Erika Mobley '86

Thanks very much to the class of 2009 for inviting me here today. I will do my best to keep things interesting because I know from experience that hearing even this much gives you hope that this might, in fact, be interesting, while also giving me a better shot at holding your attention for just a little while.

I confess, I thought about making my speech a required app download from our iTunes App Store. Not only would this have made my role here easy, but it would also give my company a big sales spike in the Boston area. In case you’re wondering, I decided otherwise, so no…. there is NOT an app for that.

I will pretend that it wasn’t that long ago that I was sitting where you’re sitting and feeling how you probably now feel: excited, distracted, joyful and anxious all at once. You’re trying to focus but barely listening with so much going on today that’s competing for your time and attention. What’s worse, there is also technology to compete with: you’re able to SMS and “Twitter” your friends right now or silently don those ubiquitous white earbuds to tune things out. The ones made, rather ironically, by the very company I work for!

In considering what I wanted to say to you today, I realized that the “10 things you should know” speech model really only comes off if you’re famous. According to my mother—and only to my mother—I am “almost famous” so permit me just three pieces of advice from my own experience. If that still sounds untenable, think of this entire speech as roughly the equivalent duration of four 5MB digital song downloads—LEGAL ones—before you’re free to go.

#1:  Don’t buy into formulas [for living your life] too quickly or too easily.  Bottom line, there is more than one way to go about doing what you want in life. I’m a firm believer in this probably because I’ve lived it. To this end, I need to come clean: I lied to you. I am not an attorney. Well, not in the traditional sense of the profession if you’re imaging a trial defense lawyer or corporate law firm partner. I went to law school, took the Bar, passed it, and completely defied the then-unwritten rule that my next choice was to teach law or become an associate at a law firm.

I am a lawyer if you want to be technical, and I needed to be technical to have a concise title to put down on the commencement invitation. But I’m not one for titles, and I’ve struggled to classify myself into any one of them throughout my life.

I work for Apple and have worn several hats utilizing my legal background in my many years there, but I have never been in the legal department, and this works just fine for me. While I do appreciate knowing how to draft and analyze an iron-clad agreement, I also like the creative side of crafting business deals from square one.

Presently, I oversee the App Store business, managing our strategy and negotiations with music labels, film studios and TV networks developing apps for the iPhone and iPod touch. For most of my professional life I’ve worked in high-tech startups like Palm, RealNetworks, and Amazon.com. They’re all different companies that have one shared standard: no rulebook. No handbook or reference manual on how to invent what we’re doing tomorrow, and how any of what we’re doing today may play out ten years from now. Of course, there are pros and cons to this. The job is challenging and demands longs days and hard work, but I enjoy that it’s something a little unconventional.

My difficulty with formulas dates back to school days.

I came to Milton as a day student in Class III and was lucky enough to call it “home.” And I do mean “home.” As a day student, I was often confused for a boarder because of my love of on-campus activities and frequent use of Hathaway House and Goodwin, (yes, I know that’s dating me) and particularly during track season.

Academically, creative writing and English courses with my advisor J.C. Smith were fun and came naturally to me. In Spanish, I aced the “ser versus estar” use case, but when it came to subjects like science or math, life was brutal. And, it seemed, remedial.

My closest friends were always one course ahead of me. When I was taking Algebra, they had Algebra 2.  They told me how “easy” I’d find Geometry, but when I took it the following year, I was ready to hit my head against the wall over the Pythagorean theory and “proofs.”

I played the saxophone in the orchestra alongside many talented, classically trained musicians. Not surprisingly, the likes of Brahms, Mendelssohn and Bartok didn’t exactly compose prolifically for an e-flat alto sax, so I had a good amount of time between notes to tap my foot on beat and relish how offbeat it was to play Romanian Folk Dances on sax, yet fun just the same.

The point wasn’t how often I played, but that it was considered okay, even cool, at Milton for someone who wants to play sax in the classical orchestra or be a day student with a boarder’s mentality.

At Yale, I enjoyed the ritual known as “shopping period”—a week-long open house at the start of each semester that let you “try before you buy,” so to speak. You could sit in on as many classes as you wished without hemming yourself into one area too quickly. This encouraged me to test-drive courses I wouldn’t otherwise dare register for sight unseen. To this day, I can thank shopping period for my love of history of architecture and appreciation for quirky comedic Russian plays by Gogol.

I settled into a major I enjoyed: American Studies/Literature.

Still, two years into college, I had a stronger grasp of what I did NOT want to do rather than what I did.

I watched as some classmates naturally gravitated toward known talents and interests, but I stubbornly resisted the idea that after 20 years of great inter-disciplinary education, it all had to boil down to one defining choice. It wasn’t that I didn’t like anything. I liked too many things to narrow the choices. When I finally decided to go to law school, people would usually ask whether I’d majored in political science. “No, I’m an English major,” I’d respond. This usually prompted a reply like “you’re supposed to major in poly sci if you want to go to law school.”

I did go to law school and did not switch my major to accommodate the common theory. And in law school, I came to two realizations rather quickly: One, that I valued understanding our legal system for my own practical application. And two, that I did NOT want to be a lawyer. At least not in the conventional sense of what we all define a lawyer to be. Don’t get me wrong:  I was happy for classmates who landed lofty law firm gigs with lots of perks and high salaries. I still knew this pattern wasn’t for me.

I researched options for someone who wanted to apply law into something a little more unique. Timing, luck, and a great deal of hard work led me to a part-time job at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) while in law school, seeding an interest on international anti-piracy, law and digital technology. When I graduated and passed the Bar, I opted to pursue this path. It was a fairly new area at the time, but that’s partly why I gravitated toward it. It defied definition.

Who would have known, least of all me, that my first job out of law school would be working on international anti-piracy concerns for the RIAA, traveling to far away places like Brazil and Paraguay to oversee trade and enforcement talks with U.S. and foreign diplomatic officials, and even traveling with members of FBI anti-narcotics team who were newly tasked with relieving the spread of global intellectual property piracy affecting the worldwide movie, music and software industries.

I never looked forward to the formulaic path that others choose for me, and I’ve never looked back on what I have done with regret.

It’s easy for any of us to get wrapped up in anxiety that everyone else has things all figured out, and you’re the one off course.

Stay in your own lane. And while you can’t do everything, of course, don’t lose sight of the things you really love doing.

This brings me to point number two of three. (Yes, you’re nearly there.)

#2: Don’t downplay your own experiences and don’t forget what you already know. My early experience at RIAA led me next to a new challenge out West at the start of the dot com/high tech era.

By then, I’d gotten pretty good at understanding the business issues, but craved a deeper technical knowledge of the industry. The problem was my mental block on anything outside liberal arts. It brought me back to my Milton days of needing a tutor to learn C-code and DOS. It was daunting. And it didn’t help matters that there were few female colleagues or mentors, and virtually no one of color.

Day after day, I’d often sit among teams of brilliant engineers speaking their brilliant engineering speak. I was very interested in the intricacies of all they knew about streaming media technologies, but more than a little intimidated by their vaster knowledge in these areas. I remember being in a meeting one day about simultaneous multiple integrated language or SMIL, as we all affectionately know it, of course. Terms like Secure Socket Layer and X code were being bandied about by my colleagues as if they were normal “how’s the weather?” parlance.

Then it clicked. I had always felt slightly intimidated viewing them as engineers because I didn’t “speak the language,” yet I was always good at learning new languages in school since that was an interest of mine. If I could just shift my mindset to the idea that this was, in essence, a new foreign language, I would excel in understanding any concept or terminology that surfaced in this new industry. It worked. For me, anyway, to the extent I have thus far.

My point? Don’t forget the skill sets you possess. There will be many titles and positions you’ll pave your own way into one day. Just don’t expect the path to always go smoothly. As a lawyer, it was no easy task in my early job interviews to prove to hiring managers that I was capable of taking on business roles.

Recruiters were often dismayed that I didn’t conform to their standard model of what they were looking for. It’s as if the entirety of my interests and experience leading up to that point fell away at the moment I was granted a law degree.

The first position I saw in the emerging dot com world required background in the music industry, marketing and analytical skills, all of which I had. But all they saw were the letters J.D. at the end of my name. “Oh, but you’re a LAWYER!” said the job recruiter somewhat ruefully. “Sorry, then this won’t apply to you.”

I had to convince people that a law degree was a valuable asset, not a deficit. I realized the challenge wasn’t really about my J.D. lacking inherent value, it was that it defied most people’s expectations of what a law degree equated to in the job market.

You may find these heightened expectations yourself in whatever you pursue. Be open, even welcoming to doing things in an unconventional way.

#3: Move out of your comfort zone. Be adaptable and open to paraphrase. Exactly one year ago today (June 5, 2008) I was completing a two-year international job assignment running the iTunes Store for Australia and New Zealand, living in Sydney and enjoying a wonderful existence working Down Under as the sole American among my team of Aussies and Kiwis in our regional office.

I didn’t know exactly what role I’d have upon my return to Apple headquarters; my previous post had been filled when I left for Australia. But I knew I wanted to look to whatever the next big challenge was facing our industry, and apply my experiences to date.

I realize it’s hard for any of you to say exactly where you will all be or what you will be doing in four years after college or more after graduate school. The world today is a funny place, and I don’t mean in the “ha ha” sense lately. Long-established companies that were once fixtures of our society are gone. The economy is in a free fall, gas prices are at their highest levels, and thanks to congestion in the air and a burning atmosphere, we’ll all need SPF 150 soon as the ozone layer falls from the sky.

Of course, this is a notably challenging time, and I don’t mean to downplay that reality, but I do feel we all tend to get sucked into the void of crisis and overlook that it is precisely in times of crisis when some of the best new ways forward are realized.

I will only remind you that in 1986 when I graduated, there was no such thing as FaceBook, and if you “poked” someone you’d get the wrath of the Disciplinary Committee,  not an enthusiastic response from your friends on that social network. There was no Amazon.com and Google wasn’t a noun or a verb. Worms and viruses were things to avoid at summer camp, not idle threats to your corporation.

The host of companies that now reign today barely existed. Blackberries, Blu-ray and Apple were not the norm.

Nor were color-coded social causes: no RED or PINK campaign at large, and no promise of Green technology. The world seemed fixed in black and white, and so did the choices of what we were all to accomplish. Today things seem much grayer.

But while things look grim and dreary out there in the world ahead, know that you’re at the helm of a new era and some of you will lead us down the path of whatever the next big thing is.

You now have a great degree from a highly sought after academic institution, and you’re all going on to great places. Understand, this does not guarantee you many entitlements. But with hard work, and the right mindset, smart people like you can accomplish anything.

Break that association between what you think you should do for others, and what you really want to do for yourself. You have to be honest with yourself about what you enjoy doing versus what you would do in life only because it makes the most money or sounds best at social functions. I once read, “If you are not genuinely honest with yourself, you can’t learn, and if you worry about what others think of you, you will be living their version of your life and not yours.”

I hope you’ll leave part of yourself receptive to the idea of change; while it can be scary, it is also exciting to know that the world is a clean slate, limited only by your ability to innovate and adapt. Congratulations, and my very best to you all for the future.

[Back to Graduation 2009]