Well starting tomorrow
work is the rest of your life.
That's right.
Ouch. Exactly.
So my first wish is for you
to find joy in work,
find work that gives you great joy,
or just follow love with whatever
work you do.
That's the only way you're going to do
your best work. That's the only way
you're going to do exquisite work.
Instead of working for a living,
think of it as your life's work.
I wish for you to love your work as much
as I've loved my work. Lori. My kids. My family.
The nearly 6000 employees at Nvidia.
And everybody I've ever worked with
in the computer industry knows,
I love my work.
Nvidia is my life's work.
One that I'm passionate about.
And one that I'm giving my very best
to make as great as possible.
So my first wish to you
is the same.
That I wish you find joy in your work
My second wish for you
is to learn to embrace failure.
I've just said two contrary words:
work and failure.
We've been taught all of our lives
to not be a failure.
So why am I standing here
wishing you embrace failing?
Avoiding failure is not the same
as achieving success.
In fact, finding failure is a discovery of sorts.
It's a discovery of yet another
way how not to do something.
Failure is often on the path to success,
it was for Nvidia.
Nvidia failed from the very beginning.
We found fame early on
as a failed start-up,
that was surely to go out of business.
You know every high-tech start-up
has a fundamental technology
that they thought they discovered.
And the fundamental technology we
founded the company on
was a rendering technology called
Forward Texture Mapping.
It doesn't matter what it stands for,
and it doesn't matter what it means.
There were tens of 3-D graphics companies,
huge established ones,
like Silicon Graphics,
to well-funded start-ups,
like 3-D Effects,
and we were the only company to use this approach.
We did it for logical reasons.
We believed in what we believe.
Well, our approach was flawed.
Inverse, which is the exact opposite,
rather than forward, was the better solution.
We were just wrong.
After two years and millions of dollars later
we had to change our course.
We failed.
Now how could anything good come from
being completely wrong, from being
a complete failure?
Well it turns out, because we were so different
and didn't work with standards
we had to evangelize our unique architecture
directly to software developers game developers.
And in working with the game creators
we adopted their sensibility.
That technology matters,
but it's really about fun
and beautiful imageries.
We learned that we were not just a
chip or a technology company.
Nvidia was really a company at the
intersection of technology and art.
So even after we changed course and became
the world's last among many 3-D companies
all using inverse texture mapping,
we retained that sensibility that games
is an art-form.
And that we need to create technologies that
allow the game developers to artistically
express their imagination.
And that purpose wasn't just to build chip
but to create an experience
that was magical and delightful.
This perspective led to fundamental
differences in how we approached our work,
to many inventions that changed the
computer industry altogether.
Today, Nvidia is the largest and the only
dedicated visual computing company in the world,
the most successful computer graphics company
in history, and that sensibility permeates
our company to this day.
It all started because we chose
the wrong technology,
because we failed.
So my second wish to you is embrace failure.
My last wish to you is to see
the world like a child.
You know, certainly after all this education
we've been told to grow up, grow up
I'm giving you yet another contrarian advice,
another wish to see the world like a child,
to see the world without preconceived notions,
and prejudice. The world is complex.
You're going to go into a complicated world,
sometimes rather cynical.
We are surrounded by conventional wisdom
dictating what works and what doesn't.
It is true most ideas simply won't work.
We created one that didn't.
So you must rigorously test your ideas
against first principles,
and those first principles have been taught here.
But then believe in what you believe.
If up to all the customers,
industry analysts, other companies in the
computer industry, Nvidia shouldn't even
be here today.
We were already dead last among many.
The world surely didn't need yet another
PC graphics company, and the space
was littered with tens of competitors
leap-frogging each other every month.
All of the conventional wisdom was true historically,
but we believed completely irrelevant to the future we saw.
We believed that computer graphics
was to become a massive opportunity
as computing devices and displays
proliferate everywhere and surround us,
that the visual experience will become
central to how we use computers,
that generating realistic images on a computer
was incredibly hard and offered years of
innovation, and that great graphics
will come to define future computers.
We were young, naive, idealistic,
we didn't know what we didn't know
about building the industry and about building our company.
We didn't know that it was impossible.
We just imagined how great it would be
if computers would do what we imagined.
Our fresh and innocent perspective,
unencumbered by conventional wisdom
allowed us to see what
thirty, forty, fifty other companies
could not and did not.
To this day we challenge conventional
wisdom with the same innocence.
I wish you my third: to see the world like a child.
Those are my three wishes to you:
to fall in love
to enjoy failure,
and to challenge conventional wisdom
by seeing the world like a child.
I hope these wishes come true for you
as it has for me. I hope you live a life
of hopes and bravely pursue these hopes
your entire life.
Congratulations Class of 2009.