Peace Gala: Alumni Experience

Hello everyone! My name is Lenny Bogdonoff and I am a member of the class of 2011, though I graduated in 2013. I’ll explain that in a few minutes.

I met a professor a few years ago who asked me a question I couldn’t stop thinking about. While it may not be immediately obvious why, I’d like to present each of you with the same question today.

If you had to spend the rest of your life pursuing one of the following three virtues, which would you choose? Your options are fame, wealth, or power. While each of these can be seen to be interrelated, which would be the one that you feel your life would be meaningfully spent mastering and achieving? Who would you choose to surround yourself with if you hoped to spend your life pursuing this arduous goal? What would you do to continue learning and creating value throughout this pursuit?

In presenting this question, I’d like to offer my own experience before, during and after my time at SUA. I can confidently say, if it wasn’t for my opportunity to study at SUA, I would not be who I am today, and for that, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to each of you, the donors behind SUA, the staff and faculty, each student and graduate, and SUA founder Daisaku Ikeda. I was born in San Francisco to my mom Akiko, a first-generation immigrant from Japan, and my dad, Jesse, a jazz musician turned businessman from the East Coast. My parents provided me with an upbringing full of educational experiences, support and opportunities for creative selfexpression, and in high school, I gravitated most toward computers and film. While I grew up with support and resources, by the age of 16, I found myself struggling to make good friends, repeatedly being arrested for juvenile misconduct, and eventually expelled from high school.

During this time, my family was faced with a series of challenging financial obstacles, resulting in bankruptcy, which impressed upon me the instability of wealth and challenges of business. As I grew up, my parents made repeated donations to Soka University of America’s founding, which impressed upon me the significance and importance of Soka University of America. Through the encouragement of my parents, family, friends, and alumni, I decided to apply to SUA and eventually attend as a student in the 7th class. Coinciding also with my family’s recent bankruptcy, my parents also moved to Southern California, where my mother decided to find a new way to continue her support of SUA, albeit not financially, working in the cafeteria for 13 years alongside students.

Although I was accepted and had the incredible support of my parents, I deeply struggled with focusing and learning in the classroom. While I had a curiosity about the world, I didn’t have an outlet to channel my interests, and due to my inability to complete assignments, I eventually left SUA on academic dismissal after my first two semesters. During this time, an alumnus who knew my situation made continuous efforts to encourage me and challenged me to deepen my own sense of purpose about my life.

One year later, after improving my grades at community college, I was readmitted to SUA, but on unfavorable financial terms because I was ineligible for financial aid or student loans. Through the support of faculty and my fellow classmates, I was able to double my GPA from the previous year and became eligible for scholarships. It was only because of the generous academic scholarship SUA offered, made possible by donors, that I was able to continue my college degree.

My time at SUA was marked with numerous cornerstones that shifted how I thought about myself and the impact I could make in the world. When I returned to SUA, I was given the opportunity to serve on the student government, participate in multi-city volunteer trips, and explore academic topics that extended beyond any specific major or course, such as digital humanities and communication theory. I had countless professors who helped me recognize strengths in myself that I had never seen and encouraged me to come up with opportunities to develop them inside and out of class.

For example, though SUA had no courses that provided any trade skills in design or software development, one professor recognized my interest in programming, and knowing there were no courses available, offered their research budget to have me make a website for them -- which provided me the structure to figure out how to learn the needed skills. Through this, I discovered a number of online resources I had previously never seen and began a personal journey to teach myself software development, which kicked off my career pursued over the past decade.

Also, throughout my time at SUA, I deeply struggled with writing, which was one of the reasons I had struggled to complete my courses as a freshman. Since my high school education had so many gaps in it, I always felt at odds with writing related assignments. The heart of the issue was not knowing my learning style, and not knowing how to effectively structure my thoughts. Through the continued support and mentorship of my peers and professors, my writing ability has become one of my greatest differentiating strengths after SUA. Paper after paper, I got more confident with writing, which culminated in my capstone project, on a then-obscure online community called Reddit, for which my professor allowed me to deeply research the business of online products, history of internet communities, and the startup tech industry.

Following my capstone, I took my required study abroad in Shanghai, China, where I coincidentally launched my official career in software at a fledgling educational language learning tech startup. After study abroad, completing my final required courses and graduating, I settled down in New York, where I was eventually able to work as a software engineer, first at Conde Nast, where I worked on the New Yorker magazine, then the US Federal government, where I was an innovation specialist, as well as a tech startup focused on the reproduction of machine learning models, and Google, where I worked in a specialized team responsible for any font text rendered on billions of devices a day.

Last year, I took steps to start my own company building a video software tool, when I saw the opportunities arising from the shift to remote work in businesses due to Covid-19. This year, I was able to participate in Y Combinator, the most prestigious investor in startup companies, and have raised a $1.5 million seed round from investors and founders of many successful companies. Our company now has five full-time employees headquartered in New York, serving customers ranging from public companies to numerous startups with billion-dollar valuations.

The skills to pursue a career in software began at the end of my time at SUA, but the differentiating skills I cultivated as a student, most importantly, learning how to learn and how to write, allowed me to succeed at identifying the most important opportunities to focus on, and communicate clearly. But what I value most is that my experiences as a student, engaging with people from around the world, gave me the confidence to meet new people, research unknown fields with ease, and even win trust from strangers to collaborate and eventually raise money to start a venture capital backed business.

While starting a company has been a longtime dream, my deeper goal is to contribute directly to the many fields which are not financially rewarded for the value they create in the world. I am determined throughout my business ventures, that I can play an instrumental role in supporting Soka University of America’s growth for centuries to come, seeing it grow to the likes of Ivy League schools and become a household name for generations to be associated with fostering humanitarian peacemakers, cultural leaders around the world, and timeless educators.

At the start, I asked the question, if you had to spend your life pursuing one virtue: wealth, fame, or power, which would you choose? In today’s cultural climate, all these virtues have become synonymous with selfish pursuits and thoughts of grandeur, but I believe in the light of value creation, they can be reframed to maximize their respective good. For example, wealth is not only the cultivation of riches for buying more houses or cars, but a way to amass value and direct it to the areas in society that are not financially rewarded for the value they create. Similarly, fame is not about shortterm recognition or special privileges, but instead the aspiration to spend your life making contributions to the world which will be valued for generations to come. And in the light of value creation, I believe power is less about political ambition, manipulation, tradeoffs, and corruption, but instead, can be harnessed by people with conviction behind their beliefs to fix the things they see as wrong in society’s broken cultural frameworks, especially for the sake of those who can’t fix it for themselves.

I am convinced and deeply grateful that it is through my time at SUA that I cultivated this view of the world, where I learned to take my experiences and struggles in life and reframe their meaning to become a tool to motivate myself to be a lifelong learner. I am also proud beyond words to be able to call myself a Soka University of America graduate, where I know with absolute confidence, the students, and graduates to come will be an instrumental force to tackle humanity’s challenges, be it global warming, inequities related to class, race or gender, international conflicts, breakthroughs in technology, educational processes, social cohesion, and so much more.

Thank you for allowing me to share today and thank you again for each of you providing me with the opportunity to call myself a Soka University of America graduate. I can wholeheartedly say, if it was not for the financial support I received through the scholarships made possible by donors like you, I would have neither graduated college, nor married my wife, who is also a member of the class of 2011. I would have never met my business partner, who I met on my study abroad, and I would not have the countless lifelong friends, who I cherish beyond all else and depend on a daily basis. Thank you so much!