much enough for the

next year

you're likely to be world class at is

whatever you obsessed over from say

age 12 to 18. you know in my case it was

writing software

where i would think i was good and then

i would meet somebody who would tell me

i wasn't and

i would look at their code and i went

through four sort of come up and says

of oh that's what a really good

programmer looks like and part of the

reason i worship digital equipment was

eventually it was a couple of their very

best programmers who came and shared

with me how they thought about it how

they did thing and i had studied their

code and

there were several people who were so

key to my doing that so today

i would go into you know software which

today that means going into artificial

intelligence

you know computers still can't read they

they cannot take a book of information

and say pass an ap test on that book

and that's a solvable problem but it's a

knowledge representation problem

and you know i've always wanted to solve

that problem uh i'm jealous

that maybe one of you gets to work on

that i'm you know unlikely to go back

and be

hands on in that in that way but it's

the juiciest problem

ever i've thought about it for a long

time