 We've got a lot of people here, which is terrific. Thank you very much all for coming. Really, really appreciate all of you making the time. Good morning, if you're to my west. Good evening, good afternoon. If you're sort of around where I am in the UK time zone, I know Tony and Jennifer, it's morning for you. It's sort of evening for me. It's lunchtime in between. And thank you very much as well if you're coming in from the east because that's showing an admirable level of commitment which we're very grateful for. So thank you for that. I'm super excited to host this session. It's just great to be able to bring this together. We at Titan Partners are delighted to be sort of working with Socap on some of these sessions. We wanted to bring some of the real thought leaders in the impact and education space to this gathering. And I'm really pleased that I've got a couple of those people here. I'm a senior director here at Titan Partners and I spend a lot of my time thinking about the impact investing space and education around the world. I'm gonna set the frame a little bit but then I'm really gonna hand over to Tony and Jennifer to talk as, they're the real practitioners that are doing this every day. So I'm really looking forward to that. You know, for a very long time, people have been talking about how education systems need to change to make them more equitable, to allow our kids to participate more fully in society and fulfill their individual potential and to raise their employability chances and our economy. And I would say that COVID has only highlighted that need around the world. There's also been a long running debate about how private capital can and should play a role in that educational transformation. We can talk a lot about where it's possible for private capital to play, where it should play and where in some cases, it can actually have a detrimental effect. We're focusing today on the opportunities, however. Where can it really make a difference and where can it make a difference to driving change in the system rather than just leaving the system as it currently is? I am genuinely delighted to have two luminously experienced people in the room with me today to talk about this. Today, we're going to be focusing on what I might describe as the global north, particularly the United States of America. Tomorrow, I'm running another session around the global south. I hope you can join it for this, but I'm just really delighted to have Tony and Jennifer with me today to talk about this. We're going to run this like this. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to have sort of a short three to five minutes from each of Tony followed by Jennifer covering some of the issues that they think are particularly keen to discuss in this space. I'm then going to ask them a few, we're going to then have our fireside chat. I wish we were all around the fire somewhere, but this is as good as it's going to get for the moment. And then we're going to throw questions out to you guys in the audience. We would love to have questions from you. I will be monitoring that and we will do that. I do very much like this to be an interactive 45 minutes with you all. So please feel free to pop stuff in the chat and let us know. And with that, Tony, I'm going to hand over to you with your amazing background in both policy and impact investing. Love to hear from you first. Thanks Nick and really happy to be able to join the group today. First, the perspectives I'll share are informed by one as an investor and in particular an education and human capital, investor in education and in human capital services and technology companies, but also having been a former policymaker in government. And I think I'm going to just speak to a number of different themes that I think are important that hopefully we can revisit during the course of the conversation this morning. First of all, when we think about the education system at large and the forces that drive it, I think it's important, again, coming from a few more of a commercial background, I think it's important to think about it as kind of the supply and the demand for talent. And so I think the good news is there's an increasing recognition on the importance of talent, the importance of talent across the entire ecosystem, be it in for-profits and commercial enterprises and the need to continue to identify and source and prepare that talent. And so I think that's driving people to look globally, remotely, look and source talent pools that potentially here to before they have an address. And you see that across education, you see that across the corporate community. When you think about that, and you think then about, what are the implications? Other things that are very positive right now. I think the pace of change that's going on, particularly in the labor market right now, the pace of change in terms of new skills that are being provided or that are being required, jobs being disrupted, the negative side of it, jobs being destroyed by technology, the positive side, new jobs being created, that employers are increasingly looking for new skills and new skills that will change even going forward. And so I think it's creating a very dynamic opportunity for people in the students, be it adults, who are in the marketplace to kind of reskill and better participate. And so I think that is creating opportunity. And so when you think then about the supply side, here's where I think we sometimes struggle. And so when you think about our education system from K-12 to higher ed, the challenge there is, it is a publicly run and governed system with all of the implications associated with that. That means for K-12, as we know in the US, it's highly decentralized. It is funded by government resources, predominantly state and local, complemented by federal. And the allocation of those resources are governed by public processes. And so you have to understand as you think about then investing capital, it's important if we're gonna have impact, when you think about investing capital in such a way that from a sustainable basis, it has to be able to participate and be informed by the ultimate funding streams that are gonna sustain it. And those funding streams are largely public sources, unless it's truly gonna be private-funded. That's true for K-12. It's similar and true for higher ed, although the funding mechanism is different and largely through federal student aid, be it loans or grants. And so I think as you think about the deployment of social capital, social impact capital, to really drive change, to take advantage of the changing needs in the marketplace, we have to think about the sustainability of that, that's one. We have to think about the suppliers of that operating in a constrained system, because again, it's publicly governed, it's constrained by, if you will, the bureaucratic incentives, which tend to be our risk averse, and it's highly decentralized. And I think, frankly, embracing the system for what it is will increase the likelihood that you can deploy social capital effectively. And what I mean by that is, understanding its complexity, we're finding solutions that solve real problems, that you have demonstrated impact, solutions that, and those can be, if you will, niche solutions, they can also be solutions that kind of have broad applicability. Solutions that lend themselves to referenceability, because again, you need to be able to reference a given school district, a given university, you need to be able to demonstrate referenceability in order for others to consider you, again, when you're operating in a risk averse environment. You need to think about, how do you actually get trial? And so again, increasingly the opportunity for these organizations to try these new solutions in a way that decreases the risk by things that we're finding kind of work very well. And so again, and I'll pause, I'll let Jennifer provide her comments. But I think again, the key takeaways are, clearly there's a need, and the needs driven by a changing a dynamic marketplace that are looking for new skills, new talent, and are open for more creative solutions. But you've got to compliment that, you have to recognize that the traditional system that's preparing that talent, is frankly moving at a slower pace, that's risk averse, that's bound by constraints associated with public funding. And so as you think about deploying impact, it's embracing that versus trying to resist that. It's embracing that that I think really allows for some real innovative solutions to break through and ultimately scale. Thanks, Jennifer. First, thank you for having me here and inviting. I really appreciate it and excited to be here. If you don't mind, I'd like to just share a little bit of background of how I came into impact investing because I think it provides that helpful lens in my point of view. So I started my career as a US history teacher in secondary and high school and middle school. I grew up in Chicago and I went into teaching because I had this experience when I was in high school where I attended an urban inner city school and a suburban school. And I had very different experiences with the quality of education and that put me on a path that I didn't really fully appreciate at the time of wanting to dedicate my career to education. So I taught for seven years, but I had this nagging feeling as a classroom teacher that school wasn't meeting the needs of a good segment of the population in the school. So I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I knew that I wanted to do something outside of the classroom. I moved out to Silicon Valley in 2000, went to graduate school and really became inspired by all of these entrepreneurs and technologists working on problems in the technology ecosystem. And I was at that moment sort of thinking, how can we leverage some of this entrepreneurial energy and create sort of an exogenous force into education to improve it? So I then went to go work for an organization called New Schools Venture Fund, worked there for nine years. It's a venture philanthropy fund nonprofit focused on improving education through entrepreneurship. Really learned the craft of venture capital at that point and then split off with a couple of friends from new schools, my colleagues that are still with me today and we started to reach capital about 10 years ago and we're on our fourth fund. And we invest in ed tech across the life cycle from early childhood, K-12 higher ed through lifelong learning. We've made over a hundred investments in the space. So I'll just double down on Tony's comments too about the space have its own idiosyncrasies and I look forward to getting into what those are, but in some ways that makes it an ideal space to invest in because it is regulated, there's sort of a natural mode if you understand the space and you can invest in companies that take advantage of that regulation. And we are really excited for the future of investing in education. It's been a great 10 years, but I think it's really changed since COVID as everyone knows and it's quite an interesting time. Jennifer, thank you. So the first thing I'd really like to explore a little bit with you guys is, and Tony, this picks up a little bit on your point that there are clear constraints within this market and what I'm hearing from you is that you have to work with the grain of those constraints in many ways to be able to be successful in this. But we're also looking at a situation where many people would argue our K-12 education systems particularly in the global North need to change. To your point, they need to change to be producing people who are not only more employable but also happier in many ways. We're seeing also, there are a number of ways across which people are saying those systems aren't working. You're a former policymaker, you were deeply involved in an administration which was actively trying to change the system across the US with, as I know, a great deal of passion and commitment to making that happen. Do you think, and if so, how can private capital in all its forms work to change the system as well as improve the outcomes within it? Do you think that's possible or do you think that's a very difficult thing to do? Oh, I think it is possible. I think it is probable. And I think it is also different but the level of difficulty is varied depending on where along the system you're trying to drive maximum change especially within a given time horizon. So what do I think is especially ripe and you're seeing it right now in terms of trends in the marketplace? And so if you go all the way into employer and employer hiring, right? What you now see, so what you now see is the emergence and it used to be boot camps but it's taking that boot camp model and saying, wait a minute, there are a whole host of jobs and skills and competencies that I can in fact develop that employer's value. I can do that short of the cost of a full two or four year degree. And so in terms from a student perspective as a return on investment you can actually provide them the requisite skills and competencies that allows them to be more employable or in fact to increase their career trajectory. And so no surprise you're actually saying private capital taking advantage of those because in again, given the constraints many of those programs don't today lend themselves to federal student loans and funding. So you have again, private markets and you can call funding markets from income sharing agreements to the providers themselves and get all kind of the market names of the past like General Atlantic and others or General Assembly, excuse me who've kind of provided these programs. And we used to think about them solely in terms of, you know hacker type programs, coding boot camps what you're seeing is the proliferation. You see healthcare lends itself to many of those kinds of credentialing programs and you're seeing that kind of move across different elements of the labor force. And so I think that's a classic example of this bridge of a gap in funding a real need that's needed in the marketplace and you can deploy social path. If you go then you say, well, what's the implications? Many colleges and universities are now seeing that demand and when they're constrained by declining enrollments which we've seen in COVID you're seeing them saying we need to adapt our curriculum and we need to do so in such a way that perhaps be partnered with third party content providers. And so you're seeing that driving demand and so you're seeing this you can be done not just necessarily a direct to consumer but you're also seeing this done in combination of higher ed institutions. So that'd be another example. And then when you kind of go through the K-12 area of the landscape you say, kind of what are the opportunities? I think it is more challenging, right? And it's more challenging because, you know, right now you've seen more disrupted learning in the wake of COVID. And so in an area where you're trying to advance to better prepare students so they can transition to the labor workforce the reality is we've kind of lost ground to where we were a year ago, two years ago with the amount of learning loss and what's been disrupted. And the fact that our remote learning solutions have not been nearly as capable, right? As we would have hoped and that's both because some of the technologies have not been there they clearly have not been optimized in terms of a system-wide approach but more importantly they haven't been integrated with the human capital side of the teacher and the instructional approach and all the professional development that's needed to make them fully effective. So the potential is there will it take longer to realize? Yes, but again, the potential is there. And Jennifer, can you bring that perspective of actually having been at the chalk face if you like throughout this? Fascinated to hear your opinion on that to hear whether or not, you know we can drive change as well as, you know work with the existing system. I think absolutely. I am not of the belief that there's one solution to kind of fix school that there's no ready player one like the Oasis portal that it's going to happen bit by bit and we are going to be back technology solutions that make education more accessible. That's something that lens that we look at at reach is how do we create accessibility? How do we bring the content, the tools, the mentors, the training into our system and make it more accessible because the story of education has always been one of expanding accessibility. You know, you go back to hundreds of years ago and what was available for people in education back then and how that has just increased over time. So that's the way that we look at it. And I think that, you know internet is a massive distribution network essentially. And when we think about what it can what is the power of it really? You know, it's definitely about accessibility in my mind and how we can leverage this incredible network so that children's kind of education is not tied to their zip code tied to their neighborhood but it can transcend the physical and that you can have access to incredible teachers, content, all of that stuff through the internet. So that's, I mean, that's like very basic example just to bring it home. What I mean is like we invested in a company called Desmos. It's a graphing calculator also a math curriculum. You might have heard of this company and what do kids use prior to Desmos? They use the TI really expensive graphing calculator. Well, there's now Desmos has an online graphing calculator that's free that has all the functionality of the TI physical calculator and far more accessible. So that's what I mean by, you know looking for what are these little areas that you can kind of pick off through your investing and make education ultimately more accessible and equitable. I just like to build a little bit with you. You know, one of the things in our work we do a fair amount of work from foundations and family offices and people like that who are thinking about their first step or the most recent steps are very experienced in education. And one of the things that I often find is that defining success in terms of your investments and what you want to measure to understand whether or not your investment has been successful in non-financial terms. Clearly there are some very obvious things you can measure in terms of financial terms but measuring that success is often a really crucial point for many people. I think that the thing that I observe about education is compared to many other areas of impact investment which I think is very different is that, you know if you're in climate or healthcare there are some relatively straightforwardly agreed measures that everybody empirically tends to agree on. You know, we can measure parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere. We can measure whether or not somebody does or does not have polio or has or has not had a vaccine for it. In education defining a quote, good education is something of a challenge and you know, many, many people will define it in many, many different ways. I'm interested in when you look at your investments and you talk to your LPs and your investors both of you starting with Jennifer, you know how do you resolve that issue of, you know how are we going to define success everybody? What are we going to agree on? Yeah, it's a super important question and we are traditionally structured venture fund and so we, you know we do communicate our impact and we do communicate it through metrics but we are not sort of tied to certain outcomes just to be clear. The way that we go about is first we start with a team. We are a team of, we have five partners and we have all had, we've all come from we've all had a personal experience where education has had an outsize impact on our life. So I think that, you know shouldn't be disregarded is that just our lived experience we have a diverse team is important to why we're doing this work. Second is we are a thesis driven investor so we understand we go about digging into the space trying to understand what are the obstacles that are preventing the achievement and accessibility and improvement of education and we'll do deep dives, market maps we publish these regularly on our website. And then we will go about trying to find an investment in a space that sort of meets the criteria of our investment thesis. Sometimes we will incubate that company and sometimes we'll go out looking for that solution. We also look for founder market fit. So we're looking for a founder that has sort of lived this problem that has experienced this problem is scratching their own itch as we sometimes say and we look for companies that are based on educational research. So I have a background in educational research and so we're looking at the literature review and is the kind of logic model that this company is built upon is there a research base to back that that thesis up. And then of course we measure the customer the demographics of the customers the growth of achievement if that's what that company is looking at. And we really look, is this company actually achieving the goal that they set out to achieve is the product working in ways that they had hoped. We also do this thing where we aggregate all of our company data from our portfolio we anonymize it and we just slice and dice the data in all different ways. We share it back with our portfolio so we can really benchmark what a tech metrics look like across all different metrics really. And that's really useful to our portfolio companies as well. So we're looking at things like engagement and how are teachers adopting these products and that to me matters like if we trust teachers a lot and if teachers are adopting that product and using it consistently in the way that it was intended to intended to then that's something that we track and we care about. Would you add to that? Yeah, I think our typical investment is significantly larger. It's not early stage it'd be kind of late-stage growth and our mid-mark or even large buyout. And so one I think it's important one thing we've learned is it's important to as close as you can get a proxy for real tangible value relative to your value proposition and not actually customer satisfaction. And I think a lot of times the mindset is well if I've got a satisfied customer you can think of measured in net promoter score they think highly of me that is my proxy. And I think that's an important thing to track but I think we've seen actually unfortunately there's been examples where customers have been satisfied with the product even though the product it may not be delivering tangible value. And I think as an investor and as a known it's very important if you will to hold the organization accountable to delivering tangible value. And that can be efficiency, outcomes, efficacy but it's more than just customer satisfaction. So one of the key messages that we deliver and then we work to metricize is that notion of tangible value. In that context and I think it's what Jennifer said I think the other thing that is very important is to oftentimes there's under appreciation of context. And so it's recognizing that different student different people, customers have different risk factors, right? And so you need to understand advocacy in a context. And I think that's also very, very important so that you can really understand the attribution how much is it is to your product and solution versus how much of this is to context and that can be both don't pat yourself on the back too much and don't in fact hurt yourself too much when if you don't make those kinds of adjustments you can actually get kind of false information. And so examples that we would have probably the largest acquisition that we've made in combination with Apollo has been the acquisition of the University of Phoenix. And people at the time and probably still today someone say very controversial a large for-profit higher ed institution aren't they exploited? And our view is no we actually thought there was tremendous potential in serving an adult learner population that's if you look at the 35 million adults who don't have a degree or the record skills that's gonna allow them to advance we think serving them and serving them well is needed and trying to do that in an innovative way is also what's needed. And so again, shortly after our ownership management actually put in place something called for example, a near-term graduate metric, an on-track metric that says how are people progressing? Because it's a part-time program are they progressing at a rate just like you would look at an on-track metric for ninth grade? Are you on track to graduation rate? And those are the kinds of things that are really looking at grad rates but moving earlier to says we're doing a lot and the student get up a great experience but are they actually progressing towards what we know is gonna be tangible value? And in this case like most things what you measure, right? Get managed. And so we've seen literally I wanna say I think it's 34 months now 30 more consecutive months on year on year improvement. And so it's delivering tangible value with respect to persistency tangible value with respect to graduation rate and tangible value with the ability then to monetize that, right? To get the value of that education investment. And I think that's the discipline you need to have as an impact investor is to even though it's hard to try to put proxies in place but to commit yourself to improving those proxies and getting them as opposed to real tangible value as possible. Thank you very much. And I don't know if you wanna come in but otherwise I'll move on to, I mean, I'm gonna move on actually to there are a bunch of questions coming in and I can see them all. So I'm gonna move on to those in just a minute. Unfortunately, no good webinar right now can escape mentioning the coronavirus word. And I know that both of you have seen this both as a challenge but also as a potential opportunity. There's also surfaced some quite interesting dynamics. Jennifer, you and I were talking about that the other day in terms of new business models emerging and perhaps becoming more prevalent. So I don't know if given where we are if you wanna briefly comment on what you think is changing and what you think the opportunities are that are being surfaced by this awful pandemic. Jennifer, maybe start with you. Yeah, and just reiterate that it is a tragedy and it is an awful pandemic and it's causing a lot of inequity in our education system. I would say one of the big from an investor point of view one of the big changes is that we have seen a flood of capital come into education investing. So we started investing in education, I don't know, 15 years ago and there wasn't a lot of folks that were investing in the traditional venture capital world that we're interested in the space. And we have actually closed since March 21 rounds of financing. So we've closed around every nine days. And what we have seen is that almost all of these rounds are being preempted by traditional venture capital. These are the light speed, Kleiner, Andreessen Horowitz, like the traditional venture capital players are now looking at education as an attractive market to invest in. So that's something that we had not anticipated would happen and COVID accelerated that for sure. The reasons for that 1.5 billion kids went remote. It forced a parent involvement in the education system that has accelerated consumer education and also has just really put a focus on a highlight on the products that are being used in schools and their ability to educate the children at home and through hybrid beans as well. So a lot of these things were in place prior to COVID and COVID really accelerated the pace of investing and accelerated the pace of progress. I really think it has brought five to seven years forward in terms of usage and revenue for these companies. Like there's a reason when you have, you know, Sandhill VC is looking at these companies, it's because the metrics are there and that's what has caused the interest in the space. I think, again, I think what we've seen, I 100% agree with Jennifer that it really has accelerated the demand for online remote learning capability and I think that has forever changed. Meaning whether, I don't think it's a substitute. Meaning I don't think it's gonna, for most, shift to be predominantly delivered online as a better delivery mechanism and I don't think the research would support that. But one, recognizing that it could be an ongoing compliment and that some of those same tools and approaches can be used in the classroom, right? Both of those things are gonna be back. And importantly, I think it's going to, right? And in some cases, painfully so, I've got a sister who is a teacher and painfully slow, it is gonna by brute force help many, many teachers, right? Get more facile with different online technologies and tools, right? So, with that said, what is very clear, the equity gap is real and you see that in just in terms of broadband access and device access. And so we've highlighted the problem and it's acute. Two, I think we've highlighted, again, the need of teacher professional development. I think it's gonna have real implications for how do you actually provide the support that teachers need to actually use these tools effectively? And I think in that, I think not enough, if you will, providers of those tools, they are so focused on their tool set, they don't appreciate that the teacher is having to integrate this in terms of a comprehensive curriculum that fits with their own pedagogical approach, but the district is trying to, right? And or the principal is trying to, the framework that they have combined with the other tools. And so I think the more effective professional development for teachers will be much more holistic. And those providers that have that mindset and approach, I think will be more effective at getting the broad scale adoption. The other thing I think we're realizing, especially in the younger grades, is that many of those tools, just like they need to support the teacher, are gonna need to be parent relevant. Because I think there's not many parents who haven't experienced the pain of, wow, this is really hard. I have a much better appreciation for the teacher. And even when provided the tools, it's like having the tool is not enough, right? The whole notion of like classroom management is like, well, how do I deal with, session management for a seven-year-old? Keep them engaged when they get distracted. How do I plan the day? All those kinds of things that are beyond, if you will, the adaptive learning curriculum, it's, again, how do you ensure an effective learning experience? I think that's gonna create demand for and the use of things that have a parent component, not just a teacher and student component. So I think those are some examples, maybe I think with COVID has done, to kind of accelerate one of the awareness and also kind of the use of these different tools. I think the other thing, and it's going to my view over time is as follows, there's going to be a shakeout. It's gonna be this classic boom. There's a lot of free trials, a lot of conversions. And then increasingly, it will be wait. We actually need a more integrated approach. And I think that's maybe three years away. It's not gonna happen next year, but three to five years, you're actually gonna see more integrated platforms and integrated approaches. And so right now, it's just give me the best of the application. And I think school districts are gonna migrate towards, I need more of an integrated approach because from a sustainability, manage, training, et cetera, that's gonna be kind of more, if you will, sustainable and ultimately more cost effective. Thank you. Look, I'm gonna move on to some of these questions. I wanna try and get through as many as I can in the remaining sort of 11 minutes that we've got here. And I hope it's might be Lucia, it might be Lucia. Forgive me, whichever one it does. And Keita both have really good questions, which are linked. I'm gonna intervene. One of them is, what future do you see for educational ventures that are not ed tech? I'm gonna have a little comment about that before passing it to you guys. And Keita added to that, how do you prioritize between solutions catered to students versus those on focused on uplifting educators? I'm just gonna lean in briefly because I have a slight hobby horse about this one. I'm not a big fan of the word ed tech because I think that there are education companies and there are education companies. And technology is just something that is used in the delivery of education. And a blackboard is a technology, a school desk is a technology, a pencil is a technology, and computers and software are just another technology which works to deliver outcomes along and with all of the other tools that teachers and educators use with an alongside kids. So that I think is an interesting frame. I don't know how I get you guys both respond to that, Jennifer, I think particularly interested in your response to that. But I think that separating educational ventures that are not ed tech is for me, a bit of a false comparison to make because I feel that we have education companies. Yeah, that is a tough question. It's, I guess the way that maybe the lens, I think there's, by the way, lots of amazing education companies that it doesn't make sense to pursue venture capital where they're growing nicely and it just, it doesn't make sense for a lot of reasons. We look at highly scalable companies that can serve huge markets, not just the US market, but really international markets. And that's another change that I didn't mention is that the kind of demand curve for education globally changed overnight with COVID. And we are seeing companies like Padlet, Class Dojo, Nearpod that now have much greater user bases outside of the US than they do inside the US. And so those Tams have exploded, which is also one of the reasons why there's so much interest in the space right now. But I do feel that, I agree with you Nick, that the term ed tech is get all kinds of problems. But I do think of the, there's companies that are really about kind of a distribution network that are kind of harm, that are really about the platform that can distribute the content. And then there are companies that kind of get closer to the point of instruction. And those companies, the closer you are to the pedagogy, the more important it is for your product to be based on educational research and to have educators that are part of your company. That's something that we see a challenge that we have as an investor in the space is that you see a startup of young, usually young men coming out of a school in Silicon Valley that don't have any experience in education and don't really value maybe the voice of the educator and you can see that kind of show up in the product. But a company like Desmos, which I mentioned earlier, more than half of the staff there are teachers. And so the companies that are kind of focusing on that pedagogy really have a close partnership with the education piece, I think. Tony, I think to add a quick before I move on. Yeah, I would say, I think there will be a bias towards technology-based solutions. And I think that's not to say that the need is for a broader set of services. But unfortunately, the reality is when you have a highly distributed system of school districts, schools, site-based decision-making, to the degree that you've got a product that can be delivered kind of via the web, that a product that can potentially be, if you will, procured over the web, and lends itself to a software as a service-type business model, those are the hallmarks of things that allow you to kind of to scale. And so if you have an efficacious solution, it allows you to scale. One of the things that have plagued the education industry in particular has been just the high cost of acquiring a new customer. And so if you're a small lure company, right? It's been hard to have a, you have to have hundreds of salespeople to match what the large publishers have to go in, call on school districts, school principals, chief academic officers, and to kind of sell the features and benefits of your particular product. And so that's one of the reasons why you haven't had as many innovative solutions in the marketplace was a tremendous cost of distribution, of the sales acquisition. I think technology kind of breaks down and reduces some of those costs. Indoor changes, you can invest in those costs because you can deliver it. And so you're a delivery cost. And I think that goes, I think, to one of the questions which is, so what are the implications in for services models? I think services models that can be done through technology are gonna be more sustainable, more likely to scale than those that are based on real people. And I think when you think about professional development and things that are teacher-centric, right? There's a notion of how much of that is done in person. But again, a lot of, as we're saying, the capabilities of online learning, a lot of professional development can now and increasingly is being done remotely. And so I do think you're gonna see both technology-based content solutions as well as professional development and the services component that are still gonna lend itself to this, if you will, you call it edtech or human capital tech. Bob, I'm gonna turn to you. At that point, sorry, just to interject on that point, the Alphodesmos has 50 million monthly active users. They have not spent a penny on marketing or sales. So this is, the world has changed. No longer do we drive up in a car to a sales, to a district and get out our CD-ROMs and sell software that way. What Mystery Science is another company that is huge distribution, does not have a sales team. So it's really changed. So I'm gonna try and roll, this is gonna be ambitious, but I'm gonna try and roll up three questions into one for us to answer as possibly the final question. And there's a lot of questioning around where capital should go and why, particularly and where it has gone. So, Jean Hammond is saying, a lot of the capital she thinks from her perception is going into workforce or workplace education rather than K-12. There's a comment from Debbie Friedman around, she's curious whether or not people are looking at school nutrition, which is almost at the other end of that spectrum in terms of engaging with that and all the models around that. There's another question around, where can debt play a role from Mark Medima? And there's a questioning of whether or not people should, should be making large amounts of money out of education ventures. So I guess the question I'm coming to cover all of that is, where do you think impact investing in education can and should make the most difference with all the different models that are available? And how do the different instruments available to it? You're both equity investors, Tony, you may use debt as well, Jennifer as well. Just interesting as a wrap up, where do you feel it can make the most difference and where do you sometimes think that it can't? I'd be interested perhaps answering that in reverse order to give us a hopeful end. Jennifer, let's start with you. Yeah, my viewpoint perspective has changed over time on this. So I came out of, I had never worked in a for-profit before I started my own venture fund. And I was a classroom teacher and then I worked at a nonprofit. And while I worked at the nonprofit, I witnessed a lot of very well-meaning philanthropists that decided to create solutions for low income and underserved kids. And what happened was they were putting capital into nonprofit and building their own technology. And meanwhile, there was another system venture capital that was fueling other types of technologies for education. And so we ended up with the crappy version for poor kids, the crappy technology for poor kids because they couldn't hire great engineers because they were under capitalized and they were not the best solutions. And I was very turned off by creating a two track system where you have really crappy solutions for low income families. And then you have amazing consumer technology for affluent families. So that's what really drove me into venture capital. And I thought, okay, here we have the system that is completely remade industries, fintech, biotech, health tech, all kinds of industries. And these industries are high stakes too. Biotech, health tech is very high stakes industry. We need to have informed domain specific capital in education at the earliest stages especially because they can find the solutions that are founded by founders that are building them on education research that have teachers on their team and have logic models that make sense in this world. So I guess like I know that's a point of view that may not be shared by many people but I have evolved from my role as a teacher and as a nonprofit and thinking that, hey, let's leverage this system of venture capital and in our capitalist world that we can bring the best tools to teachers, to students, to families because they deserve it. I'm just gonna turn it because I wanna give him in a circular way, give him a chance to kind of finish and where we started in a way. No, I appreciate it. Yeah, I'd say like it or not, at least in America, the ability to deploy private capital to drive innovation is proven. We are one of the most creative innovative societies in part because we deploy capital effectively. And so that's why you get things like Apple and that's why you get Netflix. You can see all this is like, we deploy capital, you've got talented creative people and they kind of bring solutions often times to problems we didn't know we had. Education, we know we have a problem and we know we have a very tough problem. So I think deploying private capital to drive innovation in some of these tougher challenge I think is in fact a good use of private capital. It taps into what we do well. The challenges Jennifer said is if it's only geared around making money and it's not geared around real outcomes, real solutions to problems, how do we get more poor disadvantaged kids better educated, better prepared for jobs, then that's a misalignment of capital. So it's got to be applying the capital and against the known problem. That's one. Two, in the context of debt, I would say, right? The reality is if the debt providers, if you think about how investing works, the reality is oftentimes harder to serve students in segments have a higher cost to serve. It's not something you like to admit. And I'm not saying money is the only thing that matters but the reality of oftentimes they have a higher cost to serve. And so if you just leave pure capitalism, right? Money will always go to the people who are easier and my margins are better. It doesn't cost me as much. So I'll just serve suburban soccer mom families. I'm being obviously symbolic here, but I'll do that because it's a larger market and my margins will be better. So if you just frame it on pure capital outcomes that's not good. Where debt providers can basically reduce the risk of people deploying equity such that you can now between equity and debt still deploy private capital solutions for harder to serve segments. So I think there's a role to think about where debt can play against some of these problems. I think as in you think about kind of the nature of it, I think like anything water finds its own level. I think going where one, the markets are biggest and two, where you already have natural alignment where it's a priority of the decision makers because everybody as we all know, there's not enough time and trying to drive change takes a lot of capacity. And so you wanna be part of the solution versus trying to convince somebody of the solution. And so that's where I would say as you think about these different market needs, I'm not arguing against a thousand points of life, right? Is there an opportunity? But I would argue what has often happened against some of these problem is it's just been a thousand points of life and we've got a shortage of really scalable solutions that make impact. And so that's what I would say is a slight shift to more focused, more strategic application and a more sustained investments that we're really gonna get at would have been some.