Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ]

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Starting point is 00:02:24 in this podcast. My guest today is Samir Sharif, co-founder and CEO of Campbelly. After starting his career at Google, Samir founded Cambly in 2013 as an on-demand service to learn English. At the touch of a button, Cambly connects its global user base to a one-on-one conversation with an English speaker. During our conversation, we cover the origin story of the business, what Samir views as the core functions of the two-sided marketplace, and how the team approached scaling a product that was international from day one. Once you hear Samir talk, you'll quickly realize the size of Cambly's market opportunity and why it may have been easy to overlook this problem. I hope you enjoy this great conversation with Samir Sharif. Samir, I think the right

Starting point is 00:03:08 place to begin what will be a really unique conversation is around this problem space that you're tackling because almost everyone listening speaks English, almost by default. It's not a problem that we think about that we don't speak English and need to. So it's this massive problem hiding in plain sight. Maybe you could begin by just describing how you came across this concept in the first place and then let's pick it apart as deeply as we can. So Camley really grew out of our own experiences learning other languages. My co-founder and I both grew up here in the U.S. We went through the school system here and took foreign languages in kind of a traditional classroom environment. And for me personally, I took Spanish. I wasn't great at it. I kind of felt like I wasn't really a languages person. And independent of that, I love to travel. I've been all over the world. Love meeting new people, learning about their lives.

Starting point is 00:03:55 And many of the places I went to, they spoke Spanish. And so what I found is that immersing myself in the environment was sort of a far more effective way to learn the language. And I took one trip in particular to Argentina, where I kept finding myself in environments where I was surrounded by people who only spoke Spanish. And it took an environment like that for me to come out of my shell and practice speaking. And what I found is that I got so much better at the language so quickly. And not just that, it was far more rewarding than it ever was in a classroom environment. And my co-founder, Kevin, had a really similar experience starting French in school and then going to visit France and spending time there. And we kind of got together around this idea, like, why can't we

Starting point is 00:04:35 create that experience from home? Like, we were technologists for both former software engineers from Google, sort of technologists and product people. We thought there's no reason why he shouldn't be able to practice speaking French with a French speaker whenever you want. I should go to practice speaking Spanish with a Spanish people whenever I want. There's plenty of people in the world that speak those languages. They just don't happen to live near us. And so it sounded like the type of problem technology could solve. That's kind of how we got started. And I think what we wanted wasn't necessarily a formal class or a formal lesson. But we wanted was a regular person to talk to very similar to what you do when you're traveling. You strike up conversations with people

Starting point is 00:05:09 sort of left and right. And that's kind of what we set out to do. We set out to build that product. And like I said, my co-founder, Kevin, wanted to learn French. I wanted to learn Spanish. We sort of looked at the market and we quickly realized that the world wants to learn English. And we decided to focus on that. I was going to say maybe we could double click a little bit on English. You and your co-founder or don't have the problem that you're solving, grew up speaking English. How did you start to begin to learn the scope of this problem?

Starting point is 00:05:35 Like maybe you put some numbers or some narrative around why this is so important, what it unlocks if you guys win and do a good job. I mean, that's exactly right. My co-founder of my boats grew up speaking English. We never had this problem personally. We never kind of experienced it firsthand. I think we got first exposure to the problem.

Starting point is 00:05:52 It came out of that love for travel and really looking around and keeping a global perspective of what are the important problems. to solve in the world and really thinking about the world in that case. If you zoom out a little, there's about 7.5 billion people in the world right now. Six billion of them don't speak English. In the broadest sense, that is the market. And by the way, of those six billion people, 1.5 billion people are actively trying to learn English right now. And so this is an enormous problem in the world. There's not a lot of problems that impact that many people. But what I think

Starting point is 00:06:25 super interesting about this problem is it's not a problem that the English-speaking world really sees at all. English speakers like you and I, we don't just not see the problem personally, but also no one we knows has this problem, because it's not a coincidence that the people we know and the people we talk to also speak English. It's this enormous problem in the world that sort of was largely overlooked by the English-speaking world. What does it mean for someone if they can't speak English? I think for those of who are speaking English, we just don't really know how to think about that. is very different from every other language. If you can learn English, it unlocks immense opportunity

Starting point is 00:07:01 in your lives. It unlocks huge economic opportunity. You can get a job you wouldn't have able to get otherwise. A promotion, you wouldn't be able to get otherwise. You could potentially move to a place where you can have a better life. I think access to the information is also a really interesting thing that I think a lot of people don't think about that. You and I, we use the internet every day. We're used to kind of having information at our fingertips. What we forget is that the vast majority of the internet is in English. If you don't know English, all of a sudden, the world of information you can play in is much, much smaller, even things like this podcast, which has a wealth of really good information. If you're trying to start a company or become

Starting point is 00:07:37 a really savvy investor, this podcast is in English. And so all the nuggets of information in this podcast, they feel like they're widely accessible to anyone in the world, but actually they're accessible only to the people who speak English. And so there are loads and loads of examples like that that I think as a non-English speaker, you feel this problem. very acutely, but as an English speaker, we just kind of take for granted all of the information and opportunities we have. Can you walk us through in the early days? I'm always fascinated by like the first motion you take as a business or as an early small

Starting point is 00:08:07 group. So you've identified, okay, this is a really unique problem that no one's thinking about. The address of the market is 1.5 billion people. That seems worthwhile. Something to tackle. What do you do first? So describe what Cambly is. Literally what the service does.

Starting point is 00:08:21 I think it's convenient to think about it as kind of like a. marketplace or a network that connects speakers trying to learn. So just describe the very basics of it and then go back to day one of how did you start to tackle this problem? It's a super simple product and a pretty simple idea. We're a mobile and web app. You open our app, you press a button, and within a few seconds, we connect you to a friendly native English speaker or video chat. And then you talk to them and you practice your conversational language skills. And yeah, you're exactly right. At its core, it's a marketplace, you know, two-sided marketplace. On one side, you've got tutors on the other side, you've got students.

Starting point is 00:08:55 The students are people who are trying to learn English and want to work on the English skills, and then the tutors are native English speakers from all over the world. We talked about the number of people who are trying to learn English in the world. There also happen to be lots of people that speak English. But yeah, those two populations tend to be geographically far apart. So if you can create a marketplace that connects those groups of people, it creates a huge amount of value on both sides. One of the things that I'm always fascinated by in marketplaces early on is, I don't know what you want to call it aliveness or something, where you think about the experience

Starting point is 00:09:26 from both sides that if one shows up, you need someone on the other side to be there too and you need the experience to be good. And I'd love to spend a chunk of our conversation just discussing what you've learned about building marketplaces. Obviously, some of this will be idiosyncratic to you, but a lot of it might be generalizable. So just riff for us on the challenges of building a marketplace that fuels alive. I think the way we tackled it and I think a good strategy is to just try to solve one side of the marketplace first, basically. Like, I think Aliveness is actually a really nice way to describe it. I mean, in the very early days, I guess in the earliest days when we were getting started,

Starting point is 00:10:01 my co-founder and I were the only two tutors on the platform. And so we would spend our days basically writing code and building the product and then constantly getting interrupted when someone was calling in to talk to someone from around the world in English. And it was actually a great way to get started. I think an interesting aspect of our businesses, I think it's a really good idea to talk to your customers in the early days, so you kind of really understand their needs and what they're looking for. And so talking about them was a great opportunity for us. And for them,

Starting point is 00:10:28 they were really looking, talk to native English speakers, which we happen to be. And so it was this actually very symbiotic relationship in the early days and starting the company. And yes, we spent our days like writing code and building the product and talking to our potential customers. I think we really wanted the service to be on demand. So 24-7, anytime day or night, you press a button and you get a native English speaker. My co-founder had both lived in San Francisco. We were awake and slept roughly the same hours. And so it was obviously hard to make an on-demand service with us being the only two people powering the sort of supply side of the marketplace. And so we started to build up the supply side. And to get it alive like you described, we basically effectively had

Starting point is 00:11:09 to just pay people to sit around and wait on the off chance that someone called in and wanted to talk to a native English speaker. And we just did that. We were bootstrap. We were funding the company ourselves in the early days. And we were basically paying people to hang out, paying people out pocket to just hang out and wait to see if someone called in. And so in the very early stages of the company, that's kind of how we got the place started. And what we really wanted to do is deliver on the experience we were kind of hoping to deliver on. And when you're really small, it doesn't take a whole lot in order to deliver on that. You just need someone available to talk to in our case. The people are one part of this. The technology is another. I have to imagine there's

Starting point is 00:11:46 some interesting technical challenges that you had to solve to be able to instantly connect people in the way that you do with high fidelity. And if it's about language, you need the voice to be clear and all these things. Talk us through the interesting technical challenges and maybe like what the enabling technologies are for a company like yours. Like how long ago would this have been impossible to build and what's changed? The demand for English has been there for a while. It's growing for sure, but I think the smartphone, I think, really unlocked a lot of sort of new opportunities in this sort of space and domain. The idea of being able to, like, instantly video chat with someone on the opposite side of the world, not too long ago, that wasn't really a thing that was

Starting point is 00:12:25 easier accessible to everyone. And it was really to the advent of the smartphone with these basically, like connected device with a front facing camera that's perfect for video chat. That, I think, really unlocked this market of, I can get help from someone on the opposite side of the world over video chat. That sort of broad, and there's a lot of businesses that have emerged in that space. And obviously, we've been working in line education and English education specifically.

Starting point is 00:12:48 But what you need, the ingredients you need are faster net video chat-enabled devices in order to kind of create this marketplace. And so I think that opened up a lot of opportunity in the sort of broad space. How did you decide who to focus on first within that subcategory of 1.5 billion people trying to learn? Is it like absolute beginners? is it people that are further along in the journey?

Starting point is 00:13:12 How did you figure out where the sweet spot might be? Because quality control seems like a huge problem. And both on the tutor side and on the other side, if a tutor is great, but the person barely speaks English and they don't speak the other person's native tongue, how do you manage stuff? Like, this seems like a million problems

Starting point is 00:13:26 that you'd have to manage. I'd love to hear how you'd tackle all that. I think of it actually parallel to like a service like Lyft or Uber where you've got this super simple app, but you press the button and then this, like, magical thing happens. There car pulls up in front of you. And there's a lot happening behind the scenes in order to deliver them that experience.

Starting point is 00:13:42 And so Canvas is really similar. Like you press a button and then instantly you're like talking one at one with a native English speaker, potentially on the other side of the world from you. We had to build a lot of technology to, for example, predict demand, like make sure you always have enough supply to fulfill whatever demand you have, sort of any hour of any day. Coming back to a question about like, what demographic do you focus on with a service like this? when we looked at language learning in general and English education and more specifically,

Starting point is 00:14:09 there are a lot of solutions out there for learning languages. Many of them, sort of broadly, there was kind of like brick-and-water schools that had traditional classroom environment like I described earlier. And then there's a lot of software-based tools that helped you kind of get started, learn your first few words, learn how to conjugate some verbs and put together a simple sentence. But what we found is those services would only take you so far. You've learned some fundamentals of the languages, but you'd never get to actually fluency. And I think if you were to tell me, hey, like, I really want to learn French. Your goal is not to, like, learn a few words of French. Your goal is to be able to interact with a French person in a real-time environment.

Starting point is 00:14:49 But I think likely the way you'd approach that is to do everything but actually interacting with that French person. And the same thing with learning English. Like, people would study English for years and years, but never actually practice speaking it with a native speaker. And it's almost silly to say this, but like if your goal is to get really good at something and you never do that thing, it's not going to work. And it's not that people didn't recognize this. I think the issue was more that it's much easier to go pick up a workbook or a book and study from that than it is to sort of snap your fingers and have a native English speaker in front of you. And that's kind of what we realize this is sort of a hole in the language learning process. And so we set up to solve that.

Starting point is 00:15:26 Another thing that fascinates me, because your business is all about on demand, streaming, exactly the thing you want that you couldn't get before because of technology constraints, but now you can, is how you map that onto a unique business model. So I assume that people might sometimes stand in line at the store and talk for five minutes on the phone and sometimes they might want to talk for an hour and that it's totally random, how long they want to talk and therefore pricing and the way that you share economics and structure that's part of the business with the two sides of the marketplace is really intriguing. Can you tell us just what you've learned there, what might be surprising, how it works? I was fascinated by this part of the problem.

Starting point is 00:16:05 Yeah, so we have an interesting business model, interesting and unusual business model. On the student side of the platform, people subscribe to the service, and they get some amount of usage of Cambly. And so say you pay 100 bucks a month and you get 15 minutes a day daily, and it's use it or lose it. And so what that does is it sort of encourages you. You've already paid for it. You might as well use it. And so kind of baked into the business model is we're teaching our customers how to use the product. It's going to be much more effective for you to learn a language if you spend 15 minutes a day practicing it than it is if you kind of binge and like spend three hours once every few weeks. Regularity and kind of

Starting point is 00:16:44 daily practice is super important and that's how you're going to develop the skill. And so bake that into the way the business model is structured. The tutor side, you get paid to talk to students. And so for all the time you spend speaking with students, you get kind of a fix right there. So it's kind of an interesting marketplace because it's kind of decouples the way we like collect revenue and pay it out. What mistakes have you made in the business model to date? Like, what have you learned doesn't work? We've tried various models in terms of the marketplace there and made loads of mistakes over the years. I guess zooming in on that piece in particular. We had a like pay as you go model at some point in the early days. I think the challenge there is one, I think

Starting point is 00:17:27 it doesn't tell you how to use the product. It doesn't tell you that like regularity and daily practice is really important. And I think the other thing is if you've ever been on kind of a long distance phone call and you're thinking this is costing me X cents a minute, it makes you sort of evaluate whether every minute is worth it. And we wanted to create as more of what I would call like a season past mentality of like, okay, you're committed to do this thing. It's important for you. Now go and use it. There's no sort of incremental cost of using the service. And so I think it aligns better with how we want our students to behave. And I think it also encourages them to actually use their product. And that's what we want. Ultimately, we really want a product that people

Starting point is 00:18:05 don't just pay for, but they go and actually use it because that's how they're going to improve their English. Can you talk a bit about, since what you're facilitating ultimately is a person-to-person conversation, you can't be snooping on all these conversations, how you handle bad actors. There must be people that are evil or bad or do something wrong on either side of the platform. So I imagine we're going to have more and more of these, like, massive human-to-human networks in the future. What you've learned about this, solving this problem might be really interesting to others. So how do you do it? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:36 So we have moderation tools in place. As one of the features, we, to our students, we record conversations and they can go and watch them and review the sessions they've had. And if a conversation gets flagged, we can moderate and figure out what happened and where did it go wrong. These are kind of few and far between. But anytime you're running like a large marketplace at scale, you're going to have examples of that. And so, yeah, we take it super seriously, want to create a really safe environment for sort of both sides of the marketplace. And so that's something that we have a hand in and we moderate to make sure that the activity happening on the platform is indeed English education. Are there any classes of problems that you think are general?

Starting point is 00:19:17 We'll see over and over again, whether we call it moderation or whatever you want to call it. how do you think about this as a general purpose problem of the internet? Moderation, yeah, complex topic. What's interesting and unique about our marketplace, specifically, is the types of connections that are happening. Most of the connections, or many of the connections in the internet, are you interacting with people you know in real life, maybe on Facebook or Instagram or so forth, social network-based platforms.

Starting point is 00:19:44 What's interesting about Camblies are meeting people you don't know, and not just people you don't know, but people who are potentially living on the opposite side of the globe from you, have a very different culture and life experience that they bring. And so I think one of the challenges, but also one of the amazing benefits of the platform like Hambly is these international connections you make. You make this kind of human-to-human connection for people who have very different lives. And you can imagine that there are sometimes challenges and disagreements that come up from that. But I'd say the vast majority of what we see there is just like a really incredible cultural exchange. Saudi Arabia is actually a pretty big market for us. And a lot of our tutors are Americans.

Starting point is 00:20:22 And so we have, for a while now, we've had loads and loads of Americans talking to people in Saudi Arabia. And it's just one-on-one conversation. Like, if you think about the ways you learn about various parts of the world, it's largely filtered through the media and kind of how the media portrays that. I think what's cool about Cambly is we short-circuit that and just connect person to person, citizen to citizen. What we hear over and over again, people are like more similar than they are different in a lot of ways, like movies, like music, you know, have their favorite sport they like to watch. there's a ton of similarities. And I think making these kind of human-to-human connections, I think there's a lot of really cool benefits that come from that as well.

Starting point is 00:20:57 And we set out to help people learn English, but I think it's a really cool artifact of the type of marketplace we've built. One of the models I always try to think about for marketplaces is like these kind of four core functions. So we sort of talked about the first, which is setting rules and standards, right? Like it's a fairly simple, I'll call it a protocol. You're talking to another person. I think everyone can understand that in some of the moderation stuff. The second is core tools or services, pieces of the,

Starting point is 00:21:20 the technology. There's matchmaking. You got to pair people up. And there's audience building. You've got to build supply in a man through time. And I'd love to ask in each of those four categories, just a couple extra questions because I just think those are neat lenses through which. And I'd be curious if you would frame it as those four, if there's other major categories that you would list as like responsibilities of the platform or the business. Maybe we can do that at the end. So maybe I'll start with core tools and services, sort of the technology itself. It's interesting that for me to think about the product roadmap for you. You've got like a FaceTime like screen, you're speaking to the person, it's sort of contained in that core action. How do you

Starting point is 00:21:55 think about future tools and servicing that will make this experience better for both sides of the market? Yeah, so the sort of atomic unit or core part of the experience is just this video chat, similar to FaceTime. What we've done over the years is layered on a bunch of other technology at top of that. And so things like being able to exchange messages back and forth and potentially translate them, things like maintaining a profile for students that contain some of their goals or information that kind of helps you have the most productive session you can. We talked a bunch about kind of this totally open conversational English that have from the platform, but some of our students really want more structure. And so we've added curriculum and courses that people can

Starting point is 00:22:37 enroll in and follow along with. And those courses aren't, we have a very diverse set of customers in terms of where they're coming from and why they're learning English. And so we try to build courses around those needs. And so, for example, business English is a big category of like, you may not have to be trying to learn everyday English so you can order food or a restaurant, but if you're trying to learn English for some professional setting, then zooming in on the specific sort of language and terminology you need to use for that role is super important. And I won't jump ahead to your matching piece, but there's a lot of connections, the matching of student and tutor there as well. We've layered on a bunch of technology to make experience

Starting point is 00:23:13 as smooth and seamless for both sides and as effective. That's sort of learning and teaching English beyond just kind of a fixed time screen. I always loved that exercise, Airbnb's 11-star experience where they sort of keep layering on almost like ridiculous features. So, you know, there are 11 stars. You're flying a helicopter with champagne. You know, you parachute into the hotel or whatever. What does that exercise feel like for you?

Starting point is 00:23:35 So if you look out 10 years or something and put your sort of ridiculous hat on, what is like the 11-star version of this experience, do you think, that might be? be possible in the future, but isn't yet. I'm going to have to jump into some of the matching stuff now. You're team of the up for it. Ultimately, like, what we want to do is we want to serve as many of those 1.5 or 6 billion people that don't know English as possible. And we want to deliver an incredible English education experience for them that helps

Starting point is 00:24:05 them learn as quickly as possible. And so I think the core metric there is, like, how fast is someone learning English and then specifically the English they need and want for their lives. If I start to kind of dream a bit of like, what does that six-star, seven-star, 10-star experience looked like? When we started this company, we basically, the promise, the value we offered is we're going to get your friendly native English speaker instantly. And that was kind of the initial sort of value prop. But the vision and the dream was always, we're not just going to get you a friendly native English speaker.

Starting point is 00:24:34 We're going to get you like perfect person for you. So maybe they share your interests, your personality, style, your occupations. which we touched on earlier. So we're going to get you like the perfect match, like your English-speaking counterpart, if you will, and give you this really personalized match with a tutor and give you this really personalized content and curriculum that you're going to go over.

Starting point is 00:24:57 And I think that, I think, is kind of the broad dimensions in which I think the experience can go from five-star and up and beyond from there. Obviously, there's a lot it takes to deliver on that experience. There are a lot of reasons why people are learning English, And so the cardinality that space is big. We talked about the matching piece as well. And also matching two people, matching two people to create this perfect match.

Starting point is 00:25:21 It takes a lot of scale to go to do that. And so we're far, far better at that today than we were a few years ago. But we'll be much, much better at it in the coming years. It's not just like a matching algorithm you need. You actually need enough scale in order to deliver in really good matches. And you need enough liquidity, not overall in your community, but kind of within each vertical. And so there's a lot of really interesting, like, market. place and matching pieces there. I don't know if you've heard of a term called Bloom's a two-sigma

Starting point is 00:25:46 problem, but it's a study that was done like decades ago that basically compared like one-on-one tutoring to learning in a classroom environment. What the study found is that the educational outcomes from one-on-one tutoring were far, far better than a classroom environment. To quantify that, the two-sigmas is two standard ideations better. This was done decades ago. It was this interesting study, but it was kind of academic at the time because it was like, how do you actually what do you do about that? Yeah. What do you do about that? And, you know, what we're doing is we're actually taking that model and we're scaling it to a level that it hasn't gotten to before. We are one of the largest, if not maybe the largest experiments that exist in the world of that.

Starting point is 00:26:30 And I think what's really powerful about one-on-one is this personalization. I think back to the times that I've learned things the fastest, it's always a one-on-one conversation. with someone who knows far more about the topic than I do. And the reason for that is kind of simple if you think about it, right? We don't waste any time talking about stuff I already know. You're always at the fringe kind of at the edge of your knowledge and you can kind of hang out in that zone. And that's how you maximize the rate of which you learn. And yeah, I think it's something that's unique about one-on-one. I mean, some large percentage of what I've learned in my life is from this podcast. People have heard me do it. And it is the one-on-one power that I get

Starting point is 00:27:05 to control it and go where I don't know stuff. Right. Like I'm not just like some generic, broad conversation, it's very specific to me, which makes me wonder, like, how much of what you're building is applicable far beyond learning languages and instead, you know, in any sort of one-on-one learning setting. Like, if you're capturing the right legible information about people and what they want, do you have broader ambitions to go that way eventually, or is the problem you're on now too big to even think about that just yet? It's interesting. I definitely have thought about that a lot described earlier as like, how can someone on the other side of the world help you over video chat? And that's a pretty broad parameterization of the space. And honestly, like, I almost thought about that more

Starting point is 00:27:44 in the early days than I do now, because I think as I've dug deeper into language education, and more specifically English education, I've recognized just the scope of the problem. I mean, we've done really well, and we've cut these growing really fast, we've scaled a ton over the years. But we are, when you think about the size of the market, the 6 billion people that have done to English and the 1.5 billion that are trying to learn it right now, we are a space. in that market. And so we're right now just really focused on scaling that up and then serving more of those English learners. But I think the technology and the product absolutely extends to other arenas. And there's other companies out there that have zoomed in on certain categories like

Starting point is 00:28:24 this, like getting a doctor in demand, for example, over video chat. And yeah, you can kind of pick your vertical, but we're really excited about English education. Just in investing, the expert networks are huge, really profitable businesses. I mean, I think you can kind of see this one-on-one connection being powerful just about anywhere. I have to ask more about the matchmaking, because in any of these one-on-one context, this would be powerful knowledge or set of tools. How do you approach this problem technically? Like, how do you start to set yourself up for success so that that degree or quality of personalization and match can get better as you achieve more scale? Like, what are the dimensions that matter here for matchmaking, in your opinion? I mean, I think what's interesting about people is,

Starting point is 00:29:02 if you think about, like, who are the people you get along with in your life and why? I think it's a complex creatures and there's lots of subtlete to human-to-human interactions. And I think all of those apply matchmaking service like Cambly as well. I think there are some prominent ones, some of the ones I listed, like personality style interests. I think occupation is a super interesting one. And I think particularly for the arena that we're in, where a lot of people who use Cambly are using it for professional reasons. We have a lot of young professionals using the service. And that's a dimension that there are lots of different occupations out there. It's like a pretty high card space. And so it takes a lot of scale to actually do the match in a meaningful way, even just

Starting point is 00:29:42 that single dimension. In the early days, a lot of the matching came from just allowing the students to explore the community of tutors we have and preview, watch intro videos, read profiles, find the right tutor for themselves. We've been doing a lot of work now to kind of hold your hand a bit more through that process and facilitate more of that match ourselves. And so what do you need to do to that is effectively collect structured data on both sides of the marketplace, so then you can match in some of those dimensions. It's a complex problem because, yeah, like, matching two people is, it's complicated at its own. If the student is potentially excited to have a conversation right now, there's also sort of a temporal component, can we deliver

Starting point is 00:30:22 this perfect match to you? Like, not only do we have the perfect match in the marketplace, but can we get 10 of them in each time zone, right? Exactly, yeah. Can we deliver one to you right now? And so the scale you need, I think, is sort of surprising, I think, to be able to actually match in all those dimensions, including time. Yeah. The last category of the four is audience building, which is how do you get, first of all, supply and demand to hear about your company? And then second, to get to the bottom of the funnel and actively using it. So how do you think about audience building strategies to make this thing really thrive and scale? In the early days, did a bunch of scrappy things just to kind of get the marketplace off the ground, posted to job boards and so forth for, like, getting kind of that initial cohort of tutors. A lot of our students from the early days came through like app store discovery and word

Starting point is 00:31:10 of mouth people. We kind of had this really kind of amazing wow moment where you like, you download this app, you press the button and you instantly are talking to a native English speaker. And I think it was if you can kind of blow your customer's mind in the first few seconds of using the service, I think there's a lot of value you get out of that. I remember actually back in the days when my co-founder, Kevin and I were tutor and I talked to a student in Brazil that kind of has stuck with me. since then where he told me, like, I asked him, how did you learn English? And he said, I learned it from basically like music and movies. No one I know, no one in my family, none of my friends,

Starting point is 00:31:42 nobody speaks English. And I think what was interesting about that story is I thought about this kid who had literally never met a native English speaker before. And then he stumbles across this app. He presses a button within a few seconds, a native English speaker shows up. He's gone from never meeting a native English speaker in his life to quite literally having like an American in his pocket anytime he wants. And that's sort of disparity in kind of the before and after that wow experience, I think encourage a lot of people to like share that experience. And so in the early days, a lot of them, and we still benefit a lot from word of mouth. I think what's been interesting about our business is we've had to be really international from day one. We were a couple of

Starting point is 00:32:18 former software engineers building a product in San Francisco, but we were building a product for basically everyone who was not like us, for people who everywhere but where we were. Well, we had to learn pretty early on is how do we go and market to Korea and Japan and Brazil. I think one of the things we've done is we've built out basically a lot of that international experience within the team. We hired country managers that initially were sort of one man or one woman teams to launch a market and then kind of have since built out teams there. And that's been really effective for us to kind of figure out what are the unique ways you grow in each market. And I think one thing I actually like I'm pretty proud of is if you go to Saudi Arabia and you ask our customers about Cambly,

Starting point is 00:33:02 they think we're a Saudi Arabian company. If you go to Korea and you ask our customers there, they think we're a Korean company. I think it's a testament to the level of localization we've done where it's not just the app or the website, the customer support. It's the marketing. Like every touch point is like not just in the right language, but like culturally aware, talking about the things that are relevant to you. And so we have to go global and think really internationally from day one. And we've built sort of a really international team as part of that. And so I think for me personally, it's really fun because we've got this. I told you I love to travel and I love to learn about people from different parts of the world. And I have a good fortune

Starting point is 00:33:40 I get to not just do that through our customers, which again all over the globe, but also kind of through the team. That's been super fun as well. This seems like an area maybe to dig in because it sounds completely fascinating. And this is going to be something that more and more businesses have to do going forward, right? Everything's going to be more international, more global. work remote, all these trends everyone's aware of. So let's say you're opening a new market for the first time, and it's fairly dissimilar from any market you've opened thus far. What have you learned about that playbook? Does it start with a GM and then you just delegate responsibility? And even if so, like what are the sequences or steps that that person goes through that you've learned to really hone

Starting point is 00:34:15 that make what you just described possible to a Korean and it feels like a Korean company? Walk us through the playbook here. It sounds fascinating. Our strategy has been to start with that GM. And we've kind of learned over time what the right profile for someone who's going to be really successful there is. What is that just under curiosity? What's that profile? We give our GMs like a ton of ownership and we're like pretty highly analytical team. And so I joking talk about how the languages at Campbell. The company are English and math. We've kind of learned that you want someone who's like scrappy, entrepreneurial, like highly analytical. I think from a culture at the standpoint, obviously, look for someone who fits in well with the team. But there are a few

Starting point is 00:34:57 of these skills. And obviously, you want them to then be able to grow into a manager and leader because the moment they have success in the market, they want to start to build on a team. And so I think it was easy to kind of miss a few of those things in the early days, but we honed it on what works really well. And yeah, so we start with a single person. And they kind of go through the full experience for a student and kind of make it really highly localized. That's kind of one of the first things they do. Then they start to build the sort of the brand of the business. And it's not too dissimilar from starting a new company. I often describe it to them. You're launching a company in Brazil. You've got the benefit of a great product and including kind of the supply side of

Starting point is 00:35:33 the marketplace, like a Tudor community you can piggyback off of, but go find your first few customers. It's almost like a franchise or something. Yeah. Like a franchising model. And yeah, they kind of start there and not too, you know, pretty similar to how like it is when you're getting started with a company, they do a bunch of scrappy things to just kind of get their first few customers in the door and kind of get the engine going and then scale up from there. And so I think it's a really interesting and fun job. And I think for the right person, it works really well both ways. Is there anything surprising you've learned about the markets where this works best?

Starting point is 00:36:06 And I'm also curious whether you're roughly as successful in some new market in some part of the world as in most others. Maybe it's obviously scaled by population size or core market size or something. But is anything surprising you've learned there about the distribution of your clientele around the globe or is it kind of look like a population map of the world of the countries in which you tried to have success? There's like immense demand for English all over the world. It varies as well. Like there are certain countries where like people are even more eager to learn English. And in some cases it's because they're looking for new opportunities. I think a lot of the

Starting point is 00:36:43 countries we've succeeded in are like, it's been a mix. E-stage, I think pretty well-developed countries. also had a lot of success in kind of more developing regions. In some ways, it's the population of the world, but you kind of have to have been layer on on top of that the need for learning English and kind of how well people speak English in that market. And then also purchasing power is pretty important as well because Campbell is not super cheap. You're paying to talk one in one with an English speaker often an American. And so there's kind of a cost restriction as well that layers into that map as well. If you think about, I love his thinking about these business stories as like a series of challenges you have to overcome. I always call them boss battles because I was such

Starting point is 00:37:23 a video game fan when I was young. What are like the biggest boss battles that you've faced as a business and maybe tell us one, two, three of them? In each case, what the major lesson was that you learned from conquering some boss along the way? I'm a big fan of launch and iterate kind of strategy. And so we put a product out there when it was pretty rough and had to iterate a bunch in order to get something that was actually valuable and worked. And so, you know, I don't know if I can pinpoint the exact day in which we went from like a product that wasn't working to a product that's working. But I think that's kind of the most core fundamental first boss you have to meet. I think anytime you're building a technology company, I think the next phase after that is

Starting point is 00:38:03 naturally now like, okay, you've got a thing that works well. How do you get people to use it? I think figuring out how to market and scale our service and I think it was like I said uniquely challenging just because of the international nature of our business and our customer base. I think figuring out how to crack that nut. And a lot of that came down to the lessons there was around like building, kind of hiring in that local expertise into the team. We were two software engineers. We built this product.

Starting point is 00:38:28 And literally employee number one at Campbell was a Korea country manager. So kind of an odd makeup of a three-person team, right? Two ex-cookle software engineers and a Korea country manager. But for the space we were in, it made a lot of sense. And I remember when we were thinking through that hire, when you're building out a team, you often want to, like, layer in the skills that you are missing. fill in the gaps in what you can't do. And I remember thinking, like, this is a case where, like, I could spend the next 10 years trying to learn about, learn the Korean language and learn about

Starting point is 00:38:58 Korean culture and still not be anywhere close to someone who grew up there. And so it seemed like a great, a great thing to fill in a gap and hire for. And we started there, but we've hired a lot of country managers since then. I think that sort of almost organizational structure and approach to go-to-market, I think, has been a fundamental builder block in which we discovered all sorts of different marketing channels and so forth. And so I think that was a big breakthrough for us as well. A raising money for the company, I think, was also we had challenges along the way for that, I think, largely because, like I said, it was not a problem that people saw every day and undershared super well. And so I think we, as a company, we had to hit, I think, bigger and

Starting point is 00:39:37 more challenging milestones in order to kind of get that next round than an equivalent and company that was working in a different space. And those are challenging bosses to conquer. But I also think lack of capital is actually, you can often be a strength. You know, we've built a really lean team that scaled a big business. And we've done it with like very little capital. And we went out to raise various rounds and be really successful in that realm. But we were always kind of in a position where we didn't necessarily need to do that. Yeah, I think that one, Maybe it's particularly memorable because although it was painful and challenging at the time, I think it set us on a track and a trajectory that put the company in a really good position going forward. What advice would you give to people raising money, given that it was challenging for you? I'm sure you learned a lot of lessons in that process. Any advice you'd give to founders that are in a similar challenging state?

Starting point is 00:40:28 If you're working in a space in a business where you can choose your own destiny and you can get to like cash real positive, I think it makes your fundraising conversations a lot more fun and productive. Not all businesses work that way, but I think the more traction you can have, the more flexibility you can have in terms of when you raise, I think puts you in a really good position. Like, I think every time I've fundraised for Cambly, it's gone like very much in like one of two ways. Either it's gone super smoothly and really well and gotten them faster, it's been long and painful and dragged out. And I think like having the luxury of a cutoff when it's not working and then go back to it, I think is really beneficial. And ultimately, like, investors are smart people, like, they want strong businesses. And so if you can make your business stronger and make it say your business needs less capital or is less dependent on external funding, that's just going to be a better business.

Starting point is 00:41:20 And so the irony is that the less you need the money, the more, the easier it'll be to raise. And so I'm always a fan of being lean, focusing a lot and just growing the business and keeping your head down and raising when it's easy, not when it's hard. If you look back to day one, a day of incorporation for Cambly through to today, how have you personally changed the most? It's been an amazing journey and lots of learning along the way. I mean, in the very early days I mentioned, my co-founder and I were building the product, and we were personally doing all of the tutoring that happens on Cambly. We've scaled a business a tonne since then.

Starting point is 00:41:54 We now do basically over a year of one-on-one tutoring every single day. Think back to those early days of when we got started. We were personally delivering on every piece of value. We've built a big marketplace now, and the impact we're having is quite large. I think the opportunity is far, far larger. We have a lot more ahead of us and behind us, but we've come a really long way. My role obviously has changed a lot in that journey. I started out as a software engineer and a product person,

Starting point is 00:42:20 and we would kind of fill in and do the other things that business needed as we went. And I had never raised money before. I'd never built a team before. I'd never even managed before. And so it's been a lot of learning along the way. I've worn a lot of different hats. I didn't know anything about finance, for example, and I've learned a bunch about that.

Starting point is 00:42:37 I've learned how to pitch the company effectively, how to raise money. My role has gone from doing a lot of the work myself to focusing more less on product building and more on company building. And that's been a super interesting but also challenging transition. I think especially as like having an engineering training, being used to kind of like building the things yourself

Starting point is 00:42:56 and kind of getting your hands ready, it's been a transition to figure out how do you take a step back can focus on less about building shipping code or building a product, but more about kind of building the right team to then do all the things you need. And yeah, a lot of personal scaling, a lot of letting go of things I used to do before, a lot of thinking about how to talk about the mission of the company in order to attract the right investors, attract the right people to join the team. It's been a pretty big shift. But also, we've been working on it for a while. So a lot of those changes have happened gradually. And I think part of the fun of doing this is your job is,

Starting point is 00:43:30 evolving and I think that's what I'm here for. So it's been a lot of fun. Any insights you can share with us on that idea of letting go and managing others versus doing the work yourself? Like anything that made that transition, which sounds hard, smoother or better for you? Or you've just found to be effective as you shift to thinking about company building and managing versus product building and coding? I think the letting go can be hard, especially if you've been doing something for a while. but it's super important, I think, to get the, like, one, you'll hire people who are much better at doing that thing than you are. And so that's great. I think the more you can give those folks full ownership and autonomy, whatever they're taking over, the better. And sometimes that's, like, easy. I think in the case of, like, the GMs we hired, I didn't know anything about the country. I was in a marketing expert. It was kind of natural for me to say, like, here's the high level goal that you want to tackle and go for it. And, And I think as a result of that, that org has done really well.

Starting point is 00:44:29 I think it's harder when it's something you actually have deep expertise on yourself. But I think the lessons are still the same. Like, it's still really important that you give people ownership and autonomy. What you don't want is to hire people where, like, you're still kind of overseeing all the work and still giving all of the direction on what to do. And then they're executing because that takes a ton of cognitive load for you. It's not as fun for you and it's not as fun for them. I think what you want is people who can come in and really take a high,

Starting point is 00:44:56 level of ownership. You can talk about the goals and the strategy at a high level, but I think it's when, especially when it's in a domain that you know really well, I think it's really tempting to jump in and give lots of opinions and maybe you can think about it for a while, so you think you know best. But I think it's really dangerous to do that if you're trying to build a team, a robust team that can stand in and sound two feet. I'm a big fan of collaborative learning, and it sounds like this autonomy thing and delegation, you've embraced that big time. If you think outside the company, so you learn a lot from your GMs, are there other companies or even one company just to make it fun that you've learned the most from watching them build? If I had to pick one, I would, I mean, we've kind of followed Airbnb story for a long time.

Starting point is 00:45:40 We did Y Combinator back in 2014. They had done it a few years before us. And I remember there was a lot of parallels between our story as we were going through Y Combinator and theirs, I think similar revenue scale, similar scale. similar skepticism about what we were working on. And I remember Paul Graham making that comparison a few times during our course there. And what's interesting about them is there this sort of international cross-border marketplace, creating kind of a new behavior. You'll probably remember the days when sleeping on someone's guest room or something

Starting point is 00:46:12 was considered weird. And obviously, Airbnb has managed to normalize that in the same way. Like, there was a lot of skepticism about what we were building. the idea that people would pay to just talk to a friendly native English speaker. That was kind of a novel idea. That was a category that we created when we started Cambly. Obviously, we've won some people over to that idea, but back then it was pretty strange. And I think Airbnb is a super interesting company as well.

Starting point is 00:46:35 We've just taken a lot of inspiration for how they've built their team, how they've scaled. So I think that's probably the one that comes to mind. We've spoken with the founders there before and kind of gotten some inspiration from them. Nate in particular, Airbnb has been involved. in the company. Another person and sort of company that comes to mind is Katrina Lake at Citrix. I've gotten to know her more recently, but I heard her speak years ago. And then she, a similar story in terms of challenges raising money. I think she raised something like $50 or $60 million before the IPO in the lifetime of the company up before the IPO. And

Starting point is 00:47:07 a lot of that, I think resonated with our early days at the company. I think she's really, really smart around building the right team. And so I've gotten to spend some time with her as well. and she's another role kind of role model and mentor I would consider. I think I've kind of learned from her journey and tried to emulate. She's one of my all-time favorite guests on this show, too, just a total force and incredible early recruiter. I mean, she just was able to win over some monster senior hires at the start with basically nothing and an incredibly impressive person.

Starting point is 00:47:38 Samir, this has been so much fun. I love the problem space. It's so obvious after you hear it, but never thought about it before since I never had the problem. Obviously, I hope you're successful. It just seems like it'd be something that would provide a lot of opportunity for those that use the service. So I'm excited to keep watching your journey from here. I asked the same closing question of everybody. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? I'd have to go with my parents. I'm a recent parent now as well. We have a one and a half year old now. And all of the opportunities I've had in my life, I think it stemmed from

Starting point is 00:48:11 my parents, both the sacrifices they made in their lives. They immigrated here right around on I was born and this journey I've been on, I think being able to start a company and take this path. It's obviously a high-risk path. I think I wouldn't have necessarily able to do it without a safety net. And I think back to like my parents in their lives and the fact that they weren't able to take those kind of risks in their lives, but because they had to provide an opportunity to me. And I've always appreciated them a ton. But I think being a new parent now, appreciate them that much more. And yeah, I hope to be half as good parents as they are. And so I think when you say kindness, that's probably the most obvious and probably biggest one

Starting point is 00:48:44 that comes to mind. A wonderful and not uncommon answer. The sacrifices that parents make for their kids. Awesome place to end the conversation. Samir, thank you so much for your time. Yeah, thanks to having me. This episode was brought to you by Snack Magic. In this four-part miniseries, I sit down with founder and CEO, Shaanuk Amin, to talk about the origins of the business, how they manage the complex logistical operation, and what lies ahead in the future. In this week's episode, Shaanick and I discuss the behind-the-scenes operations, including the coordination among brands, organizers and receivers. How does it work if someone wants to add company swag to the box? What is the literal operations that make that possible? Do you produce the swag as well? We produce the swag or if you

Starting point is 00:49:26 have swag already, you can just ship it to our warehouse and we'll include that. But we also, like lately, we've been producing a lot of swag for our customers. And that was, I assume, pretty significant build to be able to do that. How did you do that so quickly? I think so with Stadium, right, we also handle delivery and operations. So we had a lot of that experience from our stadium days. And with hot food and cold food, the problem amplifies by so much. Because the time you have to deliver everything during those four lunch hours, I mean, three lunch hours. So we had a lot of practice. We practiced it for six years. And now, I think when we look at the operations of snack magic, from a comparison standpoint, it's much simpler for us. And we have this app

Starting point is 00:50:07 internally at the warehouse that checks for efficiency, speed, all those things. We made it very easy, but anybody could come in and pack. How do you think about the progression of the world back to some sort of norm or hybrid of in-person and remote? People are working from home. That's remote. So it's sort of a virtual service they put in their address. It arrives at their home. What happens when things go back to the office? Do you think of an in-person solution, a hybrid solution, a fully remote? Talk us through your logic there. No, absolutely. So we think like long term. Depending on the company and their culture,

Starting point is 00:50:38 it's going to be a combination of both. So we just three weeks back launched our in-person offering where if you're in an office, you could apply the same concept where everybody gets a link, if to choose their own snacks, and have it arrived in individual goodie bags with their name on it. That way, instead of everybody going to the pantry and getting whatever is there,

Starting point is 00:50:59 you can now get your custom goodie bags. So that's one solution we just launched. Another one we launched is grab and go trace, where you could order under snacks by team. Like we could have a July 4th team, summer theme, this team, that team. So you could order a tray and just have several trays, like some in the pantry, some in meeting rooms, open. And then you could just order cases.

Starting point is 00:51:20 And then what we also launched recently on the in-person side is you could just take a snack poll or send a link out, everybody votes for their favorite stuff, and then one person can actually just order for their pantry. I'm also really curious in terms of categories, usually if you've got, I think you mentioned seven or 800 skews that you could choose from to fill your box with. How concentrated that is. Do you have a couple suppliers or a couple types of products that people really tend to order? Or is it more distributed across all those skews?

Starting point is 00:51:48 So on the buying side, we work with brands directly, right? So we are working with 350 brands that make up the 700, 800 products. And when you look at on the consumer side, what people are ordering, it's a very long tail. They are the top five to ten items that are very popular, but beyond that, the tail is quite long, which just tells you how different everybody is from each other, which is where we also feel the opportunity. How big do you think that universe is a brand? So you've got several hundred brands today.

Starting point is 00:52:17 Is this tens of thousands of brands that could be on this platform? Should brands out there can think of it because a lot might be listening? Should they consider you like a new distribution channel? How do you position yourself to brands? They should. For many of the brands, we are the biggest buyer of product, probably over. Over 50% of the brands that we carry, we are the biggest plan. But having said that, the goal for us isn't to make it thousands and thousands.

Starting point is 00:52:40 Our whole MO is like a curated set of offering that we have. So we are very selective about the brands we onboard. But we'd love to work with any brands, especially new brands that are looking for distribution. And that's our whole thing, giving them visibility, telling their story, getting their product out in front of our customers. Is it fair to just think of you as like an ultra-modern retailer? Think of a retailer. It's cost, selection, convenience, and it seems like you're sort of attacking those three key points of what has made a lot of the most storied retailers successful. Is that how you think of yourself, given the way you described your vision before? Yeah. Those things that you mentioned, Patrick, and discovery. Like when you walk into Whole Foods, you are looking to discover new products in addition to buying what you're not. I think the discovery element that happens online, right now. We feel it's broken and we are coming up with a model that's the modern retail

Starting point is 00:53:34 version but very focused on discovery and wholesale both parts of the thing. If you enjoy this episode, check out join colossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.

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