[ Silence ]
>>Well it's great to be here.
Thank you for having me.
I will say note to file, don't ever follow the genocide guy.
[laughter] I wouldn't be here without Jason Goodman.
Jason's a remarkable young guy
who really made this possible for me.
In fact, Jason wouldn't be here without his mom,
who I understand is here so thanks to Jason
and thanks for his mom.
[laughter] Let me dive in.
Okay so I guess from the first talk the first question
about this is is that a doll or is that a mind?
[laughter] You look at this picture,
you look at this photo and you say Mayor.
You say a successful Mayor of our biggest city.
Okay, he had a little bit of trouble
with the snow this winter
but he's done a lot of good in New York.
I look at that picture and I say founder.
You look at that picture and you say entrepreneur,
the man whose name is ubiquitous in the trading world.
His name sits on everybody's desk
that has to do with analytics.
It's a big business.
I look at that picture and I say founder.
You look at this picture and you say maybe possible presidential
candidate, a guy who has the talent, the background,
the skill maybe to lead our country,
maybe to do great things for our country.
I look at that picture and I say founder, very good.
[laughter] And in the next 16 minutes
and 38 seconds [laughter] I'm gonna tell you why
founders rock.
Because you see I'm a founder's groupie.
I spend my entire life hanging out with founders,
following founders, supporting founders,
learning from founders.
I'm a true groupie.
Now for someone in the venture capital business you probably
thought I was going to talk about one of these two topics,
entrepreneurship or innovation and those are two very common,
very, very important words.
But you know what?
I think they're over used.
Everything today is innovation and everyone is an entrepreneur.
Consider, for example, we have entrepreneurs,
we have social entrepreneurs, we have corporate entrepreneurs,
not sure what those are,
and in sort of the ultimate oxymoron I'm told now we have
federal government entrepreneurs.
[laughter] So as evidence that the word is over used,
I'm not going with entrepreneurship,
I'm not going with innovation.
I'm going with founders.
So you might be saying wait a second,
[laughter] how can something that doesn't have a definition
in Wikipedia be important?
[laughter] And the day I figure out how
to edit Wikipedia it will have this definition.
These are my words.
So what is a founder?
A founder is someone who impacts our world.
They change our world.
They create goods and services that improve everyday life
for many, many people.
They find ways to add value.
They do so with passion and persistence over long,
sustained periods of time.
They build through teams and organizations that lead,
inspire and influence.
A founder is all of these things, not just a couple,
not just one, not just an inventor, all of these things.
And someone who's very, very successful in our business,
a guy named John Dore [phonetic] likes to say ideas are easy
but teams, founders win.
So that's the theme, here we go.
Here's the qualities.
I have everything back to Jason, I have everything
up here except loves your parents but this is the person
that I think becomes a founder,
somebody with insight and vision.
Those two are related.
They're not exactly the same.
Someone with passion and determination,
related but not the same.
And somebody who leads and who is a builder
and probably the one word that doesn't make any sense
to you is builder, sort of a pedestrian word.
But founders build, sometimes one brick at a time,
sometimes three, five, seven bricks
at a time, founders build.
They build and the metaphor is very, very valid.
They build big, important, stable structures
over long periods of time.
You all know who this is.
You may know of George Washington
as our founding father.
I know of him as our founding founder.
[laughter] And if you think of what he built,
he built a great country one step at a time.
To me he's the role model, he's the ultimate.
Let's see if we can get another sense of what I'm talking about.
Here's six what I would call iconic founders.
I could have put dozens of others up.
Hopefully you know who each of these six people are,
if you don't here's the level of the organizations and companies
that they've created, Starbucks, Seeds for America, Apple,
Microsoft, Dell, Facebook and you know to show that some
of these are for profit, some are not,
some of these are big companies, some are newer, some are old
but they're all important companies
where founders built them step by step.
And one measure is the number of employees.
There's a lot of employees in each of these companies.
So there's sort of impact, if you will, on our world.
And look at this, right?
These are big, big numbers.
And while I was thinking about metrics to talk about founders,
I came up with one more.
Now some of you are gonna say stock prices don't matter.
It's just some capitalistic, manifestation
of discounted cash flows.
Who cares?
But to me these arrows, which are reflective
of the stock prices, the top one is Apple,
the middle one is Google and the green one is the S&P,
which to me represents non founders,
those are our big, industrial companies.
And guess what?
I think there's more going on here and in the slope
of these curves than just the stock prices.
I think these curves, these lines indicate success,
they indicate impact, they indicate employment,
I've already talked about that and they say something
about the future and dominance and providing value
and adding value to our society.
So yes, stock prices are not the end
but I thought it would be interesting.
I have one more founder I want to talk about.
I'm gonna sort of go from the high level now
to something a little more local, here's a founder, right?
Everybody knows who this is.
This is President Kim, a founder of Partner's in Health along
with his co-founders Ophelia Dahl
and Paul Farmer, 11,000 employees.
Sustained value, changing our world, long periods of time,
insight, vision, passion, building.
Okay, just to be sure we sort of have the hang of it, oh,
by the way, we all know where he ended up.
[laugher] I think it's actually a pretty interesting question,
how will President Kim's background and experience
as a founder impact his tenure as president of Dartmouth?
I think we're already seeing ways
that that's happened and we'll see more.
I'm excited about that but not the topic for today.
Okay so let's just see if we're getting the hang
of it, who's this?
Thomas Edison, founder, invented light bulbs.
Inventing is not enough, not a founder.
[laughter] But hang on a second, hang on a second,
he also discovered, he also started General Electric,
founder, 300,000 employees,
sustained value, changing our world.
Bringing good things to life.
Okay, who's this?
>>Oprah
>>Oprah, founder?
Absolutely, big network, right, big enterprise, hiring a lot
of people, changing people's lives.
Who's this?
No way, not a founder.
[laughter] Anyone?
Albert Einstein, not a founder, right?
A lot of inventions, smart guy but not a founder.
How about these two fellows?
The Google boys, definitely founders, right?
Okay so I think we're getting a hang for it, a hang of it
and now let me tell you where I'm going next.
I'm going to tell you three very personal stories
about three founders who I believe have changed our world
and who are very, very important to me.
These are people that I admire immensely.
These are people who I spend a lot of time from,
remember I'm the founder groupie so I follow them around
and I've learned a lot from each of them.
And starting on the left is, they're all different,
on the left we have Mark Levin.
Mark Levin founded a biotech company called Millennium,
a company focused on the big vision, how to take genomics
and the whole byproduct of the human genome project
and turned it into a company
that would change forever the way drugs were discovered
and impact healthcare, big, bodacious idea.
The middle founder is Mike Danziger.
Mike Danziger started something called Stepping Stone.
Mike was inspired by what he believed was the potential
of young kids and so I'll tell you his story but very,
very different, right?
He's trying to get kids into college,
from the inner city into college.
Mark's trying to solve healthcare.
And the third founder is a guy named Bruce Cerullo.
You've never heard of Bruce Cerullo
but I can tell you he's one
of the most important guys I ever met.
Bruce saw value.
Brue saw an opportunity in a company called TravCorps
that everybody else gave up on.
And he created incredible value, an incredible place to work,
employed a lot of people, he changed our world.
So for the next few minutes I'm going to walk you
through case studies of each of these three
and I'm gonna convince you, I'm gonna try
to convince you of two things.
Number one, they're just like all the rest of us
and number two, they're not anything like the rest of us.
[laughter] So here's a picture of just to remind me to tell you
about Mark Levin's childhood.
He was raised in the Midwest.
Any of you who are my vintage know
that having a radio flyer was very important
to your childhood.
That's a radio flyer.
You can't see it very well in the picture.
And Mark Levin's father was in the retail business.
There's the Levin Department Store.
After that in St. Louis he had a shoe store.
And the shoe store is important to Mark's life
because Mr. Levin would hire sales associates
from the local high school and it would turn out that every day
that Mr. Levin would bring in new associates for interviews,
Mark would happen to be there.
And it does turn out that Mark married one
of those associates so no fooling Mark.
Here's a fun picture, when Mark took his first job it was
with Miller Brewing.
He was in North Carolina.
That's his wife, Becky.
And again, you can't see this very well
but I think it's really important
so they moved to North Carolina.
Becky's in school.
Mark's working at Miller Brewing, 7:00 in the morning
until 7:00 at night every day but they decided
to open a donut store.
Why? Because and so Mark learned how to bake.
Mark got up every morning at 3:00, made the donuts
and this was the ad that they ran the first day they
opened up.
By the way, this looks like Groupon to me.
Look at this coupon.
Large soda .18.
This was Groupon long before Groupon.
Alright, Mark then goes on to found Millennium.
He goes from Miller Brewing to Genentech
and then he founds Millennium
which was Na Medallion, you know why.
And so look at the very, this is the very first thing I ever had
with Mark.
He gave me two pieces of paper.
Here's the first one.
It's me and Mark.
There's no company.
There's no nothing.
Even the name was wrong.
But look what he says, he wants
to be the acknowledged global leader, not just the leader,
the global leader and not just the global leader,
the acknowledged leader.
Incredible, right?
What an incredible set of goals.
And here is how he backed that up
because founders build organizations.
So look at what's in red.
He talks about culture.
He talked about outstanding people, creative,
passionate, gloriated.
[phonetic] I don't need to read this to you
but this is the definition of a founder.
He was way, way ahead of me.
Eight years later he's running a public company.
It's now called Millennium.
Here's a picture of him on the cover of the Boston Globe
and you can't read the little but the motto
of the company now, nothing's impossible.
Again, this is what founders are all about.
And finally I have another picture of him.
Here he's called the pied piper.
It says things in the article
like he's relentless in recruiting, why?
Cause founders recruit people, build teams
and he has a cult like following.
So this is my founder number one story, Mark Levin.
By the way part of what you have to do is be a little irreverent
and have a sense of humor.
Here he is at the annual Halloween party dressed in drag
with his wife and his daughter, Samantha.
And of course this has a happy ending.
Mark sold this company with 2500 employees to Takeda.
It still exists today and has two drugs on the market
and I think someday they'll cure cancer.
I'm hopeful of that.
Sold it for $9 billion.
Here's number two case study.
This is Mike Danziger.
Mike Danziger grew up to a well to do family in New York City.
This is his graduation picture from Collegiate,
an independent school in New York City.
He went on from there to Yale.
And Mike thought, you know what?
I want to be a school teacher.
And so here's kind of a not very good picture
but that's Mike teaching.
This is old technology.
That's Mike teaching.
And Mike got turned on by the kids in the classroom.
He was at St. Marks, a great independent school outside
of Boston.
But Mike also realized that he wasn't impacting the kids
who really needed the chance to go to college, kids that were
in the inner-city, kids
that were not having high school experiences
like at a nice place like St. Marks.
And so he and his partner, John Simon,
started Stepping Stones in 1991.
And here's the first grant they got.
And you can't read it but it's from the Balfour Foundation.
So here's a guy who had a couple of years of school teaching,
standing in front of the blackboard and he had the guts,
because he's a founder, to go to this foundation
and it shows here he got $50,000 and that's how he started.
And the idea was to go into the inner-city to take kids
who had the potential, place them into independent schools,
place them into exam schools, stay with them every step
of the way, get them into college and help them succeed.
And this program took off.
Can you imagine being a parent trusting your kid to this guy
who has no experience?
But they did.
And look at how it grew, from $50,000 in 91 to $1.4 million
in the year 2000, 10 years later.
Incredible job, Mike Danziger.
And here I took this, this is from his website
and look what he calls himself, message from the founder
and he has the nice Franklin Delano Roosevelt book.
In fact when I called Mike and I said Mike,
do I have your permission to talk about you
with this group as a founder?
He said well why me?
And I said because you're the quintessential founder.
And he said to me well aren't all founders
by definition quintessential?
[laughter] Last example, and you know I said Bruce Cerullo was
important to me.
He may not like me after he sees some of the pictures I put
in here but here's Bruce Cerullo as a kid, just a nerdy,
we all have these pictures of ourselves.
We may not share them but you all have them, nerdy little kid.
There's his house.
He lived in a 1,000 square foot house in Wakefield,
Massachusetts with three brothers and his parents.
They had foster kids living with them
because his parents didn't want anybody to not have a home.
And I put this picture
in because his high school class you can't see
but upper left his classmate was future Senator Scott Brown
from Wakefield, how about that?
Here's Bruce with his parents and I haven't talked
about parents and family much but Bruce's parents were very,
very important to him.
That's them at their 50th wedding anniversary,
imagine that.
Bruce's dad was the janitor at Wakefield High
and Bruce's mom was the secretary
of a local hospital administrator.
There he is becoming a member of the Catholic Church.
You can't see it but John F. Kennedy is in the background
and right below him is the Pope.
Bruce's parents were incredibly important.
I met them.
I've spent time with them.
I adore them.
That's what founder groupies do, you meet the family.
And this is an incredibly important family.
One more picture of Bruce and his background,
here he is on the wrestling team and if you think about it,
being a wrestler has a lot to do with being a founder so he won't
like this, there he is, but this is the U&H wrestling team.
Okay, so what did Bruce do?
Bruce bought this company.
This company, you don't need to be from top to know
that when the numbers are going like this,
that's not a good thing.
[laughter] This was a company that provided nursing services.
Nobody wanted to be involved with nurses.
This was a while ago.
Nurses were not appreciated.
And look at this, again you don't need
to even know what the lines are
but they're both going down, cannot be good.
The one on the left is census, the number of nurses employed
and the one on the right is length of stay.
So Bruce saw a value.
My point here is Bruce, as a founder,
saw a value where no one else did.
And so this is what he did.
He bought TravCorps in 1994 after this dreadful performance
and he created an amazing company.
He became the cheerleader, the visionary, he became all
of those things that I said and again I have to go quickly,
here's what ends up happening.
He bought it right at the bottom with 400 employees and look,
over the next five years, four years,
he created a real business.
With happy employees he added a lot of value to our society.
By the way, he sold it for $100 million.
First thing he did was he helped his parents build an addition
on their house for all the foster kids.
And here's Bruce today.
And I put this picture
in because this is Bruce with his family.
You know what founder's get remarried,
this is his second wife.
That happens to founders too.
[laughter] So here he is with his kids, amazing guy.
Okay so what I did was I tried to say
to myself what are the common characteristics?
How can I describe to you what founders are,
what they look like?
I mean this is not an idea per se.
This is an idea of the kinds of people that change our world.
That's my idea for this talk.
So what is it?
Is it where they were born and raised or what their father did
or their college but what occurred to me was since one
of them is short, one of them is medium, one of them is tall,
all of us can be founders.
[laughter] If you were paying attention I used each
and every one of these words today and so you'll go back
and check but what I'm trying
to say is these are incredible people.
These are people that make a difference in our world.
It reminds me of the very first day I was here and I went
to whatever that ceremony is called the very, very first day,
it's over in Thompson Arena and President Kemeny said,
amazing guy, a founder in some ways.
President Kemeny said you know you may be wondering why you're
here and what the purpose is of your Dartmouth education,
and we were of course all wondering.
And so he said well let me tell you, it's to prepare you
to make a contribution to society and he went on to talk
about how we could make a contribution to society.
It was a very broad and diverse list which had all
of us leaving thinking you know what, we can do that.
And that's what these founders do.
But importantly, here's another founder, Henry Ford,
an incredible founder, maybe not an incredible human being
but an incredible founder and here's what he says.
He said basically it's up to us,
either we can or we can't, right?
And so one of the things I was thinking
about this morning driving up here is that I have a proposal.
Why don't we make Dartmouth the place for founders?
Why don't we invite founders to come and speak to us, to come
and tell their stories and to come and teach us?
Why don't we have founders come and spend time here?
Why don't we make this a place where founders want to be?
So if we think that's a good idea we can make some noise
and we'll get that going and I'll help
or if you think it's a lousy idea, forget it.
[laughter] Anyway, I've tried to, in these few minutes,
give you a sense of a group of people which I think are very,
very important so now when you look at this picture you say?
>>Founder
>>Founder, thank you very much.
[ Applause ]