YouSaid · the spoken record

Sameer Shariff

lines on the record: 44
first: 2021-08-12
most recent: 2021-08-12
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

“Have to go with my parents. I'm a recent parent now as well. We have a one and a half year old now and all of the opportunities I've had in my life. I think it stemmed from my parents both the sacrifices they made in their lives. They immigrated here right around when I was born and this journey I've been on, like being able to start a company and take this path. It's obviously a high risk path. I think I wouldn't have necessarily known how to do it without a safety net. And I think back to like my parents in their lives and the fact that they weren't able to take those kind of risks in their lives, but because they had to provide an opportunity to me. And I've always appreciated them a ton, but I think being a new parent now appreciated them that much more. And yeah, I hope to be half as good a parent as they are. And so I think when you say kindest, that's probably the most obvious and probably biggest one that comes to mind.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But back then it was pretty strange. And so, and I think every super interesting company as well. We've just taken a lot of inspiration for how they've built their team, how they've scaled. So I think that's probably the one that comes to mind. We've spoken with the founders there before and kind of gotten some inspiration from them. Nate in particular, Airbnb has been involved in the company. Another person and sort of company that comes to mind is Katrina Lake at Citrix. gotten to know her more recently, but I heard her speak years ago and she similar story in terms of challenges raising money. I think she raised something like 50 or $60 million before the IPO in the lifetime of the company up before the IPO. And a lot of that, I think, resonated with our early days at the company. I think she's really, really smart around building the right team. And so I've gotten to spend some time with her as well. And she's another role kind of role model and mentor I would consider who I think I've kind of learned from her journey and tried to emulate.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had to pick one, I mean, we've kind of followed Airbnb's story for a long time. Weeded Y Comedator back in 2014, they had done it a few years before us. And I remember there was a lot of parallels between our story as we were going through Y Commodor and theirs, I think similar revenue scale, similar skepticism about what we were working on. And I remember Paul Graham making that comparison a few times during our course there. And what's interesting about them is their sort of international cross-border marketplace creating kind of a new behavior. You'll probably remember the days when sleeping on someone's guest room or something was considered weird. And obviously Airbnb has managed to normalize that in the same way. Like there was a lot of skepticism about what we were building. The idea that people would pay to just talk to a friendly Native English speaker, like that was kind of a novel idea. That was a category that we created when we started Cambly. Obviously, we've won some people over to that idea.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That takes a ton of cognitive load for you. It's not as fun for you and it's not as fun for them. I think what you want is people who can come in and really take a high level of ownership.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The letting go can be hard, especially if you've been doing something for a while, but it's super important, I think, to get the like one, you'll hire people who are much better at doing that thing than you are. And so that's great. I think the more you can give those folks full ownership and autonomy, whatever they're taking over, the better. And sometimes that's easy. I think in the case of the GMs we hired, I didn't know anything about the country. I was in a marketing expert. It was kind of natural for me to say like here's the high level goal that you want to tackle and go for it. And I think as a result of that, that org has done really well. I think it's harder when it's something you actually have deep expertise on yourself. But I think the lessons are still the same. It's still really important that you give people ownership and autonomy. What you don't want is to hire people where like you're still kind of overseeing all the work and still giving all of the direction on what to do. And then they're executing.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've learned how to purchase the company effectively, how to raise money. My role has gone from doing a lot of the work myself to focusing more on less on kind of product building and more on company building. And that's been a super interesting, but also challenging transition, I think, especially as having an engineering training being used to kind of like building the things yourself and kind of getting your hands dirty. It's been a transition to figure out how do you take a step back and focus on less about building shipping code or building a product, but more about kind of building the right team to then do all the things you need. And yeah, a lot of personal scaling, a lot of letting go of things I used to do before, a lot of thinking about how to talk about the mission of the company in order to attract the right investors, attract the right people to join the team. It's been a pretty big shift. But also we've been working on it for a while. So a lot of those changes have happened gradually. And I think part of the fun of doing this is your job is ever evolving. And I think that's.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing journey and lots of learning along the way. I mean, in the very early days, I mentioned my co founder and I were building the product and we were personally doing all of the tutoring that happens on Cambly. We've scaled the business a ton since then. We now do basically over a year of one-on-one tutoring every single day. Think back to those early days of when we got started and we were personally delivering on every piece of value like we built a big marketplace now and the impact we're having is quite large. I think the opportunity is far, far, far, far larger. We have a lot more ahead of us than behind us. But we've come a really long way. My role obviously has changed a lot in that journey. I started out as a software engineer and a product person and we would kind of fill in and do the other things the business needed as we went. And I had never raised money before. I'd never built a team before. I'd never even managed before. And so it's been a lot of learning along the way. I've worn a lot of different hats. I didn't know anything about finance, for example, and have learned a bunch about that.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It'll be to raise. And so I'm always a fan of being lean, focusing a lot on just growing the business and keeping your head down and raising when it's easy, not when it's hard.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're working in a space in a business where you can choose your own destiny and you can get to cash flow positive. I think it makes your fundraising conversations a lot more fun and productive. Not all businesses work that way, but I think the more traction you can have, the more flexibility you can have in terms of when you raise. I think puts you in a really good position. I think every time I've fundraised for Cambly, it's gone very much in like one of two ways. Either it's gone super smoothly and really well and gotten done faster. long and painful and dragged out. And I think like having the luxury of a cutoff when it's not working and then go back to it, I think is really beneficial. And ultimately investors are smart people. They want strong businesses. And so if you can make your business stronger and make it say your business needs less capital or is less dependent on external funding, that's just going to be a better business. And so the irony is that the less you need the money, the more the easier.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Along the way for that, I think largely because, like I said, it was not a problem that people saw every day and understood super well. And so I think we, as a company, we had to hit, I think, bigger and more challenging milestones in order to kind of get that next round than an equivalent company that was working in a different space. And those are challenging bosses to conquer. But I also think lack of capital is actually, you can often be a strength. You know, we've built a really lean team that's scaled a big business and we've done it with like very little capital. And we went out on to raise various rounds and be really successful in that realm. But we were always kind of in a position where we didn't necessarily need to do that. Yeah, I think that one maybe it's particularly memorable because although it was painful and challenging at the time, I think it set us on a track and a trajectory that put the company in a really good position going forward.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, kind of an odd makeup of a three person team, right? Two executable software engineers and a Korea country manager. But for the space we were in, it made a lot of sense. And I remember when we were taking through that hire, when you're building out a team, you often want to layer in the skills that you are missing, fill in the gaps in what you can't do. And I remember thinking like this is a case where I could spend the next 10 years trying to learn about learn the Korean language and learn about Korean culture and still not be anywhere close to someone who grew up there. And so it seemed like a great thing to fill in a gap and hire for. And we started there, but we've hired a lot of country managers since then. And I think that sort of almost organizational structure and approach to go to market, I think has been a fundamental building block in which we discovered all sorts of different marketing channels and so forth. And so I think that was a big breakthrough for us as well. Raising money for the company, I think, was also, we had challenges.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A big fan of launch and iterate kind of strategy. And so we put a product out there when it was pretty rough and had to iterate a bunch in order to get something that was actually valuable and worked. And so I don't know if I can pinpoint the exact day in which we went from like a product that wasn't working to a product that's working, but I think that's kind of the most core fundamental first boss you have to meet. I think anytime you're building a technology company. I think the next phase after that is naturally now like, okay, you've got a thing that works well. How do you get people to use it? I think figuring out how to market and scale our service. And I think it was like I said, uniquely challenging just because of the international nature of our business and our customer base. I think figuring out how to crack that nut and a lot of that came down to the lessons there was around like building kind of, hiring in that local expertise into the team. We were two software engineers. We built this product and literally employee number one at Cambley was a Korea country manager.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's like immense demand for English all over the world. It varies as well. There are certain countries where people are even more eager to learn English. And in some cases, it's because they're looking for new opportunities. I think a lot of the countries we've succeeded in are like, it's been a mix. East Asia, I think, pretty well developed countries also had a lot of success in kind of more developing regions. In some ways, it's the population of the world, but you kind of have to then layer on on top of that the need for learning English and kind of how well people speak English in that market. And then also purchasing power is pretty important as well because Cannibally is not super cheap. You're paying to talk one-on-one with an English speaker, often an American. And so there's kind of a cost restriction as well that layers into that map as well.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Franchising model. And yeah, they kind of start there not to pretty similar to how it is when you're getting started with a company. They do a bunch of scrappy things to just kind of get their first few customers in the door and kind of get the engine going and then scale up from there. And so I think it's a really interesting and fun job. And I think for the right person, it works a really well both ways.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great product and including kind of the supply side of the marketplace like a tutor community can piggyback off of, but go find your first few customers.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We give our GMs a ton of ownership, and we're pretty highly analytical team. And so I jokingly talk about how the languages at Cambodia, the company are, English and math. We've kind of learned that you want someone who's like scrappy entrepreneurial, like highly analytical, I think from a culture fit standpoint, obviously look for someone who fits in well with the team. But there are a few of these skills. And obviously, you want them to then be able to grow into a manager and leader because the moment they have success in the market, they want to start to build on a team. And so I think it was easy to kind of miss a few of those things in the early days, but we honed it on what works really well. And yeah, so we start with a single person and they kind of go through the full experience from a student and kind of make it really highly localized. That's kind of one of the first things they do. Then they start to build the sort of the brand of the business. And it's not too dissimilar from starting a new company. I often describe it to them. You're launching a company in Brazil. You've got the benefit of.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our strategy has been to start with that GM. And we've kind of learned over time kind of what the right profile for someone who's going to be really successful there is.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just do that through our customers, which are going to all over the globe, but also kind of through the team. That's been super fun as well.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teams to launch a market and then kind of have since built how teams there. And that's been really effective for us to kind of figure out how what are the unique ways you grow in each market. And I think one thing I actually am pretty proud of is if you go to Saudi Arabia and you ask our customers about Cambly, they think where Saudi Arabian company, if you go to Korea and you ask our customers there, they think we're a Korean company. I think it's a testament to the level of localization we've done where it's not just the app or the website, the customer support, it's the marketing. Like every touch point is like not just in the right language, but like culturally aware, talking about things that are relevant to you. And so we've had to go global and think really internationally from day one. And we've built sort of a really international team as part of that. And so I think for me personally, it's really fun because we've got this, I told you, I love to travel and love to learn about people from different parts of the world. And I have the good fortune I get to.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He presses the button within a few seconds, an ATO English speaker shows up, he's gone for never meeting English speaker in his life to quite literally having an American in his pocket anytime he wants. And that this sort of disparity in kind of the before and after that wow experience, I think encourage a lot of people to share that experience. And so in the early days, a lot of it, and we still benefit a lot from word of mouth. I think what's been interesting about our business is we've had to be really international from day one. We were a couple of former software engineers building a product in San Francisco, but we were building a product for basically everyone who was not like us, for people who everywhere but where we were. Well, we had to learn pretty early on is how do we go and market to Korea and Japan and Brazil. And I think one of the things we've done is we've built out basically a lot of that international experience within the team. We hired country managers that initially were sort of one man or one woman.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early days did a bunch of scrappy things just to kind of get the marketplace off the ground, posted to job boards and so forth for like getting kind of that initial cohort of tutors. A lot of our students from the early days came through app store discovery and word of mouth. We kind of had this really kind of amazing wow moment where you like you download this app, you press the button and you instantly are talking to native English speaker. And I think it was if you can kind of flow your customer's mind in the first few seconds of using the service, I think there's a lot of value you get out of that. I remember actually back in the days when my co-founder Kevin and I were tutoring, I talked to a student in Brazil that kind of has stuck with me since then where he told me like I asked him how did you learn English and he said I learned it from basically like music and movies no one I know no one in my family none of my friends nobody speaks English and I think what was interesting about that story is I thought about this kid who had literally never met in native English speaker before and then he stumbles across this app”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, yeah. Can we deliver one to you right now? And so the scale you need, I think, is sort of surprising, I think, to be able to actually match in all those dimensions, including time.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean, I think what's interesting about people is if you think about who the people you get along with in your life and why, I think it's more complex creatures. And there's lots of subtlety to human-to-human reactions. And I think all of those apply matchmaking service like Hambly as well. I think there are some prominent ones, some of the ones I listed, like personality style, interests. I think occupation is a super interesting one. And I think particularly for the arena that we're in where a lot of people who use Cambly are using it for professional reasons. We have a lot of young professionals using the service. And that's a dimension that there are lots of different occupations out there. It's like a pretty high cardinality space. And so it takes a lot of scale to actually be able to match in a meaningful way, even just that single dimension. In the early days, a lot of the matching came from just allowing the students to explore the community of tutors we have and preview, watch intro videos, read profiles, find the right tutor for themselves.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting. I definitely have thought about that a lot, described it earlier as how can someone on the other side of the world help you over video chat? And that's a pretty broad parametization of the space. And honestly, I almost thought about that more in the early days than I do now because I think as I've dug deeper into language education and more specifically English education, I've recognized just the scope of the problem. I mean, we've done really well and we've companies growing really fast and we've scaled a ton over the years, but we are when you think about the size of the market, the six billion people that don't know English and the 1.5 billion that are trying to learn it right now. We are a spec in that market. And so we're right now just really focused on scaling that up and serving more of those English learners. But I think the technology and the product absolutely extends to other arenas. And there's other companies out there that have zoomed in on certain categories like this, like getting a doctor in demand, for example.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've learned things the fastest, it's always a one on one conversation with someone who knows far more about the topic than I do. And the reason for that is kind of simple if you think about it, right? We don't waste any time talking about sub-I already know. You're always at the fringe kind of at the edge of your knowledge and you can kind of hang out in that zone. And that's how you maximize the rate at which you learn. And I think it's something that's unique about one-on-one.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like marketplace and matching pieces there. I don't know if you've heard of a term called Bloom's two Sigma problem, but it's a study that was done decades ago that basically compared one-on-one tutoring to learning in a classroom environment. What the study found is that the educational outcomes from one-on-one tutoring were far, far better than a classroom environment. To quantify that, the two sigmas is two standard irrigation is better. This was done decades ago. It was this interesting study, but it was kind of academic at the time because it was like, how do you actually do about it? What do you do about that? And, you know, what we're doing is we're actually taking that model and we're scaling it to a level that it hasn't gotten to before. We are one of the largest, if not maybe the largest, experiments that exist in the world of that. And I think what's really powerful about one-on-one is this personalization. I think back to the times.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your English speaking counterpart, if you will, and give you this really personalized match with a tutor and give you this really personalized content and curriculum that you're going to go over. And I think that, I think, is kind of the broad dimensions in which I think the experience can go from five star and up and beyond from there. Obviously, there's a lot it takes to deliver on that experience. There are a lot of reasons why people are learning English. And so the cardinality of that space is big. We talked about the matching piece as well and like also matching two people, matching two people to create this perfect match. It takes a lot of scale to be able to do that. And so we're far, far better at that today than we were a few years ago, but we'll be much, much better at it in the coming years. It's not just like a matching algorithm you need. You actually need enough scale in order to deliver really good matches and you need enough liquidity not overall in your community, but kind of within each vertical. And so there's a lot of really interesting.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I have to jump into some of the matching stuff now, your tail for it. Ultimately, like what we want to do is we want to serve as many of those 1.5 or 6 billion people that don't know English as possible. And we want to deliver an incredible English education experience for them that helps them learn as quickly as possible. And so I think the core metric there is like how fast is someone learning English and specifically the English they need and want for their lives. If I start to kind of dream a bit of like what is that six star, seven star, ten star experience looked like when we started this company, we basically the promise, the value we offered is we're going to get you a friendly native English speaker instantly. And that was kind of the initial sort of value prop. But the vision and the dream was always we're not just going to get your friendly native English speaker, we're going to get you like perfect person for you. So maybe they share your interests, your personality, style, your occupation, which we touched on earlier. So we're going to get you like the perfect match.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the sort of atomic unit or core part of experience is just this video chat similar to FaceTime. What we've done over the years is layered on a bunch of other technology on top of that. And so things like being able to exchange messages back and forth and potentially translate them, things like maintaining a profile for students that contain some of their goals or information that kind of helps you have the most productive session you can.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teotors are American, and so we have for a while now we've had loads and loads of Americans talking to people in Saudi Arabia. And it's just one-on-one conversation. Like if you think about the ways you learn about various parts of the world, it's largely filtered through the media and kind of how the media portrays that. I think what's cool about Cambly is we short circuit that and just connect person to person, citizen to citizen. What we hear over and over again, people are like more similar than they are different in a lot of ways, like movies like music, have their favorite sport they like to watch. There's a ton of similarities and I think making these kind of human connections, I think there's a lot of really cool benefits that come from that as well. And we set out to help people learn English, but I think it's a really cool artifact of the type of marketplace we built.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moderation complex topic. What's interesting and unique about our marketplace specifically is the types of connections that are happening. Most of the connections or many of the connections on the internet are you interacting with people you know in real life, maybe on Facebook or Instagram or so forth, social network-based platforms. What's interesting about Camble is you're meeting people you don't know, and not just people you don't know, but people who kind of living on the opposite side of the globe from you have a very different culture and life experience that they bring. And so I think one of the challenges, but also one of the amazing benefits of a platform like Hambley is these international connections you make. You make this kind of human-to-human connection for people who have very different lives. And you can imagine that there are sometimes challenges and disagreements that have come up from that. But I would say the vast majority of what we see there is just like a really incredible cultural exchange. Saudi Arabia is actually a pretty big market for us and a lot of”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so we have moderation tools in place as one of the features to our students. We record conversations and they can go and watch them and review the sessions they've had. And if a conversation gets flagged, we can moderate and figure out what happened and where did it go wrong. These are kind of few and far between. But anytime you're running a large marketplace at scale, you're going to have examples of that. And so, yeah, we take it super seriously, want to create a really safe environment for sort of both sides of the marketplace. And so that's something that we have a hand in and we moderate to make sure that the activity happening on the platform is indeed English education.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've tried various models in terms of the marketplace there and made loads of mistakes over the years, like assuming in on that piece in particular, we had a like pay-as-you-go model at some point in the early days. I think the challenge there is, one, I think it doesn't tell you how to use the product. It doesn't tell you that regularity in daily practice is really important. And I think the other thing is if you've ever been on kind of a long distance phone call and you're thinking, this is costing me X cents a minute, it makes you sort of evaluate whether every minute is worth it. And we wanted to create as more of what I would call like a season pass mentality of like, okay, you'd committed to do this thing. It's important for you. Now go and use it. There's no sort of incremental cost of using the service. And so I think it aligns better with how we want our students to behave. And I think it also encourages them to actually use their product. And that's what we want. Ultimately, we really want a product that people don't just pay.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we have an interesting business model, an interesting and unusual business model. We on the student side of the platform people subscribe to the service and they get some amount of usage of Cambly. And so say you pay $100 a month and you get 15 minutes a day daily. And it's user or lose it. And so what that does is it sort of encourages you. You've already paid for it. You might as well use it. And so kind of baked into the business model is we're teaching our customers how to use the product. It's going to be much more effective for you to learn a language if you spend 15 minutes a day practicing it than it is if you kind of binge and like spend three hours once every few weeks. Regularity and kind of daily practice is super important and that's how you're going to develop the skill. And so bake that into the way the business model is structured. The tutor side, you get paid to talk to students. And so for all the time you spend Spigwood students, you get kind of a fix right there. So it's kind of an interesting market.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get started, learn your first few words, learn how to conjugate some verbs and put together a simple sentence. But what we found is those services would only take you so far. You learn some fundamentals of the languages, but you'd never get to actually fluency. And I think if you were to tell me, hey, like I really want to learn French, your goal is not to learn a few words of French. Your goal is to be able to interact with a French person in a real time environment. But I think likely the way you'd approach that is to do everything but actually interact with that French person. And the same thing with learning English.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think of it actually parallel to a service like Lyft or Uber where you've got this super simple app, but you press the button into this like magical thing happens. It carpools up in front of you. And there's a lot happening behind the scenes in order to deliver that experience. And so Cambly is really similar. You press the button and then instantly you're talking one at one with a native English speaker, potentially on the other side of the world from you. We had to build a lot of technology to, for example, predict demand, like make sure you always have enough supply to fulfill whatever demand you have sort of any hour of any day. Coming back to your question about like what demographic do you focus on with a service like this, when we looked at Blang's learning in general and English education more specifically, there were a lot of solutions out there for learning languages. Many of them sort of broadly there was kind of like brick and mortar schools that had traditional classroom environment like I described earlier. And then there's a lot of software-based tools.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The demand for English has been there for a while. It's growing for sure, but I think the smartphone, I think, really unlocked a lot of sort of new opportunities in this sort of space and domain. The idea of being able to instantly video chat with someone on the opposite side of the world, not too long ago, that wasn't really a thing that was easier accessible to everyone. And it was really for the advent of the smartphone with these basically a connected device with a front-facing camera that's perfect for video chat, that I think really unlocked this market of I can get help from someone on the opposite side of the world over video chat, that sort of broad tip. And there's a lot of businesses that have emerged in that space. And obviously we've been working in live education and English education specifically. But when you need the ingredients you need are fast internet video chat enabled devices in order to kind of create this marketplace. And so I think that opened up a lot of opportunity in the sort of broad space.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what we really wanted the service to be on demand. So 24 7 anytime, day or night, you press a button and you get a native English speaker. My co-founder both lived in San Francisco. We were awake and slept roughly the same hours. And so it was obviously hard to make an on-demand service with us being the only two people powering the sort of supply side of the marketplace. And so we started to build up the supply side. And to get it alive, like you described, we basically effectively had to just pay people to sit around and wait on the off chance that someone called in and wanted to talk to a native English speaker. And we just did that. We were bootstrapped. We were funding the company ourselves in the early days and we were basically paying people to hang out, paying people out of pocket to just hang out and wait to see if someone called in. And so in the very early stages of the company, that's kind of how we got the place started. And what we really wanted to do is deliver on the experience we were kind of hoping to deliver on. And when you're really small, it doesn't.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the way we tackled it, and I think a good strategy is to just try to solve one side of the marketplace first, basically. I think aliveness is actually a really nice way to describe it. I mean, in the very early days, I guess in the earliest days when we were getting started, my co-founder and I were the only two tutors on the platform. And so we would spend our days basically writing code and building the product and then constantly getting interrupted when someone was calling in to talk to someone from around the world in English. It was actually a great way to get started. I think an interesting aspect of our businesses, I think it's a really good idea to talk to your customers in the early days so you kind of really understand their needs and what they're looking for. And so talking to them was a great opportunity for us. And for them, they were really looking to talk to native English speakers, which we happen to be. And so it was this actually very symbiotic relationship in the early days of starting the company. And yes, we spent our days writing code and building the product and talking to our potential customers.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a super simple product and a pretty simple idea. We're a mobile and web app, you open your app, you press the button and within a few seconds we connect you to a friendly native English speaker or video chat. And then you talk to them and you practice your conversational language skills. And yeah, you're exactly right at its core, it's a marketplace, you know, two-sided marketplace. On one side, you've got tutors, on the other side you've got students. The students are people who are trying to learn English and want to work on the English skills. And then the tutors are Native English speakers from all over the world. We talked about the number of people who are trying to learn English in the world. There also happened to be lots of people that speak English. But yeah, those two populations tend to be geographically far apart. So if you can create a marketplace that connects those groups of people, it creates a huge amount of value on both sides.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one we know has this problem because it's not a coincidence that the people we know and the people we talk to also speak English. It's just enormous problem in the world that sort of is largely overlooked by the English speaking world. What does it mean for someone if they can't speak English? I think for those of us who speak English, we just don't really know how to think about that. English is very different from every other language. If you can learn English, it unlocks immense opportunity in your lives. It unlocks huge economic opportunity. You can get a job you wouldn't have been able to get otherwise, a promotion you wouldn't have been able to get otherwise. You could potentially move to a place where you could have a better life. I think access to the information is also a really interesting thing that I think a lot of people don't think about that. You and I, we use the internet every day. We're used to kind of having information at our fingertips. What we forget is that the vast majority of the internet is in English.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. My co founder, I both grew up speaking English. We never had this problem personally. We never kind of experienced it firsthand. I think we got first exposure to the problem came out of that love for travel and really looking around and keeping a global perspective of what are the important problems to solve in the world and really thinking about the world in that case. If you zoom out a little, there's about 7.5 billion people in the world right now. 6 billion of them don't speak English. In the broadest sense, that is the market. And by the way, of those 6 billion people, 1.5 billion people are actively trying to learn English right now. And so this is an enormous problem in the world. There's not a lot of problems that impact that many people. But what I think is super interesting about this problem is it's not a problem that the English speaking world really sees at all. English speakers like you and I, we don't just not see the problem personally, but also”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a really similar experience learning French in school and then going to visit France and spending time there. And we kind of got together around this idea like why can't we create that experience from home? Like we were technologists for both former software from Google, sort of technologists and product people. We thought there's no reason why he shouldn't be able to practice speaking French with a French speaker whenever he wants. I should be able to practice speaking Spanish with a Spanish speaker whenever I want. There's plenty of people in the world that speak those languages. They just don't happen to live near us. And so it sounded like the type of problem technology could solve. That's kind of how we got started. And I think what we wanted wasn't necessarily a formal class or a formal lesson. What we wanted was a regular person to talk to, very similar to what you do when you're traveling. You strike up conversations with people sort of left and right. And that's kind of what we set out to do. We set out to build that product. And TI, like I said, my co-founder Kevin wanted to learn French. I wanted to learn Spanish. We sort of looked at the market and we quickly realized that the world wants to learn English.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Camley really grew out of our own experiences learning other languages. My co founder and I both grew up here in the US. We went through the school system here and took foreign languages in kind of a traditional classroom environment. And for me personally, I took Spanish. I wasn't great at it. I kind of felt like I wasn't really a languages person. And independent of that, I love to travel. I've been all over the world. Love meeting new people, learning about their lives. And many of the places I went to, they spoke Spanish. And so what I found is that immersing myself in the environment was sort of a far more effective way to learn the language. And I took one trip in particular to Argentina where I kept finding myself in environments where I was surrounded by people who only spoke Spanish and it took an environment like that for me to come out of my shell and practice speaking. And what I found is that I got so much better at the language so quickly and not just that it was far more rewarding than it ever was in a classroom environment. And my co-founder, Kevin.”
2021-08-12 · Invest Like the Best · Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source