Letter #187: Brook Byers (2010)
Founding Partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) | 2010 Georgia Tech Commencement Speech
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Today’s letter is the transcript of Brook Byers’ 2010 Georgia Tech Commencement Speech. Brook starts off his speech by discussing growing up in Georgia with his two brothers, being inspired by his high school teachers, and sharing Georgia Tech memories including flip cup, pool, and Ray Charles. He then shares his path to Stanford and Silicon Valley, where he crossed paths with people such as Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Bob Swanson, and Steve Jobs. He then dives into the core of his speech, sharing stories and lessons about jobs, opportunity, and life. He shares specific advice he got from mentors, general trends that stand out to him, and how to think about building a meaningful life both professionally and personally. He then closes his speech by returning to family—and encouraging the students to enjoy their time with their family, friends, and loved ones.
Brook Byers is a Senior Partner of Kleiner Perkins and Founding Partner of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers (KPCB). Brook started his career as a junior consultant associate at Management Analysis Corporation, a consulting group comprised of faculty and graduates from Stanford Business School and Harvard Business School. After just eight months, he moved to Behavioral Research Laboratories, an educational publisher, where he was a general manager in the publishing group, which was responsible for educational texts that went to K-12 schools. After just six months, Brook moved on to Advanced Memory Systems, a manufacturer of semiconductor memory and equipment, where he worked for the CFO across finance, marketing, and manufacturing.
While he was at AMS, he heard that Pitch Johnson, who had previously formed Draper and Johnson with Bill Draper (who later founded Sutter Hill Ventures), had started a new fund called Asset Management and was looking for an apprentice and first employee. Brook wrote him a letter (similar to Dick Kramlich writing Arthur Rock a letter), and was hired within a month of meeting him (unlike Dick, who met with Arthur for over a year before being hired).
After five years at Asset Management, the venture landscape began to shift. Brook noticed proposals in E.R.I.S.A. that would allow pension funds to invest in venture capital firms, and predicted that there would be a large influx of capital into the industry. However, Pitch was not interested in raising a larger funds—although Tom Perkins and Eugene Kleiner of Kleiner Perkins were. Tom recruited Brook to join them in raising a larger fund, and with the addition of Frank Caufield, renamed their firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB).
Since founding KPCB, he has been closely involved with founders to help build more than 60 new technology-based companies. He also formed the first life sciences practice group in the venture capital profession (in 1984) and led Kleiner Perkins to become a premier venture capital firm in the life sciences, healthcare and biotechnology sectors. Brook also led many of KPCB’s incubation efforts, and served as the founding president and then chairman of four biotechnology companies that were incubated in Kleiner Perkins' offices and went on to become public companies with an aggregate market value of more than US$8bn.
Related Resources
Kleiner Perkins
Biotech Compilations
Arthur Levinson Compilation (55 pages)
Lars Sorensen Compilation (38 pages)
P. Roy Vagelos Compilation (147 pages)
Transcript
Good morning. Thank you, but that was... really a wonderful honor to be here. I know that sounds obvious to say, but it is a thrill. It's a thrill to be back. President Mrs. Peterson, Georgia Tech faculty and staff, distinguished guests here this morning, and Class of 2010: Thank you for inviting me to speak. I've always been a very proud Tech alum. And to be chosen to be your commencement speaker is an honor of a lifetime for me.
I'm so impressed to see you graduating students here this morning at 9am--after a night of celebrations. Tech has always been a work hard play hard school. And I'm sure you did the second part of that last night.
Congratulations to all 773 of you on your accomplishments at Georgia Tech, one of the true elite universities of the world. The Georgia Tech brand you will carry with you for a lifetime, will earn you respect, admiration, credibility, and even awe. Congratulations to the family and friends of these graduating students. Your support made today possible.
My family is here today with me: my wife Shawn, and our sons Blake and Chad, who are recent college graduates. Plus my brothers Ken and Tom, and their families. My brothers and I shared a bedroom growing up 15 miles southwest of here. Imagine the pranks. What is it about siblings that so enjoys, when it's dark at night, putting the pillow above the door, or putting the snake in the bed of your brother when they're still brushing their teeth? We also encouraged each other throughout school, and that continues to this day.
We now represent three phases of entrepreneurship. My older brother Ken started and runs his own successful company. Our younger brother Tom is a world renowned professor of entrepreneurship. And I help founders build companies. All three of us, plus Ken’s son [Brin], went to Georgia Tech. Although only three of us actually graduated from here. Our younger brother Tom couldn't handle the workload. So he transferred to UC Berkeley. They let him graduate.
Like many of you, I was inspired by my high school math and science teacher. And when the college counselor in my high school found out I built ham radio sets for a hobby, she suggested I go to Georgia Tech and major in electrical engineering. So I did. And I learned to love Fourier transforms, E=MC^2, partial credit tests, working as a co-op student, varsity chili dogs--only eat one each evening--and the portable computational analog computer, known as a slide rule.
How many people here know what a slide rule is? All right, not that many students but a lot of hands went up there. I only sometimes still wear it on my belt, right next to my iPhone.
I also learned here how force vectors affects shooting pool, and how to apply physics to the game of flip cup. By the way, my class introduced flip cup to Georgia Tech--I think.
I thought of something while I was sitting here this morning that I hadn't written down. The last time I was on this stage, I was introducing Ray Charles in concert. When I was a student here, I was the concert chairman. That was a great time. And then yesterday I was touring the campus and was in the ECE building, and it brought back another memory of a group of us founding WREK. So with hand me down radio equipment that came down from WSN up in Nashville, in the back of a truck we were driving. Driving here this morning, my brother Ken put on WREK, and I can tell you the music has gotten better. Definitely gotten better.
Your memories of Georgia Tech will probably include comparing your classwork load with your friends at other colleges. Remember this: Tech is harder. So always add a 1.0 to your GPA. At Tech, we know how to normalize data, right? You also remember eating wing nuts at midnight, and winning ACC football championship, and beating Duke and UNC at basketball, all in your senior year. Yes!
After my graduation here in 1968, my first mentor, Georgia Tech's Dean of Students Jim Dull, encouraged me to head West for graduate school at Stanford. I was the first person in my family to ever travel west of the Mississippi. I was excited but anxious, probably like you're feeling today. Jim Dull's advice was terrific, and so was the timing.
Silicon Valley was exploding with invention, and I got to experience the birth and excitement of the semiconductor, computer, telecom, and biotech industries in 1970s and 80s. It was heaven for a nerd like me. Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore were inventing the microprocessor at Intel. Bob Swanson met two biology professors and started Genentech on $300,000 of seed capital. His first office was on the dining room table in the apartment we shared. Our dining table was actually a ping pong table. Steve Jobs was showing his Apple ][ machine at computer fairs. These legends of technology and risk taking were very accessible at that time. You could easily find them walking around small technology conferences. Their success was not obvious back then. Success is never obvious in the early days of a venture. There were young and hungry for a break, just like you. You're probably sitting here today with some future legends right around you. I hope you embrace the entrepreneurial spirit. Entrepreneurs do more than anyone thinks possible with less than anyone thinks possible.
In preparation for today, I talk with some of you over recent weeks to find out what is on your mind. You said, Brook, talk about jobs, opportunity, and life.
Let me answer with a story--and let's first talk about jobs.
Sadly, our country is still feeling the effects of this recession. In the last two years, 7mn Americans, and many in other countries, have lost their jobs--most through no fault of their own. You asked if I've seen a recession like this one, and when I think things will improve. So the story: you might look at my 38 year career and assume it was a clear path. It wasn't.
I got off to a rocky start. I went straight from Tech to grad school, and then right into the recession with high unemployment of the early 1970s. I managed to get a job out of grad school, but then I had three different jobs in three years, for a variety of reasons. Some having to do with the economy, some my own choices, because I wanted to find what I call a path of passion versus just a paycheck.
The stock market dropped 50% in those days, just like today--just like two days ago! An economist at that time predicted that a quarter of companies in the US would fail. In the middle of recession, it's dark times. It seemed all my assumptions of study hard and then easily get a good job were wrong. Fortunately, a mentor, Professor Jack McDonald, sat me down and said, Brook, go for experience. Go for learning. Stop chasing job titles. Go hire yourself a great boss. It took me a while to figure out the last part. But that led me to an apprenticeship, even at a salary cut, which became my life's work in venture capital.
There are three lessons in this story. First, this awful recession will pass. This is the fifth recession during my career. And they always end. Your career is unpredictable. Life is messy. And you may even take a job you end up not liking. But think long term. Second, if you can do what it takes to graduate from Georgia Tech, you can do almost anything if you stay creative and flexible. And third, throughout your career, find, cultivate, and treasure mentors. Their guidance, connections, and candor at turning points in your life will be keys to success. My half dozen mentors should get most of the credit for my career.
The second topic you wanted me to talk about was opportunity. You said, Brooke, what is the next big thing and how do I find it?
My job is to stay in touch with the world's most innovative scientists and entrepreneurs, and to find new areas for innovation. And there are three areas that stand out to me, for the next decade. Information technology, biotechnology, and energy technology. IT, BT, and ET.
The most important trend in IT is digital network mobile communications. Everywhere I turn, I see networks. New smartphones, social networks, game networks, low power chips, 4G networks. From S to Z: Shazam, Twitter, Yelp, and Zynga. Today, there are 1bn transistors for every person on the planet. In 10 years, there'll be billions of smartphones and tablets from Apple, Google, and others. These handheld devices are the next PC. They know who you are, and where you are. It is a broadband always-on computer in your pocket. And there is more to be invented. Bill Gates famously said that the competition he fears most are a couple of kids in a garage. You can be that.
The second big area where I spend most of my time is biotechnologies. It includes targeted therapies, genomic stem cells, neuromodulation, healthcare IT, and personalized medicine diagnostics. This means helping doctors get the right treatment to the right patient for their individual disease state at the right time. I'm proud to be championing that revolution. Imagine this: next generation sequencing systems that are being developed right now will allow, within the next five years, full genome sequencing of a person's 3bn DNA base pairs in under 15 minutes for less than $100. That's 100x improvement from now.
We see the third next big wave in ET, or energy technology. ET is an enormous opportunity. To scale it for you, the internet is estimated as a $1tn economy with $1.2bn users. The world energy economy is $6tn, with over 4bn intensive users, and growing rapidly. It includes climate and geopolitical security through conservation and efficiency, a price on carbon to build a green economy, smart grid power management, low carbon building materials in sustainable architecture, water purification--did you know that over a billion people in the world do not have clean water to drink?--photovoltaics, fuel cells wind energy, and urban systems design. The common theme is to find a balance between nature, the manufactured world, and the human condition--as described by Tech's own Institute of Sustainable Systems.
All the tech majors represented here this morning with you can be applied to any of the fields I just described. They all need smart design, management, finance, science, good policy, systems, language communication, international skills, and entrepreneurship.
The third topic I heard about was work life balance. How to think about building a meaningful life both professionally and personally.
Well, if you find a job that fits your path of passion, you don't need a bright line between work and the rest of your life. You can make it seamless and interconnected. I have. But remember that work-life is a marathon and not a sprint. So you need balance provided by friends, healthy lifestyle, and family.
Community service is another way to add to life's mosaic. Sometimes, the chance to help comes with a simple phone call.
A classmate of mine at Tech, Sam Williams of Atlanta, suggested I meet Kim Smith, his niece who had just finished a Teach for America experience and who wanted to apply new social venture philanthropy ideas to helping solve challenges in public education, K-12 especially.
We hosted her three person startup team in our firm's offices, where we taught them everything we know: all of our best practices, all our ways of looking at ventures, starting organizations, and scaling them. They then started with one school in a very troubled area near us. And then carefully expanded. Always going into inner cities, where the families and kids wanted to learn, but the systems had failed. Today, New School Foundations, 157 schools enroll 54,000 kids across 10 states, and they're closing proficiency gaps and improving graduation rates and enrollment rates in colleges.
All this happened because one person had an experience and a vision and an inspiration and wanted to make a difference. Your balance and your community service doesn't have to be at that scale, but I know you've experienced community service already here, and I encourage you to carry it forward. Because these kinds of outside activities can be food for the soul beyond your career work.
So your graduation, I'm sure, brings a confusing mix of emotions: accomplishment, uncertainty, fear, loss, opportunity and gain. Find enjoyment in your new job, but if you don't have one yet, try some new things: intern, go travel, see the world, volunteer, explore interests in which you might not have been able to take part, before you get into life in the fast lane.
And today's new flat world, the Silicon Valley I happened upon 40 years ago, can now be anywhere. It's been replicated across the country and around the world. And the entrepreneurial spirit is not just about business startups. Entrepreneur entrepreneurs can be risk takers and change agents in a large company, or a government agency, or nonprofit group, or the Americorps, or the Peace Corps, or in public schools. The entrepreneurial and innovative way of doing things is actually comes from a way of thinking--for your lifetime. And I hope you've also learned here at Tech that creativity is a renewable resource. The more you use it, the better you get at it.
So let's close where we began: with family. Above all else, on this day, enjoy your family, friends, and loved ones. They've made enormous sacrifices to see you here on this day. So Class of 2010, here's your very last assignment. Please join me now. Those of you graduating today, please stand.
And now, graduates, please turn and cheer your parents and loved ones.
Congratulations to all, and Go Jackets!
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Wrap-up
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