Jordan Kretchmer 2015 Guest Speaker If you’re like me you’re probably wondering why a school dedicated to the arts would pick the CEO of a tech startup in San Francisco to give this address. The truth is they didn’t. I am actually just your run-of-the-mill 32 year old designer and Arts college dropout who grew up in a small Texas town where the only thing more important than Jesus was football (neither of which I care for), who just happens to have somehow become the Founder and CEO of a 150 person tech startup in San Francisco. But most importantly, I’m a designer. No matter what my title or label is today, I AM a designer. My path was unlikely and untraditional, and riddled with great success and many, many failures. So over the next few minutes I’m going to try and share a few things I’ve learned along the way, and do my best to apply them generically to all of you, and hope that at least 2 or 3 things from the rambling that’s about to ensue strike a chord and stick with you. ---------Technology is not just around us anymore, for better or for worse it is part of us. When I was about your age the first iPod came out and it was a miracle of science that held all 1000 songs that you’d ever need right in your pocket. Today I wear millions of songs on my wrist and I take it for granted. You are the first generation in history that was born with the Internet as a part of everyday life, and you’ve grown up communicating in ways that I only dreamed of as a kid. I used to sit in class and tell my friends that I had turned my TI-89 calculator into a modem so I could email from it, a wild dream at the time, Wifi didn’t exist back then. But you had Wifi when you were in grade school. This has all has a meteoric effect on what it means to be human today. And I’m going to come back to this later because it plays a vital role in why each of you is so important after you graduate today. ---------Leaving school was the scariest and most exhilarating thing I have ever done. I threw myself into a world filled with possibilities, but also a world filled with even more rules than what I experienced in school before dropping out. This was disappointing and infuriating, and I’m sure you will all soon feel the same sense of disappointment that the real world is actually more bound by rules and norms than what you experienced here in school, especially this school. After a few years of angrily and forcibly trying to break all the rules just to prove that I thought the rules were dumb, I learned the lesson that guided how I interacted with the world from that point forward, so I’m going to give it to you right at the top: The path to accomplishing your goals is paved by creating amazing things despite the rules, not in spite of them. This requires exactly the kind of education you have all received here. One that teaches you how to explore possibilities and use a diverse set of knowledge and experience to get what you want. The world inherently dismisses artists because the world doesn’t like “different.” It takes perseverance and tolerance of the less artistic people around you in order to break through. Don’t be spiteful or angry towards the people who don’t get you, it’s not their fault and will only create more barriers to your success. Doing great things despite the rules is about out-smarting the real world, and you are better prepared than most to do that even though it may not feel that way today.

---------When I dropped out, the dean said to me, “you’ll remember this day, it’s when you made the biggest mistake of your life.” She’d have a heart attack now if she knew I was up here talking to you all about life. The truth is, right when she said that my only thought was that I would finally have the ability to experience more failures than just my failure at being a student. Failure is where the best lessons come from. In Silicon Valley there’s an entire culture of failure, there’s even a conference about it called Failcon, where prominent Founders and CEOs get up and talk openly about how they failed, and what they learned. Fail loud, fail proud. Own that shit and make something better next time. ---------As artists it’s easy to blame everything around you for being ass-backwards and broken because what you do isn’t as easily understood as what a lawyer, or a hedge fund manager does. There’s no clear system that you fit into and that will scare most of the people around you. While it is absolutely correct that the world is ass-backwards most of the time, persevere and stay positive through the naysayers and the people who don’t believe in you, and there will be a lot of them, like the dean of my school. Part of your talent must be your resolve when you know that you’re on to something good. ---------You came here to this school, and you are graduating today because you already possess many of the qualities I’ve talked about. And because you’re fearless, you’re compulsive, you’re strongwilled, and you’re wise beyond your years, and this place has taught you how to harness all of that to create amazing art. All of those traits stem from your ceaseless desire to experience more things faster. There will be people in your life who are going to call these traits “impatience,” I call it “Aggressive curiosity.” It is the feature that sets you apart from everyone else around you, it’s what makes you artists, don’t ever let anyone convince you otherwise. All of us misfits and creative types have been forced into a system that wasn’t quite built to appreciate what we are capable of accomplishing until we prove it. When I set out to raise funding for my business, and all I had was my passionate vision and some designs I did, every single person I met with said “prove it.” To me building this company was a foregone conclusion, but to everyone else, it’s a crazy guy’s vision that only the crazy guy understands. So you have to prove it. People are skeptical of vision because they’re not inside your head, and there’s no way to measure “vision.” The system around us is built to measure. Built to apply labels and numbers that appreciate the kids with the highest grades, with the most friends, with the most votes for class president… And this made me angry most of my young life, and I rebelled against my teachers for giving me C’s because I solved a problem the “wrong” way, or for telling me “real” art didn’t happen on a computer when I designed an assignment in Illustrator instead of painting it. I’m going to get back to the role of technology in creativity, and vis-versa, in just a minute. ---------Before I moved to San Francisco and started my company at age 25, I lived right here in Boston, where I ran a Digital Creative team at an ad agency. Having lived in both Boston and San Francisco, I have been a part of two very distinctive cultures. One that relishes the values of

education and specialization, and one that dismisses it almost entirely. Neither is wrong but I’ll let you connect the dots on which is which. I have hired a diverse set of people in both places over a long period of time, and the profiles of the candidates I see are becoming more and more specialized every year. They are experts in specificity and can recite the rulebook verbatim. All the right answers but no new answers. They don’t surprise you with anything, it’s all very learned but also very expected. With the path you have taken, it is up to you to be the surprising ones, do that and you’ll stand out from the rest you’re entire life. ---------When I was first starting my company, I got an email from a young woman named Jenna. She had heard about what I was doing and it connected with her, so she wanted to help. She was straight out of Art school, and after a couple of phone interviews I offered her an unpaid internship (I didn’t have a dollar to my name at the time, everyone was working for free). She shot back immediately, “I’m not going to be an intern but I will accept a full-time job as a community manager, and I’ll do that for free.” … HIRED! Jenna came to my office/apartment kitchen a few days later with a notebook full of ideas, dozens of them, about how Livefyre (my company) could have an even bigger impact on the world than what I had originally envisioned. I had been working with a few engineers for months, and not one of them had ever brought me a single idea. And here’s Jenna, straight out of school with more ideas than I had ever had myself. Not only that but she knew how to design, she new how to present (no doubt a result of the performance classes she took), she had a knack for writing… and she became my first paid employee. I even hired her before the engineers, because the value of ideas is immeasurable, and the value of someone who can contribute creativity to every aspect of an endeavor is immeasurable. She spent so much time exploring on her way to finding her final path that she knew a whole lot about just about everything. She still works with me today as a Vice President, and is one of the most important people at the company. This is an important story because some of you will go on to be artists in the definition’s sense, and some will go on to apply your craft and your creativity to other fields. Both are not just important but are necessary, both are responsible for bringing art to life. And for those of you looking to leave here and get a “real” job, remember that story. Be bold and value yourselves highly, use everything you learned here to be a swiss army knife of ideas and creativity, and bring your art to whatever it is you’re doing. You are valuable because you are capable of becoming anything you want, not just what you were taught in school. You have been taught how to identify problems, and then solutions using a breadth of knowledge and experience, a multitude of tools, not just one toolset. This is why some of the most important companies in the world today were not created by business people. ⅓ of all fortune 500 CEOs have an Arts education and nothing more, not a finance degree, or a law degree, and definitely not an MBA. ---------Even the Chief Technology Officer at my company, the guy who built our entire technical infrastructure, got his Bachelor in the Arts. From his experience there, he decided that his real passion was landscape design, so he went to school for that. Then he became obsessed with how patterns and structures in the digital world weren’t any different than they are in the real world. So he taught himself to code and built an application that mapped photographs to points

on the earth using image recognition to recreate entire landmarks by stitching together thousands of photos automatically. Arts degrees aren’t limited to just thinking, they’re about discovery. So another lesson: Apply your creative passion to solving real world problems, use it to discover pieces of the world’s systems that you can contribute to or change altogether, never limit yourself to your first dream and you will accomplish things beyond what you are even considering sitting here today. ---------Now I’m going to talk about what I think is the most important point of all. The value of an arts education in a world of learning that is moving towards specialization and technology. Specialized degrees teach you knowledge, but the problem with that model is that knowledge is now a commodity. I can know just about anything I want at any moment. And now I don’t even have to take my phone out, I can “know” anything just by lifting my wrist to my face (except what to get my mom for her birthday, that may forever remain a mystery). And in 10 years you won’t even need to do that, you’ll just think a question and get the answer instantly on your contact lens. But Creativity and critical thought can’t be Googled. Art can be replicated by machines but machines can’t create new art and new ideas. Technology’s reality is only made of things in the past and it has no vision of the future. Google an idea that’s never existed before and Google will return nothing. Creativity is the application of knowledge and experience to solving new problems and breaking new ground. There’s no such thing as innovation without art, and technology is useless without creativity. As in the enlightenment, the creative class - and that means all of you - will become the leaders of tomorrow because creativity is the new currency. In San Francisco right now, the level of hope and aspiration is Bohemian, creative people and artists are celebrated as heroes and the oddballs rule the land. The line between art and technology is blurring to the point of obscurity and if history is any guide, we can expect it to be the same everywhere in short order. ---------Something that’s soon going to fall squarely on your shoulders, is how we continue to raise creative people in a world where technology obscures that line. I was having lunch with the head of technology at Crayola a few weeks ago. This is a company dedicated to childrens’ creative education for over a hundred years. And for a hundred years they did one thing… they made crayons. Now as they look to the future, they need to figure out how to teach creativity while also staying relevant to the realities of the changing world around us. So Crayola is now building robots. Robots that connect to iPhones, and as kids draw on the iphone, the robots roll around drawing what the kid is drawing. While on the surface this might seem a bit scary, it’s necessary, and I was inspired by the effort they’re making to re-invent themselves in the face of technology in order to make sure they can continue to carry out their charge of teaching creativity even in a world ruled by 1’s and 0’s that we all now live in. ---------When we were kids, we didn’t concern ourselves with the “right” answer. Have you ever asked a kid if something is a circle or a square, and when he answers wrong, he just sits there and giggles like you’re the crazy one? Kid don’t give a shit that a circle is a circle.

It’s only as we get older that the importance of “right” answers and “wrong” answers is beat into us with things like standardized testing. But here is the truth about the real world: There is almost never such a thing as the “right answer.” In reality, the answer to any non-mathematical problem is almost always a sliding scale. Even programmers all choose to execute the same thing in different ways, some with more code, some with less. But both will get the job done on a sliding scale of rightness. Art is the same way, no two artists would represent a scene in exactly the same way, and neither is wrong for that, even though one might be more appealing to some people than the other. ---------This is the Grey area, and only us humans can occupy it. This isn’t the realm of machines, as hard as people are trying to get them there, when I said “Hey Siri, what should I get my mom for her birthday?” She said back to me “You say tomato. I say tomato.” Not very helpful, Siri, but thanks for the grammar lesson. She’s not very helpful because there’s no binary answer to that question. The answer lives in the grey, with no right or wrong. Grey is important because grey can become anything, it’s why you paint a wall grey before you paint it blue, or red, or purple. You are all about to receive degrees in the grey area, which means you are the shapers of new things. You are the ones everyone else will look to to forge new ground for humankind, like those who lived and continue to live in the grey area before you... Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Salvador Dali, Robin Williams, David Lynch, Richard Scarry. In the grey area, you are never wrong, and there are countless opportunities for success personally and for the world. Creativity is not measurable, it’s just grey. There is no universal standard like there is for weight or length, it’s just grey. That also means that success as an artist isn’t as cut and dry as the more measurable, boring, kind of success. In the grey area, the second you feel successful is the second you become scared shitless that soon, you’ll be found out for the fraud that you are. Success for a creative person breeds selfdoubt unlike anything else for the same reason it’s so hard to measure… because there is no right and wrong. I feel like a fraud most of the time, I consider it a badge of honor that I hope you all get to wear in your lifetime. ---------2015 Graduates of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts here is why you are so important… ART is in everything. Being an artist doesn’t just mean painting, or sculpting, or designing. It’s about bringing beauty and humanity to as many things as possible. And this has never been more important in our history than it is right now. When the forces of technology threaten to suck the soul out of every interaction we have, the dehumanization of our world is only stoppable through creativity and art. Creativity brings humanity to the complexity and machinery of technology. It is why each and every one of you is so vital… you’ve now been trained to bring humanity to a world that is constantly fighting what it means to be human. And I, and the rest of the world whether they know it yet or not, thank you for it. Congratulations graduates, here’s to a more creative and more human world with you in it.