The Endless Vision
It has been a while since I've written. We have evolved a lot and I want to share what we do. If there is a question that lights me up it is "What do you do?" It is an invitation for me to tell you how excited I am about my work, but it's also so big it's hard to know where to start.
So I've written the definitive answer to what we at Endless do. Here it is!
We believe that youth should be able to shape their technology rather than be shaped by it. We want to create a world in which every child is a creator, and in which the statement 'every child' doesn't just include every child of privilege. It truly includes every child.
Endless began with the realization that smartphone processors could enable affordable PCs. I say this only because it was the catalyst. Our answer to that was Endless OS, which is still produced today. Endless OS combines everything we do into one place. But the real power of what we do today comes from what I learned spending years in the field with our users. Climbing that mountain gave me a vantage point to perceive the real problems and solutions. Three insights during those years have shaped the three pillars of our work:
1) We needed to teach kids who lived beyond the reach of great teachers. We can use games to teach kids everywhere.
2) We had to solve for the barrier of internet access. Storage is a shockingly powerful tool to deliver key information on any internet connection.
3) We had to address the fact that billions of people can't afford a computer. A payment mechanism that unlocks your device unlocks financing for the whole world.
Let's go into each one in detail.
Endless Studios
Every time I went into a school, I found kids playing the education games we had bundled. It was clear: games were by far the most powerful way of engaging kids in learning. If you can build great learning games, you can teach them. We also realized that the majority of our engineers had learned to code by hacking games as kids! If there is anything that kids like more than playing games, it is building them. From this was born Endless Studios, a distributed youth game making studio that is harnessing the power of games to teach youth 21st century skills like coding, design, digital art, storytelling, marketing and project management. It is an always-on internship that anyone can join to build games in community with friends and mentors. Collectively, members of this community are contributing to an endless game called The Endless Mission. When the players in The Endless Mission are victorious, they will be ready for their digital futures. I will be writing much more about this in the coming months, but I believe that games are an important part of the future of education, and we are going to be working hard on that in the coming years.
Our goal is to make it so that every kid in the world has the ability to access these tools. There are two barriers to that happening: internet access and device affordability.
Endless Internet
The Internet has an end. It ends where wires, cell signal or people's ability to pay for it ends. Nearly half the planet lives beyond the internet's end, including millions of American youth. The question is, how do you get people what they need even if they live beyond the internet? Our answer is quite simple. If you take the internet and put the tip of it right into someone's personal computing device, as if the very last server lived right inside of their own computer, then that person is able to have access to the important things even without connectivity. Storage is now so vast that a $100 hard drive can fit millions of web pages. If you had that much content to educate a kid who lived beyond the internet, what would you put there? All of Wikipedia. All of Khan Academy. Digital textbooks. TedEd. PBS Kids. Anything a child could dream of. All of it. Refreshing every time a kid is online. If we wait a decade for broadband to reach every corner of the Earth, 8-year-olds will become 18-year-olds. What are we going to do for them? Simply having a USB key filled with content can ensure that every child has access to the most important resources on the internet. Now.
Endless Laptop Financing
It seems so unsexy, but financing is the answer to the biggest problem in digital equity. When COVID hit, America discovered that millions of kids didn't have a computer at home. Only 11% of kids in countries like India have one. Imagine sending your child to school without a PC. If a smartphone isn't enough for you and your child, it isn’t for their kids. How can we make computers affordable to billions more people? The same way you make homes and cars affordable: Finance them. A $200 computer financed over 3 years costs less than a cup of coffee a week. BUT, we found that banks wouldn’t give these people loans. They weren’t creditworthy. Our response to this was inspired by the solar panel industry. They're solving this same problem by building “pay as you go” solar panels. If you don't pay the electricity stops. So people pay. We have built the same idea into a computer. The computer unlocks when you pay. The result is a high repayment rate. The result of that is that we can disperse financing liberally to those who couldn't afford a computer before. Every computer is profitable to those selling them, and thus scalable to billions of kids.
Every Child Is A Creator
We envision a future where every kid is pulled into the allure of building games and, in the process, into becoming a coder, a designer, a product manager, a creator. What would the world look like if every teen grew up with the tools to unwind the injustices of the modern world? If we succeed in these three dreams, that world will be possible.
While we are building solutions ourselves in Endless Studios, an Endless Internet, and Endless Laptop Financing, our aperture is larger than these products. We are advocating for the ideas within them. We are trying to urge others to use games to teach. To use intelligent caching for those who can't connect to the internet. And to use financing for those who cannot afford computers. If any of these ideas carry weight with you, share them. Use them. The ideas themselves, in the right hands, are enough to change a lot of lives.