Hello, everyone. And congratulations to the Class of 2020.
As well as your parents, your teachers,
and everyone who helped you get to this day.
I never imagined I'd be giving a commencement speech
with no live audience from my backyard,
but it's giving me a much deeper understanding
for what our YouTube creators go through.
And I certainly never thought I'd be sharing a virtual stage
with the former president, a first lady, a Lady Gaga and a Queen B,
not to mention BTS.
I don't think this is the graduation ceremony any of you imagined.
At a time when you should be celebrating all the knowledge you have gained,
you may be grieving what you have lost.
The moves you planned, the jobs you earned,
and the experiences you were looking forward to.
In bleak moments like these,
it can be difficult to find hope.
So let me skip right to the end and tell you what happens.
You will prevail.
That's not really the end of the speech,
so don't get too excited.
The reason I know you'll prevail
is because so many others have done it before you.
A hundred years ago, class of 1920
graduated into the end of a deadly pandemic.
Fifty years ago, the class of 1970
graduated in the midst of Vietnam War.
And nearly 20 years ago,
the class of 2001 graduated just months before 9/11.
There are notable examples like this.
They had to overcome new challenges,
and in all cases, they prevailed.
The long arc of history
tells us we have every reason to be hopeful.
So, be hopeful.
There is an interesting trend I've noticed.
It's very conventional for every generation
to underestimate the potential of the following one.
It's because they don't realize
that the progress of one generation
becomes the foundational premise for the next,
and it takes a new set of people
to come along and realize all the possibilities.
I grew up without much access to technology.
We didn't get our first telephone till I was ten.
I didn't have regular access to a computer
until I came to America for graduate school.
And our television, when we finally got one,
only had one channel.
So imagine how awestruck I am today
to be speaking to you on a platform
that has millions of channels.
By contrast,
you grew up with computers of all shapes and sizes.
The ability to ask a computer anything, anywhere,
the very thing I've spent my last decade working on,
is not amazing to you.
That's okay. It doesn't make me feel bad.
It makes me hopeful.
There are probably things about technology
that frustrate you and make you impatient.
Don't lose that impatience.
It'll create the next technology revolution
and enable you to build things
my generation could never dream of.
You may be just as frustrated
by my generation's approach to climate change or education.
Be impatient.
It'll create the progress the world needs.
You will make the world better in your own way,
even if you don't know exactly how.
The important thing is to be open-minded,
so that you can find what you love.
For me, it was technology.
The more access my family had to technology,
the better our lives got.
So when I graduated, I knew I wanted to do something
to bring technology to as many others as possible.
At the time, I thought I could achieve this
by building better semiconductors.
I mean, what could be more exciting than that?
My father spent the equivalent of a year's salary
on my plane ticket to the US, so I could attend Stanford.
It was my first time ever on a plane.
But when I eventually landed in California,
things weren't as I had imagined.
America was expensive.
A phone call back home was more than $2 a minute,
and a backpack cost the same
as my dad's monthly salary in India.
And for all the talk about the warm California beaches,
that water was freezing cold.
On top of all that, I missed my family,
my friends and my girlfriend,
now my wife, back in India.
A bright spot for me during this time was computing.
For the first time in my life,
I could use a computer whenever I wanted to.
Completely blew my mind.
And at that same moment,
the Internet was literally being built all around me.
The year I arrived at Stanford
was the same year the browser Mosaic was released,
which would popularize the World Wide Web and the Internet.
The summer I left was the same summer
that a graduate student named Sergey Brin
met a prospective engineering student named Larry Page.
These two moments would profoundly shape the rest of my life.
But at the time, I didn't know it.
It took me a while to realize
that the Internet would be the single best way
to make technology accessible to more people.
And as soon as I did, I changed course
and decided to pursue my dreams at Google.
Inspired by the wonder that first browser created in me,
I led the effort to launch one called Chrome in 2009
and drove the effort to help Google develop affordable laptops and phones,
so that a student growing up in any neighborhood or village
in any part of the world
could have the same access to information as all of you.
Had I stayed the course in graduate school,
I'd probably have a PhD today
which would have made my parents really proud,
but I might have missed the opportunity
to bring the benefits of technology to so many others,
and I certainly wouldn't be standing here speaking to you as Google CEO.
Believe me when I say I saw none of this coming
when I first touched down
in the state of California 27 years ago.
The only thing that got me from there to here, other than luck,
was a deep passion for technology and an open mind.
So take the time to find the thing
that excites you more than anything else in the world,
not the thing your parents want you to do,
or the thing that all your friends are doing,
or that society expects of you.
I know you're getting a lot of advice today,
so let me leave you with mine.
Be open, be impatient, be hopeful.
If you can do that, history will remember the Class of 2020,
not for what you lost, but for what you changed.
You have the chance to change everything.
I'm optimistic you will.
Thank you.