0:00 - President Levin, Provost Martinez, trustees, senior class presidents,
0:07 thank you for the invitation to address you today
0:10 and to the distinguished Class of 2026,
0:22 congratulations.
0:22 I must warn you all,
0:24 this is only the second commencement speech I've ever given.
0:27 The first was literally in my backyard.
0:31 It was the spring of 2020, right in the middle of COVID and lockdowns.
0:36 We were filming a YouTube commencement for the graduates who couldn't have their own
0:42 celebrations like this one.
0:45 When I look back on it, I see a time of great anxiety.
0:50 I see the empty space where there should have been an audience.
0:56 I see the haircut I gave myself right before filming.
1:01 In fact, I really wish I could unsee it.
1:05 Today, what I see in front of me is how graduation should be:
1:09 Graduates celebrating together and with the people you love who have supported you on
1:15 your journey.
1:17 Your parents, relatives, friends, professors, and everyone who helped you reach this milestone.
1:24 Let's give them another round of applause.
1:26 They deserve it.
1:38 I know not everyone you care about could be here.
1:41 Many of you came from other parts of the country
1:44 and the world as I had.
1:46 And it's not always possible for families to travel.
1:50 In fact, this is the first time my mom
1:52 and dad are attending a graduation ceremony I'm a part of,
1:56 so let me say a special thanks to them
1:58 and to my entire family here with me.
2:08 I know today's about giving you all advice,
2:11 but people have also been giving me a lot of advice on what to
2:15 say.
2:16 Actually, it's been the same advice and it's about what not to say.
2:23 People thought it would be really difficult for me.
2:25 It's the last two letters of my last name.
2:27 After all.
2:29 In all honesty, the topic is truly material to what I wanna share with
2:35 you.
2:35 The most timeless advice I've learned is technology agnostic.
2:39 It's about you, the life you want to build for yourself,
2:43 and the choices that help you pursue that life.
2:46 Some of you know what you're pursuing already.
2:49 Congratulations.
2:51 Enjoy closing down the Rose & Crown now; it gets tougher with a day job.
2:57 Many of you may have absolutely no clue.
3:00 That's okay too.
3:02 I remember feeling uncertain on graduation day.
3:05 The sense that life was a series of really big moments,
3:09 and the pressure I felt to get them all exactly right.
3:13 This is especially true for a group of high achievers who have sweated every
3:18 grade,
3:19 every paper, every exam, who have focused on having the right mix of activities,
3:25 athletics, internships, and now your first jobs.
3:29 I'm gonna let you in on a little secret:
3:32 While these things matter in the moment,
3:34 they are much less consequential than you might think.
3:39 You could have failed that biology test, skipped a class,
3:43 never learned to play the tuba, and you'd still probably be here today.
3:48 Let me tell a story of how I started to learn this for myself.
3:53 When I was a student here, I had a classmate named Pat.
3:57 He was from Long Beach, had an earring in one ear,
4:00 which I thought was really edgy at the time,
4:03 and a wide two door Honda Prelude convertible.
4:07 One Wednesday morning in January, my first winter quarter,
4:11 we were on our way to class.
4:13 He was like, do you want to go to Vegas instead?
4:16 I had never skipped a class.
4:18 I had never definitely taken a road trip before.
4:21 In fact, this is the first time my parents are hearing of it,
4:26 and yet I said, sure.
4:27 So we went back to our dorm rooms, grab some things and set off.
4:31 You have to cut through the mountains to get there.
4:34 As we drove through them, it started to snow.
4:38 I had never seen snow before.
4:39 I stuck my hand out to grab it,
4:41 I couldn't believe the softness of the flurries.
4:44 Pat stopped the car so I could get out.
4:47 It was really beautiful, a moment I'll never forget.
4:51 Nine hours from when we set out,
4:53 we arrived in Vegas with the night lights on the horizon.
4:57 I didn't know what to think.
4:59 Pat taught me how to play blackjack.
5:01 I started with $5 and did manage to win about 15 more,
5:05 and I was like, I'm out.
5:08 We didn't have enough money to stay long,
5:10 so the next day we started the drive back.
5:12 No one seemed to notice that we had missed class.
5:15 For the first time,
5:16 I realized the world won't end if I relaxed a little.
5:20 You're gonna face a lot of moments in your life.
5:23 Only a few of them are really important
5:25 and you need to get them right.
5:27 Picking a partner, choosing whether to start a family, a bigger career pivot.
5:32 Those decisions require time and intention.
5:36 However, you will face many more moments in your life
5:40 that only seem really big.
5:42 Thousands of them, in fact.
5:44 And very few of them are make or break.
5:47 Your first job out of college, the city you move to next,
5:52 whether to take that road trip.
5:54 While those moments add texture to your journey,
5:57 they rarely determine the course of your life.
6:00 But if you're able to filter the signal through the noise,
6:03 you can nudge your life in these moments into having the impact you want.
6:08 So today, I want to share three simple filters have applied to my own
6:11 life.
6:12 Three filters that have helped me get more moments right than wrong
6:16 and took some of the pressure off.
6:18 First, choose optimism.
6:21 This might not ring true to you at this moment.
6:24 The world is going through a lot: global conflicts, economic anxiety,
6:30 a rewiring of technology, information overload, all at a fast pace.
6:36 It's easy to look at the news of the day
6:38 and think that we are living in uniquely challenging times.
6:42 For me, it's helpful to remember
6:43 that each generation has faced hardship in their own way.
6:47 We don't get to choose the world we graduate into,
6:50 but we do get to choose how we frame our circumstances.
6:54 This was something my parents instilled in me at a young age.
6:58 I grew up in the vibrant city of Chennai, India.
7:02 It was a comfortable life for the most part, but in those early years,
7:05 we had some challenges.
7:07 We worried about severe drought and whether the water trucks would arrive in time.
7:11 And for us, technology came slowly.
7:14 We had to wait years to get a telephone, a TV, a refrigerator.
7:18 Each changed our lives in meaningful ways.
7:21 My parents never let the constraints limit my imagination of what was possible.
7:27 It's the reason I even let myself dream I could one day work in
7:30 a far away place called Silicon Valley.
7:33 When the call from Stanford came,
7:34 my father spent the equivalent of a year's salary to buy my ticket.
7:38 It was my first time on a plane.
7:41 When I landed in California, it wasn't exactly as I'd imagined.
7:45 I remember that first drive down 280,
7:48 coming from the airport with my host family.
7:51 If you're not from here, California has advertised as being really lush and green.
7:55 But when I looked out the window, it was more brown.
7:59 I guess I said this out loud; I'm not sure why.
8:02 My host, Mrs.
8:03 Jane Earl, gently corrected me.
8:05 "We prefer to call it golden," she said.
8:09 And that's exactly what I mean by choosing optimism.
8:12 It's about reframing for the positive.
8:14 Where I saw brown, she saw golden.
8:17 This slight change of perspective had a huge ripple effect on how I thought
8:22 about the world around me.
8:24 Lush forestry wasn't all that was misadvertised if I'm being honest.
8:28 The ocean looks warm and inviting on the brochure.
8:31 A Stanford professor even emailed me before I accepted
8:34 and used the beautiful beaches
8:35 as a selling point.
8:37 So the first time I went to the beach in Santa Cruz,
8:39 I ran fully into the water.
8:42 It was not warm.
8:44 I've since learned that the Atlantic can be warmer,
8:46 which by the way is the only reason Stanford joining the ACC makes any
8:50 sense at all.
8:53 Despite the brown hills and the cold ocean,
8:55 it seemed like almost everyone I encountered had a generally positive outlook on life.
9:00 Maybe it's because you can wear shorts all year.
9:03 I don't know.
9:04 I found myself adopting this California optimism
9:08 and it helped me navigate one of my bigger pivots during my time at
9:12 Stanford.
9:12 I came here fully intending to get my PhD and to move into academics.
9:17 Life had other plans and I needed to get a job sooner.
9:20 So I left my doctorate program
9:22 and Stanford was generous to offer me the chance to fulfill the requirements for
9:26 a master's.
9:28 I could have seen it as the end of a dream,
9:30 but thanks to Mrs.
9:31 Earl, I was able to see that particular brown hill as golden.
9:36 In that moment, I chose optimism.
9:39 The second filter is to gravitate towards working on hard things.
9:44 I'd love to tell you I was an immediate success after leaving Stanford -
9:47 I wasn't.
9:49 Even a decade later,
9:50 I felt like I wasn't on the right path
9:52 and took me a
9:52 while to find my footing.
9:55 Until I applied to Google.
9:56 I had my final interview there in 2004.
10:00 It was April Fool's Day and the day Gmail launched.
10:04 So when my interviewer asked me about it,
10:06 I wasn't sure if it was a joke or a real product.
10:10 That's because at the time,
10:11 one gigabyte of free storage for everyone felt super ambitious and almost impossible.
10:17 A couple years into the job,
10:19 I got my chance to work on a seemingly impossible problem too.
10:23 It was around this time that the internet was moving into a new phase.
10:28 The web was evolving from simple webpages to rich applications.
10:32 There was a group of us
10:33 that felt we could reimagine the browser to be much better
10:36 and faster,
10:38 and we had an early prototype that we thought was pretty good.
10:42 Internally, there was a consensus that building a browser would be incredibly difficult,
10:47 requiring hundreds of engineers.
10:50 We had a group of about 10.
10:52 The consensus was right.
10:53 It was going to be really hard.
10:56 In some ways we were naive,
10:58 and it's good to be a bit irrational when you approach new things.
11:02 And in 2008, we launched what we thought was a great browser.
11:06 We had 8 million users in the first 24 hours,
11:09 and the reviews were really positive.
11:11 And then user growth stagnated.
11:14 After a year, we had around 2% share.
11:17 I remember Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft,
11:19 made fun of Chrome in an interview and called it a rounding error.
11:24 It could have been demoralizing, but with that California optimism,
11:28 I told the team
11:29 that the fact he went out of his way to dismiss us meant we
11:33 were doing something right.
11:35 We kept going, setting highly aggressive stretch goals to keep the team pushing.
11:40 We rapidly iterated, shipping the browser every six weeks
11:44 while others shipped one maybe every six months to a year.
11:48 Success began to follow.
11:50 Working on hard things has taught me a lot.
11:53 It typically attracts other great and optimistic people.
11:57 And even if you miss meeting the high goals you set,
12:00 you will still achieve something great.
12:02 So when you have the choice to work on something hard, say yes.
12:07 And the third filter I use when all else is equal,
12:12 do the thing that excites you.
12:14 For me, that has always been access to technology.
12:17 The more access my family had, the better our lives got.
12:22 I didn't have much access to a computer until I came to Stanford.
12:26 So you can imagine my surprise
12:28 when I walked into Sweet Hall
12:30 and saw rows and rows of computers
12:32 that I could use anytime I wanted.
12:35 It was 1993 and the internet was being built literally all around me.
12:39 I saw it as a fundamental enabler of human progress.
12:43 The idea that I could be a part of bringing it to
12:45 as many people as possible was exciting.
12:49 It's why I took the offer at Google,
12:51 why I jumped at the chance to work on projects like Chromebooks
12:54 and Android later on.
12:56 Several years ago, I remember meeting a group of women in rural India using
13:01 Android smartphones for the first time to learn new trades,
13:05 to speak with loved ones far away.
13:07 And I remember visiting a classroom in Pittsburgh
13:10 and seeing students from different backgrounds learning through the products I helped to build.
13:15 Seeing computing change people's lives
13:18 as it had changed mine was the most exciting thing in the world to
13:21 me.
13:22 So as you look at your own path,
13:25 don't focus on the thing your parents want you to do
13:28 or the thing all your friends are doing
13:31 or that society expects of you.
13:33 Instead, think about the things
13:35 that keep you chatting excitedly with your roommate late into the night
13:39 and go do those things.
13:42 Class of 2026.
13:44 I genuinely believe you're the most capable class in history,
13:48 at least until next year's class.
13:49 That's how progress works.
13:52 You have thousands of moments ahead of you.
13:54 The important thing isn't to get them all right,
13:57 it's to find a way to keep moving forward.
14:00 Sometimes we end up somewhere wonderful, like a beautiful snow-capped mountain.
14:06 Other times, we end up in, well, Vegas.
14:09 Both are a gift.
14:10 You already have the California optimism to see life's golden hills
14:15 and a Stanford diploma proving you can do hard things.
14:19 Now go out and set your heart ablaze.
14:21 Congratulations!
