Sameer Shariff - Breaking Language Barriers - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 46 ]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types.
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**SPEAKER_2** (2:02)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:27)
My guest today is Sameer Shariff, co-founder and CEO of Cambly.
After starting his career at Google, Sameer founded Cambly in 2013 as an on-demand service to learn English. At the touch of a button, Cambly connects its global user base to a one-on-one conversation with an English speaker.
During our conversation, we cover the origin story of the business, what Sameer views as the core functions of the two-sided marketplace and how the team approached scaling a product that was international from day one. Once you hear Sameer talk, you'll quickly realize the size of Cambly's market opportunity and why it may have been easy to overlook this problem. I hope you enjoy this great conversation with Sameer Shariff. Sameer, I think the right place to begin what will be a really unique conversation is around this problem space that you're tackling because almost everyone listening speaks English almost by default. It's not a problem that we think about. That we speak English, that we don't speak English and need to. So it's this massive problem hiding in plain sight. Maybe you could begin by just describing how you came across this concept in the first place. And then let's pick it apart as deeply as we can.

**Sameer Shariff** (3:32)
So Cambly 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, 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, we're both former software engineers 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 go 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.