 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome. Welcome to all those who are present here in person and all those who are viewing this this session, this event online as well. Welcome to all of you. Delighted to welcome all of you to the Purdue Engineering Frontiers lecture series, the first one actually of this semester, and I'm even more delighted to talk about our speaker today, Arun Gupta. Arun Gupta is the CEO of the Noble Reach Foundation and a great partner for us at Purdue Engineering as we've all learned about earlier today with a special announcement that we had just, you know, half an hour ago. Arun is actually an engineer. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering with distinction at Stanford University where he went on to get another master's degree. He then went on to get an MBA from the Harvard Business School and he started his professional career at Arthur Little's telecom and technology consulting practice. Then he went on to Carlisle Venture partners focused on software investments, and then he was a partner at Columbia Capital. In fact, Arun's investment career has spanned 18 years, including initiating Columbia's Cybersecurity and Government Technology investments with a focus on national security AI and software as a service in cloud infrastructure sectors. Arun is also no stranger to higher education institutions. He's a lecturer at Stanford University for Valley Meets Mission, and we'll hear more about that here today, and an adjunct Entrepreneurship Professor and Senior Advisor to Provost at Georgetown University. He's also, as you see, the author of the national bestseller Venture Meets Mission. Arun is really active in the emerging tech, entrepreneurship, public policy and venture finance communities. He's passionate above all for inspiring students to pursue mission-oriented entrepreneurial careers. Please join me in welcoming Arun to the stage. Make sure you can hear me okay. First and foremost, a big thank you to Dean Rahman and the entire Purdue team. The hospitality since we've been here, it's been unbelievable, and we're really excited about the partnership that Noble Reach and Purdue are forging together. And think there's, you know, a great amount we can do and a great impact we can have, not only in this region, but also nationally, and we'll talk a little bit more about that. So, you know, what I'd like to do here is, you know, give you a little bit of the arc of the story of what we wrote at Venture Meets Mission, the book, and then how that's led to the foundation that we now have called Noble Reach, where we have a half a billion dollar endowment, you know, which we'll be collaborating now with Purdue, jointly to be able to, you know, inspire this next generation more about public service, especially engineering students. So, a little bit about my own journey. So, I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. My father worked in Naval Sea System Command for 45 years, and he's still working there today. So, government service has been in my family, you know, all through my childhood and adult life. And, you know, it's around us in D.C. So, you really have a great deal of respect for those that are going in and serving. As Dean Rahman said, you know, I was an engineer, undergrad, and then went to business school. And my professional career was primarily in venture capital. So, I started off at Carlisle, but then, you know, for the most part, with 18 years at Columbia Capital, which was founded by Senator Mark Warner. And the first half of my career there was focused on your typical kind of Silicon Valley kind of investing, where, you know, you're looking at, you know, the hot trends and looking to invest in young founders and things of that sort. And then in 2008, 2009, I was part of the tech transition team with then President-elect Obama. And that opened our eyes to starting to look for the first time at investing around mission tech and entrepreneurship. So, investing around government-related technology. And at that time, it was primarily cybersecurity. And the rationale was just that, look, the velocity of threats was way outpacing our procurement cycle. And so, the ability to build everything custom was going to have to change. And we were going to need to have a dependency on dual-purpose technology. And so, that led to me investing in that space. And it really influenced me quite a bit because you also realized that when you're working with folks that are around the mission that the money followed the mission versus mission following the money. And it made going back to normal venture investing seem a little empty. And in a bit hollow. So, I did that for the second half of my career at Columbia. And then, you know, I started thinking about what's next after having been a VC for 20 years. My wife asked me the question of like, so is this it? Or is there something else, you know, another chapter in your life? She's a psychiatrist, so no question is ever that simple. And it sat with me and I really kind of felt like there was something else I kind of wanted to start to think about doing. I got involved then at teaching. I was teaching at Georgetown. I was teaching at Stanford. And the class I was teaching at Stanford, as Dean Rowan said, was titled Valley Meets Mission. I was teaching it in Stanford in Washington. And it really was talking to students about, hey, you know, don't waste your talent and more importantly the platform that you have on Candy Crush 3.0. Like, there's bigger problems to go solve. And these bigger problems can also be solved in a for-profit way. You don't need to create this artificial distinction. But we need your energy, we need your thinking to help us solve these kinds of problems. But these larger, the largest of these problems, take climate, take national defense, take cyber, take healthcare, take food, take space, aren't going to be solved by just one company in the valley either. You need the scale and reach of government to make real impact. And so it was really a class to kind of, you know, help these students kind of understand how these two worlds can kind of come together to solve big problems. I had brought in Mike Morrell, who was a former CA director and into the class, and he's like, everyone, what I love about your class is that 45% of the students dislike government, the other 45% dislike entrepreneurial capitalism. And you're trying to land the plane by the end of the course that we need both to solve big problems. And we ultimately got there. And the way we got there was, you know, really kind of having students engage with people in each of these spheres. And really kind of challenge their own ill-informed biases in a way that made them then want to, and we would see this, many of these students would rescind their banking, consulting, big tech offers, and come into this world. And having seen this, started teaching the class before COVID, but then having seen the interest around this accelerate after, really is what inspired writing the book, Venture Meets Mission. I had the privilege at Georgetown of meeting Tom Feuer, I'm a co-author who's here in the front, and we began working on this, and we started talking to folks inside of government, academic, and industry, and we'll talk a little bit about what we wrote. But while that was going on, I was on the board of a not-for-profit called LMI, which was started under Kennedy by McNamara to basically give government a way to access the best talent and the best technology in the private sector. We went through a process where we had a not-for-profit with a for-profit entity underneath us, and not to spend too much time on it, we sold the for-profit entity to David Rubinstein's family office and some investors, but that created a meaningful endowment for us, nearly half a billion dollar endowment. And then we started thinking about what to go do with it. You know, there was some early talk about doing a think tanker research, and then I think the board and members really thought this would be a great opportunity to try to use this capital to try to put to work some of the things that we talked about in the book. And at the core, it's in great power competition, if we're going to be competitive in this country, we need to have our best talent and our best innovation connected to the government so we can solve big problems. And that was the essence of what we started about in the book. You know, when you look at the book, you know, we open up with this quote because we felt it kind of captured, I think, how the uneasiness that a lot of people feel today, right? Rapid technological change, AI is going to change the world, rapid geopolitical change with multiple wars around the world, rapid environmental change that we're seeing around us, rapid social change, it brings a real uncertain feeling, like where are we, which direction are we going in? And we use this quote because it was actually said 60 years ago, right? And the purpose was to remind us that each generation has this feeling at some point in time, like we go through this moment and that we've been here before, right? That doesn't mean the future is we take it for granted, but just know that, you know, this isn't a new feeling, but it's a feeling that should create a call to action. And that's where we feel we are today, right? At this moment where there is a little bit of call to action, you look at kind of the existential threats that this generation has faced in a very short period of time, you know, you had COVID, a pandemic, you've got, you know, wars in geopolitical fights now in Ukraine and the Middle East. You look at the ongoing sustainability fight that we have globally. You layer on top of that great power competition that we have with the real adversary. You know, there's a lot, this is a lot happening for this generation. And, you know, the fundamental premise we have, though, is that we need to, you know, there's two bastions of optimism and both of them I've had the privilege of being in during my career. You know, one is the entrepreneurial community. You know, there's no one more optimistic than an entrepreneur, because if you're not, you're not going to be an entrepreneur if you don't believe. And they also have the mindset we need to think about right now, which is how do you build a plane while we're flying it? Like, in a rapidly changing world, we can't just plan. We need to have a different model of testing and iterating, which is much more akin to the entrepreneurial mindset. The second fashion of optimism is this, is students. It's this next generation, like, if you're not optimistic at this age, it only goes downhill, guys. No, no, I'm kidding. But, I mean, this is why we all teach. This is why we like to be around students, right? It's because of that optimism. And so bringing these two communities of optimism together is incredibly important. You know, what I saw while I was teaching my class, though, is that, you know, I feel like our generation's given a vernacular that forces the students to make an artificial choice. That choice is, you know, in a very binary way, right? We don't leave a middle ground. You know, we say not for profit, for profit. You know, we say public sector, private sector. There's no middle ground there. One implies for good. The other one implies making money. And, you know, actually have students, you know, an officer is going, God, I really want to make some money, but I really want to do something good. What should I do? And this idea of or is a really troubling thing, right? For a generation, I have to think that they have to pick between one or the other. We don't have a language. Words matter. We don't have a language for this middle ground. You know, in addition, we talk about innovation, right? And look, each sector innovates, you know, look at this institution, the level of innovation. You can see it in the back there. That's happening at the engineering school. You know, you look at government. You look at DARPA, what's going on in NSF. There's a tremendous amount of innovation happening there. You look at what's happening, you know, in industry, there's a tremendous amount of innovation. However, it's all stove piped. And so, you know, what we were, what we talk about in the book is how, how do we rebuild trust, right? How do we rebuild trust between government, academic, and ventures? If we truly believe that what we need is to get our top talent and our top innovation around these problems so that we can solve these larger societal problems in some capacity. You know, before moving too much further, you know, in chapter two in the book, we talk a little bit about how we're confronting two main biases. One is a bias of, like, how we think of government. And the other is a bias of how we think about entrepreneurs. So we talk a lot about, like, humanizing government. You know, I found many times, you know, in my class, you know, if I said a former CA director was coming in, it, you know, they would, there were some real feelings about that, without knowing who the individual was. But I'll tell you, every time they finished a one and a half hour meeting with Mike Morel, everyone felt like that was a thoughtful, humble, respectful human being that's trying to do the right thing that got in North Star. Like, I want to be like that person. And I, you know, I think this is a broader statement. I think it's easier to be, you know, have biases and, you know, discriminate against groups, but it's harder to do it when you break it down to individuals, right? And so, you know, when even someone says, like, I'll get government out of my life, I'm like, well, what does that mean? Right? Like, what part of government? What are we talking about? Like, government at its basic molecular level is just an organization made up of people, right? And so humanizing that is incredibly important. And, you know, also, even just we were just chatting with some students just even the basic distinction between politicians and civil servants, right? Like most people conflate government with what they see on CNN and what they see on Fox. You know, that's not government, right? That it's a very small portion of what's really happening behind the scenes. The second is, you know, the entrepreneurial mindset. You know, likewise, I think many times people, and we heard this last night, you know, conflate entrepreneurship with just being the billionaire class, right? Oh, it's Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Right? And you can have your, you know, pros and cons of what you think of them. But you know, that's what it evokes. And, you know, again, the truth is entrepreneurship is something much more, it's much deeper. It's not really the outcome of how much you make. It's the mindset with how you go about doing it. Right? You know, and we try to personalize entrepreneurship. You know, to the point where we say like each each of us is actually an entrepreneur, like anyone here that's raised a family would tell you that's a pretty entrepreneurial endeavor. Right? You have a co founder. You may have one, two, three products. You go through product market fit for, you know, hopefully it's only 18 years, but you know, could be longer. And then you launch, right? But I mean, there's a lot of similarities to kind of how you think about, and you have to decide what kind of culture you're going to create, what kind of values you're going to instill. You know, how you manage your career could be very entrepreneurial. Right? Do you want to stay in one thing? Are you going to bounce around and do different things? So, you know, we try to confront those biases. We also try to highlight the fact that as to understanding the why these cultures are different, right? It's very easy to say like, oh, government doesn't take risk. Right? They're slow. But we have to understand the systems and the incentives that that that government has and why it reacts that way. And then what's the what's the incentive system and the risk reward if you're an entrepreneur? You know, we say in the book, like if I was at the VC, if I was measured like government, like I'd never raised another fund. You know, what do I mean by that? You know, if I make 10 bets, and two of them go public, and the other eight, you know, get shut down, I'm probably still oversubscribed on my next fund as as a VC, like people feel like, all right, you really know what you're doing. If I'm government, and I have 10 projects, none of them are okay. But one of them is Cylindra. I'm carrying that around for a decade. Right? In one system, you're measured by your best deal. And the other system you're measured by your worst deal. It's going to change behavior. It just is. If I'm measured by my best deal, I'm just going to keep trying, going for a really big home run. And if I'm measured by my worst deal, I'm going to be working on make not making sure I don't make mistakes. If you think about it, every government agency right now has, you know, what's called an inspector general. Their job is to make sure you don't deviate from the playbook. Like, here's the procedure, make sure you don't deviate from the procedure. And if you do, you know, you could get called in front of a congressional hearing. You know, a buddy of mine, Dan Tangirlini, has a quote that we use in the book where he says, like, the answer to that is to have two IGs. And they're kind of like, why would you want two? And his point is like, the other IG should be called an innovation IG. Because actually, think about it, you know, it's an interesting thought exercise. If you actually had someone in each agency that also is making sure that each agency is innovating fast enough, and if they're not, they could also be called in front of a congressional hearing, you may see a change in behavior. Because right now, you're only going to get called in front, you're not going to get any reward, and you're only going to get called in front if you make a mistake. Right? And so, having said that, look, we can't wave the magic wand and change what government is. Although I think it's starting to change, and that's partially because I think we're at a generational tipping point of, you know, decision makers now being part of the digital generation. But so what we really talk about is, what does a renewed partnership need to look like between government and entrepreneurs? Because we need some place in this country where we can take these risks in a way that you don't get penalized, but then we need to have a partner that can help us scale in a way that we can compete nationally and globally as a society. You know, I fundamentally, you know, and we talk about this, you know, and I believe this, look, I think democracy in this country is superpower. And today even is our ability to create talent in our higher ed ecosystem. I mean, you look at the institute that we're at right now and the numerous, you know, that are trying to be like it here in the US. But our ability to create talent is like nowhere else in the world. Right? And our ability to innovate is like nowhere else in the world to our entrepreneurial ecosystem. The evidence of that is that everyone from around the world comes here. They're not going somewhere else. They're still coming here. Right? And that highlights, you know, that we have the capacity to do this. And that's our strategic differentiation as a country. Right? Is our ability to create talent and our ability to innovate? And I've the issue is that over decades, we've just let that kind of continue, let a thousand flowers bloom. But we haven't had a coordinated way to be able to build the infrastructure to connect it around larger societal and government ambitions. So what we talk about in the book a bit is, you know, look, many of you may say, well, public private partnerships, that's been around forever. And it has, right? In truth, it has. Nothing new there. I think the implicit assumption, though, in public private partnership is the private is usually a big company with big resources. Right? And history and background and all the things that you don't have an adventure. Right? And so that we need another vernacular to start thinking about, like, how does government collaborate with ventures? It's different. It's a different ecosystem. In one case, you've got companies that have maybe billions of dollars on their balance sheet. In another case, you've got ventures that aren't even fully funded. Right? That's where most innovative technology is today. Right? So how we interact with that ecosystem is very different. We identify, you know, five challenges around incentives, outcome process, relational challenges and temporal. And look, you know, I'll pick on one, take temporal. Like, you know, if a government, you bid on a contract and let's say it slides nine months. Right? Let's say it's a $50 million contract. If you're a big company, a contractor, you know, no harm, no foul, you kind of wait and, you know, slide through. If you're a small company, you're a venture, like, and you've scaled up to deliver, you know, you've burned a lot of cash. That's the difference between existing and non-existing. Right? So how we kind of manage that is incredibly important. What we try to do, though, in the book is rather than providing solutions, is show solutions. Show companies that are overcoming these barriers. And then really posing more the question, well, if they can do it, why don't we do more of it? And what's keeping us from doing more of it? Right? So we show companies that are, you know, using mission as their core to create profit. Right? Companies that are building the easy button, customizing for the unknown. And again, you know, are really building for the long haul in a way that, you know, companies normally don't do on the venture side. You know, we then move a little bit and talk about what's government's role here. Because it's not just about the companies needing to adjust. You know, government needs to adjust as well. Right? And has an opportunity to really energize this ecosystem. You know, laying out broad visions, which is what you're seeing now with chips and IRA. These are directionally industries that we really care about. We're going to put some capital in. But we want to put that capital in to have it be a force multiplier for the private sector to join us in this endeavor. Right? Those are incredibly important. And I think we're moving into an age where we're going to see more of this, not less. Right? How we develop talent. This is a large conversation we've been having with the folks at Purdue. Right? How does government become a place like it actually was where this is where you want to start your career for a year or two. And then you go off and do things. Right? It's the top students that get in. Right? It doesn't mean you have to have a career here. But even just starting there signals something about you. How do you mobilize capital? And then how do you become the procurer of value? This last one is a subtle but important point. Right? Many times people think government and when they think about ventures is like, oh, these ventures need capital from government. Having been a VC, having backed a lot of these companies, we never needed capital from government. We needed contracts. Contracts are very different than capital. What I needed, and we, you know, two great examples are SpaceX and Moderna. Right? Government says this is, this is an ambition is really important to us. We need to rebuild the space launch industry. We're going to put a hundred million dollars out there for someone that can build a solution that can do X. And if they can do that, you know, here's a hundred million dollar order. And then each step of the way we'll we'll increase that. Advanced purchase orders. We did that with Moderna. Any any company that could come up with an FDA released COVID vaccine. The government said we will buy three to four hundred million of them. And that research also started inside of government for Moderna, by the way. But these are stories we don't talk about. Or we don't we don't associate as being actual success stories of how government and industry have actually collaborated. Those are two big name ones, but there are plenty of smaller ones too. Again, we as a country have the capacity to do this when we're in crisis. The question then becomes how do we do it as a north? You know, one of the things we talk about also in the book is how we how we build talent, right? And how we need people going in and out of these ecosystems. I mean, we're a fundamental believer that, you know, trust is about people at the end of the day. Institutional trust comes down to the people in those institutions trusting each other. There's no such thing as like the broad institution trusting someone, right? That means that people need to be moving in and out and having these diagonal careers. We also think there's opportunities now where as we're talking about like people can start their career in government and then go on and have very big private sector careers or something doing something else. Likewise, they could flip it, be in the private sector and say, look, I've had a successful first career. And now my second career, I want to deploy my talents around this. And we were just chatting with some students earlier and we're like, look, you know, I've been working for 30 years and I still think I'm only about halfway through your generation by the time you get to where I am, you may feel like you're only a third of the way through. Right? You'll have a chance to maybe not even only two careers, you can have three careers. The way we're going right now. But it changes your mindset around how you think about things, right? Before when we had 20 year careers, it was very linear. You didn't think about like multiple careers and how am I going to bounce around? You know, why do wow is a anecdote that we share? And I think it captures a little bit of and I'll talk about this more when we get to Noble Reach of what we're trying to create and spark and hopefully in the partnership with Purdue spark it here. Right? And the why do wow was actually, you know, the aha moment was a two-stampered CS students, both female, both CS majors, one selected to do Kessel Run for those of you don't know, that's a very prominent software factor in the military, you know, very exclusive to get selected for that. She told her friends she's going to go into government, be part of this project and her friends go, why would you do that? Like why would you do government? You could do all these other things in the valley. Her other friend was selected to do Teach for America. And her friends go, wow, that's amazing. You're going to serve, you're going to give back and then you can go do whatever you want. And when you want that, there's a lot there. Because we like to say the reason people aren't going in is because of the money. But in that example, the one that got the effusive energetic response was probably earning half as much as the one that would be going into government. You know, we need to create the prestige, we need to create the respect amongst peers of saying, like, that's the desired thing to go do. But implicit in that also is that we have to create it so that it feels like a career in answer. So that people know that when I do a program like this, and I come out, I can still go to a consulting firm, a bank, a big tech firm, if that's really what you want to do. We're not saying you're signing up for a career in government. No different than when you go to Teach for America, are you signing up for a career in education? Right? It's not a fact. Most of those people don't stay as teachers, but what they do stay is connected to education, right? They stay as folks that are, you know, if you look at most of the tech startups, they probably have high percentage of Teach for America alums in them. And so if you think about, you know, this next generation of people that can create really breakthrough gov tech startups, it would be people coming out of a program like this, right? That I think is what is really where my comment earlier about, like, why I think the ceiling is much higher with the partnership that we're talking about with engineering and public service with Purdue is that. Because I really think that's a really big opportunity for, you know, at a national level. So I'm just closing out really quickly on the book then I'll move over to Noble Reach. You know, we close out a little bit on the vision of the future. We layer it in three levels. At an individual level, what people should care about at an organizational level, and then how that all rolls up into a societal level of what, you know, the future could look like. Again, we try to use examples of what, of people that we see out there and what they're doing as role models. And then we close with, look, we start with optimism when we close with optimism. When we close with the optimism of, like, I think we're at the very early innings of what I would, you know, think as a virtuous cycle. You know, first, I think you have really exciting industries that are being disrupted by technology right now, right? You got climate, cyber, health, food, defense, space. These are massive industries. You know, these are niche industries. These are massive industries that are going, going through massive change that need engineers in a, in a, in a, in a way that we haven't needed them in decades, right? There's a shortage. Second, the why now. We actually have real success stories of companies getting created where they've actually solved really inter, inter enabling and solving major societal problems while also creating real shareholder and value. And then for those that are part of it, you know, financial wealth so that you're actually able to go do something that's purposeful and good, but also create your own financial independence in the process. Right. Once you have these success stories, this is a tipping point that I think we're at right now. The capital starts to flow into it. Why are you seeing all this capital going to space? Why are you seeing in the last two years more money going to defense tech than when in the last eight years? It's because of these success stories. VCs aren't leaders. We're followers. I've been in the space. We wait till we see success and then we go like, oh, people can make money here than a lot of us come into the space and start investing in it. You start seeing more capital come into space and then what happens is you see better talent come into space because it's now hot. It's a great, it is a fun, interesting, great thing to go do. And I think we're at that point now and you see better managers come into space, better executives come into space, better institutions wanting to collaborate with you, which leads to the next thing where you start to see better collaboration. The ecosystem gets stronger. Right. And you've got institutions that are on the front end like Purdue is here wanting to collaborate and be part of this ecosystem. But I guarantee you in five years there's going to be 30 other universities wanting to be in this ecosystem. Right. And this is the virtual cycle. Look, this isn't new. This is the Valley. This is how Silicon Valley was created. The irony is Silicon Valley was created by DoD funding. The future looks like our history. We don't teach it. We don't talk about it, but we've seen this movie before. Right. And this is why I think in great power competition against, you know, our system of being able to unleash this kind of entrepreneurship and energy against, you know, versus our adversaries model, I'll take this any day. Yes, we have our issues. We can be better and all this other stuff, but I'll bet on this any day of the week. Real quick on how this leads into what we're doing at Noble Reach. So, you know, we think of Noble Reach then in harnessing that energy of trying to build the infrastructure to connect this talent and connect this innovation at this intersection. We are, you know, when we talk about the connection of what we're doing there and building infrastructure, we use infrastructure intentionally. As I was just chatting with mine earlier, infrastructures, you know, implies making an investment that betters everybody. It also implies political neutrality in today's polarized world, which is important. Right. It's the one way we're able to talk about government and not and find when we chat with Dems and Republicans, you know, senior corporate execs and senior university leaders, that everyone has the same question. And that question is how can we help? And so we look at also this infrastructure in two dimensions. One is think of it as building the highways to connect. But then it's also to build a scaffolding the buildings to support because sending some of the best and brightest from Purdue into a government agency and saying, hey, we'll check in with you in two years is not sufficient. We need to build an infrastructure to support them while they're in those opportunities. As you see here, we've been having a number of great partnership conversations, which has been probably one of the most heartening thing in this process is to see how universities, government agencies and private sector partners are all wanting to be around this. They recognize that we're in a time and place where we need to be collaborating in a different way. You know, there's a stat we have in the book, we're less than 7% of tech workers in government right now. We're under the age of 30. We have four times as many over the age of 60. You know, you can have two conclusions from that. One is this generation doesn't care. Or that this generation actually does care. But the infrastructure to connect them to these opportunities is outdated. The bet we're making at noble reaches that we think it's a ladder. And the partners we want to bring in board with us in this journey are those that believe the same. Where they can feel that their students are energized that want to do this. And that we can collaborate with them. And that's why these programs like Engineering for Public Service are so important. Because it puts it in the ethos of these students. That this is something I can do. It also puts it in the ethos of the students if we do this right, that this is a really prestigious thing to go to. And if we do it really right, like after people leave that program and seeing where they end up, you know, we'll create that cycle effect of more and more people desiring to go into this space. And we're already seeing that. And I'll walk you through a few stats. I've walked you through what we're doing on the Y to Wow. You know, the one thing I'll say is we just did an internship program last year where we had five interns. We had 600 applicants. This year we did the internship program and then the first 48 hours we had 1300 applicants. So when anyone says like, you know, I'll do these podcasts or interviews and they'll be like, well, how are you going to inspire these students to want to do this? I'm like, no, no, you've already missed the boat. That's the easy part. The students are actually inspire. Our job is like how do we get them to the right spot? Right? So what were we launching what we've launched through the leadership of Linda Bixby who's here and then Rebecca LaMadrid, who is running the program. Rebecca was the executive director for the presidential innovation fellows program started by Obama. And she's running our scholars program is a noble route scholars program. We're bringing in our first pilot cohort, 15 to 20 scholars this year. We're already 10 X over subscribed on applicants. And you know the idea is again, across key domains AI cyber materials bio energy business, bring students in create a bootcamp like experience. So they, you know, have a feeling of what it's going to be like going in but more importantly also build social bonds with each other because we want this to be a cohort based model. We're modeling this after the night Hennessy Fellowship for those that are familiar out of Stanford. And the idea being that each student is going to have their own personal experience, but they'll be connected in a very cohort based model, you know, everyone gets a mentor, you know, we'll have learning modules. And this is where our private sector partners come in. We've already had the investment banks offer to want to teach financial modeling to these students, you know, online. We've had the consulting firms want to teach, you know, industry analysis, we've had the big tech firms wanting to do tech stuff. Why? These are the kinds of students they want to be able to hire and get in front of when they're done with these program. Right. It's also good for them. Like, they care about like, this is a mission they care about. So now you're a student, you're doing public service. Right. You know, you're, you're while you're doing that, you're also getting the same analysts, not the exact same, but, you know, you're touching some of the same analysts training that your peers are getting at some of these other places. And then you come out a year or two and you can decide where you want to go and what you want to do. And that's and that's where part of our theory on the case is we need not for profit, it's outside of government to help coordinate talent for government because we can structurally manage those partnerships. Whereas, you know, it's trickier for government to do so. On the second career side, we've created a platform where we're on, we have Emerge Fellows led by Simon Davidson who's here where we're bringing in folks that have built companies, invested in companies across those key strategic domains. And they're collaborating with DARPA and NSF to help us commercialize tech. So here you are now, you know, these are folks that could be doing anything they want, but they really care about the mission. And they feel like, oh, look, I've already made what I want to make. I want to be able to now do something more purposeful and meaningful. And they've joined this journey. In addition, we've brought on board Sri Ramaswamy and Colin Kahl, Colin with the Undersecretary of Defense for Austin and Sri was Senior Chips Advisor for Gina Romando, you know, as what we're calling leadership fellows, which we're going to, you know, build out. But think of them as mentors. These are these are mentors. So you go into government, right? Not only are you getting the experience of being there, not only are you getting then the experience of being part of a cohort, not only are you getting, you know, to learn hard skills from some of the leading private sector players, right now you're getting a mentor. Take someone like Sri, who was an engineer for 10 years, then with a Kinsey partner for 14, then was a senior advisor and co-author, probably one of the most significant pieces of legislation in the last few decades in the CHIPS Act. And now he's over at Noborage. He's your mentor. Now, if someone like that's your mentor, as I tell my students, like, and this came up today, like, how do you decide where to where to go work? Like you go work where you get the best mentors, because they're the ones that will set you up for not only the next opportunity, but the one after that. You know, under Simon Davidson's leadership, you know, we have an innovation group called Emerge. Really what we're doing here is we collaborate again with DARPA NSF and the government research institutes. You know, for decades, we've been going counterclockwise with that research where we try to take it right to the agency that was funding it. And what we found is that, like, look, we hit the belly of death and no surprise, we don't get the right talent, we don't have the right tech around it, we don't have the right capital. Now if we bring it out to the to the venture or entrepreneurial community, we can connect them to entrepreneurs and they're allowed to scale or fail appropriately. And this starts so what's a renewed partnership look like of government? Because either investments at the private sector would never make. And what we've seen early on, you know, not to belabor the point is, you know, we've done about 70 of these over the last three years. And, you know, those have attracted over a billion to capital. And we've had exits already, most notably dive being bought by Andrew. But you start to see these are mission, these are all mission-oriented ventures. These are places we could actually place our scholars, right, coming out of school. And the final piece that we were just chatting about with the team and Dean Rahman as well is for those that are familiar, there's a program called Hacking for Defense that started at Stanford, really taking national security problems and using that as context and then teach entrepreneurial pedagogy. I think Lean Startup and MVP by Steve Blank, that team is really kind of coming underneath us as of two weeks. And we're looking to expand that out and we're looking to expand that out into hacking for climate, you know, hacking for semiconductor, right? We're looking to rename it and brand it under the brand of innovation for impact, but innovation for semiconductor, right? Where you can identify real semiconductor problems that agencies are trying to solve, teach that in the classroom, let students kind of work on it. And oh, by the way, those same problems were actually commercializing some of that tech elsewhere over time. And so then what that creates is, you know, an ecosystem. And this is the dynamic fluid system that we're trying to create, which is like we create a repository of what are these problems that the government's trying to solve. Believe or not, that's hard to do, but we have those relationships starting with DARPA and NSF. We're already commercializing much of that tech through our Emerge program that Simon's leading. But now we can repurpose those same questions and teach them in the classroom to students like you. Right. And you can put your entrepreneurial energy thinking about like how would I go about solving that with your team? And it's less about you actually solving the problem. It's about you going through that process. And then, you know, the very best of those, at the very least, hopefully we're energizing an ecosystem to think about not solving, you know, not using your entrepreneurial energy for Candy Crush 3.0, but solve these mission oriented problems. And in the very best cases, you know, what we can be doing is, you know, taking those top students and actually matching them to ventures that are getting commercialized on those same problems. So you've already hit the ground running, having been thinking about this for like three to six months. And that becomes its own living breathing system. Right. It keeps getting replenished with problems. You keep, we keep spending them out and you keep teaching. Right. And it and I think these are the systemic things that we need to start thinking about. Again, you know, back to the, you know, the slogan at Purdue Engineering, if you're going to have excellence at scale, like if you don't think it's systemically, you're just going to have a little bit of excellence or you just try to scale. But if you can do excellence at scale, you need to be able to mesh the talent and the innovation together. And so this is my last slide, just kind of closing out. This is what we're doing at Noble Reach. It's really how we modernize the pathways of building and building the scaffolding to connect and support our best talent and innovation to go in these government problems.