Venture Meets Mission with Arun Gupta

We were going to call this series Shiny Object Syndrome for the fact that all these new technologies come along and people get really excited about them. But we chose instead to call it this Does Not Compute, a podcast series about what's going on with emerging technologies, with the technologies that you read about in the papers, and we get real experts to come in and talk about it. I'm Jim Lewis. I work at csis. I'll be your host for this podcast.

Arun Gupta is currently an adjunct entrepreneurship professor and a senior advisor to the provost at Georgetown University. He's also a lecturer at Stanford and a venture partner at Columbia Capital. He does a lot of work in spaces we're interested in. And we're going to talk about his new book, Venture Meets Mission. It's good to have a real entrepreneur and venture capitalist on the show to tell us how things actually work. Well, thanks for coming on. Tell us about the book.

Well, Jim, thank you for having me. So the book, Venture Meets Mission, it really explores how as a nation, can we create a renewed partnership between government and entrepreneurs to solve the big problems that we have today? And that we need the optimism and innovative capacity of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, but we also need to marry that with the scale and reach the government provides. And how can we do that? And the essence of the book is presenting that we believe that there's a generational opportunity in front of us today to solve these big problems, whether it be climate, whether it be national security or cybersecurity or health or food. It's a lot of storytelling, honestly. It's a lot of storytelling of folks that are doing it, how they're doing it, and starting to raise the question more of like, how do we do more of it? I mean, how do we make it the norm versus the exception?

What's your favorite story in the book?

Gosh, you know, there's so many. You know, I think one of my favorite stories in the book is actually the folks that come in wealth fusion. Here's a company that started off as a grant inside of the university, doing important work around energy. You know, the grant goes away and then they start to say, hey, let's go down the not for profit world to see if we can raise money to kind of keep this going. And they realized the money that was available along those paths wouldn't get them to where they needed to get to. And they then moved to a for profit model. And in, in doing so, were able to attract the capital that they needed to kind of continue forward. And then would that attract the people that you need and make the progress that you want. And to me it was a marrying of people, purpose and profit to go solve a larger problem which has societal benefits to it.

In 2015, Ash Carter said there was a disconnect between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley and he was going to fix it. I'd say it's actually gotten bigger. It's more of a disconnect between Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley is sort of a placeholder for the larger entrepreneurial ecosystem. A larger disconnect between Silicon Valley and dc. Do you think that's changing?

I do, I do think that's changing. And I think, look, I think some of the disconnect comes in, you know, some of the more regulatory battles that are seen. But I think what goes unnoticed, and that's a little bit of what we were trying to highlight in the book, is all the collaboration that's actually taking place behind the scenes that is actually happening. I shouldn't say behind the scenes, it's happening in front, but it's happening in a way that many times goes overlooked. It's the collaboration if you look at the venture funds that are now getting created to address mission oriented problems that are trying to collaborate more effectively with national security infrastructure, you look at the great work that's being done over at doe, around climate, you look at the work that CHIPS is doing around, you know, rebuilding our manufacturing resiliency around semiconductors. That's all venture and government collaboration that's happening. It's not necessarily sometimes presented that way in the media, but there's a lot of, I think great activity going on. And that's what we try to highlight in the book, is that there is a lot and many times we want to focus on the negative, but is to put a spotlight on the positive collaborations that are taking place now. That doesn't mean it can't be better. And we talk about as well these systems. You know, I think of it as infrastructure. It's the highways and the connective tissue to connect These two ecosystems still need to be modernized in a way. But having said that, I do think it's definitely moving in that direction. And look, I think part of what's happening, what's changed, especially over the last just five years, right, is we've had a number of, as my students would say in my classroom, existential threats. You know, we've had a healthcare pandemic that I think had a lot of people thinking about what do they want to do with their lives. But also a level of interdependency that's obvious when you go through that. You know, we're obviously now in the geopolitical battles that we have both in Ukraine and then what we've seen in the Middle East, I think have really shaped this generation as far as what's their role and how do they, especially in Ukraine, where you see folks fighting for democracy, you add to that a climate existential threat that every summer, every year, we feel a little bit more. And so it feels more palpable to folks. Right. And how do they participate? And then look overarching. That as well is a larger geopolitical great power competition threat with some of our adversaries.

So from the framework of the book, what do you think about the industrial policies this administration has put place? You've mentioned a couple of them. Ira, chips Act. What does that fit in?

Yeah, yeah. So look, I think it's the way you want to see more collaboration, you know, without getting into commenting on the details of it. I think directionally it's what we need to see is how government and the entrepreneurial community can collaborate. I think that's the spirit of what CHIPS is intended to try to do, is to spur that. But as you do that, you realize that there's a lot of infrastructure that we need to build to be able to make ventures successful, right? It's not about just giving money to VCs or money to startups, but it's also investing in the surrounding ecosystem so that when you do provide capital to those firms, that the ecosystem's ready. And that ecosystem includes talent, Right? Like, are we training people? Do we have the talent? And I think what we try to do in the book is to think at this and highlight this in a systemic way. Right? So it's not an S or them issue. But, you know, look, this requires a larger systemic look of what we need to do to create these collaborative ecosystems.

The World Bank, I think it was the World bank called it soft infrastructure. And so when you look at the big innovative centers, they've got the lawyers, the banks, the hard infrastructure, electricity particularly, you know, so what, when you say infrastructure, what are you thinking? Are those the things, the soft infrastructure, or is it more.

Yeah, no, when I say infrastructure, it is soft infrastructure, but I'm really getting it at the core of like, really talent, right? So, you know, here, when I, when I use the word infrastructure or a little bit of what we're, you know, doing at our foundation, Noble Reach, which is trying to put to practice a lot of what we have in the book, Is we talk about this in the book, but I look at our two superpowers in this country continue to be our ability to create talent, when you look at our higher ed ecosystem, and our ability to innovate, when you look at our entrepreneurial ecosystem, even today, at orders of magnitude ahead of anywhere else in the world. And the evidence around that is everyone everywhere else in the world comes here to do both. And the infrastructure I'm referring to in this context, Jim, is how do you connect those more effectively around these governments ambitions to solve larger societal problems? How do we get better talent going into government? How do we get better talent collaborating with government? To me, those are creating the pathways to do that, but also creating the scaffolding to support it. In addition, you know, how do we get innovators, you know, entrepreneurs to want to collaborate with government more effectively? How we think about public private partnerships needs to, you know, be reassessed. And then how do we provide them the right scaffolding to be able to do so?

Macron wants to make France an innovation superpower. What advice would you give him? And your point about the US having a lead? I almost got lynched once in Berlin because I said Europe has great researchers, they have great entrepreneurs. When they're successful, they move to the United States. And Macron wants to change that. What would you tell him?

Yeah, that it will take time. Right. That it's an ecosystem and it's deeply cultural. It's deeply, deeply cultural. I mean, even if you look at why we have innovative pockets, innovation centers, and with even within the US a lot of it's deeply cultural. You need to be in a culture that like failing's okay and that you can come back up and get funding again for your next thing. You know, it's a subtle but profound way of looking different way of looking at the world. I think with that you have to be open to new ideas. You have to be open to people challenging and disrupting things at the core as well. You need a lot of trust in the system. In my entrepreneurial finance class, that's what we talk about. Like the currency of entrepreneurship is trust, right? It's how you hire your first people, it's how you get your first partners, it's how you get your first sale. If people don't trust you, that's hard. And so my advice to Macron is like, they should try to do this. Like every country should do this. Every place is capable of doing it, right? But just recognize that it's not. There's not a silver Bullet to it. It takes time. And the culture piece of, it's the hardest piece to change.

I thought the discussion of culture was really interesting and it's one of the things that has always been a problem, particularly when you look at the Pentagon, but the larger government and you talk about this, the government's risk averse, it's designed to be risk averse. And so I was talking to one of the big telcos last week and they're deploying 5G commercially. They say it takes, takes them about, you know, six weeks. And I said, well, how's it, how does that compare with the government? They said, oh, about seven years. What do you do about that? You have a very risk averse culture. And I think you've talked about this a little bit. How do you marry a very risk averse culture encumbered by bureaucracies to reduce risk with the, the entrepreneurial system you're talking about?

Yeah, we do talk about that in the book, Jim. And you know, what we try to say is as I just, even with my previous comments, changing culture is hard, right? So starting with that, just saying, hey, we got to change culture. And without doing that, we can't do anything. I'm not sure is, is the right first step. So recognizing what the culture is, why the culture is that way and then how do you marry that with maybe another culture that can take that risk?

Right?

And that's what we talked about in the book. Like, so if you have science and R and D that's being done inside of government, how can you create the pathways to connect those more effectively to entrepreneurs that may be able to take the risk to commercialize it? There's a big leap, as you well know, from science to commercialization. If you try to leave the commercialization process to inside a government that's a hard place to commercialize. Not because they're not capable, not because they, they can't do it. But as you said, sometimes the risk incentive structure doesn't allow the level of test and experimentation that's required to be able to really commercialize some of the stuff. And so that's that, that's the kind of partnership that we've talked about. Having said that, look, I also think it's important to double click on when we say government, right? And I challenge my students with this in my class, like there isn't one thing called government, right? Like we use it as a, we treat it like, you know, one homogeneous group.

Hey, that's my line.

But at the end of the day, I mean Break it down to its molecular levels. It's a. It's a bunch of sub organizations made up of people, and people are trying to do their best thing. And like any organization, many times it'll function based on the leader of that group. And so even with inside of government, you know, there are pockets, right, that are. That are pushing the envelope of recognizing this. So anything that we're saying here isn't something like, oh, you know, we're kind of coming down from the hilltop saying, like, this is what you should do. People are doing it. And, and that's really the spirit of the book is, is not to really say, here's what should be done, but highlighting what is being done.

This is a hard question, but I. People are innovating within the government. So if you look at things like DiU or AF works or some of the others there, people are. We're experimenting with different models to bridge this gap. What do you think are the elements for success here? What would you. What would you tell people they should be thinking about? Because DA is sort of out of the slump, but they had a bumpy start.

Yeah, look, again, you hate to say this, but I think the currency in any good partnership is trust, right? And trust then comes down to people. And so leadership on these points of intersection is incredibly important. I think why DIU is coming out of its slump, as you put it right now, is because of leadership. You know, you have someone like Doug Beck that comes from Apple that knows how that community thinks, that community being the venture community and the west coast, the Valley community, and also can bridge that. And so when he's sitting inside a DIU and now wanting to collaborate, people lean in and there's a level of trust there. And, you know, I think that's incredibly important. Now, the other piece that's important here is on the one hand, you want to. You want to spawn innovation. On the other hand, if you have, you know, 150 groups inside of the DoD alone saying, hey, we're a front door for innovation that are all subscale, that just paralyzes the market, right? So there needs to be some level of coordination and some way of thinking about how do we get to scale. Scaling is a big part, right? Like, you can get every small organization saying, hey, everyone wants to play vc. But the idea here is that if I'm the VC on the other side, like, I want to know who can really help me and who can do this at scale, right? And I do think the scaling element of this is incredibly important. There's only, you know, a few institutions inside of government that I think have done this well, and Q Tel being one of them. Diu, as you said, is now spending more time around this. And then you look at, you know, organizations that like, again, energy and in the, in the group there that Jibber Shah is running, they're doing a great job collaborating with the, with the private sector. We are now standing up what's happening in commerce with chips. And they're looking at how do you collaborate more effectively? But, but you need these institutions. So it's not just having front doors, because having too many front doors that are subscale, you know, I think can be more confusing, but having a few big front doors that people can trust, you know, I think is how we can kind of create more alignment.

And this isn't a criticism of Mike Brown, the first CEO of diu. He really, in some ways he laid the foundation for what's happening now, you know, with a lot of effort. But you mentioned In Q Tel and Mike and I used to talk about In Q Tel a lot. In Q Tel is a very different model. What do you like about the In Q Tel model? And one thing I like about it is it's not plugged into the acquisition chain.

Yeah. What I think is interesting about the In Q Tel model is with Chris Darby's leadership and Steve Boucher's leadership, when they came in, they really recognized that what is our overall objective here? We're not trying to play vc. What we're trying to do is really bridge the top innovation in the, in the venture community that we think could have applicability into the agency. And so in doing so, they really set up a structure that allowed them to be more collaborative in a way so that it's, it wasn't about like, hey, giving. They recognize that like the, the venture companies don't need our capital. What they need is our contracts. Right. They need, they need to see that they can, that there's something here for them to go. It's, it's the revenue piece. It's a subtle but important insight that many times people fall in the trap of thinking that, oh, something's not happening and it's because there's no capital. It's actually because the conditions for the capital to go there, you know, aren't interesting. Right. The risk reward doesn't present itself. And that's where I think government can play an important role, which is like establishing those, those risk reward conditions. A way to be able to attract the capital. Because having been Someone on the capital side for 25 years. I could tell you there's plenty of capital out there.

So I was going to ask about that. We're jumping around on my question list and we'll just have to live with it. But easy money is over, at least for now. What's that done to the VC model? What's that done to the VC driven innovation model? Because last year, lots of deals, but not a lot of dollars. So what do you think the environment is? What's going on?

Yeah, look, I had the benefit of having lived through multiple cycles. You know, I, I got into the industry right before the dot com crash. So witness that. You know, we saw the 0809 financial crisis and you know, look, every, every time people want to write off venture and it's done and it's gone, you know, I think you start to see certain, some of the same patterns reemerge and that is there's always a flight to quality. So when what's happening is like, you know, companies that maybe should have never been funded to begin with, they're having a much harder time raising money. But great companies get created in, in sometimes I think the greatest companies get created at the, at the times like this when there's fewer dollars being put out because they have the benefit of like there's not going to be 10 of them getting created at the same time. And you know, you're not diluting the talent base across that as well. So as far as the venture model goes, look, I think you're also seeing a stability around customers, right? And you're starting to see more people looking at government as a customer. You know, when I got into the business, we actively did not look at companies that were doing any business with the government because of many of the things that, you know, we were talking about. This is early 2000, right. Procurement cycles are slow, everything's bespoke, you can't scale. No one's going to give you an acquisition, no one's going to give you a multiple on that revenue. And now we're seeing that's changing. Right. I think that's where the level of optimism comes in around how I think the venture and the mission ecosystems can now really start to thrive in a meaningful way. Is that we have some success stories out there, but we also are capital is always looking for the right risk reward. Right. I think they're recognizing that this market, I mean, look, you know, if I'm a VC and I'm looking at the amount of money that government's Putting in around chips today. Right. I'm more intrigued by that market today than I was three years ago.

Right.

I look at what's happening in climate and clean tech. I look at what's coming out of ira. I'm more interested in that market today than I was five years ago.

Right.

Because there's probably ways for me to benefit in creating companies that can be in that swirl of new company and capital formation and, and likewise when I look at, you know, kind of what's happening, you know, in national security and cyber and things of that sort, I think this is an interesting time. I think while the, the venture market, you know, and I think at the, the, you know, I think where it's hitting hardest or the growth stage, companies that were probably and, and look a lot of this having been in the business and, and with no disrespect to, to my brethren that are VCs, but for those of, many of those firms haven't lift cycles. Right. They have partners that have, you know, joined post 2010, 11 and it's always been up and to the right.

Yeah, right.

And so they don't, they don't know that there's a, a down cycle. And I think the firms, you know, and I've had these conversations with friends of mine that are still in the business from when I was there. You know, the firms that have, folks like them that have been in the business since that period are doing, have been a little bit more prudent around how they've approached this.

You know, I think all the data would show that you're right, that the US does have sort of unique structure connecting it to the problems that you identified that are those sort of larger social problems. It's a difficulty, but we're making progress. But we do have competitors. We talked a little bit about France. What about China? What are China's advantages? And people tend to write China off or assume somehow that we can export control our way out of the problem. What are China's advantages? Because I think they're stronger than they might look.

Yeah, look, by no means am I writing China off. Look, size of market is a huge advantage for what they can present. And the technology development, the infrastructure and the ability to have a little bit more of a command and control infrastructure and build what you need is an advantage. Having said that, I still think the great innovations come from this model that we've developed here in the U.S. you know, which is really fundamental to that is a liberal democracy where you can really, in a university or educational settings really debate free thought around solutions and ideas and things of that sort.

Right.

Which may lead to breakthrough research and then having a capital system for formation system in the entrepreneurial level whereby you can around ideas form teams and capital in ways that is extremely fluid. And where I think we have a real distinct advantage. Right. Versus some of our competitors is hopefully the trust that we can maintain between government and that ecosystem. Because an entrepreneur when they're starting a company here largely does not feel like oh, at some point someone's going to take this away from me or if I don't comply something's going to happen out of the norm I should say. And I think that's an important distinction in a hallmark of like you know, a functioning liberal democracy which is enabling this education ecosystem and this entrepreneurial ecosystem here.

How far do you think we can go with the decoupling? So I was talking to a investor a couple days ago who said basically there's now two pots of money in the world for, for this kind of thing. There's the US and there's the Persian Gulf. He didn't mention China, which I thought was interesting. The Chinese have kind of knocked themselves out of the race. But to your point about human capital, still a lot of human capital in China. Do we need it? Can we decouple? What? Give us some predictions.

Yeah, look, I, I'm, as my friends will tell you, I'm probably not the one to, to lay out predictions, forecast.

Things is from a venture capitalist. All you did was take bets.

Well, this, well, you know the joke around that with, with being a VC is that you know, everyone talks about your winners but you're usually wrong more than you are right. You know, one of my favorite funds was the a fund that used to put their anti portfolio on their website and it was all the bets that they didn't make that ended up being wildly successful. Like you know, here's how we passed on Apple, here's how we passed on ebay. And so there's a level of humility in what we do. We act. And that's why if I'm honest about it, it's hard to be predicting. We take directional trends. Look, I, I think the decoupling is going to be harder than we think. So you know, I think it'll be slower over time. But you know, I think the big wild card also is how the US is going to react in it. Right. Like what administration we have, how we pursue this path. And this is an important year to find out and you know, without saying much More. I think that's why it's hard to predict. I could give you a very different answer in December based on how November turns out.

So that's a fair point. Welcome to Washington. That's going to become what technologies would you invest in now? I mean, what are you, what are you doing? And everyone's doing AI actually have started. Remember that old atomic scientist clock, five minutes to midnight. I started an AI bubble clock or five minutes away from bursting. But we can put that. I'm picking it April 1st as my preferred date. But what technology? You can say, I didn't mean to discourage you, but what technologies would you invest in now? I mean, just we talked about clean tech, we talked about some other things. Where do you think the opportunities are?

Yeah, so look, my investment thesis as when, when I was in venture was starting with people and markets, right? Less about technology. And so because I found that if you invested in 18s with B technology, you could still win. But if you invested in A technology with B teams, you ended up losing. And so I say that as a precursor to kind of like how I'm answering your question. I would be finding great teams in the climate space right now. Right. Given the amount of money and activity that's going on there. Having said that, that's not a place I'm an expert. Right. But if I could find teams that were really well positioned there or you know, venture funds that are really well positioned and that's what I've done is given my capital, personal capital to people that I think are really well connected in that space. You know, I think bio and biosciences is a, is going to be over the next five to ten years continue to be a big. And some of that's going to be driven by AI. Right. You know, as we bring down the cost of compute and being able to run experiments and tests to a level around all the data that we have in the bio area, I think the level of breakthroughs that we'll start to see will become really profound. And so that's an area that I think is really, really interesting. Look, I actually think on the chip side again, as far as thinking about manufacturing and how do you build an upscale talent, I think there's going to be some interesting models that really emerge from that that we'll look back on and say this was the time to create those kinds of companies and that our country was ready for it.

That's sort of off script. Let me ask you about that because I helped work on the CHIPS act and at the time I'm less concerned. I'm not worried about the dependence on Asian companies. What I'm worried about is that we had three champions and the American one was getting knocked out of the business. But you're talking about that's broader than tsmc, Samsung and Intel. What, what are the innovations you're looking at in the CHIPS act and is that the right approach? I mean, I didn't, I didn't want America to lose, as we lost in other industries, its place in the manufacturing, the fab environment, CHIPS act is good for that. But what else would you, what else would you do on chips?

No, I think you're hitting the key piece of it. Right. It's a. And again, it's not about just the fabs, but how do you create the ecosystem around that. Right. The suppliers, the key components there. There's so many things that, that, that, that lead into that that we've let go that we no longer have the resiliency for and supply chain resiliency here in the US for. And so developing that I think is, is, is incredibly important. You know, I think the talent piece and upskilling talent, the ability to be able to do that in a meaningful way. And you know, you look at how the universities play into that and you've got, you know, many universities really leaning in on this. You know, I'll be down in.

You.

Know, Apple Crow, who's been a big proponent around tech hubs and, and how universities can play and, and launch ventures and collaborate with government around these things. And you know, I think this is an important model and that's what I'm talking about when I say that I think there's real innovation there that will start to happen. It, it's as much the how we do this. Right?

Yeah.

As much as the what we're doing and. Sorry, go ahead.

No, I was going to say, weirdly enough, the big winners have been Arizona and Ohio. Right. Which I wouldn't have picked, but it's largely because of the universities. But that sort of leads into the question. You said that when you were thinking about making investments, you thought about people in markets. How did you do that? Was that interviews? Was it visits? I mean, what, what was your technique here?

Yeah, so when I say markets, you know, we're looking at these, you know, large markets where you see dis. Eruptive forces coming in, technologies changing the markets, the competitive landscape, you know, being able to change. And when I say teams, you know, a lot of these are, are really, you know, references from your Network. The, our, our most valuable asset is our network. When you're a vc, it's your own portfolio companies that you've invested in because you've invested in them for a reason. You know, you believe that, you know, it's very simple. You, you believe birds of a feather flock together. So a players attract a players. You know, if I had, if I had three or four, CEO is telling me that, hey, you really should meet this company, I'm going to meet that company. And you triangulate around that, right. And they tell you that this person's a rock star and I've worked with them or her in these different capacities and you should really think about finding a role for them or with somebody I wouldn't bet against. So a lot of it is more the intangible diligence, honestly. And this is why I come back to trust as the currency. Right, because you're basing it based on the people that you have trust in and that that goodwill carries forward to the people they trust. And I think that's what gets lost. Many times when people think about ventures and entrepreneurship, they focused on the finance and the technology aspect of it, like, who's, what's the coolest technology out there? And they lose sight of the people piece. Even in my entrepreneurial finance class at Georgetown, when I teach it, you know, I call it entrepreneurial finance with a lowercase f because it's about finance. It's more about people and knowing how to, you know, build those relationships with the right people. I think that's the opportunity that sometimes gets overlooked even, you know, in this government, you know, venture ecosystem. Right. Many times it's usually an enamorment with technology that we've developed.

Yeah, yeah.

Or the finance we can attract. But we lose sight of the people that we need to bring into the ecosystem and, you know, ultimately. But that talent.

How did you get into this? I mean, you really have at least, at least two careers. You, you, you came from the whole investment world and now you're, you're really in the policy world. So the transition we can describe. Tell us how you got into this field.

You know, look, it starts with, I grew up in D.C. my father works at Naval Sea System Command, still works there today. So he's been there over 40 years. So, you know, look, government's been in our family. And you know, as a civilian engineer there, as you said, I was on the investment and capital side of the equation for, you know, 20, 25 years. And the last 10 years of that was really you know, investing in companies at this intersection of mission, tech and entrepreneurship. And I think that gave me a little bit more window into both the challenges, but also the magic when you can make that happen. Right. You know, our firm was founded by Senator Mark Warner, so there's always been some level of connectivity at Columbia Capital to government and thinking about how government service can play in and how innovation can. Can tie into that. And then when I started teaching at Georgetown and then Stanford, the class I was teaching at Stanford was called Valley Meets Mission. Again. How did we take the innovation, innovative spirit of the Valley and bring it to DC and tie it to the mission orientation? And I think what I, what I would just felt was this palpable sense of, like, students really kind of trying to figure this out of, like, how do you do good but make money as well? And, you know, you realized in a very simplistic way, we've given them this artificial vernacular that makes it feel like a binary choice, you know, for profit, not for profit, private sector, public sector. There's no middle ground. We've given them. We haven't given them a language. And I would have people, you know, my office hours were largely, you know, students like, wanting career advice of. I really want to do something impactful and meaningful, but I, you know, I want to make. I want to, you know, make money and feel I can have some independence. You know, having come from this world and seeing this, I was like, there's this whole world out there, right? Like, you realize you don't really, when you're a student, you don't see it. And that's a little bit what, what was the inspiration for the book and of, you know, when we were teaching the class, we would see folks rescind their banking consulting offers and go into. Into this world. And then, you know, we thought the book would be a way to kind of amplify those stories. We're not by any means expecting the kind of reception that I feel like it's. It's been getting. You know, we honestly started with a pretty modest, like, is there even enough here to write a book? Can we, you know, write one with an optimistic tone around people, purpose and profit? And then honestly, you know, we didn't start with a publisher. So even, you know, as we were writing, then finding, you know, find a publisher, it's been gratifying to kind of see the reception of what we started with. It'll be interesting to see where it goes. What that's led to, though, is, you know, we have a. Now a Foundation called Noble Rouge, which is now doing a lot of the work we talk about in the book. You know, that has an endowment of close to half a billion dollars. And you know, there, what we're really focused on, Jim, is as we talked about, is trying to be some of that infrastructure that can help connect our top talent into this mission ecosystem and provide them the scaffolding to support them and then also do the same thing with our innovation ecosystem, you know, create those pathways. And so we've got, we're doing that now. We just launched last week our Noble Reach Scholars application. So we're, you know, doing our first cohort of 12 year fellowships. Think Teach for America going in. You know, if you're an AI Bios manufacturing, go ahead. No student, you could come in and spend one or two years in government, create a cohort based model, have a mentor, feel like you're learning hard skills with private sector partners.

So it sounded to some extent like what you're talking about as a conversion experience. You're converting people to think a new way about that. Not the old binary way, but some new way.

That's what we're trying to do. I hesitate to use the word convert, but I probably say we want to expose them to another way and then let them decide what they want to do. But as we quit, we want them to try to expose them to using their entrepreneurial energy to solve. Not Candy Crush 3.0. Right. But let's solving more meaningful problems and show them that they can still do that in a for profit way. Still a level of purpose and mission in what they're doing, along with being able to create the financial security that they're looking for.

That's probably a good note to end on. This was fun, interesting stuff.

Thanks for listening. See you on the next episode.