YouSaid · the spoken record

Cindy Mi

lines on the record: 59
first: 2022-12-06
most recent: 2022-12-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“A member of Masters of Scale to get access to a year's worth of courses and content on the Masters of Scale Courses app. Find out more at masterscale.com slash membership”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Master the scale is a weight what original. Our executive producers are June Cohen, Darren Triff, and Jordan McLeod, our head of content and production is Lori Hoffman. Our producers are Adam Skeuse, Catherine Clark Bray, Alex Morris, Tucker Lugurski, and Chris Gautier. Our editor at large is Bob Saffian. Our music director is Ryan Holliday, original music and sound design by Eduardo Rivera. Audio editing by Keith J. Nelson, Stephen Davies, Andrew Nolt, and Brad Worrell, mixing and mastering by Brian Pugh. Special thanks to Chris Yea, Elisa Schreiber, Arya Finger, Saida Sapieva, Greg Beato, Adam Heiner, Alfonso Bravo, Colin Howarth, Willem Krolls, Tim Cronin, Kelsey Capitano, Samioputa, Anna Pizzano, Sarah Tartar, Leah Sarmedis, Charlie Minesis, Chine Azequena, Emily McManus, Halle Bondi, And Sierra Black.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you remember, the IP kid was designed to put the student at the center of the universe. With VIP teacher, that shifts. Time will tell whether the VIP teacher membership platform will succeed. Remember the teachings of the NBY problem. Even small changes, much less seismic ones, have big impacts you can't predict. But as of now, VIP teacher has a four thousand person waitlist. Their building and rebuilding, using the best incentives within the reach. How will these incentives affect the communities of families, students, and teachers in orbit around them? We don't know yet, but that's the beauty of a challenge that lasts as long as your business does. I'm Reid Hoffman. Thanks for listening.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Once the survey results came back, Cindy and her team designed a new program based on what their teachers told them might get them to stay. It's a membership program to help teachers grow their own careers. They call it VIP Teacher.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sending her team, Noah will take time to make all the necessary adjustments to their ecosystem. In the meantime, their teacher community needs tangible incentives to stick around, so VIP kid sent out a huge survey to every teacher in its network, trying to assess what form those incentives might take.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those partners include Topica, a Vietnamese Learning Company that recently created a mashup with VIP Kid called Tapaka Kid. Cindy also cited another surprising partner, American school districts, whose student outcomes have suffered due to the pandemic.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This incredible support provided Cindy with all the incentive she needed to keep going. Instead of folding VIP Kid, she pivoted their base of operations to Singapore, and they're now expanding their work across Asia.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a moment like this, when a black hole opens up and throws your system into chaos, remember that you are the central gravitational force keeping your stakeholders together. It means, above all, being human with all your constituent groups. That's what Cindy kept in mind when she recorded a video for all VIP kid instructors in October of twenty twenty one.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember, with any multiplayer system, each trajectory affects the others. When part of the system is disrupted, so are the rest.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Level of impact on the business. So, how did you think about it? How did you start adjusting? What were the lessons from that early adjustment?”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“VIP kid had reached a $3.5 billion valuation. They had around 100,000 teachers in their system with around a million students throughout their then eight year lifespan. And that's where we might have ended the story, except for the fact that in twenty twenty one a truly seismic policy change in China ripped a hole in the foundation of the VIP kid universe. In August of that year, the Chinese government made two announcements. One, they were banning all for profit tutoring companies for core school subjects, and two, they were banning the use of foreign based tutors. Shares in education funds, including VIP Kid, plummeted, and the industry was sent reeling. The company had two months to comply. The policy shift happens it must feel just like the ground falling out from underneath you.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The referral system had an obvious benefit to VIB Kid in accelerating scale and had an equally obvious financial benefit to the teachers making the referrals, but it also benefited the new teachers in a real way, giving them tools to succeed in their new video classroom environment. This story is a great reminder that one way to keep up with evolving conditions is to incent your users to invest in the platform. It's a way to distribute the work without eroding the quality of returns. Eventually, VIP Kid was receiving ten to twenty thousand teacher applications a month. They started expanding their offerings to subjects like science, math, and history, and they began hosting major conventions for teachers around the United States. In twenty eighteen, they cleared a five hundred million dollars round of financing. By twenty twenty, when the pandemic started introducing everyone to the idea of online school”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This referral system was a massive recruitment and training unlock. Social media channels with names like Teacher Mike or Teacher Stephanie would get tens of thousands of views in which current VIP cadeachers would advise new teachers on everything from how to create props and animated backgrounds to how to work your mic and video camera.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This referral program let current teachers cultivate high-quality referrals and check in on their progress. In other words, it both distributed the work of recruitment and gamified it.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can hear how these feedback loops tie the fates of each player together, the incentive for each person to serve their counterpart well becomes the gravity that keeps customers and providers orbiting around each other. Instead of spinning off on their own trajectories. The IP kid also use clever incentive tactics to get their existing teachers to recruit new ones.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The IP kid also chose to make parents' comments visible and left room for teachers to leave comments for parents. This was a way to create feedback loops, help teachers and students get better results.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a powerful lesson in building incentives into your business. Part of the game design you use to build your platform is about which incentives you highlight at what time. Cindy's team took this principle to heart as they continued to build out the incentive structure of their platform. VIP Kid built a rating system for the teachers just like Uber or TaskRabbit or any other marketplace platform. Instead of five stars, the teachers would get rated five apples, and with that high grade would come real, tangible benefits.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We actually talked about that teach for all network with the organization's founder, Wendy Kopp. You can find that episode in our show feed.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cindy wasn't talking about changing the payment incentive itself. She was talking about how it was presented to the teacher market, and when the first applicants came in, she saw there were people incentivized not by money, but by the rewards of the job.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a lesson for every company, and especially any network platform. The first hundred people really do set the tone and shape of the culture. So you need to be intentional about who you attract and how.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you'll remember, this was where Cindy got stuck in her quest to grow her last school. She didn't have enough native English speaking teachers living locally, and incentivizing teachers to move from the US and Canada had proven a challenge. But as an online platform, VIP Kids' potential recruitment pool was every teacher in North America who needed some extra cash, which basically means every K twelve teacher out there. Cindy knew from her time in the US that many teachers there unfortunately don't earn as much as they deserve, so they often look for supplemental income. But here, notice how Cindy made an important choice in how VIP kid calibrated their pitch.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not every disruption to your planetary system will be negative, like a collapsing star. It could be a delegation of friendly aliens bringing transformative technology, but it will still upend your system of incentives. At VIP Kid, suddenly, everyone in the company, including grumbling engineers, was recalibrating their orbit. That company wide scramble to accommodate demand highlighted a larger scale challenge for the company.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At this point, the VIP Git flywheel was gathering speed. Parents were telling other parents, and in fact, one ended up telling a lot of people.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they were still small, Cindy could take the handcrafted step of calling and meeting one-on-one with parents considering enrollment. To answer those questions, this attention to detail became its own incentive for parents to enroll.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Orienting around student learning incentives would be the company's guiding star. The VIP kid team worked for months developing their platform around the four young children of investors and friends. They improved their video software and helped hone the teachers twenty five minute lesson plans. When they were satisfied with their learning experience, they made a video promoting VIP kid for social media.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Teaching the children of her investors and of her co founder's good friend, Cindy definitely had incentive to make the platform work. But in those early days of video conferencing, the IP kid was navigating questions like how to use colorful backdrops without causing the webcams to blur or how to support picture and picture animations.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. If VIP kid was going to succeed, it had to put the child's learning experience at the center of its gravitational universe, because in the end, how well the student learns is the measuring stick that matters. The VIP kid focused in on that goal way, way in.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Her platform to work, Cindy knew she would have to manage those three different incentive drivers affordability, flexibility, and stability, and how they manifest on the student side versus the teacher side is different. But which player do you orient around first? For Cindy, the choice was clear.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The double-sided, impossible Trinity at scale may sound more like a killer band name. A classic business term. When Cindy describes what it means, what it actually resembles most is the three body problem from the start of the show.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With this observation under her belt, Cindy created a new business plan, finished her semester abroad, then returned home to China to build a brand new company. She called it VIP Kid. So it builds on a bunch of stuff you already knew, right? Which is like, okay, how do we create really good learning experiences? How do we have students having delight in education? But now you have new elements. You have, oh, well, it has to be done through technology. You have to recruit teachers because you have to have this network.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back on how to create and keep creating better incentives within your business with Cindy Mee, a VIP kid. If you're enjoying this episode, we hope you're incentivized to share it with friends. Just hit the share button in your podcast app and hear my complete conversation with Cindy become a master's scale member at masterscale dot com There you'll hear some great moments we didn't have time for in the episode like how VIP Kid developed a reciprocal program for their English speaking teachers to learn Mandarin and you'll hear how they navigated the international spotlight after an investment from the late Kobe Bryant You won't want to miss it When we left off, Cindy had slashed and burned the tutoring business she tended for a dozen years in order to build something new. She started by heading back to school to pursue her MBA. This included a semester abroad at Cornell University and it was there that she started observing the real incentives.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listeners, Bob, here, if you listen to rapid response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the Devilware's Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was clearly a jump off the cliff moment in Cindy's entrepreneurial journey, but the incentive for her to make the leap was compelling. She saw that the flywheel at her old company was stuck, and she had a better chance of putting the right incentive structures in place by building something new from scratch.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In solving one incentive's challenge, she had opened up another. Cindy saw she wasn't going to be able to win the talent she needed. If she was going to get this new idea off the ground, she was going to have to send an asteroid crashing through her current business.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today, a pivot to online teaching seems like a natural decision, but in the pre pandemic, presume world of twenty twelve, it seemed more like a story from Cindy's sci fi magazines. Even so, putting classes online would create a much improved value proposition for teachers. It would allow Cindy to recruit instructors from the West without asking them to move halfway around the world. It seemed like the right direction. Just one problem.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The demand for native English-speaking teachers was fast outpacing Cindy's ability to recruit them. For some people, moving thousands of miles away to teach English in a place where you don't speak the language yourself is a daring adventure, for others it can sound daunting, lonely, or even frightening.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember, incentives change over time. What appeals to an infant isn't what appeals to that same child as a teenager, and what held the attention of kids in the early two thousand wouldn't cut it for the kids of twenty twelve. But there was a second incentive's problem Cindy was dealing with, and this one couldn't be solved with a device.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the span of time that ABC English had been running, a wandering star called the smartphone had disrupted multiple industries, including education. Of course, China was the center of smartphone manufacturing, took a little longer for iPhones to start making their way into the hands of Chinese customers. But by twenty twelve, eighty two percent of the Chinese population had a cell phone, and Chinese customers were buying smartphones at a faster rate than in the US.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could spend an entire episode breaking down what helped the company grow their customer base by 200X, like orienting their success around students' overall engagement and not just mastery of certain isolated skills. Or, like fostering a strong connection between teachers, students, and their families, but instead we're going to accelerate to the point where after a dozen years in business ABC English hit a plateau”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Giving out little school bags was a modest enticement, but the handcrafted charm worked. Parents did start to enroll in ABC's learning centers, and the company started to thrive. Soon one hundred students became two hundred, and eventually many more”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is an excellent observation and key to building any network product. You need to get multiple flywheel spinning at once on the customer side and the provider side by offering the right incentives. ABC English was a brick and mortar education company, but the rules for growth are the same as for online businesses. Cindy needed to recruit teachers and students at the same time, calibrating the incentives for each.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Olympics put a clear incentive in front of the parents of Beijing. They had eight years before their city would be on the world stage. Cindy and her uncle were there to help the next generation get ready. Were some of the early lessons in that effort to start ABC English?”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was a huge risk for Cindy, especially in an environment where higher education was not only valued but considered the only route to success. But the possibilities entrepreneurship had to offer were a powerful incentive. Cindy decided it was worth a shot.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She helped her uncle with his tutoring business, and in two thousand she helped him move to Beijing to form a brand new brick and mortar school. They called it ABC English.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As incentive structures go, this one is a classic. First, endure this hardship for a greater reward right after. But there's a second lesson we can learn from Cindy's offer to her students. There are often ways for buyer and seller, or in this case teacher and pupil, to align their incentives. Cindy wanted to share her sci-fi adventure stories with the children just like the children wanted to hear them. Both were looking forward to the reward. With this fact in place, the children were perfectly happy to take on the ABCs. Keep this in mind when you think about the relationship between yourself and your customer, or if you have a marketplace product, the relationship between customers and providers. Their incentives may not be totally aligned, but they don't have to be fully oppositional either. Bolstered by a successful trial by fire with a three year old, Sydney leaned into teaching”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cindy watched her uncle teach a masterclass, not just in English, but in creating the right incentives, because four year olds respond to stories and games, not severe wrote memorization, for Cindy, who was not much older than these children herself, something clicked. School didn't have to be a place of humiliation and shame. It could be a place where learning is fun. Cindy enjoyed helping her uncle as a teaching assistant, but she was soon thrust into the role of instructor.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Priscindi, learning the answers to these tantalizing questions, was all the incentive she needed. She started buying herself English lessons on audio cassette, if you remember those. She had another way to accelerate her learning as well. Her uncle was in the tutoring business, teaching English to small children.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you may have guessed, this exchange with Cindy about Liu Chi Sin inspired our planetary metaphor at the top of the show. Cindy's love of science fiction was a gateway for her curiosity about the wider world. That curiosity became its own incentive, even as she tuned out of math class, she tuned in to a different project, teaching herself English.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out of curiosity, what kinds of science fiction were you reading, if you remember, as the escape from a horrible classroom experience?”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This would be embarrassing for anyone, but for a student in the Chinese educational system at that time it was borderline ruinous. In that awful moment, Cindy lost any incentive to push past her obstacles in the class. Instead, she disengaged. This demotivated feeling is one I actually remember from my own middle school experience, which I shared with Cindy. When I was in seventh grade, I was taking a French class that was so boring that I read a science fiction book all through class. And when I was asked any questions, I said pa, you know, which I don't know.”
2022-12-06 · Masters of Scale · Build the right incentives, w/VIPKid’s Cindy Mi · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT