The Georgia Tech Class of 2025 is walking away from school with their degrees — and if they dream of being an entrepreneur, a chance to get their startup off the ground, courtesy of this year’s commencement speaker.
Atlanta entrepreneur Christopher Klaus will pay for the startup incorporation costs for every Tech graduate this year — from undergrads to PhDs — he told the students during his speech Friday morning. If every graduate takes him up on his offer, the gift could be worth millions, Klaus told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Commencement speakers surprising graduates with gifts has become a recent phenomena at some institutions. This is the first gift of its kind during a commencement at Georgia Tech, the school’s president, Ángel Cabrera, said in an interview.
Klaus founded a cybersecurity company, Internet Security Systems, in 1994 while a student at Georgia Tech. One of his advisers provided the spark that would make him turn an idea into a billion-dollar company, Klaus told the AJC. That adviser asked a simple question: Had he ever thought of commercializing his project?
“That one question kind of became a pivot point for me to start my journey,” he said.
“This person believed in me enough to ask that question about commercializing, and that was the impetus to go, ‘You know what? Let me see if I can announce a commercial version.’”
His first product was software that automatically probed a network for vulnerabilities and provided action for fixing security holes.
Klaus found that people would pay for his idea, so he dropped out of Tech as a sophomore to focus full-time on his startup, which proved to be a wise decision. The company eventually went public in the late 1990s and in 2006, IBM acquired it for more than $1 billion.
Klaus has been giving back to Georgia Tech for decades, even giving the school equity in his startup that funded the Klaus Advanced Computing Building on campus. He also helped launch the school’s accelerator, CREATE-X, and is now the founder and CEO of Fusen, a platform that helps student founders.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Klaus hopes his gift to this year’s graduates provides the spark that his adviser’s question did for him more than 30 years ago.
“This isn’t about really covering the cost of the incorporation. It’s really going, ‘Hey, I believe in you guys, and I’m willing to not only tell you that you should do a startup, I’m going to help you,’” he said.
Cabrera called Klaus Georgia Tech’s version of Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, “someone who got so deep into his project, his idea as a student, who decided to even drop out of school to make that a reality, and who was so successful.”
“The difference with the other cases,” Cabrera added, “is that after he was successful, and after he sold his company and became a very wealthy man, his immediate next thought was, ‘How do I help others do this? How do I help others make their dreams come true?’”
Though Klaus never ended up graduating from Georgia Tech, he can now officially say he has a degree. Friday morning, the university bestowed on him an honorary doctorate.
“I’m kind of framing it as this has been a 30-year detour from getting my degree,” he said.
Credit: Handout
His gift to the Class of 2025 follows in a tradition of other high profile gifts during commencement speeches at Atlanta universities.
In 2022, Pinky Cole Hayes, the founder of Slutty Vegan, announced during her speech at Clark Atlanta University that she was gifting graduates their own limited liability corporation.
The most high-profile gift is likely billionaire investor and philanthropist Robert Smith’s surprise announcement that he was paying off the student debt of the entire Morehouse College Class of 2019.
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