A note on what we're building

From the beginning, our work has been about one thing: making sure the people who need good information actually get it.

Bryce and I started this work because we both watched people we love struggle. And because we learned, across hundreds of schools, that the educators closest to kids — and the parents at home with them — face the same gap every day. The question was never whether good information exists. It was whether it reaches the right person, at the right moment, in a form they can actually use.

As that work has matured, we've gotten clearer on where we can have the most leverage.

The bottleneck isn't programs. It's the source material underneath them.

Brain science, AI, and how young people actually live are moving faster than the publishing cycles that produce the books schools, parents, and educators reach for. The textbooks people learn from update every five years. The world updates every week. The skills that matter most right now — judgment, reasoning, emotional resilience, the durable skills for a world reshaped by AI — barely make it into the canon at all.

So we're focusing the Foundation on producing the canonical material itself.

Here's what we're building: open-source textbooks. Produced with frontier AI to keep them current as the science moves. Vetted by leading researchers, clinicians, and educators who hold the editorial line. Hosted online for free, with print available at cost-plus. Available for schools, institutions, and individuals to adopt.

We think of it as a modern Library of Alexandria — a small team using new tools to do work that used to require a publishing house and a decade.

Our first textbook is on the durable skills young people need to thrive in the age of AI. Judgment and clear thinking. Brain-health and executive functioning. Mental health and emotional resilience. Living and learning alongside AI. Foundational, evergreen, and updated continuously.

We're grateful to be doing this work with partners like Google, and with the support of researchers and practitioners who've helped shape what good in this space looks like.

We're also giving the Foundation a new name: Openbrook. Lenny got us here, and we're proud of everything that name represents. As open, freely available source material becomes our core work, we wanted a name that reflects what we're building — something open, shared, and meant to be built on.

For those of you who have supported this mission from the beginning: your impact now does something rare. It doesn't fund a single program. It strengthens the foundational source material underneath all of them.

Imagine it's 2030. A new finding comes out of Johns Hopkins on early intervention for adolescent mental health. Within days, not years, that finding is synthesized, vetted, and folded into the textbook a counselor in Texas reads tonight. A nonprofit in Chicago uses the same updated chapter in their family support work. A parent at the kitchen table reads it free, on a phone, alongside their twelve-year-old.

The knowledge moves the way it should — like water through a system already built to carry it.

That's the world we're building toward. We live in a remarkable moment; the technology to make this real finally exists. But technology doesn't build anything on its own. People do.

You can learn more on the home page. If our mission resonates, we'd love to hear from you.

Onward,

Ting & Bryce