听力杰夫胡贝尔在伊利诺伊大学香槟分校2016年毕业典礼上的演讲

Commencement Address by GRAIL CEO Jeff Huber at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

May 14, 2016

 
When I first agreed to do this, I would have thought if my knees were shaking at the podium. It was because I was nervous, not because I was freezing.
 
Chancellor Wilson, President Killeen, faculty, distinguished guests, it’s an honor, a true honor to be back here at the University of Illinois.
 
Class of 2016 – that’s your cue. It is more fun if we do this together. I’m here to congratulate you, but I’m also here to thank you.
 
For many of you, this is your first college graduation ceremony. Well, this is also my first college graduation ceremony.
 
See, I didn’t come to this event when I graduated in 1989. I had excuses. I had a new job. I was eager to get on with my life.
 
I don’t have many regrets, but, 27 years later, that’s one of the decisions I do regret, because I didn’t get to share this day with the people who loved me and who supported me.
 
That might also explain why I have 15 members of my family in my cheer section here today. And why my 90-year-old father in Dubuque, Iowa is watching on the livestream right now. Hi, Dad! Love you!
 
That’s a life lesson that took me a while to learn: it’s important to reflect and celebrate, and be grateful for those who bring learning and love into your life.
 
In fact, how about we all show our appreciation for the people who helped you get here: your families, friends, mentors, and loved ones? So, graduates, please stand up, stand up, turn around and show your appreciation for those who helped get you here. You may also want to do a few arm movements.
 
So, today, I’d like to share three pivotal chapters from my life.
 
The experiences themselves may not be universal, but the lessons of failure and resilience, of passion and purpose, of loss and renewal may be. And they’re united by an overarching belief, one that I hope I can convince you to share.
 
The belief is this: there has to be a better way.
 
The first chapter opens in Menominee, Illinois; population, 248. Anybody heard of it? No, not a chance. Downtown Menominee has a church, a firehouse, a four-room schoolhouse, and of course, a tavern.
 
I grew up on a small dairy farm, the youngest of five. The farm was a great place to grow up, although it wasn’t without its, ahem, character-building moments.
 
A key feature of the farm, of the dairy farm is the cow yard. A key feature of the cow yard is, of course, cow manure. Lots and lots of it. When you add in spring rains, it’s a thick soup. And one particularly soggy day, when I was about 12 years old, my job was to walk out through the cow yard to open the pasture gate for our cows.
 
Every step I took, I sank deeper, deeper and deeper, up to the top of my boots. Cow poop threatening to seep over the top. Not quite able to get them out. I yelled for help, but no one could hear me except the cows. And they didn’t really seem interested.
 
I started to panic a little, but then a remarkable calm came over me. It was very Zen. I saw my future: it was filled with cow manure.
 
Don’t get me wrong. Farming is a worthy and noble way of life, if you’re passionate about it. In that moment, I knew I would need to find my purpose elsewhere.
 
For me, that meant, there had to be a better way to find fulfillment and a different future, and that meant going to college. My parents believed in education, but they could only afford to pay for the first year of college. After that, it was up to me.
 
At the time, I had an uncle and a much-older brother who were working in accounting jobs in “the big city,” in Chicago. I thought their work with then-cutting-edge computer programs was impossibly cool, so I started lobbying my parents for a computer.
 
An Apple II, Apple II at the time was about $3,500 – about the equivalent of one year’s earnings on the farm. But my mother used her inheritance from my godfather, all of it, and bought me that computer.
 
Being a precocious kid, I wasn’t happy enough to just use it. I had to take it apart, and “soup it up.” My parents were horrified. For me, the problem wasn’t putting it back together; it was that I needed storage. I needed floppy disks, lots of them.
 
Floppy disks were the thumb drives of the day, of the 1980s, except it would take about 7,000 floppy disks, or a stack 50 feet high, and cost $35,000, to equal the storage in a one-gigabyte thumb drive you buy for 3 bucks today, and easily fits in your pocket. Progress. Technology is really damn cool.
 
But the nearest computer dealer was 15 miles away, and a box of disks cost about 10 weeks of my allowance for doing farm chores. That’s a lot of cow poop scooped!
 
So my brother helped me find a distributor in Chicago where I could buy them at wholesale for myself. I took out ads in some very geeky computer magazines, “Byte” and “Nibble”, to sell to others.
 
I was a budding 14-year-old entrepreneur. I added other computer products over time and taught myself how to code. I bootstrapped the business out of my farmhouse bedroom into one of the first mail-order computer product companies in the country.
 
And that’s how I created Amazon.com.
 
Well, no, I’m kidding. That’s a different Jeff, who’s now an investor in my new company, but we’ll get to that in chapter three.