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Evan Marwell
93 Plays1 year ago
This is Move The Needle with Rob Kaplan, where we talk to people who lead, innovate and inspire. Today on Move The Needle, Rob talks with Evan Marwell. He had a super successful business career, but now he wants to take America on the EducationSuperHighway.
Evan Marwell is the Founder and CEO of EducationSuperHighway, the leading non-profit focused on closing the digital divide in America’s most unconnected communities. In eight years, EducationSuperHighway closed the digital divide in America’s K-12 schools – connecting nearly 47 million students in 99.7% of America’s classrooms to high-speed broadband. To accomplish this, Evan secured commitments from 85 governors from all 50 states to upgrade their schools for the 21st century and $2.5 billion per year of federal funding to make these commitments a reality. A recipient of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Visionary of the Year award and a serial entrepreneur, Evan launched companies over the last 25 years in the telecom, software, and hedge fund industries. Evan is an honors graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, board chair of myAgro, a board member at Direct Relief and Recidiviz, and a co-founder of Ignite! Reading, a Zoom-based K-3 reading tutoring program.
#movetheneedlewithevanmarwell #educationsuperhighway #evanmarwell #education #educationforall #americaneducation #nonprofit #harvardbusinessschool #entrepreneur #visionary #recidiviz #movetheneedlewithrobkaplan #samzeff #robkaplan #scottrichardson #ronelgolden
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:04
Speaker
This is Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan, where we talk to people who lead, innovate, and inspire. I have this bias to action. I want to do things. I want to get things done. I want to change things. And from my point of view, that was not academia.
Guest Introduction: Evan Marwell
00:00:20
Speaker
Today on Move the Needle, Rob talks with Evan Marwell. He had a super successful business career, but now he wants to take America on the Education Superhighway. I met Evan Marwell through my venture philanthropy firm, Drayton Richards Kaplan. Several years ago, we were looking at Education Superhighway, which was a nonprofit
00:00:47
Speaker
that Evan was running with a mission of getting internet into schools across the country. Evan was the CEO. I got to know him, interviewed him. We decided to back him. I was extremely impressed with him. And then I got to know him in the years since and saw what a fantastic leader he was and is.
Evan's Background and Early Career
00:01:11
Speaker
did in trying to improve Wi-Fi access for schools around the country. Evan, I'm thrilled to have you here today. It's great to be here, Rob. Thanks for having me on.
00:01:22
Speaker
So let's talk a little bit about your life. You, you went to Harvard, uh, and then you went to Harvard business school. And for the first 20, 25 years or so, or 25 years to be exact of your career, you were a business person. A lot of that 25 years, at least for the first 10, you ran a firm and phonics.
00:01:43
Speaker
in New York, then you ran an investment firm. Tell us a little bit about your business career. I think it's a good place to start to know that I was the black sheep in my family. Both of my parents were PhDs. My sister's a PhD. They're all in academia. And I decided to go be in business. And I think the reason I decided to go down the business path
00:02:06
Speaker
was I have this bias to action. I want to do things. I want to get things done. I want to change things. And from my point of view, that was not academia. Sitting back and just thinking and writing and communicating great ideas is super important in the world, but wasn't, I thought, the highest and best use of my time.
00:02:26
Speaker
So, you know, between Harvard and Harvard Business School, I worked for a management consulting firm. I probably learned most of what I learned about business other than the people side of things during those three years. I had an incredible group of partners that I worked for, and one in particular who is a real mentor in helping me learn how to think strategically and think about problems.
00:02:50
Speaker
And then I was in Harvard Business School and thought that, you know, I wanted to go into a field where I could actually make stuff and build stuff and build companies. So I didn't want to go back to consulting. I didn't want to go into banking. I wanted to go work for a real company and I was all set to go work for a loading dock equipment company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Pivot to Social Entrepreneurship
00:03:16
Speaker
when I had this crazy idea for my first business, InfoNXX, which was a competitive directory assistance provider. Now, many of your listeners may not even know what directory assistance is, since it barely exists anymore, but it's what we talked about as 411 or 555-1212. You needed to call to find out somebody's phone number. And so we built a competitive directory assistance company to the phone companies, largely on the backs of the fact that
00:03:46
Speaker
The wireless industry didn't want people writing down phone numbers while they were calling 411 and driving down the road because they were worried about the liability of those issues. And so they came to us and said, could you just connect the call because the phone companies can't do that for us? And we, of course, said, sure, we can do that. We actually didn't know how to do that, but we said we could figure it out.
00:04:13
Speaker
And that really launched sort of my first business into being a really big organization. I've had this sort of pattern throughout my career where as long as I'm learning, as long as there are new challenges ahead of me, I'm really engaged, I'm really excited, and I stick with things. But when my learning curve starts to flatten and it becomes more about sort of wash, rinse, repeat,
00:04:37
Speaker
I start to get bored and I start looking for the next thing. And that tends to happen at about year seven or eight. And so about eight years into my first business, I decided that it was time to go do something else. And I got a call from one of my HBS classmates and said, hey, why don't you come start a hedge fund with me in San Francisco?
00:04:58
Speaker
And I said, that sounds great, but I don't know anything about investing. And he said, well, that's okay. You know about business and you're a smart guy and you'll figure out the investing. And so I did. It was a great excuse to move to San Francisco. And the challenge once again, I looked at this business. I said, this is one of the greatest business models I've ever seen. You know, the first sort of six years was about learning how to invest and learning out and building a firm and
00:05:25
Speaker
And so on and so on. So it was more entrepreneurial stuff again. But then at about year six, seven, eight, it started to be wash, rinse, repeat again. And so I started looking for the next thing to do. And, and, and that was sort of the, the trajectory that I kept going on for my business career. And so if someone was listening, they'd say, Oh, exactly the prototype background you'd expect from a social entrepreneur. And, uh,
00:05:50
Speaker
And I guess before I get into that, could you have ever in hindsight seen yourself working for a big established firm? For me, the key is that I had to be in a position where I could actually make things happen and make change happen. And so I think if I was in a big firm where my scope was really limited and I really didn't have agency, that wouldn't have worked for me. How did you get interested in
00:06:20
Speaker
The digital divide I'll call it lack of internet lack of internet access. What got you interested in that in? 2010 11 and 12 Yeah, so it was really kind of by accident And I would say that there were you know, three things that happened that that drew me into this world The first was I read a book by a guy named Felix, right?
00:06:44
Speaker
Well, I'm sure you know, you know, one of the Alliance of Wall Street saved New York from bankruptcy. Right. Lazard Frere. Yeah. Lazard Frere, exactly. He wrote this book called Bold Endeavors. And what this book was about was how infrastructure can change a nation. And he had these vignettes of these 10 infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal and the Transcontinental Railroad and land grant universities and rural electrification. We are here because
00:07:14
Speaker
The mussel shows development in the Tennessee River, development as a whole, are national in their aspect and are going to be treated from a national point of view.
00:07:30
Speaker
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Tennessee Valley Authority, the TVA. 15,000 workers labored to build 32 dams that controlled floods and provided power in an area where only two farmers in 100 had any electricity at all. TVA meant power for people. And his conclusion was basically like that only the government is big enough to do these things, but the payback is enormous.
00:08:00
Speaker
But the other thing that I took out of his book was that every one of those things was one person who had this sort of crazy vision and kept at it until the government showed up with the money.
Challenges and Mission of Education Superhighway
00:08:15
Speaker
And I saw myself in that. I'm a visionary. I'm a strategic thinker. I'm an evangelist. And so I was like, that's what I want to do next. I want to do something like that. But of course, I had no idea.
00:08:29
Speaker
The second thing that happened was I was the board chair at my daughter's school and we happened to be having a finance committee meeting when it was time to review the annual technology budget. And they came in and they said, we want to buy 50 more computers. And a couple of days before I'd had this experience where teachers were telling me basically that the internet didn't work in the school. So I said, well, before you buy any more computers, you got to fix the internet.
00:08:58
Speaker
And they were like, well, what do you mean? I said, well, everybody tells me that we've got a cable modem serving 500 people, and we've got an old internet, a Wi-Fi network, that one student described to me as sucking peanut butter through a straw. And I said, so we need to fix that. And so I started getting into the details about broadband in schools.
00:09:24
Speaker
And then the last thing that happened, which is really what launched me into the work that we do at Education Superhighway was I got invited to go to the White House to talk to the president about how to make America better with technology. And it was myself and a dozen other Silicon Valley CEOs and serial entrepreneurs. And I had no idea what to talk about.
00:09:47
Speaker
But then I started thinking about this broadband problem at my daughter's sort of private school in Silicon Valley. And I said, I wonder if this is a problem that exists elsewhere in the country. And I did some research. And what I found was a survey that said only 10% of the schools in America had good enough broadband to actually use technology for teaching and learning in the classroom. And so when I went to the White House, I said, we need to fix this problem.
00:10:16
Speaker
And they turned to me and said, well, why don't you go fix it? And that was the start. And to be honest, I actually had no desire to be in the nonprofit world. My view of being in the nonprofit world was, oh, if you lead a nonprofit organization, that means your job is to go ask all your friends for money. And I had no interest in doing that. And so this was not on my roadmap, but I think one thing that I've been consistently good at
00:10:45
Speaker
throughout my career is recognizing opportunity and having the bias to action to go take advantage of them. And you knew this had to be a nonprofit. This really wasn't a for-profit opportunity. Or how'd you think that through? There were plenty of ISPs out there doing this on a for-profit basis. Right, internet service providers. Correct. And so I figured, look, if I was going to be able to get the trust of schools
00:11:13
Speaker
to harness the scale of government and to then get the private sector to do what it needs to do. I needed to be an honest broker in the middle. And the only way I could be that is if we were a nonprofit.
Post-Pandemic Focus Shift
00:11:27
Speaker
Let's just go through the steps a social entrepreneur does what you did to get this enterprise up and running and moving.
00:11:35
Speaker
So what I did was I called up a couple of friends who had worked with me back in the day when I was a consultant and who I knew were sort of on the beach between jobs. And I said, hey, you want to help me do this study to figure out what the root causes are? So we spent about six months effectively doing the consulting project. And we figured out that there were four root causes to the problem. And by the way, and the study was to go out and did lots of field interviews all over the country.
00:12:05
Speaker
It was that plus it was to actually look at the data. So we found this data source from the Federal Communications Commission that sort of told us what schools were buying in terms of internet at a not completely clear level, but it allowed us to then sort of scrape all that data. And that was another thing, like I called up a friend
00:12:33
Speaker
who was at a quant hedge fund and I say, hey, do you think your quant guys could build something to scrape all this data off the FCC website so that we could analyze it? They were like, sure, we'll do that. And so we then looked at the data and that's how we discovered the price was one of the big problems. I mean, schools were paying eight times as much as companies for their internet.
00:12:57
Speaker
And so we knew that was one of the things we had to solve. And why is that? Why were they paying more than companies? No negotiating leverage? Frankly, because the person buying the internet in many of these schools was the gym teacher or the superintendent or whatever. And they just had no expertise either about the technical side of things or the procurement side of things. And I gather as a one-off things where the schools made the purchases, not the school district.
00:13:24
Speaker
No, usually it was the school district, but what you got to remember is once you get beyond the sort of top, maybe so that there's 13,500 school districts in America. Yeah. Once you get beyond maybe the top thousand, there is no dedicated personnel even at the school district level. Got it. To do purchasing. Well, to do broadband. Got it. Okay.
00:13:48
Speaker
All right, so keep going. So you did the study, analyzed the data, and as a result of that, you concluded, you said the four root causes. Right, there are four root causes. Number one, schools didn't have the technical expertise to deploy these networks. Two, they were paying too much money. Three, there was a policy problem. There was a federal program called E-Rate, which was paying for
00:14:15
Speaker
uh, most of the broadband, but that program had been created in 1996 and it was no longer doing what was needed. And, and then the fourth problem was that, you know, schools didn't know who to talk to about buying stuff. So there was, there was a procurement issue. So there was a technical expertise, procurement expertise, a policy problem in a pricing problem. And so therefore you decided that your enterprise was going to do what?
00:14:44
Speaker
Well, we decided we were going to fix those things because what we realized was that we didn't have to invent anything. This was an execution problem, right? Got it. How do we fix the policy at the federal level?
00:15:02
Speaker
How do we then get to school districts and help them know what they need to buy and be good at buying it? And then how do we lower the cost of internet through price transparency? And that was the strategy that we used. And so the first year, how big was your organization? How many people and how many school districts did you try to work with?
00:15:24
Speaker
I think the first year we ended with about five or six people in the organization, probably three of us were volunteers, three paid staff. We probably worked with less than 10 school districts because we were in that phase of figuring it out and how do we do this stuff. And frankly, we didn't have any money yet. The only buddy we had was the first $100,000 that I put in.
00:15:54
Speaker
We have a tendency at Draper Richards Kaplan to want to do things that have a big impact, particularly on at-risk populations. But more than that, we look for leaders. We look for imaginative, passionate, talented leaders. And we backed Education Superhighway because it was in the sector we liked. But the biggest reason is we really liked, and I really liked, Evan Marwell.
00:16:21
Speaker
Let's roll forward to today. How big is education superhighway? How many people and how many school districts do you now serve? Well, so at our peak, we were 70 people.
00:16:32
Speaker
And we were working with, you know, thousands of school districts a year, but we finished. We finished our mission. We connected all the schools. We went from 10% to 99.6% of schools connected in 2020. And we were on our way out of business and had downsized to about 10 people on our way to zero when the pandemic hit.
Strategies for Broadband Accessibility
00:17:05
Speaker
you
00:17:28
Speaker
We decided that we had to stay in business because we had to work on the home broadband problem. And suddenly there was an opportunity to do that. And in that shift, you started looking at at risk communities or how did you focus on the word to decide to prioritize the home issue? Yeah. So it started out that 47 million kids got sent over 50 million kids got sent home due to the pandemic.
00:17:57
Speaker
And it turned out about 15 million of them didn't have internet at home. So the first year of our work on home broadband was all about what they call the homework gap, those 15 million kids that couldn't go to school remotely because they didn't have internet at home. But what happened was that, and I think this will be one of the great sort of silver linings of the pandemic, is that the pandemic made it really clear
00:18:26
Speaker
how screwed you were in this country if you didn't have good home broadband. You couldn't work remotely. You couldn't send your kids to school remotely. You couldn't access telehealth. You couldn't access the social safety net and so on and so on and so on. And that caused a real change in the political will around closing the digital divide. Historically, the narrative of the digital divide was, oh, we just need to build infrastructure to rural America.
00:18:52
Speaker
But what people came to realize was during the pandemic was, well, actually, two-thirds of the digital divide, 18 million unconnected households, are not in rural America. They're in urban and suburban and small-town America, and they're offline not because there's no internet available, but because they can't afford it. And so that was where we decided to focus, was on that problem, because there were plenty of people building infrastructure into rural America.
Role of Government and Leadership
00:19:21
Speaker
So who'd you approach to get internet Wi-Fi to those 18 million households? Well, look, we basically said we're going to run the same playbook that we ran to connect all the schools, which was we need federal policy to pay for it.
00:19:35
Speaker
We need states to be our partners in our distribution channel effectively. And then we need to work with people in the local communities to actually get folks connected. And so we started off by working on the infrastructure bill to make sure that there were resources in there to address affordability in addition to building new infrastructure where there was not.
00:20:02
Speaker
Now we're working with states across the country to help them figure out how to spend those infrastructure dollars that are coming to them effectively to close that broadband affordability gap. And then we're working in local communities with trusted institutions, with community-based organizations, with city governments, with apartment owners to actually figure out, okay, how do we get these people connected?
00:20:28
Speaker
Let's step back, and now we're gonna talk a little bit of philosophy, and then we'll get back to what you're gonna do next. If you hadn't been a successful businessperson, and I gather made some money and saved some money, would you have been willing to be a social entrepreneur when you started this in 2012, or would you have felt like, ah, I need to keep working in the for-profit area? Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, for sure.
00:20:58
Speaker
For me, the goal of achieving financial success was to create the ability to choose how I spent my days. And so that truly was an enabler for me to go and make a decision that I'm going to go do things to change the world.
00:21:19
Speaker
Look, like I'm sure most of your listeners, I've got all kinds of obligations and people I need to support. I think it would have been harder for me to go down this path if I had not already achieved the financial success that I
Nonprofit vs. For-Profit Challenges
00:21:39
Speaker
had.
00:21:39
Speaker
I see more people working 70 hours a week or just as many for sure in the not-for-profit sector, in the for-profit sector, and lots of stress and I worry a lot about burnout among social entrepreneurs. How do you compare being a CEO in the for-profit versus the not-profit sector?
00:21:59
Speaker
Well, I like to describe being a CEO in the nonprofit sector as being a CEO with like one and a half hands tied behind your back. Okay. Explain that. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, look, it is much more difficult to be a nonprofit social entrepreneur CEO. I'm not necessarily going to say the same about
00:22:22
Speaker
well-established, been around for 40 years, nonprofits that are set in their ways, not necessarily trying to do really new big things.
00:22:32
Speaker
And the reason is that you just don't have the resources, right? If you have a good idea on the for-profit side and you can get people to believe in you, there's almost unlimited capital available as long as you keep delivering. That is not the case in the nonprofit side. And I've recently made a decision for one of my next projects to do it as a public benefit corp. So a for-profit public benefit corporation
00:23:02
Speaker
because I was worried about access to capital to fund the growth, because it's a huge problem that I think we can solve, but if I had to rely on philanthropy, I don't think I could raise the capital I needed to grow the way that I wanted to need it. So I think access to capital is one issue. The second issue is, you're under resourced in many other ways, because you don't have the same access to capital, it's much harder and you don't have stock options,
00:23:30
Speaker
It's much harder to get the talent that you really need to take on these problems, which, by the way, are also harder problems, right? Think about, you know, one of the trends in the nonprofit world that I am always frustrated by is, you know,
00:23:48
Speaker
philanthropists say, well, what's your sustainability model? Like how do we get out of needing philanthropy for this organization? And the thing you gotta remember is most of the nonprofits are out there, they're serving a customer base that has no resources. So how do we expect them to pay for the services that these nonprofits need to do?
Advice for Social Entrepreneurs
00:24:11
Speaker
So it's just much harder being a nonprofit CEO.
00:24:15
Speaker
What makes a great social entrepreneur or another way to ask that when you, you, when you get approached by a emerging social entrepreneur and they want advice, what are your one or two most important pieces of advice about becoming a great social entrepreneur? So I think the first thing is you have to view the world as an optimist because if you're negative, whether you're a social entrepreneur or a for-profit entrepreneur,
00:24:44
Speaker
You won't be able to get up every day and deal with all the problems that are coming your way, right? So you have to view the world as an optimist. And the second thing is persistence. You have to have that drive to take the hill no matter what gets in your way. What's your leadership philosophy? How would you describe what you believe in from a leadership point of view?
00:25:10
Speaker
Yeah, so as a leader, my view is it's my job to set the vision, to make sure that we have the right people on the team, the right strategy and the right people on the team, and then to make sure that they have the resources and support that they need to be successful. Who have your coaches and mentors been and how important has it been to have coaches and mentors?
00:25:37
Speaker
What's been more important for me has been having a peer group through YPO, my YPO forum, that was a safe and confidential place for me to talk about the issues that I was facing, whether in work or personally or in family. At the end of the day, what you need is people you respect who you are comfortable being completely honest with.
00:26:07
Speaker
Right. If all of us type A people, we never want to seem like we're failing. Right. And so you need a group of people where you're comfortable saying like, yeah, I screwed this up or yeah, I'm failing at this or oh, my God, I have this problem, but I don't know what to do about it. And and as long as you respect them and that they have a set of experiences that they can bring perspective, not necessarily tell you what to do, but just bring perspective. I think finding a group of people like that is
00:26:37
Speaker
is really, really important. And what I would say is the older you are, the easier it is to find those people because, you know, the first 10, 15 years out of business school or college or whatever, like nobody wants to admit they're failing. But people don't realize as you get more senior and more accomplished,
00:27:01
Speaker
the need for advice and honest feedback gets more important, not less. Yeah, totally. And the feeling of isolation becomes a bigger battle if you don't have that. Exactly, exactly. What's the role of government at its best today? You know, what I've learned about government is probably the most important thing to understand. Government is at 110% of their capacity to do anything.
00:27:31
Speaker
So asking government to take on new initiatives or do anything, frankly, is really a challenge because they don't have the human capital to do it.
00:27:45
Speaker
And I think if you limit your asks for government to setting goals, using their bully pulpit, and being sort of a distribution channel, and providing refunding, that's where government can be super impactful. And I'll give you a great example. So we're about to send $65 or $42 billion to states to spend on broadband to close the digital divide.
00:28:12
Speaker
And I would say that the average state today has two to three people working on that. So think about that. The average state is gonna get a billion dollars to allocate and they have two to three people. I mean, they just don't have human capital. If I could wave a magic wand, I would ask government to do two things. One, define success before you start doing anything.
00:28:41
Speaker
And two, use data, measure, you know, use data to identify the problems, but also to fix the problem. And to do that, is it that we need a different mix of people in the government? Is it the lack of diversity in the broadest sense, not just
00:29:04
Speaker
all types of diversity, but also diversity of points of view. Is that what we're missing? That's keeping us from doing this? Just lack of certain types of folks. No, it's leadership. It's having the people at the top saying we are going to make decisions based on the data. Got it. And then, yeah, they need more capacity around, you know, doing the getting the data and invest, you know, and they need to allocate funds to
00:29:32
Speaker
collect the data they need and analyze the data and all that, but that's all doable. And by the way, it's mostly outsourcible. But we need the leadership vision and the people at the top to say, this is how we're going to operate.
Introduction to Ignite Reading
00:29:46
Speaker
So let's talk about what you're going to do next. I know you're working on a new venture. Why don't you talk about that a bit? About four years ago,
00:29:58
Speaker
I was thinking to myself, gee, I brought all this internet to schools. So what's the education problem I can now solve with this internet? And when the pandemic happened and every school went on Zoom, I was like, okay, is there something we can do with Zoom and internet that can solve a problem? And the problem I landed on was the fact that 65% of kids in America
00:30:27
Speaker
can't read at grade level by the end of third grade is when you go from learning to read to reading to learn. And that number is 82% for low income kids. And it turns out that there's 25 years of reading research, what they call the science of reading.
00:30:44
Speaker
that explains how you're supposed to teach a kid to read. And the way you're supposed to teach a kid to read is to first teach them their letters, their letter sounds, their phonics and their sight words so that they can do what's called decoding a sentence. So they can sound out the letters and words in a sentence so that they can actually read the sentence. And then you practice and you get fluency and vocabulary and comprehension.
00:31:08
Speaker
And for a variety of reasons, our schools stop doing that for the most part, starting about 30 years ago. And it turns out it's actually really hard for them to do that because to really do that effectively, you have to be able to meet every kid exactly where they are ready to learn. So if you're ready to learn the ch sound, but I'm still trying to figure out that the letter J is j.
00:31:34
Speaker
Right? We can't be learning the same thing at the same time. So being able to differentiate instruction is key. And so I happened to meet a woman who is a literacy specialist and I said, you know, do you think we could teach kids these foundational reading skills that the science of reading says we need to teach them over Zoom? Because if we could do that, we could actually differentiate for every kid
00:32:05
Speaker
and actually teach them these skills that they need.
00:32:09
Speaker
And she said, yes. And so in October of 2020, we launched a venture called Ignite Reading. And we are delivering one-on-one tutoring in foundational reading skills to kids while they're at school. Kids get 15 minutes a day of one-on-one instruction exactly based on data where they're ready to learn.
00:32:38
Speaker
And what we're finding is that our kids make 2.4 weeks of learning progress for every week in our program. So imagine that you get 75 minutes of instruction and you almost two and a half weeks of reading progress. Wow. Wow. And on top of that, for most of these kids who think of themselves as dumb because they're behind and they can't read, it is probably the single biggest confidence boosting experience they've ever had in school. Yeah.
00:33:07
Speaker
Because for the first time, they're being taught at the level they're ready to learn by an adult who's totally invested in them. And teachers come back to us and say, what are you doing to these kids? They're coming back confident. They're coming back. Instead of avoiding my gaze, they're raising their hand to participate in class. It's extraordinary.
00:33:31
Speaker
So we've launched Ignite Reading. It's a public benefit corporation, which means that we are mission first and profit second. And our goal is to serve a million kids a year who need this foundational reading skills instruction. And where are you, how many kids you serving at the moment? 2,500. Okay. So you're just, you're just in the pilot right now.
00:33:53
Speaker
You know, so we're still building systems and figuring things out, but the kids, the results are happening. But you know, you got to grow at a measured pace so that you don't get ahead of yourself. What advice would you have the listeners on an action they could take from where they are that would help move the needle? Do something.
00:34:14
Speaker
So too many people think about what could I do? They wait to find the perfect thing. You're never going to find the perfect thing. Just get out there and start doing stuff and opportunities will present themselves. So get involved. Evan Marwell, thank you for your leadership. Thank you for all you're doing and look forward to talking about your progress in the months and years ahead. Thanks for having me, Rob. This has been fun.
Next Episode Preview
00:34:52
Speaker
Next time on Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan. As a presidential historian, I would tell you my view is that the two most consequential presidents of my lifetime are Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan for almost diametrically different reasons. Rob talks to Mark Updegrove, president of the LBG Foundation, about Johnson's legacy and what we can learn from it today. That's next time on Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan.
00:35:24
Speaker
Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan is produced and edited by Sam Zaff and Scott Richardson and I'm executive producer Ronell Golden. We want to thank Michelle Brown and Zorik's team from Hello Studios for help with production and logistics. Do not forget to subscribe to Move the Needle wherever you get your podcasts and to Rob's YouTube channel. Until next time, this was Move the Needle with Rob Kaplan.