(audience applauding) - All right. So first, thank you for this kind introduction. I thank you to the people who automatically raised this so I can do a little bit of reading.
So thank you, president Spinelli, thank you to the board of trustees, and thank you for the faculty and all of you for inviting me to be here. Everybody in my family was so excited to be here today that after many years I'm so lucky to have my 83-year-old father, my wife, my brother, and my six children all coming here today. So thank you.
(audience applauding) It is truly an honor to be the commencement speaker at the world's leading entrepreneurship college, number one. Entrepreneurship is something that's very near and dear to me. Not only have I been an entrepreneur all my life, but I've applied my entrepreneurial spirits to pretty much everything I do.
And I'll have to admit that today is a bit of a stretch for me to be here today. I never made it to graduate school, but today I'm lucky that I'm jumping from being an undergrad from Bentley to being a doctor at Babson. So thank you.
(audience applauding) On a more serious note, I wanna commend each one of you for the resilience that you have completing your degree, during probably the most complicated crises in history. It takes a lot of character not to give up. You have the perfect excuse, your decision to continue studying in these tough times is gonna make you stronger.
I know many of you have full time jobs, but I assure you that you are now better prepared, and this is gonna give you a competitive advantage once you enter the business world again. As I took the time to reflect, "What should I tell them? " It cannot be all optimist because we know what we're living today.
So I read something from somebody we all know called Charles Dickens, and he called it, it was the best of times, and it was the worst of times. And it's gonna be up to you on what you do and how this is gonna impact your future. We can never ignore that today we're living probably one of the scariest times in all of human civilization.
This pandemic just doesn't go away. There were 15 million people who died because of COVID. And now China is dealing with exactly the same problems we dealt two years ago.
And because of China's power over the manufacturing, if China fails, the whole world can come to a halt once again. And if this wasn't enough, we're in the midst of a war, none of us could ever imagine to see tanks flowing towards cities in Ukraine and seeing people die and being reported through social media. We're seeing firsthand the devastation and destruction of what is happening and no doubt that it's gonna have a lot of future effects on mental health of people and this add to the already uncertainty looming from the pandemic.
And now if there wasn't enough, something else is gonna test your resilience. We're in the middle of probably a very complex financial crisis. Inflation has reached the highest it's been in the last 40 years.
Interest rates are spiking. Cost of living continues to go up, and most likely we might enter recession in the future. So when you put all these three things together, a pandemic of equity proportion, a senseless war and a complex financial crisis, this worlds look daunting.
And most people are thinking today about their school or their careers at times like this. It's easier to just stay in survival mode, but my view is totally different. I think you, all of you, are the luckiest and most fortunate grads in the history of Babson College.
The reason is very simple. We are entering a time where there has never, ever, ever been a time that's a better time to be an entrepreneur. The digitization of everything has started.
There's gonna be more disruption in this next 10 years than in the last 2000 years combined. Every single industry will be disrupted. Nothing will be the same as it is today, and entrepreneurs like you are gonna be at the core of this disruption and this innovation.
Today, we're living some incredible technological revolutions and where we're living today is bigger than agricultural, the industrial, and information revolution combined. For the first time in history, we have three revolutions going on, the AI or artificial intelligence revolution, the blockchain revolution, and the electric vehicle revolution. And what is amazing is that all of us are gonna be at the center of all these revolutions.
So let's start with AI for a second. AI to me is the most transformative technology humanity has ever developed. Many people get spooked by AI.
And many people think that machines are gonna replace humans. That's not the case. The beauty of AI is that humans with machines will replace humans without machines, and this is only gonna boost our abilities.
You might think this is far out, but I assure you that when you open your phones this morning and we're opening TikTok, and you find yourself scrolling through two hours of content that was AI at it's best. That machine learning algorithm finding videos because machine knows what videos that you will love. The use cases for AI go way beyond what we're experiencing today.
By the turn of this decade, it's gonna be normal to see autonomous cars roaming through the streets all over the world, virtually eliminating all traffic accidents and death. Another area that I'm fascinated by AI is the drastic advancements in biotech. Doctors are gonna use AI to accurately diagnose symptoms and that way preventing the tens of thousands of people who are dead because of misdiagnose.
And the advances in biotech are so profound that right now scientists are working on improving our quality of life and extending our quality of life. Meaning that kids that are being born today, most of them are gonna live over 100 years and more importantly, most of them are gonna die young at a very old age. Another revolution that I'm excited, and a lot of young people are excited is what we know as the blockchain revolution or what some of you call the Web 3.
0. The rise of Web 2. 0, the internet, it was all about the transfer of information.
And we created some of the world's most valuable companies like Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook, who basically dominate the economy as central intermediaries. Web 3. 0 is gonna take the transfer of information and it's gonna open ownership of data to everyday people in a peer to peer exchange.
These central intermediaries are gonna go away and new global financial systems using blockchain will be faster, cheaper, and frictionless and it's gonna bypass all the big banks. New forms of money like Bitcoin that are outside government control are gonna hold their purchasing power, and over time, they're gonna continue to emerge. And what's inspiring about all of this is that the amount of innovation going on in the blockchain revolution is gonna make younger generations like yourself, who start flocking to the blockchain economy.
And if this wasn't enough, the electric vehicle revolution. I have six young children, including my 14-year-old daughter, Sienna, who constantly remind me how important climate change and global warming are to this new generation. And I believe that the EV revolution will play a major role in solving these environmental challenges.
Electric vehicles are about to do to combustion cars what combustion cars did to horses in the 1920s. This revolution is gonna be so impactful that we're gonna see economic power switching from oil producing countries to potentially lithium producing countries who will power this new economy. So I could go on and on showing examples of how technology is gonna change our lives but I want you to remember something, absolutely everything from healthcare to transportation, to education, to eCommerce, to entertainment and everything are gonna be massively different in the next 10 years.
And we haven't even scratched the surface when you layer in the Metaverse and the concept of digital identities, or even the commitment that some people have made to take us to Mars by 2029. The point is the world is changing at an astonishing rate and all of you are entering the world, and I will say the most exciting time in human mankind and it's gonna be up to you on how you react to these opportunities that are gonna be put in front of you. I wanna share a couple of things of how my life had been shaped by a lot of the opportunities that when I was sitting where you are today, or when you were an undergrad, somebody sat in front of me and said the world was gonna change and I didn't believe.
So I made a living out of taking risk and seizing every opportunity that has come my way. As an immigrant from Bolivia, I came to the us to pursue a great college education and to achieve the American dream. After graduating, I had to return to Bolivia because the poor immigration policies where they kick you out after you finish school.
On the plane going down to Bolivia, I was very lucky. I met somebody by the name of Guido who was the president of the Bolivia Soccer Federation. After a few drinks with Guido, he basically offered me a job.
He wanted me to be the international manager of Bolivian Soccer Federation and would had one huge goal which was to take Bolivia to the World Cup. Something that nobody ever believed was possible because when you gotta play against Argentina and Brazil, it'd be very hard to beat them. But against all odds, in 1994, we took Bolivia to the 1994 World Cup which marked the first time in my country's history.
And probably that taught me that the impossible becomes possible when you have big dreams and you work hard to execute them. This was by far the most defining moment in my career and something that I've applied all along. And after I've finished my stint within the Bolivian Federation, I decided to come back to Boston and I went to a job interview with somebody in Merrill Lynch and he loved my story, and he told me he wanted me to connect to his boss.
So he asked me for my cell phone. I told him, I forgot the number. I went running to a cell phone store to buy a phone and I was lucky that who I met was the owner of the company, and instead of selling me the phone he offered me to sell me his store.
Of course I had to take that opportunity. And in no time, I was the proud business owner of a store in the United States. With the same big dreams and same thing that we did in the soccer world, we made that company grow to be the largest retailer in the Northeast United States.
And within a couple of years in the best way of the American dream, private equity showed up in my door and they basically bought my company for a lot more money than I ever dreamed I could ever make. Now, with some cash on hand, big dreams and more experience, I decided I was ready to start my first business and I started a company called Brightstar from scratch, selling phones from the back of my car. We had really big aspirations and in no time, we turned Brightstar to be the world's largest distribution company with revenues in excess of $10 billion and presence in over 50 different countries.
While running Brightstar, I thought that life couldn't get better than that. I said, "I made it. I run the number one company in the world," and I met a Japanese guy who's quite famous by the name of Masayoshi Son.
Some people know him as Masa, and we basically became friends and at that point in time he was the world's largest tech investor. We immediately hit it off because Masa loved the story of achieving and achievable. A few months before Masa had just bought Sprint and probably was one of the worst purchases ever.
The company was in trouble. It was losing millions of dollars, and it was in the verge of bankruptcy. Out of the blue, Masa approached me and he says, "I have an important deal for you.
If you come and become the CEO of Sprint, I will buy your company called Brightstar. " And for me, I love the idea of being an entrepreneur in one of the world's most iconic company, 120-year-old company. And I had an experiment and that is, can I as an entrepreneur apply my entrepreneurship skills to a very large American company and it worked for so many consecutive quarters.
We motivated the rise of an AT&T, and we took the company back to profitability. And I applied a new way of working, which was I made all of my 80,000 employees to become entrepreneurs and I taught them the concept of owner's mentality. And it was one of the most fascinating experiences of my life.
And then we decided to merge with a company called T-Mobile to create one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. And every single person told me the same thing they're gonna tell you, it's not possible. To merge number four and number three in a market like the US is absolutely impossible.
And against all odds, we delivered that $195 billion with T-Mobile on April, 2020. After that merger, Masa told me that I had been a good entrepreneur and I had been a good operator, but I really didn't know how to invest. So he invited me to Japan and there, again, my whole family came with me and we launched 100 billion vision fund in 2018 which was the largest technology fund ever launched.
To put things in perspective, it was bigger than all venture capital funds put together. And I learned so much by just interacting with entrepreneurs who were determined to change the world. But what really bothered me, and I know a lot of you are not from the US, was that there was not any money flocking into Latin America.
So I convinced Masa to gimme 8% of the fund which was $8 billion for me to fly to Miami and I started the Latin American Fund which is a fund that completely transformed the entrepreneurship landscape in Latin America. And the last thing that I did was one day I was watching TV and I saw the murder of George Floyd and that bothered me so much. And then I started hearing people saying, "You should do something about it.
" So we launched one of the most things I've ever done which was 100 million opportunity fund that was a fund dedicated only to helping Black and Hispanic entrepreneurs. (audience cheering) In the middle of all this, the WeWork debacle happened which I'm sure in some of your classes, you must have heard about it. I remember hearing that special ringtone I had allocated to Masa, and the moment I saw that my phone rang, I know it was Masa calling me and said, "I need you to go fix WeWork.
" Again, company was losing billions of dollars. It was almost out of cash. And every person that I know basically told me that I would be crazy to do it, that WeWork was dead, that there's no way we could bring that company again.
But challenges like this have always seemed to excite me. So I basically, in addition to my jobs, I moved to New York city with my wife and my kids and then basically we started the mission of turning around WeWork. And for those of you who watched the documentary "WeCrashed" I'm the guy at the end who comes to fix this whole mess.
Joking aside, (audience applauding) I took that because I love the company's mission. And after a couple of years, we put the company in the past to profitability and we did the WeWork IPO finally in October, 2021. But the day after I finalized the WeWork IPO, I was at a point where my gut was telling me, and always follow your gut, that it was time for another big change.
So over 90 days ago, I quit all of my jobs and I decided that now it's my time to give back. And what I wanna do next is I wanna use my experience, my contacts and everything I've accumulated this last 30 years to make sure that we can do something that's gonna have a big impact. So what I plan to do is basically to help entrepreneurs all over the world, launch new businesses where I can contribute my capital and my experience.
And I think this is how I'm gonna be able to achieve a multiplier effect. Meaning I don't want to be a CEO of another company. I definitely don't wanna do any more turnarounds.
So any one of you as you hopefully get inspired and decide that you are the perfect person to start a new business, you can call me anytime and I'll be able to help you in whatever you can. (audience cheering) So like every one of you, every single one of you, is gonna be presented with incredible opportunities. I should never taken some opportunities.
While I had the largest company in the world in my industry, I should not have gone to Sprint. While I was running one of the largest technology funds in the world, I should not have run to WeWork, but you should. Life's too short and you should always pursue, and every one of you is gonna be faced with the same opportunities.
And what I ask you is you are a lot more prepared than me to be successful. So when you're young basically take advantage of those opportunities. I wanna share with you, and that's the last thing that I'm gonna talk to you because then you gotta get your degrees.
I wanna share with you five things that have always worked for me. And I share this with you from my heart. The first one is always dream big.
Whatever your dreams you have right now, I assure you, they're not big enough. The bigger your dreams, the further you'll go. Don't be scared to dream big.
Secondly, is don't be afraid to take risks. A good friend once told me something that I always remember, a life lived in fear is a life half lived. So don't be scared to take risks.
And probably the most important thing that I do today is always do what you love. There's no substitute for joy and happiness in life and you're only gonna succeed if you love what you do. Four, don't be afraid to work hard.
This is a hot topic these days. The other day, I got in trouble in my Twitter account for telling people to work harder. Success never comes easy.
It takes a lot of hard work. Please don't believe someone who tells you otherwise. I always tell people the harder I work, the luckier I got, and the secret to hard work is love what you're really doing, because then it's not really work.
And lastly is don't give up. So many times I was ready to give up in my life. And it doesn't matter whether you're an entrepreneur, you're an employee in a corporation, you joining on for profit.
There are gonna be so many times where the road is gonna want you to just give up. But those of you who are resilient and persistent will be the ones to succeed. So Babson class of 2022, congratulations.
(audience cheering) To be here today, you have worked hard, you have dreamed big and you didn't give up. So we're in the same path. You deserve to be proud of this achievement, and please take this opportunity to celebrate.
I wish you from all my heart, a lifetime of happiness and success and no matter where your path takes you from here, I hope it's everything that you ever dream of. Thanks for having me here. Thank you.
