Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #108 - Cindy Mi and Qi Lu

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

Cindy Mi is the founder and CEO of VIPKID. VIPKID is a 1-on-1 teaching platform where children in China learn english from North American teachers.Qi Lu is the CEO of YC China and Head of YC Research.***Topics00:23 - Qi's intro00:38 - Cindy's intro1:38 - Moving to a new province as a teenager4:38 - Being an educator and an entrepreneur 8:23 - Starting VIPKid in a hyper-competitive market14:53 - Metrics for measuring product market fit21:43 - How did she find the business model?26:53 - What things did she try that didn't work?30:38 - Strategy for product expansion33:03 - Content expansion for Mandarin learning34:53 - Building global companies41:23 - Creating a global culture44:13 - The future of education48:08 - How should engineers and product managers think about edtech?51:33 - Thoughts on AI54:33 - Advice for entrepreneurs

Hey, how's going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's episode is with Cindy Me and Chi Liu. Cindy is the founder and CEO of VIPKid. ViP Kid is a one-on-one teaching platform where children in China learn English from North American teachers. Chi is the CEO of YC China and head of YC research. All right, here we go. Hi, everyone. My name is Chi Liu. I'm a partner at the Y Combinator. I'm also working on. on YC China. Today I'm very, very pleased to have the opportunity to speak to Cindy Me, the founder and the CEO of VIPKID.

As many of the YC community in the US or China know, VIPKID has been a tremendous entrepreneurship success. And seeing the credit to your success, you more and more become a role model for many entrepreneurs. Today, I have the opportunity, I want to go through a list questions. Hopefully we can share a lot of your insights, what learning you had over the years that can prove to be very valuable for many other young generation entrepreneurs. So let me start with sort of your early phase upbringing, because as we look at the many entrepreneurs,

motivation, passion, long-term drive about something is often a key success factor. Can you share with where you grow up? In particular, what was like when you had to move, I believe it was at age of 14, I believe, moving to a different province and start new school. What was the experience like and how that impact you? Sure, absolutely. First, I'd like to start by thanking you T for doing this interview. And then congratulations also on funding and launching YC China. Thank you very much.

This is really exciting for many young entrepreneurs and tech people because you are the role model for everyone for connecting the world and making it a better place and making these companies global from day one. So thank you so much for being here. Absolutely. And I'm really looking forward to our discussion. So to your question on the, story of my upbringing and growing up, I was born in

Hebei province. So it was Zhang Jakao City, where the Winter Olympic Games will be hot. And the reason I believed so much in lifelong learning is because I moved from Zhang Jakao to Harbin in Hegelang province when I was 40 years old. And in my math class, my teacher hated me. She thought I was the most to be a student on the planet. And she just doesn't believe that I can learn. So I lost confidence in learning when I was a little kid.

And I thought, you know, school probably is not the right place for me and I should leave. So I dropped out of high school when I was in the 11th grade. But nevertheless, I was very lucky because I started tutoring young kids English when I was 15 years old, part time. So teaching has been my passion and learning has been the motivation that drives me all these years. And then through teaching young kids, I learned that every child is so curious and we should help them build the connection to the world of the best teachers and content and learning experience. And then they can imagine and explore. And then through the experience of being an English tutor, I figured learning. it's also so important for the tutor or teacher herself because only if you learn more,

you can then teach better and then creates this lifelong learning mission for all the kids so that they can learn better. That was very interesting. So what you shared was so the early phase of experience motivated, also shaped the spirit for you to become an educator in many ways to promote learning. But the interesting aspect for me is learning and English and also learning blend with entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship. So can you also tell us more about that aspects? For example, I believe you start learning English when you were at 13, and you mentioned you start tutoring other kids English when you were around 15.

And there's another very, very interesting aspect. You actually co-founded an English training school. When you were at 17 with your uncle, believe or not, with your uncle. So tell us more about that and how those sort of blend together, shape up, sort of instilled the spirit in you as an educator and also a entrepreneur. Sure, absolutely. So when we moved to Beijing, it was a very linked startup experience. We rented one classroom in the middle of nowhere, now today by the third room. By then, it was a very rural area in the city.

So we went and found students by the elementary school that they go to and then sent flyers to their parents and then say, hey, come and learn with us. And you don't have to pay, you get a gift. And if you like it, you can stay and continue to learn with us. And then the lessons that I learned from those early early days is very important because it helps really. build up the understanding of the students, the parents. And then to be entrepreneur or to fund the business, I think there are so many things one needs to do well. For example, how do we hire the right people?

How do we make sure we have the best culture? How do we build our customer base one by one and make sure everyone is happy and successful? So I was the chief errand officer by then. Running all the errands, right? Running all the errands. She was driving car. I need to pick up the other teachers from like 20 kilometers away in Tongjo.

And then when everyone goes to bed, I need to continue to learn more and to prepare for the next day. So by running all the errands, I think, just taught me so many things. But then by being so close to the customers, namely our students, I got the privilege to understand. understand much more on what every child want and what every parent want. So I think those understanding really shaped the way that what I think about learning or education. And then when I got the chance to build a second business, a VIP kid business, I then really understand and appreciate it's way more on how difficult it is to build something from the scratch and then what are the mistake not to make and how to do better.

That was a terrific sort of experience you went through learning all the errands. The learning about the students, what they need, also the parents, because education in many ways the users are not the buyers. The buyers actually what pays is the parents. So understanding both students and parents are super important. But what you just to touch about sort of naturally, let me switch to the next. key set of area of topic. I'm going to go through

seeing a list of questions about how you start VIPC, your second business. And initially, while you saw the opportunity that many others, perhaps at the same time, didn't see, in particular, English learning market when you started, was already

very competitive market. There's a lot of players in that space. In China, a lot of people always say it's hyper-competitive, very aggressive what you see as a unique opportunity that you latch onto, and how you convince yourself and your teams that you can win in this very hypercompetitive environment. Right. That's a great question.

So when we started VIP kit back in 2013, the market was competitive. The market size is about 15 billion U.S. dollars, parents spending every year. And then Chinese parents value. education as investment. So around 15% of our household income goes to supplemental education. Oh, 15% for household. Compared to 2% in the U.S. That's, in some ways, the culture and the tradition for the China specific. Because it is absolute true, the Chinese parents value education and the willing to invest. That's great to know. So it's 15% of household income they're willing to spend.

versus 2% United States. That's terrific. Yeah. And then although it's a competitive market, but there are still a lot of pain points yet to be solved for the parents. So how to win the pain points that I see from by then 15 years of being in the classroom and being close to the students and parents are a few. One is we don't really have good English teachers that are out of China.

even today. So there are only 27,000 North American teachers national way. And the number is so little compared to our vast number of students. There are 17 million new babies born every year, and there's about a million elementary school kids only in Beijing. And today, VEP kid has more than 60,000 teachers. It's almost three times.

of the supply. So supply has been a huge challenge. And what parent want is a good teacher. And I think a teacher can make or break your students learning curiosity and sparks that lifelong learning spirit. So it's really critical to have the best teachers. And then even if the teachers are in China, it's mostly very young, like people spending a couple of years in China. They're not really teachers. So the teachers we're able to find are the best kid of educators in the U.S. coming from all different states. Texas is our largest teachers. I see. We really love our teachers and they're the reason that we're successful, I think. So teachers supply. Secondly, is the content of learning. Students are still learning curriculums from many, many

years ago and it stays unchanged. But when we have technology like all those pads and mobile devices. For children, it's much more engaging if they're able to explore. And for example, read the online learning library and they have the content to get access to instead of just a whole set of book. So the content has also been a challenge in the traditional service providing that parents can get access to. And lastly, talking about language learning, if one can spend 15 minutes a day to learn the language, it's much more effective than 15 minutes times seven

put into a two-hour weekend class because more frequency helps memorizing better and utilizing the language in a much more effective way as a tool. So those are, the pain points that parents feel in terms of quality. And lastly, parents today are so tired of bringing their children to children classes in the weekend. It's a more challenging job than their day job. They have no free time of their own.

So parents would prefer if children can learn from home and they can probably do yoga at the same time. So all these pain points, we've been rethinking, how can we reimagine? imagine children's English language learning. So we can bring more value to the kids, probably 10 times better. So that's why VIP kid launched by the idea that we want to find the best teachers, build this global classroom where we connect cultures and sparks the lifelong learning spirit for the kids. So the product itself, by what parents believed in and comment on, is at least five times better, if not 10 times.

compared to the existing product and services. This is terrific. Cindy, let me summarize a few key things that I move to next question. Sort of right, connect to what you're describing. Essentially, through your own experience, you identify a set of opportunity unique inside. One is demand, essentially, particularly the Chinese parents, the China's traditional value, learning education, willing to spend.

The demand is there and it's growing. The second is you identify opportunity, essentially to use the internet to expand supply. Because without the internet, you actually, a set of teachers in the United States won't be necessarily become a supply. But technology enable you to have that unique insight to say, I can bring a lot more supply in another different place. That's a second very big insight. Third is sort of the content and devices that are available can be more engaging. And the fourth is the product form. You sort of tune to the language learning itself, moving to a smaller set of chunks,

make it much easier, as you said, five times better than the alternative four. So that's a terrific set of insight that you identified. And then my question to you is almost every startup funders will grapple with, which is the classical product market fair. Essentially, you identify a market already. You see the supply and the demand. You have the opportunity to bring them together. But ultimately, you still have a product that fits,

the market demand. You already elaborate quite a bit about the some aspects of product, content device, short duration, continuous learning, lifelong learning. But in the early days of VIPKit as a founder, I'm curious, do you have a set of measurement metrics or key success factors that you keep measuring, comparing, and say, this will help me to find the product market fit. And keep improving the product around those metrics. And then when do you feel like I already find it? This is the product that's going to wait. So help us sort of walk through this.

I think that would be super helpful for a lot of founders that are sort of initially starting going through this phase. And they try to learn what the insight you can share with them on how to find the product market fit. Absolutely. That's a, it took us a year and a half to that product market fit. It's a very long time. we had a few metrics that are still very important to us today.

What kind of metrics? Yeah. So those are like efficiency and effectiveness and engagement of our students. And that's essentially what believed to be the user value of the product we created. So for efficacy, we would be measuring student units assessment scores. I see. Just the scores. Test scores, right?

Yes. So those are evaluations conducted by our teachers live streaming. I see. And also the practice. I'm curious, are these standard? Like what sort of test, similar to schools, how they test English? Or you invent something different? So similar to schools, but we do build our curriculum content based on our scope and sequence

and the knowledge that we need students to learn and the skills need to master. So based on those scope and sequence, we've developed our content. So it's really critical. for us to go back and then check and then see, well, how does she learn? How does a student learn? I see. And then is everything very efficacious?

So it's really important to have that. And secondly, on the effectiveness, we would then be measuring of all the time that is consumed on the platform, how much progress has the child made. And then lastly, on engagement, And how well is a student rating the class and what are the feedback from the parents? And does he keep coming back and take classes every week? And then does the parent refer our program to other parents?

What is NPS score? So those are the very basic and fundamental matrix that we look at and when we evaluate the product market fit. So by the first year and a half, what we did was, a few steps. One is we started with actually four students. I see. Because we can't now find the fifths. I see just the four students. Or the fifth students.

Yeah, so that's the MVP, right? That's the new viable priority. Yeah, and so innovation ventures, Dr. Kai Fuli. Oh, they founded it. I see. They had to help us find the first three. I see. I see. They find three. You found another one. One, only one. That one was a friend of my co-founder, Jesse's kid. So it was Lucy, Theo, Crystal and Lovely. I see.

And it's very hard to persuade even the four to start to learn with the program. But then later on, gradually every month, we would have additional 10 students. So it makes it almost 200 by March 2015. And then throughout this whole experience, we've iterated our content and technology platform a couple of a few times already. I see. Because it's critical to, we only had limited resources as all the, like every entrepreneur in the very early days, startup teams. And so we had a handful of like content developers and a handful of engineers. So where we spend those resources matter the most. And then

by iterating three times, three versions of our content and two versions of our, um, versions of our like online learning platform, we found the most important tools or the ways that we need to build for our students. And similarly, on the teacher side, we also make sure that our teachers are happy with the schedule. They find a convenient to teach. They have the essential tools that they need and they have the content that is very well designed by our team. So it's also part of market fit for the supply as well. You have to do both sides because you're a marketplace. Right.

We are a double-side marketplace. We have to do both. But I think we have more responsibilities than double-side marketplace. We need to guarantee the quality of the whole experience for both students and teachers and their success are what we believe to be the most important. So by piloting the program with 20 teachers and 200 students in the first year and a half, when everyone was like 2014, it was the year where everyone is celebrated. where it's entrepreneurship and grow, like funding the company and everything,

we chose to really lock ourselves in a little room and figure out all these fundamental challenges and important part of market fake questions. Terrific. So there's a lot of things. I will actually have a couple of follow-up questions based on what you described. But Cindy, what you shared is in many ways sort of YC also advocates for essentially it's always about build something users or customer want. can be a very humble beginning.

In your case, four kids, essentially four kids, and you start teaching. But once you find the right fit, it will grow, right? So at some point from what you described, sort of the key mark curves of initial milestone would be 20 teachers, 200 students, and you have two iterations of platforms, three iteration of content. That, in many ways, showcase you find something. I think this is a terrific story. it's motivating for many other startups.

Don't be sort of discouraged. I only have one user or two users. Any big enterprise, they all start with small. In York, it's just a terrific that you start with a humble beginning. Sandovician venture gave you three students. You'll find another one. That's awesome story. So what I will have two related questions.

I think sort of classic for a lot of founders to go through. One is the business model, the revenue. models because ultimately we're operating a market. You need to make it a business-wise. There's income. Otherwise, it won't sustain. So how do you essentially get to the point whereby the key segment of people, which is the parents, I assume this is the case, they're willing to say, okay, this is something good. My kids are learning good stuff. I'm willing to pay for. How do you sort of find the business model and making sure that this business model is viable and can, you can, provide a sustained growth for an enterprise.

So can you share with the aspects of experience on the business development side? Yeah. So for business model, we believed that it's essential to bring value to both sides of the market, the students and parents and the teachers. So for the students and parents, the value in the business model is we have lowered significantly the one-on-one learning experience, the cost for the parents, by more than 50%. 50%

So parents used to pay about 600 R&B award less than 100 US dollar to find a one-on-one teacher. And as we talk about, there are only 27,000, so good luck finding one. It's very difficult that you can.

And then it's literally impossible also to find a teacher and have her come to your house every day for half an hour because the commutes will be two hours for that half-hour class and you've got to pay for it. So essentially parents

find if they only pay for small class tuition for one-on-one experience, they have multiple times of value created. And also on top of that, 50 to 60% less than they had to pay for one-on-one offline. So they're paying about $40 per hour of the one-on-one learning experience. So it's great. And the teacher are very. really amazing. They're five times better than what they can find in China. So if you multiply those values, you probably see 10 times more the value created for our parents and students.

And also, children really love it because they previously, they cannot find, you don't, you can never choose your teacher. You can only go to a training like an institute and there is a teacher four year. You sign up, you learn. And now it's very personalized. We can. compare the most suitable engaging and motivating teacher for this child out of our 60,000 teacher so all these are value created for students' parents. And for teachers, similarly, if you look up on payskill.com, you then find teachers get paid $16 US per hour of their tutoring services. And then you've got to commute as well, half an hour one way. two hours you get paid 16 on average.

Of course, not in New York or San Francisco where parents pay tutoring a lot of money for SSATs or ACTs. But generally we're talking about like the few million K-12 teachers and English language teachers national wide in the U.S. or Canada. So the value for teachers then is they are willing to teach a global student audience. But unless they move to China or Asia or like Japan, they can't do this. And also teachers, many of teachers are female. And then when they have children, they become stay-home moms for a few years. That's a really great.

The teachers are doing this for the family. But at the same time, teachers need to supplement families income. And if you are in Salt Lake City in Utah, what are the options as a teacher to make those supplemental incomes? So then VIPKK brings value to our teachers in a way that we pay our teachers about $20 per an hour. We make sure they don't have to commute. They can't even stay home and teach in the early morning and then spend the whole day with a kid, with a family. So we have a very, very strong teacher community. Teachers are connected with each other online.

You see the 30,000 YouTube videos the teacher created in the Facebook community. We have teacher conferences. So all these value add you put together are value created for our teachers. So we want to make sure that we're here to facilitate the communication, the culture connection, the learning, and everyone is successful. And there becomes then the VIPI business model. Gotcha. It's terrific. So essentially fundamentally focus on real value creation on both sides.

And then the economic model becomes very natural and sustainable. So I have related to questions, which is a lot of the things. startups always need to be focused on, which is you mentioned iteration, because ultimately to build a long-term successful business, there will be things you have to try. And I'm curious to you are learning. What sort of iteration, you mentioned iteration on content, iteration platforms, what sort of things you tried that didn't work. Sort of salient learnings, often you learn a lot more by trying something didn't work, and then you capture the learning, move on to a new start to expand, are there's important learning lesson you can share with the other

startups from those? I've got two lessons that I learned that are very deep memory for me. So one is we try to build too much for the technology platform when we started from day one. It's common mistake for our companies. You would always imagine, oh, this will be perfect. You have this and that and that and then build a blueprint that is so impressive to everyone. But then we had to understand there are limited resources. So we did spend like three months try to build this in the second half year of 2014.

But then we found it didn't work. We should focus on what's most needed and then we reorganized our resources. We're able to launch something formally March 2015. Otherwise we'll probably won't be able to launch anything by then. And the funny fact is that of the blueprints we built by then four years ago, some of the work we haven't even finished today. It's not a three-month job. It's probably 10-year-old up that we've blueprinted.

And second thing was we were not ready for growth. But one of the key opinion leaders, one of the student parents, she owns a Weibo blog. And she posted. But she's also called the Big Veefeet. Right, the big Vee. And she posted on Weibo. So about 2,000 parents sign up for the day, and we took us three months to call them back. I see.

So we probably should be thinking about, oh, we've been building the product market fit. It takes a long time. But what if in the middle of the timeline something exploded and then you've got to be ready for this? Because it's negative customer satisfaction if they didn't. get respond along the way. So the solution we had was everyone becomes a customer service person. And our engineers really hated it when they are asked. But that's really good that you did that.

That's terrific. Yeah. But our engineer said, I didn't want to talk to people. That's why I become an engineer. Oh, right. Why do I have to call parents? It's really difficult. But we didn't manage to make sure 2,000 customers get addressed and responded and connected

in the time span of three months. But there were a lot of unsatisfactory voice. People were saying, are you guys for real? Where are you? Nobody's calling me. What's wrong with you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's also learning.

So now let me see a sort of move one step up. Obviously, looking back, you had a sort of early beginning. Now it's very clear. Lipkit is going through tremendous. Just walking upstairs this morning going through our building, it's very impressive. Now you have, I believe, almost 10,000 employees with massive several grocers. At the core, it's always about product. My understanding is your product recently goes through a lot of expansion.

For example, you are getting into Mandarin learning. And essentially moving from English to another language, in some ways, the market is sort of reversed. The learner will be maybe in North America, the teacher will be in China. It's a swap, if you were, than the original product. And also, you have expanded your English learning process. product from sort of the classic one-on-one into one-on-four. And you also expand the range of students all the way from sort of zero, I would imagine, a zero young kid's learning to 18 years old.

How you envision, how you sort of strategize pick these product expansions and how those new product initiatives come together to catalyze the next phase of growth for VIPC. Right. So the theme of all these product services we built are a common theme. It is to build a global classroom. Global classroom, okay. That is shared by many, many teachers and students.

That's the theme tie everything together. Right, with amazing content that is personalized and also connect cultures and inspires this lifelong learning for everyone. So then comes to the... the one-on-one VIP gate, and then we have CABC, our one-on-many, one-on-four model, and then we have mentoring, learning, and all the other curricula sets. So we follow the demand of the parents and students we work with,

and we believed that by building this global classroom, we then had a great chance to personalize learning for the kids with data, technology. And also, my dream and goal, as a tutor or teacher myself, is to empower our teachers better by building more intelligent tools and assistance functions so that our teacher's job can become much easier in the days to come. I see. And they can make more income and then be happier.

Gotcha. So this is super helpful. It's essentially there's a cohesive thing of a global, massively expanding classroom that's personalized and technology and data can enable. both sides, the learner to learn better, the teachers to be able to teach better. So in that context, content always seemed to play an important role. My understanding is, Vipkett is also sort of launched a set of initiative to expand the content. For example, you had a recent partnership with, I believe, scholastic that including sort of premier content like Harry Potter's and also with Houghton-Mifling,

Harkourt and Oxford University. And these are sort of English content. And then speaking of Mandarin learning, what do you think would be sort of the marquee, catalyst Chinese content that can help the Mandarin learning. So I'd be curious to see how you envision the content aspects of expanding of your product portfolios. Right.

So similarly, we also follow the needs and demands of our students and parents. So for the Harry Porter content, and skill estate partnership. We also have a lot of reading library, like readers that we introduce to the platform. So that's based on the skill that we believe to be very important reading for our children to have a global library.

And we also work with partners like Lexile to measure children's reading ability and then to measure how they've learned with our major curriculum together with the reading library content. And also for the Hulton Mifling Hotkort content, we've introduced journeys and collections, which are the elementary school and high school curriculum for American students at school today to be accessible and available for China's international school students, who's willing to later on take a global international school path.

And then we partnered also with SSAT. Oh, okay, okay. So that we're then able to be able to. provide our students with a very exclusive opportunity to sign up and to take that assessment. And also, a TOFO primary, TOFA junior for young kids as well as a third-party assessment tool. I see, I see. Okay, so let me maybe take our conversation into one more step, which is the global aspects, because earlier you mentioned emphasizing many ways, VIPKID, the prior roadmap, and the long-term vision aspires to be a global classroom

that's personalized learning. That also fits into the sort of the biggest themes that we see, particularly the Y Combinator, that there is more global innovations, new startups, they all tend to have aspiration to be a global company. And VIPK-King someone is very unique. Your beginning is global because you connect the supply demand through a global platform. Can you share with us with your learning experience? How do you initially build sort of global aspects from beginning, from get-go? What are the challenges that you had to overcome by building global company that's based in China?

Absolutely. So I was at the first Founders Forum two years ago, last year and also this year. This year is so good to have you for both of the founders forums. I really love the YACcombinator family, the community. And then the topic, Anu gave me the first year, was a global company from day one. I see. I see. So it was a very interesting topic.

And I think a VIP kid is able to make this happen for a few reasons. One is, I think we believe that with our teacher community, we are global from day one. I personally interviewed and persuaded our first 20 teachers. I see. The first one was extremely challenging. Actually, how to do you fly to the United States or interview remotely? So I interviewed remotely. I see.

But I did spend three months trying to find teachers in the U.S. I see. Before I found a VIP kid, Portland, Oregon. I see. Los Angeles, California. Do you go to Texas? I didn't go to Texas by then. Actually, New York.

I see. I even went to Toronto, Canada, to find teachers. So by spending three times, there are food. I understand it is extremely difficult for people to come to China. But if they were allowed to work from home and it would be something really beautiful for teachers because every teacher wants to have like tauli, as a teacher helping exceed the learning of every child of student across the globe by the Chinese Sea.

So it's a value that teachers want to teach work locally and teach globally. So the community is essential for our global perspective. because it's our entire supply side. And then our teachers coming from all states and Texas is our largest state. All 50 states? All 50 states. And for the Texas community, we're very proud of our second teacher conference journeys in August, Dallas, Texas this year. The former first lady, Laura Bush, keynote in our session.

She's the whole afternoon. Our teachers feel so proud of. of being a connolly and praised by her. And then Orlando is where we had our third teacher conference. I see. The city named VIP Kid Day. Yeah, Day for the whole city. Yes, 29th of September.

And it's a great honor for our teachers because they felt as a city's, and their contribution is so well recognized by their mayor. And our very first teacher conference is in Salt Lake City, Utah. It's where teachers are so loving and passionate. We will have our fourth one. in Chicago next year. We just signed an AMOU with the city mayor of Chicago by helping the underserved community in Chicago

for the kids to learn Mandarin and will be providing programs for free. So this is the global community that everyone cares so much about and the value is tremendous for the teachers and the local community. So I think that's a very important reason. And secondly, we have a global team from day one as well.

And today, we have a San Francisco office. We just launched a new city office on the Howard Street, 301 Howard, and our teams come from... Interesting. What that team does, you actually didn't realize you have a team in San Francisco.

What that team does it? Do they do customer service or product development? What's their role? I'm very curious to learn. So the team is essentially about teacher success. Oh, okay. So we have people mostly in San Francisco, but we also have a Texas, a Dallas office as well. And then we have team in New York and everywhere.

So the team are from organizations like Teach for America, like at-tech communities in the U.S., people who's worked in, like United Nations, those institutes globally to help teachers be successful. So we have people who really cares about teacher success and they are from the local communities that knows how to do it and how to communicate with our teachers. And we've built a very transparent service platform for our teachers. We have called a Hoh Tong. It's our... Hohong, I see. Right. It's a posting system where our teachers can send us tasks or questions or tickets or anything that we need to work. and we communicate very proactively with our teacher community.

And we have teachers keeping in leaders formed all those Facebook groups and initiated local, like, events, like communities. But those are some of the work are facilitated by our teacher success team. But I really love and admire our U.S. team because they constantly fly to all different states. A sponsor teacher event and make sure teachers can have a great time. And whenever there is something we need to work on our address, they would be in the teacher's house the next day and be there to make sure that they're successful. I think it's because we've got the right people to build out the global. That's perfect. I think two key success factors.

One is the wonderful community. The other is the teams that's underground in the United States. Right. And if I may say the last one, the last one I think is where people, you know, in our Beijing office, we really make sure that we have a very good communication. I see. And we cater for a different time zone, oftentimes six years. I was going to ask you about it.

It is difficult. A lot of global organizations, what they struggled with, the difficult is build a global culture. That that's being very mindful about the other teams that would be 16 hours away. When we schedule a meeting, we don't want to schedule a meeting when people have to wake up in the wee hours. So how do you, I'm curious,

how do you sort of cultivate that? Build that sort of Beijing teams is very mindful about the US team. The US team is also, when they collaborate, they really sort of think for the other side, make sure that we can create a environment

internally. People really work together to build success for the global platform. Right. So firstly, we make sure when we like operate, we have the most availability to our teachers, in this organization we set up.

So if you think about how teachers can apply an interview with VIPK is 24 hours. We have a team that work on night shift. Oh, nice shift. I see. To make sure teachers access. I see. You have a night shift the team.

The value, I think, then very naturally would impact on how the team work together. So I was asking the head of my global business development team, and he said I have a morning call at 4 a.m., a morning conference call, not a morning call. The morning call probably with 3.m. And because of the time differences. And then you work with your partner center.

I think it's just the culture is led by example. Yes. If the leadership teams would want to do this and they would accommodate more to the teams that are not in the bigger office, I think it made much easier. And also we also have this concept of global due headquarters idea. So we want our teachers to trust that. So teachers sometimes would say, this is too good to be true.

Are you guys for real? You're so far away. So we want teachers to understand that our American headquarter in San Francisco office is there to make sure we have teachers' success. And our team is there so important and critical to our future success. And we're keeping investing in the team. Now it's a 30 people team. We're investing the team to be a. a 200 people team.

So we want to make sure that the team there has more they can execute on and help the teacher with so that we can build the culture. Terrific. So particularly the one thing you mentioned, Cindy, the culture is best to shape or most shaped by leaders' behavior. That's true for so many successful organizations. Maybe switch gear to the last stretch of our dialogue this morning, which is looking forward to the long-term future,

the future of education, particularly, in the context of a massive new wave of technologies, for example, AI, that will give us so much more technological capabilities. What is your big, long-term, more ambitious visions for the future education because you already have a very, very strong, vibrant platform? What's that vision with those new technologies? Can you share with us? Absolutely.

So the common theme there is for the big, global classroom that we're able to build on the cloud. Two things. One is personalization. The other is empowerment. So the idea for personalization is that learning should be engaging and effective and efficacious and fun. But then every child is so different. So how can we find the most appropriate in engaging, motivating teachers for the child?

And then how do we make sure there is a personalized learning path based on the knowledge graph that we've built the content, like massive bank of readers and learning content and books and everything? And then also how do we make sure that the way teacher engage with the child is most focused on how this child learns? And then what are the methodology, the training we need to give to teachers? And then for the empowerment section, I think for teachers' job, it's been almost most challenging job on human history. But then the common traits for good teachers are very, very similar, the passion for your students, the love, the understanding of this child, and then the real-time interaction between the childhood and teacher to motivate and to inspire. So how do we help our teachers build a more effective? tool so that they would have an AI tutor, AI teaching assistant to help our teachers to do their job better. So our teachers can be more effective and they can get paid more. They can be happier

with what they do and they can make more impact because if they can only teach one, like teacher 10 students, they can probably they don't teach 100 students, even a thousand students when we're able to empower our teachers with technology. Terrific. That's a very, very powerful vision for the long-term future. My final question to you, Cindy, is looking back, looking forward, your very, very inspiring journey. What are the key advice that you will have for today's young generation of entrepreneurs? Just thinking about starting or just starting,

if there's one important piece of advice to them, what that would be? Great question. I mean, think about this, but at the same time, may I also ask you a question on the technology piece? Because I think you're the model for every, like, parents who are tech background and want to be global and help their children learn better. So I have two questions. Okay. But I will give you my answers, but I would make sure that you also give the important advice to the start. Absolutely, sure. I want to, well, you see. Always we help figure out the most important one. But I think my question to you is, one is how should an engineer, product manager, or anyone in tech, think about education sector going forward?

Because traditionally it's fintech that matters more. It's med tech, medical technology matters more. What are the opportunities in education technology that every parent, if they're able to change the world and make it better for their children going forward? what should they be thinking about for the sector? And also on the AI question, what are the things you believe to be the driving force for the change for the future? Okay. So I will share some of my thoughts with the obvious caveat, I think these are coming from my personal observation. But I'm not a domain expert. This is more observing from a macro perspective and project that into the education space.

And in many ways, Cindy, what you articulated earlier is, in my view, is a very, very expensive, comprehensive vision because you've addressed the learning side, the teaching side, the platform, the personalization, the knowledge graph, that connects everything. So on top of that, here's a couple of things. For me, that's important. One is, I think ultimately technology should be able to transform pretty much everything we do as a society. And the education is perhaps among the most important. To me personally, it's always about education medical services. These are the only two human professions that are unique.

They make human better. Education, I perhaps will pay a little more emphasized because if imagine every kids or every adult can always learn more, can become wiser, empower with more knowledge, the world will be a much, much better place. There are many positive things can come out of learning. So personally, I taught actually briefly in Fuad University before I went to Carnegie Mellon. And I always have this sort of lingering passion for teaching because it's fundamental importance.

Having said that, I also sort of observed education for the past couple thousand years hasn't really changed that much. Technology hasn't really made a massive uplift or transformation yet. while you have done in many ways is a tremendous step forward. What I think at its core for the innovators in the air tech space you to think about is the end-to-end complete learning scenario because technology is only a means to serve end. We cannot sort of put the horse before the cart. With technology sort of focus on technology, think the other way around,

I think we are all better of thinking the learning, the teaching, the complete scenario. let's say, for example, early childhood, what I learned is sort of my incomplete knowledge. A sixth grade in the United States, learning fraction mathematics, is actually the defining moment. That would be the most sort of leading indicators on this kid's intellectual development. There's a lot of sort of cutting-edge technologies, including brain scans too. So analyze how a sixth grader's learn fractions. And I was sort of honing on that at complete scenarios.

How do we teach, how do we really understand a six-year-old, six-graders learn fracturing mathematics? And then use that to make sure that our content, our teachings, our learning experiences are truly transformed to the next level so that every kid's will be given much, much better opportunities to learn fraction mathematics. And that opens the door for them to whether they want to be an artist, whenever they want to be an engineer, they can all be better off. So I will focus on scenario, end-to-end scenario, and then say what technology can do. That's sort of one piece of thoughts. The other is on the technological side. This is my personal view. AI is massive.

We have an unprecedented set of technological capabilities. For me, I think we need to understand what's the core essence of what AI is. My view on this is, AI is about a rapidly efficient way of acquiring knowledge. we can use sensors, cameras, whatever sensors, to observe a phenomenon and use deep learning, machine learning, self-technics to rapidly distill into certain knowledge. Because knowledge is power, as Bacon said. With knowledge, we would understand.

So I think with the early cusp of understand fundamentally how human learn, how kids learn language, how adults learn a new programming language or new manufacturing skills, we're at the very early cusp. I think VIPCIPCIP is a powerful platform, global platform, with additional technological capability, you will be able to get so much more personalized data to figure out at the early frontier how kids learn language. I'm pretty sure you'll expand your part of the map, how, let's say, kids learn artistic skills, drawings, dancing, or designing new machinaries.

You know, the future is unlimited. The key is can we so blend technology with passionate innovators like yourself and then truly use the opportunity in front of us to make learning so much better for everyone. I'm truly confident with that the world will be a vastly better place for decades to come. Thank you. That's sort of how, but take that as a name as comments because I sort of often fancy myself to be a teacher, even though I taught for a year as a teacher at the Fuller University. In the future, when there is an opportunity, I certainly would be interesting in the content

why see China or YC overall, Cindy would love to explore future opportunity we can collaborate, helping more innovators figure out on new technologies, new way of teaching and learnings, and hopefully that can be synergistic to VIPCIDA as well. That's really exciting. I think to echo what you said, learning science is a huge opportunity here to help more kids. And I totally agree with you that we should start from the scenario where a sixth grade child learns fractions in math. And I apparently failed when I was a sixth grade. And the seventh grade is where I had the most challenge learning math.

And if the child can be assisted and helped with technology. Learning better. It just builds so much better foundation for the future learning. Thank you for the great visionary comments. Thank you. Can we come back to your wisdom if you can share with, and if there's sort of one piece of feedback or advice to a young funders today, what that would be?

Okay. So I think the most important thing is always the most apparent thing. And it's always so hard to stick to it every day, even if you think you believe in it, but then I think you would need to check on your actions, your agenda schedule every day to see if you're investing the most time on it. So my answer there is customer success. So I think for VIP kids, the core of its success is because parents, teachers,

our colleagues, all 10,000 of them. Ultimately, what we want is student success. the young minds being sparkled to learn and curious and imagine and everything. It's the dream that everyone wants for their own children is what everyone want for the hundred and thousands of VIPK students. And there are a lot of challenges that we talk about a global company, the culture, the time zone, the technology, the day one problem, market fit. But then how does everyone keep, how do everyone keep working to work?

together, going through all the challenges, because there are always a lot of them. It's the common goal that we want student success. And then go to the teacher success part is also important that we can align on this. And then, like, I personally would fly 25 hours to be at our teachers' conference in Orlando because I had to be in another business meeting. And after flying 25 hours straight, I went to the conference straight away. And I stood there for four hours so that our teachers can take photos one-on-one with me. And then everyone shared with me in three sentences, their own story.

And more than half are in tears. And everyone thanked the VIPQ platform. Because they said, Cindy, make sure tell your team. It's their diligent in answering all the hothong, like, post-questions and communities made our success. So that our teacher said, I'm a retired teacher. I broke my leg last year. I can't teach, but I need the income. So VIP kid really helped me loving my kid and then making an income.

Another teacher said I had breast cancer, but I was pregnant. I worry so much I cannot have a healthy baby. Like VIP kid gave me the emotional support, the income opportunity, and then now here's my photo of my loving baby. So I think it's customer, student success, teacher success that are so critical. our team, many of our week-up calls are a set of 10 customer phone calls from the previous day. Some of us would do it 9 a.m. on the way to work. 7 a.m. on the way to, like doing in the gym, or for me, 60, 30 a.m. to listen to all those

customer feedback. And then it motivates the team greatly to go to work and solve the quite challenges. So I think the thing is very apparent, but it's very difficult to stick to it every day and make sure that everyone does it. So I think the VIPK team bears in mind that our mission is to inspire an empowering every child for the future. It's such a challenging goal because for the future already it's a difficult topic. And what we want for the future for our children is a global kid, global citizen. And then how do we build up their 21st century skills and how do we build up this global competency? This is something that we really need to work on. But inspiring and empowering power itself is also very challenging because it's not just teach the children, give them the fish, it's teach them how to fish and make sure that they're inspired to learn, they want to learn.

So all these mission and ambition we have drives the team forward. And I think as a young entrepreneur, it's very important to check on this every day and to figure out whether. we're doing the right thing. So well, said, Cindy, it's truly inspiring. Thank you very, very much for the wonderful interview session. Today, on behalf of Y Combinators or community members, very much, I want to thank you for your time and best wishes for continued success with the WebKit. It's an inspiring journey.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Thanks for listening. So, as always, you can find the transcript and the video at blog. dot ycombinator.com.

And if you have a second, it would be awesome to give us a rating and review wherever you find your podcast. See you next time.