Tom SiebelFounder, Chairman & CEO

History does not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes. Studying the history of technology and science allowed me to make well-informed guesses about what would happen next based on what happened prior. A historical foundation provides essential context that a purely technical education lacks.

American exceptionalism was built on an exceptional educational system. The Puritans established schoolrooms that taught classical literature, philosophy, and history to ordinary citizens, producing leaders who could write eloquently and think critically.

The Morrill Act formed land-grant institutions like Berkeley, Illinois, Cornell, and Purdue. Previously, higher education was restricted to the sons of the wealthy landed class. Land-grant universities opened education in agriculture, engineering, science, and medicine to everyone, fueling entrepreneurship and greatness.

It comes down to our core experiments: freedom of religion, individual liberty, a representational republican government, and a public commitment to education. By keeping government limited and letting people pursue their ideas, we create the perfect environment for continuous reinvention.

We build AI products that optimize processes, forecast demand, and deliver high-quality public services at lower costs. Applying generative AI to benefits programs like Medicaid and Medicare can significantly reduce operational fraud and improve constituent satisfaction.

Silicon Valley did not invent AI. Almost everything we know about supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning was invented by John McCarthy at Princeton in 1950. It simply took seventy years to develop the cheap computing and storage capacity to run those systems.

Agentic AI represents a massive leap forward. Large language models and transformers allow software agents to perform complex, multi-step reasoning. This technology changes how we work, govern, conduct warfare, and engage socially, accelerating innovation at a breathtaking rate.

Within a short time, six billion smartphone users will have the sum of human knowledge available in their local languages. This access will boost productivity and global gross domestic product, helping families solve local problems in agriculture, medicine, and clean water.

When I joined Oracle as a small startup, relational database technology was just a theory from academic research. Commercializing it was a major gamble, but it was a calculated risk based on my graduate research in database theory.

We founded Siebel Systems to apply computer technology to sales, marketing, and customer service, naming the category customer relationship management. Every expert insisted there was no market for it, but I believed the economics of information technology made it inevitable.

In 2009, before major cloud platforms were established, we saw that cloud computing, the internet of things, and predictive analytics would converge. Nobody believed in enterprise AI for the first decade, but today the market is thousands of times larger than we imagined.

In business, everyone gets knocked down. Tech leaders like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison all faced near-collapse. When you get kicked in the teeth, you pick yourself up, get on one elbow, then the other, get to a knee, stand up, and keep walking.

In 2009, a matriarch elephant charged us from two hundred meters away. The guide shot at ten meters and missed. The elephant threw the guide, then rolled, punched, and gored me, putting a tusk through my left leg and stepping on my right foot.

I was critically injured and spent three hours bleeding in the desert before being airlifted to Nairobi and then San Jose. Over the next five years, I endured nineteen reconstructive surgeries, refused amputation, and eventually walked, ran, and sailed again.

In early 2025, after a misdiagnosed viral infection, I woke up blind in the hospital. An autoimmune attack fried my optic nerves, leaving me bilaterally blind. The doctors told me the blindness was permanent, which was emotionally jarring.

We are launching a massive, multi-disciplinary project at Stanford using magnetic and electronic brain stimulation, neurological therapy, and pharmacology to help the brain wire around damaged pathways. We are already seeing progress, and my own vision is improving.

Our two hundred and fifty year old experiment is just getting started. Despite temporary challenges, our system of liberty, education, and entrepreneurship continues to make the world healthier, happier, and safer. The greatest days of this country are still ahead of us.