Introduction

Today is one of the days you’ll remember for the rest of your life.

It might be because you feel proud – it is the culmination of thousands of hours work and study.

It might be because you feel relieved – no more cramming for exams and assignments at the last minute.

It might be because you feel dominant – after countless hours of swearing and rage you’ve managed to beat the compiler and debugger enough to graduate!

It might be because you feel appreciative – for the amount of support you’ve received from teachers, parents and friends over many years, efforts that you might not have appreciated at the time when you were stressed about an exam or an assignment.

It is probably all of these reasons, and more – this is a special day for you all (and sometimes more so for the parents and friends up the back).

Given this is such a special day, when you get a call from the VC and you’re asked to give the Occasional Address, you naturally want to make it to be good.

You think back to the great addresses given at occasions like this by people like Steve Jobs, Theodore Roosevelt and Nelson Mandela.

You naturally think, “Hey, I should try and impart some wisdom and amazing advice,” and then you realize there’s a little problem.

I’m less than 10 years older than the average age of the graduands here. I don’t have enough grey hair yet to have any wisdom to impart.

It gets worse though. I’m an Informatics drop out. I’m never got to sit in your seat as an Informatics graduate.

What legitimacy do I have to fill you full of advice about what to do now you’ve graduated?

Damn, so we’ve got a bit of a problem.

So, rather than vainly try and fill you with wisdom I don’t have, coming from a drop-out without legitimacy, I thought instead it might be more valuable for you to share a few stories and lessons learned, and then I want to do something a little unorthodox – I want to throw thrown down a challenge to each and every one of you.

That’s right. A challenge.

If you only take away one thing from my talk today, I want you to remember this: it isn’t where you’ve been, what you’d done or what you’ve got: it’s what you do with it that counts.

What I want to do today is challenge you in what you do with what you’ve got. I’ve got three stories to share with you today – one that might help see how to work with what you’ve got, one about the perspective you should have, and one that is about why you should do it, rather than talk about it.

Find something you want to work hard, be passionate and get better at

As I mentioned before, I’m a drop out. It was early 2000, and the whole world was crazy. The internet was changing everything, or so they said. I’d been dabbling as a freelance web developer to make some extra money to spend on beer, back in the days when that meant writing code first, and making things pretty and usable second. The minority of Australian households with internet connections all used modems, and frankly, the quality of web design sucked.

So, in early 2000, I dropped out of uni, quit my job at the Novotel, and moved out of home, all in the course of a couple of months. I registered my company, Internetrix on the 10th of April 2000, and within a week, the Nasdaq crashed.

The dot com bubble burst, and I’d just staked my ability to survive on an industry that was just taken around the back of the shed and shot.

As you can imagine, this situation presented a few challenges. So how was I able to grow from Internetrix from a one-man-band into an award winning company, recognised as a partner by companies like Google, with clients in the US, Japan, China and of course here in Australia?

In short, there were three things – work hard, be passionate and never stand still.

Selling thousands of dollars of IT services to businesses when you’re a 20 year old with no track record is bloody hard. When they’re small businesses, it is harder. When they’re small businesses in Wollongong, it is almost impossible.

If keeping a fledgling business going wasn’t hard enough, the government introduced the GST when I was only 3 months in; I had to learn accounting and tax, and quickly, since I couldn’t afford an accountant.

And being young meant I was easy prey for bad actors – between being ripped off and having people threaten to sue me I had to learn quickly how to survive in the jungle.

It was frigging hard work, but thankfully I didn’t have the temptation of a cushy graduate position as an alternative of making it work.

This could have been because I wasn’t a graduate – I’d dropped out. But it wasn’t.

This could have been because the whole industry had just exploded and no one was hiring IT people, especially drop-outs with very little experience.

But it wasn’t.

I pushed through without the temptation to do anything else because I’d been bitten by the startup bug – the freedom and excitement of creating something out of nothing was just too intoxicating for any mere job to ever be enough after that.

I didn’t start Internetrix to get rich. I started Internetrix because I had a believed that the internet was indeed transformative.

I also believed that your average business they had been doing it wrong – they spent money on a website without knowing why, and how the investment was going to pay off.

From the beginning, had a passion for building a startup that helped clients get a positive return on their online investment – this passion put my business on a good footing, and I was able to develop long term relationships with clients that allowed my business to grow.

But this energy for hard work and passion to throw yourself at something isn’t enough – in our industry, you have to have a hunger to keep learning. Things change so incredibly fast. You need to be constantly reading, experimenting, learning, hacking and tinkering.

It is only by being at the top of your game that you can combine your willingness to work hard, with your passion for the field, and know when you stand in front of a client, a colleague and a new hire that you have what it takes. IT is a meritocracy, without the baggage of other professions, so you’ve always got to be willing and able to bring the best to any occasion. Cramming won’t do it. You need to be continually training, and if you’re working in a field that you don’t care about, that you’re not passionate enough to read about in your spare time, do something else.

So, what’s the lessons here? Since what matters from here is what you do with what you’ve got, make sure you’re prepared to work hard, be passionate and stop improving at what you’re doing. If you’re not, you should do something else.

Play on a World Stage

In mid January 2006 I found myself in the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas  as a guest of the owners of MySpace, which at the time being was the world’s 4th most trafficked web property. Later that week I was pitching to the world’s most respected venture capital firms, the people who’d make the initial investments in Google, Yahoo, EA, Facebook and many other household names.

I spent three months living at the home of Mike Arrington, the founder and editor of Techcrunch.

This all happened because I co-founded a company, Omnidrive, with a fellow uni dropout, Nik Cubrilovic in mid 2005. If you’ve used Dropbox, you’ve got a good idea of what we were building – cloud based storage with clever sync technology between multiple devices. And while our business failed (and Dropbox just raised a round of capital on a $1B valuation), the crazy roller-coaster experience was one of the most valuable things I’ve ever done.

Thrust into the limelight of Silicon Valley and playing the startup game at the time Facebook was just getting going was an amazing experience, not for what I learned about business, fundraising or the industry, but because of what I learned about myself.

Driving down Highway 101 through the heart of Silicon Valley, you see the headquarters of companies like Oracle, Yahoo and Google. Seeing these buildings, and realizing they were real places, with real people working there, people just like you and I, was paradigm shifting.

When it comes to technology, Silicon Valley is unquestionably the top level the world stage. It is where the best in the world compete and define technology worldwide. One night I was lucky enough to have dinner with Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, because a friend of a friend made an introduction and he was free and keen to find out about what we were doing. It is just that kind of place.

While initially feeling very inadequate and out of my depth, it didn’t take too many meetings with VCs, too many conversations with entrepreneurs at dinners and beers with senior engineers from places like Yahoo and Google at parties to start to realize that I had what it took to go toe to toe at this top tier game.

And it wasn’t anything special about me. I was an average student. To this day, my staff would ban me from all hacking and meddling if they could. And yet, as time went by, I got the sense I wasn’t out of my depth.

I thought about the dozens, if not hundreds of tech people I’d work closely with in Australia over the years, and realized that they could also hold themselves in this, the beating heart of technology globally, and could honestly regard themselves as being world class. The distance between Wollongong and San Francisco might be great, but the difference in calibre of technologist wasn’t nearly as great as I’d imagined.

The University of Wollongong has one of the best IT programs in Australia, and so what I’m saying is that you have what it takes to go toe to toe with the best in the world too.

Two UOW alumni who aren’t that far ahead of you – and one of whom was sitting unemployed on North Wollongong beach in January – have built a startup in the last 6  months. After going to Silicon Valley a couple of months ago, they are now in acquisition discussions with some of the biggest names in technology fighting over them.

These guys are just like you, and if they can do it, so can you. Why shouldn’t you be the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg? Seriously.

So, what’s the lesson here? When it comes to thinking about what you’re doing to do with what you’ve got, make sure you’re mindset is to be world class and play on the world stage.

Be the man in the arena

This last story is not my own, so it is probably the most important of three stories I’m going to tell today.

Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States, and when he became President in 1901 at age 42, he was the youngest man ever to do so. Widely regarded as one of the best Presidents in US history, Teddy was invited to give a speech at an occasion like this at Sorbone University in Paris, one of the world’s oldest Universities, established in the 12th Century.

In his speech, he reflected on the temptation among the learned and privileged scholars and academics before him to become commentators, critics and cynics. He cautioned against this, and delivered some of the most stirring words I’ve ever read:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength.

When it comes to rising to the challenge of what we’re all going to do with our education, our skills, our lives, I believe this message is the most important. As President Roosevelt says elsewhere in this same speech, “To you and your kind much has been given, and from you much should be expected”.

As Informatics graduates, you have more power, more opportunity to change the world, than any other group in the history of mankind. I mean that. Think through history, and think about the forces that are going to drive, enable and facilitate the future of our world more than any others. Technology is common to all of them, for good or for evil.

Just take a moment and reflect – today, there are now more than a billion people online, and if you throw in mobile phones there are billions more.

We’ve seen how technology has changed the world in Egypt, Tunisia and other parts of the middle east in the last few months.

Closer to home, the opportunities to change healthcare, education, how we live, how we work, and more are vast. We’re only three or four decades into the information revolution – even if we accept the pace of change now is much faster, compared to previous revolutions – industrial, bronze, etc – we’re surely now in little more than the first early rays of a new dawn.

I believe we all have the power, the opportunity and the responsibility. But, to make a change, to make a difference, you have to be in the arena.

So, how can you get into the arena?

Of course, I have a natural bias towards seeing the arena as being a part of a startup. You put it all on the line, and even if you fail you still learn so much more than you would working for a bank or the government in a graduate role. There has never been a better time to do a technology startup – thanks to cloud services the costs of getting going are lower than they’ve ever been, and with a mature web audience of over a billion people, and app stores and the like making distribution and payments easier than ever before, I’d encourage all of you to keep the idea of doing a startup in the back of your mind.

But, being the man in the arena doesn’t just mean doing a startup. It can mean passionately advocating for change and improvement in a workplace. Or using your technology skills to help a cause you’re passionate about. Whatever you choose, the key is to both avoid the temptation to just throw rocks or criticism and cynicism from the stands, and show the courage to get down into the arena.

So, when answering the challenge of what are you going to do with what you’ve got, make sure whatever your doing, you’re doing it in the arena, for that’s the only place that matters.

Conclusion

From here, you’ll follow many different paths, across careers, across the world.

You should take this time to reflect and look back with pride on what you’ve achieved – enjoy this moment and the sense of achievement that rightly comes with it.

But also realize that from here, it isn’t what you’ve done to get here that matters – it is what you do with it that counts.

When it comes to choosing your challenge, work hard, be passionate and always keep getting better.

When it comes to framing your challenge, be world class and don’t be afraid to play on a world stage.

When it comes to how you tackle your challenge, remember to always be in the arena, fighting to succeed but not afraid to fail.

Good luck and I wish you all the best in rising to the challenge of doing something amazing with what you’ve got.