Steve Jobs
Commencement Address at
Stanford University
"I'm honored to be with you today for your
commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I
never graduated from college, and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a
college graduation. Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's
it. No big deal. Just three stories."
"My second story is about
love and loss. I was lucky
-- I found what I
loved to do early in life. Woz and I started
Apple in my parents' garage when I
was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us
in a garage into a two billion dollar company with over 4000 employees. We'd just
released our finest creation -- the Macintosh -- a year earlier, and I had just
turned 30."
"And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you
started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to
run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then
our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out.
When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. And so at 30, I was out. And very
publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it
was devastating."
