 I'm Kevin Guthrie and I was the co-founder of JSTOR and I'm the president of Ithaca. I've been working in the education and technology space since 1995 when we started JSTOR. We're a not-for-profit organization. We were started actually to save shelf space at libraries was the original idea that long runs of academic journals were filling up the shelf space at many many libraries and Bill Bowen who was the president of the Mellon Foundation at the time and previously the president of Princeton was the one who had the idea he's an economist and was on the board of actually Denison and Denison was doing a big addition to their library and and he was like do we really need to build all this space for all these old old journals and at the time you know we weren't connected by the web it was 1995 so his idea was really to try to just you know reduce space like put the put the content onto CD-ROMs and have them be you know like Incarta if you remember the the Microsoft Encyclopedia and so the idea was to save space and then you know we got started as a as a grant project at the University of Michigan and demonstrated the the concept that you could digitize this content and do OCR on the images to create text that could be searchable that would be valuable and that the same time we could reduce the costs of shelf space so we were started as an offer profit really you know to act as kind of a library in the cloud for for libraries and felt like we needed to be an offer profit to be able to stand in that position and and also to encourage publishers to make their content available license the content for this kind of preservation based perpetual access so so we're not for profit from the very beginning I mean really with a broad mission to serve education but with this specific goal of of creating this this what became a database of the core academic journals in the humanities and social sciences reaching all the way back to their first volume and first issue so you know we did that and as I said in the in the sort of mid 90s right before you know the beginning of of Google and all that we kind of were swept up in the wave when that when that all took off so how long you know initially you were supported by grants but now you're you know kind of a thriving organization on your own how long did that process take yeah so we we we started from the very beginning as we said we need to create a sustainable service I mean even though the Mellon Foundation was was supporting us and Bill Bowen was was behind it he was like we've got to create a sustainable service we got to figure out a model that will allow us to continue to exist long beyond you know foundation grant funding so you know we we we first launched in 1997 and we had two components to our fee structure one was a one-time component that would help us to develop a reserve so that we could preserve the content for the long run so we wanted to create a kind of endowment and and the funds from that endowment would allow us to keep sustaining the the actual database the actual content for the long run and then this concept of a subscription for annual access fees that would that cover the cost of access over time so you know in the early days we kind of had a we brought in a fair amount of capital from the one-time payments but we didn't have very much annual access fees so it took us quite a while to generate the annual fees and that the key for us was that we we launched multiple collections so we licensed the collections one by one so you know I would say it probably took us you know four or five years before we had this you know sort of we were we we had a kind of sustainable level of revenue to cover our our expenses our expenses we did develop a little bit of capital at that time that would allow us to invest in more content and we actually had that was where most of our grant funding came in the early days was to help us digitize content that we would include on the platform and that was really valuable because we didn't have to pay the investment costs the capital costs of generating the content we just had to recapture the cost of the annual cost of that and so that was what allowed us to get up to a sustainable level as I said it was probably it was probably four or five years before we were we were covering our costs with our annual revenue so can you talk uh just you know kind of briefly like how big are you and kind of what is the reach of the organization like how many libraries are you serving and you know yeah so so we we um uh JSTOR is now a part of Ithaca and Ithaca is uh is an organization with a mission to serve education worldwide and to make education more accessible you know all over the all over the globe one of the services at JSTOR and another of our services is Portico which is a long-term archive and preservation of of of born electronic and electronic content and then um Ithaca SNR which does uh consulting and strategic research in the same areas you know of education particularly with a particular emphasis on on access and completion to higher education for underrepresented groups low socioeconomic status folks etc so we uh we we do the work in all these areas and and are approximately about a hundred million dollars of revenue when you combine everything together uh per year um you know that's been kind of steady growth over over the nearly 30 years of our existence it's not been you know super uh high growth but just pretty steady growth throughout um there are about uh I think we're close to 13 000 institutions that license JSTOR um as library licenses that includes um several thousand that are what we call uh developing nation and access initiative institutions meaning uh they either get free access or extremely low discounted access uh there are quite a number that get free access like in Africa and you know in in Asia as well and uh South America and we we also have um uh about 3 000 secondary schools that license JSTOR at this point um there are uh approximately 2 000 publishers um 800 publishers in 2000 2 500 journals I think is about the number so um mainly in the social sciences and humanities again less in the STM fields uh we have natural sciences and such so you know it's JSTOR has as pretty pretty broad coverage and reach uh in the humanities and in the human humanistic social sciences uh and you know at this point um pretty much um uh almost every four-year college you know in the United States at least uh has access to some of the collections I mean I think there's you know less than a hundred institutions on and four-year colleges in the United States that don't have access so so pretty wide um uh coverage uh in the in the higher education space how is um I have two questions one is um how is the mission of what you're trying to do the same and and how is it different than when you started um 30 years ago yeah I think that you know amazingly over 30 years I think the mission is the same uh how do we how do we help more people get access to to education and knowledge and how do we how do we do that all over the world and I think um the the way that we've we've we've tried to do that through JSTOR the way that we're we're working hard on that at EthicSNR the way we're preserving content in uh Portico they're all very much lined up to that to that goal and that mission and you know I think the work that we it's it's amazing I think the work that we're doing now feels so much like the work that we were doing in the in the late 90s in in a different way so for example uh well I'll just say that like the most the most motivating and inspiring thing for me is when I bump into somebody you know at a you know out out and about in a library in a in a bar wherever it is and it's somebody who went to college in the last 15 or 20 years and they asked me what I do and I say oh I was working I work with JSTOR oh my gosh that made a huge oh it made a huge difference to me you know I I couldn't have gotten through my thesis without JSTOR oh you know JSTOR I I I use it all the time in high school or whatever that never gets old like that that concept that we've actually helped somebody get through something or learn something and so that's that's highly motivating for for for me for all of us and right now for example the combination of EthicSNR and JSTOR we're working very hard to make JSTOR available in for incarcerated students and EthicSNR has worked developing programs for higher education in prison trying to support colleges providing instruction in prison and developed relationships with you know departments of corrections and and and people involved in the whole infrastructure around you know prisons in the United States and you know we're combining that now with with JSTOR and trying to make it possible for the incarcerated students to get access to JSTOR which is which sounds relatively simple but is anything but simple given the the the challenges there and you know once again I'm just kind of thinking like oh in five years time I bump into somebody who happened to be incarcerated who would say to me oh that made a huge difference for me you know when I was when I was in prison to have access to JSTOR you know that that's so the motivation is exactly the same even as we have EthicSNR and JSTOR working together it's you know to try to get to that same that same place to make a person you know make a difference in in a person's learning life and and try to help them to get you know quality information quality knowledge quality scholarship in their hands to to learn and do do good work so you know I think I think it's in many ways I could tell you a great length how how we're really still working in the same the same important areas. Do you guys think of yourselves as open infrastructure? Yeah you know the question of whether we're open is a great is a great question obviously because we're a subscription resource we're not open access right so we've never been associated with open access I think we've it's it's been frustrating for me because at some level but I understand it I'm not I'm not discouraged by it in any way but you know people want content to be without a paywall and to be openly available and the challenge is obviously how do you fund that how do you build on that how do you invest in in the resource so it keeps having impact I think of this I've always thought of this is that you know you if you think of a continuum with one end of the continuum being a subscription product and the other end of the continuum being a completely open product the open product has got to figure out ways to generate resources over time and you know in in some form or fashion it will move toward the middle it will have some things that it it figures out how to get resources for and that could be contributions or it could be services or it could be other things but it's going to have to develop some way economically to cover its costs and you know we at JSTOR we had a paywall quote unquote subscription resource so we were kind of over here at this other extreme and so we we work to make ourselves more open and more open and more open and I think you know the more content the more capabilities the more infrastructure we can make open over time we're going to meet in the middle with with folks that started out completely open because the bottom line is sustainability depends upon a recurring revenue stream so how you develop that recurring revenue stream can be a hundred different ways and if you can develop that recurring revenue stream in a way that does not require a subscription as a not for profit or as it's better I mean that's that's that's that's better but it's it's not by itself at least in in my experience possible to just say well that's how we're going to do it so so we've been moving over time to to make more and more of our of what we do open so we have a fair amount of open content that's growing all the time the other thing that we're really trying to do is is to say okay we we've had all these libraries all these publishers all these enterprises invest in us and we've developed an infrastructure around that right we've developed an infrastructure to make access to this content available to millions of people around the planet all over the globe like licensees everywhere that's that's an asset that's an infrastructure that's an asset and in addition the fact that people are aware of jstore they've had a good experience with jstore they've used it that also is an asset now we could think about those things in a commercial sense and say well what are we going to do with that asset but I actually think of it as as an obligation in the sense that if we're not for profit we've built that infrastructure now what I mean it's fine to have that infrastructure and keep doing what we're doing but what are we going to do now on top of that how are we going to add more value or how are we going to add more impact so one of the ways is by making more and more of the content open but another of the ways is kind of taking a page out of an you know amazon's book a little bit where you know amazon web services was take the infrastructure you've built and make it useful make a service out of it and so one of the things that we're really trying to do is to figure out ways to take our infrastructure and make that available so so we have a program called open community collections now where libraries can upload the content onto the platform and the idea is that content sits alongside the jstore content which has value um but we can make that content openly available to the world if the libraries want to do that and and we can use our infrastructure to help support the community so so we're working to try to make um our infrastructure more open we're trying to make our content more open but we can't just flick the switch and do that for everything and all we do at at at a at a moment um hopefully over time people will who are who are more committed to open will see the movement we're making we've been doing that all along I mean I think you know in the form of as I said earlier things like the dnai initiative where you know institutions all over the world have been getting free access to jstore for a long time and that's obviously subsidized and enabled by the institutions that are paying a subscription and it's not enough in some respect because we should open it to everyone as much as we can but it's it's a way for us to do that sustainably and and keep growing and evolving over time so that's a that's a broad overview of how we're trying to build infrastructure that can support the open uh open principles so you and I are talking today because um we're announcing uh an investment from uh by ithica into ano um our public benefit uh corporation and um you and I have been talking about this now for almost three years and I'm curious um why did you guys decide to make uh this investment well I think I think that first it's been it's been great to get to know you and we have a lot of faith in your leadership of of of the enterprise and also just the commitment you've made to open infrastructure over a number of years and um you know I think we first did some collaborative work with with hypothesis as much as I don't know seven or eight years ago and you and I've gotten to know each other over over several years three or three years at least and you know just realizing at a first level that annotation just seems like an important part of education it's kind of unrealized and that eventually annotations got to be a part of the learning process right I mean just the notion of a faculty member uh teaching students giving them the opportunity to asynchronously engage with a written document and and have a discussion online I mean that just it seems inevitable to me that that's that's necessary and the approach that that um that hypothesis has taken and I was taking with an open interoperable infrastructure for that that all different resources can use is definitely the way to go as opposed to some proprietary approach to try to create you know loyalty or stickiness on one it's you know one company's platform so so I think we were we were taken both by the the idea of of annotation being an important part of education and also by the approach that you've taken and the leadership you've provided to to work very hard to do that in an open way and you know it's taken years some years for you to get you know attraction on that and uh you know our hope is that that that that time for impact is here and that you are well well timed for that to have the impact that that you want to have so you know I think from a standpoint of just investing in the community what I was saying before about moving toward open it seemed appropriate for us to try to accelerate or help with with something we thought was an important tool and important component of open infrastructure that we could support that now at the same time it will be very good for j-store users right if we can work with you collaboratively to develop the capability and you know really easily and really conveniently for people to do annotation over j-store articles and other content that we're adding to the platform so there's a there's a direct benefit for for our user community if we can if we can work effectively together so so the idea that we could also both support through an investment the broad principles and mission of the organization and at the same time work together with you to actually improve the product and service that people get both when they work with j-store whether using j-store and when they have an opportunity to use hypothesis whether that's on our platform or you know other other providers that seems like just a you know a wonderful win win if you will on both sides and you know great for for the community generally so we're supporting open we're supporting j-store we're supporting hypothesis and most importantly we're supporting the users that we think annotation can really help improve their learning and improve the teaching so so you know we're super excited about about it and you know really happy that that you know after this time we've been able to figure out a way to work together so so we're very excited that's true so my understanding is that this is actually the first time that that it has made this kind of an investment in another organization and how how did it how did it come about that that you guys decided to go in this direction yeah so i think i think the the the question of making investments in in other organizations i think it's really fundamentally about accelerating the mission like how are there there may be some things that we can do well ourselves uh but there may be some things that we're just not well positioned to do ourselves or we can't do it fast enough and if we really want to serve our community there are better ways for us to invest the resources that we have or spend the money that we have uh so for example i mean we we believe that that annotation is a really important uh potential tool and we think it's inevitable we could you know have our product teams develop an annotation layer you know or service um this just seems a such a better way to to go about doing that um and as i said before to to invest and open at the same time makes a lot of sense so we're thinking about um how do we make the best use of our resources and while you know there'll be you know we're not you know we're not a company that an organization that's going to have huge investments in other companies or you know acquiring a bunch of companies or anything like that but i think we are going to look to ways that we can um uh advance our mission and and serve our community and if we can do that faster and better uh we'll do that now there are a couple examples that we're not investments but that also fit this one is reveal digital uh which we we brought into the organization several years ago um and another is art store which we merged with with jstore uh five or six years ago these are these are opportunities for us to you know in the case of of reveal digital uh to bring primary source content that libraries care about and having made open onto the jstore uh infrastructure as i was saying earlier and in art stores case bringing images onto the platform and and working to integrate the image and text experience for for scholars and students so so we look for those opportunities and this was one where you know we feel like we can we can um we can have an impact and accelerate our impact uh in the community by an investment uh not a you know an acquisition or something like that so uh you know a great opportunity for us to bring together the um as i say before the investment and open and also the the impact for our users i guess if you um we're going to look out a little bit and think about what's possible together um what are some of the things that um that you think about or that kind of um excite you the most yeah i'm really excited to work with with uh hypothesis and anno uh to bring you know jstore even more into the teaching and learning experience um you know to have faculty uh engaged in real time in when they assign articles to to students having that kind of uh careful reading being done through a social platform an annotation platform um i think that working with with hypothesis will also bring us more closely engaged with the the learning management systems of you know from a variety of different providers that that that bring jstore just a step even closer into the teaching and learning environment i think we're there now but i think there are ways that we could be better integrated and and more useful and more impactful in that way so i think you know that's one thing that's that's uh that's very appealing to us and and you know as that door opens i think there are lots of other opportunities for the way that um the ways that that jstore can be useful uh not only the the journal archives that we talked about earlier but the the many you know tens of thousands of books that are on the platform and the increasing huge amount of of of primary source content on the platform so i think that you know bringing first the annotation but you know we're we're confident that hypothesis and and anno are going to move beyond just annotation into other areas of teaching and learning and we'd love to be along along for that uh for that that journey so i think it's just the start of of more engagement in the teaching learning space for for us what um what are some questions you might have for me well it's uh you know i i think i think some of some of the questions that i would have are a kind of mirror yours i mean i think um you know you all uh have grown over a number of years gained traction over a number of years as you looked out in the community there there are a variety of places that you could prioritize for uh for first collaboration but also in looking for resources what what drew you to to jstore and to ithica and and and how how is it that you know we became we're i mean at least you've you've worked with a lot of different providers but in terms of this kind of investment um you know we're we're a partner that's um you know it's obviously actively engaged in an operational uh uh enterprise uh was that something you were looking for what what are some of the the the decision um factors that you had in in in choosing us or working with us yeah well at first i would say it wasn't like there were 10 you know options in which we went through a search process or something jstore and and ithica are actually an incredibly unique um and kind of singular resource out there in the combination of this impact focus non-profit structure extraordinary reach i mean 13 000 you know institutions around the world that sheer volume of content that you guys have got across so many different fields heart store and so for us i think it was just um that that's a um you know to be able to bring this kind of um collaborative capability both in classrooms but just generally for researchers research communities scholarly communities um and to do it with a partner that represents you know such a huge part of the gravitational you know force of those communities is pretty unique um and we're just you know we're super excited about that um so i would say we're we're interested we're interested in the classroom aspects which are we're very very focused on right now we're also looking to see how we can bring infrastructure for kind of scholarly communities um uh forward so that they can use um have discussions that are you know in in smaller community groups um over uh the literature um art store is just super exciting for us as a place to think about how to do some really cool um kinds of annotation social annotation and even individual annotation um capabilities um to really you know kind of take that resource and bring it to an even you know greater um level and just in terms of what people can do with it um so for i think um there's just so many different things i think for us the challenge is going to be kind of focusing first and really choosing the things that that are the most important to work on next and you know as a cooperation with you guys the other thing i would just say is you you're the people at Ithaca um the team members you know that we've been working with uh Alex Humphreys i mean for years now are just um really high quality thinkers that are passionate about this space and it's you know just a a joy to be to have that privilege of working a little closer with you guys no we appreciate that you know i i think about you asked me the question about you know some of our history and um and obviously the the context of open and you've been in that space for a long time and um you know you've you've gone through a journey uh of you know sort of as as every sort of startup does uh sort of evolving changing adapting to you know a changing environment can you kind of take me through a little bit of that history in terms of you know hypothesis early genesis and what you originally thought it was going to be how that evolved uh how that evolves in the landscape that we're in now like how tell take us along on that that journey a little bit um see if i can shorthand it um i think initially that the idea and this kind of is doing work in the climate space and you know there's a you know you know different perspectives on what's the truth and you know uh you know what what kind of information should we pay attention to and fundamentally how do we as a society come to consensus um about things that are important uh we may disagree on our perspectives but we do agree that they're at least important topics um and i you know i had this idea that um that instead of trying to create an alternative information source that being able to have be able to bring perspectives or surface perspectives over the content that already exists um that is perhaps sometimes contentious um was powerful and i discovered that it turns out that was a really old idea that a lot of people had had um for a long time before um uh before me for sure um and so i discovered started to discover these different projects and uh and more and more of them and finally i was like okay well we still don't have it all these people have been trying what's happened and started to interview um people that had been involved in some of these early projects and uh and a kind of a story began to emerge about the importance of standards um and um open infrastructure open approaches um open source software very much the same in in the same way that before the web we had these online service providers like copy-serve and and you know um aol and whatnot and they were all their own little kingdoms um you know you were either over here or you were over here um uh maybe you could send an email to each other but you couldn't there was no shared space and then the web came along and changed all of that because of some fundamental properties about openness and standards and so forth and open source implementations of these things called browsers um that were that were the first examples of those and um so for us when we when i started thinking okay well how do you have a shared conversation and started interviewing these previous projects it became very clear that if we didn't borrow the principles and the learnings of the of the web in trying to solve this problem that we you know we're not likely to be successful in the way that so many of these other projects had kind of gone by the wayside um so it initially kind of started off as kind of a you know almost like a fact checking you know um frame but as we started to proceed write software and to start to tap into these communities that have been thinking about this problem for a long time um we're invited into the w3c process um to form a working group it became crystal clear that the opportunity is you know fact checking is a teeny little sliver of just an enormous collaborative opportunity um over knowledge overall knowledge and um something that could be with you um ever you know always as a native feature of browsers or even the proprietary thing like the kindle you know why can't you have a book club over the book you just bought well you know if we're if we're effective at solving this problem um you will be able to because eventually um this paradigm will so for us it was um um just really realizing the magnitude of the opportunity that was in front of us and then beginning to pursue it um initially Josh Greenberg at Sloan reached out and said hey what you're doing is would be perfect for some of the problems that we're trying to solve in open peer review and um then Don Waters at Mellon said hey you know we've been looking at some of this annotation stuff and um and funding projects like this so we got introduced to the scholarly communities and a lot of things started to resonate um that the that starting with these communities in scholarship science and in learning where so much of the knowledge production um content production of the world happens you know annually I think 11 of the top 15 publishers by revenue on earth are either educational research publishers um and so you start to appreciate um that this is an extraordinary if you're going to try to bring something to the world and content is your strategic real estate that starting here is a really powerful place to get started to get traction um and to and to develop the um the paradigm um and its utility um and then to take it from here out to the broader world um and we also think it's really powerful to start on learning and and knowledge oriented utility cases for this um as opposed to you know necessarily inner entertainment type more classically social um use cases which are fine um but they um we think will get closer to the impact that we're trying to have by starting with these communities so you had a you had a startup uh originally and you had a you know what they like to call a successful exit uh previously so what what drew you to this like a more mission driven effort and in how when you you know first getting you mentioned several you know Don Waters from Mellon and and Josh from Sloan you know you were chasing uh grant funding at a not-for-profit as opposed to investment capital um what what took you down that path and then now you're thinking about uh doing this with ANO and having you know an investment uh uh uh company around it to help make it happen so tell us how you got started and why why ANO at this point yeah um great question uh so my first company was a travel travel startup the first uh web based capability to book travel reservation over the web um and you know we grew that uh from a couple people to almost 600 and over six years and went public and uh you know it was I was very young you know I started when I was 25 years old and this was a you know it was a an extraordinary personally you know kind of empowering experience to be able to create something like that and go through all these different stages and um you know and then we you know the company got sold and you know we had that successful exit um but I it left me um you know um you know in a way wanting much more just personally from that journey and to have the next journey be much more about bringing it's great that people can book their travel online now but does it really fundamentally change the world um in a profound way for the better no it's been a kind of a you know a feature um and so I was um trying to say you know I think the great thing about going through that journey was a realization that I as a as a very young person you know could decide to do something and actually have it come happen and to to you know create you know a large organization with a bunch of people that were in support of a mission and achieved it and so it this kind of switch uh flipped in my brain um and I said you know if that's true then the most important thing if I'm going to do something else is the choice about what to do um and if I want to you know if I want to try to make an impact then what am I going to choose um and so I think for me um you know the the experience with different perspectives and information what's what's maybe happening or not in in the climate space I said well there there might be no larger apex problem than trying to find infrastructure to build you know social consensus um and to bring people a little bit closer in their perspectives as they you know transit the world around them um and over you know kind of pulling in on the piece of yarn over a little while you know kind of led um led here you know the the choice of non-profit initially was just a simple one it was a bunch of for-profit ad-driven companies had tried to start and solve this annotation problem with basically ad-driven widgets that were built on proprietary stacks and interviews with those founders led me to the conclusion that if you wanted to get the entire world to adopt a universal conversation framework over everything and you wanted to do it as a proprietary thing it just wasn't going to work um because you would have too much friction um people would be like well okay but you know you guys are going to be the you know rulers of all conversations everywhere using a black box system it's just not going to happen um so um so it was you know the you know borrowing from the web shamelessly from from Tim Berners-Lee and from everybody else that came before it was like okay we don't have to do that let's create a standard by which anybody can build this scaffolding by which together we could all build this scaffolding for conversations using you know open apis and and anybody can build a conversation client or server and they can interoperate together and that felt like a much more satisfying answer and so initially we did that as a non-profit because um we just felt like it was too hard to solve there was a bit of a build-up with standards and everything it just didn't feel like we could get venture folks to fund that early work that it was too much of a uncertain you know kind of time period required and too much uh you know needing to bring stakeholders together uh we funded this for a number of years um on grants uh increasing grants from Mellon and Sloan and whatnot and about 2017 they're started to become a shift um where the grants were harder to get we weren't the shiny new penny anymore um we were entering this kind of mezzanine phase of our existence when it's classically harder to get that kind of uh support and um and a lot of the grants programs were starting to dry up a little bit or their scholarly calm tech category was going away Helmsley shut theirs down Arnold shut theirs down um kind of Josh at Sloan kind of went dark there for about a year um Don Waters retired at Mellon and there was a little bit of a you know a little bit of a shift and all of a sudden we were looking at trying to grow and step into the opportunity declining sources of funding um and a greater need and we just said how you know so we came together on a project called invest in open infrastructure um which um that came out of a conference where we realized a bunch of these open tech projects like ourselves were having exactly the same challenges and we said well how can we solve this these challenges together so we we came together in um and formed IOI invest in open um and began a process to kind of solve this and and recruited Kay Thaney from Mozilla to come in and who's now the executive director of IOI and at the same time we were doing all this which we felt like was important work we rise the time frame is just too short like this is going to pay off maybe in five or ten years um with better funding for infrastructure but we need a solution now um and so we said what's a good hybrid approach here um and we we really looked into benefit corporation b-corps and realized that there was a path here um to start a parallel organization that could bring investment into well still preserving the mission and would help us identify a line better with the kind of investors like Ithaca um that had the resources to be able to support we wanted to do um and but but really needed and appreciated that impact focus um and so um we made the decision and and incorporated and here we are yeah I think it highlights one of the the big challenges for for not for profits in general right is is the capital um how do you raise capitals and not for profits it's very challenging and and as you pointed out you can generate some capital from about foundations but generally speaking they're they're spreading their resources out over a lot of different institutions and and programs and and they don't tend to stay in there over time with the level of capital is required to get to get services started so it's been a challenge for not for profit based services as long as I've been working in the space and um it you know it's it's it's uh it's very difficult it's why you you sometimes see you know that that sort of sequence of entities working on a problem you know rotating through so um so I think it's a it's a it's a very um uh creative and and thoughtful way uh you're taking to to both create the capital generate the capital to be able to make the investments to make a non-profit service work and um and I think it's I think it's super important to to to be able to have that it's just hard to get these things started without those kind of early resources and you've you've hung in there for quite some time um uh you know on a combination of grants and and other funds I'm sure you found from from your own personal finances and other things but yeah it's it's it just takes time to get these things things going does indeed to find that's half the battle is just pushing long enough and surviving long enough um to get to get the the win um you know the stuff is infrastructure is not easy timing is everything in the sense of like you know there's gotta be there's gotta be good weather yeah well um I thank you so much for taking some time and sharing your thoughts thank you it's it's fun it's fun to uh to talk about you know where we're going to go together and uh and it really you know totally looking forward to it and really appreciate appreciate the work that you're doing and look forward to to working with you to serve you know serve scholars and students and teachers