Student’s speech ties personal struggles to the entrepreneurial spirit at Stanford
BY JESSICA RICHMAN
Senior Jessica Richman is one of two students who spoke at the annual Founders’ Celebration, held this year on April 7. Richman successfully started a business before transferring to Stanford from community college.
Senior Jessica Richman is one of two students who spoke at the annual Founders’ Celebration, held this year on April 7.
I didn't come to Stanford as a result of an unbroken line of achievements, planned and scheduled from preschool to orientation day. Instead, I took a circuitous path: I left home at age 16 and became an emancipated minor. I lived on the streets for a while. I worked as a cashier at 7-Eleven.
Through it all, I dared to hope that beyond my struggles lay something greater. I read with eagerness and a certain painful longing about the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and the Stanford culture. Then, I started to make things happen: I created a successful business and sold it. I got my GED; I aced my SATs. I earned a 4.0 and finally transferred to Stanford.
These experiences have given me a different perspective on the Farm. Of course, I am privy to the standard joys of life at Stanford. At this beautiful campus nestled in the hills, you can muse about philosophy in a garden of Rodin sculptures with the winner of a Nobel Prize; you are invited to dinner with the author of your computer science textbook and asked to read his wife's poetry; you can jump in a fountain to the tune of an off-key saxophone played by a ruffian in a sparkly outfit; you can stand on the same stage where both Martin Luther King Jr. and Sergey Brin of Google have stood, and sing songs you wrote yourself. In fact, you can even live in the apartment that Sergey (or Jerry Yang or any number of famous entrepreneurs) lived in back when they were sketchy grad students instead of kazillionaires.
But Stanford is more than that. Our innovative, entrepreneurial—even wacky—culture is a pure expression of our roots. In the face of an overwhelming grief, the Stanfords must have transmuted their pain into inspiration and they did what many entrepreneurs do: They founded a startup. With a dream of a nondenominational, coeducational university, they transcended the norms of their time. They promoted interdisciplinary education before there was a word for it. They even extended their vision of personal empowerment beyond the university: Leland Stanford's primary efforts as a U.S. senator were support for an early form of employee stock ownership.
This tradition continued during the university's next hundred years and beyond with startling innovations from unlikely people. Just look at the names on our buildings: Hewlett and Packard, who started their business in a garage; Hoover, an orphan who became president; Terman, an engineer who pioneered a new way of funding technology ventures and created Silicon Valley as we know it.
There is a deeper story underneath all of this. There is something uniquely Californian about Stanford's history and ethos. Californian ideology is about the opportunity to reinvent yourself. Throw off the stodgy traditions of the East and make your fortune and change the world, it tells us. Although your parents may have attended school here, Stanford is not your parents' university. It is constantly changing, constantly renewing itself. As Judge Crothers wrote about the Stanford tree, it is "a pledge and resolve that the University shall never become stagnant, unprogressive, self-glorifying, or petrified in its imperfections."
The founding myth of Stanford, of transformation and redemption, has special meaning for me. I did not come here as an innocent, as many do. I came here in search of something whose name I did not even dare express myself. But after two years here I have now found the words to articulate this desire, this drive to have an impact.
"Father, serve humanity," were the words Leland dreamed that his son told him just hours after the boy's death. And this is what we do, in fulfillment of Stanford's mission to create useful as well as cultured citizens. Stanford students go to Guatemala and Tanzania and Bhutan and Yemen to help others. Stanford stands for not just re-creating oneself but remaking the world. At Stanford, we learn how to become who we might be, and how to use that newfound identity to help others through entrepreneurial creativity, technological innovation and humanistic study, finding new ways to unite and advance, as the Stanfords would call it, "the cause of human civilization."
As Jane said: "[I] hope that you will each strive to place before yourselves a high moral standard; that you will resolve to go forth from these classrooms determined in the future to be leaders with high aims and standards; and live such lives that it will be said of you that you are true to the best you know."
Stanford is a place for self-creation, where we transform our griefs into passions, where we learn both the moral and the practical, the humanistic and the technical, and have the unorthodox innocence to dare to dream of something new. It's a start-up university that rivals America's oldest educational institutions, a place where two guys in a garage can create an industry and a high school dropout like me can get a start on changing the world. Stanford is where the founders' promise, that audacious and visionary promise—the promise of self-transformation—comes true.
Jessica Richman is a senior majoring in economics and in science, technology and society.
