How do we unlock the potential of the billions of talented people around the world who lack access to quality education and careers? On this episode of Venture to Flourish, we explore that question with Nat Ware, founder and CEO of Forte. Nat shares his journey from building schools and orphanages as a teen to creating a global university-based consulting nonprofit. Ultimately, he landed on the venture-backed startup as the most powerful vehicle for creating scalable human impact. Nat explains how Forte innovates on income share agreements to align incentives and drive quality education funded by private capital. Throughout the episode, one of Nat's insights stands out: income, when prioritized, becomes the catalyst for a flourishing society.
For a deeper dive into Nat's ideas and Forte's mission, check out these insightful talks:
Evan:
Welcome to the Venture to Flourish podcast. I'm your host, Evan Baehr, and today's conversation is pretty mind-blowing. My guest is Nat Ware. He's the CEO and founder of a company called Forte that's re-imagining how we can invest in human capital, and he thinks he's gonna build a trillion-dollar company. Two big ideas we'll explore. Number one, he used to believe that the way to solve the world's big problems was through nonprofits. He grew a little bit sour on that. Then he built a massive global consulting firm that helped people scale social enterprises. Grew a little sour on that.
What does he believe now? Venture-backed, tech-enabled companies that become multi-billion dollar businesses are the most powerful and profound way to drive human flourishing around the world. It's a big claim. Number two, I pressed him a little bit on the key metrics we should think about around impact, around human flourishing, around wellness, around Maslow's hierarchy. Aren't all these other factors important to drive what we're investing in? He argues no. If we invest in human capital in a way that gets people more income, having more income solves essentially all the other problems that we should be interested in caring about. It's a big claim.
If those aren't interesting to you, hear this. The night before his company does a big opening press release in Columbia, he's shot in the chest. He's waiting to get surgery to have a bullet literally removed from between his ribs. And he goes and he does his press conference in the morning anyway. This guy is an animal. He's brilliant. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Thanks for being with us.
Nat, really appreciate you being with us and taking time for this conversation. Welcome to the pod.
Nat Ware (03:04.954)
It's good to be here, thanks for having me.
Evan (03:07.742)
Well, we will get you some coffee. We're glad you have coffee. You're a busy man. You're living and thinking across multiple time zones, across multiple ventures. You've grew up in and lived in different countries. We're excited to have you locally in the States, at least for right now, and know you run really fast and excited to dive into your story and really what animates you around this real mission. Let's first get into a little bit of the making of Nat. Your resume is...
I feel pretty small when I read it. You've done a lot of crazy things, winning lots of accolades. Give us a little bit of the animating story. What was it like growing up for you and walk us through some of your early educational background?
Nat Ware (03:50.086)
I think resumes often sound better than they are. So, but in terms of my background, I think my journey has a bit mirrored the journey of the sector at large. I grew up in Australia, my parents are both school teachers. So I was very much brought up with a focus on education and the idea that education can transform lives. And I think over the course of the past 20 odd years, my view of how to have an impact in this space of human capital has really shifted.
Certainly in high school I thought the way you change the world is you raise money and donate money. So that's what I did. I raised money, built a school in Mozambique, built an orphanage in Thailand, and it wasn't until the first year of undergrad at Sydney University in Australia that I realized that doing good is more an intellectual endeavor as it is an emotional endeavor. So I started an organization called 180 Degrees Consulting. That was sort of my first baby, I guess.
And through many years, I thought the way you change the world is through helping organizations solve problems and scale up and have more of an impact. And that ultimately led to a PhD in the UK and then Forte, which is based on my PhD. So it's been a bit of a journey, but it's one of those things where, as Steve Jobs said, you can connect the dots looking back, you can't always connect them looking forward.
Evan (05:08.846)
I want to, I'm thinking about you as sort of a Russian doll, there's kind of the different levels, the different versions of you, and I want to go back to the first one of this concept that I share sometimes, I think many young people share this, which is the way to help people, the way to invest in human capital development, improve the world around you is to raise money. It sounds like you did that in the context of starting one or multiple schools. Tell us about that, like tell me about the motivation for that.
and then the point of realizing the limits of that approach.
Nat Ware (05:41.422)
Hmm.
That's a good question. And I think the realization was just that for any outcome that anyone seeks, there's often literally hundreds, sometimes thousands of different ways to achieve that same outcome. And some approaches are an order of magnitude better than others. Like if you care about education, you can have more teachers, you can have better teachers, you can have better learning environments, you can have greater student engagement. You can, you know, that there's so many different ways that you can approach it. And if some of those are five,
or ten or a thousand times more effective, what matters more than the quantity of money thrown at it is the actual approach that we use. And so I think in high school I was a bit torn, to be honest, because I both wanted to do good in the world in some way, but I also loved to be intellectually challenged. And I sort of thought it was a trade-off between the two and that I'd need to choose one or the other. I'd need to choose between being like an actuary or a scientist on one hand or doing charity work for the rest of my life. And I was really torn.
And so I ended up enrolling in economics and law at Sydney University, partly because I didn't really know what to do. And I figured the economy and the legal system are kind of important to how society works. But yeah, it was in that first year of undergrad that I came across this idea of sort of impact investing and social entrepreneurship and the idea that actually you didn't need to pick one or the other. You could sort of use problem solving, use intellect, use research to solve some of the world's biggest problems.
Evan (07:10.19)
I'll invite you, it's a little bit of a downer, but I think it's really important to dig in on, it's so compelling on the surface to raise C3 dollars for, especially people in the most impacted situations, to raise money for an orphanage in Tanzania, for example. It does seem like the data around the outcomes and the sustainability of those kinds of ventures is not particularly strong. And I'm curious if you're able to contrast, you're now building a venture backed,
startup, you've worked with leveraging multinational organizations, including global consulting firms. I wonder, could you point to anything specific about how nonprofits operate, how they raise money, how the incentives work? What might be some of the challenges that explain why many nonprofits don't produce the results we hope?
Nat Ware (08:01.978)
I mean, I could talk about this for hours, but I think one of the factors is nonprofits are often constrained by public conceptions around what a charity should be, because the reality is we still, most people in society anchor to the extremes. Like most people still view the world in a very binary way of nonprofits and for-profits and profit-maximizing investors and philanthropists. And so people sort of hold charities to an impossible idea, which actually constrains their ability
By way of example, like say you walk into a cafe and you see a sign on the wall that says we donate 20% of our profits to charity. Your immediate reaction is like, what a good cafe, what good people. So we're fine as a society with an organization like keeping 80% of profit and doing 20% good with the money. But if the reverse was true, if sort of an organization purported to do impact as their primary goal, their primary focus, but they spent 20% of their money on, you know, important
employee retention or trips or other sort of perks, people would view that organization as bad or evil or stealing money. And so we sort of almost prefer sort of honest greed to imperfect generosity, which as a result of that means that, you know, charities can't spend on admin in the way that they should. They can't spend on operations in the way that they should. They can't hire the best people in the way that they should. I mean, if we, you know, judge Google on the basis of admin cost,
then they'd score incredibly badly. But in the same way that we judge for-profit companies, not on admin costs, but on financial return, so too should we judge impact organizations on the basis of the impact that they're creating rather than judge them on inputs. We need to focus on outputs and outcomes rather than inputs into that process. And so I think one of the frustrations in the impact space is that people can't have the impact that is necessary.
is running a nonprofit, 180 degrees, that's across 35 countries at the moment. It's very financially sustainable. We're having a great impact. But when it came to starting Forte, I wanna solve the world's greatest problems. I want this to become the main way the world finances education and healthcare. I wanna make, trickle up economics. I wanna make capitalism work in the interest of those who are most vulnerable. And I thought that I could grow more quickly and have a greater impact as a for-profit company. We're just a Delaware C Corp.
Nat Ware (10:29.77)
And so even though I do care about impact, I think the way you have the greatest impact is just by having an amazing company that can grow quickly and change lives.
Evan (10:39.714)
Take us to phase two of NAT, of building this global consulting platform. Remind us what that was and then ways that you, sounds like, wondered a little bit about its efficacy.
Nat Ware (10:54.858)
Yes, so the organization is called 180 Degrees Consulting, or 180 DC, some people call it. And it basically tries to be a way to develop the next generation of social entrepreneurs and social impact leaders. So it's basically a university-based consultancy. Initially, it just started at Sydney University. Now it's in 174 universities around the world. We've had about 70,000 people go through the program. And how it works is we take top university students,
them, match them with a mentor often from McKinsey BCG Bain who help in the training up process. We then put them in teams and match them with nonprofits facing particular challenges. So it could be a nonprofit that is running eight programs and has no idea which of those eight programs are most effective. It could be an organization that is spending 90% of their time raising money and wants a new business model. So charities and nonprofits face a ton of challenges and so we get top university students working to solve problems
for those organizations. And it's very mutually beneficial from the perspective of the university students. It's a way that they can get real work experience, real leadership. It's a way that they can make a difference in a highly leveraged way. And it's a way that they can have a community that they like to be a part of. And then from the perspective of the nonprofits, this is a way that they can access high quality, team-based, in-person consulting services at a tiny fraction of the cost of usual consulting services.
And I think it's because it was so win-win that it grew very organically. I mean, we've never spent a single dollar on marketing, and yet it's spread to 35 countries over the past 16 years.
Evan (12:35.582)
And yet, the tip of the spear model there was still, is still, the nonprofit. And I'm curious, so you started with the school in Mozambique. Then you build this 180 campus, thousands of people. But still, the delivery agent sounds like the tip of the spear for you of how actual human capital is invested, food is moved, care is delivered, is a nonprofit.
Reflect on that. Now you're transitioned to a for-profit. What did you make of the giant delivery apparatus that you built through 180?
Nat Ware (13:13.878)
I mean, certainly 180 degrees taught me to be very lean and to use money effectively. I mean, you know, we, as I said, we operate across 35 countries on a very small budget and have a massive impact given that. So I think there are definitely, like, if you can run an effective nonprofit, then in some ways, a for-profit is relatively easy, I think, by comparison. So I definitely learned a lot through that process. I think with 180 degrees, one of the lessons that I learned was just, if you get the incentives
And if something is mutually beneficial, then it's sustainable and it grows. And also, if you write the right trends, that's super important. And certainly with 180 degrees, I do think it was and still is very mutually beneficial. Great for the nonprofits, great for the university students, also great for the people who do the mentoring, both from an impact standpoint and a recruitment standpoint. And so that idea of let's create win-wins, let's understand incentives, let's make sure the value proposition stand up to scrutiny. That is a principle.
that I sort of learned in 180 degrees and I've applied to forte as well.
Evan (14:21.102)
I want to get to this venture, Forte, that you are building, and particularly your evolution to choosing this vehicle of a venture-backed startup as the horse that you're riding, so to speak. On our way there, I want to detour a little bit about what is really motivating you to do all of this. You've given some great TED Talks.
written theses on these topics. I know you've thought extensively about this. We often try to think about at Learn, alongside financial returns. What are some of the metrics that matter to us, that communicate to us that our companies are creating some elevated experience for humanity? And there's a lot of competing approaches on this. There's sustainable development goals, there's Martra Sends human development capabilities.
There's all sorts of UN goals. There's flourishing metrics. There's Maslow's hierarchy. There are a lot of different approaches to understanding and measuring alongside financial returns. How do we understand if this thing is shaping the world in a positive way? Take a few minutes and just give us your understanding of where we are with that instrumentation of metrics and where you come out on this. Which ones you sort of land on as your North Star. But take a few minutes and give us your context on that.
Nat Ware (15:43.89)
It's interesting that you mentioned the North Star because we're just doing a rebrand right at the moment and integrated into the new brand and the new logo is that idea of a North Star. And we want to sort of be in some ways sort of the guiding light, sort of the direction that people are moving in. And I think part of it is like, you know, my mind goes back to sort of Adam Smith's and the invisible hands and how market forces sort of bring supply and demand together, I think what we're trying to do with Forte at a very, very high level
is sort of make capitalism work in the interests of those who really need it. Make capitalism work in the interest of the most vulnerable. Do trickle up economics. If we help those who are struggling and disadvantaged, then benefits flow through the system. And I'll talk a bit more about how Forte works and go into more detail. But before I do that, maybe if I just take a step back and address some of your other questions. I think in terms of my journey, I've sort of gone from viewing the world in a binary way, which is sort of my high school days, nonprofits for profit.
profit maximizing investors to philanthropists to my 180 degrees consulting days where I think I view the world in a linear way or sort of conceived the world in that way where you have social impact on one extreme and making money on the other and you sort of choose where you are on that spectrum and so that's a world with concessionary returns where if you want to make more money you do less good if you want to do more good you make less money. What I've tried to do both through my PhD
Nat Ware (17:13.484)
ends of that spectrum and join them up. So they the way you make more money is by doing more good. The way you do more good is by making more money. Because the reality is that altruism and generosity is great, but it's not as reliable a predictor of human behavior as profit motivation. And so if we really want to
Evan (17:33.418)
Can I just ask you, if you began with a linear spectrum of maximizing profit on one end versus maximizing impact on the other end, do you have sketched a 2D model or a two by two that communicates how you're thinking about it now?
Nat Ware (17:53.054)
Yeah, I mean, the way that I'm thinking about it now is more a parallel conception of the world. It's like, let's take both ends of the spectrum and join it up so that the two lines are kind of pointing in the same direction. And then the question is, how do you sort of move from a linear conception of the world, which is what most people think of, to a parallel conception of the world? And one of the big problems is that the way we typically approach human capital investments is to ask the question of who should pay by looking at existing pools of funding.
looking at the existing money that students have and asking them to pay from savings or asking them to pay in the form of a loan or looking at the pool of funding that companies have and asking maybe they should chip in and maybe they should pay or looking at the existing government budgets. But as long as we look at existing pools of funding and try to pay from that, what that often leads to is a trade-off where the way you make more money as an investor is at the expense of one of the actor or the expense of the person that you're trying to help.
Our approach is different and we don't solve the who's pay based on any existing pool of funding. We look at what are the biggest positive externalities that arise from effective human capital investment. Now the biggest positive externality is uplift in future government income tax revenue and so can we enable that huge future positive externality to be attributed to and appropriated by the entity that creates that value so that the way that we make more money is
can really have a win-win where everyone benefits and nobody over-pays. So at a very conceptual level, that's our approach to sort of moving from a linear conception of the world to a parallel conception of the world.
Evan (19:35.434)
If I could take you through another pass of a challenge I see in how we think about instrumenting metrics around impact. And just one example, we've looked pretty closely at the sustainable development goals, the SDGs. Many of our LPs ask us to report against those. It's an important framework. I believe that the United States is one of the top performers in these. And these are things like...
education for women and girls and being free from violence and access to clean water and a number of things that are sort of down the fair way in development language. It's also the case that a sort of different assessment of the United States, for example, right now, directionally, we are, as a nation in the United States right now, more medicated than ever, more obese than ever, more depressed and...
on SSRIs than ever. In recent years, it's been the first time that through deaths of despair, we were actually intentionally lowering our own life expectancy, isolation, and loneliness, and depraved. There's a lot of stats that just have me thinking about, all right, alongside maximizing profit and building huge companies that really work, which I think you and I agree with is table stakes. It's necessary but not sufficient. If the company doesn't work, there's no impact.
because it doesn't work. In terms of measuring these things, what do you make of the fact that on the one hand, we can be crushing it about having access to clean water, clean air, democracy, education for women, and yet some of these other stats that you might call flourishing or happiness or wellness or contentment, we're not performing particularly well on? How do you think about that?
Nat Ware (21:27.362)
It's a good question and I think there's sort of two sub questions within that so I might answer both. One is just the question of what metrics we use to assess human capital and sort of impact. I think there's three key factors here. One is that
You know, often we sort of focus on the metrics and try to have 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 different metrics. And that in and of itself is a bit of a problem. One, because there's high transaction costs associated with collecting that data, verifying it and measuring it, which often means that it's not viable to implement. You know, that's one of the many problems with social impact bonds and development impact bonds that it just takes, it's very ad hoc and it takes a lot of time and cost and effort to collect and verify data. So what we need for scalability of impact
a bit standardization. So this is the transaction cost aspect of it. The second big problem in this space is what is the counterfactual?
And this was a big focus of my PhD research, but basically often when we're measuring outcomes, people are measuring it relative to very different counterfactuals. I mean, take education. Sometimes people measure outcomes relative to if there was no education at all, relative to a historical benchmark, relative to other schools, you know, and people pick lots of different comparables, which makes the metric not that standardized. What we really want is a way of measuring marginal impact relative to a consistent counterfactual
to be useful. And we also need standardization so that we can compare different programs and outcomes over time. The approach that we take at Forte is to use the change in the present discounted value of expected lifetime income and equivalently change in the present discounted value of expected lifetime tax as sort of a proxy for social impact. And even though that's not a perfect measure, what it does is that it captures a lot of the things that we care about in the education space.
Nat Ware (23:23.484)
if your education is greater for a group of people, that increases the odds of employment, increases the odds of quality employment and higher salaries, it increases the odds of job retention as well. And so the metric of change in income tax captures, you know, what we care about, jobs, job quality and job retention. But the other benefit is it's data that we as a society already collect, already measure, already have systems in place to verify. And so that both enables standardization, but also massively reduces
transaction costs. And so the way that I see this working is let us use that metric as the consistent metric that we use. And sure, let's have all these other metrics as well as intermediary metrics as predictors of change in lifetime income and income tax. So that if we achieve better outcomes in the short term, that changes our predictions of long term income and income tax. But we also need standardization and we do need to reduce transaction costs.
but I think that is how we achieve massive scale in this space.
Your other question was about sort of wellbeing and happiness. And I actually gave, you know, Ted or Tedx talk on this about a decade ago. And I think some of it is still quite relevant. And before I shifted the focus of my PhD to very much be on forte, the first couple of months of my PhD, I was actually looking at the idea of wellbeing. And particularly relative wellbeing, because often the way that we measure, for example, poverty around the world is by saying, you know, $2 a day.
below $2 a day. But in reality, what drives happiness and well being isn't absolute measures often, it's more relative measures. Because beyond a certain level of wealth, once you have enough to meet your basic needs, what really drives happiness is how sort of our expectations compared to our reality.
Nat Ware (25:17.87)
And so that was the focus of this TEDx talk. And I basically talk about how we form expectations in three main ways. One, based on our past, two, based on our community around us, and three, based on our imagination, which is informed by social media and advertising and other factors. And at a very basic, simple level, we're happy when our expectations, you know, when reality exceeds our expectations, we're disappointed when reality is less than our expectations.
The problem is that everything in society is geared towards raising expectations. I mean, when you vote for politicians, you vote for them because your expectations are higher. When you buy a product, you buy the one with the highest expectations. When you go on a holiday, you pick the destination that you think will give you the greatest happiness. But all those factors, the very way that we make decisions, help to raise expectations and make it harder for reality to exceed that, which is, I think, one of the drivers of unhappiness in society.
You know, often we relegate happiness to sort of the worlds of hippies and not the realm of science, but I do think we should take it seriously because, you know, it does impact human flourishing.
Evan (26:31.97)
So a key metric that you're pulling forward to design forte is some version of discounted present value, net present value of future growth and earnings. And I just wonder if the entire canon of literature, Arthur Brooks sort of popularizing a lot of this, would directionally say something like, once you're above, call it 2x.
poverty line. Additional dollars and income net you very little marginal gain and happiness. And actually, things like contentedness, connected to spiritual practices, in close intimate relationships with friends and family and loved ones, avoiding commutes always comes up in the short list of these things. I kind of wonder if.
you are too narrowly optimized that you're going to help people earn a lot more and yet stay miserable.
Nat Ware (27:37.814)
I think that sort of ignores the fact that financial security and freedom buys time and enables you to determine your own path of your life. I'm reminded even last week I was speaking to one of our Forte students in Colombia, a guy called Christian. Now he was a wrappy delivery bike rider for about six years. He was working 18 hour days to try to support his wife and children. He did not have the freedom to be able to spend quality time with the kids. He did not have the financial freedom.
to be able to invest in his family. That caused him enormous stress and hardship. Now he's on a job earning over 20,000 US in Columbia, which is a good salary in Columbia, and now feels like he's a good dad, a good husband, that now he has infinite possibilities and he has freedom over his time and now can spend it in a way that actually delivers him happiness. So I do think that...
We can't separate the two in many cases, because often if you have a quality job, that actually enables you to invest in other things that deliver you great happiness and provide dignity to you as well. And I think that's particularly the case in places, low and middle income countries, where a lot of people are really, really struggling to get by. And it's not because they're not talented, there's hidden talent everywhere. We just need to support those talent with the right opportunities
right backing to enable them to get back on their feet and to get ahead.
Evan (29:05.998)
So let me try to play this back and just make sure I'm critiquing myself in the right way, and then we're moving on to forte. So as a bit of a parody, you're saying, Evan, look, it may be the case in Western nations that helping someone go from 75K to 80K gets them no additional happiness, and maybe they should focus on building meaningful relationships, living a healthy lifestyle, et cetera. But for the billion plus people that
Forte is excited to elevate and to help. By picking the single factor of a present value of all their future income is a necessary condition to be able to even explore some of these other areas of Maslow hierarchy, to have deep friendships, to have time to engage in spiritual practices, to afford a place that doesn't involve long commute times, to have healthy foods for your kids. All of those things.
are made possible when there is predictable, healthy income. So Evan, apply that critique to the states. That's fine. But for the rest of the world, let's be serious. Income is, if we had to pick one thing to drive flourishing wellness, happiness, flourish whatever, it would be income. Is that a fair summary?
Nat Ware (30:27.25)
Yeah, and I know that maybe comes across as being sort of money hungry and profit driven. But I think what frustrates me about the world, and you alluded to this before about what drives me, is that there is just so much hardship and suffering around the world. And a lot of that is unnecessary. And the reason I say it's unnecessary is because that could be solved by the right investments. And it's not the reason those investments don't take place is not because the benefits are smaller than the cost.
If the benefits of investing in education were smaller than the cost, then it would make sense that it's not provided. But in the vast majority of cases, education has an order of magnitude greater benefits than the cost, and yet those investments do not occur on the scale and the quality that they're needed. And the reason they don't occur is because of the system, because of structural problems. Often the costs are borne by one entity, by one stakeholder, but the benefits are split between many stakeholders and over time.
So for any one stakeholder, their costs are often greater than their benefits. And so therefore, we don't see the investments that are made. Now, the good thing is the economic system was designed by people. So we can change the design of it. We can change the financial flows. We can change who gets those benefits. And if we can enable the stakeholder who bears the cost to get more of the benefits, such that the benefits provide the necessary return, then we can unlock massive pools of capital.
and actually direct it to the things that should be directed at and therefore unlock human potential at a massive, massive scale. And I think one of the world's greatest untapped resources is that there are literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of people around the world who have inherent talent, but never have the opportunity to realize their potential. And so let's redesign economic systems. Let's make the incentives work. Let's give the investors enough of the benefit that we can actually make the
scale.
Evan (32:27.638)
And this is the mission of Forte, and really excited to dive into it. So I wanna make sure I'm tracking on some of the really important points that you made. Let's start with the first one, which is this. You're arguing that there are for billions of people a net positive ROI calculation, which is for this one woman living in this one country, if we put $100 of investment into her skills training, et cetera, that...
many multiple times over would be returned to her and her community. Explain how that works.
Nat Ware (33:00.298)
Yeah, so it is the case that often it's like a very small investment that makes a massive difference. So what we find is that often digital training around the world might cost about one and a half to two and a half thousand US, particularly in like middle income countries. And yet that can lead to salaries, not salaries as high as what you'd see in sort of New York or the Bay Area, obviously, but still salaries sort of in the 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 US range. And so that's a massive, massive change.
and sort of the increasing demand for skills. Now there's other applications.
Evan (33:32.33)
And just to clarify the math on that, so a one time ballpark $2,000 training investment would redound what over lifetime earnings? Ballpark.
Nat Ware (33:42.734)
I mean, an order of magnitude greater than that. And so often, I mean, obviously not 100% of people are going to get a job as a result of that. But often, the order of magnitudes that we're talking are more than 10x, and often up to 50x times the benefits relative to the cost. Now, obviously, that benefit is split between a few stakeholders. But a large portion of that benefit accrues to the government, because the government often takes 20% or 30% of that increase in income tax
increase in income in the form of income tax. So if you have sort of, you know, 50x times the benefits and a government is taking 20 or 30% of that.
then the uplift in income tax alone is an order of magnitude greater than the cost. And so you have this one positive externality that is an order of magnitude greater than the cost. Now you might be asking, why don't governments therefore just fund those human capital investments given that? Now sometimes they do, but often they don't for a range of reasons. One is like, they just have no clue what works often, whereas often private entities are better placed to figure out the most effective training interventions in a data-driven way.
constraints that are often real both for political reasons and economic reasons and three the time horizon that often governments optimize for one or two or three years and yet the benefits of education often accrue in five ten fifteen twenty years from now and so if for example you know we're funding high quality high schooling in India you know there's hundred million girls in India that don't have access to high quality high schooling now a government might not make sense to fund that high quality high schooling because they don't get
Nat Ware (35:21.284)
investors could get back, for example, 30% of the increase in income tax for 30 years, a bit like sort of dividends and shares, like if there was a payment stream over the course of 30 years, then suddenly investors are optimizing over the medium and long term, whereas governments are only optimizing over the very short term. So there's a range of reasons why governments don't do it, and can't do it, and can't do it well, even though the uplift in lifetime income tax is often an order of magnitude greater than the initial cost of the education.
Evan (35:52.706)
Set against that backdrop, what is Forte, what's the product, how does it work?
Nat Ware (35:58.894)
So Forte was based on my PhD research at Oxford. So I spent about five years looking at how we can better finance human capital around the world, how we can better finance education and healthcare. I started by looking at all the current ways that we do this, everything from income share agreements to low interest loans, to vouchers, et cetera, basically became convinced that all those approaches have big challenges that will prevent them from scaling and having the impact that we want. And as part of my PhD, I worked out that any way to finance education should have
16 key characteristics, a proof that no existing approach satisfies more than eight of those, and then proof that the only way you can achieve those 16 desirable outcomes is with a new approach that no one in the world was doing. And I call that approach FORTE. FORTE stands for Financing of Return to Employment. And I guess the one-liner is that it's a way to finance high quality education, high quality talent development at no cost to individuals, no cost to governments, and without needing philanthropy.
use private capital to fund high quality talent development. When I say talent development I mean both you know hard skills retraining for example training people in programming or data science or web development or cyber security and also wraparound support services so complementary non training investments that are needed to ensure course completion and to unlock potential you know if someone breaks their laptop during training we will pay to fix that things like that. We don't do the training ourselves we have over 50
partners around the world. So in some ways, we're sort of a new business model for them. But basically, we use private capital to fund a high quality education. The people who receive that education don't pay anything at all. Nothing now, nothing in the future. It's not a loan. It's not an ISA. There's no chance of exploitation. There's no chance of predatory behavior, completely at no cost to those individuals. And we're particularly focused on groups who might be earning, you know, either low wages or below the income tax threshold at the moment.
Now that...
Nat Ware (38:00.778)
investment, that education by its nature leads to greater employment, greater incomes, and therefore greater government income tax revenue. And we have agreements with a number of governments around the world, where they then pass back to the investors via the Forte platform, a percentage of the increase in the income tax revenue they receive that's attributable to the retrained individuals for a set period of time, such as 80% for three years or 50% for five years or 30% for 10 years, etc.
a win-win. From the perspective of individuals, as good as you can get. Way, way better than loans, way, way better than income share agreements. And that means that we can provide high quality education to people irrespective of capacity to pay and we get the best students. From the perspective of investors, you know, investors can make a very good return, you know, from some of our current projects that the returns are well above market rates. And the way that
expense of the people that we're trying to help. And so in many, like a number of people have described it as the holy grail of impact investing or the holy grail of ESG investing, because there is that perfect alignment of social impact and financial return at a systems level. The way investors make more money is by doing more good, by the education, actually working and actually helping people and actually leading to good outcomes. So we can almost think of this as like trickle up economics, you know, let's help those who are struggling and disadvantaged and then benefits flow up through the system.
not reliant on altruism or generosity. Like even morally agnostic profit seekers in this model are still incentivized to do what is in the best interest of humanity, to ensure the education actually works. So that's from the investor standpoint. Now from the perspective of governments, this is a way that they can help different groups without worsening the budget. Often governments are budget constrained around the world. Without worsening the budget, it's a way that they never pay for something that doesn't work.
Nat Ware (40:00.672)
have no clue what works in this space. So this is a way they never pay for something that doesn't work. They get the revenue first and the increase in revenue is always greater than the cost. So it always makes economic sense, is always fiscally responsible. And so if I'm talking to the Bernie Sanders of the world, this is a way to provide high quality education at no cost to disadvantaged groups. And if I'm talking to the Ted Cruz's of the world, you know, this is a way to help disadvantaged groups by using market forces, using
tapping into private sector innovation and investment in a way that doesn't worsen the budget and is fiscally responsible. So it sort of uniquely appeals right across the political spectrum. And so many governments say that it's a no-brainer. Different governments have said it's music to their ears, that it solves a lot of the problems that they face, et cetera. And then from the perspective of education providers, this is a new better business model for them.
Nat Ware (41:00.252)
effective business model. Often they, you know, try to convince individuals to part with savings or try to convince people to take out loans or to use ISAs. They all have challenges. And I can go into all the challenges associated with that, or organizations spend a ton of time applying for grants or donations or an administration. In this model, in this business model, we just fund the best education providers around the world to do what they do best, the training, they can work with any students, they can work with more students.
They get to focus on the training, they can scale up, they can enter new markets at no risk. And so we've never been turned down by a training provider and I think it's an order of magnitude better business model for them. So we sort of want to be the engine that powers the world's great human capital providers going forward.
Evan (41:47.65)
You mentioned a few times ISAs, income share agreements. Remind me, what are those, how do those work, and what's sort of your critique of why that didn't play out with a lot of the promises that were made about them?
Nat Ware (41:59.318)
Yes, so income share agreements try to solve one of the problems with standard loans, which is, you know, individuals who are disadvantaged are often not well placed to bear risk. And one of the problems with usual loans is that the people are risk averse, people don't want the stress of debt. And the worst case scenario with a loan is worse than the worst case without a loan. That is if you do education and take out a loan, and you don't get a job, then not only do you not have a job and a salary, but now you have this debt as well. And so
rational for low income people to not want to take out standard loans, even if the outcomes are likely, even if they're likely to get employment and good salaries. Now ISA has tried to solve that by having sort of investors bear that financial risk. And the way it works is that investors pay for the education. If a student doesn't get a job, they don't pay anything. If they do get a job, they repay a percentage of their income in addition to tax for many years after the training. Now this sounds good.
terms of risk transfer, but it carries with it sort of four major problems, which is why I say is have failed and are failing and I really do not think based on all my knowledge and all my research are at all the future. And those four reasons are as follows. One is there's just a big trade off between social impact and financial return, the way investors make more money does come at the expense of the people are trying to help. That is not only a problem from an impact standpoint, but also is bad from a PR standpoint and also leads to a lot of regulation,
are coming in and trying to impose caps on repayments, which reduces investor returns and makes it harder and harder for businesses to operate. A second problem is the practical side of things. You're basically duplicating the IRS. You're relying on private entities, knowing incomes and enforcing payments, which companies are bad at and don't like to do. You know, what is the government better at than the private sector? Not much, but they're better at knowing incomes and collecting taxes. So can we use what the
Nat Ware (43:59.012)
sector innovation and investment. A third problem with ISAs is what we call adverse selection. Basically you get the worst students. That if you're super talented and you think that you're going to do a programming training and get $100,000 as your first job, you're not going to opt for an ISA. If you're given three options, first forte where you don't pay anything ever, secondly a loan repaying say $10,000 or an ISA which if you're successful means you end up paying $20,000, your first choice is going to be forte.
then a loan, then an ISA, which means that the people who think they're going to be really successful don't opt for the ISA and the worst students do opt for ISAs, which therefore reduces investor returns and makes the model collapse. And the fourth big problem is that because individuals are repaying a percentage on top of tax, that percentage needs to be quite low, meaning the duration of repayment for investors is very, very long. Because we're a subset of tax,
of tax, meaning our sort of repayment duration is much shorter than what you see in ISAs. And so there's obviously a ton of failures in the ISA space over the past decade, and it's mostly because of those four reasons. And what we've tried to do with Forte is have all the benefits of ISAs, where we're not imposing any debt burden on individuals, we can still work with anyone where individuals are not bearing the risk, but we solve all those four problems.
Evan (45:27.63)
So you're really unlocking a huge amount of capital to invest in human capital development. And I'm trying to understand in what ways this drives innovation in the training programs themselves. So if you think about the
student loan market in the United States. A challenge in flooding the market with essentially no interest or free money means that consumers make bad choices and massively overspend and choose poor quality products that don't net improvements in lifetime earnings. So walk me through when you guys are unlocking billions of dollars of investment into human capital development, what is the sort of
competition and innovation look like that actually produces a higher ROI on net improvements in lifetime earnings? I want to see programs compete. I want to see new ones get birthed. I want to see this long-term data that 30 years out, this program is dramatically more effective than this other one. How does that work?
Nat Ware (46:39.31)
Great question. I think that the first thing to point out here is that the usual way or the traditional way that we ensured quality in the education space was via a method of approving things in advance. Often we developed curriculums, approved it, taught to it.
That doesn't work in the world of the present and it doesn't work in the world of the future. One, because technology is constantly changing. If we're teaching to curriculums, we're not teaching to AI and chat GBT and everything else that's relevant. And also, whereas in the past people got educated at one stage in life between the ages of like 18 and 22, now people are gonna get educated again and again and again throughout their life. And so people are in very different life circumstances. And so we can't just approve everything in advance
because we need to be responsive to individual circumstances. So what Forte is, is an alternative way of ensuring quality, not by pre-approval, which increasingly doesn't work, but by aligning incentives and where we just pass back a portion of the uplift in income tax, which as I said before, that metric captures, does someone have a job, is it a quality job, and is there job retention? And so what that means is that we don't need things approved in advance. If sort of there's an intervention, whether a content change,
or another sort of non-training intervention that actually leads to greater income and income tax in the future, we just make that investment. And so we can be very innovative. We don't need it to be approved, we don't need to incorporate it in a curriculum, we can just be innovative, be agile, be spontaneous, both to individual circumstances and to the content that is needed by business. So that's sort of the first high-level thing. The second thing in this space is about information asymmetry and you're right,
and saying that individuals often don't know.
Nat Ware (48:28.066)
themselves which training providers and courses are the most effective. And the problem is that the usual way this space work is training providers and trying to sell things to individuals. And so individuals are being sold things often they don't need because obviously training providers have a vested interest in selling more courses and getting more money in and having more students and getting more revenue. In our model, we're sort of the platform. As I said, we have over 50 different training providers at the moment, and that's ever increasing. But we are objective.
we're not trying to sort of sell students things they don't need because if they don't get a job, we don't succeed. So where our incentive is to make sure that we do optimal talent opportunity matching and match the student with the right training provider and the right course in the right areas that will actually generate good jobs, quality jobs, high salaries into the future. And so it's because of that trust and objectivity that students are sort of embracing this. And, you know, in most of the markets where we are,
around the world, we're getting sort of 30, 40, 50 times more people applying than there are places. Partly, you know, obviously, because it's no cost, no risk, the value proposition is very good, but partly also because we're an objective partner, they're not going it alone, they're not being thrown in the deep end, we can sort of guide them into the careers and courses that are most effective. And so those are sort of two more high level comments about one, how we do that better
Nat Ware (49:58.06)
guarantee quality. And I think that's important because when it comes to innovation, you know, we need to move away from sort of an idea of pre-approval and we need to embrace new ideas. And what I like about this is that people can put their money where their mouth is. Like if there's a great training provider using a method that's never been tried before, we can still back them.
In a way, government might not if they had to pay for it in advance, because they might be risk averse, they might not want to pay for something that doesn't work. Whereas we can say, actually, we think this new approach to education, this new approach to human capital investment is effective, and we're going to back it, and we're going to be paid based on outcomes. And so having a model of governments never paying for something that doesn't work and just passing back what they otherwise would not have had, unlocks a lot of innovation and experimentation, which is needed to move this sector forward.
I think one thing that a lot of people agree in this education space is that it is very, very slow moving. There's a lot of very slow moving incumbents that are not adapting to the world of the future and part of that adaptation is embracing innovation, embracing new approaches and I certainly think the Forte model helps that process.
Evan (51:09.11)
to think about some high level numbers with you about how big this could be. And you've probably administered many case interviews before, so let's play around with some numbers here. So let's just say we have a billion people and we want to give each of them a $2,000 digital skills training course. Ballpark, call it $2 trillion. As context, that's about $2.
what the United States spent on the Iraq War. You don't have to comment on that. The money's available. Walk through some of the numbers. If we put $2 trillion into skills training for a billion people, what are some of the numbers that you would be thinking about and what would that mean for the world?
Nat Ware (52:00.47)
I mean, a billion sounds a lot, but honestly, that is what the world needs. I mean, even the world economic forum says that over a billion people need retraining in the next decade due to a range of factors, robotics, automation, AI, demographic shifts, environmental shifts as well. And so we need to be thinking at the scale that you're talking about. And part of the reason for the Forte model is to have a very, very scalable model that can actually solve problems on that scale. And I think Forte is very scalable for a few reasons.
constrained on the education side, we can work with a wide range of education providers. Two, we use data that we already collect, already measure. And three, we're not reliant on philanthropy or concessionary returns. And obviously sort of profit-seeking capital is an order of magnitude greater than philanthropic capital in the world. And so if we want to train a billion people, you can't rely on foundations, you can't rely on philanthropy, you need to tap into the largest pools of funding. And so that's what this tries to do. And so very much when designing the Forte model,
It was a question of what does it look like to train a billion people and what approach would enable us to do it on that scale. And so certainly, when we come to sort of market sizing, at a very basic simple level, you know,
Household budgets, a large portion of household budgets get spent on education, a large portion get spent on healthcare. And Forte can both do education, but also healthcare as well. You know, there's 200 million people in the world with avoidable blindness. Often they just need cataract eye surgery, which isn't that expensive, but if you can see, you're more able to work, earn income, pay tax. If you have life-saving drugs, you can live longer. If people are living longer, obviously they're gonna work some more as well. So there's a lot of healthcare applications of Forte as well.
the household budgets, education and healthcare being huge, and also government budgets. Education and healthcare are also huge portions of government budgets. So we're sort of dealing with some of the biggest problems facing the world. And if you were in space looking back on Earth, and you're thinking, what are the biggest problems to solve? Obviously, there's the environment, but the other big problem is you've got eight billion human beings. Some of them are succeeding, some of them are flourishing, but often many of them aren't, not because they're not talented
Nat Ware (54:16.084)
And so we're really thinking about how we can unlock the constraints, unlock the potential of a large portion of those 8 billion people. So certainly, you know, in terms of market sizing, like
You know, that alone would be massive and massive, but it's not only the $2,000 training, it's also everything else that can be invested into a person to further increase their salary and potential to provide dignity, to ensure they have the freedom that they need and deserve.
Evan (54:48.302)
And in the case of preventable blindness, that one feels pretty down the fairway. But take someone who doesn't have digital skills training, isn't really able to use the internet to work, and they're given some digital skills, and their income goes up. And if you do that for a billion people,
Evan (55:15.118)
Their income goes up. Tax revenues go up. GDPs go up.
Evan (55:24.358)
Why is that a good thing? I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but how do you think, how valuable is that? The tax rolls go up and their incomes have gone up a little bit. How do you begin to think about the amount of value you're creating there?
Nat Ware (55:38.966)
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, in my mind, like, training and work and not ends in and of themselves. They're sort of means to an end. I mean, the reason why I do what I do, and the reason we do what we do at Forte is not because of work. It's because of what work enables. It's because of work enables freedom, because work enables dignity, because work enables reduced financial stress and hardship. And the reality is there.
are a lot of people around the world, hundreds and hundreds of millions of people who live really, really difficult, really hard lives. You know, where they're struggling day by day, how do I feed my family? How do I pay my rent? How do I pay off this debt that I have? How do I sort of provide for my children? How do I give them an education? And so by sort of providing people with good skills that unlock their potential, good salaries that mean that they have that financial security and freedom.
We're in the process able to provide dignity. We're in the process able to reduce hardship. We're in the process able to enable human happiness and human flourishing. And so I do think this is very much an enabler of many of the things that we view as core to what it means to be human. And so I think that it would be a mistake just to view sort of, you know, salary alone as the end. I think that is the enabler of the things that really, really matter in this life.
Evan (57:04.618)
to try to create and share what you might have some critics or some people in this conversation who might be critical of some elements of this. So I'll try to play these out. I really don't share many of these perspectives, but let's just try them out and just kind of understand how you wrestle with some parties that you're probably in the same ecosystem. So some people say work is slavery.
And the real dream is something like a universal basic income where we reallocate resources in ways that people have significantly less work. You talk about work as a source of dignity. What do you say to advocates of UBI?
Nat Ware (57:41.682)
Yeah, so I think UBI in some ways tries to achieve the same objective of Forte, but in a different way that I think is less scalable and less effective and that doesn't align incentives as well. Because what UBI aims for is like a safety net. It's like, let's provide people with sort of a basic safety net. Um, so they're less stressed and so on. I mean, Forte is also a different way of providing a safety net so that if someone sort of loses their job at 30 or 40 or 50, um, here's a way that they can access the support.
they need to get back on their feet to transition to move into new jobs, new careers, to live a different life without incurring any cost, without bearing any risk and without having debt stress. So if the objective is let's provide access, let's not exploit people, let's not burden them with debt, then Forte does that, but I think it does it in a far more scalable way from a financial standpoint. And so it's not that the objectives of UBI I'm supportive of,
I just don't think it is the best approach for doing that. The other thing that I'd say is like, the two are not mutually exclusive. Like we could certainly have a world in which people get a very small amount of income to meet their basic needs, but then we still use forte, not just for basic needs, but to unlock potential, to move someone from the bare minimum standard needing to sort of live, to actually enabling them to keep moving forward and forward in their life in a way that aligns incentives, in a way that mobilizes private capital
scalable manner, etc. So it's not necessarily one or the other. Obviously, I think, you know, the best case scenario in the world is where there are a mix of effective solutions that are together supportive and complementary of each other. And so even if for those people who do support UBI, I think that's entirely compatible with the Forte model. And in fact, I think they're sort of based on the same idea that we can create a world where people have dignity that unlock potential, and that don't impose debt burdens on individuals. I mean, even in
the US, like we almost assume that debt is necessary for disadvantaged populations and that debt is a given and that there's no other way. I mean, often the criticism of
Nat Ware (59:52.03)
you know, government policies is we can't afford it. Like you're being idealistic, how on earth are you going to provide high quality education for free to populations? And I'm like, it's because we're narrow minded in our thinking. It's because we think that the way you have to pay for things is from existing budgets and you don't. You can pay for it from the uplift in the positive externality that arises, and you can mobilize private capital to align incentives. Um, and so I think we need to distinguish between the objective and the means.
Evan (01:00:21.294)
It reminds me a little bit of the contrast that the Laffer curve really pointed out, which was the big debate, I think, we're dealing with what marginal tax rates under Carter in the late 70s in the 80% range. And the big argument here was, look, when you lower marginal tax rates, you're incentivizing economic growth. Actually net to the Treasury grows. It's a smaller percentage of a much larger pool of taxable income means more money. So maybe...
parallel there. Let me try to turn up the heat a little bit. Again, this is not my words, but let me just try this one and see how you respond to this. So, we're talking about helping the least off. We're talking about cochlear implants for the deaf. We're talking about cataract surgeries for the blind. How dare you?
Marshall hedge fund capital to profit for these greedy capitalists How dare you be a giant equity owner of this hotshot venture backed company that's has you standing to make millions or billions of dollars you are Profiting off the backs of the most needy What do you say to that?
Nat Ware (01:01:31.774)
I mean, I think that logic, you know, is based on the past world where almost the people who say that kind of assume if they're being honest with their logic, they assume that the way people make more money is at the expense of individuals. So that line of thinking sort of almost relies on the implicit assumption that there is a trade off between social impact and financial return. And in a world where that trade off does exist, in a world where the way you make more money is at the expense of people.
criticism stands. I think that, you know, if the way you make more money is at the expense of disadvantaged individuals, maybe there should be a limit on the returns or the profit of those individuals, or at least it's right to sort of raise that question in the first place. What that ignores is that in our model, in Forte, the way people are making more money in no way whatsoever comes at the expense of the people we're trying to help. You know, if there wasn't the profit motivation, this would not occur anyway. And the only way that people are
money is by the increase in a positive externality. And so I don't think that logic stands up to scrutiny, and it would only stand up to scrutiny if we lived in a world where there was that trade off. And so I'd have no problem sort of arguing with anyone who thinks that because I don't think that logic stands, to be honest.
Evan (01:02:51.822)
Okay, I like that. Maybe last one for you. So in the world of ESG, the initials for environmental, social, and governance is sort of a global conversation that drives a lot of asset allocation, a lot of economic research. There are two regularly.
focused on areas, a huge emphasis on decreasing our production of carbon, so a huge interest in green and renewable energy sources, and the other common tent pole is around the diversity equity inclusion space, which thinks a lot about racial and gender representation of boards, leadership, et cetera. What's really exciting to me about what you're focused on is...
this real core to maybe some of the original conversation, the original purpose behind ESG. When we were looking at, in some of this history, we were looking at a company that have a massive market cap like an ExxonMobil or a Chevron. And then we say, gosh, their mining practices in the Congo, the human tragedies that result from their practices.
something feels off about that coexisting alongside a multi-hundred billion dollar market cap. And so much of the early inspiration for ESG was really sound. And yet, there seem to be some areas of interest that I wonder if they have distracted us from what is your core mission? Which seems like, how are we marshaling as much capital as possible with the right kinds of incentives?
to grow human capabilities as aggressively and widespread as possible. How do you have conversations with them? What do you think about where you stand vis-a-vis these other very loud parties in the world of ESG?
Nat Ware (01:04:48.662)
I mean, first of all, I think impact investing and ESG investing, ESG investing succeeds if you don't use those terms. So I don't call Forte impact investing. I don't call it ESG investing because that makes it seem niche. It makes it seem like we're asking for concessionary returns. You know, what we want is to be the best model of that, which is by definition, you don't need that. And if we can provide investors with, you know, these are the people who fund
you know, very good returns above market returns. We're not relying on philanthropy. It just should stand alone as a financial instrument, as a financial mechanism. And if it stands alone, then we can unlock, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars in capital directed towards the worthwhile causes. And I think that is more scalable, sustainable, and can solve bigger problems. Like on the issue of the environment, you know, how do you train people at scale for the green jobs of the future? Forte can do that. How do you reskill people in unsustainable industries, whether it logging or beef farming or mining?
or other areas to prove you can transition economies without job losses. We can do that as well. And so you can use market-based mechanisms and solutions that stand alone as market mechanisms to solve some of the world's biggest problems. When it comes to diversity and inclusion, obviously a big challenge there is that not people from marginalized populations and disadvantaged backgrounds often don't have the same access to traditional education pathways. What Forte enables is alternative pathways that better fit the needs of disadvantaged
populations and marginal populations. Now the Forte model itself can be applied across the board. It's not only for the most disadvantaged, we can also take someone on 40,000 and turn them into earning a hundred thousand. If someone loses their job because the industry is disrupted, we can help them get back on their feet and get another job as well. So it's broadly applicable but yes we can help both environmental causes and diversity, equity and inclusion as well. But I think the big shift that needs to take place here is moving from a mindset
harm, which is kind of the basis of a lot of what you were talking about with the big oil and gas companies, to a world where we're not just trying to minimize harm, but we're trying to mobilize the world's greatest resources to solve the world's greatest challenges. And that is front and center of my mind. I mean...
Nat Ware (01:07:05.314)
take any big challenge in the world, we're not going to solve that with philanthropy. We're not going to solve that with foundation capital alone. Let's use human innovation. Let's use human ingenuity. Let's use capitalism. Let's use market mechanisms. Let's use the largest pools of funding that exist in the world and innovation to solve climate. Let's use that to solve education. Let's use that to solve healthcare. And obviously, everyone's got to be biased towards what they do.
I genuinely think that this new approach, which tries to align social impact and financial return at a systems level, does that better than anything else that I've ever come across, and that's why I'm working on this.
Evan (01:07:48.118)
Well, the thread of the many layers of the Russian doll of Nat, to me it makes a lot of sense. It's really fun to see how all this comes together. And there are so many things about your case for the venture-backed startup that really resonate with me. And a challenge and evolution that I went through was, like you believe that, nonprofits and or public policy were ways to.
massively grow human capital and positively contribute to human flourishing. And then when I first started thinking about business, I understood business as a tool that would make people wealth, and then the wealth would be used to be delivered through nonprofits to actually do good. And in a much lesser educated, smaller way than your journey, it's really exciting to think about, no, actually the reason that businesses specifically and especially
heck enabled businesses have such a huge capability to transform the world in a positive way and to contribute to human flourishing is a bit about how they are designed, how they're able to marshal resources beyond their immediate control, financial capital, equity, debt, human capital, how they're able to build teams, how they're able to create culture, how you're able to build incredibly high performance organizations that can
move so much more quickly, they can scale so much faster, they can build teams and infrastructures 100x faster, bigger, more effective than nonprofits and certainly governments. That is the opportunity. I sort of see it as it is a side product that your equity investors make a lot of money. It is a side product that you, as a big equity holder, would make a lot of money. The big story here is that
this weapon, this tool, this infrastructure that you've chosen, I think is an incredible vehicle to just unleash total good in the world. And it's really exciting to see your own journey and you as a conversation partner, primarily leading this work at Forte, and we're huge fans of what you're building, but also on the stage and in conversation with people who I think probably need a little bit of a nudge, need a little bit of a reminder about the value and the importance of the kind of venture
Evan (01:10:12.03)
You're not building it because you're greedy. You're choosing this instrument as the instrument that you think is one of the most effective ways to shape the world. It's amazing to see that journey closes out on this, and that for people that are really excited about what you're doing, how can people learn more? How could people get behind what you're building right now?
Nat Ware (01:10:31.254)
Yes, certainly. I mean, we'd love to stay in contact with any person or organization that is interested in sort of supporting this mission. You know, I'll be doing this for a very long time. I put it this way. If after a PhD, I did not believe 150% that this is the way the world should work and the way the world could work. I would not now be doing this. So obviously sort of, you know, I think what's that saying? If you go it alone, you go quickly, but if you want to go far, you go together.
on as many partners who believe in this mission, who want to unlock human potential at a scale never seen using a mechanism that I think sort of mobilizes market forces effectively. And certainly for anyone who wants to be a part of that, would love to be in contact. Obviously feel free to connect on LinkedIn or whatever your platform of choice is and we can go from there.
Evan (01:11:24.906)
Nat, congrats on this amazing project. We wish you the best of luck and we're cheering on your many successes. Thanks for being with us.
Nat Ware (01:11:31.322)
Thanks, Evan.