My speech at Columbia
I was invited to give a commencement address at Columbia Law School, from which I graduated in 1999, on Monday. I tried to make it helpful. I've included my remarks below - hope you enjoy them.
Columbia Law Graduation Speech, May 16th, 2022
Hello everyone, it’s a pleasure to be here addressing you today. As you know, I graduated from Columbia 23 years ago. There are graduations one attends that aren’t that big a deal. I’ve now been to a pre-k graduation for example. But this one is meaningful.
I’m told that one of the reasons I’m here today is based on student voting, so thank you for that. It’s the first election I’ve won.
You all are among the most talented intellectual products that our country has. Among the people I graduated from law school with, some became advisors to the President, the good one. Others became professors and entrepreneurs. Some others became layabouts, but let’s not mind them.
I’ve been reflecting on where I was when I was in your shoes. After I graduated I spent the summer studying for the bar, which you all will pass, and joined a law firm here in New York, Davis Polk and Wardwell. I practiced for 5 months and left to start a dot-com that flopped. It was the year 2000. I went from law firm associate to failed entrepreneur in record time.
I worked for another startup that ran out of money. And another one after that. On the side, I started throwing parties and taught test prep. This is an unusual path; you could call it unconventional and even unwise. My parents told their friends I was still a lawyer for years. I didn’t socialize much with my peers from law school during this time because I was self-conscious about the fact that I wasn’t making much money.
Years later, I would become CEO of that test prep company, which grew to be #1 in the country and was bought by a public company when I was 34. Around this time my parents started being proud of me again. I then spent 6 years training young entrepreneurs as part of a non-profit that I’d founded called Venture for America, which won me a couple of awards from the Obama White House. I got to introduce Evelyn to the President, which made my in-laws happy for about a week.
But we all know I’m not here today because I’m the former CEO of Manhattan Prep or of Venture for America. I’m here primarily because I ran for President of the United States. And if you were to track down my classmates from Columbia they would tell you that I was one of the last people they’d imagine doing something political. I was a good student but I wasn’t very social or particularly altruistic.
I ran for President because, after Trump won, I thought “Wow, things are not going well, and I should do something to help.” Very few people early on thought my presidential run was a good idea. But we ground it out until we found an audience, raised $40 million from over 400,000 Americans – and I sense that at least a few of you were among that number, so thank you - made it to 7 debate stages, mainstreamed Universal Basic Income and cash relief as a policy solution, and helped expand what people think of as possible in politics.
I was also the first Asian American man to run for President as a Democrat. Asian Americans are the most underrepresented group in the country in elected office, for reasons that some of you understand, and to the extent that I can help change that I’d be very proud. If you’re Asian, I know what your first thought was when you heard about my campaign, “Please let him not be terrible.” For everyone else, you probably thought, “Huh, that’s different.”
So that’s why I’m here speaking to you all today. Not my 5 months in the law or my startup career. And the question is, what wisdom can one take from someone who has made objectively unwise career decisions repeatedly in his career?
I know where you’re coming from. Law school graduates tend very strongly to be institutionalists. You’ve spent 3 years learning legal arguments and a degree of intellectual discipline. You are trained to be experts in rules, and rules require structures and institutions to support them. You will be recruited by high-resource firms and organizations that need smart people who can work hard. And yes, you also have certain expectations of your own careers and advancement and opportunities.
And yet, this is an era of institutional struggle. We can see it and feel it around us every day. For some of you, this is daunting and you look forward to getting into an environment where things make sense as long as you work hard and produce results. For others of you, you sense opportunities but don’t quite know how to pursue them. And at the same time, you each have your own personal lives to figure out, as you come to a point when your life decisions begin to have import and weight.
My advice to you is threefold. First, ride this new Columbia Law degree for all its worth. What does that mean? Now that you have a Columbia Law degree, people will assume that you’re smart. That means, to truly maximize the value of this degree, you have to do some things that make people question whether you know what you’re doing. Think about it: if you just did smart things from now on, then what is the point of this degree? You could have done smart things without the degree. Now that you have it, you have to make use of it. Think of it as having a “Get out of Jail free” card for the rest of your career.
Now, some parents here are groaning at this – you thought those days were over. Well, my Mom is here to tell you, those days are never over. They go on forever. But if your child plays it right, they too can be the 25th most well-regarded political figure in all the land.
Second, find a problem that you can work on for years and feel good about dedicating your time to. It could be a market-based problem. It could be trying to improve treatment for a particular group. Right now, I’m pursuing 2 related problems: alleviating poverty and reforming our democracy. These are very big projects that I can work on for years and feel good about.
Right now, you might not know what drives or animates you. That’s fine. When I was your age, the problem I was most consumed with was getting a date. I never did solve that problem until 7 years later when I met Evelyn. You can just do good work on what is in front of you while you wait, but keep an eye on what you find yourself reading about and caring about. One of the enormous virtues of your new Columbia Law degree is that, if you show up on someone’s doorstep saying, “I want to work with you to help solve the problem you’re working on” they will be THRILLED to accept your help. And I can say with total confidence that if it’s a significant problem, someone is working on it right now. Indeed, perhaps the greatest challenge that lies ahead is actually figuring out what you care about, because this process typically takes years and evolves over time, and the market will try to hide it from you, not show it to you. So lie in wait for it. Stay the person who cares about important problems and can show up on someone’s doorstep and say, “I’m here to help.”
And that leaves me with the highest ambition – have confidence that you can do what you want and make the market follow you. What do I mean? Most all of you were recruited by firms with big budgets as second-years and are going off to work for them after graduation. That’s fine. I did it too. That is the market for people like you. But eventually, you may find yourself in position where you want to do something but the market doesn’t exist yet. Know that if you work hard, you can create that market for yourself. When I ran for President, no one knew whether there was a demand for a candidate running on an idea like Universal Basic Income. I thought it existed, but I needed to work hard to find out. It took time. Now, I’m looking to do the same for a new independent approach to politics and measures like ranked choice voting. There will be times in your career where you’ll do what the market wants you to do, and there are times when you’re going to have to stand up and go against it. But if you push in a certain direction that you care deeply about and work hard enough, the market will follow you. It will spring up around you. People will reach out to help you. It’s the best feeling in the world when it happens. You form lifelong relationships. And the more of you who have that feeling, the better off our world will be.
What’s funny is that this market I’m describing is really the people around you right now. You’ll each receive a call or message from a classmate at some point in the future saying, “Hey, I’m going to run for office” or “I’m going to start this new initiative.” When you get that message, do what you can to help. We all have a role to play. If you’re on the inside of an organization, lend a hand, gather some people together, and invest some resources. We don’t all have to quit our jobs, but we do have to support the person who is trying to discover if good people care enough to move us forward.
So those are the three guideposts I have for you – make the most of your degree by testing people’s belief that you know what you’re doing, find a problem to solve that’s significant enough that you’ll care about solving it each day, and have confidence that if you do what you want and work hard at it, the market will follow you, not the other way around.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of civilization may rest on the choices you all make. Find that voice inside you, apply yourself with the same energy you have to reaching your goals thus far, and I have no doubt that you’ll do great.
Congratulations Columbia Law School Class of ’22! Let’s do all we can with what we’ve been given and build a future we’ll be proud to pass on.
