The video captures the commencement ceremony for Tomorrow University’s Class of 2026 in Berlin. A series of short, impassioned speeches (Speakers A‑J) celebrate the graduates’ journey and outline a forward‑looking vision. The speakers stress that graduation is not an endpoint but a launchpad for lifelong learning, self‑reinvention, and purposeful impact. Core themes include the importance of community, curiosity, responsibility, and courage; using technology and business models for planetary resilience; embracing entrepreneurship and overcoming fear of failure; prioritising collaboration over competition; drawing inspiration from nature and generational stewardship; aligning personal purpose with societal challenges; and fostering diversity and authenticity. The overall message is an enthusiastic call to graduates to stay connected, keep learning, leverage the TOU network, and apply their skills to create a better, more sustainable future.
Chapters
Your graduation, I hope, is not an end but more a starting point for being a lifelong learner. This is why we started Tomorrow University and you trusted this university to educate you. What you did as graduates now, but as learners, you started with self-love because in the end you're learning to grow. You're learning to understand the next version of yourself. But you're also learning to show up as better versions of yourself for your peers. And at the same time, it's constant falling in love again and again and again. And you need to do that when you actually want to be alive. You want to continuously learn. But most probably you'll forget the degree and the title of the degree, but what you will not forget is the people that you spent the time with, and that's where you learned the most. With compassion and with being together. You're not ending the university today, you're actually taking it with you.
So use your technology not just for efficiency, but for planetary resilience. And use your business models not just for profit, but to protect human and environmental health. Your true power is your creative imagination. It's the ability to look at unexpected crises and say, We are dropping what doesn't matter and focusing entirely on what keeps us alive.
Throughout this journey, it felt like my brain was in a way rewired. I learned so much about myself. I never believed before that I could be an entrepreneur or that I could ever have a business or think about that even. And this completely changed. I kind of transitioned from Thinking about limitations to not being afraid to fail, which was great.
And so I can't think of anyone better to send out into the world right now, a world with no shortage of turmoil, of change, and relentless competition. Because you understand something that a lot of clever people never learn, that when we compete, only one person wins. But when we work together, we all win. So congratulations.
Without TOU, I could have hardly found such a source of guidance and inspiration to embrace nature as a role model, nor the warmth of this community. Think in decades, centuries, and the generations that are still to come and we will never meet. Our success is measured by how much life flourishes around us. Grow boldly, share generously, adapt gracefully, and wherever you stand, create conditions that help life thrive. Congratulations.
Throughout your TOU journey, pretty much every single one of you has some area you want to create impact in, be it oceans, be it transformative leadership, be it business model transformation. All of you almost have a calling and you are driven to creating impact in that area. You're all changemakers, you're doers. The issues that you're passionate about, you think, what can I do? What can I build? Who can I work with? How can I leverage that to create impact? You know, for building TOU, for building change and impact in the world that is tangible, being so committed to it. To be perfectly honest with you, it has genuinely been a privilege and an honour to work alongside such passionate, committed individuals.
Back home, I threw myself into the first challenge: defining my purpose and mission. Something I had wanted to do for years but couldn't pull off alone. Slowly but surely, my professional life started catching up with my purpose. What I thought was going to be purely about sustainability and climate change turned out to be a safe space to discuss inclusivity, equality, and the biases we carry without knowing. Every claim TOU made about itself turned out to be true. Look around this room. Every single one of us is proof that all 4 core values— curiosity, community, responsibility, and courage— are alive and well represented here. This ending is just the beginning. Let's go make the world a better place.
If you leave today with 3 things: continue learning. This is the start of a journey, not the end. Really use this community. It's rare and it's powerful. Lift each other, open doors for each other, but also always challenge each other. And 3, stay connected to your purpose. We build your programs thinking about how your work, how your life, how your education connects to what truly matters to you. It's very easy in everyday life to let go of that, to lose sight of that. Try not to lose sight of that. Come back to us. Remember that purpose.
You see also back there my son Ben, who is doing right now an internship with Tomorrow University, actually was the inspiration to start Tomorrow University. And the reason was that he just demonstrated very clearly in his class that education hasn't changed so much since I was in school. And if you're thinking about the times of today, as we have large problems, there is more. We need more than just people who have knowledge. We need people who build real skills and can take action. We need people who are not just learning by themselves, but learning from and with each other. And we need people who have a purpose and want to change the tomorrow for a little bit better. And that's what you all have proven and shown here. From your mission, you're building the skills, you're having an amazing network to build a great future. And as we are so many together, we can have a large impact.
I was staring up at some of the words that are written up on the banner above, and they felt like they'd been written for us. Diversity.
Be you.
Stay true. Fuck hate. And together we rise.
Education is not to fill you with knowledge, right? It's to fill you with love for the right questions, the new version of yourself, and the next thing that you're going to build. And I'm sure we will see many, many things that you are building, that we see many, many questions that you ask, and go deep for the rest of your life. And I really, really hope that you will succeed at a continuous reinvention of yourself. Keep on learning as much as you can, be as crazy to build the next things, and as I said, enjoy life as much as you can.
