U.C. Santa Cruz Commencement Speech – 2019

Posted on June 18, 2019 by steve blank

I was honored to give the commencement speech at the University of California Santa Cruz, right down the road from the ranch. Rather than my usual talks about innovation and entrepreneurship I shared a few lessons learned after serving seven years as a public official on the California Coastal Commission. I told four stories about the conflict between money and power versus the common good.

I was invited to give the talk by Professor Sue Carter, now the provost of the college. In 2011 Professor Carter was in the first National Science Foundation I-Corps class. Last year, she testified in front of Congress about the program.

Bay Nature, the San Francisco regional nature magazine, did a great job in capturing the context of my commencement speech in this article.  Worth a read first, before you read below.

The speech is below.

—–

Congratulations to the graduates!

The talk starts at 27:00

If you can’t see the video click here

Today while we celebrate your college degree, it represents just the end of one part of your life and the beginning of the next.

You’ve just spent the last four years putting passion, energy and conviction into your friendships, politics, social justice, partying and – every once in a while – your classes.

Now your time in the classroom is over and your real education is about to begin.  Many of you will find yourselves colliding with a world driven – less by ideas, knowledge and the pursuit of truth – and more by money – ideology – and power.

So today, I’m going to offer you a glimpse of how the world outside of this esteemed institution really works. And offer some tips on how to be effective change agents for repairing the world.

It’s altogether fitting and proper that in a college named after Rachel Carson, to share four short stories of what happened when truth and justice faced money and power – for the seven years I served as a public official on the California Coastal Commission. The agency that regulates land use on all 1100 miles of the California Coast.

My first story is that the Smartest person in the room is almost never the most effective.

One of things I loved about being a coastal commissioner was how much I learned. Coming out of Silicon Valley and the tech world, I was a complete novice on how policy gets made. So, I had to read the Coastal Act, the Coastal Regulations, and enough law to understand the positions our staff took and what the applicants were contending. And each month I’d have to read through 100 staff reports to figure out how to vote. Deciding between the applicants, their lobbyists, the environmental community, the staff, the coastal act and the law.

Meanwhile, while I was reading everything, I noticed that one of the other commissioners was reading nothing, not the staff reports, not the coastal act, not the law.  In fact, all he could do was count to seven.

And that ability to count to seven made him the most effective commissioner.

Why? Because out of 12 commissioners, seven is the number needed to win a majority in a vote.

While I was the master of the facts and data, he was calling in favors, cajoling others, and building a coalition to get the majority of commissioners to see the world his way.

So, my first lesson is – You don’t need to be the smartest person in the room to be the most effective. Being effective means not just mastering the facts but – figuring out how to move your agenda forward.

My second story is about the power of Misdirection over the truth

Magicians use misdirection all the time: they sweep off their top-hat, you fixate on it, and all of a sudden, their assistant standing next to them disappears.

I got to watch a magic act unfold before my eyes when real estate developers made eight office buildings totaling ¼ million square feet — twice the size of a Wal-Mart — disappear. How?

The developers wanted to build office buildings in an area zoned for farmland. Traffic from this huge project would have filled local roads not designed for this density and would impact the public’s access to the beach. Given that on the face of it, this project violated all kinds of laws, how did these developers make it disappear – andget unanimous approval from the county’s Board of Supervisors?

Their solution was brilliant – and evil. They proposed that after building these eight office buildings, they would build a housing facility for developmentally disabled adults. They convinced the dedicated, deserving and passionate parents of this group that this project was the only hope these families would ever have to secure housing for their children (neglecting to tell them they had located the housing for the disabled in a tsunami inundation zone).

Naturally these parents became vociferous advocates for the project. They brought their disabled children to the hearings and did exactly what the developers had hoped – with not a dry eye in the house, no one could see the project anymore. The developer had moved the attention from a project that violated local and state zoning onto a small and deserving group of individuals. It was heartbreaking. And it was world-class misdirection.

The lesson here is that misdirection is designed to distract you from the truth. Obscuring a fact-based argument with a faith-based one is what demagogues do – in policy and politics.  See through it. Help others to see how this kind of misdirection distorts their perspectives.

My third story was about the day I learned to Follow the Money

The business model for real estate developers isn’t hard to understand – they buy farms and ranches then build houses and sell them off. And in California if you can build 1,500 houses on a 400-acre farm, that might be worth a billion dollars. Developers make their profit off the difference between the cost of the land and the net profit on the houses.

But one obstacle for California developers is that the Coastal Act says you can’t build on land that has been designated a Sensitive Habitat or wetland. So, if you’re a developer, having any land declared sensitive is a loss of potential revenue.  In fact, it can kill the project. However, … there is one loophole in those rules – if you’re a farmer you can plow under anything.

So as a consequence,real estate developers are great farmers. They buy-out family farms for prices that far exceed what the farmers could ever get from selling their crops. And then they lease the land back to them so they can continue to farm. The developers invest in equipment so farmers can plant multiple crops each year, till each and every inch of their fields, and ensure those fields are perfectly level so no water can collect on the fields.

When I first ran into this I thought, “Wow what a great deal. The developers are great for the environment, they’re helping farmers by making all these improvements.

It took me a year and lots of looking at puddles on farms for the dim lightbulb to go on over my head. Real estate developers couldn’t care less about farming or the crops.

The developers were keeping the farmers plowing the fields to make sure no sensitive habitat would appear.  And the day a developer got the zoning approvals, the bulldozers would show up to start building the houses that would bury the farm.

The lesson here was that when I was standing in the farm field, I wasn’t looking at a puddle – I was staring at a billion dollarsv- and I didn’t see it.

So when you hear or see something that is too good to be true – follow the money. It’s usually a long and winding road – but eventually you’ll find it.

My final story is: if you want to make change you have to learn to communicate and inspire others.

In all these lessons, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the namesake of your school – Rachel Carson. You all study her work your first year here. You know she was a marine biologist at theU.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – only the second woman in the job – and she served as editor-in-chief of all its publications.

Her 1962 book, Silent Spring, launched the modern environmental movement.

The book’s title evokes a spring when all the songbirds died. Ittold the story of the damage caused by indiscriminate use of pesticides, especially DDT, to control insects. It educated a mass audience, most who had never seen a scientific paper in their lives, about how these chemicals entered the food chain, accumulated in the tissues of animals and ultimately made their way up to humans.

DuPont and other chemical companies threatened Carson’s publisher as well as the New Yorker and Audubon Magazine unless their planned Silent Spring features were canceled but nevertheless, she persisted. The book was a moral call to arms for people to take personal action.

Rachel Carson wasn’t first to raise concerns about DDT, but her impact was to communicate scientific evidence in a way that the general public could understand – she used facts to inspire others to take action.

In naming this college the donors said, “Carson, like UC Santa Cruz, epitomizes love of the natural world, ethical judgment based on sound scientific principles, and the persistence and courage to create change.”

Change happens when you can educate and inspire others – when you can use facts to create faith in what’s possible.

For those of you who will continue in the sciences or research, the easy part will be to write papers for your peers. The harder part is how you’ll explain “inconvenient truths” to people who may not want to hear them. How will you rouse an audience to action?

Finally, why do public service?

My work on the Coastal Commission took four days of my week each month in public hearings – at times in exhausting 12-hour days. And I’ve sat on the boards of other local and national non-profits.

But why serve your community, state or country? For me, I volunteered my time because of a gift I received my first year in college.

On my first day of school in Michigan I met Michael Krzys, who one day would be the best man at my wedding.  As we got to know each other, I pretty quickly realized that I had met my match, someone with even more curiosity, creativity and a wry sense of humor.

But as I got to know Michael, there was another, completely foreign part of him I didn’t understand. It would take me another 30 years.

From the day I met him he had a commitment to public service that was deep, heartfelt, profound, unshakable and to me, mysterious and completely unfathomable. Even as a freshman, Michael already knew that his calling was to help others and to do so he was determined to become a public service lawyer.

It confused and unnerved me to know someone with so much certainty about the meaning and direction of his life.  It couldn’t have been more different from mine.

After our first year our lives took different paths. When they would touch again, it would be in ways neither of us could have predicted. 

I left school and joined the Air Force during Vietnam, and Michael and I kept in touch via letters – me telling him about adventures in the military, fighter planes, electronics and foreign countries. His letters to me explained that while he appreciated my dedication to national service, public service was the higher calling. Each of his letters ended with him reminding me that I was destined for a different career.

When I got back from Southeast Asia, Michael was in Law School and I was stationed nearby. Over dinner we’d argue about politics, talk about how to best save the world, and he’d tell me what he was learning that week in his law school classes.  I remember when he taught me the best way to understand an issue was to learn how to argue both sides of a case.

When I got out of the military, Michael was finishing up law school. A year later he and his new wife headed to the South to work for Georgia Legal Services.

I moved to Silicon Valley, and we kept up a sporadic correspondence, me trying to explain startups and Michael telling me about the world of civil rights and social justice for the poor.

If possible, it seemed like his excitement for what he was doing matched mine.  I just didn’t understand why he did it.

For entrepreneurs, understanding why people dedicate their lives to working for non-profits is hard to fathom. Why work for low pay, on something that wasn’t going to deliver a product that would change the world?

Today, each time I see the staffs of those non-profits I support, I get a glimpse of that same passion, commitment and sense of doing right that I first heard my freshman year decades ago.  For the best of them, it’s not a job, it’s a life-long calling. They remind me of what Michael might have become.

One fine California April day, three years in Silicon Valley and now into my second startup, I got a call from someone in Michigan who had been trying to track me down.

Michael and his wife were bringing some kids to camp, and he was killed in a head-on car accident with a drunk driver.  His wife and the kids survived.

It took me a long time, but as I got older, I realized that life was more than just about work, technical innovation and business. Michael and others worked to preserve and protect the values that made life worth living.  And while we were making things, they were the ones who were changing our society into a more just place to live.

There wasn’t a day that went by during my time on the Coastal Commission that I didn’t wonder what Michael Krzys would do. He was my model as a human being who found his own compass.

I always hoped that mine would point in the same direction…

Graduates, as you set out on your own extraordinary adventures, remember the measure of a life is not time or money. It’s the impact you make serving God, your family, community, and country.

Your report card is whether you leave the world a better place.

—

Carpe Diem. Seize the Day.

Filed under: California Coastal Commission, Commencement Speeches, Conservation | 15 Comments »

In Defense of Unreasonableness – Saving the California Coast

Posted on June 28, 2013 by steve blank

CLCV Enviro AwardsLast night Alison and I along with others were honored for environmental leadership by the California League of Conservation Voters. Here are the remarks I made.

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Alison and I both grew up on the East Coast but we’ve been fortunate to live in California for 30 years.  One of the things we love most about living here is how beautiful the natural landscapes are and how close nature is to urban areas.  When we had kids, we began to think about our role in protecting these California landscapes for future generations.

Alison got a head start on me by joining the board of the State Parks Foundation. I soon followed by joining the board of Audubon, Peninsula Open Space Trust and the California League of Conservation Voters. And 6 ½ years ago I was appointed to the California Coastal Commission.

As you know, for the last 35 years we’ve been running a science experiment on the California Coast: How would the Coastal Act affect California’s coastal economy?

The results are now in.

California has some of the most expensive land in the country and as we all know, our economy is organized to extract the maximum revenue and profits from any asset. Visitors are amazed that there aren’t condos, hotels, houses, shopping centers and freeways, wall-to-wall, for most of the length of our state’s coast.shutterstock_127554866

It was the Coastal Act that saved California from looking like the coast of New Jersey.

In 1976 the voters of California wisely supported the Coastal Act and the creation of a California Coastal Commission with 2 goals.

First, to maximize public access and public recreational opportunities in the coastal zone while preserving the  rights of private property owners, and

Second, to assure priority for coastal-dependent and coastal-related development over other development on the coast.

For the last three decades, the Coastal Commission has upheld these directives while miraculously managing to avoid regulatory capture. It was able to do so because of three forces that sustained it: 1) an uncompromising executive director, 2) a majority of commissioners who looked past local parochial interests and voted for the interests of all Californians, and 3) an environmental community that acted as a tenacious watchdog.

The Commission has been able to stave off the tragedy of the commons for the California coast. Upholding the Coastal Act meant the Commission took unpopular positions upsetting developers who have fought with the agency over seaside projects, homeowners who strongly feel that private property rights unconditionally trump public access, and local governments who believe they should have the final say in what’s right for their community, regardless of its impact on the rest of the state.

During the last three decades, Peter Douglas ran the Coastal Commission. Unlike Robert Moses who built modern New York City’s or Baron Haussmann who built 19th century Paris in concrete and steel, the legacy of Peter Douglas is all the things you don’t see in the 1,100 miles of the California coast: wetlands that have not been filled, public access that has not been lost, coastal views that have not been blocked by hotels or condominiums. Douglas did this by standing up to developers, speakers of the state assembly, governors, and others who wanted him to be “reasonable” and to come to a “compromised solution”.

I was appointed to the Coastal Commission by a governor hoping to find a candidate with “green enough” credentials who would be “reasonable” and understand how “compromises” are made in California politics.

And for the first few years, I was reasonable.  New development, sure –just avoid the wetland.  More condos—OK but watch out for the Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Areas (ESHA).

I’m a slow learner but over the last few years, I realized that the coast of California exists as it is because the Commission had an unreasonable leader, who refused the political allure of “compromise” and who managed to keep the commission independent despite enormous pressure. And we as commissioners had to stand up to those pressures and be at times unreasonable in order to not compromise the essence of the Coastal Act.

Unfortunately Peter Douglas is gone and his unbending vision to save the coast is fading. Some current commissioners seem to want the Commission to be reasonable, and understand the reality of politics. In fact, some may even want a new “reasonable” executive director who will turn the commission into just another regulatory organization driven by the people they are supposed to regulate.

Sadly, even today with the results of an independent commission in front of us, some of our appointing authorities haven’t understood the gift that has been handed them – 100’s of miles of Pacific coastline, much of it unspoiled and accessible to all. And unlike other regulatory agencies, the unspoiled California Coast is finite, and bad decisions are virtually impossible to turn back once a development decision is implemented.

Over the last few years I learned that unless there is a vigilant and engaged public, lobbyists and developers will take over the commission using “reasonableness” and “fair compromise” as their watch words. It is up to individuals and our environmental organizations to become more active on coastal issues.

As Peter Douglas used to say, the coast is never saved, rather it is being saved every day,” as an ongoing process.

Unless we insist that our elected officials appoint people who are willing to prioritize the principals of the Coastal Act over both their own careers and the notion of being “reasonable” within the larger ecosystem of day-to-day California Politics, our children may one day look back at pictures of the California coast and wistfully say, “Look what our parents lost.”

Today it was with a feeling of a mission yet to be accomplished, I let the governor know that I am resigning from the Coastal Commission. My work on innovation, job creation and entrepreneurship for the Federal Government is taking an increasing amount of my time.

I’ve had a great time at the Commission. I’ve learned a lot from my fellow commissioners and hope I’ve done my part for my fellow Californians. I’d like to thank my alternate Jim Wickett on the Commision who has also dedicated his time and uncompromising votes towards carrying out the Coastal Act.

Most of all, I’m proud to have been “unreasonable” and “uncompromising” in defense of the California Coast. To be anything less risks the loss of what the Coastal Act and Peter Douglas has uniquely brought to all Californians.

Thank you for this award, and I very much appreciate all the support you have provided to me to be able to make my contribution to the California Coast and the Environment.

Poppies full size

Filed under: California Coastal Commission, Conservation | 23 Comments »

Change We Can Believe In – Reinventing the US Auto Industry: Open Source the Chevy Volt

Posted on April 15, 2009 by steve blank

This article in the NY Times about China’s thinking strategically about electric cars was a poignant contrast to our struggles in the U.S. with the auto bailout.  It reminded me about the adage, “when you’re up to your neck in alligators, the last thing you remember is that you were supposed to drain the swamp.”  Memo to Washington – weren’t we were to be the country innovating here?

nytimes-article-on-hybrid-cars-china

Normally I’ll keep my posts to subjects on which I have domain expertise. However:

  1. The clock is ticking on General Motors
  2. The auto industry is desperate for some new thinking and reinvention as a 21st century enterprise
  3. The administration has the opportunity to think like entrepreneurs not just bankers – by creating something new, innovative and valuable
  4. An industry gasping for its last breath is least likely to continue to invest in new products that won’t pay the bills for another decade (regardless of whether its in the national interest.)
  5. I’ve shared this with Obama’s Energy and EPA team

The auto industry bailout ought to have four goals (you can put them in your own order.)

  1. Jobs
  2. Keeping an Auto Industry as a strategic national resource
  3. Energy Independence
  4. Clean Energy

I proposed that in exchange for the GM bailout we spin out the Chevy Volt into an open source electric car platform.

Any automaker who builds the car in the U.S. will be able to build on the Volt Platform, but all drivetrain improvements are open source.

The first 10,000 units would be royalty free. After that, other automakers would pay GM some per/car royalty.

Since it’s in the government’s interest to facilitate goals 1-4, they will subsidize the cost of the initial units so that they are affordable. Economies of scale will drop component costs (read batteries) over time.

(I will admit that taking a concept such as “open source” from the software business and applying it to the auto industry and Washington D.C. was somewhat incomprehensible at first to the Energy and EPA team. But they’re smart, let’s see what happens.)

The reality is that independent electric vehicle startups will win over time (closer to the customer, more agile, etc.) over a national platform.  As part of this spin out I’d make sure the Government also supports the nascent U.S. electric car industry and ensures it gets its share of the bailout largesse.  But the two together will kick start a new industry and save a dying one.

As I said, I am far from an expert in the auto industry, government bailouts or other related big “businesses”. But I think it’s time we take the out-of-the-box thinking that created new businesses in high tech – the concept of open source, for instance − and apply it in creative and powerful ways to reinvent floundering, older industries.

If anyone has a better idea, I would love to see it here.

Filed under: Conservation | Tagged: | 14 Comments »

Watch This Space

Posted on March 23, 2009 by steve blank

I am going to post on Mondays and Thursdays – at least until I run out of war stories. Posts are going to be a mix of topics: entrepreneurship, secret history and conservation. I’ll try to mix the topics up during the week. BTW, keep the comments coming, they’re read and appreciated.

Filed under: Conservation, Customer Development, Secret History of Silicon Valley | Tagged: | 3 Comments »