 Hello guys, it's a big day for us today. It's the first birthday of ABT Masterclass and of course the inception of our online school. The first idea came to us long ago, but it was on October the 12th last year that our courses, our first courses went live. So it's a big day for us today, big course for celebration. I'm hoping for some drinks later on. And we decided to sit together and have a chat about this last year, what changed, what we learned, what were the most interesting experiences. And perhaps we could start by talking about the reasons we had for starting this initiative. So I guess the first idea was to bring closer the audiovisual translation to those who know little about it or who don't know about it yet, right? But also, empower to succeed, oh, this way, empower to succeed those who are already in the industry and would like to learn more or would like to improve their skills and would like to become more fluent in what they are doing or speed up their workflows. So I think this was the main reason behind it. I believe it's been a year, to be honest. And I think everybody has their own different reasons and they just came together very nicely. For me, I think on a personal level, I don't know, I've been teaching for so many years. I've got teaching in my genes, I think. And I was teaching those small groups, 20 students or so, and I was thinking, I have this passion, I could teach more people, I could teach more students to share the passion and spread the world, the word. And also, when you think about that, it was what, 2021. So it was the second year of the pandemic. So we were after this year and everybody was working online. So it kind of made sense to look more into online education with so many people getting used to this type of work, right? So I think this had a big impact as well. For me, I remember this experience of running courses at universities and having so many bright and talented students. And many of them did want to have a career in localization, in the visual translation, but very often they were unable to find the right jobs and they ended up having careers in other industries. And then I moved to working at companies and recruiting people and I found how hard it is to recruit the right people to find the people with the right skills and how much time and so many companies lose in trying to find those people. So I realized this disconnect between us at academia producing bright graduates and companies somehow not reaching them and then people who are reached by companies and don't have the right skills, the right training. So I thought, now is the time for some innovation and for giving people the power to get trained online, wherever they are, and be able to reach their own career goals this way. Yeah, and considering there's this great demand for artificial translators right there, especially in the pandemic. And I think we're sort of coming in between the academia because when we think about that, where can you learn how to become an audiovisual translator? You can take some university courses but there's never enough time, right? There's just several hours of training. There's never enough to go deeper. So there's a university training on the one hand and there is in company training but then companies are not educational institutions, right? So of course there's some onboarding and some training but perhaps, you know, there's a little further know this and that missing. So I think we nicely fill in this gap. We can go deeper. We are free to set the curriculum that answers very pertinent questions, hopefully. And, you know, we can get the right balance of theory and hands-on training. That's actually a very good point because during many events and conferences, right? And there was this topic that there, we need a bridge, right? Between industry and academia. And I think we are part of that bridge now that we're actually building it ourselves, kind of, of course. Exactly. And then there's also this idea that my experience of working in the industry is that it's not that you get trained once and then you know everything forever. Things are changing so much and so fast that we need to keep being trained and getting new skills all the time. And that can be fun and that can be exciting as well. Actually, one of the things that was surprising for me throughout this whole process of creating AVT Masterclass was that people from all kinds of countries, from all over the world, from all sorts of the coordinates of the globe, they need training and they are looking for it. And some of them have different options that you can go for a university course. But in many places, people don't have that option. And being trained online is the only opportunity they have. And they were very happy and very glad to have this option in the form of AVT Masterclass. And of course, we are mostly based in Europe. Our servers are in Canada, but most of our content is recorded in Poland and in Spain. And I expected that most of our students will be coming from Europe as well. And something that I found surprising was that actually, yes, we do have lots of students from Europe, but it's actually people from Argentina to Australia, from across the globe, from very, very different places, we didn't expect them to come to us to get trained. And they are here, they need training and they are very happy to have this opportunity. That's right. And this was also very visible in those free webinars that we were organizing, right? We have to repeat some of them to adjust for different time zones. So thank you to everyone who participated in those events. It's always very rewarding for us to meet people and to talk to people and try to find out as well, you know, what can you say? Educational needs that people have in different corners of the world. Exactly. So the response that we got was pretty surprising, but it was a very positive surprise, right? We felt that this is the product that it's indeed needed, right, on the market. And this is what people are looking for. So this is something I think we are proud of, right? That we came up with this idea and that we can share the knowledge with all the people that may need it, right? In any corner of the globe. Perhaps a less positive surprise was how much work is involved in online teaching. So I expected this to, that this will need a lot of work and a lot of effort, but I could never realize how much work is actually involved. So when I go back to in-person teaching to the courses around the past, it was so much less work, whereas with online teaching really spend as a team hours of end hours. And it's really a lot of effort. But the satisfaction of then seeing people from different corners of the globe interacting with this content, appreciating it, writing us very positive reviews. It's really paced off all the efforts that we are putting in. And for me, one of the most memorable experience this year was when we had a chance to interact with our students directly through meetings or our community meetups. And I remember one of the students whose story moved me most was actually Ravi, who was a linguist base in the UK and he now moved to India. And he was absolutely new to translation subtitling. He took our course and he took our other courses. And through this, he trained himself as a subtitler and very quickly he got a job and he's now working as a subtitler and he shared the story with us. And it was like a living proof that the whole idea that we had for AVT Masterclass that was right, it's really working and that our content is actually changing lives. It's really helping people. So this was very moving for me. Yeah, I can hear this story online. It's available in social media. I have to put it on now on YouTube as well. So, you know, and the guys of you who also have those stories, feel free to reach out to us. It's really the most rewarding thing for us to hear your positive feedback. So we're wishing a very happy birthday to AVT Masterclass and a very good day to all of you, our students. And we hope to be able to keep bringing you good educational content, new skills, new knowledge over the next year. See you in nine.