Topaz Conway
Director, StartupAus and Cicada Innovations
Ceremony: 16 May 2019, 2:00pm - Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation
Pro Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, presiding deans, presiding directors, members of the University Executive and Academic Board, staff, friends, family and also graduates, good afternoon. I, too, give thanks to the original owners of this land, the custodians, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, whose ancestral lands this university stands.
Chancellor, thank you for warming up the audience for me.
Congratulations, and being last on the agenda means that I have this wonderful challenge of capturing your attention, leaving you with some words of wisdom when what you really want to do is probably start the party. So, please bear with me – it’s my first graduation speech, hence the cheat sheets. So, please be kind, laugh at the right places, clap at the end and keep your phones in your pocket.
So, did you know there’s a species of jellyfish that never dies? This is true. The eternal jellyfish is able to revert back into adolescence after it goes through adulthood and then it repeats the cycle over and over again for eternity. Pretty amazing. Sounds like some guys I know.
[Laughter]
Now, there’s no relevance at all of that fact to my speech, but now I have your attention.
[Laughter]
Graduation speeches are meant to be about advice, but to be honest, advice is merely nostalgia repackaged, taking old things, like my experience, dusting it off, rewrapping it in pretty paper and then selling it back to you for a price that’s probably a lot more than it’s originally worth. You’ll get some of that, I promise, but I also want to talk a little bit about what I think is probably on your minds as you get ready to leave the protective custody of this amazing university.
If you think about it, you cannot even imagine what the world will look like in your future. 20 to 30 years from now, what will it look like? Where will technology take us? Will we even have a habitable earth?
When I was in university, which was a long time ago and I won’t tell you how long, I never imagined a world with technology available to me at my fingertips in real time to access any amount of information that I wanted. Mobile phones were a fantasy, I didn’t have my first personal computer until I was 30 and encyclopaedias were a thing. We wrote letters, we dialled phones that were permanently fixed to the wall, but I’m digressing here.
The question that is likely on many graduates’ minds is what will you do now? If you haven’t been thinking about that, I suspect your parents or partners have been, because I know, as a parent of three children, all I ever wanted for my children was gainful employment.
A couple of years ago, UTS did a survey of its students that indicated around 40 per cent of you either wanted to be an entrepreneur or wanted to work for an entrepreneur at some point after graduation. Firstly, that’s an incredible number – 40 per cent of you understand that you will not have traditional careers. Secondly, it says to me that there’s a motivation to make a difference in the world through doing something that solves a problem. Because this is what entrepreneurship is – finding solutions to the world’s problems, be they big or small.
We’ve all heard – and I know the Chancellor said this as well – the world is changing. Single careers are no longer a viable alternative for most; you’ll likely have 5–8 career changes along the way. And if this scares you, let me ease your mind. Change is fun. I’m an entrepreneur but I haven’t always known it or worn that label. My life reflected this DNA and eventually I learned it had a name, but entrepreneurship is not a job.
So, here’s my story: I was born a strange combination of a rebel and a negotiator. I was the only girl in a family of three brothers, so I grew up tough and I learned the art of negotiation at a very young age. Drawing on my innate sense of fairness to produce those win-win outcomes, I became expert at it. When I was young, what it meant was I didn’t get tortured and my brother got the chores done.
Don’t worry – by the time I was 13, I reversed that dynamic and they did my chores and I introduced them to my network of girlfriends.
[Laughter]
Later, as an adult, I discovered I had an unquenchable thirst for learning, which, being a tactile learner, meant experiences. So, after university, I took every opportunity that came along just to learn. I did so many things – different things, and it was atypical of my generation – that by the time I was 40, I had changed career at least eight times. And today I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.
In doing so many diverse roles, I learned a lot, overcoming my own fear of failure, thinking outside the box, getting comfortable with risk, and strong resilience. I developed a deep understanding of what drives people, motivates successful businesses, and why people pay for solution in companies. And this was my MBA.
And what I just said, if you were paying attention, is my first nostalgic repackage. It sounds so much better than the real story, which is that I went from job to job, got bored very easily, ran into lots of resistance when I tried to change things and suggest that they could do it better, and when I got frustrated enough, I’d leave and go to the next interesting thing.
Being the rebel, I lived the words of Winston Churchill: ‘Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.’
But underlying all of it were my two driving personal motivations. I craved solving problems and I truly wanted to make a difference in the world. Here’s an interesting fact: studies have shown that women naturally possess higher levels of agility, resilience, acceptance and empathy, all qualities that are essential in a social structure but only recently have been identified as essential in good business practice. These qualities, interestingly, also define a lot of entrepreneurs.
I have these qualities in spades, but in my early years, that didn’t provide me with a clear career path. Only later did I learn they would serve me well in doing my own businesses. But back to entrepreneurs.
I discovered this tribe in the US in 1999 when I decided to leave Australia after 10 years to find out what all this dot com IT stuff was all about. I was feeling a little bit without a country, but when I arrived in Seattle, I truly did find my tribe and they were called entrepreneurs.
The next eight years were busy, but they were blissful for me. I was with people who were solving problems, which is my favourite thing to do, with this thing called technology, which was a toolkit that could do almost anything. So, I jumped in, boots and all, built one company that crashed and burned along with all the other dot coms; I became CEO of a bioengineering company that grew until it was acquired; and then founding my next company, which was the curated online wine company. I loved my product, and then selling that to come back to Australia.
My point here is that the world and now your world is not only changing faster than you can even imagine, but it’s offering unlimited opportunity due to one thing: technology. Technology has revolutionised knowledge. We have at our fingertips the ability to do everything from creating robotic limbs that respond to brain signals, vehicles that drive themselves, ability to photograph black holes in the universe. We can produce more, predict health outcomes, offer solutions with AI and machine learning, feed nations. Technology can even predict what I will be buying next week at Nordstrom’s in Seattle when I land on Thursday afternoon. That is scary.
We’re living in a time of extraordinary innovation, limited only by our own imaginations. So, I propose to you, graduates, that we all have to at least think like entrepreneurs. You’re entering a world that will leave you breathless with the speed of change and probably confused at times with the lack of definition of what your role is in it. Yet each of you is better prepared for this journey than ever before.
You were born into the digital revolution, you’re embedded in it and you’ve gained the tools that you need to thrive in it, but tools without purpose are meaningless, and if you’re not solving a problem with these tools, be they science, chemistry, technology, engineering and even law, then they become simply a language that you have learned.
Complicating this, technology has moved faster than our ability to responsibly understand, use and protect ourselves from its abuse. So yes, ethics matter. Sadly, the world’s lost its way in many things – human rights, the right to food, shelter, education. We’ve abused our earth, ignoring decades of signs that we were poisoning our air, water and soil. We wage war for profit and the innocent are the collateral damage.
Now, I say this not to depress you but to inspire you. These are all new challenges that you as graduates are facing and now have the amazing opportunity to solve. This is what defines your jobs of the future. And you’re so lucky to live in a world that embraces innovation, problem-solvers and appreciates the power of technology. You are the future solutions and I ask you to be that change that you want to see. Turn ‘what do I do now?’ into ‘how do I make the world better?’
In closing, I couldn’t resist some blatant self-indulgence – to give you some advice. Don’t be apathetic. Human rights are our problem. Hunger is our problem. Climate change is our problem. Baby boomers did not have it easier than you, so please stop saying that, because it really hurts my feelings.
[Laughter]
Equality is not solved. See it, call people on it, act on it, don’t just talk about it. Social media is not a source of truth – do your own work to find truth. And vote. Make your leaders accountable. Better yet, you run for office, because we know the bar is really low right now,
[Laughter]
And lastly, to quote one of my favourite people, Gloria Steinem, ‘The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.’
[Laughter]
Now, go change the world, graduating class of 2019.
Thank you.
[Applause]
Speech
Pro Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, presiding deans, presiding directors, members of the University Executive and Academic Board, staff, friends, family and also graduates, good afternoon. I, too, give thanks to the original owners of this land, the custodians, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, whose ancestral lands this university stands.
Chancellor, thank you for warming up the audience for me.
Congratulations, and being last on the agenda means that I have this wonderful challenge of capturing your attention, leaving you with some words of wisdom when what you really want to do is probably start the party. So, please bear with me – it’s my first graduation speech, hence the cheat sheets. So, please be kind, laugh at the right places, clap at the end and keep your phones in your pocket.
So, did you know there’s a species of jellyfish that never dies? This is true. The eternal jellyfish is able to revert back into adolescence after it goes through adulthood and then it repeats the cycle over and over again for eternity. Pretty amazing. Sounds like some guys I know.
Now, there’s no relevance at all of that fact to my speech, but now I have your attention.
Graduation speeches are meant to be about advice, but to be honest, advice is merely nostalgia repackaged, taking old things, like my experience, dusting it off, rewrapping it in pretty paper and then selling it back to you for a price that’s probably a lot more than it’s originally worth. You’ll get some of that, I promise, but I also want to talk a little bit about what I think is probably on your minds as you get ready to leave the protective custody of this amazing university.
If you think about it, you cannot even imagine what the world will look like in your future. 20 to 30 years from now, what will it look like? Where will technology take us? Will we even have a habitable earth?
When I was in university, which was a long time ago and I won’t tell you how long, I never imagined a world with technology available to me at my fingertips in real time to access any amount of information that I wanted. Mobile phones were a fantasy, I didn’t have my first personal computer until I was 30 and encyclopaedias were a thing. We wrote letters, we dialled phones that were permanently fixed to the wall, but I’m digressing here.
The question that is likely on many graduates’ minds is what will you do now? If you haven’t been thinking about that, I suspect your parents or partners have been, because I know, as a parent of three children, all I ever wanted for my children was gainful employment.
A couple of years ago, UTS did a survey of its students that indicated around 40 per cent of you either wanted to be an entrepreneur or wanted to work for an entrepreneur at some point after graduation. Firstly, that’s an incredible number – 40 per cent of you understand that you will not have traditional careers. Secondly, it says to me that there’s a motivation to make a difference in the world through doing something that solves a problem. Because this is what entrepreneurship is – finding solutions to the world’s problems, be they big or small.
We’ve all heard – and I know the Chancellor said this as well – the world is changing. Single careers are no longer a viable alternative for most; you’ll likely have 5–8 career changes along the way. And if this scares you, let me ease your mind. Change is fun. I’m an entrepreneur but I haven’t always known it or worn that label. My life reflected this DNA and eventually I learned it had a name, but entrepreneurship is not a job.
So, here’s my story: I was born a strange combination of a rebel and a negotiator. I was the only girl in a family of three brothers, so I grew up tough and I learned the art of negotiation at a very young age. Drawing on my innate sense of fairness to produce those win-win outcomes, I became expert at it. When I was young, what it meant was I didn’t get tortured and my brother got the chores done.
Don’t worry – by the time I was 13, I reversed that dynamic and they did my chores and I introduced them to my network of girlfriends.
Later, as an adult, I discovered I had an unquenchable thirst for learning, which, being a tactile learner, meant experiences. So, after university, I took every opportunity that came along just to learn. I did so many things – different things, and it was atypical of my generation – that by the time I was 40, I had changed career at least eight times. And today I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.
In doing so many diverse roles, I learned a lot, overcoming my own fear of failure, thinking outside the box, getting comfortable with risk, and strong resilience. I developed a deep understanding of what drives people, motivates successful businesses, and why people pay for solution in companies. And this was my MBA.
And what I just said, if you were paying attention, is my first nostalgic repackage. It sounds so much better than the real story, which is that I went from job to job, got bored very easily, ran into lots of resistance when I tried to change things and suggest that they could do it better, and when I got frustrated enough, I’d leave and go to the next interesting thing.
Being the rebel, I lived the words of Winston Churchill: ‘Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.’
But underlying all of it were my two driving personal motivations. I craved solving problems and I truly wanted to make a difference in the world. Here’s an interesting fact: studies have shown that women naturally possess higher levels of agility, resilience, acceptance and empathy, all qualities that are essential in a social structure but only recently have been identified as essential in good business practice. These qualities, interestingly, also define a lot of entrepreneurs.
I have these qualities in spades, but in my early years, that didn’t provide me with a clear career path. Only later did I learn they would serve me well in doing my own businesses. But back to entrepreneurs.
I discovered this tribe in the US in 1999 when I decided to leave Australia after 10 years to find out what all this dot com IT stuff was all about. I was feeling a little bit without a country, but when I arrived in Seattle, I truly did find my tribe and they were called entrepreneurs.
The next eight years were busy, but they were blissful for me. I was with people who were solving problems, which is my favourite thing to do, with this thing called technology, which was a toolkit that could do almost anything. So, I jumped in, boots and all, built one company that crashed and burned along with all the other dot coms; I became CEO of a bioengineering company that grew until it was acquired; and then founding my next company, which was the curated online wine company. I loved my product, and then selling that to come back to Australia.
My point here is that the world and now your world is not only changing faster than you can even imagine, but it’s offering unlimited opportunity due to one thing: technology. Technology has revolutionised knowledge. We have at our fingertips the ability to do everything from creating robotic limbs that respond to brain signals, vehicles that drive themselves, ability to photograph black holes in the universe. We can produce more, predict health outcomes, offer solutions with AI and machine learning, feed nations. Technology can even predict what I will be buying next week at Nordstrom’s in Seattle when I land on Thursday afternoon. That is scary.
We’re living in a time of extraordinary innovation, limited only by our own imaginations. So, I propose to you, graduates, that we all have to at least think like entrepreneurs. You’re entering a world that will leave you breathless with the speed of change and probably confused at times with the lack of definition of what your role is in it. Yet each of you is better prepared for this journey than ever before.
You were born into the digital revolution, you’re embedded in it and you’ve gained the tools that you need to thrive in it, but tools without purpose are meaningless, and if you’re not solving a problem with these tools, be they science, chemistry, technology, engineering and even law, then they become simply a language that you have learned.
Complicating this, technology has moved faster than our ability to responsibly understand, use and protect ourselves from its abuse. So yes, ethics matter. Sadly, the world’s lost its way in many things – human rights, the right to food, shelter, education. We’ve abused our earth, ignoring decades of signs that we were poisoning our air, water and soil. We wage war for profit and the innocent are the collateral damage.
Now, I say this not to depress you but to inspire you. These are all new challenges that you as graduates are facing and now have the amazing opportunity to solve. This is what defines your jobs of the future. And you’re so lucky to live in a world that embraces innovation, problem-solvers and appreciates the power of technology. You are the future solutions and I ask you to be that change that you want to see. Turn ‘what do I do now?’ into ‘how do I make the world better?’
In closing, I couldn’t resist some blatant self-indulgence – to give you some advice. Don’t be apathetic. Human rights are our problem. Hunger is our problem. Climate change is our problem. Baby boomers did not have it easier than you, so please stop saying that, because it really hurts my feelings.
Equality is not solved. See it, call people on it, act on it, don’t just talk about it. Social media is not a source of truth – do your own work to find truth. And vote. Make your leaders accountable. Better yet, you run for office, because we know the bar is really low right now,
And lastly, to quote one of my favourite people, Gloria Steinem, ‘The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.’
Now, go change the world, graduating class of 2019.
Thank you.
About the Speaker
Topaz Conway is currently an angel investor in multiple start-ups in Australia and the United States of America. She has worked in hi-tech, biotech, manufacturing and founded an internet wine company. Her skills and passion have been in guiding entrepreneurs through strategy, investment, development (including regulatory approvals), manufacturing, product launch and exit, in the USA and Australian markets.
With this unique background including earlier years in the bio-medical translation space in Australia at the Garvan Institute in Sydney and Deputy Director at the Mater Medical Research Institute in Brisbane, Topaz has worked on multiple sides of product development and commercialisation.
Across the USA and Australia, she has been an Associate with venture capital firm Pacific Horizon Ventures in Seattle and Chief Executive Officer of Cytopeia, a USA bio-engineering company which she took from product launch to ultimate exit.
Topaz is a Commercialisation Adviser for Accelerating Commercialisation, is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, is past Executive Chair of CleanSpace Pty Ltd, co-founder and past Chair of the Springboard Enterprise Programs Australia and currently is non-Executive Director of StartupAus, Cicada Innovations and Alberta Research & Innovation Council. She also sits on multiple Advisories including: Australian Industry Innovation and Science Women's Advisory Roundtable and CEBIT [SEE-BIT] Women in Tech Advisory.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of the Pacific, and a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from Oregon State University.
