in the last 100 years there's been a recession every six years in the Great Recession of 2008 9 million people lost their jobs almost instantaneously at 6% of the Workforce despite the high almost all-time high stock market we're still at 8% unemployment one in nine people right now are contract workers or self-employed and that ratio is even higher for those with Advanced degrees so every job virtually every job is possible to be done by robots or computers and certainly getting more and more of that way in the future here's just an example an automated car
assembly Factor here in this country almost completely Ro well completely robotic these automated plants are not being built just in the developing nations they're being built in China and soon being built all over the world combined with the Advanced Technologies the 3D printing the genetic engineering these plants will be able to put into countries that can leap frog the developing countries in production so Industries are being created and destroyed so think about being one of those laid off and being thrown to the wolves in competition if it's the first time that you went from a
job and you can't find one so you're trying to start a business imagine you have kids you probably have a house you probably have a mortgage credit card debt limited savings and everybody is after you you have a limited time for success and every single mistake you make is critical to your survival so I want to give you an answer but before I give you that answer I really want to look at the other side of the world like Peter 7 billion people today and within 25 years there will be 10 billion or more so
that's not just people who can help but people who need things food shelter buildings the um urbanization for example in China like here in Shanghai the mega cities is going to provide incredible opportunities for building for technology for all sorts of innovation that you can be a part of so just a couple of quick examples at the when the car was invented you could get any color as long as it was black today what do we have under water Vehicles personal flying vehicles we've got hybrids we've got I just a whole set of choices pretty
soon this will be the view from your own personal spacecraft what about Services education started out as the apprenticeship a father giving a skill to a son or a mentor providing their knowledge to a group of students or now of 500 students in an intro to biology class at MIT or hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of students participating in massively online open courses like the robotics course from Stanford so there's so much Innovation available there those three billion people we cannot make and build enough schools and universities for them so you'll have the opportunity
to innovate in all these areas so in this crowded crazy world changing and so such a way what is that answer well that answer is entrepreneurship and how do you start build a business while you're in school so what is entrepreneurship one of the best definitions I heard is it's the pursuit of an opportunity without regard to the resources currently controlled so what does that mean pursuit of an opportunity implies a process and a process can be broken down it can be learned it can be taught and it can be practiced without regard to resources
controlled most of the companies in the fastest growing Inc 5000 group were started with less than a thousand dollar of Founders money simple businesses like a lemonade stand can teach you the fundamentals of of business right selling nothing happens until you sell something and that was actually a plaque that my father had in his office for the 25 years that we had a entrepreneurial company that disrupted the steel industry in this country Supply Chain management well if your mom gives you the resources for the lemonade stand may maybe you can sell it for 5 cents
right but if it cost you something you need to do a little bit more marketing there's so many things you can learn from a lemonade stand from another Next Level business in college until you can actually practice and get a successful Venture just like a sport however you can't learn entrepreneurship watching a lecture you can't learn entrepreneurship listening to me you have to participate and the lemonade stand the business in college those are all the Stepping Stones toward running a successful business or getting great at a sport so I want you to look at these
three people very famous dropouts from college right well I want you to reframe your view of these three people and think about what they got in college Bill Gates who created Microsoft while at Harvard one of his Partners was in fact his main partner Paul Allen but what happened Paul Allen and Bill Gates met in high school where they hacked computers and when he thought about creating Microsoft he thought about who else Paul Allen and the others similarly who he brought on to his Microsoft team Steve Jobs famously didn't do so well in college but
you know what in college he found a course calligraphy that he just happened into and that inspired him to develop the Mac operating system with all that beautiful font and what you see is what you get and finally Michael Dell yeah he assembled computers and sold them but what not a lot of people know is um that he applied to be a supplier to the tech system and because he was the lowcost producer he would win contast contracts and he learned all of the secrets of Supply Chain management just in time keeping your inventory low
all those things have helped make Dell a really successful computer company so in my six years here at IIT I've been honored and inspired by students who have actually started their businesses and who have gone through that process I've met them in classes I've met them at events I've been introduced to them by our Administration they developed their skills here through project courses the iOS through just practicing their businesses some failed some succeeded and we supported them as they went off and graduated and now have successful businesses and there's a lot of them happening right
now we recently announced the Innovation Center at IIT which once it's built it'll bring all the ingredients together to allow students to create successful Enterprises now imagine that you're a student starting a business you have your housing pay for you're on a food plan everybody around you is supportive you have mentors you have the abil you have time and every mistake you make not critical to your survival it's actually part of your learning so let me tell you about five of these students that I've had the great pleasure to be around so meet Tiger Tiger
likes to build things so he came to IIT in architectural engineering makes sense he was introduced to me by the president and kind of like Michael Dell he was the lowcost supplier to a few jobs around the campus and just outside the campus so he won a few contracts to practice his skill on the road to developing a general contract company he came to me for some advice pricing profitability and when he graduated went out started a few um projects and then found an opportunity to become a leading contractor of Hightech dental offices using the
skills that he learned here at IIT and the and the business skills that he learned through that mentorship yes 30 of these that he built are already in the first few years meet aell avell likes to build relationships that inspired him actually to start the project that connects people remotely using some physical object he developed that idea with a team of students through about three or four iOS and started going into business plan competitions start at winning business plan competitions and getting so good that he was able to pitch Venture capitalists for hundreds of thousands
of dollars in investment which allowed him to build and sell these communicating necklaces for teenage girls and you'll hear a little bit more from aell and later this afternoon in the program so meet Richard Richard loves to disrupt things whole Industries kind of like Bill Gates he met his Partners um at a previous school but while going to the Kent law school here he recognized that the legal industry is ripe for disruption and so he and his team while they were in school built a few iterations of the business and you know came up with
some good ideas made a few mistakes had the time to do that and after graduation He Hit Upon a successful model for a high growth Legal Services business that has millions in Revenue two offices one in the Google Plex and Mountain View that I just visited few weeks ago this one in Chicago that's his sales office and he has 20 full-time employees that's just barely a year after graduating meet Taylor Taylor's the people person and living an entrepreneurial lifestyle so Taylor is a sociology major not even a business major not an engineering major he came
to me with his partner and asked for advice on a coupon business that he was trying to build for Whole Foods well when that didn't quite go as planned he networked around the city um using some of the connections that he made and found an opportunity to bring together interdisciplinary teams that work on behalf of big companies like Nokia and Microsoft and he now helps others to achieve their dreams and finally meet Daria Daria is a senior business student here at IIT she's been working with me at the Nap Center since August she had a
burning desire to do something entrepreneurial but she didn't have a specific idea so I introduced her to Alex an engineering student who developed a bamboo processing technology a clean technology renewable technology she put together a team of business students law students engineering students they developed the business strategy to get this on the off the ground they developed and entered a business plan competition and last week won first prize at the idea to product competition and will uh represent IIT in s poo in the global competition in November and she's watching right now from Pittsburgh where
she just took second place in the carnegi melon Venture competition all right so we have students working in all kinds of businesses some of them that definitely will be world changing flowers and water transportation helping the Blind and saving premature babies I know out here in the audience some of you have ideas that'll change the world and be part of that abundance and the opportunity that Peter talked about earlier come to us tell us your story and be part of the story of IIT build a business while you're here thank you
