A commencement address is one of the few occasions when a speaker has an audience of people at the most consequential threshold of their professional lives — and has about twenty minutes to say something that might actually matter to them in ten years. Stuart McClure's commencement address took the opportunity seriously, centering it on a message that runs through his own career: never give up on what you believe is important, even when the evidence against you is accumulating and the institutional consensus says you are wrong.
Stuart's experience founding Cylance is the most vivid version of this lesson. In 2012, he left a senior position at one of the world's largest security companies to argue that the entire foundation of the industry's product approach was wrong — that the signature-based detection model was fundamentally broken and that machine learning could replace it with something categorically better. The industry told him he was wrong. Experienced investors passed. Security practitioners were skeptical. The hype cycle around AI had already produced enough disappointments that "AI-based security" was widely read as marketing language rather than a technical claim.
What sustained Cylance through those years was not external validation but the internal conviction that the evidence supported the thesis. The model worked. The empirical results were real. What took time was not proving the approach internally but convincing an industry conditioned to expect failure that this particular application was different. "Never give up" in this context is not a platitude — it is a specific claim about the relationship between conviction, evidence, and the patience required to let both accumulate before the market catches up.
For graduates entering a world being transformed by AI, the message has particular resonance: the most important things you will build will require you to maintain conviction through periods when the world has not yet seen what you have seen.