President Bok, former President Rudenstine, future President Faust, members of Harvard Corporation and Board of Trustees, faculty members, parents, and especially, graduates: I have been waiting for over 30 years to say this.
"I want to thank Harvard for this timely honour I will be changing my career next year..and it will be great to finally get a college degree in my further development.
I applaud the graduates today for taking a more direct route towards their studies. I'm just happy that CCrimson called me "Harvard's most successful winners.
" I think that makes me a vvictorianof my special class… doing my best for everyone who has failed. But I also want to be known as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to quit business school.
I have a bad influence. That is why I have been invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken to you, few would be here today. Harvard was a great experience.
The academic life was exciting. I used to sit in many classes that I did not sign up for. And sleep life was scary. I lived in Radcliffe, Currier House. There were always a lot of people in my bedroom very late at night talking about things, because everyone knew I wasn't worried about getting up in the morning.
Thus I became the leader of an anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way to ensure the rejection of all those social people. Bill Gates addresses the Harvard Alumni association inTecentenary Theater at Harvard University's 2007 Commencement Afternoon Exercises.
Radcliffe was a great place to stay. There were a lot of women up there, and most of the boys were kind of science-math. That combination gave me a lot of great challenges if you know what I mean. That’s when I learned the sad lesson that improving your challenges does not guarantee success.
One of my fondest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a phone call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had started making first-person computers in the world. I promised to sell them software.
I was worried that they would see that I had just learned from the hole and hang me. Instead, they said: "We're not ready yet, come and see us for a month," which was a good thing, because we didn't write the software. Since then, I have worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the start of an amazing journey through Microsoft.
What I remember most about Harvard was between a lot of energy and intelligence. It can be fun, scary, sometimes not depressing, but always challenging. It was a wonderful privilege - and even though I left early, I was changed by my age at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked for.
But when I look back… I am very sorry. I left Harvard without really realizing the horrible inequality in the world - the shocking diversity of health, and wealth, and the opportunity that is judging millions of people to lives of despair.
I learned a lot here at Harvard about new economic and political stars. I was exposed to a great deal of scientific advancement. But much human development is not based on its availability - but on how that discovery is used to reduce inequality.
Whether it isdemocracystrong public education, quality health care, or broader economic opportunities - reducing inequality is the highest achievement of human beings. I left the campus knowing little about the millions of young people who have been deprived of education opportunities in this country.
And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in poverty and undiagnosed diseases in the developing world. It took me decades to discover it. YYourgraduates come to Harvard at a different time. He knows more about world inequality than the classes that came before.
In your years here, I hope you have had time to think about how - in this age of accelerated technology - we can finally take away this inequality, and we can solve it.
Imagine for a second you were transposed into the karmic driven world of Earl Gray and you were transposed into the karmic driven world of Earl. Where can you use it? For Melinda and me, the challenge is the same: how can we do better than the large number of resources we have?
While discussing this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who die each year in poorer countries because of diseases that we have long since become harmless in this coherent.
Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I have never heard of, rotavirus, kills half a million children each year - not one in the United States.
We were shocked. We have long thought that if millions of children die and are not saved, the world will make it a priority to find and deliver medicines to save them. But it did not happen.
Below the dollar, some interventions could save lives that could only be brought about. If you believe that all life has an equal value, it is sad to learn that some lives are considered worthy of salvation and some do not.
We told ourselves: “This is impossible. But if it is true, it should be the first of our offerings. “So we started our work in the same way anyone else can start.
We asked: "How could the world allow these children to die?" The answer is straightforward The market did not offer to save the lives of these children, nor did the government pay for them.
So the children died because their mothers and fathers were powerless in the market and had no say in the system.
But you and I have both. We can make markets better for the poor if we develop creative capitalism - if we can expand marketable power so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living,
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