YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Hulett

lines on the record: 87
first: 2019-10-14
most recent: 2019-10-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So when you think about in terms of how people learn, obviously people are twitchier than ever. They're doing something. So you're talking about when you talk about digestible, it's not really the way language has been taught in the past. It's been in a very long-term classroom oriented where effort is required rather than instant learning.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you can chunk out the lessons to make them more approachable versus feeling like you're behind your desktop and you're going to allocate a couple hours a day, which no one wants to do. And that's what fundamentally changes the bite-size aspect of the learning. Also, you can take advantage of cool things that make it much more personalized. We grab through ARKit and the Apple iPhone environment different images that you can collect, kind of like Pokemon Go for Learning, so you can actually personalize objects around you and incorporate that into conversation. Those are things and experiences you haven't been able to do in the past.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think language learning, if you break down, and I'm not an academic in language learning and they roll their eyes with the people on my team when they hear me speak about it, but it's really about usage, frequency, and time. And we have a very specific pedagogy called immersion. So we're not teaching you anything. Procedurally, we don't conjugate things for you. You're just learning as you're seeing objects and video and pictures. What's changed over time is that thanks to the 3 billion worldwide market of smartphones, everyone's ready to have digestible content.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We built speech recognition of the technology to get people producing the actual language so you become more proficient and sound like a native speaker. But that landscape has changed significantly over time. It's interesting that as players like Duolingo ventered the market, we've actually seen our brand awareness go up. And one of the things about language learning that I'm excited about is it's still growing at pretty strong clips. There's people like Duolingo, there's Babel. Those are some of the larger players in ourselves. There's a ton of other people in this space. And I find this market as being relatively new to it, relatively disloyal. So we find that 56% of our customers have already used another product So, we think there's some opportunity there to go deeper in the stack to get. Different types of experiences for customers”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's mentioned before $50 billion worldwide. 80% of that's schools and offline tutoring, like we talked about before, it's schools and tutoring is still a big part of that. Digital is smaller. It's single digits, but growing quickly. Unlike a dynamic you've seen in other markets. In the United States, we're still number one, you know, in terms of overall dollars. All my competitors are private, so I have no idea what their real revenue is. I would say in terms of share, you could definitely, you know, look at Duolinga and say they've done a fantastic job. They've built a very engaging product, very addictive product. We like to think of ourselves as a product that actually gets efficacy and results.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, about a third of the time of the kids allocated time in the class is using the product. That gets data, keystrokes, results back to the teacher. They can personalize what the issues are with the student and provide very personalized training plans for the student. There are six elements to the science of reading. We need to be teaching that across the board of the United States I learned about those six elements. I have one called phonemic awareness. I'm dyslexic. The other is her phonic structural analysis, comprehension, vocabulary, and autometricity, which is sometimes lacking for me called fluid fluid.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. And the Barksdale Institute, and there's been a lot of tech investment in it. This product's interesting because we probably have quantitatively more PhDs that know the science of reading than most companies have in terms of software developers. And there's like 17 evidence-based academic research papers that show that this software works. It's software that's worked in conjunction with a teacher in the classroom. It's not a self-serve product. It's not what you typically have read about like the flip model where the student does all the work and the efficacy is a little bit lacking. This is a product that's used within the environment of the classroom. The teacher gets personalized.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's well of my passions is literacy. Two-thirds of kids are reading below grade level by the time they get to grade three. And this is nothing new and that trend continues through eighth grade. Unfortunately, it's been like that for 30 years. I'm sure you've had, you've talked, this has been around forever.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is literacy, and the other half is consumer and enterprise. And so those components are what I'm restructuring right now. The Lexia business is growing pretty nicely 20% year over year”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a little bit of an Amazon, but we sell through Amazon, but no CDs at all. About half our business is selling to USK-12 schools.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the young. Yes. MacGyva. That's right and not dirty. Bailing wire and Elmer's glue. Right. In all seriousness, I've been in situations before where company's about ready to run out of money, investors aren't happy. Those are stressful situations. I haven't been in a situation where there's a world-class brand. And customers want the product. They like the current digital product. It just needs some restructuring and some innovation. That's a different type of problem.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mobile's been around since 2000? Oh, quite a while. 10 years, I'd say. And so, you know, we're obviously playing a little bit to catch up. And the space is about a $50 billion language learning space. About 6% of that's digital. There's a lot of competition in the space. But we're starting to make some strides there.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that a lot of companies get stuck in this rut of lack of innovation because it's very hard to move from $1,000 CD to a product that's $9.99 a month. And I think those are hard decisions to make. And most companies don't survive that. So we went through that. I was hired to bring on a team and a product and really make this product really mobile native, which we've started to do.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why? Yeah, it's always hard to think through, you know, because I wasn't there, the playbook as to what got him there. But I do think it's very difficult to cannibalize yourself as a company. You think about which company has been successful turning themselves around from business models, like Adobe Comes to Mind, moving to a subscription model. Apple obviously did a major turnaround. But not many brands have been able to do that. And I think Rosetta Stone is one of those brands that one is well known It's a well liked. It almost has a nostalgia to it. My biggest competition is actually the fact that everyone knows who I am. I just don't know how I have an app.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think, like, most companies, the arc of Rosetta Stone has changed significantly over the last five years. We bought several companies years ago. One of them was Lexia, which is really interesting company that focused on literacy in USK-12 schools And also the arc of the consumer business with Rosetta Stone took a different turn. They were later to innovate in terms of digital technologies than I think they would have liked. They focused on the Alexia software. And our last CD was sold in December of 2017 right as I was getting into the company.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And so this was going along. CDs, obviously, everyone had first CDs at home and then in their computers and then in Walkmen and things like that, but that changed really drastically. People didn't learn this way anymore.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Then so, well, it worked for him in terms of immersion. And so he decided to build software around it. And so CDs came out. We became known for the iconic yellow box, the CDs, airplane kiosks. Right. And built a huge brand around language learning”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hell of a time with Russian. Decided that 27 years ago actually been a public company for 11 years. And the company was started by a gentleman who actually had difficulty learning a language but had previously learned German Because he was immersed in it. So he tried to replicate that experience in software.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The company history is fascinating. The founder was unsuccessful at learning a language. Had learned German by being immersed.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years ago, it's a long time. And it started with essentially I used to learn languages was you went to class, essentially, or a night class if you're an adult or anything else. And then you would learn, and you would use flashcards and everything else, but you would not. And then they moved into CDs and tapes and then CDs where you listened to people speaking, essentially.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely The internet companies. Yeah, yeah. Friend of mine has a recruiter called me. What actually got me most interested in the company was my personal story around literacy. I'm dyslexic. I have three kids, my youngest child is dyslexic. And most people don't know this when they hear Rosetta Stone is growing part of our revenue is literacy software. And that really spoke to me. And so that's really what got me excited.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And not as much. But it's been affiliated with IACs. Absolutely. And again, that was one of the successful things pulled out of my. There were several like that within Microsoft that spilled out. And so how did you get to Rosetta Stone? You've got sort of like you're a typical journey of the internet companies.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“else Glassdoor Avo. Anything with a directory retired me to Expedia, and I started the corporate travel group. And then since then, I've been doing both startups and turnarounds.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And we were trying everything. We licensed content to HBO, to airplanes, anything with a screen. But eventually I left, went back to Seattle, eventually that company was bought by Viacom. Of the board members of Adam Films at the time was Rich Barton. He hired me at Expedia, Rich at that time CEO of Expedia, now CEO of Zillow.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but it was interesting because a lot of these ideas weren't super early and super correct just wasn't the right time. Absolutely. There weren't mobile phones. There weren't mobile phones changed and everything, obviously. But a lot of this stuff was bandwidth and Bandwidth, which I know Kim, you don't even say that word anymore, but ability to access the internet and the device was critically important.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We eventually raised a bunch of money and we merged with then Shockwave and the geniuses that we were at the time combined the companies and called it Adam Shockwave. And I think we were the last significant round. Raised in San Francisco at the time in the Bay Area, Sequoia Capital, Mike Morritz led it. It was like around $20 million. And that was right as he sent that ominous slide deck”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I joined him because we believe that short form content was going to be big on the internet. We started licensing content.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. And it was really interesting. Seattle this time, there was Real Networks, which was a big company, it was down by the water. We had Microsoft, which was sort of still pretending the internet didn't exist for many, many years, even though they started MSN badly. And most of their internet efforts were bad, essentially. And then Amazon had its beginnings there. And I remember visiting him when he had five or six people. But then there were a lot of gaming companies, essentially. That's right.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that was early in my career. Saw the wheel player download like 300 times a day and then eventually by the time I left. Post IPO is about 300,000 times a day”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are Savvy and Gl A dancer Tap dance are quite talented, and we had a hell of a time streaming him because he was so fast. So we really had to go in and instruct Spike Lee on how to direct someone.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's true. Also, we had a challenge when we had Spike Lee come in and do a, I remember why I haven't thought about this in years”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the only way you could actually enjoy anything was streaming at the time, so real networks, then progressive networks invented audio streaming and progressively pun intended got better and better at it, higher quality, started with broadcasting voice. Then we got into music. And then as bandwidth started opening up, we got into video and other friends.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it really was. At the time, you couldn't really do anything over the internet because it was all dial-up 28.8. And then the big innovation was 56K with the US robotics modem. This is dating myself, which is, I think, illegal in Washington State.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had just left Microsoft. I was employee 50. I was one of the first product managers there. I was the product manager for the real player.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I compiled it on a SunOS box. I got into Unix and X Windows at the time Thought, wow, this is going to change the world because I was using Telnet and VI and I was somewhat techie. You know, my only techie, mine little geeky. And then I wanted to get involved with it. So I looked around for innovative Seattle companies that were doing things on the internet and I found one called Progressive Networks. Sent a letter actually to the CEO Rob Glazer.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I've always been in Washington State. I've always done technology. I've been professionally promiscuous in terms of what I focused on. I like you already. I've jumped around between every software vertical imaginable travel games, marketplaces, business models like SaaS and microtransactions and stuff like that, freemium. I actually started out at a small software tech company in Seattle, got fascinated with the internet.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as someone who wants to be fluent in every language but only swear words, but in my spare time I'm a technology journalist and you're listening to Recode Decode, a podcast about tech politics and media. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair is Matt Hewlett, the president of education company Rosetta Stone after he got there in 2017 the company stopped selling CDs for learning a new language and now focuses on reaching students on their phones. One of his previous jobs was as president of the corporate travel division of Expedia under Barry Diller who has been on this podcast many times before so has Dara Kost Rashahi so we know lots of people in comment. Welcome to Rico Decode Matt.”
2019-10-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rosetta Stone President Matt Hulett · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT