Bill Gates

Harvard University, June 7, 2007 Bill Gates opens with the best joke a dropout could make, "Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree," then turns the speech into an admission. His one big regret, he says, is that he left Harvard "with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world." The rest is an argument that the graduates should take on those inequities, quoting a line from his mother, "From those to whom much is given, much is expected." Pair it with Steve Jobs's Stanford speech: two tech founders, two years apart, with completely different ideas of what a life is for.