#108 - Cindy Mi and Qi Lu

**Qi Lu** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going?

**Cindy Mi** (0:01)
This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast.

**Qi Lu** (0:05)
Today's episode is with Cindy Mi and Qi Lu. Cindy is the founder and CEO of Vipkid.

**Cindy Mi** (0:11)
Vipkid is a one-on-one teaching platform where children in China learn English from North American teachers.

**Qi Lu** (0:17)
Qi is the CEO of YC China and head of YC Research.

**Cindy Mi** (0:21)
All right, here we go.

**Qi Lu** (0:24)
My name is Qi Lu. I'm a partner at Y Combinator. I'm also working on YC China. Today, I'm very, very pleased to have the opportunity to speak to Cindy Mi, 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 Cindy, 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 of 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 grew up?
In particular, what was it like when you had to move, I believe it was at the age of 14, I believe, moving to a different province and start a new school? What was the experience like and how did that impact you?

**Cindy Mi** (1:51)
Sure, absolutely. Well, firstly, I'd like to start by thanking you, Qi, for doing this interview, and then congratulations also on funding and launching YC China.
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. Thank you so much.

**Qi Lu** (2:21)
Absolutely.

**Cindy Mi** (2:23)
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 Zhangjiakou city where the Winter Olympic Games will be held. And the reason I believed so much in lifelong learning is because I moved from Zhangjiakou to Harbin in Heilongjiang Province when I was 40 years old. And in my math class, my teacher hated me. She thought I was the most stupid student on the planet.
She just doesn't believe that I can learn. So I lost confidence in learning when I was a little kid. And I thought 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 is 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.

**Qi Lu** (4:10)
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 blended with entrepreneurship, entrepreneurialism.
So can you also tell us more about that aspect? For example, I believe you start learning English when you were 13, and you mentioned that 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 it or not, with your uncle. So tell us more about that, and how those sort of blend together, shape up sort of instilled spirit in you as an educator and also an entrepreneur.

**Cindy Mi** (5:13)
Sure, absolutely. So when we moved to Beijing, it was a very linked start-up experience. We rented one classroom in the middle of nowhere, now today by the third world, but by then it was a very rural area in the city.