The Unseen Story Behind Steve Jobs’ Iconic 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech
In early June 2005, Steve Jobs sent an email to his close friend Michael Hawley, attaching a rough draft of a commencement address he had committed to deliver at Stanford University’s graduation ceremony just days later. “This is embarrassing,” he wrote. “I’m just not good at these kinds of speeches. I never do this. I’ll send it over, but please don’t puke when you read it.”
The draft he shared that day held the core of what would become one of the most famous commencement addresses of all time. It has been viewed more than 120 million times online, and its lines are still quoted widely today. Chances are, every person who has ever agreed to give a college commencement speech has rewatched it for inspiration, only to sink into despondency over ever matching its magic.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the address, the Steve Jobs Archive—an organization founded by Jobs’ wife Laurene Powell Jobs—has launched a new online exhibit honoring the speech. It features a remastered version of the original video, interviews with peripheral witnesses to the event, and rare ephemera, including Jobs’ original enrollment letter to Reed College and a custom bingo card for 2005 graduates printed with common phrases from his speech. Words like “failure,” “biopsy,” and “death” never made it onto the card, but they were clearly top of mind for Jobs as he drafted his remarks. (If you have somehow never seen the speech yourself, pause to watch it in the embedded player below, then return to this story properly moved.)
Jobs dreaded giving this speech. The Jobs I knew stuck rigidly to a carefully policed comfort zone. He thought nothing of walking out of a meeting—even a high-stakes one—if something displeased him. His hyper-exacting instructions for anyone preparing his meals rivaled the strict requirements he set for iPhone manufacturing. And back in 2005, there were three topics you never brought up around him: the trauma of his adoption, his 1985 firing from Apple, and the details of his cancer, which he guarded so closely some even wondered if it violated SEC disclosure rules. That makes it all the more extraordinary that he chose to share exactly these personal stories in front of 23,000 people on a scorching hot Sunday in Stanford’s football stadium.
“This was really speaking about things very close to his heart,” says Leslie Berlin, the archive’s executive director. “For him to take the speech in that direction, particularly since he was so private, was incredibly meaningful.”
Jobs actually was not the graduating class’s first choice for speaker. The four senior co-presidents polled their class, and the top pick was comedian Jon Stewart. The class leaders passed their shortlist to a broader committee of alumni and university administrators. One of the co-presidents, Spencer Porter, lobbied hard for Jobs. “Apple was already huge, and my dad worked for Pixar at the time, so it made sense for me to make the case for him,” Porter says.
Indeed, legend holds Porter was the inspiration for Luxo Jr., the star of Pixar’s first short film and later the studio’s mascot. When his dad, Tom Porter, brought toddler Spencer to work one day, the story goes, Pixar’s John Lasseter was captivated by how the boy’s size stacked up next to his father’s, and got the idea for a baby lamp opposite a full-sized adult one. Whatever the case, Stanford’s then-president John Hennessy favored Jobs over all other candidates and extended the invitation.
By that point, Jobs had turned down dozens of similar requests. But he had just turned 50 and felt optimistic about his cancer recovery. Stanford was a short drive from his home, so no travel was required. Also, as he told biographer Walter Isaacson, he figured he would walk away with an honorary degree for the trouble. So he accepted.
Almost immediately, Jobs began second-guessing his decision. At his own Apple keynotes and product launches, Jobs was unshakably confident. He pushed his team with criticism that could be instant, corrosive, even cruel. But this was nothing like an Apple production, and Jobs had no idea how to pull off the feat. Oh, and one small detail: Stanford does not award honorary degrees. Whoops.
On January 15, 2005, Jobs sent an email to himself (subject line: Commencement) with his first rough thoughts. “This is the closest thing I’ve ever come to graduating from college,” wrote Reed College’s most famous dropout. “I should be learning from you.” Jobs, famous for his ultra-artisanal organic diet, even considered structuring the whole speech around nutritional advice, centered on the unoriginal slogan “You are what you eat.” He also mused about endowing a scholarship to cover tuition for an “offbeat student” like himself.
Flailing for direction, he reached out to Aaron Sorkin, a master of dialogue and lifelong Apple fan, who agreed to help. “That was in February, and I heard nothing,” Jobs told Isaacson. “I finally get him on the phone and he keeps saying ‘Yeah,’ but … he never sent me anything.”
One day at Pixar, Jobs ran into Tom Porter. Per Spencer Porter’s account, Jobs asked Tom if his son could send over a few pointers. The students shared their thoughts with Jobs, and Hennessy advised him to skip generic advice and make the speech personal.
Eventually, Jobs recruited his old friend Michael Hawley to help. Hawley was a polymath affiliated with the MIT Media Lab: a brilliant technologist who once co-won a global piano competition for outstanding amateurs, and later founded a TED-like intimate conference called EG. He had worked with Jobs at NeXT and even shared a house with him back in the day, and the two had stayed close.
Hawley’s role in shaping the speech has been an open secret for years, but it has rarely been acknowledged publicly. Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli devotes a full chapter to the speech, but never mentions Hawley. Isaacson’s official biography also does not cite him, and surprisingly, neither does the new Steve Jobs Archive exhibit. In an online tribute to Hawley published in April 2020, Jobs’ son Reed spoke about Hawley’s contribution, including the “don’t puke” email quoted above. But Hawley never spoke publicly about exactly how he helped Jobs—until 2020, a few months before Hawley died of cancer at age 58, when he opened up during a drive around Boston with journalist John Markoff. Markoff recorded the conversation, which has never been made public until now.
As Hawley recounted to Markoff, Jobs first tried to get him to deliver the address in his place. “He told me he was hoodwinked, as he put it, into giving a speech at Stanford and just didn’t know what to say or do,” Hawley said. “He wanted to turn it down, he wanted me to do it instead. I said, ‘No way—it’s your gift.’ He then basically begged me, in a very sweet way, a very Steve way, to help him out. And I said sure.”
Hawley loved Jobs’ idea of opening with his own experience dropping out of college. Jobs had been kicking around the structure of giving students “three pieces of advice as you leave college.” The first would be about “surrounding yourself with people smarter than you.” He did not even have a second topic worked out. The third centered on the unflinching truth that “we are all going to die. You are going to die.” A few days later, Jobs drafted lines about the Whole Earth Catalog, thinking notes on its final issue could work as a powerful closing for the speech.
“He had the closing idea before he had any of the rest of the content of the speech,” Hawley said. He urged Jobs to strengthen that final kicker. “Like a good comedian telling a joke, or a good composer writing a piece of music, you want to be sure to nail the punch line, so I think maybe think more about the ending,” he wrote to Jobs in an email. “I like your Whole Earth recollection a lot. I grew up with it too. Even the phrase WHOLE EARTH taps a powerful idealistic undercurrent.” He suggested a few tweaks and reminded Jobs he would need to explain what the catalog was for a younger audience. As Hawley told Markoff: “I said, ‘Look, this was Google for our generation … And I said for god’s sake, give credit to Stewart Brand, whose poetic touch infused all that and so much more.”
The archive exhibit holds eight draft emails Jobs sent to himself while working on the speech. There is a gap between early May and June; presumably, Jobs was preparing for a far more familiar presentation at that time: his opening keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on June 6. Onstage in San Francisco that day, Jobs was masterful, prowling the stage with his signature swagger, breaking down a new phenomenon called podcasting (“We see it as the hottest thing going in radio”) and announcing the Mac’s historic switch from PowerPC to Intel processors. But the Stanford deadline was looming. By June 7, he was back to sending draft notes to himself. Hawley told him that, just like an undergraduate cramming for a final, he might have to pull an all-nighter to finish.
By all accounts, Jobs did hold a marathon writing session, working through the draft with Laurene. Hawley suggested he print out the speech, squint at it, and practice reading it out loud. “You don't want to be stumbling with your nose in a page, so just walk down the street and read it to a tree a few times so that you're comfortable with the flow and page turns or whatever,” Hawley told him. For the next few days, Jobs rehearsed, revised, and as Schlender and Tetzeli wrote, read the full speech to his whole family at dinner.
The night before the ceremony, Stanford held a welcome dinner for commencement guests. Jobs’ attendance was uncertain. “The entire day we were hearing Steve is coming,” Porter says. “Then we heard Steve is not coming, definitely not. Then, 30 minutes before, we hear he is coming.” When Jobs arrived, he gravitated to his Pixar colleague Tom Porter, who introduced him to his son and the other co-presidents. They thanked him effusively for doing the speech. “I should never have agreed to do this,” he told them. “I don’t have any jokes. It’s not going to go well.” He admitted he had considered backing out just days earlier. The co-presidents exchanged horrified looks.
“We were like, holy shit, this guy doesn’t even want to be here,” says Paola Fontein, one of the co-presidents. “Should we have gotten Jon Stewart?” Another co-president, Steve Myrick, thought to himself, I sure hope he shows up tomorrow.
Jobs woke up on the morning of June 12 riddled with anxiety. “I’d almost never seen him more nervous,” Laurene Powell Jobs would later tell Schlender and Tetzeli. Even on the short drive from his home to the stadium—their three kids in the back—he rode shotgun in the family SUV, still tweaking lines of the speech. When they tried to access the VIP parking lot, they could not find their entry pass. They struggled to convince the guard that the frazzled man in a black t-shirt and ripped jeans was actually the commencement speaker, but they finally got through. (Jobs had asked Hennessy ahead of time if it was okay to wear jeans, and he showed up in Levi’s and Birkenstocks.)
The family headed to a private luxury suite while Jobs was fitted with academic regalia. By the time Jobs joined the procession to the podium with Hennessy and other guests, the stadium crowd was already rowdy. Stanford commencement has long had a carnival-like energy: graduates did a “wacky walk” around the field, many wore absurd costumes over their gowns, and plenty were still fuzzy from the previous night’s celebrations. It was also a sweltering summer day. So after Hennessy gave Jobs a warm introduction, the speaker stepped up to face a boisterous audience distracted by heat. And he was about to deliver a speech that could easily have felt like the ultimate downer: sending graduates into their new lives by reminding them they would one day die.
Though he almost certainly practiced the 15-minute speech enough to memorize it—at his keynotes, he could speak articulately without notes for an hour—he chose to read from his printed pages this time. This was no typical Stevenote. The audience was unfamiliar, the venue uncomfortable, and he was stuck in an awkward academic robe instead of his beloved Issey Miyake turtleneck.
When he spoke, his voice was steady, but it lacked his typical authority and verve. “He was a little gimpy at the podium,” Hawley told Markoff. “It was one of the few times he was vulnerable in public. That worked out well for him.”
Watching the original video, the audience appears to listen politely, though many are distracted. Even Porter, the co-president who pushed hardest for Jobs, was half distracted by the heat. “It was so unbelievably hot that a lot of time during that speech I just spent drinking water and looking for more water,” he says. The Stanford band had been instructed to play a note every time Jobs said a word on the graduation bingo card, so there were random bleats when he hit squares for words like “dropout” or “NeXT.” Graduation speeches are usually crafted to draw constant laughter, but the closest Jobs got to a joke was an offhand remark about Windows copying the Mac—a passing nod to how the Mac’s approach to fonts shaped the entire computer industry. Jobs did not pause to acknowledge the crowd’s reaction. He just kept reading.
“Most folks had gone out celebrating the night before, so you had a group of tired people sitting in the sun,” Myrick says. “But you could tell it was something that he had really put thought into. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I'd like to go back and read that when I'm not in this situation.’” Hennessy says he knew from the start that Jobs was delivering a thoughtful, moving address, regardless of the printed pages in front of him.
Jobs concluded with the words printed on the back cover of the Whole Earth Catalog’s final issue: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” It was exactly the uplifting kicker Hawley had pushed for. Stewart Brand would later remark that because his phrase became the punchline for the most famous college address ever, “I became famous late in life.”
The initial applause from students was modest. At his keynotes, Jobs was used to thunderous roars after announcing a new OS feature or a new iPod sales milestone. After a few seconds, though, some students stood, seemingly more out of respect than jubilation, and most others followed. It is not clear Jobs even noticed. He simply looked relieved. “Steve wasn't so sure it went well as we headed out of the stadium,” Hennessy says. “But I assured him it had.” Jobs returned home with his family, glad the ordeal was over.
It was only the beginning.
Back then, YouTube was only a few months old, Twitter did not exist, and Facebook did not even have a news feed. National media did not cover the speech, and Apple sent out no press releases. But Stanford published the transcript on its early, clunky website, and people began discovering it. I recently checked my inbox from June 2005 and found multiple copies of the transcript forwarded to me from different mailing lists. As weeks and months passed, more and more people found the speech. Berlin describes it as going “slow-motion viral.”
“The speech started to get talked about, how honest it was,” says Porter, now a TV writer working in Hollywood. “I would have meetings, people would see I was from Stanford and ask if I saw that speech that Steve Jobs gave.” Jobs himself seldom mentioned it; at least I never saw him quoted on the subject. He joked to one person that he’d bought the speech from CommencementSpeeches-dotcom. He responded to a thank-you note from the co-presidents by saying, “It was really hard for me to prepare for this, but I loved it (especially when it was over).”
Six years later, an event changed how audiences perceived the speech forever. On the podium in 2005, Jobs had said his cancer diagnosis and surgery a year earlier had been the closest he had ever come to facing death, and that he hoped to have a few more decades. On October 5, 2011, after many months of fighting the cancer he told students he had beaten, Steve Jobs died.
Anyone replaying his speech today can see how fully he lived by the advice he offered that day, over his 56 years. As much as any public figure of our era, Jobs lived according to the words he shared with the class of 2005. He pursued what he loved and refused to live anyone else’s life, and that legacy lives on in his legendary products. But as life-changing as his gadgets have been, none strike the heart and soul as intimately as the Stanford speech. One random example: In 2016, after the Cleveland Cavaliers lost the first two games of the NBA Finals, LeBron James played the speech for his dejected squad in the locker room. It galvanized the team. Kevin Love wrote “stay hungry, stay foolish” on his sneakers. Four games later, James hoisted the championship trophy.
For her class reunion this October, Paola Fontein, the class co-president, plans to make custom sweaters printed with the words “still hungry, still foolish.” I asked her if she thought it was the greatest commencement speech of all time. “I would say so,” she replied. “I don’t hear anyone talking about another one.”
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