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№ 2005.005 — Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Commencement address
Irwin Jacobs
Co-founder and CEO, QUALCOMM
At MIT's 2005 Commencement, Qualcomm co-founder and CEO Irwin Jacobs drew on his own career to encourage graduates to prepare for change, recounting how he switched from hotel management to engineering and later co-founded Linkabit and Qualcomm. He urged graduates to consider teaching, to not be swayed by conventional wisdom, to view their work in a global context, and to pursue philanthropy.
Key moments
- 01 Describing his own shift from hotel management to engineering
- 02 Recounting founding Linkabit and Qualcomm
- 03 Encouraging graduates to question conventional wisdom, citing cellphone forecasts
- 04 Emphasizing global context and ongoing opportunity for philanthropy
Visual speech map
Irwin Jacobs at MIT, 2005
A commencement address about changing course, building companies, resisting conventional forecasts, teaching others, and treating success as a platform for giving.
- 01 Career pivot
- 02 Engineering
- 03 Teaching
- 04 Linkabit
- 05 Qualcomm
- 06 Wireless bets
- 07 Global view
- 08 Philanthropy
Pivot
A career can begin with a changed premise
Jacobs uses his own turn from hotel management toward engineering to show that early plans are provisional and that preparation can make change productive.
The personal origin story makes reinvention concrete rather than abstract advice.
Technical education becomes the leverage that lets a new direction become durable.
The lesson is not drift; it is staying prepared enough to recognize a better path.
Builder
Companies emerge from applied engineering judgment
The address follows Jacobs into Linkabit and Qualcomm, showing entrepreneurship as repeated translation from technical insight into working institutions.
Starting companies is framed as a way to turn communications theory into systems people actually use.
Engineering breakthroughs require organizations capable of carrying an idea through uncertainty.
A venture becomes credible through many practical decisions, not a single moment of inspiration.
Judgment
Conventional wisdom can miss the future
Jacobs points to underestimated cellphone growth to argue that graduates should respect evidence, but not let prevailing forecasts define what is possible.
Market predictions are useful inputs, not verdicts on technical or social possibility.
The wireless story makes scale visible: small devices can reshape communication habits globally.
Questioning consensus matters most when paired with disciplined execution.
Return
Knowledge should circulate back outward
The closing advice widens from career to responsibility: teach, think globally, and use resources for philanthropy and public benefit.
He asks graduates to consider passing knowledge forward as part of a technical life.
Work should be judged in a worldwide context, where communication technology changes opportunity.
Philanthropy becomes the mature form of entrepreneurial success.
Transcript
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