Wendy Kopp: I just felt like the timing was absolutely perfect for this, and I just thought it had to happen.  The mood on college campuses was really so conducive to this.  I myself… and I ended up pursuing the idea of actually teaching in the New York City public schools, and that also contributed to my realizing this is actually… it could work. But I was still trying to figure out, “What do I want to do?” and that was the one thing I could think of that was inspiring.  So I just knew, for this generation, this is what we want to do.  Secondly, there were huge needs which enabled the whole thing.  There have never been headlines like this since. Just the level of teacher shortages in the big urban areas was overwhelming.  They were starting — New York, L.A. — with 1,200 teacher vacancies, et cetera. And there were various business executives in corporate America who had made this big pledge to say, “We’re going to take on the American education system. We want to improve it.”  So it just seemed like the perfect time, and it seemed like if we passed that window of opportunity, it might never happen.