10/11/2024 Bruce Adams
On September 18, Thomas M. Siebel spoke with students via a fireside chat at the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) 28th annual Reflections | Projections Computing Conference, the Midwest’s largest student-run tech conference organized by Illinois CS students and held at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.
Written by Bruce Adams
On September 18, Thomas M. Siebel spoke with Grainger College of Engineering computer science students via a fireside chat from a room where his four degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign were prominently displayed. He was speaking at the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) 28th annual Reflections | Projections Computing Conference, the Midwest’s largest student-run tech conference held at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.
Watch Tom Siebel video (46 minutes)
Siebel introduced himself by saying, “I am a computer scientist.” Describing his first job out of college, he recalled that “I had actually never heard of Oracle” but was persuaded to join the startup by the “very bright people with high levels of energy” who worked there. “Turned out to be a pretty good idea,” he noted.
At Oracle, Siebel became interested in applying information technology to the “largely untouched” sales, marketing, and customer service areas. Oracle founder Larry Ellison was not. Siebel founded Siebel Systems in July 1993, and by 2000, the customer relations management company had $2 billion in annual sales. In 2005, Oracle bought Siebel Systems for $5.8 billion.
“Not being very retiring,” Siebel then founded C3.ai, an artificial intelligence software platform, anticipating that computer technology would turn towards elastic cloud computing, the internet of things, big data and predictive analytics– “designing a platform instead of applications,” as he put it to his student audience. Running company services “on bare metal” was a “pretty neat trick,” as he put it. Now publicly owned, the company aspires to “maintain a market leadership globally in enterprise AI,” Siebel said. “I think there’s some risk we might actually do that.”
Siebel concluded that “it has been the experience of a lifetime to play the game.” He described himself as having “a seat at the table during one of the most interesting economic transformations in history.”
When a student asked Siebel if he was 19 now and if he would still go to college, he replied in a single word: “Absolutely.” His advice for dealing with setbacks? “The world is about setbacks. You need to be on the balls of your feet; you need to have knees bent.” That’s from a man who recalled regularly participating in the tae kwon do club as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois.
Siebel described sitting on a bench on the Quad reading and roaming the library stacks as vivid memories of his college years, saying, “I have a book in my hand all the time.” Siebel notes that he reads about history to expand his understanding of the past as he prepares for the future and urges his audience to do so. “Learning is a lifelong opportunity.” He described the pressure on students to study STEM subjects exclusively as “a bunch of bunk,” urging students to “get engaged in the field that you’re passionate about. It doesn’t have to be computer science; it doesn’t have to be AI. If you’re interested in the classics, study the classics. If you’re interested in art or literature, study art or literature. If it’s religious studies, philosophy do that.”
He urged his audience to “develop proficiency in the language so that you can continue to learn, continue to apply, and then you can play the game at whatever level you choose to play it,” He called Illinois a “place of substantial excellence,” urging his audience to take advantage of the university’s offerings.
Watch the Tom Siebel Fireside Chat at the 2024 Reflections | Projections Computing Conference video.