I am honored to be with you today. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever got to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky—I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. But I got fired when I had just turned 30. How? Well, as Applegrew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me. But gradually our visions of the future became different and our board of directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed my dream one bit. So I decided to start over. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story , and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT. I returned to Apple.