class of XX! first i’d like you to stand up, and wave and cheer your supportive family and friends! i’m sure you can find them out there. show your love!
a long time ago, in this cold september of 1962, there was a steven’s co-op at this very university. that co-op had a kitchen with a ceiling that had been cleaned by student volunteers probably every decade or so. picture a college girl named gloria, climbing up high on a ladder, struggling to clean that filthy ceiling. standing on the floor, a young boarder named carl was admiring the view. and that’s how they met. they were my parents, so i suppose you could say i’m a direct result of that kitchen chemistry experiment, right here at michigan.
everyone in my family went here to michigan: my brother, my mom, my dad—all of us. my father’s father worked in the chevy plant in flint, michigan. he was an assembly line worker. he drove his two children here to ann arbor, and told them: that is where you’re going to college. i know it sounds funny now. both of his kids actually did graduate from michigan. that was the american dream.
what i’m trying to tell you, this is way more than a homecoming for me. i have a story about following dreams. or maybe more accurately, it’s a story about finding a path to make those dreams real.
you know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? and you know how, if you don’t have a pencil and 4)pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning?
well, i had one of those dreams when i was 23. when i suddenly woke up, i was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links? and i grabbed a pen and started writing! sometimes it’s important to wake up and stop dreaming. i spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work. soon after, i told my advisor, terry winograd, it would take a couple of weeks for me to download the web—he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough not to tell me. the optimism of youth is often underrated! amazingly, at that time, i have no thoughts building a search engine. the idea wasn’t even on the radar. but, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking and we made a really great search engine, and google was born. when a really great dream shows up, grab it!
when i was here at michigan, i had actually been taught how to make dreams real! i know it sounds funny, but that is what i learned in a summer camp converted into a training program called leadershape. their slogan is to have a “healthy disregard for the impossible”. that program encouraged me to pursue a crazy idea at the time: i wanted to build a personal rapid transit system on campus to replace the buses. i still think a lot about transportation—you never loose a dream, it just incubates as a hobby. many things people labor hard to do now, like cooking, cleaning, and driving will require much less human time in the future. that is, if we “have a healthy disregard for the impossible” and actually build the solutions.