On a Friday afternoon, look at this crowd,

that too before a long weekend, and I know all of you

have come here just to listen to me, right?

I know you didn't.

My name is Ravi Pendse.

I have the privilege and honor to serve

as Vice President and Chief Information Officer, which

means I actually work for all of you.

It's my pleasure to welcome you to our Distinguished Lecture

Series, Leadership in Technology,

and the goal of this series is really

to bring transformational technology leaders to Brown

campus to help engage with us in a dialogue to help and enhance

our amazing students-- and so many of you

are here today, that's great-- our wonderful faculty,

and our dedicated and innovative staff.

Did you use a smartphone today to perhaps

pay for that cup of coffee or to download music and listen

to music from Spotify or perhaps to do many different things,

and you're shaking your heads, right?

If you did, chances are some of the information

that you consume came from servers made by Dell.

Most businesses and universities, Brown included,

are exploring ways to mine and analyze data

and to derive insights from data.

Did you know that a lot of data analytics that

are powered at, say, Netflix or Hulu

and many other businesses, come from engines-- data analysis

engines-- actually made by Dell?

If you're thinking about information security

and privacy-- and I think about it every day--

one of the strongest and largest security profiles-- a company

and products-- come from Dell in the company

called SecureWorks, and did you know

they're right here in Providence, employing hundreds

of cyber security professionals?

And so great opportunities to engage and partner.

And oh, by the way, if I didn't mention,

Dell happens to also make some pretty good desktops

and nifty laptops.

So talk about imagining.

Imagine you are 19.

For me that imagination is not so easy, but for many of you,

you are already 19-- that age frame.

Imagine you're 19, sitting in your dorm room.

You have $1,000, and instead of going to your next vacation

you decide, you know what?

I'm going to start a PC company, and I'm

going to take on the likes of IBM.

That is the story if Michael Dell, our speaker today.

Michael Dell, who is the Chairman and CEO of Dell,

founded his company in 1984 in a dorm room

at University of Texas.

Michael's vision for technology fundamentally

changed that technology business.

He was the first one to establish a company that

was directly marketing to consumers over initially--

believe it or not-- over phone, and then later

on using the web.

That was the first company.

Only eight years after he started the company, in 1992,

Michael became the youngest CEO to be on the Fortune 500 list.

Michael and his wife, Susan, understand the importance

of giving back.

In 1998, they established Michael and Susan Dell

foundation to provide philanthropic support

to a variety of global causes.

To date, they have given-- donated over $1 billion,

and their generosity continues.

In June 2014, Michael was named the United Nations Foundations

first Global Advocate for Entrepreneurship.

He serves on many, many boards and committees

and too many to list here, but I wanted

to share some other facts that you may not be aware.

Michael tends to be incredibly competitive-- surprise,

surprise, right-- and sometimes impatient.

When he was in third grade, he applied for a GED.

Think about that.

Third grade.

I know.

He was an over-achiever.

What can I say?

He's incredibly competitive, as I told you,

and on a given day bikes to work for about 22 miles every day.

Very active on Fitbit as well, so typically leading

among his Fitbit friends.

I did a few miles this morning and decided to check out

how Michael was doing.

Bad idea.

I lost miserably.

Now, one area that I'm kind of competitive,

I'm coming close to Michael, is in the area

of Twitter followers.

We are only a million apart.

I have about 200 followers, and you can guess how many he has.

It is my pleasure and honor to introduce

Michael Dell, an amazing CEO, a caring and compassionate

leader, and a friend.

Michael.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for the kind introduction, Ravi.

Welcome, Michael.

I know there are lot of institutions and organizations

which obviously want you to go and have a conversation,

so I'm so glad that you took time

to come to Brown University.

Thrilled to be here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Just so you know, this is going to be an interactive event.

Michael and I are going to engage in some dialogue

initially.

Later, you will have an opportunity to, of course,

ask Michael questions.

There are microphones on both sides that you can use,

and I'll let you know when you can

start lining up so we can use your time

and Michael's time efficiently.

Please note, however, that this event is being live

streamed as well as recorded, just so you know.

So Michael, you want to get started?

Great.

All right.

So Michael, as we talked about the fact

that you started this company when you were barely

the age of many students here in our audience,

from your dorm room, so can you recap for us

how the journey began?

How did you go from being a pre-med student,

as we know, to suddenly deciding on starting a PC company

and taking on the likes of IBM?

Can you share some thoughts with us, please?

Sure.

Well, I could tell you I didn't have this in mind

when I started.

I didn't know that I would be here today

and that all this would happen.

What was happening in the early 1980s was,

it was sort of the dawn of the microprocessor age,

and I had been kind of fortunate in that when

I was in seventh grade I was in this math class,

and this is even before there was such

a thing as a personal computer.

There were teletype terminals, and you could write a program

on the teletype terminal, you send it off

to a bigger computer and the answer would come back,

and I was just kind of fascinated by that

and enthralled by that, so I started learning

everything I could about this.

And when I was in high school, some people

would like to soup up their cars.

I was souping up computers, so I was playing around

with microprocessors and circuit boards

and trying to understand all that,

and one of the things I saw was that the way the products were

sold, it took a long time for the latest,

best technology to get to the actual user,

and it cost a significant multiple of the actual cost

of the components.

And to me it seemed kind of a criminal that it took so long,

and why does it cost-- if it's only $500

worth of parts, how come they're selling it for $3,000?

And so the initial business was really not necessarily in PCs.

It was in upgrade kits for PCs and then very shortly

thereafter, we started making our own PCs.

And just a little bit backwards, I

was a freshman at the University of Texas, and I was pre-med,

and I had organic chemistry, and this is really hard stuff,

and I'm thinking, there's got to be an easier way

to make a living than this stuff.

I'm sure a lot of Brown students who take

Orgo class can relate to you.

And I kind of saw this opportunity.

I said, you know, I'm going to take this business from my dorm

room and give it a go, and it worked out pretty well.

If anybody had checked his net worth today,

it has worked out really well, I would say.

So that's a great story.

But, as you indicated, you were a pre-med student,

and then I know you decided to start this company,

and I know you had come from a family

of medical practitioners.

How did that conversation go with your parents

when you made that phone call or face to face?

It was not pretty.

It did not go well.

My parents had been sort of the first in their families

to go to college and to them higher

education was an absolute must, and how could you possibly

compete in the world and do well without those skills

and give up those opportunities?

And so I had a pretty big disagreement with my parents

and did what most young people do when they

disagree with their parents.

I just did whatever I wanted to do.

So we kind of agreed to disagree.

The school I went to, you could take a semester off,

and so I started the company and work got off

to pretty good start and so I continued.

The business grew about 80% a year

for the first eight years in a row, compounded,

and then it grew about 60% a year

for the six years after that, compounded.

And if you are good at math, you know

that that's like $10 billion plus dollars, so--

Nice.

Not too shabby.

--we expanded quite fast in terms

of new geographies, new countries, new types

of customers, and certainly it was a very exciting time

and continues to be exciting.

Obviously the name Dell makes sense,

considering that's your last name,

but I have some interesting story--

heard about interesting stories about how

you came about the name Dell.

Can you share that story behind the name Dell

with our audience?

Sure.

Well, I had this customer who was a lawyer when

I was in college, and I was doing about $50,000 or $60,000

of business a month in my dorm room,

and this customer, who was a lawyer,

said you should probably-- you've

got to adjust for inflation too.

This was 1983, '84.

So the customer is a lawyer, and he says,

you should probably incorporate your business, and I said,

why do I want to do that?

And so he kind of goes through this pitch

and why you should incorporate, and afterwards I said,

what's this going to cost me?

And he said, well, I'll tell you what.

I need another hard drive for my little law practice

here, so why don't you install a hard drive for me

in my computer here, and I'll do the incorporation for you.

We'll make a trade.

I said, OK, that sounds pretty good.

So I had set up the company as a "doing business as,"

as a sole proprietor, and the name of the company

was PCs Limited, so it was Michael,

doing business as PCs Limited.

So I go to the lawyer's office, I'm installing the hard drive,

and he says, OK, I'm going to work on this.

Come back in the day or two, I'll have it all done.

So I come back and he's says, well, there's

a couple problems.

First is, we couldn't register the name PCs Limited

because it's too generic of a name,