I don't think I heard you first.

I want you to stand up and wave and cheer your supportive family and friends.

I'm sure you can find them out there.

Show your love.

OK.

It's a great honor for me to be here today.

Now.

Wait a second.

I know that's such a cliche.

You're thinking every graduation speaker here says that it's a great honor.

But in my case, it really is so deeply true.

Being here is more special and more personal for me than most of, you know, I'd like to tell you why.

A long time ago in this Cold September of 1962 there is a Stevens co op at this very university that co op had a kitchen with a ceiling that had been cleaned by student volunteers.

Probably every decade or so picture a college girl named Gloria climbing up high on a ladder, struggling to clean that filthy ceiling.

Standing on the floor.

A young boarder named Carl was admiring the view and that's how they met.

They were my parents.

Yeah.

So I suppose you could say I'm a direct result of that kitchen chemistry experiment right here in Michigan.

My mom is here with us today and we should probably go find that spot and put up a plaque on the ceiling that says, thanks mom and dad.

Everyone in my family went here to Michigan.

Uh My brother, my mom, my dad, all of us, my dad actually got the quantity discount.

He got all 3.5 of his degrees here.

His phd was in communication science because they thought computers were just a passing fad.

And when he earned it 44 years ago, he and mom made a big sacrifice for that degree.

They argued at times over pennies while raising my newborn brother, mom typed my dad's dissertation by hand.

Kind of ironic given it was a computer science dissertation.

This velvet hood that I'm wearing.

This was my dad's this diploma.

Yeah.

This diploma that I have here.

Just like the one you're about to get.

This was my dad's and my underwear.

Oh, never mind.

Sorry.

My father's father worked in the Chevy plant in Flint, Michigan.

He was an assembly line worker.

He drove his two Children here to Ann Arbor and told them this is where you're going to college.

I know it sounds funny.

Now, both of his kids actually did graduate from Michigan.

That was the American dream.

His daughter Beverly is also with us today.

My grandpa used to carry an alley, oop, hammer, a heavy iron pipe with a big hunk of lead melted.

On the end, the workers made them during the sit down strikes to protect themselves.

When I was growing up, we would use that hammer whenever we needed to pound a steak or something into the yard.

It is wonderful that most people don't need to carry a heavy blunt object for protection anymore.

But just in case I brought it with me.

All right.

My dad became a professor at Michigan State.

Yeah.

And I was incredibly lucky boy.

The professor's life is pretty flexible and he was able to spend oodles of time raising me.

Could there be any better upbringing than a University of Bratz?

What I'm trying to tell you this is way more than a homecoming for me.

It's not easy for me to express how proud I am to be here with my mom, my brother and my wife Lucy and with all of you at this amazing institution that is responsible for my very existence.

I'm thrilled for all of you and I'm thrilled for all of your families and friends as all of us join this great big Michigan family.

I feel I've been a part of all of my life.

What I'm trying to tell you is I know exactly what it feels like to be sitting in your seat listening to some old gas bag.

Give a long winded commencement speech.

Don't worry, I'll be brief.

I have a story about following dreams or maybe more accurately.

It's a story about finding a path to make those dreams real.

You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream.

And you know how if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone.

By the next morning, I had one of those dreams when I was 23.

When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking what if we could download the whole web and just keep the links.

And I grabbed a pen and started writing.

Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming.

I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work soon after I told my adviser, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks for me to download the web.

He downloaded, he nodded knowingly fully aware.

It would take much longer but wise enough not to tell me the optimism of youth is often underrated.

Amazingly at that time, I have no thoughts of building a search engine.

The idea wasn't even on the radar much later.

We happened upon a better way of ranking and we made a really great search engine and Google was born when a really great dream shows up.

Grab it.

When I was here in Michigan.

I'd actually been taught how to make dreams real.

I know it sounds funny, but that is what I learned in a summer camp, converted into a training program called Leader Shape.

Yeah, we got a few out there.

Their slogan is to have a healthy disregard for the impossible.

That program encouraged me to pursue a crazy idea.

At the time, I wanted to build a rapid personal rapid transit system on campus to replace the buses.

Yeah, you're still working on that.

I hear it was a futuristic way of solving our transportation problem.

I still think a lot about transportation.

You never lose a dream.

It just incubates as a hobby.

Many things people labor hard to do now, like cooking, cleaning and driving will require much less human time in the future.

That is if we have a healthy disregard for the impossible and actually build the solutions.

I think it is often easier to make progress on mega ambitious dreams.

I know that sounds completely nuts.

But since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition.

No.

In fact, there are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name, they travel as if they are pack dogs and they stick to each other like glue the best people want to work on the big challenges.

That is what happened with Google.

Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

How can they not get you excited?

We almost didn't start Google actually because my co founder, Sergey and I were too worried about dropping out of the phd program.

None of you have that issue.

It seems you are probably on the right track.

If you feel like a sidewalk worm during a rainstorm.

That is about how we felt after we maxed out three credit cards, buying hard disks off the back of a truck.

That was actually the first hardware for Google Parents and friends.

More credit cards always help.

What is the one sentence summary of how you change?

The world?

Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting.

As a phd student, I actually had three projects I wanted to work on.

Thank goodness.

My advisor said, why don't you work on the web for a while?

He gave me some seriously good advice because the web was growing with people and activity even in 1995 technology and especially the internet can really help you be lazy, lazy.

What I mean is a group of three people can write software that 10 millions can use and enjoy.

Can three people answer the phone a million times, find the leverage in the world so you can be truly lazy.

Yeah.

Overall, I know it seems like the world is crumbling out there.

It's actually a great time in your life to get a little crazy.

Follow your curiosity and be ambitious about it.

Don't give up on your dream.

The world needs you all.

So here's my final story on a day.

Like today, you might feel exhilarated.

Like you've been just shot out of a cannon at the circus and even invincible.

Don't ever forget that incredible feeling.

But also always remember that the moments we have with friends and family, the chances we have to do things that might make a big difference in the world or even to make a small difference to the ones we love.

All those wonderful chances that life gives us life also takes away.

It can happen fast and a whole lot sooner than you think.

In late March, 1996 soon after I had moved to Stanford for grad school, my dad had difficulty breathing and drove to the hospital.

Two months later, he died.

I was completely devastated many years later after a start up after falling in love.

And after so many of life's adventures, I found myself thinking about my dad, Lucy and I were far away in a steaming hot village, walking through narrow streets.

There are wonderfully friendly people everywhere, but it was a desperately poor place.

People used the bathroom inside and it flowed out into the open gutter and straight into the river.

We touched a boy with a limp leg.

The results of paralysis from polio.

Lucy and I were in rural India.

One of the few places where polio still exists.

Polio is transmitted fecal to oral, usually through filthy water.

Well, my dad had polio.

He went on a trip to Tennessee in the first grade.

And he caught it.

He was hospitalized for two months and had to be transported by military DC three back home.

His first flight, my dad wrote, then I had to stay in bed for over a year before I started back to school.

That is actually a quote from his fifth grade autobiography.

My dad had difficulty breathing his whole life and the complications of polio are what took him from us too soon.

He would have been very upset that polio still persists even though we have a vaccine, he would have been equally upset that back in India, we had polo virus on our shoes from walking through the contaminated gutters that spread the disease.

We were spreading the virus with our every footstep right under the beautiful kids playing everywhere.

The world is on the verge of eliminating polio.

There's 328 people infected so far.

Let's get it eradicated soon.

Perhaps one of you will do that.

Yeah.

My dad was valedictorian of the Flint Mandeville High school class of 1956 of about 90 kids.

I happened across a graduating speech recently and it blew me away.

53 years ago.

My dad said we are entering a changing world.

One of automation and employment change where education is an economic necessity.

We will have increased periods of time to do as we wish as our work week and our retirement age continue to decline and we wish that were true.

We shall take part in or witness developments in science, medicine, and industry that we can only dream of today.

It is said the future of any nation can be determined by the care and preparation given its youth.

If all the youth of America were as fortunate in securing an education as we have been, then the future of the United States would be even more bright than it is today.

If my dad were alive today, the thing I think he would be most happy about is that Lucy and I have a baby in the hopper.

Yeah, I think you would have been annoyed that I hadn't gotten my phd yet.

Thanks Michigan.

Yeah.

Was so full of insights of excitement about new things to this day.

I often wonder what he would think about some new development if he were here today.

Well, he would be one of the best days of his life.

He'd be like a kid in a candy store for a day.

He'd be young again.

Many of us are fortunate enough to be here with family.

Some of us have dear friends and family to go home to.

And who knows?

Perhaps some of you like Lucy and I are dreaming of future families of your own.

Just like me.

Your families brought you here and you brought them here.

Please keep them close and remember they are what really matters in life.

Thanks mom.

Thanks Lucy and thank you Paul.

Very much.