Irwin M. Jacobs (Qualcomm) - 2005 MIT Commencement Address

[MUSIC PLAYING] Now, it is my pleasure to introduce our commencement speaker-- Dr. Irwin M. Jacobs. His distinguished biography is included in your programs. Dr. Jacobs is one of MIT's most illustrious and successful graduates, whose leadership of the telecommunications industry, his advocacy of science and math education, and his philanthropy in education and the arts, are inspiring and in the best tradition of MIT. Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, graduates, and graduates to be, Dr. Irwin Jacobs. JACOBS: Thank you very much. It's a great honor to be here with you on this very special occasion. And I would like to give special thanks to President Susan Hockfield for asking me to provide this address. I'd also like to congratulate the Class of 2005 on this very special day, and provide welcome to the family and friends of the graduates, to the faculty here, to the entire MIT family. It really indeed is a very special time. It's a very great day to graduate. I remember back to my receiving my graduate degrees here-- a master's and a doctorate-- back in '57 and '59, quite a few years ago, fitting very well in with the 50-year reunion class. I must say that, at that time, I could not possibly have imagined all of the things that we're going to happen in my life over the succeeding years. And that indeed is something I'd like to pick as the theme today. Namely, that we are all going to-- and in particular you're going to-- be going through a great deal of change, providing both opportunities and occasionally some problems, but that, in fact, an MIT education is about the best possible way to prepare yourselves for this very exciting future. I suspect again that a few years from now, you'll have the opportunity to think back over the many things that you just could not have anticipated, and so it's important to be prepared. Be prepared for those changes. My life itself has been a number of changes. I'll use those for an example. I actually was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, not too far from here. When I graduated high school, I had always been interested in math and chemistry, physics. My high school counselor advised me that there was-- and this was 1950-- that there was no future in science, nor in engineering. [LAUGHTER] And since I didn't really have a measure to evaluate that, I then took his advice. My family had a small restaurant, and so I entered the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University. Well, I had an engineer as a roommate. After a year and a half of hearing him talk about-- you couldn't possibly get those grades if you were in engineering-- and knowing I really preferred engineering, again, I made a very significant change in life, and decided to transfer over to electrical engineering. And that was a very exciting period. I was a co-op student. That turned out to be very useful. One of the engineers I worked with then advised me to go on to graduate school, and that's how I ended up at MIT. But thinking back, in my last term at Cornell-- and this is how fast things have changed-- I took a course in the theory and practice, building, of vacuum tubes. Built a 6SN7, a 6J6-- you probably never even heard of these terms any longer. I was reminded last week, when I gave a talk at the Computer Museum in Mountain View, and that, in fact, has a lot of equipment that originally came from a Computer Museum here in Boston, but now is out in Mountain View, California. And so, as I toured around looking at all the equipment, seeing analog and digital differential analyzers up to cell phones, which of course are the latest and most powerful computers-- I'll come back to that-- that, it was amazing to me how fast things have changed. And again, that's the key issue with change. It was amazing to see all these familiar items that had been in my life and then passed out of it so quickly. Well, I did decide to apply and, luckily, was accepted here at MIT to graduate school. I originally came thinking that EM theory, ElectroMagnetic theory would be an interesting area. But MIT, at that time, Professor Claude Shannon had just come, the father of information theory, there was a lot of interest in the theory, the mathematics, probability theory, et cetera. And so I decided that that would be my future, and very pleased with that decision. One of the early courses I took was from Professor Norbert Wiener. Now, I don't think probably anyone here might have had the opportunity. But it was very interesting. There are many tales, I'm sure, still running around MIT about Professor Wiener. One that I most remember, in taking this class-- probably like several of the classes you might have taken-- the lectures were-- well, I shouldn't say this. Probably, it's not the case anymore. But the lectures were incomprehensible. And so each night, a group of graduate students would get together and try to figure out what it was we had heard during the day and kind of put it together in a way that we could understand. About halfway through the term, Professor Wiener heard that we were doing this, came to the room and said, can I look at the material? Became interested-- said we should make a book from this. And so we, then, continued to put the material together as a book. He would come in, every day after class, and his only question was how many pages are we up to? So he always had a different slant on things. That book did come out. It's Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory. It was the first book that I was ever involved with. Went on the faculty here, again, it's a wonderful way-- if some of you are considering careers in teaching, I'd greatly recommend it. It's the best way to learn material. And while here, decided with Professor Jack Wozencraft to put together a textbook for a senior-level communications course on applying what was then brand new digital theory and information theory and try to give it a little bit more of a practical face. And there were many, at the time, that said that there really is no practical use for this. You should just treat it as applied mathematics. In fact, of course, that's turned out not to be the case at all. I did take a leave of absence to make my one visit to California about the time we were finishing the book in '64, '65. We decided that might be a good place to retire some time, came back to Boston, had a call from a professor from Cornell saying he's going out to start a brand new department of electrical university in San Diego. Would we join them? First reaction, of course, was no-- family, friends, career here. But after a couple of days, we decided that California and a brand new university, an opportunity for a different experience might be quite exciting in our lives, and we accepted. Again, change-- the change from here to a brand new school. It was interesting. A brand new school-- it was very small, of course, very few faculty. One of the classes I started had to do with introduction to computer science. There were some engineering students. But there were students and faculty from music and from the arts departments, and in interacting with them, developed even a greater love and appreciation for the arts and for music that we've been able to follow, then, ever since. It was very interesting being in a brand new university. But that also led to another major change in my life. Because of the MIT background, a lot of industry in Southern California, there were many requests for consulting. Typically, if you're in the faculty, you might consult a day a week. And so I mentioned that to a couple of friends from UCLA and the faculty of UCLA as we were flying back on a trip. And they said let's start a company and share consulting. And I said fine, as long as I don't have to get involved with managing it. And so we started our first company called Linkabit. And very quickly it began to grow. And so I did, then, decide to take a year off and check out business, try to get things properly organized. Didn't know, really, a thing about it. Luckily, in the Hotel School I had had a course in accounting, a course in business law-- so a little bit of background turned out to be very useful. But really had to learn the business side of things. Engineering is, by far, the best preparation for just about any field. So that has indeed worked out very well. Well, Linkabit, this first company did grow very nicely. We got involved in a number of interesting programs-- one scrambling TV signals from satellite to home that's turned into a very major business, another what are called very small aperture earth terminals for-- if you put a credit card in at a gas station, often, it will go over one of these satellite terminals. The first what's called Time-Division, TDMA type of cellular phone-- we got into the cellular phone business early on. And actually a processor-- we didn't know the name at the time, and I don't think it was really out-- but a reduced instruction set processor that we built into a terminal for use in government programs and, in particular, for a program here at Lincoln Laboratory to communicate with what was then called the LES-8 -9 satellite. So again, things tied back together very nicely, but very exciting to be able to come up with ideas, be able to apply theory to things that were rather practical, rather useful. Well, we made the mistake, in a sense, of selling that company. And in 1985, I retired. Retirement was a terrible thing. So I lasted about three months and then started Qualcomm. And I very much assured my wife that if things went very well, we might have 100 employees at some time. Put that in context, we're now over 8,000 employees. And by the way, in my welcoming, I also meant to welcome any Qualcomm shareholders that might be here today. Well, we didn't have any products. Luckily, we didn't have to go out for venture capital, so we didn't have to have a business plan. But we knew digital. We knew wireless would be very exciting. And it turned out that it was on a drive down from a consulting contract meeting in Los Angeles. A drive down the San Diego, about halfway, luckily-- it's 110 miles or so-- about halfway down, realized that something called Code-Division Multiple Access, CDMA would be very useful for mobile communications. Well, the company was very small. We had to wait a few years before we could go ahead and develop that idea. But the time came when we sold our first product, had a little bit of a cash flow, and were able to, then, go back and pay attention to CDMA, actually, at the end of 1988 began to take a look at it. Well, if any of you decide to go into you own businesses-- and some of you I'm sure we'll be doing that-- you run across a time when you have to make a bet-the-company decision. And so CDMA was one of those. Should you put a lot of money into R&D in a technology that may or may not be accepted? The world is going off in a different direction. And luckily, at that time, I had not heard one of the projections that had been made to AT&T by a consultant a few years earlier that, if all went well, there might be 1 million cell phones in use by the year 2000. Actually, they missed by a little bit. It was 600 million. And that, of course, gave a great opportunity for moving ahead with CDMA. We did develop the technology, demonstrated-- because otherwise, everything sounds too complicated. You have to have a demonstration. So that was, again, one of the bet-your-company-type issues. And then the question comes up, if you now have a good product, how do you build a business model? What do you do about that? And so again, this is a type of concern that you may be having going forward. We decided to go into a mode, which was both licensing and of selling, initially, phones and infrastructure to get things started, but, ultimately, the chips. And that works out very well. As you know, chips keep getting more and more powerful. You can put more and more capability in them. If you come up with innovative ideas, you can build those into the chips. And so that's exactly the path that we followed. It's interesting that, today, there's probably about 1 and 1/2 billion users of cell phones around the world. In 2005, there were over 600 million sold in the one year, or will be by the end of the year. Comparing that to about 150 million desktop and laptop computers, it's quite clear that the future is not in plastics, but really, now, in mobile devices. And the interesting aspect is that the capabilities keep going up. One of the things that is now being provide is what's called third generation. I won't, again, go into details. But if some of you have been using, not just the wireless that's available on campus-- that's called 802.11, but a wide area coverage provided right now by Verizon here, one can get a very high data rate anywhere that you can receive a cell phone call. And so that is a key step. But the interesting part is the devices. And because of Moore's law, the number of transistors on a chip doubling roughly every two years or so-- power going down, costs going down, all the right things kind of happening-- there's been a major transformation. When we first built up our first cell phone, it took three chips to implement the communications only. Now it takes about 20% of one chip. What do you do with the other 80%? You can put a lot of computing power. In fact, now we're going to two processes-- one of which is moving toward a gigahertz-type processing speed. Two processes, a couple of signal processing units, a 3D graphics capability, GPS receiving-- you can put a lot on that chip, make it available at a low cost, high reliability, and therefore very useful to people. Therefore, since it's a computer now, not really a phone-- you may not realize it when you're carrying it around-- very powerful computer that opens up many possibilities. And so we developed another approach we call ROO. In fact, there's a conference now with about 2,400 people at it occurring in San Diego-- where developers anywhere in the world can develop an application to be downloaded to the phone. We arranged to provide a digital signature, tested digital signature so it won't corrupt the phone. And therefore, they can develop these, bring them via some internet meeting grounds we've established with the operators, bring their applications to the attention of operators around the world, and build the business. And I think, at this meeting that's ongoing, it was mentioned that there was about $350 million that had been funneled from operators to Qualcomm, then Qualcomm back to the developers around the world, in this last six months, in the order of $150 million. The more exciting aspect is other things I think that were going to be able to do with that. We've all heard of issues with the digital divide, access to communications, to the internet being more limited in certain regions. I think that the phone as a low-cost device with a huge amount of computing power, connection to the internet, ability to download software, process-- it had a large amount of memory by the way. With the appropriate amount of thinking and planning can be used to supplement teaching in many remote areas as well as, of course, developed areas around the world. So I think that there's a great possibility there to move ahead with these devices. People are still just realizing what the power in the devices might be. And again, hopefully, some of you out there will find this challenging. Of course there's also medical devices that are now being attached to the cell phone measuring blood capabilities and moving toward eGovernment providing support, voting, information, et cetera by use of the cell phone. So again, a device we think of as a phone, very powerful computer, opening lots of opportunities. Well, I mentioned eGovernment-- one of the things I would like to recommend to all of you, at least some of you is to think-- well, all of you to think about politics. To some of you, perhaps, to consider a career in politics. Again, I think an MIT education prepares you for just about anything. And it was interesting. It was over a couple of years ago-- so the previous president of China, we had a meeting. They always have this very formal U. So myself and the president was sitting at the head of the U and then staff is on either side. And there's a little bit of chit chat that occurs before the formal meeting. What do you think the first question that was raised by the president of China sitting next to me? How many more generations did I think Moore's law had to run-- president of China. Discussing it with him a little further, it turned out he actually was trained as an engineer, as a radio engineer, as was the prime minister at the time. That's the kind of interest and ability to, again, think about technology, bring it to use that I think is also very important here in this country. And of course, there's very little of that available here. Another aspect, when I came to be a student here, I was lucky to benefit from the Research Laboratory of Electronics, but it was very well funded at the time. Now, the funding has been cut back quite a bit. There really are reasons to get out, to become very politically active. Well, there have been many rewards from having this type of an education. Being able to go out-- the world is changing. One can take advantage of those changes, do very well. It's important, of course, to have an impact back. And the opportunity for philanthropy, of course, never goes away. We've been very lucky. Our focus often is on education, but also cultural activities, other activities around the world. And I think, again, that's something that, as you begin to move ahead in your careers, that you should definitely pay attention to. So I'd would like to finish by, again, congratulating you. You're embarking on a great adventure. You're probably entering a period where there's even greater change, greater things happening around the world than was correct when I graduated here. You might have seen the statement back from 1899 that the head of the patent office said that everything that can be invented has been invented. Clearly, another shortsighted statement. But if you check with the patent office now, you'll find that many of the applications, many of the patents in the US patent office are coming from overseas. And so again, the competition is heightened. We have to move ahead. We have to improve our education throughout. We have to remain very innovative. You can certainly be guaranteed that there will be there changes. You have been well-prepared. I wish you as much fun and excitement as I have had along the way. Than you all very much. [APPLAUSE]