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Bill Gates’ Commencement Speech at Harvard 2007 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 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 for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I’m just happy that the Crimson 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 Balmer to drop out of business school. I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I’d spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today. Harvard was a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes that I hadn’t even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Courier House. There were always a lot of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew that I didn’t worry about getting up in the morning. That’s how I came to be the leader of the antisocial group. We clunged 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 math-science types. The combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. That’s where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn’t guarantee you success. One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975. When I made a call from Courier House to a company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that had begun making the world’s first personal computer. I offered to sell them software.
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