 I came to the Czech Republic in 1996, which is now 22 years, 22 years ago. And I just finished my university. I'd studied literature and I got into the art scene here. And mainly I was working as a writer for a contemporary art magazine. As a journalist, I was working on art catalogs. I was in publishing. And for me it was a chance to really explore and begin my career as a writer and as a journalist. I also wrote poetry and did other things. And I really fell in love with art and contemporary art, and in particular with artists. And it was a wonderful time. It was a time of exploration and learning about myself quite a bit. At the same time it was a struggle working in the art scene and being a writer meant that I had to make myself very uncomfortable in terms of my lifestyle and the amount of money that I was making. That was very poor. But at the same time I felt like it was a really rich time of my life. I was in my mid-20s. I was living in Prague during a very exciting time of transformation. And I was really getting to know a lot of very interesting people and making friends that would last my entire life. After about four or five years I had been really soaking myself in words. I was translating from Czech to English. I was editing. I was writing daily. And one day I just woke up and realized that I was burnt out. I actually had, I felt like I had nothing left to say and the words were just dry. It was kind of a crisis moment. I didn't really know what to do. At the same time my wife, I was married at that time, was pregnant. And I was feeling extreme pressure to change in some way, but I didn't know where to go. I didn't know what path to follow and it was very difficult to make any decision like to leave Prague or try a different profession or anything like that. And I vividly remember walking through the streets of Prague and just asking myself, looking around at the buildings, looking around at the people around me and just asking myself, so what do people need? What is it that people need? It was like kind of a mantra in my head. What do people need? What is it that they really want? Not just another product or another gadget or something like that, but what is it that they really need? So I kept asking myself this question and I didn't get an answer. It's not like I had a sudden flash of inspiration. Nothing like that happened. I kept going to work. I was trying to plow through, but it felt flat and uninspired and kind of lost. And it was interesting at that moment an old friend and colleague approached me with his idea of starting a college. And I went into his office and he spent I think three or four hours just laying out this grand scheme for the next ten years of all this college that would form in Prague and telling me the whole time this is really needed. It's something that's not here. It doesn't exist yet. It's something that really feels a need in the market and it's what people are looking for. And this was really resonating with me. I almost couldn't believe it. It was like somebody had just stepped in the door and opened this box. But it meant something, starting something new. It meant making a big transition in my life away from what I had been doing to something entirely new. It was exciting and it felt like a really great opportunity to develop something, to really create something new, which something that I really enjoy. So we did it. We jumped in and we started working on it. And at the same time, neither he nor I, we wanted to lose the connection that we had with the artists and the designers and the people that we had met over the years, which is one of the reasons that we wanted to offer fine art and graphic design as one of the main disciplines of the college. And for me it was a little bit like, rather than working with artists on an individual level, it became let's create a space where people can work, where they can develop themselves, where they can learn and they can engage in art practice. So for me it was like transforming what I had been doing from writing and creating and working directly with artists to creating a space where people learn. So that was my journey and in a sense it was answering the question that I'd asked myself, you know, so what do people need? I think that people need a place to work. They need to make connections with others. Humans naturally want to learn and they want to experience. And when people go to university it's a time of their lives of real openness. They want to be challenged and at the same time they need adults and people around them to help guide them and show them that there are possibilities. And I think that this has become something of an answer for me and I'm not going to say passion but a real kind of motivation and drive to create such an environment.