Good afternoon.
On a Friday afternoon, look at this crowd,
that too before a long weekend, and I know all of you
have come here just to listen to me, right?
I know you didn't.
My name is Ravi Pendse.
I have the privilege and honor to serve
as Vice President and Chief Information Officer, which
means I actually work for all of you.
It's my pleasure to welcome you to our Distinguished Lecture
Series, Leadership in Technology,
and the goal of this series is really
to bring transformational technology leaders to Brown
campus to help engage with us in a dialogue to help and enhance
our amazing students-- and so many of you
are here today, that's great-- our wonderful faculty,
and our dedicated and innovative staff.
Did you use a smartphone today to perhaps
pay for that cup of coffee or to download music and listen
to music from Spotify or perhaps to do many different things,
and you're shaking your heads, right?
If you did, chances are some of the information
that you consume came from servers made by Dell.
Most businesses and universities, Brown included,
are exploring ways to mine and analyze data
and to derive insights from data.
Did you know that a lot of data analytics that
are powered at, say, Netflix or Hulu
and many other businesses, come from engines-- data analysis
engines-- actually made by Dell?
If you're thinking about information security
and privacy-- and I think about it every day--
one of the strongest and largest security profiles-- a company
and products-- come from Dell in the company
called SecureWorks, and did you know
they're right here in Providence, employing hundreds
of cyber security professionals?
And so great opportunities to engage and partner.
And oh, by the way, if I didn't mention,
Dell happens to also make some pretty good desktops
and nifty laptops.
So talk about imagining.
Imagine you are 19.
For me that imagination is not so easy, but for many of you,
you are already 19-- that age frame.
Imagine you're 19, sitting in your dorm room.
You have $1,000, and instead of going to your next vacation
you decide, you know what?
I'm going to start a PC company, and I'm
going to take on the likes of IBM.
That is the story if Michael Dell, our speaker today.
Michael Dell, who is the Chairman and CEO of Dell,
founded his company in 1984 in a dorm room
at University of Texas.
Michael's vision for technology fundamentally
changed that technology business.
He was the first one to establish a company that
was directly marketing to consumers over initially--
believe it or not-- over phone, and then later
on using the web.
That was the first company.
Only eight years after he started the company, in 1992,
Michael became the youngest CEO to be on the Fortune 500 list.
Michael and his wife, Susan, understand the importance
of giving back.
In 1998, they established Michael and Susan Dell
foundation to provide philanthropic support
to a variety of global causes.
To date, they have given-- donated over $1 billion,
and their generosity continues.
In June 2014, Michael was named the United Nations Foundations
first Global Advocate for Entrepreneurship.
He serves on many, many boards and committees
and too many to list here, but I wanted
to share some other facts that you may not be aware.
Michael tends to be incredibly competitive-- surprise,
surprise, right-- and sometimes impatient.
When he was in third grade, he applied for a GED.
Think about that.
Third grade.
I know.
He was an over-achiever.
What can I say?
He's incredibly competitive, as I told you,
and on a given day bikes to work for about 22 miles every day.
Very active on Fitbit as well, so typically leading
among his Fitbit friends.
I did a few miles this morning and decided to check out
how Michael was doing.
Bad idea.
I lost miserably.
Now, one area that I'm kind of competitive,
I'm coming close to Michael, is in the area
of Twitter followers.
We are only a million apart.
I have about 200 followers, and you can guess how many he has.
It is my pleasure and honor to introduce
Michael Dell, an amazing CEO, a caring and compassionate
leader, and a friend.
Michael.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for the kind introduction, Ravi.
Welcome, Michael.
I know there are lot of institutions and organizations
which obviously want you to go and have a conversation,
so I'm so glad that you took time
to come to Brown University.
Thrilled to be here.
Thank you.
Just so you know, this is going to be an interactive event.
Michael and I are going to engage in some dialogue
initially.
Later, you will have an opportunity to, of course,
ask Michael questions.
There are microphones on both sides that you can use,
and I'll let you know when you can
start lining up so we can use your time
and Michael's time efficiently.
Please note, however, that this event is being live
streamed as well as recorded, just so you know.
So Michael, you want to get started?
Great.
All right.
So Michael, as we talked about the fact
that you started this company when you were barely
the age of many students here in our audience,
from your dorm room, so can you recap for us
how the journey began?
How did you go from being a pre-med student,
as we know, to suddenly deciding on starting a PC company
and taking on the likes of IBM?
Can you share some thoughts with us, please?
Sure.
Well, I could tell you I didn't have this in mind
when I started.
I didn't know that I would be here today
and that all this would happen.
What was happening in the early 1980s was,
it was sort of the dawn of the microprocessor age,
and I had been kind of fortunate in that when
I was in seventh grade I was in this math class,
and this is even before there was such
a thing as a personal computer.
There were teletype terminals, and you could write a program
on the teletype terminal, you send it off
to a bigger computer and the answer would come back,
and I was just kind of fascinated by that
and enthralled by that, so I started learning
everything I could about this.
And when I was in high school, some people
would like to soup up their cars.
I was souping up computers, so I was playing around
with microprocessors and circuit boards
and trying to understand all that,
and one of the things I saw was that the way the products were
sold, it took a long time for the latest,
best technology to get to the actual user,
and it cost a significant multiple of the actual cost
of the components.
And to me it seemed kind of a criminal that it took so long,
and why does it cost-- if it's only $500
worth of parts, how come they're selling it for $3,000?
And so the initial business was really not necessarily in PCs.
It was in upgrade kits for PCs and then very shortly
thereafter, we started making our own PCs.
And just a little bit backwards, I
was a freshman at the University of Texas, and I was pre-med,
and I had organic chemistry, and this is really hard stuff,
and I'm thinking, there's got to be an easier way
to make a living than this stuff.
I'm sure a lot of Brown students who take
Orgo class can relate to you.
And I kind of saw this opportunity.
I said, you know, I'm going to take this business from my dorm
room and give it a go, and it worked out pretty well.
If anybody had checked his net worth today,
it has worked out really well, I would say.
So that's a great story.
But, as you indicated, you were a pre-med student,
and then I know you decided to start this company,
and I know you had come from a family
of medical practitioners.
How did that conversation go with your parents
when you made that phone call or face to face?
It was not pretty.
It did not go well.
My parents had been sort of the first in their families
to go to college and to them higher
education was an absolute must, and how could you possibly
compete in the world and do well without those skills
and give up those opportunities?
And so I had a pretty big disagreement with my parents
and did what most young people do when they
disagree with their parents.
I just did whatever I wanted to do.
So we kind of agreed to disagree.
The school I went to, you could take a semester off,
and so I started the company and work got off
to pretty good start and so I continued.
The business grew about 80% a year
for the first eight years in a row, compounded,
and then it grew about 60% a year
for the six years after that, compounded.
And if you are good at math, you know
that that's like $10 billion plus dollars, so--
Nice.
Not too shabby.
--we expanded quite fast in terms
of new geographies, new countries, new types
of customers, and certainly it was a very exciting time
and continues to be exciting.
Obviously the name Dell makes sense,
considering that's your last name,
but I have some interesting story--
heard about interesting stories about how
you came about the name Dell.
Can you share that story behind the name Dell
with our audience?
Sure.
Well, I had this customer who was a lawyer when
I was in college, and I was doing about $50,000 or $60,000
of business a month in my dorm room,
and this customer, who was a lawyer,
said you should probably-- you've
got to adjust for inflation too.
This was 1983, '84.
So the customer is a lawyer, and he says,
you should probably incorporate your business, and I said,
why do I want to do that?
And so he kind of goes through this pitch
and why you should incorporate, and afterwards I said,
what's this going to cost me?
And he said, well, I'll tell you what.
I need another hard drive for my little law practice
here, so why don't you install a hard drive for me
in my computer here, and I'll do the incorporation for you.
We'll make a trade.
I said, OK, that sounds pretty good.
So I had set up the company as a "doing business as,"
as a sole proprietor, and the name of the company
was PCs Limited, so it was Michael,
doing business as PCs Limited.
So I go to the lawyer's office, I'm installing the hard drive,
and he says, OK, I'm going to work on this.
Come back in the day or two, I'll have it all done.
So I come back and he's says, well, there's
a couple problems.
First is, we couldn't register the name PCs Limited
because it's too generic of a name,
so the lawyer names the company Dell Computer Corporation.
And then he says, a second problem
is you can't start a company in Texas unless you have $1,000,
so you need $1,000.
I said, well, you didn't tell me that.
I've got to go get $1,000, I've got to go sell some more stuff.
Give me a few days, I'll be back.
So I sold some more stuff, got $1,000, came back,
and so we're Dell Computer Corporation doing business
as PCs Limited--
I see.
--and for the first two or three years,
we were really known as PCs Limited,
even though the name of the company
was Dell Computer Corporation.
Fast forward to 1987, we hire a guy
to open our business in the UK.
So, remember, the company's three years old.
Now we're going for global domination.
So Canada, too close, too easy.
We'll go to the UK.
At least they speak a language we can sort of understand,
and so we go to the UK, we hire this guy.
He's off and running, and he's setting up the company.
Well, you can't be PCs Limited Limited, because that makes
no sense at all, and so he's calling back to headquarters,
and he says what should we name the company?
And we're like, we don't know, we're too busy.
Just leave us alone, we're too busy making computers.
And so the guy in the UK says, well, I
don't know what to call it, so I'm just
going to call it Dell Computer Corporation, because that's
actually the name of the company.
So we were Dell Computer Corporation in the UK,
and we were PCs Limited as our brand,
but actually Dell as the company name,
but nobody had known that name.
So anyway, a bunch of the folks in the company came to me
and said, we should just change the name of the company
to Dell.
I was kind of reluctant, because I didn't really
want to name it after myself, but that's
what we ended up doing.
I see.
If you want suggestions for names for future companies,
Pendse is a good name.
Just wanted to let you know.
Yeah, I'll keep that in mind.
[INAUDIBLE] I thought I'd mentioned it.
So Brown, as you may know, has an open curriculum,
and it's very unique in the world,
and it attracts amazing, innovative, creative students
to Brown, and I have no doubt that through their innovation
and creativity that our young people are
going to change world and change world for better.
So I'm curious about the culture of innovation at Dell.
Can you talk to us about how innovation occurs at Dell
and how you nurture that culture?
We have a culture at Dell that is fast paced,
it's customer focused, it embraces
kind of smart risk taking.
We like to have experiments, and we
do lots of startups within Dell, and we like
to have big ears, listening.
If you think about all the things we do as a company,
you outline some of them today, well,
how did we get to doing all those things?
Well, we go and ask our customers,
what are the big unsolved problems that you have?
What are the opportunities that we haven't-- that
nobody's really addressed for you,
and then how do we build our business around that?
So it's a diverse culture.
We like to have fun.
This last year, we filed 28% more patents
than we did the year before.
We filed-- have been issued or filed almost 8,000 patents
in the company.
We have something in Dell we call Tell Dell,
and it's an anonymous and confidential survey
that we do once a year where we sort of ask people,
how do you like it?
How are we doing?
Are you getting what you need in your career?
Are your leaders helping you?
Do you think the company has the right tools and focus?
We track a couple things.
One thing we track is the participation rate.
If the participation rate is high, that's a good thing.
If we get the survey and we don't actually do anything
with it, then the participation rate
goes down, because people think it's like a Dilbert cartoon,
and they don't want to do it.
But if we get the survey, we actually do stuff,
then they go, this is real.
If somebody is not a good manager,
they don't have good Tell Dell scores,
they might no longer be a manager.
And so we listen to our people.
So we just completed our last survey in May of this year.
We had the highest participation rate ever.
We also had the highest scores ever in 15 years of history.
Wow.
Congratulations.
That's terrific.
So continuing our conversation, I
know you've been often quoted as saying, "technology
is about enabling human potential,"
and that's very powerful.
Can you talk about that a little bit more
and with some examples, if you can?
Technology enabling human potential.
Well, if you think about what are we doing,
we're making tools, we're making machines that help people,
and I think human capacity, whether mental,
physical, spiritual, I believe is generally far beyond what
people realize it is.
And if they push themselves and put themselves
in more challenging situations, I
think they often rise to the occasion.
What's interesting about the computer
is not to replace humans, but how
do you combine the unbelievable creativity, innovation, sort
of non-linear thinking that humans have
with the computational engine and ability
to reference and sequence enormous amounts of data?
So think about an architect designing
a brand-new structure.
How long does it take for the thoughts
from the architect to actually make it down
into an actual plan?
Well, it turns out, the interface
between the machine and the human,
there's opportunity to improve that.
Yes.
It's getting better, and I'm a big believer in human plus
machine instead of human versus machine,
and if you look at the last 30 years,
it's been pretty amazing what's happened.
You can be in a small country in the middle of nowhere,
and if you have about $50 you could
hold a device in your hand where you have more information
than the President of the United States had 25 years ago.
That's pretty dramatic.
There's enormous deflation in the cost
of getting information and tools and the availability of all
these resources.
It's pretty incredible.
And that's had a pretty fantastic effect
in lifting large numbers of people out of poverty.
Not all people, but there are certainly
challenges in the world-- we can talk about some of those--
but what I've seen is technology really driving
significant advancements in a number of developing countries.
Absolutely.
That's terrific.
Now, in terms of Dell, I know you took your company public
back in 1988-- if I recall correctly-- and then fast
forward 25 years, in 2013 you decided to take Dell private,
which is one of the largest leverage buy
outs in the history of the industry.
Can you talk about what inspired--
some people would call it-- unconventional move,
and how is it going?
Well, you've heard the expression go big or go home?
So we went big.
So around 2007, 2009, the pace of industry change
was accelerating.
Software was changing the value structure of the industry,
all kinds of new challenges were presenting themselves
in terms of cyber security that customers were dealing with.
We needed to evolve our business,
and so we started not only organically innovating,
but we were inorganically innovating with acquiring
new companies and bringing all sorts of new capabilities
into the company.
And in 2013, we decided to go private to really accelerate
the pace of those investments, so I mentioned the increase
in patents last year.
Right now, we're hiring thousands of salespeople
into our company, hiring thousands of folks
in research and development.
You mentioned we have our cyber security business, SecureWorks,
has an office here in Providence,
and if you want to work in cyber security,
we've got jobs available.
It's pretty cool stuff.
Right.
And it is really, really cool, some
of the things they are working on
that he shared with us today.
Yeah.
We can't talk about all those in here--
I know, we can't.
I know, I know.
--but we see about 150 billion events every day,
and we're protecting several thousand
of the largest organizations in the world
from all manner of cyber attacks,
whether they're state sponsored or criminal groups or hackers
or activists or other mischievous folks who
are trying to steal information, manipulate data, destroy
critical infrastructure.
The cyber challenge is an enormous one
that organizations are dealing with all the time.
I understand.
So in terms of public to private,
I'm sure you miss those analyst meetings and 90-day clocks.
I'm sure you miss that, don't you?
Don't miss that at all.
I think in many parts of society,
there is a bit of an over-orientation
toward short-termism, and you see it in politics,
you can see it in many fields.
Certainly finances is one, and so the opportunity
to change the focus and the time horizon to be more three years,
five years, 10 years oriented is really wonderful.
So we can invest in our business and take
on risks in a good way and innovations
that-- we think of the right things to be focused on.
That's terrific.
As we talked this afternoon, there
is lot of churn in the technology industry right now.
We hear about cloud, we hear about everything as service,
we hear about the Internet of Things.
In fact, at Brown we are building an Internet
of Things laboratory.
What's your view of the competitive landscape,
looking ahead to future, say, class
of 2020 when they graduate, what they might be thinking about?
I think it's a really interesting time.
IT used to be kind of in the back rooms
in large organizations and now you
can't do anything without IT, and it's everywhere.
It also used to be a lot about making the existing
process more efficient and, while there's
a lot of that that goes on, the pervasiveness
of digital technology and the cost of digital technology
has declined so fast, that now you
have things that are invented that are completely new,
like Airbnb, Uber and Nest.
There are many examples like that,
and so organizations are embracing this idea
of how do we transform ourselves digitally?
Some organizations may have a kind of digital fear,
because they're wondering are we changing fast enough?
What if these things come, and we're not quite ready?
And a way to think about it is you
have an explosion in the number of devices.
It used to be might have had one big computer at Brown
University, and then you have lots of midsize computers,
then you have PCs, then you have smartphones,
then you have tablets, then you have sensors and embedded,
and the number of devices-- we sell
to a lot of the big industrial companies.
They're embedding intelligence in their equipment.
Cars are becoming computers with wheels.
There's enormous amounts of telemetry data,
and so everything is getting smart,
and so an enormous number of devices
and then an explosion in the number of applications
that all of you use, and then the fine-grained nature
of the data.
We go from 1K to 2K to 4K video, we have 256-slice CT scans,
and so there's just an enormous amount--
you have thousands more devices, times thousands more
applications, times thousands more data,
so you have just this sea of information that doesn't really
help.
How do you turn the information into better results, better
outcomes, knowledge, and success,
whether it's in a school, a hospital,
in a commercial environment, and how do you do it in real time?
And the reality is that the vast majority of the data
isn't used that way today, so that's a big opportunity.
So I think in 2020, people will be thinking about,
how do we use all this information in real time
and get something useful out of it?
And, by the way, as we expand all these new nodes
and everything becomes smart and intelligent, mobile, agile,
we have to balance that with security,
because if everything's connected,
everything's also vulnerable, and the hackers can get in
and mess things up.
Absolutely.
That's fascinating.
And since you talked about all these globally connected
devices generating enormous amount of data,
a lot of Brown students are exploring
classes in the area of data sciences here at Brown now.
Do you have any advice for our students and faculty
in terms of your thoughts on that field,
the field of data sciences?
Well, kind of everywhere we go, we
don't find enough people that know how to do that,
so I think that's a very good field of study.
We'll hire you in any number of our businesses,
and I think you'll have no shortage of jobs there.
Again, just look at the sheer amount of data.
We were talking about the health care example.
Here's an example where you have the typical health care
practitioner is one to three doctors, and talk
about campfire behavior.
It's not a normalized process, and there really
isn't a lot of data.
How many of you have been to a doctor's office and they have
files?
I don't mean like digital files.
I'm talking like actual files.
It's like from another century.
And you might have more technology at the grocery
store, and so the opportunity to digitize and then turn
all this into useful insights and outcomes I think
is incredible.
For our industry, I'm convinced that it's
how our industry grows from about a 3
and 1/2 trillion dollar industry to its the next trillion,
but it's also how all of our customers
advance their objectives, whether they're
in higher education or health care
or whatever it is they're doing.
Thank you.
I just want to get to our audience here in a second.
I'll be coming for questions from you
in just a couple of minutes, so if you have questions
and if you want to start lining up, please go ahead
and do that.
But can you talk a little bit about how
you deal with adversity and challenging situations in life,
in business?
Oh, we never have any challenging situations.
I don't know.
We just sort of sort through it and say what's the right thing
to do here for our customers?
We have some principles and some beliefs.
I think when you're-- you don't actually learn anything when
you're succeeding.
I think you learn a lot more when you fail.
Very true.
And what you don't want to do is have the same failure
over and over again and so you want
to have little failures where you learn,
collect information and then iterate.
And if you're in an industry that's changing very rapidly,
experience is not necessarily all that helpful,
because you can do some pattern recognition
and say, oh, I've seen something like this before,
but you need to be very creative,
and you need to be innovative because there's somebody out
there in a dorm room--
Might be time to disrupt.
--who's going to come at your business.
Absolutely.
The next Michael Dell, perhaps, might be disrupting.
I'm not the only one who started in a dorm room.
There are plenty of people started in dorms.
Some people had garages.
I didn't have a garage.
So we'll come back and have a conversation about the company
starting in a garage in a minute,
but I wanted to make sure, since people are lining up,
so we'll go this side first and we'll come here,
so go ahead please.
Ask your question.
Please identify yourself and again, reminder,
this is being live streamed and video taped.
My name's Matt, I'm a sophomore here,
and I'm working on a startup out of my dorm room.
There you go.
As I'm sure you know, one of the biggest issues
is trying to balance time between working on the startup
and working in school, so I was wondering
for how long you were balancing those two before you committed
full time to the business, and what your tricks were
for getting stuff done on your startup
while also being in school?
I don't have any great tricks there,
and I could get in a lot of trouble with your parents
with my answer.
Look, when I started my company, I can tell you it was a 24
by 7, 365 endeavour for the first couple of years,
and balance wasn't really something I was thinking about,
but I was having an enormous amount fun,
and adrenalin rush in doing it, so it didn't seem like
a problem or an inconvenience.
But I started-- our company was incorporated about a week
before my final exams of my freshman year,
so that wasn't the best approach,
but that's what happened.
Thank you.
Thank you, Matt, for your question.
Please.
I'm David Porter from University of Rhode Island.
Michael, I feel like we've grown up together almost.
In the early '90s, I was buying a lot of your PCs and watching
your company--
Thank you.
--spreading into Europe and whatnot.
One of the things about Dell as I've watched it over the years,
in my mind, you're one of the first
to do contract manufacturing, and tell me if this is true
or not.
I'm kind of curious as to how important it was,
but my perception was that you were
able to contract manufacture and focus on R and D and marketing.
Is that where the company really spent their efforts
in the early years, and was that the secret
of your success in terms of growth?
I'm not sure I would say it was the secret of our success.
What I can tell you is that from a supply chain standpoint
and industry ecosystem, we kind of looked at the business
in every aspect, and we said where
are we going to differentiate, and what's valuable,
and we don't want to reinvent things that we
can get from other people.
We want to go fast, we want to be capital light
so we're efficient, and so we didn't have a desire
to do everything ourselves.
So to give an example, when it came time
to go from text to graphics in personal computers,
the choices were to develop our own graphics chip
or to pick among four or five companies that were developing
graphics chips and pick the best one,
and we concluded that even if we hired whoever we thought
were the smartest engineers to develop the chips,
the likelihood that they would beat the four or five
independent companies every single time was not very high.
And so we took a different route than IBM and Compaq
at the time.
They then later ended up following us,
because it turned out we-- and we
were sort of forced into it because we
didn't have a lot of capital.
And so necessity is the mother of invention,
and we found a better, more efficient way
to do things because we had to, and we
had to deliver more value to customers
because they didn't necessarily know our name at the time.
Thank you for your question.
Please.
Hi.
I'm Jackie, and I'm a grad student
in the program in Innovation Management
and Entrepreneurship.
My question is, what is your two-to-three-year forecast
of PC and server sales, and what is the new corporation upgrade
cycle looking like?
Why I don't have a forecast.
What I can tell you is if you look at the PC sector,
and we have a little bit of an expansive definition of PCs,
we include things like the embedded computers.
Increasingly we are putting computers in other things,
so if you go get your genome sequenced
from life Technologies, there's a Dell inside.
If somebody you know goes to a hospital,
and they are treated for cancer with a machine from Varian,
there's a Dell inside.
We have thousands of examples like that
where our machines are inside all sorts of other machines.
So there are about 1.8 billion PCs and similar-type things
in the world.
About 600 million of them are more than four years old,
and so in some ways our job is to create a machine that's
better than the one we sold five years ago, enough to compel
the customer to say, you know, this is so light
and the screen is so incredible, the resolution, the battery
life, the performance, I have to replace this five,
six, seven-year-old thing.
It's actually not that hard.
We've been gaining share in that sector
for now 11 quarters in a row.
We gained 120 basis points a share
in the quarter ended the end of September.
And then in servers, every time there
are 50 new smartphones minted in the world,
a new server pops up, because when you get a smartphone
it has nothing on it.
Everything that you put in your smartphone comes from a server.
Everything you put in your smartphone
probably goes back to a server, and as you consume
more information, and every time you
do anything on the internet, you go to a server.
So there are pretty good growth dynamics.
Certainly the industry's changing.
You have public clouds, you have private clouds being built.
There's a massive build out to be
able to support all these devices
that are being put all over the world,
so we're focused on how do we grow faster than the industry?
How do we gain share?
How do we serve our customers and address the challenges
that they have and increasingly learn
more about the vertical needs that they
have in their industry and help them grow and succeed in ways
that are important to them?
Thank you for the question.
Let's go here.
Hi, I'm Jason, and I'm an undergrad here at Brown.
My question is, do you think there's
room left in the tech industry for another behemoth like Dell
or Google or Apple to take hold, or is the future-- or is
it already set in stone that these big companies are
the only ones that can really exist to that level of size?
I think the evidence would suggest that there is always
room for new ones.
If you look-- first of all, the industry
is about 3 and 1/2 trillion dollars, as I said.
You have some new companies that have popped up
in the relatively recent time frame-- Alibaba, Facebook.
These are relatively new companies.
If you look in the $3.5 trillion,
nobody has 10% of the $3.5 trillion.
There are about 10 companies that have maybe more than 1%
of the $3.5.
We have about 2%-- and we'd just like 3% or 4%.
So total pie is growing.
I think you're going to see all kinds of new companies,
and you'll also see companies going away.
It's a tumultuous business, it's a change or die business.
You have to evolve and keep doing new things.
Let's go here.
Hi, I'm Angela, and I'm a sophomore here.
My question is, what was your biggest challenge in starting
and running Dell, and what did you
do to overcome that challenge?
The biggest challenge-- plenty of challenges,
made all kinds of mistakes.
I'd say, certainly in the early years,
attracting the kind of talent that we
needed to grow the business was pretty challenging.
I started when I was 19 and didn't really have any capital,
so the people who joined me were mercenaries.
And they might have been good at a particular thing.
The risk was really high, and the rewards
were potentially very high, but most people
knew about the risk, not the reward,
because it didn't look like it was going to be a $60 billion
global company.
It looked like a 19-year-old kid with $1,000,
and so yeah, that was the biggest challenge,
but we got through it.
As I said, made a lot of mistakes and experimented,
failed, and iterated quickly and learned.
Thank you.
And one thing that did help us is our competitors
really didn't understand what we were doing,
and they typically underestimated us.
That was very helpful.
Terrific.
Thank you.
Please.
Can everyone hear me?
We can hear you.
Sorry, I lost my voice earlier this week.
My name is Daniel.
I'm a freshman here, and I'd like to know
how did your background culture--
your Jewish background-- help you run your company?
Looking back, how did that help you run your company today?
We're you able to hear him?
I think the question was, how did my Jewish background help
me start the company or run the company from a culture
standpoint.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, that's a-- you know, I usually
don't get new questions, because if you've been in a situation
where people ask you questions a lot, a lot of times
you get the same questions over and over again.
No offense to the prior questioners.
I've just raised the bar.
That's what is unique about Brown.
Yeah, that's a new-- I've never had that question before.
Not really sure I know the answer, but one thing I know
is that I don't take things for granted.
I still see myself as a challenger,
and I live in fear of failure, and I
want to do better, and I want to succeed, and pretty driven.
It's also a lot of fun, and I don't have any complaints.
I don't have any regrets, because it's gone quite well,
and so it's been a fantastic adventure,
and I feel like I'm just getting started.
But one thing I do know, having travelled all around the world,
I was very fortunate to have been born in the United States
of America, because as a 19-year-old person it would
have been very hard to start the company that I started in many
other places in the world that I've traveled to.
And I know through your foundation,
you're focusing on helping people
all over the world to succeed.
Yes, and one of things that I did this year and last
year was the United Nations asked
me to be their global advocate for entrepreneurship,
and as I've traveled around the world,
I've observed a couple things.
One is if you see a lot of young people that are unemployed,
bad things are happening, whether it's in an urban area
or in some particular part of the world,
and something struck me a few years ago.
You remember when the young man in Tunisia lit himself on fire?
Very, very sad, and he was in a way protesting the government
and a kind of underemployment, and he
didn't have opportunities.
That struck me very strongly, because about 15 years earlier,
I was sitting in a conference room
with some of my Dell colleagues, and we
were getting ready to decide if we were going to put a Dell
site in either Morocco or Tunisia,
and it was pretty close.
It was Morocco, Tunisia, Tunisia, Morocco.
We ultimately decided to put the site in Morocco,
and it had to do with a few factors
that the Moroccan government had done to make it a better place,
we thought, to put our site, and a couple years ago
I went to our site in Morocco, and it's amazing,
it's inspiring.
We have tons of young people, and they are learning,
they're excited, they are proud, they are soaking up knowledge,
and they're very, very happy, and they go back
to their families, and they explain
that they have a bright future, and they see opportunities.
If you have young people that are unemployed,
it doesn't matter if you give them a refugee camp,
it doesn't matter if you give them a new government,
it doesn't matter if you give them a temporary handout,
if you don't give them a job, if they don't have the ability
to be part of something where they believe
they have a bright future, you haven't really
addressed the fundamental problem.
So if you look at where do jobs come from,
actually they don't come from big companies-- 70% to 90%
of the jobs come from entrepreneurs,
from small businesses, medium-sized growing
businesses, and I think in these conflict zones,
a lot more thought should be given to how do we create jobs,
because if there aren't bright opportunities
for those young people, the same problems are
going to repeat themselves in some different form.
Appreciate that.
Your question.
Hello, sir.
My name is Brandon.
I'm a freshman at Brown.
I'm just curious on the intersection between technology
and government.
So many governments are challenged
by the way they handle and the way they manage
technology in their countries.
Some are fearful of it, some have harnessed it better
than others but all see it is a challenge, so I'm wondering,
what would you see the role of government
in managing, handling, or interacting with technology?
Well, you're right.
I think governments are trying to figure out, first of all,
how do they provide citizen facing services where
the citizen is used to "click" and something happens versus I
have to go stand in a line, fill out a form,
press hard four times.
What?
I don't understand.
So governments are trying to figure out how to adopt
and, of course, it's a whole lot easier for work and information
to flow across borders, so there are big issues for governments
to deal with there.
And the speed and pace of change of governments, in many cases,
has not been great, but they've never been the early adopters.
But more and more governments you see being pretty proactive
and focusing on, how do we educate our people?
How do we create modern cities?
How do we leap ahead and make sure
that our people, our society is winning in this digital age?
There aren't easy answers and just
like all legacy or traditional industries are disrupted,
governments are being disrupted too, and they have to respond.
Thank you for that question.
Please.
Hi.
My name is Ashley Conard.
I'm a first-year PhD student in the Computational Biology
Track, and I'm also a board member at the Anita Borg
Institute.
So my question is related to that.
What do you think are the next steps that we should be taking
as a society and more in tech to integrate more
women into technology and to computer science
as well as retain them?
There's a problem of retention, as you might now, through Dell.
It's a big problem worldwide, so what
do you think about that topic?
Yeah, it's definitely a challenge.
I think it's a challenge both in terms
of the pipeline of graduates that we
see in computer science.
At Dell our largest employee resource group is our women's
employee resource group, and it's
fantastic in terms of-- here's the challenge.
Let's say you're a computer scientist,
and you join a group at Dell, and you're in a team,
and there are no other people that are like you.
Well, you might feel like you don't belong,
but actually inside Dell there are
thousands and tens of thousands of people like you.
They just might not be in your group,
and so we use employee resource groups as one way to do that.
We have all kinds of programs that we've
created and supported inside and outside of our company
to help diverse communities, certainly including women,
in the STEM fields and in the IT sector.
Now, one of the things we've done at Dell
is I'm on the board of Catalyst, which is an organization that
supports the advancement of women in management roles,
and we have a program called MARC, which is Men Advocating
Real Change, and I think one of things that you realize as you
dig into this issue is the issue is not just the women,
it's the men, and do the men understand
what the challenges are for the women, and how do you
create an environment that allows anyone to succeed,
everyone to succeed?
And so we have been either the first,
or one of the first, large companies to really adopt that.
I chair our Global Diversity Council at Dell,
drive the issues.
We're not perfect.
There's lots of room for improvement,
but it remains a continuing focus and passion
to make progress.
That was a great question, by the way.
I know a lot of you are lined up,
but we only have about another four minutes or so,
so we'll try to get to as many of you,
but if we can't, I apologize in advance.
So let's go here.
OK.
Hello, Mr. Dell.
I'm [INAUDIBLE], a grad student in Computer Science,
and it's nice to meet you here.
I have two simple questions.
Firstly that, can you give any advice
to a young man like me who wants to be as successful as you?
My own answer is to be, first, have
a great ambition and, second, hard working as much as you
can, and that's what I've done.
So I want to listen to your--
I would say you need to be fearless.
Don't be afraid to fail.
If you're not afraid to fail, nothing can stop you.
Thanks.
Second question is that, what's the most important aspect
of you or your personality that makes you different from most
other people on earth?
Well, I'm not sure I know the answer to that,
but I do think curiosity is way underrated.
You mean curiosity?
Curiosity.
Only curiosity?
I think it's way underrated.
If I had to place my bet on one thing, I'd put it on curiosity.
Thanks.
Thanks very much.
Thank you for your question.
Let's go here.
I'm Daraj.
I'm a freshman who wants to concentrate in CS.
My question was about categorization of products.
So in the past we used to have smartphones, tablets, PCs,
and laptops, but with new announcements from Microsoft
about the Surface Book, we've seen
a merging of the smartphone with the PC and the PC
with the tablet--
Right, right.
--and Dell also has computers that
have touch screen, so I was wondering
what you were thinking about the market heading
towards more merged products versus discrete ones.
I think you're right.
Our industry tends to get into the semantics
of this is this product or this is this product.
If you look at a tablet, a lot of people with a tablet
have a keyboard for their tablet.
If you have a tablet and a keyboard, that's a notebook,
so get over it.
And I think smartphone-- it's a PC, but it's really small.
It's a smartphone.
So I think the ingredients, you're right,
they're very, very common.
I think there are going to be different form factors.
Some of them you'll wear, some you hold in your hand,
you put it in your pocket, you carry them around,
they're physically mounted.
The net of it is that for every human on the planet,
there are going to be more than 10 of them
and so they're all over the place.
And the number of them are multiplying,
and as the cost comes down-- technology
is kind of like a gas.
It expands to fit the space available as the cost comes
down, and the uses-- not all the uses are great, and cat videos.
I don't know how much that helps the world,
but if it doesn't cost anything to have cat videos,
you're going to have a lot of them.
As the cost of technology comes down, you get way more usage.
Let's go here.
Thank you.
Hi.
I'm Cliff Weitzman.
I'm a senior studying renewable energy.
I run a tech company that I'm going to go work on full time
after I graduate.
Initially, I was going to ask you
about the growth of your company,
how you dealt with the new people that were coming
into your company and how you adapted,
but you brought up a more important topic
regarding Tunisia.
So there's a lot of unemployment in the world,
there's a lot of people who are underemployed,
and I feel-- or not I feel-- according to economics,
creation of value comes from a combination of labor
and of capital, and running Dell,
like you said before, you deal with a lot of the capital that
really allows the productivity.
What are some systems that you see in the world
or think should be implemented that could
employ as many people as possible
and minimize the amount of capital that goes in
to maximize the amount of output so we could put more
people in productive work, to make people really more
satisfied?
I think the best thing you could do
is help make it easier for people
to start new small businesses, and that is by far and away
I think the best thing.
If you look at these places where
there are large numbers of unemployed people,
it's pretty hard to start a small business.
Now, in many cases there are skills issues.
Do they have requisite needed skills?
But still, you see big differential outcomes
in places that are very close to each other where
certain things were done to make it easier,
and the results are much better.
It's interesting.
If you look at China and India, there's
been a pretty nice economic result over the last 20 or 30
years in those countries, the first and second most populous
countries in the world.
Imagine if those governments had made it much more
difficult to create businesses.
You could have a lot of problems.
There are big challenges.
Some countries export unemployment.
They subsidize things.
But if I had to bet on one thing,
I would bet on making it easier to be an entrepreneur
and to start new businesses, and a lot of businesses
you don't need tons of capital.
So those are generally systematic issues
that need to be solved.
As an entrepreneur, what are individual things
that you can do or individual sectors
you would recommend looking into particularly
or individual pieces of technology that you think
have a lot of potential to allow for that creation of value
with a maximum amount of labor?
I haven't really thought about it that way.
I think you're kind of limited by your imagination there.
I tend to understand industries related to technology
and really interested in some of the bio-sciences,
the intersection with technology.
I think those are really interesting areas,
but if you look at the number of people doing
productive work and the amount of productive work,
there's been an enormous rise but not everywhere
in the world.
And so I still go back to the best job
creation engine in the world are small businesses,
and so if I were in one of these countries that
had high unemployment, I would go out
of my way to try to get new businesses started,
and some of the countries are doing a reasonable job at that.
I think that's really the only way
you're going to employ large numbers of people.
There are also big issues.
Manufacturing is becoming much, much less labor intensive.
We can make 10 times more things now
with the same number of people that we
could have six or seven years ago,
so if you think manufacturing is going to consume all the labor,
you don't understand what's going on with productivity
and technology.
And I'm sorry to interrupt, but unfortunately we have literally
run out of time, and Michael has a very, very tight schedule,
so I apologize.
I can't take any of your questions.
Very, very sorry about that.
I do want to acknowledge our events staff.
You guys did amazing things, so thank you for all your help.
Ron Dunleavy and your team-- media
team-- you guys did an amazing.
Thank you for your help.
Giovi and your team.
Thank you, thank you, and our DPS, Department of Public
Safety, and Mark Porter.
You guys did amazing things.
Thank you so much for all your help.
Michael, I can't thank you enough for your assistance
in coming here and sharing your wisdom with us.
This was wonderful.
We do have something small for you
to take back so that you'll think of Brown on your way
back, so--
Thank you--
Thank you so much.
--very much, Ravi.
This was a great honor for me.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]