Steve Blank opened his speech by telling the story of dropping out of Michigan State University after a single semester, hitchhiking to Miami in the middle of a Michigan winter, and stumbling into a job loading racehorses onto cargo planes at the airport. It was the airplanes, not the horses, that captured his imagination — and he began hanging around the repair shop, volunteering to help, reading equipment manuals late into the night. The irony, Blank told graduates, was that if he hadn't dropped out of college, he never would have found his passion. His entire career — from electronics technician to startup CEO to the father of the Lean Startup movement — grew from that initial spark of curiosity at the Miami airport. He shared this as a 'secret' that graduates had paid for their degrees to hear: the thing that would set them apart wasn't credentials but genuine enthusiasm.