Twitter创始人在内布拉斯加大学林肯分校2017年毕业典礼上的演讲


Commencement Address by Twitter Co-founder Ev Williams at University of Nebraska-Lincoln


May 6, 2017


Good morning, faculty, families, friends, and everyone who’s helped these graduates reach this day. Congratulations to you and the Class of 2017.


This is a very humbling opportunity for me and a humbling honor, I really appreciate it. I think it’s gonna be a little confusing for my kids, why, when we went to Nebraska this time and visited Grandpa, Dad became a doctor. Right, guys? But I’m gonna make them call me that around the house, so I think they’ll get used to it.


I’ve been asked to speak for less than 10 minutes, so this won’t be too long but for me, that’s like 50 characters worth of tweets, so it’s pretty generous. I might go a little bit over that, too, we’ll see.


Though I really appreciate the introduction, I don’t really feel like a Silicon Valley guy, especially being back here. ‘Cause at heart, I’m a Cornhusker. And I mean that quite literally. I did grow up on the farm near Clark’s about 90 miles northwest of here and one of my many summer jobs was to go pick and husk the sweet corn for dinner. Some of you may be familiar with that and I had fond memories of growing up on the farm. I’m very proud to be from here, but I didn’t really feel like a Clark’s guy when I was there, I always felt a bit different than those around me. I knew I wanted to go out and be part of something big and make my mark, I just didn’t know what that was. So, like you, I enrolled here at U.N.L. And though I thought about not going to college at all, I never thought about going anywhere else. As Chancellor mentioned, both my mother and father went here and met here while attending. My older brother and sister came here as well and speaking of being part of something big, from the perspective of a farm kid, this is pretty damn big. Even scary. And I figured if this were really the place where the boys were the squarest and the girls were the fairest, not only would I fit right in, I’d have something to look forward to. So, I loved my year and a half here, but I didn’t find what I was looking for and I was in a hurry to get to go do something else. So I kept searching and one day, I found a clue in, of all places, the Conastoga Mall in Grand Island. True story.


So it was there I picked up a copy of Wired Magazine and I’d never seen this magazine before, most people hadn’t. It was the second ever issue and I picked it up thinking it must have something to do with computers, which I was kind of interested in, but it turned out to be about ideas – ideas like connecting every brain on the planet. One of the essays read, “Words have been de-coupled from paper, transforming the world as profoundly as the printing press did 500 years ago.” Of course, it was talking about the internet, which I knew a little bit about. We had it here at school, even in the early 90s, but it wasn’t yet a part of our lives.


Maybe it was because I grew up on that farm with so many ideas in my head and so few people to share them with, but I couldn’t think of anything more exciting than a system with the potential to connect brains from all over the planet, a giant idea-sharing machine, as I saw it. I’ve spent my life ever since working on that machine, connecting brains and helping people share ideas in easier and better ways. That work did not start smoothly. I founded my first internet company here in Lincoln, we had an office down at 14th and O, which is a great location for going to the bar, which we did plenty of. The company itself was a complete disaster, I had no idea what I was doing and learned many painful lessons but it did serve a purpose and that was to fuel my interest in the internet and prompt me to consider moving to California, which was an even scarier journey to contemplate than coming here from the farm. My concept of California at the time was a vague montage of Baywatch, earthquakes, hippies, and what I had read about Silicon Valley, a wondrous place where super-geniuses were actually building that brain-connecting, idea-sharing, money-making machine called the internet and I wanted to be a part of it.

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