My Speech at the Carlson School of Managment

Last week I was asked to speak to a class of junior and senior marketing students at the Carlson School of Management.  Attached is a terrible picture of about a third of the class. 

While the reason for the invitation was really based in the school fishing for a big charitable donation from me, it was still an honor to talk to the kids.  I spoke to them about my company, my career story, the ecommerce industry, and offered them advice as they begin their careers.  I felt the talk went fairly well, and I intend on building out some of my speech for content on this site - look for that coming soon. 

My overall impressions of the students were as follows: 

• I was impressed in their engagement, and how they really poked at me with questions.  I was clearly not just some blow off day; they really wanted to learn from me. 
• I was also impressed with the technology with which they were armed.  I would have loved to have been able to go to school similarly outfitted, although I likely would have wasted a ton of time on video games. 
• Finally, I was impressed with their intelligence.  They knew their subject matter well, and clearly were true students of business. 

It was really fun to engage with them, and since my company leveraged my speaking to conduct on-campus hiring, I'm might be engaging with some of them again in fairly short order.