President Bok, former Presiden 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 degree. 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 recognised 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 has 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 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 oter 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 wrold's fitst personal computers. I offered to sell them softwoare. 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 to see us in a month,' which was a good things, 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 jurney 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, someties 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. ...

The barrier to change is not too little caring, it's too much complexity. To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps. .....If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution... Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have-whether it's something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet...

And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your proffessional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world's deepest inequities...on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

Good luck