Honolulu Community College
2002 Commencement Speech

May 17, 2002 - Waikiki Shell, Honolulu, Hawaii

Provost Pedersen,
Esteemed faculty,
Ladies and gentlemen,
and fellow students:

I am greatly honored to be speaking with you today, not just because Honolulu Community College feels that I'm an inspiration to its students, but also because I never actually graduated, and here I am supposed to tell you why you should be proud to be a graduate. I think you should, but I'll get to that in a moment.

I'm here because nine years ago this month I started one of the first World-Wide Web sites on Earth at HCC. Back then there were around 40 sites, not 40 million like there are today, and surfing was something you did in the water.

How many of you have used the World-Wide Web?
My story is for all of you.

I came to the college hoping to restart my education. I'd flunked out of UC Berkeley, lost my scholarship, and couldn't get into UH Manoa. I took courses while I lived with my grandparents in Manoa and rode the number 5 bus down to Ala Moana Shopping Center every day. Even though my mother and my grandparents were born and raised here, I wasn't so familiar with Oahu, having grown up in California around the Bay Area. Once trying to take the bus back home from Blaisdell Center I ended up in Waianae.

I originally wanted to be an industrial designer. Industrial designers create objects like alarm clocks, refrigerators, salt shakers, anything that can be assembled in quantity. Designing each product is a challenge and requires a mixture of engineering knowledge and artistic skill: how do I make this radio both good-looking and easy to use? How do I make this chair both durable and comfortable? That's what I wanted to do.

I learned how to use the Internet at UC Berkeley, where computers and Internet access were available for free to any student, and I immediately became addicted. At UH Manoa computers and the Internet were only available to Engineering and Computer Science students, and I went crazy writing letters to the faculty begging them to give me a computer account. When I got to Honolulu Community College there was no Internet access, but there was a computer lab, and I spent most of my time there.

A few months later, when Internet access became available, I got a job as a student systems administrator and took my first true programming course. It was open to anybody and it was the most valuable college course I ever took. I knew that I now had the knowledge and tools to create whatever I could dream up and felt empowered in a way that I never had before. So every weekday, after classes and before dinner with my grandparents, I spent my time in Building 2 at the academic computing office, writing programs for the campus and researching new ways to use the Internet in education. It was then I discovered the World-Wide Web.

Back in 1993 there were no educational Web sites, hardly any images, and few were in color. Just paragraphs of text with links, mostly. I joined and occasionally contributed to a mailing list made up of people interested in the Web. The list was made up mostly of researchers, physicists, and college students like me. Almost every day there were suggestions on the list about how to improve the Web. What if we add forms? What if we add tables? What if we allow people to make colored pages? And every once in a while someone would write a program, or add a feature to do whatever we wanted. Just like that.

I asked my boss Ken Hensarling, then HCC's Director of Academic Computing, if I could take on this Web stuff as a project. He said sure, go to town. So I went to town.

I wrote a program that allowed people to put hyperlinks in images - you could click on different areas of an image and go to different places depending on where you clicked. I needed certain algorithms to create this program and was able to ask people over the Internet to freely share bits and parts. This program, which was eventually called imagemap, is now used in the Apache Web server, the most popular piece of software for transmitting content over the Web, and is used by millions of people every day. You can still see my old HCC email address in the software, although I have no idea if the address still works.

A map of HCC's campus was the first image on the Web to use the imagemap technique. You could click on different buildings and go to the appropriate information about each building. Not a big deal now, but it was really cool back then. I made HCC's Web site and with the help of instructor Rick Ziegler, who provided audio commentary, created an online version of HCC's dinosaur exhibit. Robert Cailliau, who along with Tim Berners-Lee created the World-Wide Web, told me that it was this exhibit, shown halfway around the world in Geneva, that convinced the European Commission to fund the World-Wide Web project. These people were so bowled over by the fact that this stuff was all coming from Hawaii that they didn't need any more convincing.

I didn't stop. I made movie galleries, put up student and faculty magazines, information about student government, online surveys, all kinds of things. HCC was getting famous online, and thanks to the ongoing support of then-provost Pete Kessinger was given a part-time faculty position to conduct public classes about the Web and the Internet. I walked around the Manoa campus putting up flyers and set up computers in the labs to show people what a Web site was. It wasn't something you could tell people about - to really get it, they had to see it and use it for themselves. Of course you understand, because I'm sure you learned how to use the Web in the same way, not unlike learning how to ride a bicycle. Like many things in life, you just have to do it to grasp the concept.

A software company in California saw my work over the Internet and offered me a job. There was no such job title as Webmaster in those days, so they called me a graphic designer. I wondered if I should leave Hawaii and abandon my dreams of being an industrial designer in order to create Web sites and software, a job which nobody else on the planet could understand or even describe back then. But as it turns out I ended up doing what I wanted to do.

See, designing software that affects how people use computers is in some ways like designing anything else. Designers have to make things easy for people to use - so easy that you forget about the thing itself. Computers as most people know them today were created to allow you to create and communicate, either by yourselves or with others. Personal computers by their very nature act as an extension of your brain, so technology that allows you to create and communicate easily - the Web, email, and so on - can affect how you think. If this technology is well designed, it can be natural and empowering. If it isn't well designed it can be restrictive and force you to think, communicate, or create in ways that you don't want.

These days, the World-Wide Web and computers in general are poorly designed. They have a long way to go before they reach their true potential. You can't always communicate exactly what you want or the way you want over the Web. The computers you use every day break, or crash, or cause you to waste time fixing their problems. They force you to think and create in ways that are unnatural. You spend so much time installing them and maintaining them or have to depend on someone else to do it for you. I'm sorry this is the case. I know it will improve.

After leaving HCC I spent seven years in the heart of Silicon Valley working with and meeting some of the smartest and wealthiest people on the planet. I watched the Web as it made its way into magazines and radio, then television, then movies. I watched people I knew become millionaires and even billionaires. I watched companies go from two people to two thousand. And thanks to companies that I helped create, I made - and lost - over $100 million dollars in the stock market. Some words of advice: don't do that! It was crazy. It is crazy. But it all comes from simple principles.

I've found that the surest way to know whether or not a person will succeed is to examine those around them. If you surround yourself with excellence, if your friends and co-workers are excellent, then there is no limit to what you can do together. You can tell when you're surrounded by excellence when you can completely put your trust in those around you. And when I say excellence, I don't just mean talented, but excellent in heart, and spirit, and integrity.

And when you are surrounded by excellence, what is the measure of success? When I tell people about what I did at Honolulu Community College, they often ask me if I patented my work or made money off of it. It's hard for people to understand why someone would want to give away useful knowledge and ideas that so many others can use and copy for free. Well, first of all, if myself and the other hundred or so people that contributed to the core technology of today's Web hadn't made it free, then it wouldn't have been as popular or useful or empowering as it has been. Second, isn't it nice to imagine a creative world in which one's ideas and imagination are more important than the size of their wallet? You have to start somewhere.

My grandmother's brother, Ellery Joe Chun, is recognized by the State of Hawaii as being the official inventor of the aloha shirt. Although this may not be technically true, he did more to promote the concept than anybody else in those days. He didn't get wealthy from his idea - he actually made it in real estate - but look how many smiles he's caused and look what he's done for the global imagination.

See, I believe and continue to believe that if you find what you truly love to do, just do that, do the best you can, and success by whatever measure you choose will follow. Stay true to what you believe in, but also be open-minded enough to accept and embrace change, for that is truly the only constant thing in life. If people think you're crazy, or unreasonable, or naive - then you know you're on the right track! Stay at it.

No graduation speech is complete without a quote, so here's mine: George Bernard Shaw once said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Be unreasonable!

Back to my first point. You should feel good that you're here. HCC afforded me opportunities when I had nothing to lose. You're here because you took advantage of opportunities that were presented to you and I know you'll have many more opportunities in the future, just as I will.

Thank you very much.