#44 - Cindy Mi on Building VIPKID, the World's Largest English Learning Platform for Children

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's guests are Anu Hariharan and Cindy Mi. Cindy is the founder and CEO of Vipkid, and Vipkid is a one-on-one teaching platform where children in China learn English from North American teachers. And Anu, who you've probably heard on the podcast before, is a partner here at YC.
So just a quick reminder before we get going, if you haven't yet subscribed or viewed the podcast, we would appreciate it if you did. All right, here we go.

**Anu Hariharan** (0:28)
We are actually here for a private YC event, the Global Growth Conference, which has growth stage founders coming from US and China.
And I know Cindy, you're talking at the event. So thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us before the event. Why don't we start off with, can you tell us a little more about yourself and what really motivated you to start Vipkid?

**Cindy Mi** (0:51)
Absolutely. So I started teaching young kids English when I was 15 years old.
So that's about almost 20 years ago.
And what really motivated me to start Vipkid is the possibility of inspiring and empowering every child for the future. And just think about how we can connect the world of the best teachers, best content and the most innovative learning experiences online is just amazing. So I, you know, through all these years, teaching young kids English, I figured the pain point for parents today is for their kids to be able to learn from the best teachers. And then the curriculum they learn nowadays are mostly out of date, and they really want something fun and then, you know, content-based. So when we started Vipkid, it changed everything for the parents and the kids. Now that many children in China are able to learn with the best instructors from North America, learning content-based knowledge based on Common Core State Standards and children having so much fun, and it's a great thing for the teachers as well. And this just fulfills my dream of making learning so different for the kids today, and we're still working on it to build something even more amazing for the future.

**Anu Hariharan** (2:07)
That's fantastic. I remember when I visited you in Beijing, you know, I had heard about VipKids, but I didn't realize that, you know, you pretty much built a global marketplace from day one.
You know, I didn't realize that a lot of your English teachers were from the US, right? And you were teaching kids in China. Can you talk a little more about that? Because I thought that was interesting. And especially, you know, before you talk about that, also give some idea for the audience on what is the platform? What is the product? Do you provide the curriculum? And how does it work?

**Cindy Mi** (2:40)
Absolutely. So in the world of learning, we have this after school tutoring space where children go learn after their schools, right? So this is extremely important in Asian countries, particularly in China.
Our parents in China spent 15% of our household income in after school tutoring services.

**Anu Hariharan** (3:01)
That does not surprise me at all, given I come from India.

**Cindy Mi** (3:06)
It is really important for the children because then they can get a tutor on things they really like or things they need to work on, right? So for this space, we would usually have a brick and mortar training institutes operating across the country.
So those are usually 20, 40 people classrooms with children learning their after school for like three hours a week or two times of two hours a week kind of thing. But then what Vipkid provides nowadays are very, very different from the brick and mortar setting. So we provide this live one-on-one, 25-minute classes with online tutors teaching live from the comfort of their homes.
So for children, they're not learning in a classroom set up with 20 other kids, they're by themselves. So this is a very private lesson one-on-one.
And then the teachers are the best we can find across the globe because if you think about it, we're today working with over 20,000 teachers in the US. And they're the best we can find, and everyone has to go through a very highly selective interview process. We only admit 5% of the teacher applicants. So children really enjoy it. For the first time in their inner life, they can feel free to choose to work with teachers that they feel the best, help them learn, and we're able to match the best teachers to them in the system. So this is about the teachers. A second highlight of a product is that the content, the curriculum content is developed by the Vipkid curriculum team. We've got over 200 professionals working on this.