The Mountain

“I tried carrying the weight of the world but I only have two hands.”
— Avicii

Have you ever cared about a mission so much that it didn't matter if you were the one who made it successful? You just knew that someone had to do it.

For more than a decade I fought on the front lines of this fight, traveling hundreds of days a year in the field and working 100 hour weeks. At Endless, we have enabled tens of thousands of kids in slums and villages and refugee camps to access life-changing technology. In these places, I gleaned the insights that I believe make it possible to educate millions more. As Charlie Munger says "take a simple idea and take it seriously." These are simple ideas and I take them very seriously. But this is a massive mountain of a problem.

In the real world you can choose the trail but you can't shape a mountain. In 2007 I spent a month climbing Mt. Marcus Baker. It was the highest peak in Alaska's Chugach range. We were a day from the peak and had to turn back. Real world mountains are made of immovable rock. In the world of products and technology, business and strategy, mountains can be reshaped. The mountaintop is a vision, the solving of a problem. There is freedom to shape strategies, to craft a series of summits, each achievable. This requires patience. And patience requires total faith. Bezos dreamt of an "Everything Store". That was impossible at the start, so he built an online bookstore. It started humbly. One of his first innovations was a packing table so his knees wouldn't hurt when he was taping boxes. But he knew that if he could build the world's best online bookstore, the everything store could grow from there.

Our mountain: ensuring the future employability of the vast majority of the world’s youth. If we can shape the summits so that each victory leads us closer to the top, we will get there.

My solution is game creation. It may seem like a trivial solution. Games. It kind of is. How can play be our answer? Video games are going to save the world?

But yes, I believe that they can, because they can engage.

As the team behind Fortnite, who went on to build Level, an educational game company, put it: "20 years from now, will education still look like a teacher in front of a whiteboard and ~30+ kids in classroom chairs? We believe it will not. Will interactive digital experiences play a big part in the future of education? We believe they will."

I get that "build games" feels trivial compared to the civilizational stakes. I really do.

But if building games means that entire nations of kids grow up fluent in the way that software is built, and turn that into careers that push the frontier of industries, then it's not. If we have to teach 3 billion young people something that can take thousands of hours to become proficient in, and if schools aren't currently capable of teaching them, then we have to engage these young people at the scale of billions of kids for trillions of hours. The only things that have ever done that are TV, social media and video games. Only one of those has consistently produced tech entrepreneurs and engineers.

If we are able to scale this to countries across the world, to hundreds of millions, the way that Roblox and Fortnite and Minecraft and GitHub all have, then we will have a generation of technically capable young people building our future. It will show up in everything from the type of people who sit in congress in a generation to whether these kids are employed.

If someone asks whether humanity is going to land in a good place, I think the answer is: yes, but not automatically. The ceiling is real and the floor is also real, and which one we land closer to depends on choices we haven't made yet.

I am willing to die on this mountain. That is also exactly why I refuse to climb it alone.

What if we fail? I have seen Marcia in Guatemala drop out of school because she couldn't afford an internet cafe, and then get a computer and become valedictorian of her high school. A computer alone did that. Imagine what an entire educational system designed to level kids like her up can do. That is what we are building. How could I forgive myself if a generation of kids never gets that chance, all because I failed? The stakes are so high that we have to plan for our own failure, and make it acceptable.

If we fail, the only other way I know of ensuring that they are conquered is for there to be others walking by our dead carcass on the way up, who can learn the lessons of our failures and do what we were unable to do, finding the path that we couldn't find. We have gleaned pearls of insight from the mountains of rural villages around the world. These pearls were buried within the muck of the places we've traversed. They were not easily found. I return from the mountain bearing these ideas. I've seen them change lives. They must live on, regardless of whether we are the ones to carry them forth. Because the one thing that I'm clear on is that these mountains cannot go unconquered. My solution: swarm the mountain.

My solution to the Grand Challenge of our era is just one solution. I share it both so you might understand what I believe is an important solution, and so it might inform and inspire your own. We need all the solutions we can get. Take these ideas. Steal them. Iterate on them. The core challenge of our era needs more people, and the best way I know to invite them in is to share the insights we have found. That is what this writing is all about. If this mountain must be climbed, let's be clear about what lies beyond the summit. Because what we do next may determine the future of the world.