Letter #327: John Ternus (2024)

Incoming Apple CEO | 2024 Penn Engineering Commencement Speech

*KG Note

I’ll be in Omaha for Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting this year. If you are attending and hosting an event I can attend, would like to try and grab a coffee/meal, or go for a walk, please reach out (email; twitter).

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Intro

More on this newsletter here.

Today’s letter is the transcript of John Ternus’ 2024 Penn Engineering commencement speech.

Short Bios

John Ternus is the incoming CEO of Apple.

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Transcript

Thank you very much, Dean Kumar, for that kind introduction. I really appreciate you inviting me back to campus after I nearly destroyed Penn’s first, and at the time only, CNC milling machine my senior year. I won’t get into the whole story here, but let’s just say it was dramatic. They called me “Crash” for the rest of that year.

So, it’s truly an honor to be back and to be here speaking on stage with you, Dean Kumar, and with you, Akanga. That was awesome, you did great.

To the Class of 2024, congratulations! This is an amazing day, and it’s all the more amazing because of the journey you took to the seat you’re sitting in right now. Think back to four years ago, to that high school senior who didn’t know what their college journey would or could look like when a pandemic turned the world upside down. Now think about everything you’ve accomplished since then. Today, you’ve become graduates of one of the best engineering schools in the world. You did it, you’re here.

And, of course, the next part is even more exciting because now you get to go out there and make your mark, make your future what you want it to be. And while you’re at it, I have just a few pieces of advice that I hope will help guide you along the way.

Here’s my first one: the care that you put into your work really matters. My first project at Apple was the Cinema Display. It was a large desktop monitor. It had a beautiful clear plastic enclosure that was held together with some screws coming in from the back. These screws were made of stainless steel, and the head of every screw was machined to have a pattern of concentric grooves that shimmered like a CD when light moved across it. I should probably say, if some of you have never seen a CD before, you can ask your parents afterward.

At some point in my first year, I found myself at a supplier facility. I was far away from home, it was well past midnight. I was using a magnifying glass to count the number of grooves on the head of this screw, which, remember, lives on the back of the display. And I was arguing with the supplier because these parts had 35 grooves, they were supposed to have 25.

I distinctly remember stepping back for a minute and thinking to myself, “What the hell am I doing? Is this normal?” And I thought about it, and I realized it might not be normal, but it’s right. It’s right because I’d already spent months working on that product, and if you’re going to spend that much time on something, you should put in your very best effort. Maybe a customer notices, maybe they don’t, but either way, whenever I saw one of those displays on someone’s desk, it mattered to me to know that my teammates and I had considered everything about it and done the very best job we could.

But make no mistake, it’s hard to put that much of yourself into something. It’s stressful, it requires sacrifice, but it’s worth it because our time is finite. Some of you will work on hundreds of projects in your careers; some of you might just work on one or two really big ones. But the time will come when you hand things off to the next generation, and I guarantee you that the greatest source of pride that you feel when you’re looking back, it won’t be about the specific projects or products or technologies themselves. It’ll be the journey of building them and the effort and collaboration that it took to make it all happen.

Now, while you’re on that journey, there are going to be many times in your career when you have to take on something new, and sometimes you might wonder whether or not you can actually do it. And there’s a trick that I’ve learned along the way that helps me through those situations.

And it’s my second piece of advice today: always assume you’re as smart as anyone else in the room, but never assume that you know as much as they do. With this mindset, you’ll find the confidence you need to push forward, but more importantly, the humility to ask questions and learn.

When I first got to Apple, it was my second job out of college, and the first time I walked through those doors, it was exhilarating and intimidating all at once. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I belonged there. The people I met were so smart and so confident, and they knew so much more than me. But I’ll always be grateful that I wasn’t afraid to ask for help when I needed it, because being around people that care that deeply, it won’t just make you want to stretch your limits and see how far you can go, but they’re also the best people to help you understand how to get there. This mindset will serve you across your career because, trust me, the learning won’t stop just because you’re leaving college, and it won’t stop after your first job either. There will always be new skills to master and new people to learn from.

Now, as I mentioned before, those early displays I worked on and later iMacs were made from large, complicated, clear plastic parts. The look was totally iconic and so beautiful. After a few years of designing products like that, I felt like I truly mastered it. And then our design team fell in love with aluminum, and I never designed a large plastic part again.

But here’s the thing: do I regret that skill? Absolutely not, because every experience like this sharpened my ability to approach problems from different angles. They gave me the confidence and willingness to try new things and the resolve to keep going until I found a solution. It may not always be comfortable, but in this way, ongoing change is one of the great gifts of life, and learning how to learn and keep learning is one of the great gifts of your college education.

And that brings me to my last piece of advice, maybe my most important and something I think about almost every day: build what interests you, build what excites you, but above all else, build it in a way that aligns with your values. At Apple, we’re pretty good at making products that our customers love, but we’re also an organization made up of people who work hard to lead with our values in everything that we do. And one of the key values I see shared across everyone I work with is a deep desire to do what we can to protect the environment.

That’s why Apple is carbon neutral for our own operations around the world, and now Tim Cook has us working on a truly audacious goal: by 2030, we want to become carbon neutral across our entire supply chain, including manufacturing and lifetime usage of our products. This will be one of the most ambitious engineering undertakings that we’ll do in our careers, because meeting this goal is going to require invention from people across all disciplines. And it means solving problems and pushing boundaries at every stage of product development. It means going deep into chemistry and material science to develop new recycled materials. It means making our products more energy efficient with innovations in silicon design, system design, and software. And it means finding ways to do all this and more without ever compromising our ambitions for innovation or our standards for quality and reliability.

So whatever you do in your careers, here’s my advice: take the time to build skills and expertise in areas that matter to you. Strive to be the engineer who unlocks medical advances that fight incurable diseases, or designs technologies that bring clean water to every corner of the globe. Be the engineer who builds an AI model to help people navigate our healthcare or legal systems, or revolutionizes the way we build infrastructure to bring us all closer together.

No matter what you choose, I think the choice itself represents one of the most amazing things about being an engineer, because fundamentally, this career is about changing the world around you. It’s about giving people tools and solutions they never had and making an impact that can resonate for generations. You all are quite literally the people who are going to design and build our future. That is both a profound opportunity and a great responsibility, and the incredible thing about the degree you’re receiving today is that the possibilities are truly limitless. And I cannot wait to see what you do with them.

This is your time, this is your moment. So do what Steve Jobs once said and go out there and make a dent in the universe.

Thank you all, and congratulations, Class of 2024!