June 7, 2007

Harvard Commencement

Boston, Mass.

Remarks by Bill Gates

President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust, members of the Harvard
Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the
graduates:

I�ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: �Dad, I always told you I�d come back and get my
degree.�

I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I�ll be changing my job next year� and it will be nice to
finally have a college degree on my resume.

I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I�m
just happy that the Crimson has called me �Harvard�s most successful dropout.� I guess that makes
me valedictorian of my own special class� I did the best of everyone who failed.

But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I�m
a bad influence. That�s why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your
orientation, fewer of you might be here today.

Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on
lots of classes I hadn�t even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier
House. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because
everyone knew I didn�t worry about getting up in the morning. That�s how I came to be the leader of
the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social
people.


Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were
science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is
where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn�t guarantee success.

One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House
to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world�s first personal computers. I offered
to sell them software.

I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said:
�We�re not quite ready, come see us in a month,� which was a good thing, because we hadn�t written
the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that
marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.

What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence.
It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an
amazing privilege�and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I
made, and the ideas I worked on.

But taking a serious look back� I do have one big regret.

I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world�the appalling disparities of
health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the
advances being made in the sciences.

But humanity�s greatest advances are not in its discoveries�but in how those discoveries are applied
to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or
broad economic opportunity�reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational
opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in
unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.

It took me decades to find out.

You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world�s inequities than


the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you�ve had a chance to think about how�in
this age of accelerating technology�we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.

Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to
donate to a cause�and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest
impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?

For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest