NYU Commencement Speech: We Ve Given You Fire

NYU Commencement Speech – We’ve Given You Fire

Thank you for the opportunity to address you on your graduation from this esteemed engineering school. I’m honored to help you celebrate your success so far.

Your parents can probably still remember the day when you stood up by yourself and took your first shaky steps towards their open arms. Today, you take those first shaky steps again. But this time as you step out your parents are behind you and the world is open in front of you.

Unlike your last four years the next forty don’t come with a curriculum or a textbook, it’s a self-paced class. And the final exam is living a life with no regrets and leaving the world a better place.

This morning I’d like to share three short stories -- lessons

Shortly after, a student of mine introduced me to Pete Newell, the retired head of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force – one of the best Lean and agile organizations in the military and Joe Felter an ex Special Forces Colonel. As I spent time with them, I realized two things –

1) the U.S. government was still operating like a 20th century organization while our adversaries were operating at 21st century speed. And
2) Solving this problem required new ways to think about, organize, and build and deploy national security people, organizations and solutions.

Serendipity brought together my military experience of 40 years ago and the tools and techniques I had spent the last decade building for Lean Startups.

I asked: What if we could teach students how use Lean methods to solve the most challenging national security problems? Hacking for Defense was born.

With Pete Newell’s help and support from many others, we just taught this class for the first time at Stanford. We are going to scale the class across the country and create a new opportunity for students to engage in national service—solving problems to keep Americans safe at home and abroad.

My advice to you—let serendipity happen, if you do you’ll find yourself on a path that has been there all along. It’s been there waiting for you to find it.