Mitchell Baker delivers Keynote at Cornell Tech's 2022 Recognition Ceremony
Mitchell Baker, the CEO of Mozilla Corporation, delivered an inspiring keynote speech to Cornell Tech graduates at the Class of 2022’s Recognition Ceremony on May 21. We are excited to share the text of her speech, as delivered at the ceremony.
Mitchell Baker
It is my honor and great pleasure to congratulate you, the Cornell Tech class of 2022. Thank you graduates, and thank you Dean Morrisett — thank you for having me here on such a momentous day for you, and on the ten-year anniversary of this deeply innovative program.
It feels like not so long ago that Cornell Tech was a dream conjured up; a vision for a technology-focused education that would think about the future differently. When the first announcement was made it was like a bolt out of the blue. For those of us working in the space of technology for social benefit, it was a wild and exciting idea.
It was a wild idea that a city would inspire a tech program as part of the city’s fabric, it was a wild idea to partner with the community and with the private sector in the way this program does, and, of course, it’s a wild idea to explicitly approach the problems facing our society through the lens of technology as a tool for change. And now, here we are celebrating your graduation; celebrating the work you’ve done that’s brought you to this point, and celebrating that wild ideas can come to life and create new things in the world.
Personally, I’ll say how wonderful it is to see you participants, and now graduates, of this way of approaching technology — I’ve been working on a similar goal with Mozilla for some time now. I’ve seen how new ideas can start off as radical and end up changing the mainstream social outlook. Seeing you, another community of people building something different, is wildly uplifting; a new generation of people attuned to technology and the common good. I am so moved and so buoyed up by the choice you made to come here, and by what you will do as you go forward.
When I started with Mozilla, it was because of a new radical idea: open-source. It’s easy to forget how threatening an idea open-source was. No one thought of sharing as a paradigm for working or for access to goods. Sharing code was crazy; no one had even thought of sharing homes or cars or rides. Collaboration and people choosing to work together to create a shared asset was a shocking idea.
So dream big! Embrace shocking ideas. Test them rigorously; we don’t need shock for its own sake. Test them fiercely to see if they do in fact enhance the common good — we need that.
Now, you may execute incrementally. We can use the proven tools of minimum viable product, specific use case and target audiences, etc. Even so, dream big! You’ve got tools through this education that many don’t, and I know from experience that there are huge numbers of people working in the tech industry who want our impact on society to be better. I know this because people choose to affiliate with Mozilla for precisely this reason — we are able to hire people in a competitive market because this hunger is huge.
We need leaders, so please step forward! As you move into your next era, please step forward. When you have a big idea, don’t be surprised if you get a lot of pushback. Lots of people won’t understand; they’ll express dismay, and they’ll try to say you’re on the wrong track. So, prove the doubters wrong, and if you wind up proving yourself wrong in the process, take stock of your learnings and try again. The next approach will be richer with your learnings, and will probably still seem odd to most people. That’s what real change is — a new way of thinking.
Also, I encourage you to set yourself within a community of people you trust. You already have your fellow graduates, who have come to Cornell Tech for a reason. There are many of us in the tech industry today who want to contribute to something different. So, identify a set of people who have internalized the values that are driving you and will help support you and will tell you if you are becoming rigid, dogmatic, or, worse yet, hypocritical. This is different than people telling you they have different opinions. This is a small set of people who can help assess if you are losing sight of the path you set out for yourself. Believe me, I’ve seen the importance of this in my own experience at Mozilla.
Back to new ideas! Before Firefox, the conventional wisdom was open-source was only for geeks. But then we showed that values of openness could apply to consumer products. We showed the world that you could have collaboration and a community of people invested in a product.
Once people saw that Firefox could work, more and more people would come to me and say, “I want to do open ‘something’, can you help me learn? I want to do open journalism - how does it work?” Open architecture, open education, open data, open science, open access — you name it. People from all of these areas contacted me to try to learn. It was an explosion of ideas, an explosion of pent-up energy for something new to solve problems and let people organize themselves differently.
We should see that again — and you should be part of that. Dreaming that, building that, spreading new approaches. It’s hard! It takes commitment. And, it’s amazing. The hunger for new approaches right now is enormous. The hole in our society that needs you is huge. The opportunity for change is big. That opportunity is part technology, part product, and part legal and cultural frameworks.
The open-source movement used copyright law to create constitutions for communities building shared access. We really thought of it and talked about it that way. The Apache license creates one kind of community, the GPl creates another, and the Mozilla Public License, which I wrote, creates yet another. Today, open-source has succeeded and it’s easy to just grab a library from Github. But in the early days, we were very intentional about the kinds of communities we created with our legal and cultural frameworks.
More recently, we’ve seen corporate law start to provide ways for companies to be better citizens. So far, this is occurring through B corps and other laws explicitly allowing corporations to consider elements in addition to financial gain for shareholders. These feel important, like early steps in addressing the questions of whether we incent corporations to be good citizens or whether we incent them to be rapacious.
There is so much good to be done by connecting technology to public benefit and the common good. You’re on your way to your next great adventure, with both possibilities and challenges. By coming to Cornell Tech, you have already made great choices — keep making those choices.
Keep being radical. Keep embracing new ideas. Allow yourself to consider different perspectives, different viewpoints, and different options. I am rooting for you. You have ahead of you important work. I am so excited to see what you will do.
And so today, as you look ahead, I want to congratulate you again on your achievement. You worked hard to get here, and the best is still to come. Now go, bask in your accomplishment for a while, rest, and recharge. And then there’s a world waiting for the skills you bring — so please dive in and bring new things to life. Thank you.