[ Silence ]
>> Good afternoon ladies
and gentlemen and welcome
to the Nelson A. Rockefeller
Center at Dartmouth College.
Today is our presentation
of the Portman lecture
in the spirit of
entrepreneurship.
My name is Andrew Samwick and I
am a professor of economics here
at Dartmouth as well
as the director
of the Rockefeller Center.
I'd like to take an opportunity
to extend a special welcome
to the members of the Dartmouth
class of 2016 and their families
who are visiting for
Dimension's weekend.
I look forward to seeing you
at the Rockefeller Center
open house tomorrow morning
and in the fall when
you matriculate.
The Portman Lecture
is an annual event
at the Rockefeller Center
hosted in partnership
with the Amos Tuck School of
Business through which we seek
to encourage a discussion
of entrepreneurship
and the many challenges
of starting, growing,
and running new enterprises
in all fields of endeavor.
We are very fortunate today
to welcome Carl Schramm
who recently finished a decade
of service as the president
and CEO of the Ewing
Marion Kauffman Foundation.
The Kauffman Foundation is
the world's largest foundation
devoted to entrepreneurship.
Under Dr. Schramm's leadership,
it became the world's
premier organization dedicated
to developing high growth firms
and understanding the role
they play in economic growth.
Today, the mission of the
Kauffman Foundation is
to foster opportunity
through both education
and entrepreneurship.
At the level of any
given individual,
either opportunity
is a good one.
But for society as a
whole, I would argue
that it's entrepreneurship
that is in scarce supply.
There are many organizations
focused on education.
There are far fewer
focused on entrepreneurship.
Our pedagogies for
education are well established
if not always well implemented.
We know much less about how
to foster entrepreneurship.
And most importantly,
I think, by itself,
education doesn't create jobs.
And education may
qualify you for a job,
but it's entrepreneurship
that creates jobs.
I listen frequently to political
ideas and arguments about how
to grow the economy
and I wonder why
that simple point is
so often overlooked.
As we enter the thick of the
2012 presidential campaign,
no issue will loom
larger than job creation.
A discussion of entrepreneurship
should be front and center.
I'm happy that we
get to begin our part
of that discussion
this afternoon.
The link between
entrepreneurship
and jobs has a more local and a
more personal dimension as well.
In the spring of each year, many
of our students are finishing
up their degrees and looking
forward to finding a place
in the workforce beyond
the comforts of Hanover.
As I have told some
of them recently,
the entrepreneurship
recruiters don't come to campus
to interview you like the
management consultants
and the investment bankers.
You don't take a GRE or an LSAT
and fill out an application
to go to entrepreneurship
school.
The path is not so easy
or so well-worn as that.
Going right to the
original meaning
of the word entrepreneur, if
you want to be an entrepreneur,
you have to undertake something.
At Dartmouth, it is clear
what we hope our students
and graduates will undertake.
What is the admonition from
John Sloan Dickey that was
so frequently that, "The world's
troubles are your troubles
and there's nothing
wrong with the world
that better human beings
can't fix except the call
to undertake some endeavor
that reaches far
beyond the narrow world
to which we've all
become accustomed."
We aspire for our
students and graduates
to be thinkers and doers.
Our stated mission is to prepare
them for a lifetime of learning
and of responsible leadership.
I don't see how we could
possibly deliver on that mission
if we do not foster a
spirit of entrepreneurship
and a global consciousness
among our students.
Today's lecture and
discussion will help
to connect those two ideas.
Entrepreneurship and the
Future of the Global Economy.
A recognized authority on
entrepreneurship, innovation,
and economic growth, Dr.
Schramm currently serves
as a visiting scientist
at MIT and as a fellow
at the Bush Institute.
He is a Batten Fellow
at the University
at Virginia's Darden School
of Business and a member
of the Council on
Foreign Relations.
A graduate of LeMoyne College,
Dr. Schramm earned his masters
and doctoral degrees
in Economics
at the University of Wisconsin.
He earned a law degree
at Georgetown University.
He was a member of the faculty
at the Johns Hopkins University
for 15 years before deciding
to broaden his career
well beyond the academy.
His expertise has played
a role in public policy
in both Democratic and
Republican administrations.
Ladies and gentlemen,
please join me
in welcoming Dr. Carl Schramm.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you very much.
That way [inaudible]
so enlightening
and introduction is possible.
He spent very little time on me
and did the substantive
stuff related to the topic.
I especially liked your comment
that education might
get you ready for a job,
but it's the entrepreneur
that makes a job.
And-- that always happens
when I scratch my head.
[Laughter] Are we okay?
>> Yeah.
>> I once saw a wonderful
bumper sticker that said,
"Can't spell entrepreneur?
Become one and hire
somebody who can."
And absolutely, the word is
in fact somewhat confused,
it's the French phrase
for undertaking.
Some people think
that the connection
between venture capital and
undertaker is appropriate.
I once marveled that
George W. Bush commenting
to the premier of France.
But the problem with the French
economy was they didn't have a
word for entrepreneur.
So anyway, my topic is
about entrepreneurship,
it's Entrepreneurship
in Global Growth.
And I think I want to treat this
from two different perspectives.
First, I want to talk about
entrepreneurship per se,
I want to talk about it
in the numerical context
and then I want to
talk about it in terms
of what it means
in global context.
As professor Samwick
said, if I could be happy
about one thing I
did in my life,
it's basically take the study
of entrepreneurship and seed it,
if you will, in the larger
context of economics.
10 years ago when I went
to the Kauffman Foundation,
if you had wanted to go and
talk about entrepreneurship
in a serious way,
in a policy way,
you couldn't almost
go any place.
And indeed I would basically
say you couldn't talk to anyone
with a few exceptions,
well Obama would be the
principal exception.
The great thinkers that
actually saw entrepreneurship
in the larger economic
context of growth were dead.
The prime most example of
that is Joseph Schumpeter
who died in 1950.
Schumpeter saw with
his enormous clarity
and his great phrase making,
an Austrian economist.
His great phrase of
creative destruction.
It was Schumpeter who points
out that in capitalism,
it is the entrepreneur
who challenges the
incumbent businesses.
And Schumpeter says that the
dynamics of our economy or such
that we will not grow without
people creating new businesses,
bringing forth innovation
and essentially disturbing,
upsetting, destroying,
the incumbent businesses.
This is very, very important for
us to understand particularly
at a moment like this in our
economy when we have slowed this
so called great recession,
is a very important lesson
for us in several regards.
The one that I think is
of greatest consequence is
that for the first time
in a post war recession,
the number of people starting
businesses has not gone
up in the recession, but
actually has gone down.
This is a very, very dangerous
because it suggests there may
in fact be something
going on in this recession
that has dampen the
spirit of entrepreneurs
such that they don't go
forward to start new businesses.
The reason this is critical
is, and I will suggest to you
that you won't hear this
from many other economists,
so you ought to come here to
school because they have people
like me come here
once in a while, okay?
Am I doing okay?
All right, I'm trying to
swell a class of '16, okay.
All of our other post war
recessions have been--
we have led the economy out
by the creation of new firms.
Now that's probably easy
to understand in the sense
that with recessions, we
see upticks in unemployment.
And often, it's large firms
that disemploy critical people
at the cutting edge of where
the firm's innovative frontier
might be.
So those of you from Tuck
understand that in times
like this, preparing you to
become a business consultant.
You have a little playbook
and says, "At times like this,
you tell our client companies
go back to your core business."
What that means to the company
is, fire all the engineers
who are doing all
the innovative stuff.
And historically
when we fire them,
they gleefully cheer
saying, "This is my time
to take all the stuff
I've been working
on at amalgamated consolidated.
They've given me
intellectual property rights
over it 'cause they just
want to get rid of this
as they go back to the core."
And new companies are born.
And the creation of these
new companies is critical
because new companies
do three things.
First, they actually are
the vehicle for innovation
in our society and
this is very important.
It's more important now and
it has been for a long time.
So those of you who might
have graduated want to--
I got out of college
40 years ago.
You knew that innovation
happened
in big firm laboratories.
Del Laboratories or Merck & Co.
And in fact this was the way
economists said it was supposed
to be.
In the Keynesian era, when
John Keynes' great apostle,
John Kenneth Galbraith
held his way at Harvard,
he in fact told us, as late as
1984, that all new innovation
in our economy would happen
in large firm laboratories.
And indeed, as if this
mistake wasn't bad enough
and I don't want to
pick on Galbraith,
most economist make
big mistakes.
We've had about 36, 37
Nobel Prizes in Economics,
at least 12 to 15
have been over turned.
That the theory on which
somebody won the price is
subsequently been found to be
wrong, okay, which suggests
that Nobel Prize in Economics is
a little less of a Nobel Price
than sort of like chemistry
or physics, it's not often
that the physics
prize is an indictment
of the scientist
inside some years later.
So Galbraith goes to Gilded
Lily [phonetic] and says
to which again in 1984 that,
"The age of the entrepreneur
is over.
Innovation will happen
in big firms."
Now he says this even as the
Nielsen Companies, Microsoft,
Intel, Genentech
are all under way.
And to make my point in
large macroeconomic terms,
a statistic that if
we ring the doorbell
at the White House
today and said,
"Let's talk to all the
members of the Council
of Economic Advisers,"
no one would register.
They wouldn't get
this answer right.
Another reason you ought to come
here 'cause you're already ahead
of the game now, you
trump renowned economist
in Washington.
And the question
we put to them is,
how much of this year's
GDP comes from firms
that didn't exist in 1985?
They'll get this answer wrong.
They'll give you a little
smidgeon number like,
yeah, maybe 12 percent.
Remember, we're saving all
our huge firms in Washington,
they are critical for making
jobs that's why they allowed
General Motors, Chrysler, we
got to preserve those jobs,
let them make new jobs.
A little historic
foot note, okay,
General Motors now employs
something in the new order
of 30-- 25 to 30,000
people less than it did
when it took the bail
out money justified for--
on the grounds for
saving new jobs.
Okay, so the answer is 40
percent of today's GDP comes
from firms that didn't
exist in 1980.
This is astounding, they are
the carriage, these new firms
of innovation, and
most importantly,
they are the carriage
of new job creation.
Almost all new net job
creation in the United States is
in firms less than
five years old.
So you can see why we're having
such sluggish job growth.
We don't have new firm founding.
We don't have new jobs.
This is a [inaudible]
the big issue.
The last thing of
course that new firms do,
that entrepreneurs
do, is they make new--
they make all the margin wealth.
The wealth in our
society, which is critical.
And by the way, let's just look
at our economy for a moment
and talk about the wave
of entrepreneurship
that's going on.
Today, in a class, I
spoke about this in terms
of the United States and
its entrepreneurial penchant
or propensity in other nations.
And with the exception of
Israel which is very small
and doesn't count
that much in one way.
America produces on a per
capita basis more new businesses
than any other country
in the world.
We are a nation of
entrepreneurs.
And we're getting more and
more entrepreneurial sort
of the statistics since
2009 suggesting a downturn
in funding not withstanding.
We have more and more of the
human capital resource necessary
to start this economy really
good and maybe move it to four
or five percent annual
GDP growth
to have a shocking
sort of goal for us.
So these firms create
these jobs.
And if you will, and we
think of the United States,
we bring about 30
companies a year
to one billion dollars in sales.
It's really vital.
When I talk about creating
new net wealth in he society,
it's this constant
pipeline of new firms
that are growing to scale.
Israel brings about
eight to nine a year,
all of Europe brings
about two, all of Europe.
Europe's population is the size
of the size of the
United States.
What does that tell us?
That's a great place if
you're kind of wealthy,
middle class and wealthy.
It's a great place to visit
and go on vacation, right?
We here that all time.
Well, it wouldn't be so
bad if we're like Europe.
Yeah, that's a perspective
of the people who are sort
of at 250,000 dollars
of income and above.
You know, taking a boat to
Capri in the Sidewalk Cafe,
outside The Muris, okay, over
there at the flower market
in Rome, the Via
Veneto, it's a nice life.
That's not how Europeans
pants live.
Europeans live in an economy
that grows one percent a year,
it has no new turn in
terms of new businesses.
The reason is this is
the policy of government.
It's industrial policy.
We favor big firms.
We favor big firms.
This is very, very dampening to
the spirit of entrepreneurship.
It's one of the reasons why
so many people from abroad
and including Europe try to
get into the United States
to start their businesses.
We are a magnet for this
type of human talent.
And our magnet is basically
freedom, a wide open economy,
people won't care if you fail.
I used to be president--
vice president of Fortis,
I was president at several
divisions in the United States.
Fortis is a big Dutch
banking and Holland company.
And let me tell you, I spent a
lot of time in the Low Countries
in Holland and it's a
very confusing mess to me.
But [inaudible] is where
I spent a lot of time.
If you have a failure
as an entrepreneur,
in the Netherlands,
you're done for life.
You're not going to
start another business.
Are you going [inaudible],
the banks knows,
the records are kept, you had
a failure, you are not going
to have a second bite of
the entrepreneurial apple.
That's pretty much
all over Europe.
In the United States, we often
regard failure as the school
for your second most
successful company.
Think about it this way and
this is very encouraging to you.
Pay attention, okay?
We think about entrepreneurs,
this is very important
for everybody.
What's our archetype
entrepreneur?
Well, if we apply the archetype,
some of you who are young,
haven't graduated yet or
graduated a year ago or maybe
over Tuck, your day
is gone, okay?
If you're not Mozart, if you
haven't learned the Concerto
by nine, it ain't
going to happen, okay?
Our vision is you dropped out
of college, you were so smart,
you couldn't finish college
because you're had an
a raise [phonetic].
Before you were 21, you had
to had your big company
started, right?
That's not true.
Entrepreneurship happens
all through ones life.
Our 500 fastest growing firms
in the United States are started
by people when they're
40 years old.
So the notion of
entrepreneurship is focused just
on our young folks is
not actually right.
We are an entrepreneurial
society that's growing
like crazy.
So as we move to the next part,
let's remember the three things
that entrepreneurs do,
they birth the new,
they bring forth new
jobs, a visit on that just
for one moment if you think
about General Motors eliminating
jobs which we all want to do
over the last three years.
We really wanted to do.
Politicians in the
Washington don't--
they tell us that we
gave them all that money
to save jobs in Detroit.
But the other half
of us when we think
about that money is investors,
I wanted them to cut jobs.
It's a productivity gain,
productivity gain makes the
companies more productive.
It's more valuable.
You know, productivity gain
merely means all the money
that you make or all the
cars that you produce,
all the revenue that
comes in divided
by the number of workers.
If we can cut the workers
and keep these numbers higher
and growing, we've made
the company richer.
So the guys and their big
chauffeur limousines running
down from Connecticut
everyday to New York,
chomping on their cigars,
speaking on 4 to 13 phones,
they are all saying on those
phones, "Can't you get rid
of another 20 people
at the division
over there in X, Y, or Z?"
That as investors is
what we want them to do.
If you're an entrepreneur and
you cut people, you got nothing
or put affirmatively, you have
to have people to
make your firm.
And that's why we
see all these hiring
and the creation
jobs in new firms.
Now, let's see this on a larger
scale of economic growth.
And as I said before, we now see
entrepreneurship in that lens.
Now tell me who are
here from Tuck,
how many people are
here from Tuck?
Okay, I won't look, one
person is here from Tuck.
It's profoundly illustrative,
maybe two,
somebody is a little
shy about that, okay.
I'm from Tuck here, okay.
And it's profoundly
illustrative in the sense
that in our nation's
business schools,
entrepreneurship is treated sort
of like a backwoods
subject over here, okay?
I've visited many business
schools in my last job,
we gave lots of money, millions,
tens of millions of dollars
to universities to
teach entrepreneurship,
we bribed schools to
teach entrepreneurship.
You get to profoundly
important business schools.
I've sat with the dean
I said, "Now tell me
about who teaches
entrepreneurship?"
Let's say, the--
well we got this guy.
I said, "Is he a
tenured guy [inaudible]?"
"He's and adjunct guy,
you should meet him."
His office is across the
street in a bottom of a hotel.
He runs our entrepreneurship
center for those freaky kids
who want to fool around with
the business while they're here
at school, okay?
In this particular
case, the person I have
in mind was a retired audit
partner in a big 8 firm,
at the time now big 4 firm.
That's right, an audit
partner in charge
of entrepreneurship teaching
at this major university, okay?
Very famous university, very
famous business school, okay?
People don't treat this
subject seriously and in fact
if we think about how we
teach it in business school,
you want to go to
business school?
Maybe. You might not after I
tell you this 'cause you'll have
all the secrets,
okay, all right?
This is like going to
the Wizard of Oz, okay.
They teach the whole
starting a business
in this extremely
mechanical rubric
of writing business plans.
Now to go back to our
500 fastest growing firms
that are started by people at
the age-- average age of 40,
these firms are critically
important
to the future of this country.
More than 60 percent never
wrote a business plan.
So what are they teaching
in business school?
Well, the business school plan
is a very rigid mechanical
document that is invented in
business schools some years ago
for the purpose of
teaching entrepreneurship.
And they snitched a little
out of the strategy department
'cause they think about plans
and they snitch a little
out of the finance department
called Venture Capital.
So the process of how we
think an academic terms
about teaching people to start
business is essentially boiled
down, half baked and half
merged curriculum from business
where people learn how to write
a business plan with the view
that high up there in the high
meadow with the high clover,
seats three or four great
judges, venture capitalists.
And if I write the great plan
and I get up those stairs
on my knees, they'll give me
money to start my company.
Again, a false narrative.
Our 500 fastest growing firms,
only 14 percent ever
had venture capital.
So we have to teach this process
as if venture capital
is the end of the road.
The messianic moment,
the end of history.
It's crazy.
It's now how companies go.
It is now how companies
are financed.
And long behold, we
teach the wrong stuff.
So what we ought to do is think
about what we should teach
people because the point
of this lecture is that
we should have more people
doing this.
Now think about this.
We only create 700,000 new firms
a year in the United States.
It sounds like a big number,
we do more in a per capita
basis than anybody else.
But if we set this
in the framework
that the whole enterprise,
the whole economic enterprise
should be focused on growth.
So four percent GPD growth
is better than three percent,
is better than two percent.
The United States is growing
on average three percent a year
for a hundred years, never,
ever equaled in human history.
Imagine we could
grow four percent.
The net welfare gain that
would come over this country
in the space of 25 and 50 years.
We could eradicate poverty.
We could never have a deficit.
We'd have all the money in the
world to advance the frontiers
of energy consumption.
And as I said, we could
eradicate poverty.
Other than that, we
could probably help
out the world a great deal.
I'll just drop a footnote here.
One of the reasons you don't
want to go to college, okay?
Is in college, you'll hear
all these means, like, "Oh,
America is over, okay and we
destroy the environment, okay.
And you shouldn't
go into business
and growth is bad, okay?"
And what I'm going to say to you
is use your head, use your eyes,
believe what your eyes tell you
and not what people tell
you you're looking at, okay,
because growth is good.
We wouldn't be at Dartmouth
in a building some very rich
person gave to this school
and subsidized tuitions and
pay for faculty salaries
at Dartmouth and a thousands
of other institutions like this
that are at the incubus,
they're the incubator
for the human talent that
makes the country grow
and get wealthier and
improve human welfare.
All these came from somebody.
It was imagined by somebody.
And most of the buildings here
and every other campus are
from grateful alums who made
a lot of money in this system
and often times they are
essentially the entrepreneurs.
People who saw and imagine
something fantastic stick their
fortune on it, took the risks,
and made something
fantastic for us.
This is what entrepreneurs do
and this is the force
of what we're doing.
And if we have, my point being,
a view that we should have more
wealth, high rates of growth
which we can get done, okay?
Have you read Thomas Friedman?
The world is flat,
don't, okay, all right?
The world's very round.
It's very bumpy, okay.
And America's not
done with, okay.
He wants to sort of suspend life
and let the Chinese communist
model come to the United States
for just one day so brave
bureaucrats can adjust all the
rules and we get wealthier,
ain't going to happen.
If that was going to
happen, it's going to happen
in free markets where people
have the freedom to imagine,
to start companies, to bring
those companies into the role
of making new jobs for
people in making wealth
that he shared throughout the
society and is shared in places
like this and improve some
successive generations the
capacity of the society
continue to grow
and expand human welfare.
So the question becomes,
a very important question
in a university, how come we
only have 700,000 people taking
this step every year?
And the question is, of--
it's almost never asked which
is a great speculative question
that should be asked by
all of you, should be asked
by you 'cause you don't
know if you're in this box
yet and you should be.
And you should be there and
you should take your friends
with you.
Perhaps we envisioned, which
I think is fair to say,
not all the creative
people start firms,
we have people running
over here writing sonatas,
painting pictures,
designing buildings.
But there are a lot of people
who express their
human creativity
in commerce and business.
It's very important
to understand.
It's their way of
being authentic.
We run a business school
on this campus for people
who are creative and
want to be creative
in the world of commerce.
It is this high minded of
purpose as writing a sonata.
It's where nature sent
them, it's their proclivity,
it's where their talent
can be actually leveraged,
actualized, in our behalf.
This is what happens
in business.
So if we take just the people
who are creative in business,
you could make the case that
in any advanced society,
maybe some very small substrate
of people are really responsible
for all the innovation
and creativity
in entrepreneuring
and job creation.
And let's say that
number is five percent.
I have no idea what
that number is.
You may have a better idea than
I do, you may have no idea.
Let's just argue in though,
say it's five percent.
Wouldn't it be great if
one of our occupations
in universities was to think
about how it was that we made
that number seven
percent or 10 percent?
Indeed, I think this is one of
the particular preoccupations
that we should focus
on in higher education
for a lot reasons.
Not the least of which is,
I'm certain we are going
to have a wealthier
society down the road.
In many ways, the need for work
as we understand it
now will dissipate,
attenuate, be diluted.
What are people going
to do with their time?
I will let that question just
hang there pregnantly 'cause I
don't have an answer, but
it's a very important answer
for civilization.
What do people do
in a wealthy society
that is actually constructive
and not mischievous,
and not mischievous?
Okay, now let's talk
about this in the context
of the large world,
the global world.
We'll go into the world
that Thomas Friedman
discovered to be flat, okay?
America in the other nations.
America has given a
great gift to the world,
it is never recognized,
certainly not
by Thomas Friedman's first book,
he start to begrudgingly gets
there in his second book.
The world is bumpier,
whatever it's called, okay?
I got to get off to
Thomas Friedman kick, okay,
there are lot of people
on the kick, I'm over it.
I just reviewed one of his
books once and it was--
several pages were
so preposterous they just
sort of burned in my head.
The United States have given
a great gift to the world.
We've given our entrepreneurial
model.
You know, all those graduate
students from other countries
who are here, when you
were in graduate school,
not here necessarily,
but wherever you went
to graduate school and I
went to graduate school,
those folks were here and
not just becoming engineers,
physicist, chemist, they're
here watching how the American
economy work.
And when they went
home, if they went home,
and some of them were here,
expressly, not as spies,
we had many people,
delegations come,
they still come all the time,
just study the American
economic system,
particularly its
entrepreneurial system.
And we know for example that
the Chinese reforms of 19--
the beginning of
1972 are expressly
to liberate the economy, so
they can have an outbreak
of entrepreneurship
like the United States.
Why do they come to
the United States?
For the fact I suggested before,
we know how to grow the economy.
Mao Tse Tung did not know
how to grow the economy.
The Soviet Politburo did not
know how to grow the economy,
and in fact, for those of
you who pay an attention
to Chinese politics which is
phenomenally interesting these
days, they know how
to grow the economy,
but their political ideology
makes them very nervous
about the chaos that will
come in a free market economy
and have to settle the
question of who owns this?
In the minute, the
State doesn't own this,
you suddenly have
people who can vote.
And maybe, they'll throw
the Politburo out, okay?
You watched that drama
with what's happen
with [inaudible] is
famous disappearing family.
The window in China
to look at it
from our perspective is it
confirms very loudly their
observation about the
power of entrepreneurship
as the key stone of
a growth strategy.
Same thing in India,
actually in India, some ways,
it looks like China in a sense
you don't find entrepreneurship
every place in India, but
you find very powerful
entrepreneurship in
places like Bangalore.
Again, the Chinese imitate
and understand consciously
the American system,
the Indians really are conscious
of the American system,
our love affair back and forth
with India, pays huge dividends
in India, pays them in
the United States, too,
but there's an unabashed
understanding of the importance
and power of entrepreneurs
to the Indian economy,
and here's the great good
news, this phenomenal news,
this is historically important
news, I wish I had drums,
trumpets, and other stuff, okay.
We've watched in the
last 30 years as a result
of the infection of this
American perspective
of entrepreneurship, a
reduction of between 25
and 30 percent [inaudible]
to poverty using the World Bank
numbers in the last 25 years.
It's never, ever been
achieved in human history.
We are making gains on poverty.
And the instrumentality of those
gains is people starting new
businesses, particularly in
China and particularly in India.
So I want to wrap up
because I think meetings
like this are actually a lot
more productive, both for you
and for me, and me and you.
If we do questions and answers,
but just making a
couple observations
about what the future holds.
No matter what you think about
politics is almost immaterial,
I believe that the
power of entrepreneurs
in the United States, people who
want to get on with the creation
of new businesses is so powerful
it will not be dampened.
And I say that and you're going
to say, "Yeah, but what happened
in the last few years
since 2009,
and there's been this fall off?"
I think we've seen a lot
of signals in Washington
that make it much more risky
for people to start businesses.
I believe in a rational system
where policy makers are going
to come to understand that if we
don't have these new businesses,
we're not going to have growth,
and if we don't have growth,
we're not going to have
political stability.
That applies to either party.
The only caveat I want to put
on there is we've been watching,
job's act passed
three weeks ago,
we've been watching
the government warming
up the policy, making policy
to help entrepreneurs.
I can't sort of hold
those two thoughts
in my head at the same time.
The government helping
entrepreneurs get started
in making new businesses, and of
course government will do this,
always under the
rubric of reinvesting.
Now before we get deep into
that and this will likely sound
in today's modern
discussion of politics is
if I'm making a partisan
comment,
I want to wash partisanship away
and just say, "Solyndra to you,"
because Republicans could make
the same mistake and they have.
I remember it was
George Bush who bails
out the motor companies.
Solyndra is our postured child
of the government saying,
"We're going to invest
and we're going
to pick a business
that's going to succeed,
an industry that's
going to succeed."
And of course it didn't.
It had a lot of explanations
for it afterward,
but the reality is, it was
a bad bet and the proof
of my case is the first money
in was venture capital money,
but the venture capitalist
wouldn't put
in the next 500 million dollars.
No sir, they call all the
senators and everybody else
and say, "Could you put
in the 500 million dollars
and save our investment?"
And in fact save their
investment we did,
because when it went down, we
will ask collectively, as guys,
some down here have 560
million dollars, but those guys,
the first money in,
the venture capitalist,
had their money protected, okay?
Now, why do we visit with this?
Because this is the
archetype that you want
to carry in your head.
And when government says we're
going to help entrepreneurs,
we'll have a venture fund, or
we'll start to invest directly,
invest directly in the
future, in this hot new area,
energy technology, okay?
You have to be cautious because
they're not investing their
money, they're investing
our money.
And when it's public
money, nobody cares.
Now I'm a limited
partner in venture funds,
Shreyman [phonetic] Company is
an investor in 12 companies.
That's my money.
And when I invest through
a venture capital fund,
if they say, "Oops,
there's a venture,
there's a limited
partner's meeting," right?
And it's not nice to
be a managing partner
at those meetings because a lot
of people grow very long teeth,
holler and scream 'cause
it's my money you lost, okay?
Where is that great
drama over Solyndra?
No, congress holds a hearing
and some bureaucrat show up
and [noise], you know, it's
a complex world out there
and [inaudible], Baltic and
Chinese make better solar panels
than we ought to be
and it blah-blah,
you have to blah-blah.
You're watching on
C-SPAN, right?
Well, maybe you don't but I do.
I'm a C-SPAN addict.
I can't live without C-SPAN,
and that's the drama
you see on C-SPAN.
Now, to our point,
to our last point.
If I ask any of you to
make our society better,
to improve human welfare,
you know that human welfare
is connected to the capacity
of the society to make wealth.
Would you have a better answer
on helping people
start businesses?
To encourage a social
and economic network
where people take the
risks to start businesses?
Think about this, for
those of you who may have--
who maybe harboring
some question
about this growth business.
In 1947, a professor at the
Johns Hopkins, Henry Sigerist,
studies health over history.
He writes a book,
Health and Civilization--
I'm sorry, Civilization
and Disease.
It's a classic.
It's a classic because
he observes historically,
when we watch secular
gains and health status,
the single most important
independent variable is the
increase, when it grows
up, the driving variable,
its disposable personal
income, not more doctors,
not more drugs, not
more hospitals.
Give people disposable
income and guess what,
they'll make good choices.
They'll buy better food,
they'll house themselves,
they'll buy education.
Disposable income is just
another word for wealth.
And the only way we
know historically
in the United States, we have
200 years of this record, of--
it's the imagination of a
new future, the risk taking
by individuals, pulls of
individuals and investors,
the creation of new companies
that disturb the old companies.
Now, let's talk about
disturbance
and the last point
I want to make,
to quote in here is
let us be comfortable
with chaos [inaudible] we
see all these huge companies
in Washington, General
Electric, IBM, General Motors,
it's because they're
protecting themselves from risk.
They're seeking government
rents.
They are very concerned about
instant death as a corporation,
it's a real phenomenon.
Between the years 1960 and
1985 on the Fortune 100,
we have 17 countries,
17 companies displaced.
To run a major company
in the United States
in that 25-year period of time
was like being in a vestibule
of heaven, very secure,
very stable, nothing really
to worry about, no such
thing as corporate death.
And the next 25 years,
we have the reciprocal,
71 companies dropped
out of the 100 list,
huge corporate velocity,
companies die, okay?
We know, we can name
airline companies die,
they're not around, a real,
real threat to management.
Now, this is good for growth,
but there's something in us,
our human nature is, we're not
so sure we like all that chaos,
we certainly don't
if we run a company
and we're shareholders
in a big company.
I'm not so sure we
like all that chaos,
but it is in the chaos
that we have growth.
Schumpeter is right, create a
destruction, the constant gales
as he gales of entrepreneurs
knocking at the doors
of the big companies,
bringing forth new innovations,
creating new and much
more interesting jobs,
and making wealth in their wake
is how we as a society proceed.
I'll end by just saying, "Listen
carefully because the prejudice
in public policy is that
the government can plan
out our future."
And if you think about
everything I told you
about Europe and
industrial policy
and govern the plans
of the future.
And government has the insights
about how an economy
is supposed to go.
What industries are
supposed to flourish?
What are the good ideas that
should get government backing?
You get one percent growth.
In the world of intelligence
here, as I said before,
this is often wished away.
Well, one percent growth
sounds pretty good to me.
When I visit the Little Piazza
in Arezzo is 'cause
I'm a wealthy American.
To go to the rural farms
in Italy or the backwaters
of Paris is what Europe
looks like for most people.
And it's not the future
you as Americans want
and put aside your Americanist.
It's not the future, you, as
a citizen of the world want.
Last, last point.
We know since 1954 that
the incidence of death
and organized violence warfare
has falling dramatically.
To correlate to this is the per
capita comes written enormously.
The wealthier people are, the
less it seems that we are ready
to fight with each other,
death and war goes down,
and human welfare flourishes.
There is no single force
that stands in the way
of welfare gain like warfare.
So all that the entrepreneur
has in his or her hands,
there's nothing less
than the future world
and the peace among
nations and people.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
We have two microphones
on one aisle so I'm going
to watch this pair with.
[Laughter].
You're going to go find
people with questions.
There's a guy on the
corner there, okay?
And don't make them too hard--
>> Okay.
>> And you're thinking up
a good question, all right?
You better have 'cause I'm going
to take your admission away
if don't have a great question.
>> Okay. [Laughter]
>> Entrepreneurship in
the developing world--
>> Yes.
>> -- has been in the
news in the last decade
with microlending and I wonder
if you know what the research
says about the results of that
because initially,
it was very exciting.
And I have heard more recently
that the sustainability
of that growth depends
on the infrastructure
in these countries as much as
whether the little guy is able
to get hold of money
to start a business.
>> Yeah, okay.
Now, I'm going to walk into a
little hot water here, okay?
It's hard to talk about
microlending and its impact
in empirical terms in university
audience 'cause there are
certain things university
audiences are wedded to.
But microlending is wonderful
'cause all the names that flash
out of it are-- it's women
doing handy work, okay?
But it's not harmful
to the environment.
We read books like three cups
of tea and we fall in love
with this idea that, you
know, we can change the future
of Afghanistan by
building schools, okay?
The hard reality is microlending
starts in Bangladesh,
Professor Yunus does it,
he gets the Nobel Prize.
There's no evidence that per
capita income has changed much
at all.
And think about it,
think about it,
just ask yourself this question,
what did we miss
in making America?
That make it-- made
America looked like and say,
"Did we do the wrong thing?
Should we have had
microlending to make America?"
We couldn't have.
But definitely, if we microlend
as our stratagem, will a country
that embraces that ever
have a modern university
or a modern hospital?
There's no scale gain and
wealth is made in scale gain.
So I don't want to
rain on the parade,
it's altogether important.
The use of cellphones to make
markets is really a consequence.
You know, if I was king of
the world, I'd put cell towers
over Africa because
free information
and free communication is the
predicate of growth these days.
But we have to be very serious
about what our prescriptions
are.
It's very, very important.
Okay? I'd put it differently.
Okay, the next-- the
followup question is, okay,
so what would you do for
growth in the third world?
Okay? And the answer is I would
create a holistic approach
that actually, first and
foremost, envisioned growth.
And this is actually quite
a radical departure 'cause
in the United States from 1950
forward, all of our theory
of AID, USAID, is
not growth at all.
We are a schizophrenic country.
We propagate a notion
of sustenance.
Actually, I think it's
fully racist, by the way,
our government's
policy in this regard.
Okay, so we go to an African
country and we envision
that the best we can do for
them is sort to make them live,
sustenance, sustain them.
We never say, "Hey, how
about a growth economy?"
And if you want to run into the
cause to this schizophrenia,
there are a lot of people
in Africa, political leaders
and others, who are hugely
resentful of the United States
for not bringing the
message of growth there.
And it's a very important
thing 'cause sometimes
in faculty clubs we say, "Oh,
it'll be great to have sort
of a microlending world," right?
As the professor of economic
development says, "Fred,
I want another crab
cake, quick."
Okay? Do you get my point?
The cultural drift
here or divide, okay?
Now, why don't you go to this
gentleman with the beard, okay?
'Cause he's been nodding his
head in ascent half the way
through the lecture
and I got nervous--
>> No, no, no, you shouldn't--
>> I think I've gone
nervous halfway.
>> You shouldn't be
nervous, I was very pleased.
There's just an-- one thing that
you were too nice to us about,
one of the big problems is that
universities have failed test--
just devastating in
mental innovation.
Let me give an example because--
>> Mental--
>> I'm getting new ideas
that can drive change.
Simple example, I discovered
that hydrogen could be made,
this is a defense department
study, using solar energy
to just split water like
hydrogen fuel cells,
drive a car, no pollution
rather than put of oil.
This is an [inaudible]
'cause the hydrogen goes
out the other end, it hit
oxygen and makes water vapor.
So you're actually storing
solar energy, the hydrogen.
Nobody knows about
this damn thing.
All right, Toyota is now
making a hydrogen car,
where are they making it?
In Europe, why?
My colleagues here at Dartmouth
don't care about the fact
that I do research, ever tired,
that deals with these
technological innovations.
So that has to do with
public policy like that.
>> Yeah.
>> But kind of putting
water supplies
that increases the crime
rate, but the issue is
that when you think
outside the box,
you can generate new businesses
and we are not helping you
because my colleagues
aren't doing their work.
>> Well, now, it's my time
to shake my head in
that sense, okay?
And go back from
my remarks about--
imagine if the driving
notion of the university,
let's say Dartmouth, if you were
to come and matriculate here
in the fall, which I'm now
getting a little doubtful about.
[Laughter] You know,
if the president said,
"Welcome class of 2016."
I'll tell you our
commitment in this university.
We are going to entice, prompt,
deliver to you an environment
in which we expect more
creativity out of you guys
in any freshmen class,
in any other institution 'cause
that's what we're really about,
just what this professor
says, okay?
I couldn't agree with you more.
And if you think about it,
here's a very startling
number and, by the way,
this is really important
for a lot of people
who might be invested
in the notion
that government can invest
and our future will flow.
I'm not a panel at the moment
where we're advising the
department of commerce on how
to improve innovation.
I chaired the panel in
the Bush administration.
We're the fastest, cheapest
panel the government ever
put together.
I don't know that to be true
but we wrote our report
way before our deadline
because it was a great
report, we has a lot
of very important people on it.
Sam Palmisano was the chairman
of-- IBM was on it and so forth.
We concluded we couldn't
measure innovation
in United States
and who cares, okay?
It's happening, but if
you can't measure it,
you can actually take policy.
And so what I was hoping to
do is appropriately bring us
to a conclusion so we
didn't make any mischief.
Now, the current
panel, basically,
a third of our panel are
presidents of universities.
Some are venture capitalists.
What do you think their
recommendations are?
"Give universities
a lot more money."
That's simply it.
And here's something that
troubles me about universities.
If you look at the rate
of new discoveries
coming out of NIH, okay?
This is a little
radical, but it's subtly,
secularly trending down.
And mind you, President Clinton
doubled, doubled, doubled,
that is 2X, 2 magnitudes
the budget at NIH.
And they were getting
the marginal return
on our investment.
You know there are
professors who say, "Well,
we sort of invented,
doing, you know,
we've gone as far as science.
Well, let us go right now."
My view, it's okay, let's
build roads then instead, okay?
I mean, let's wait for somebody
to breakthrough with something.
But of course, that's not
the mean among universities.
Just give us a lot more
money 'cause this is
where innovation happens.
Well, that has been true.
But to understand economics
that which was the institutional
arrangement 20 years ago is not
the institutional
arrangement today.
So the big fat question
that ought to occupy a bunch
of professors in some place is
where is the optimal seedbed
for innovation in the society?
Is it free market or private
firms like IDEO design firms?
Can design schools
tell us more about how
to create new businesses?
That's one hypothesis
that I carry.
But where this-- where is
innovation going to come from?
But we don't have that
dialogue underway.
Sir, your question is
particularly well-taken.
Oh yes, here in the
neighborhood, okay?
>> Thank you again for coming.
I have a question that's
kind of directly relevant
to what you just addressed but--
so talking about the incubators
for innovation, currently,
we see a lot of young people,
you know, under 20 coming
up with entrepreneurial
ideas solely based
on say Facebook apps
or iPhone apps.
And they're becoming
increasingly specialized
and increasingly bizarre
and you could call
that new value creation.
But at the same time, how do we
produce the sort of innovations
that are based on
a very specific
and necessary knowledge-based
that only comes from
universities?
>> No, I agree with you,
right up to the back end,
that only comes from
universities?
That's not clear, that's
not clear and in fact,
I think we are making
a huge mistake by going
into the future thing as just
universities that can do this.
I think we should stress test
our universities like crazy
and you watch 'cause I'm
watching it in this panel
and you watch it 'cause it's
going out in Washington.
The current administration
is very friendly
to big universities.
They have tortured for profit,
education establishments, okay?
Tortured maybe a little big
word but if you were running one
of those companies, you'd
think you were tortured, okay?
'Cause it's presumed
you're no good.
Now, there's a lot of abuse
there, taking veteran's payments
and so forth in private
sector area.
But clearly, you know, is
it abusive to a student
to let them come to fine
university and take a course,
take-- become a major
in Leisure Management?
That person will
never be productive,
that person going to take.
I mean a public sector
job running a park.
A job that does not require a
college education by the way,
but it brings up an awful
lot of college resources
and they populate a
campus with a lot of people
who sort of-- are
they scientists?
I mean, are your colleagues,
they don't teach you
and I hope-- I hope I'm making
a right assumption here.
You're not coming here to become
a leisure time study major, huh?
>> No.
>> Okay, all right.
I hope they don't do that here
but there are a lot of colleges
in very splendid universities
who would spend a huge amount
of the university resources on
stuff where we're never going
to have any innovation.
Indeed, we have counter
innovation.
Think, if you will, of
graduate schools of education
that they are a counter
revolutionary force,
if you will, or a
counter innovative force
for starters, okay?
So don't just make
the presumption
that at [inaudible] universities
that it's comfortable
here, okay?
And I gave absolutely
wrong answer.
But I've been assured that that
door goes to the street, so.
[Laughter] Okay, but, you
know, your question is really
where are we going
to find this, right?
Where is it going to be instead?
And I think we have
lots of little clues,
people running incubators,
you know.
This year, by the way, we
have more angel investors
and new firms than
venture capital investors.
Angel investors are people like
me who've been tried in firms.
They know a huge amount
of technical, not me,
but a lot of people do huge
amount of technical stuff, okay?
They can encourage and push
innovation in these firms,
you know, a firm that I'm an
investor in has 60 patents.
The innovation is going
on totally outside,
it got kicked off of the
University of Minnesota,
but it's going out way outside
the University of Minnesota.
This is how your
blood will be drawn
into a test facility, okay?
It will be painless, it
will be a prick of a laser,
they'll take a microdrop of
blood, you won't even know it,
and we will do 80 assays
in these five-ply
pieces of plastic, okay?
It will revolutionize us.
Anyway, like technology, we put
a lot of people out of business
so we can be sure the American
Society of Phlebotomist will be
in congress saying, "Oh no,
that can't be nowhere near
as accurate of me going, vial
one, vial two, vial three,
not a little infection
risk, yeah, we'll do four."
Okay? [Laughter] Right?
"Oh, I mixed up the
vials, I'm sorry."
Right? "You don't have
diabetes, I'm so sorry."
Right? I guess you get to live
some more or whatever, okay?
All right, you had a
question there, sir?
>> How many in your
view, has the--
>> Microphone please.
>> In your view, is the
hyperkineticism and overreaction
of financial markets
to particularly intellectual
technology entrepreneurship a
good thing or a bad thing?
>> No, there's a great paper
buyer, a former colleague
of mine at Kauffman called
the "Financialization
of Entrepreneurship"
and it makes the case
that we are wasting huge
amounts of human capital
of our brightest kids go to
New York and do innovations
in finance that we just
plain don't need, okay?
And I don't know what
we do about that.
You know, it's alarming.
It pays extremely well but
maybe the first step we make
as we actually are conscious
of it is, if you will,
I mean this is it's a
little bit of hyperbole
but I actually believe this,
it's a waste of human capital,
it's a waste of human talent.
Same thing, you know,
if you think about--
did you want to be a doctor?
Good. [Laughter] It's a
terrible way to live--
tell me, you're not
going to be a lawyer.
>> No.
>> Good. Okay, that's
very good, okay?
And think of all the
extraordinary talent
that we push into
medical schools.
You know, some subset of
doctors have to be great,
some subset of doctors
have to be really great
and be on laboratories.
You know, I spent 15
years at Johns Hopkins.
Those are stupendous doctors
but you have to, you know,
it's a total societal ways.
I think Hopkins and Stanford
are actually recognizing it now.
Stanford I know for sure is.
You don't get to
Stanford if you intend
to practice medicine, okay?
Hopkins, same thing.
You know, if you go to-- it's
a total social ways if you go
to Johns Hopkins and
turn out you want
to be a practicing pediatrician.
I mean social ways is
unbelievable, right?
And it's just an
illustration of it.
So I think we've got a lot in
our labor markets mixed up.
But the reality is
we don't have a path
for extremely creative
kids to go down.
Or put differently, you know,
my chance of getting rich are
much higher at Goldman Sachs
if I'm a wizard mathematically
or going
over to ABC hedge
fund then going out
and trying to start a new firm.
Everything is loaded
in that direction.
In my view is I'm sort of--
and I hope this isn't this--
ex-marketing, I'm
sort of with you.
If we had a culture
inside our universities
that was not just a
laboratory, but actually,
we knew how to engage
people in a way
that they became more creative.
We might draw a half of
those people over here
and they could be doing
extraordinary things.
I have this lady in the left,
I must have given her the
wrong answer [laughter]
but she raises a question
that's very much in the mind
of a lot of policy makers.
I'm not so sure I'm
in that camp,
but there are people running
around starting to see this--
my cell phone is away,
but these cellphones
and all these new things,
Groupon and, I mean,
they're all ephemera, they're
not really breakthroughs.
They are right at one level.
This is not heavy duty
advancing of our economy.
The cellphone itself is, and
in fact, I think in our hands,
if we can imagine, I have one
here, you know, not a lot longer
like measured at X,
X minus five years.
We thought about this as
a communicating device,
it's not a technological
platform.
And my own view is, in a broad
definition of infrastructure,
that's what we got and it
won't propel the economy.
It's very important
that we do this.
It should not be
dismissed the way
as you see commentators
do on TV all the time.
On the other hand,
they're sort of half right.
You know, an analysis of returns
in venture funds lead you
to one conclusion and that
is when we had a breakthrough
in silicon and a breakthrough in
cell technology, we made a lot
of money as an investor.
We have not had a subsequent
enormous breakthrough
to year point, okay?
We're all the people
fooling around with hydrogen
and new car type stuff.
But anyway, my own view is, when
you bailed out a car company,
you'd needily snuff out
all the human capital
that would run in
that direction.
And my own view is that
employment will be much lower
in Michigan, had we not bailed
out those two companies?
You say, "Oh, but we need cars."
Yeah, [inaudible]
guys would have been
in there in nanoseconds.
They'd have bought
the Pontiac brand.
Somebody else would
have bought Chevy truck,
somebody else would have
bought blah, blah, blah.
And incidentally,
every single one
of those things would be
much better products today.
There'd be hugely
better products
and you'd see innovation
like crazy,
they would have killed enter--
they would have killed
engineers left and right,
brilliant engineers out there.
We'd have 3,000 new companies
in Michigan creating, you know,
transmissions that use half the
energy to move power, the wheels
and stuff, new break systems.
We'd see stuff we
couldn't even imagine.
But not when the government
says, "We'll keep it like it is.
And oh, by the way, you
want to produce some vault?"
[Laughter] It's not to say
I'm against innovation,
there's not-- you never talk
to anybody who's more committed
to innovation but the
government's got going
to be able to design a car
for us and the evidence
of it is look how many of
us are buying it that's not
producing it?
[Inaudible] as they
sold 140 of them
across the entire
American nation.
So you could vote
religiously for the car
which some people do,
they're still on their car
at their garage,
they're perfect.
Someday, it's going
to be a huge market,
but absolutely, untouchable.
Run away off to Ebay and
put your reservation in.
Okay, how many more minutes
we have or is this it?
We got one more question?
>> One more question.
>> One more question.
The man in the back.
I'm sorry, that's not enough.
Do I hear 200?
>> You mentioned the
value of forgiving
and encouraging failure
of entrepreneurs
but why isn't the failure
of government-sponsored
entrepreneurs equally valuable
for learning?
>> Because it's extremely
costly.
Government can't
do it cheap, okay?
If you and I started to
fund, then we are going
to do Solyndra, we would not
have first built a beautiful,
beautiful, gorgeous building.
We would have finely
broken airplane hangar
of which there are
[inaudible] in California
and spend a lot of money.
So I agree with you in half
but when government does it,
the cost of the failure
is extraordinary
and you can't find a
kind of an example.
We're waiting.
>> But isn't there-- isn't it
possible to simply have cops
on the amount of funding
that the government provides?
>> Yeah, that'd be great
but politicians are not
capable of doing that, right?
The Secretary of Energy
wasn't going to say, "Well,
we're going to have a new fund,
we're going to recreate the
energy future of America
so we're here ready to dole
out five-million
dollar investments."
Would that have been the case?
Incidentally, would
that have been the case?
'Cause, you know, if
that had been the case,
it would have been an invitation
to lots of people like you
to think you could have a
shot at 5-million bucks.
In fact, I will now
offer the empirical case.
All over the federal
government, we have SBIRs
which is free money
from the government.
If you got a good idea,
you can get 700,000 bucks
and I think another
700,000 bucks and it's not--
the government doesn't take
any equity, it's a grant
for small business
innovation research.
And when the government said,
"Hey, we're going to move it
from 700,000 up to
seven million,"
I would have been
there applauding
because it would have invited
lots and lots of people
in who might have, you know,
for seven million bucks,
there are people out
there who could say,
"I can build a vault
that's beautiful and works."
And the evidence I
would suggest is look
at the Express Foundation.
Look at what just the
tantalizing notion
of a two million,
seven million dollar,
5 million dollar award is, how
many people invest huge amounts
of money to get there?
And the innovation that's
happening, you know the Express,
I used to be a director of
the Express Foundation and one
of the great extraordinary
things is there's a price
to develop a technology
that come up with oil scum
if there's oil in the ocean.
And, you know, the entrance,
every single one the entrance
I believe is doing 2X the
efficient gathering of oil
is the existing technology.
And this is a very
good point of--
why do we want contests, right?
When you got here as a freshman,
you sit down with
freshmen and [inaudible].
This is an awful stogie.
You guys are sitting on
your reputation up here
in the middle of nowhere, right?
And put this noxious
away buster, okay?
How about tantalizing
our freshmen class
with a two-million dollar
bet that we can come
up with something that will
revolutionize human welfare?
Overnight, you'd meet
your colleagues like that,
you'd figure out who the
smart engineers were,
you'd be at the dean's
office saying, "You know,
we don't have the
smartest people here,
we got to get quickly
transfer in some kids from MIT
or some place," right?
CalTech, right?
Something like that, okay?
IIT, let's go international.
Okay, I think I'm at the
end of what I have to say
and I appreciate
all your attention,
you've been a great,
gracious audience.
It's been a delight to be here,
the food were great at lunch
and it's like I'm
going to Cornel,
there's only one
drawback here, no airport
but you're doing pretty well
without an airport anyway.
So I wouldn't mess with the
formula except it's going
to be your school so, all right?
And as a student,
you own the school
and make sure you
tell them that, okay?
Faculty don't believe that.
Okay, thank you.
[ Applause ]
