Wendy Kopp: There have been many moments where it’s felt like the whole thing was going to come crashing down. Definitely. Our first decade was extraordinarily challenging. I think there was a lot of positive energy around the initial idea, and that carried us through the first two or three years.  We built a lot of funding support.  The timing really was so perfect, but then, in year four, many things collided to make the path far more difficult. We started losing our funding sources in half-a-million and million-dollar chunks.  My complete lack of management ability started conspiring, because sort of the internal organization was in a bit of chaos.  And we started realizing that education is a very politicized sphere, and we started really encountering many challenges as we worked to gain the policy approvals we would need even to get our teachers in classrooms. So there were many, many challenges, and probably the most central of all was we were on such a steep learning curve around, “How do you actually do this well?” How do you recruit and select and train and support teachers who do excel, instead of just survive, and who do take the right lessons and not the lessons of disillusionment?  So we had a lot on our plate, and it was not clear that we were going to make it, at many points.