American University Kogod School of Business Commencement Address
delivered May 7, 2016
Standing here as a parent, I can feel the joy of each of your parents and families. In fact, my 6-year old son is here today, sitting in the front row, along with my husband.
I remember the day Chase was born as if it were yesterday:
That immediate rush of protective, all-consuming mother-love that is unlike any other. I remember his glorious baby scent, the music that played in his crib while he napped, the bouncer he used to jump in that made him squeal with delight. And that time he threw up on me when we were on vacation.
Your family remembers all the moments of your lives in the same way.
For each of you, the last 22 years have seemed long and arduous. But for your parents, it’s as if they blinked and you grew from a precious little one into the adults you are today. In parenting, and in life, I’ve come to learn the days are long but the years are truly short.
And, as Jerry Seinfeld jokes, “Babies’ sole purpose is to leave us! That’s why their first words are, “Mama, Dada…Bye Bye.”
There is great irony in giving a commencement speech — here you are, dressed in identical caps and gowns and I’m standing up here to tell you that ‘individuality’ is the key to success.
I reflected on my own graduation ceremony, and it helped me enormously because I couldn’t for the life of me even remember who the commencement speaker was.
That was a tremendous relief for me. Maybe you’ll remember my words and they will have changed your life. Or maybe all you’ll remember is the part about my kid throwing up on me. Either way, I’ll have exceeded expectations.
I am an entrepreneur.
I spend my days leaving no stone unturned to find people with ideas that can change the world and equipping them to succeed. In the past three years, my business, 1776, has worked with thousands of startups across the globe.
My work has taken me and my family to extraordinary places, like Jordan, Columbia, Russia and many of the incredible countries that some of you are from.
Like most entrepreneurs, it all started with a childhood venture. For most kids, it’s lemonade. For me, it was worms.
I was 10, and Stephanie Waterhouse and I decided to collect worms after a rainstorm to sell them to our neighbors as bait for fishing or to put in their gardens. We ran out into the puddles, scooped up as many worms as we could collect and began knocking on doors. And we sold every single worm. My parents still like to embarrass me with that story, and my life has been one wild ride since that first worm venture.
My professional career as an entrepreneur began with a clerical error.
A mix-up at my university’s career office had me interviewing to be a systems engineer rather than the finance job I coveted. It led to a job offer that no student with loads of debt could turn down, and my career as an accidental techie began.
At least I was open to it…
Suddenly I was in Detroit working with top automotive executives. I wrote code — and hated it. I helped bring personal computers to the automotive C-suite and played a critical role helping GM to embrace the North American Free Trade Agreement. Who could have foreseen that a clerical error would put my 25-year-old self into the executive suite of one of the world’s largest corporations? That led me to another tech giant, where I traveled the world selling software in places like Germany and Korea.
But like Elle Woods in Legally Blond, who woke up one day and decided to go to law school, I reached a point where I’d had enough of corporate life and decided to quit my job to launch a startup. My family wondered if I was nuts.
I like to call my first venture my “starter company” because it was small, and I had no idea what I was doing with it.
Several more followed in wildly different areas: in healthcare, in education, and in government affairs.
In each, there were incredible moments.
- Taking a mere idea, creating a product and having people actually want to pay for it
- Raising millions of dollars in capital
- Adding hundreds of employees
- Landing on a business model and growing millions in revenue
- Making the who’s who lists
- Being in the press
- Selling to a private equity firm
Heady stuff!
But there were dark times too:
- Going two years without a salary
- Selling my house to make ends meet
- Running out of money after an investor passed away
- Letting employees go — right before Thanksgiving
- Getting fired from the very company I started
So many of you graduating this year feel incredible pressure to have it all figured out; to have a plan, a roadmap, a life goal you can make happen. You’re fearing failure and worrying about whether you’re making the right decisions.
And you suspect, in watching your friends’ posts on social media, that you’re already behind.
I worried too. At every turn, I fretted over making the wrong choice. I spent countless hours wondering why certain doors weren’t opening or why I was languishing in a particular job with no ready exit. The jobs themselves were interesting, and I succeeded in them, but no step in my journey made sense to me when it was happening.
What troubled me even more was that everywhere I turned, I saw need:
- Poverty
- Hunger
- Homelessness
- Disease
Our world had major problems, and I wanted desperately to help solve them.
So three years ago, I launched 1776. In it, I got the rare opportunity to take the messy, tangled, knotted tapestry of my life, turn it over, and glimpse the glorious picture that all those life experiences had created.
It turns out that accident that launched my tech career put me exactly where I needed to be:
- Those early jobs cemented my belief that technology can change the world
- My travels taught me that genius exists everywhere on the planet
- The startup successes gave me the hard-won experience to know what it takes to bring an idea to life
- The dark startup days gave me exactly what I needed to be able to help other entrepreneurs succeed
- And, that startup I got fired from? It opened the door for me to move to Washington, D.C., where I fell in love.
Every single part of my journey mattered.
Today, I’m not just building one company and solving a single problem. I’m helping thousands of entrepreneurs tackle poverty, hunger, homelessness, disease and all of the great challenges of our time.
My front-row-seat to changing the world was worth the wait.
Trust me on this: Life is a tapestry that takes years to weave. Even when you cannot see the full picture, each experience is a valuable thread. Listen to that voice inside that tells you what you care about, what you want to leave for the world.
There are no shortages of challenges you can take on, and life is going to be hard, so you might as well pick something big, something worth doing.
Or as I like to tell the entrepreneurs I advise: Make sure you pick a lemon that is worth the squeeze.
Work hard.
Approach life with insatiable curiosity.
Be patient with yourself.
Treat every experience as an opportunity to contribute, accomplish and learn.
Be thoughtful about your choices, but hold your plans loosely.
In those unclear moments, trust the process. If you are true to your heart, life will take you where it needs you to go.
