What do you think universities are fundamentally getting wrong these days?

The model of the university, the creation and dissemination of information.

was created before the printing press existed.

The way that we disseminated information prior to the printing press, prior to universities, were effectively monks, at least in the Western world, writing illuminated manuscripts on sheepskin.

and disseminating it to the very, very, very small percentage of the population that was literate.

And the concept of getting those people together and effectively reading to them out loud to a large number of people what was written down, the lecture, was a very efficient way of transmitting knowledge.

And the printing press had something to do about that.

So how do you see this actually could work in a system and in a different way? So that some of these conservative, perhaps, and status quo-oriented institutions could actually take advantage of the opportunity this year.

So a bit of that background on your professional career and as well how you pick one company about publishing and then you went to education.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know...

In many ways, those kinds of analytical tools helped me throughout my career, but perhaps most so when I was running Snapfish.

Snapfish was in what we know today as a personal publishing business, but at the time it was just known as the photography business.

And people associate photography, and you have to remember, this began an era of film photography, right, just at the cusp of the digital transition.

And so the idea was that photography was, certainly when we were starting, or when the founding team was starting Snapfish, I joined a couple months in, it was really a very precious business.

So I want to just contextualize this for you to frame and present what is Minerva for people that don't know about it.

So you're validating a lot of those initial assumptions, which is terrific.

Oh, very much so.

Look, my critique of education really centers on first and foremost, what I view as its central role in society.

And on the one hand, I personally believe that universities are the single most important institutions on the planet.

They are the determinants of who is going to make decisions for humanity.

Practically every single person who makes decisions of consequence, decisions that affect the lives of others more than they affect lives of themselves, has gone through the filter of universities.

And so that puts them in an absolutely critical role in society.

starting a home and university, it's kind of one of those chicken and egg situations, you know, you have to have an excellent program, and you go to the Republic of Hudson, we're going to be the best university in the world, which I thought was, you know, had a certain amount of grit to it, right? But then how do you convince people that that's true? And then how do you get the right kinds of students to turn up?