Printsyst co-founders Itamar and Eitan Yona are brothers, and they represent our first startup from Israel as members of Batch X. They are also the 3rd generation in a family of a printers, carrying their family tradition into the realm of 3d printing. Their startup, Printsyst, is for companies that use 3D printing, but don’t have internal expertise. PrintSYSt is an AI-powered management solution that provides a complete automated 3D printing workflow. Unlike standard existing solutions, PrintSYSt requires no expertise, allowing users to focus on design instead of production.

Itamar, the older brother at 34, plays the role of CEO, and  has a degree in Electrical Engineering. He provides professional engineering advice, lectures, and workshops about additive manufacturing worldwide. His articles being published on well-known industry magazines and blogs. Eitan on the other hand focuses his attention on marketing and communication, and can be found frequently on the team’s YouTube channel, connecting with experts and educating his audience on 3D manufacturing.

 

 

Hi Eitan and Itamar. You are not actually our first pair of siblings at StartupYard, but I think people will be interested to know how it is you both came to make 3d printing your focus in life. What’s it like to do this together?

We will answer these questions in one voice, because that’s really the way we are as a team. We know each other so well, it’s like one hand working with the other. It’s muscle memory.

Working with family is unlike anything else. You can have colleagues, and you can have people whom you rely on and you trust, but these are not your family. We are a 3rd generation family in this business. Our grandfather was a printer, our father is a printer. We are carrying that tradition forward, and in that sense we see ourselves as a part of that tradition, just bringing it forward.

Our father taught us growing up that individually, we would never have the strength that we have together. Perhaps you can tie this in with the history of our country and people as well. We have to cooperate as one to get things done. As brothers we are able to learn collectively, and to multiply our strengths.

That is the secret sauce in a family business, which is that you are building upon a foundation that is rock solid. In most tech startups, we think this is missing. That sense of belonging to the industry and the sense that you are born to do what you do is very appealing. Our family is not just in the printing business, but rather we are in the technology business, and always have been. The technology just changes. The business part is not so different.

It’s fun as well. We can laugh at and scream at each other, and change directions in 10 seconds. We don’t have to forgive each other for every mistake. We can be angry, and we can share our feelings with each other. One can rely on the other.

Is there a downside to the family dynamic?

Sure. We are very monomaniacal about our work. It can be hard to stop talking about work and switch to other topics. How are your kids? What did you do this weekend? We get very comfortable talking about work topics, to the point where the separation of work and life is a bit blurry.

But again, this is in the family for generations. Our parents worked together all our lives, with our grandparents too. Life and family is business. There is no distinction sometimes. I don’t know if you consider that healthy. Maybe it’s good for some people and not good for others. We make it work. We are happy with what we do now.

Do you think that family background, being a 3rd generation printing family, gives you an advantage over others who come into this business from a different background, such as in computer science or manufacturing? What are the intangibles of a printer’s life experience?

So, it’s important to emphasize that we are technologists, by tradition. Printing is just the technology we know. A family business is not something that should stay the same for all time. That is not progress. Instead, a family business gives you the roots you need and the stable base you need to grow with much higher confidence and the right connections from the beginning.

It may seem like we are departing from tradition. Our father and grandfather were in 2D printing (Printing Press). We are in 3D. It’s a different world. However, our father made the switch from offset to digital printing. That was equally difficult, and equally transformative in its own time. The needs of customers change continually, and having a deep empathy and respect for people is something that takes a lot of life experience.

In that sense, what you do in 3D printing is no different at all from any other kind of printing. People always have the same flaws and the same needs from you. You are the person helping them to take advantage of the technology and see what is possible for them. If 50 years ago it was that they could print a photo or a book, today it’s that they can print something like a pair of glasses. Still, you serve a human need: to start a small business, to realize a creative dream.

That human level is where everything important is happening. The business that can get down to really sharing a bond with the customer and understanding and appreciating them for what they are, is going to be successful. The money will follow. That’s our view.

It seems rare to me in technology to see people follow their parents as role models and mentors

Yes, it is more rare than it used to be. Technology is no longer seen as a trade, but rather as a skillset. So you are not a craftsman or a journeyman, but an engineer. That brings the focus out of customer-minded, traditional practices, and toward institutional ideas and practices. The engineer thinks as the university teaches him to think. Not as his father teaches him to think.

That is not always bad of course, but there is a reason that trades have been passed down from

parent to child for all of time. In the formalization of some knowledge, you will lose that which cannot be written down. I can teach you to code out of a book. I cannot teach you to run a business out of a book. I cannot tell you what use that code will be once you know how to do it. That is experiential, and it is something people can get from their parents, and should get from them.

So in a sense you would like to see the tech business be more conservative?

Maybe. What does this mean, conservative? There is simply a great deal of value in growing up in an industry, just as there is value in coming into an industry fresh with a new perspective. Both approaches must always be considered.

In the “entrepreneur industry” today, ego is heavily monetized. Right? It is all about the founder and the singularity of them and their vision, and how no one else is the same as they are. No one can do what they do. But this is nonsense. This is not how knowledge is gained in the real world or passed on for our shared benefit. We are not islands to ourselves. If you build to last, then what you build is more than you are.

When you look to the great fortunes of the 21st century, it is sad in a way that they belong to people who are in many ways isolated in time and place. They have no sense of their past or future. Disruption in the sense that the technology industry means is often just an ego trip. Technology always changes. It is a question of whether we are better as people, or worse. Do we do good for people, or not?

What attracts you to working on 3d printing in Europe? Why not somewhere else?

Well, of course we were attracted to StartupYard! But also the fact that Europe is a really fertile ground for change and innovation in 3D printing. We see it as somewhere that we can bring a lot of value, and where businesses and people are ready to take advantage of our technology.

We love Israel as well, so we will always be home there. However, 3D printing is not like the old printing business. It is language independent. It is global and digital. So we must be where other companies are doing this work. The business may be global, but being physically present is still very important. We have to make ourselves unavoidable and inescapable for the future of 3d printing.

Let’s talk about the technology because I think most people see 3d printing in a really simplistic way. What is the current state of 3d printing, if you can provide some analogy to traditional printing technology? Are we in the Gutenberg days? The Franklin era?  

Yeah, that’s a good question. So decades  ago, when our father was taking over the family business, there was no really good software drivers available for professional, quality printing. People who were going digital were doing this stuff on their own. You had to have a very good reason to do that, because the change was very drastic. It was essentially taking everything that you know about printing, and changing all of it.

You want to print digitally? Ok. You need a team of developers, hardware engineers, you need a lot of money to research and test. You basically have to start from zero. People cannot imagine this now, because today you don’t think about PostScript and print drivers, and these things that were hell on people in the printing business for many years.

You have to consider that digital transformation is not a new phenomenon in 2018. It has been going on for decades already. The journey from an offset press, with physical plates printing pages, to a digital laser printer is an enormous change. It is like going from steam power to electric. Everything must change.

Now we face the same level of challenges in 3D printing. To digitize the making of 3D objects. If you will, I think we are in the offset printing era right now of 3D objects. You have injection molds. You have industrial processes that take huge investment and planning to work. You do have 3D printing happening on a small scale, but you lack all the hardware and the essential drivers between the finished object, and the technology itself. And if you are lucky enough and have access to 3D printing, you still need to follow a long learning curve.

That is the problem we are solving at the end of the day. The ease with which you print a page of paper today should be, maybe 15years from now, the same ease you experience printing a pair of glasses or a new doorknob. Whatever you need. Remember printing evolved from handwriting to the printing press, to the digital laser printer in more than 500 years. Manufacturing also is taking a journey from the handmade to the ubiquitously available object in a similar space of time.

Obviously there have been some hype bubbles surrounding 3D printing in the last few years. Do you think we are poised for a major step in the adoption of these technologies now?

It’s true, particularly maybe 10 years ago, that there have been some hype and disappointment around 3D printing. This is necessary to the process, And predictable in a way.

This is a normal thing for new technologies on the adoption curve.

There were lots of ideas, and people doing very cool things with 3D printers, but the technology has not jumped to mainstream adoption for a few specific reasons.

One of them is the materials being used, and that is changing very quickly. People found pretty quickly that the variety of objects and functionalities was limited by the material. Color, strength, consistently, etc. There are many new approaches coming to the physical printing process that will make this much easier.

On the side of software, this is what we are trying to solve. One of the problems that emerged very quickly was that there are many physical parameters to consider when you are printing an object of any size.

Unlike on a piece of paper, you have an object in 3 axis, and you must consider the 4th dimension as well: in which orientation should parts be printed, and even more, what should the internal structure of the parts be?

So that is where AI comes in?

Yes, precisely. AI is needed to run through all these potential variations in the way a thing can be printed, and select the best one for the purpose at hand. That can save a very lengthy process of having to manually determine these factors, or just guess and check to see if it works, which is what people are doing today.

Many hobbyists quickly found out that they could not move from imagining a new object to simply printing it, because the technology required more detail than the imagination supplies. You need hundreds or more parameters to print a 3D object. You must know the thickness of each component. You need to choose internal structures (honeycomb, swiss cheese?) you must know in what orientation to print, and where the piece will be separated from the printer. How fast will it be printed?

So the process of iterating these tiny details in a physical printer is very expensive and time consuming. There were many cases in which people just couldn’t produce prototypes because they couldn’t get the printer to follow a process that created a stable object. That’s a big problem in 3D printing. That’s not a physical obstacle, it’s a software obstacle.

We are using AI to sort that problem out. You have to virtually simulate the infinite combinations of possible approaches to printing an object, and find that ideal process, which is going to be absolutely unique for every single thing you print. One small change to the thickness or the length of something, and a 3D printer must be completely reconfigured to allow for printing a stable version of this new design.

That really destroys your ability to iterate, unless you can be sure that each time you print, you are getting the best version of the object you are trying to make. You can make quite complex parts in 3D printers, and in some cases these parts can serve to replace dozens of other components that were formerly separate pieces in a machine or a piece of furniture. But if you can’t figure out how to stabily print that object, then the 3D rendering is useless. It’s just an idea.

Printsyst is taking that rendering, and making it printable and stable, and useful from the first try. That’s the objective. Break the expertise barrier that stops people from using 3D printing for whatever reason. Democratize manufacturing and make it something accessible to small businesses, entrepreneurs, and individuals.

We know that 3D printing has huge applications for manufacturing and design (such as being able to rapidly build custom parts and eliminate assembly steps). But what kind of impact do you see on consumer lives in the next decade or so?

Much of the impact may go unseen for the near future, to the end user. Many things that were formerly very complex to assemble may begin to be 3D printed, such as electronic components and even parts for cars, furniture, and things like that. But you may not know the difference if you don’t know how to look for it. It will simply allow businesses to deliver these goods cheaper, faster, and in more variety.

Later on, as this technology is further democratized, it can have the same effect that widespread printing had on the spread of literature and businesses around the world. The ability to create something fast, cheap and in good quality with minimal equipment also means you can take a lot of creative risks, and many microbusinesses may be born. Already you see this among some designers, using 3d printing as a bit of a gimmick. It will not be a gimmick forever.

Ultimately, we probably get to the point where an individual is able to order or print parts and object themselves that are customized to their exact needs or the needs of a situation. You know what size shoe you wear, but I bet you don’t know the distance between your temples. So why don’t you? Because knowing that, you can create a pair of glasses that fit you perfectly.

3D printing will mean “mass customization.” This means less waste of energy and materials, less cost to transportation, and ultimately we believe a better environment in which fewer resources are ultimately wasted by overproduction and under-customization.

How can companies who are employing 3D printing start to take advantage of your technology? Where do they get started?

Right now, we are working with small and medium sized enterprises who are using 3D printing to develop and produce new products. These companies don’t have a lot of internal 3d printing expertise, but can bridge that gap with Printsyst.

We also are interested in working with designers, and other entrepreneurs or engineers who want to use 3D printing, but again, don’t want to lose a lot of time learning how to get the most out of a printer or a particular design. We would love to support efforts to build low cost housing, and there are currently many needs from many different types of printers to get them to run more efficiently, and to optimize designs on the go, making each printed part perfect for its exact position and purpose.

Some industries we see getting interested are especially interior designers, architects, and automotive repair as well. 3D printing is great for refurbishing cars or making customized components, so we should see a lot more interest in that direction. Replacement parts, particularly, can be made much faster and exactly to fit.

In the long term, we really believe this technology is going to penetrate everywhere. Eitan spent his military service on a submarine in the Israeli Navy, working mostly on repairs. Imagine having a 3D printer in a submarine so print the exact parts you need. Stock becomes a much easier logistical issue.

 

Deaf Travel, the last of the StartupYard Batch 9 startups to be interviewed, is our first non-hearing team in the program. They are a team of Deaf entrepreneurs who have dedicated their careers to building up the Deaf community, both online and offline. Their mission today is to create an online platform and community focused on helping Deaf people to enjoy travel and adventures with the same depth that hearing people enjoy.

They are doing this by bringing together public attractions and organizations, with the worldwide Deaf community, and offering them a space where the needs of Deaf tourists can be met with Deaf-friendly video content, interactive maps, and other features that make foreign travel enjoyable and interesting. I sat down with CoFounder and CEO Jan (Honza) Wirth to talk about his team’s vision for the future of Deaf tourism and the internet. Here is what he had to say:

Hi Honza, first of all we should acknowledge that there is someone else in this conversation, Tim, your interpreter. As a deaf person, what do you find most challenging about communicating with hearing people?

Most hearing people have many misconceptions about the Deaf. They think we have less intelligence or skills and feel we can’t do many things, such as drive a car, work, etc.

These misunderstandings stem from the communication barrier we have between hearing and Deaf people. If we had a common language, then many of these false ideas would solve themselves. Hearing people can learn sign language, but a Deaf person cannot learn to hear! As a Deaf person, I deal with these barriers every day.

One of the ways we can solve this is through interpretation. In fact, what many hearing people don’t realize is that interpretation in our own sign language is far superior for Deaf people than simply reading. Written and spoken languages, such as English or Czech, are native for hearing people, but they are always second and third languages for Deaf. I can write and read in English and Czech, but for me that is a very different experience than it would be for a native speaker. Writing is the same: we must translate our thoughts into a foreign language in order to write. Thus even in writing, an interpreter is very helpful.

I use different methods to try to break through the communication barrier. If I have to communicate about something very important like a mortgage, legal issue or a job interview, then I use an interpreter for clear understanding for all. In common interactions like a restaurant, ticket office or a shop, I can use gestures and writing back and forth. It is for deeper discussions that an interpreter becomes essential to bridge the divide.

How did you come to found DeafTravel, and why is a for-Deaf, by-Deaf travel platform so important to the Deaf community?

I have been dedicated to improving the Deaf community my whole life. I am the founder of our first community center in Prague, called Znakovarna. This is a place where Deaf and the hearing can gather to discuss new ideas and learn from each other, and support each other and the community. We host seminars, talks, and other Deaf-oriented events. Deaf Travel is one idea that comes from seeing what Deaf people talk about and what they really miss in the market, which is a way of getting this Deaf-friendly experience wherever they go.

Nowadays, smartphones are common within the Deaf community and they have a huge positive affect for us. Such technology and the ecosystem of apps allow us an equal footing for chatting and staying in touch with our friends and family via video, or text. We can use our native sign language to make quick interactive video chats. We can even use some interpreting services via our mobile phones, which opens doors that have been shut to Deaf people until now. It is a great time to be alive.

But mobiles haven’t solved all the everyday barriers for us. Yes, the tech is amazing, but they aren’t the ultimate answer for the barriers we have, especially when we travel. In the USA, the benefits for the Deaf there have skyrocketed, but these don’t spread worldwide for various reasons.

One of those reasons is that European and worldwide Deaf communities have many sign languages, just as hearing people have many languages and cultures, and so there are always added challenges for smaller Deaf populations to find content in the sign language which they use every day. Those of us who travel, especially in Europe, learn International Sign System (IS), which is not an actual language but follows the rules of most sign languages and uses signs from various sign languages.

Let us not forget, even when a Deaf person does understand multiple sign languages and written languages, this does not change the fact that other Deaf may not have those skills. Hearing and sighted people take the internet for granted today. You can Google anything, and find whatever you are looking for. But how does one “Google” content which is in a sign language? How does one tell Google the signs they want to search? Of course these functionalities are not available.

Think of it like this: imagine the internet was only in Chinese, and to use Google, you had to learn how to read and write in Chinese. Not impossible! But very hard, and very unnatural. You would not find the internet so useful if the only way you could communicate and consume content was in a language that is not your own. Thus, Deaf people are discouraged from creating and sharing content, because other Deaf people cannot find and use that content very easily. It means that for many purposes, the internet as you understand it is beyond our reach.

On the close horizon, we have newer tech, virtual reality (VR) and artificial reality (AR), that has great potential for us all. For the Deaf it could mean even better access to information, because we are such visually-oriented people. VR/AR means more access to interpretation and visual information displayed in a Deaf-focused way.

Still these technologies are yet to become reality. We want to begin to change that, and we understand that the way to do it is to begin using what we have to solve the problems of Deaf travelers. Deaf Tourism is on the rise, and we can feed and encourage this with content and a community in the format that Deaf people will really be able to use, and ultimately contribute to themselves.

Our platform can give deaf travellers access to information equal to hearing travellers, just by using the smartphones or other devices that Deaf people already have. It’s a visual platform, using maps and images to help Deaf travelers find content focused on the sites they are visiting. Eventually, we will be able to provide a forum for the Deaf to create and share relevant content, based on real world landmarks, much in the way that Yelp, Google, or Facebook function for hearing communities today.

Many of our mentors and investors have been surprised to learn about the difficulties that deaf people have with getting information in a format they can use. Can you talk about why reading and writing are such a challenge for the deaf? 

There are two main problems that are caused by many forces, socially, economically and politically. In addition, these problems are worldwide in varying degrees.

The first is that education for the Deaf has been historically lacking, sometimes pathetic, and often downright horrible. For most of history, we have been treated as mentally disabled by society, because people did not understand that we can learn and think just as hearing people do if we are educated in a way that makes sense for us.

The curriculum in most Deaf schools is not the equal to the what is taught in hearing schools. As well, the Deaf students who are sent to the hearing schools do not always have a quality interpreter. These same students also have less socialization with their hearing peers, since the language of the hearing school is spoken.

The second problem in both of these types of schools is that the teachers usually don’t know the students’ native sign language. Which means the student is using an interpreter, or even nothing in many cases. The student is simply expected somehow to adapt. Most deaf schools in the world focus on making the students learn to speak, and the actual education is dismissed as less important. This is sad, since teaching speaking to Deaf is rarely successful or needed.

This is treating the Deaf as if their goal in life should be to compensate for their lack of hearing. I think that’s just silly. I wish to live in a world where the Deaf are treated as different, and not as disabled. We can teach and learn from each other, and we have rich cultures and languages to draw from.

As I think the StartupYard team have learned from us during our time together, we can share our ideas and our dreams with a little shared effort. The Deaf have much to offer and indeed to teach the hearing, just as we have much to learn.

Let’s talk more about Deaf Travel: what does the solution look like today, and how can people use it?

Our first focus is on proving the value of Deaf content for travelers. We are doing this by focusing on getting landmarks and tourist locations and attractions interested and involved with the platform. This means creating content focused on these locations, that the Deaf can use in place of guided or audio tours, and also content that the Deaf can use to do their travel research, such as deciding what monuments to visit, and even finding Deaf-friendly services in the destination city or country.

This means a Deaf tourist can experience the story of the site in his own native language without being dependent on others. The Deaf tourist today has little freedom of action or choice in making travel decisions. If we do not depend directly on others to help us plan and navigate a trip, then we still must face a lack of depth and context in what we see and experience. Tell me how many times you would go to the cinema if the sound was always turned off? That is the experience we face almost everywhere, and the worst outcome is simply that we choose not to go somewhere new.

We want to create a way for Deaf people to enjoy traveling, and also a reason for Deaf people to travel and experience more. If more content and services exist and are accessible for Deaf people, then more of us will travel, and so even more demand will arise for these services. We want to prove now that such a demand does exist and that it will grow when attractions and cities invest in building up their ecosystem of Deaf resources.

What do you want Deaf Travel to be a few years from now? How will Deaf people use it in their daily lives? (note: talk about tripadvisor, Yelp, deaf reporting, etc)

It’s simple really. We envision individual Deaf travellers accessing our platform of videos via our Deaf Travel App. Similar to the services of Tripadvisor or Yelp, our app will be a community of amateur and professional deaf video “reporters”. Each reporter will upload their videos to our server and the community can search for, watch and review individual videos and locations, based on visual maps instead of text search. They will be able to use it in their daily travels at locations around the world.

The key is to create this connection between the “local heroes,” and the travelers. You can be a local hero in your home town, who makes videos and helps visitors, and you can benefit from the work of your fellow heroes around the world when you travel. You can also create content as a traveler, aimed at your own community, who may also travel to the same places in the future. This new online community platform will also be a place for promoting Deaf-owned or Deaf-friendly companies, Deaf events, interpreting and other services.

Deaf Travel will be supporting the community so that the community will support itself. What do you think happens when one restaurant in Prague becomes known internationally as the place to be for deaf visitors? I can tell you: it will be very successful, and this will allow entrepreneurs from the deaf community and from outside it, to explore new opportunities. It is a big, untapped market that is still invisible to most people.

How will Deaf Travel deal with the complication of having many different native sign languages that travelers know?

Yes, many people think that there is one universal sign language, as I mentioned. I’m not sure why! I mean how would you get people in every country to agree on one language when each culture is different? Yet people think we Deaf could do this ourselves.

Karlův most, Praha (ČZJ) from Deaf Travel on Vimeo.

 

Each community in each country has its own natural sign language which is connected to that culture, as all languages are. After all I am a Czech man in addition to being Deaf. I need a language that fits with this identity, and it is the Czech sign language. Each sign language has different dialects as well, just as spoken languages do.

How do we solve this situation of such diversity?Deaf Travel will use video reporters in each country to have that local sign language in the videos there, in addition these videos will have a second communication mode called International Sign System (IS). This fills the function that English fills for many international travelers.

Not everyone knows IS, but most Deaf tourists have learned it by travelling and meeting other Deaf in their travels. IS was developed by Deaf in the European region where many languages and cultures converge. It uses the basic visual grammar, syntax and structure that almost all sign languages have. It then adds clear vocabulary from various sign languages. It is not a pure language, but a good method for everyday communication.

Today you’re looking for tourist attractions to join you as partners to create quality content for their deaf visitors. That is hard to scale. Over the long run, how do you see the platform being monetized and growing as a business?

 

As I just mentioned, the community of travel vloggers and reporters all over the world will add to our video library quickly.

A traveler in Peru and a traveler in Germany could upload their videos during the same week, but from different trips, and thus we’ve increased our library by several short videos in two different countries in the same week. Those videos will be catalogued and tagged on the appropriate map for that region. The map with these pinpointed videos will be the growing visually searchable platform for other Deaf travellers.

Understand that the Deaf community is small and news always travels fast within our network. Awareness of Deaf Travel’s platform will equally spread like wildfire, because Deaf travellers will be eager to add their own amateur travel vlogs to the database alongside our professional ones to share their experiences, good or bad, with the community. Everyone has a need to communicate and to help each other. You just need a way to do it.

These videos will be accessible for free or for a monthly subscription price for our full-length professional travel vlogs. In the world, there are approximately 466 million Deaf and Hard of Hearing. 70 million of those use a native sign language, for those who do not, we will offer subtitles as well. So, the market potential is great and will sustain our mission of supporting the community by tearing down the travel communication barrier.

You’ve been our very first Deaf founding team at StartupYard. How has the experienced matched up with your expectations? What have been the biggest surprises?

Overall, the experience has been amazing. There were a few moments when things did not click with us, but I’d say 99% of the people we met and worked with were great.

At first, I was truly shocked that we were picked for StartupYard. I didn’t think there would be much interest in our project. Then after meeting so many mentors and EVERY one of them showed interest in our vision, our motivation increased exponentially. We now feel like we really have something that will make this dream of barrier-free travel a reality.

Perhaps I did not have enough faith in hearing people to see the potential that we see in this idea. However I have seen that this is a problem anyone can understand, and it has been wonderful to see that others who have not experienced these same problems can deeply empathize with it.

As the StartupYard team have told us many times, what we do must become somehow obvious on first sight to people with no experience of the problem. That is something I think we have accomplished and it is really exciting to be able to open people’s eyes to it.

What kinds of partners and potential clients are you looking to talk to right now, and what’s the best way for them to start cooperating with Deaf Travel?

That’s a great question. We’re looking for well-known tourist destinations that attract thousands of tourists every year. The kind of places that are famous and have a very interesting story to tell, like cities such as Prague, castles, zoos, museums, and other such attractions.

Lesser known sites are also of interest to us, because our mission is about equal access to information for our community. It is our way of supporting the social and civil rights laws in place now. We don’t want to be dependent on others to provide these services. We know what we want and need. The world has provided us with the political backing, and we want to partner with those who support this vision too.

We don’t need people to see this necessarily as a charitable or humanitarian activity. It is an opportunity for Deaf and hearing people to fill a great need that exists and to build new businesses and provide all-new services. Invest in serving the Deaf community and we will vote with our money just as everyone does.

Thus if you are a forward-looking institution or a business, that can see a great opportunity to lead the pack and be a magnet for Deaf tourism, then we want to talk to you. If you are an adventurous Deaf person who wants to serve the Deaf community, or an entrepreneur who wants to explore a new market, then we want to talk to you.