Managing Director Consumer Business, Carsales.com
Ceremony: 10 October 2019, 10:30am - Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology
Speech
Pro-Chancellor, Provost, presiding Dean, University Secretary, Chair of the Academic Board, members of the university Executive Council, staff, family, friends, and graduates, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. It is an honour.
I want to begin this address by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which the UTS campus stands, the Gadigal People of the Eora nation, and pay my respect to the elders past, present, and emerging.
Before I start this speech, I must say I have two degrees from UTS, but this is my first graduation ceremony. I missed my graduation ceremony both times, because speeches are a bit boring. And for the next 10 minutes that may happen to you. I will try my best to make sure, if you give me your focus for the next 10 minutes, maybe one of you will be inspired to build a billion dollar company, employ the rest of you in that organisation. There is a chance that that might happen. So I ask you for next 10 minutes of your life, and if you could please give me that focus.
10 years ago, the top 10 companies in the world by market capitalisation, only one of those companies was a technology company. Move on to today, seven out of those 10 companies are technology companies. The world is moving fast, and it's bringing amazing opportunities for those in technology. There is simply no better time to be a UTS engineering or technology graduate.
With inspirational alumni of UTS, such as multi-billion tech company founder Richard White, the greatest showman and generally a very nice person, Hugh Jackman, and our current shadow education minister Tanya Plibersek, you are in good company. So congratulations. As a proud alumni of UTS myself, I subscribe to the core values of UTS, of entrepreneurship and innovation. I believe these values are core to creating a positive future for Australia as a whole.
Now, a little bit to my story. I started with car sales 11 years ago. 11 years ago I got this offer from this little start-up called carsales.com. At the time I was working for a large organisation, a large corporate with 10000 employees. And this little start-up with 50 people offered me a job. I was in this situation where my status quo was a really comfortable job, good salary, life is going on really well, nothing needs to change. There was a massive risk in changing anything.
But at the time, that company, that large corporate, had values that were contrary to my own values. So I made a decision, I took the risk, and I moved on from a 10000-person company to a 50-person company. And since then I've been part of this incredible growth that has become carsales.com, present in 10 countries around the world, multi-billion dollar organisation, ASX top 100. The organisation that I left, sadly, rapidly declined. And they declined because they were looking at the past rather than the future. They were too interested in protecting the present rather than boldly embracing the future. This is somewhat of a theme in my speech today.
No doubt the next phase of your life will be very different to the world of learning and discovery that you've embarked on for the last many, many years. We live in a time of incredible change. We've sort of moved on from hunting and gathering to cultivating and harvesting to the industrial age, then to the knowledge age. And more recently, to what people called Industrial Revolution 4.0. While this brings many risks to our society, if we carefully navigate Industrial Revolution 4.0, it brings many, many more opportunities, especially for those in tech. But what is really important is that you never stop learning. As the Pro-Chancellor correctly said, your learning journey has not ended, the learning journey has only started. The most valuable skill I ever learned at UTS, it wasn't the signal theory subject or the electrical engineering one or programming in one language or another, it was how to learn and how to learn fast.
I'm probably double the average age of this room, which, by the way, makes you 10 years old. But regardless, my learning journey has not stopped. Up until last year, I was still studying. Today, the barriers to disrupt a business are extremely low. Back in the time, maybe a hundred years ago, when you established a $10 billion business, it was almost thought of it would be impossible to disrupt the business. But there are so many organisations around us, like Kodak and Yahoo, that at one stage we thought no one could disrupt these organisations. But yet these organisations have been disrupted by small startups.
What that means is you, yourself as fresh graduates, have the opportunity to benefit from these low barriers to disruption. Organisations who are not embracing this disruption, who are not embracing innovation, are slowly dying, creating an opportunity for fresh graduates, fresh thinking like yours to take advantage. So I encourage you to jump into something that you are passionate about and create something that disrupts an outdated business model.
For those who haven't heard, the fourth industrial revolution broadly encapsulates new trends such as artificial intelligence (A.I.), Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain and much more. These trends will fundamentally change the way we live and work. Combined with the challenges of climate change and the advent of this Industrial Revolution 4.0, our dependence as a country, Australia's dependence as a country on mining cannot be the future of a sustainable and high wage economy alone. We must diversify. And the emerging industries that recognise the potential of this fourth industrial revolution, which by the way all of you are equipped to take advantage of, they should be our focus.
In this world, to use a mining analogy, gold is no longer found in the ground. It is in this room. It is all of you. It is the emerging leaders and innovators. You are the gold. You will put Australia on the map. You will put, if you are an international student, your country on the map. And most importantly, you will put UTS on the map.
But to succeed in this new world we must change our mindset as a nation. We must embrace failure as the first step towards success and build upon our fundamentals, as the Pro-Chancellor said, of hard work and resilience. And this is one of my thousand failures that I'm about to describe. Many years ago when I first migrated to Australia, I had completed year 12. That year of my life, when I did year 12 overseas, was a fun-filled year full of distractions. And academically I didn't do as well. Somehow fun-filled distractions are inversely proportional to your academic score.
I chose to repeat that year when I came here to Australia. I repeated year 12. Because I failed, I repeated year 12. And I repeated year 12 because I wanted the wide choices of courses that I wanted to do. I wanted the choices of scholarships. I wanted the choices of courses that I wanted to pursue. After that one year, of a lot of hard work, I got into UTS. I chose engineering. But what I learned was, the failure wasn't the issue. The real merit was in getting back after you failed. And to me, that is far more important and shows your character, what you do after failure. You will have thousands of failures in your life. And if you do not have failures in your life, you are not trying hard enough.
Besides embracing failure, another key in my life, and advice to you, success comes from the aspiration of wanting to be the world's best, the world's best at something. No matter how small or big that something is, each one of you is capable of that. It doesn't matter whether you got a pass, a credit distinction, or high distinction, each one of you is capable of being the world's best at something.
The key is to understand your strengths and your weaknesses, but then to double down on your strengths. And to fill your weaknesses by surrounding yourself with people who complement you. I strongly believe that you are a product of the choices that you make. If these choices are consistent with the values that you hold, you are then authentic. And Pro-Chancellor mentioned authenticity. It's absolute key to being the world's best. Because you can only be the world's best at something that you believe in. If you like cricket and you want to be the world's best at soccer, it probably won't happen. You should play cricket. I do play cricket. Yeah, I'm not the world's best cricketer though.
I've been very lucky to have gone from being a migrant to this country to now a leading role in one of the top organisations in Australia. And I'll tell you the secret to my success. The secret to my success was not any technical knowledge. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It was the technical knowledge of others. I've always employed people who've been better than me. I've always been the dumbest in my organisation. Everyone that I've employed has been smarter than me. That has been my superpower. I believe everyone has a superpower. You probably just haven't discovered it yet. And the same superpower tells me that everyone in this room, each one of you is capable of being the world's best at something.
I want to encourage all of you to ask yourself the question, what is that one thing that you're most passionate about? Something that you in future can be world-class at. You may know the answer to that today, or you may know that answer in two or three or five years’ time. No matter when you know the answer, start a business in that field. And if that's too hard, join someone who has the same aspiration. There is a lot to be enthusiastic about as you move to the next phase of your life. Companies that are excelling are looking for people just like you, especially in technology. Ideas are waiting to be crystallised. Start-ups are waiting to be ignited by you. And one of you is going to create a billion dollar business. I just don't know who. And most importantly, the world is waiting to be changed by innovators and leaders like yourself.
Congratulations to getting to this stage of your learning. I know it's been many, many hard years. From now on, you will be UTS alumni. You will join the rest of the inspirational UTS alumni that I described at the start of the speech. You have the opportunity to show your UTS enterprise to the world. And in time, I'm confident, if you back yourself ... You've got to back yourself. If you back yourself, you work hard, you are resilient, you get up after that failure and you try, so you do fail a few times, you get up after that failure and try again, you will in time, each one of you, become the world's best. Thank you, and congratulations.
About the Speaker
Ajay is the Managing Director Consumer Business for Carsales.com. His role entails running the consumer group businesses for Carsales and operational responsibilities for customer service, data science, group product management, user experience and a number of other support functions at the Carsales.com Group.
Ajay has a keen interest in the commercial application of technologies that can change the world. He has over 18 years of experience in digital businesses. During this time, Ajay has held several consulting and leadership positions in banking, not for profit and media organisations.
He serves as a non-executive director on a number of boards including Tyresales.com.au, Redbook Inspect, Stratton Finance and Myeloma Australia.
Ajay is an Executive Sponsor for the Stanford University’s Digital Cities Program. In 2015, he was awarded the Australian Chief Information Officer of the Year by CEO Magazine Limited.
Ajay holds both a Bachelor of Engineering in Telecommunications Engineering and a Masters of Engineering Management from UTS. He also lectured for a number of years here at UTS. Ajay recently completed the Advanced Management Program from Harvard Business School.
He is a member of the Australia Computer Society.