Yeah, definitely. Eso I I grew up in Kansas and I was middle of five kids, and both my parents were in public service. So before I even really started thinking about public service or non profits as a potential career path, I, you know, had had parents who were examples in that way. And I think one of the big kind of, you know, inflection points or changes that led me on my current path was when I was just going into my sophomore year of high school. My dad, who was working as a civilian contractor for the military, was deployed overseas to Afghanistan. And as the middle of five kids, I had to take on a much bigger role of family responsibility than I had had before, including, you know, helping drive around my little brother and my little sister. And then also my older sister has a disability. And so I took on a bigger role in trying to help support her. A swell on DSO. During that year, I started seeing, you know, I started realizing how fortunate, really, our family was just in the sense that we had great schools and, you know, safe neighborhood and a loving family that was able to actually, you know, help us make it through that year. But I also started realizing that for you know, people like my older sister, who has a disability, or for people not too far away from where I was in Kansas City And certainly, you know, for Children who are growing up in places like Afghanistan, where my dad was that many people didn't have the same opportunities. And I think with, you know, lead for America. By the time I got to college, I was really set on going into career in public service and was really interested in going back to my home state of Kansas to do that and tried toe, you know, make friends and no other people who really wanted to do the same thing. But then I started seeing so many of these people who you know, said that they wanted to go into public service or starting on profits after graduation. We're actually just moving Thio, New York, Boston, D. C. San Francisco The same kind of you know, really big cities, and almost all of them are accepting jobs and kind of for profit. Very large companies, whether that's companies or investment banks are consulting firms. Andi, it's one thing if you really want to do that. But it's another thing. If you're like Hey, I really want to change the world and work, you know on this cause I believe in. But I just don't see a pathway to do that on DSO. Really, The inspiration for Lead for America was okay. Our country has a lot of big challenges. We have a ton of people actually who really wanna work on those challenges and are incredibly, you know, talented moral dynamic leaders. And we just got to match the two. We've got to provide a pathway for these really incredible young people to actually be working on those big challenges facing our country.

Yeah, for sure. Well, I think that that I had the benefit of having started several other initiatives before, including several that had failed. Andi, I think that's a really important thing, because, Aziz, you probably know in your work with mentor students, whenever you're trying to start something, there's a million and one things that go into doing it. And there's so many details that you just wouldn't imagine being there. Andi, if you haven't done it before, you could get really overwhelmed. And, you know, where do I start? How is this even gonna be possible? Will I ever get toe? You know, kind of the place where I could realize the vision that I have on DSO for me. I knew from my past experiences that the most important things where given that I was 21 years old when starting the organization I needed toe have some people who had a lot more experiencing credibility, saying yes, this is a good idea. And yes, this is important. So that was one thing. Ah, second thing was I knew that in order to pull this off, it was going to require an awesome team on DSO knew I needed to actually find great people there. And then the third thing is, everything that's worth doing does require, unfortunately, money on DSO I knew that we needed to start building relationships or find a way that we were actually gonna get funding for it. So in those first few weeks, I really tried to focus on those three things. And so the first one was, you know, going and talking Thio local governments, mayors, advisers, people at my university to get their advice, get their feedback. And then if they said they're willing to support it, I said, Can I, you know, include you on a list of advisers or supporters and I would literally put their names on a piece of paper. And when I would go into meetings, I would have this printed out. So and I had, you know, a binder of all the materials and resource is I put together. So it just seemed kind of a little bit more legitimate than maybe I actually was and and could show. Hey, here's all the people who think that this is a good idea and important on the team perspective. I went through my entire Facebook friend list and was trying to search for Who are the people who I've met, who I'd really love to work with on going to try to recruit them. And so over my fault break. I basically called all of them up and said, Hey, are you willing to work on this? Most of them said no, but a couple said yes, and then we were able to help recruit other people from that list, or even the people who said No said, You know, I can't do this because I'm accepting a job or no, because I think you're crazy for trying to do this. But that being said, I'll tell you somebody else who can help and then the funding perspective again. I was just asking for referrals, advisors, advisors, other people, predominantly through my university and scholarship program. And I think the classic advice. If you want money, then you ask for advice first. If you want advice, then ask for money on DSO for me. I just tried toe first. Ask people Hey, do you think this is a good idea? And then you know what would need toe happen or be true in order for you to support this or, you know, for others to support it financially. Eso anyway, that's the first, you know, a couple weeks the first couple of months. And I would say the biggest thing that shifted over time was once you start actually having mawr advisers and supporters and team members that you're working with, um, as a CEO of an organization, you have to really make sure that you're setting the vision that you're getting the right people on the team and that you're providing direction for those people and that you're bringing resource is into the organization. But you've got to really have a team that you can trust, and you've got to move from a position of feeling like you're doing absolutely everything, um, toe, actually being able to delegate on just again be able to provide guidance or support Andrea Lee only focus on the things that you uniquely condo's s O. That was really the biggest shift from the early days to, you know, the following months and now years is moving from a place of feeling like I've got a obsess over every single detail to instead building a team in a network of supporters who can help you manage that growing complexity of the venture

Yeah, well, I mean, I think the first barrier that we ran into was I was again 21 years old and mostly other people who I knew were also 21 or 22 years old on DSO. When you're building initial team, you just have less experience and how things were supposed to go, which is, actually, I learned an incredible gift. But when it comes Thio Uh oh, How should a meeting go, or how should the agenda be set up? Or who's going to take the lead on this thing or what is? You know, what is the standard of success look like for this memo? All those sorts of things were uncharted territory. And so I think one of the challenges was just, you know, inexperience. And everyone kind of figuring out in their own domain what needed to be done and then who they needed to talk to. And just all the same things that you would imagine. I think also we didn't have any money, so I was trying to recruit people to say, Hey, you know, at this point it was December, January. Andi, I knew that, you know, people are graduating in May, and I wanted to be able to have other people who are working full time. I knew our timeline for the venture wasn't gonna work out if I was the only person working full time. So we had to find a way to get people to sign on and say, yes, I'm gonna commit to doing this full time, but we didn't yet have kind of the financial resources. And so one of the things that we got really good at was, you know, going to our universities and saying, Hey, we really wanna work on this thing. Um, if we're successful, it's gonna be a really good look for the for the university. This is something where you're gonna be able to say, this was started at this place. Or, you know, one of the founding team members came from my university, and all I need is, you know, $10,000 or $20,000 to just try to see if this could work for, you know, three months, six months, whatever else, but yeah, that financial challenge was definitely something that we ran into on Ben. I think the other thing is you just don't and that founding team have all the sorts of expertise, especially on the technical subjects like finance and operations and systems building. Um, that you need to be able to build something that's really going to last. And so we've mostly got around that by just finding really smart people and then giving them a chance to learn and surrounding them with great advisors and mentors. But certainly some of that skills or experience gap was a challenge in their early days on Ben. To your second question about how did the kind of teams composition and dynamics and time and resource is change over time. I think that, you know, we're really been fortunate to have most of the same founding team that we had at the start, still working on lead for America, which I think is a huge reason why we've been able to be successful. Ah, lot of groups will have incredible turnover. So many people fall off and it's just really hard, especially in your first couple of years, to build something great if you're constantly on boarding new people and if you don't have that level of this really kind of steadfast trust and you're and you're co founders or your fellow colleagues. So I would say the trust has, you know, the a lot of composition. We've more been adding people to a core group of people as opposed to kind of cycling through more and more people, which again, has been a really big blessing. I think from a time perspective, you know, in those early days it was everything felt existentially. It was like If we don't do this, then the organization's gonna fail. If we don't do that, then things is never going to work. And so definitely, you know, sleeping in the office, working through the night. All those sorts of things were the norm in the early days, and we're fortunate in the sense that, yes, we still work hard. But from a time perspective, it's no longer quite that same way. And there's, you know, very few things that could happen. Where would be like, Okay, we're actually gonna have to stay up through the entire night now to get this done in the same way that we did in that first year. Andi, I think the other thing is that we've been able to hire some people who have a lot more experience. So, you know, we just hired in operations and finance manager who has, you know, 25 or 30 years of experience in that field on Bond, who is ultimately gonna be reporting to a 25 year old. You know, C 00 Bond. The recognition is that both of them have, you know, perspectives, more experience that the other could really benefit from. But it's an incredible blessing to actually have now the financial resource is and legitimacy to go out and be able to hire people who have really made a career, you know, building exactly the sorts of organization organizations that we hope leave for America will become.