Kyle
According to brothers Billy and John Martyn, language learning and educational technology in Japan needed a big dose of innovation. That’s what their Japanese startup Language Cloud is all about.
The Martyn brothers are half American and half Japanese and spent their lives growing up internationally. They were born in Saudi Arabia, and grew up in Pakistan, France and the U.S. Billy ultimately graduated college from UVA while brother John graduated from George Mason University. To call these two worldly may be a bit of an understatement.
Now back in Japan, both brothers are attacking the problem with technology in language education. We’re not talking about Rosetta Stone here. Language Cloud is a complete educational system that helps teachers teach languages to students better, and helps students learn easier.
“Language Cloud is a learning management system designed specifically for language education. In short, it provides educators and students with an easy to use and more importantly, free, digital platform for managing and enhancing the quality of language classes, while simultaneously promoting student collaboration and enthusiasm for foreign languages through school-based social networking. In addition, the Language Cloud interface has been designed to be both intuitive and simple to use. This allows instructors and students, even those with little tech experience, to confidently begin using web 2.0 technologies in the classroom for educational purposes.” Billy told us in an interview.
Language Cloud has already attracted 7000 students and teachers out of 54 academic institutions including grade schools, private language learning schools and universities.
We got a chance to talk in depth with Billy Martyn. Check out our interview below.
In layman’s terms, how does Language Cloud work? (In other words how would you explain it to your grandmother)
For teachers, Language Cloud offers the ability to grade assignments electronically, manage classes in the cloud, and provide supplemental lessons that integrate other forms of media, such as videos and audio files. For students, the learning platform offers an easy way to track and review teacher provided corrections, promote self-study through language learning apps, and socialize with their peers – an important part of language learning experience.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Billy Kosuke Martyn (American/Japanese)
Billy leads the business development and strategic direction of Language Cloud together with brother John. Prior to co-founding Language Cloud, Billy worked for two years at investment bank Credit Suisse in Tokyo and later at media firm Bloomberg. Billy studied abroad at Kyoto University in 2007 and graduated from the University of Virginia in 2008 with a B.A. in Foreign Affairs and Japanese Language & Literature.
John Hideyoshi Martyn (American/Japanese)
John leads the business development and strategic direction of Language Cloud together with brother Billy. Prior to co-founding Language Cloud, John worked at investment firm BlackRock in New York for four years where he managed sales and relationships with Japanese financial institutions. John studied abroad at Sophia University in Tokyo in 2006 and graduated from George Mason University in 2007 with a B.A. in Global Affairs.
Where are you based?
Tokyo, Japan
What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?
The startup culture in Japan is growing, but is in many ways still very new. Japan’s recent inward-looking and risk-averse culture has dampened the nation’s entrepreneurial spirits for years, but it is starting to gain traction helped by various startup incubation programs that have been popping up recently. We graduated from the startup incubation program called Open Network Lab, run by Digital Garage (investors in Twitter and LinkedIn).
How did you come up with the idea for Language Cloud?
Brothers, Billy and John Martyn are half Japanese and American. They were born in Saudi Arabia and grew up in Pakistan, France, and the U.S. While attending university in the U.S., they both had the opportunity to study abroad in Japan and noticed that the language education industry there was in desperate need of reinvigoration. Instructional technology was almost entirely absent from the majority of classrooms and language teachers were often spending far too much of their time managing assignments, hand-grading papers and keeping track of student progress manually. These early study abroad experiences planted the seed for Language Cloud.
A few years later while John was working at BlackRock in New York and Billy at Bloomberg in Tokyo, they started developing the predecessor to Language Cloud in their free time. In 2011, they timed their exits from the financial sector to focus full time on their startup in Tokyo. In April 2012, they beta launched Language Cloud, a learning management system (LMS) designed for language education. Within the first 7 weeks, 50 different academic institutions enrolled and have been further helping the Language Cloud team develop the site’s infrastructure and interface through user feedback and support.
How did you come up with the name?
It was a name we thought of when we first started developing Language Cloud; the imagery of students and teachers with a personal cloud with all of their course materials and notes that can be accessed from anywhere, anytime. We thought it perfectly fit our goal of bringing language education into the cloud.
What problem does Language Cloud solve?
Language Cloud seeks to simplify the teaching and learning experience by providing educators and students the platform and tools they need to easily create, manage and access course materials and track progress.
At present, there is a wide variety of educational technology available, but it is unfortunately scattered across the internet and typically focuses on one type of classroom activity such as composition markup. Language Cloud plans to change this, by centralizing popular educational tools and incorporating digitized language textbooks and test preparation guides into a simple to use and intuitively designed school-based social network. This allows users to quickly adapt the Language Cloud platform to meet a wide variety of different language learning challenges.
What’s your secret sauce?
Our secret sauce is the mutually beneficial relationships we have formed within the educational community. By working cooperatively with educators and advisors to create a simple to use tool that specifically addresses real classroom challenges and problems, the educational community has in return, been very receptive in providing us with strong feedback and their support to further innovate Language Cloud.
Are you bootstrapped or funded?
We were bootstrapping for the past year and a half, pooling our savings to cover our living expenses. In July – August 2012 we raised our seed round with DIgital Garage, 500 Startups, Sunbridge, and a Japanese angel investor to grow our team.
What’s one challenge you’ve overcome in the startup process?
The main challenge of any startup is to survive long enough to iterate and validate demand for your product. We have been extremely focused on keeping our costs low so that we can survive as long as it takes. For one and a half years we lived off the money we pooled together between the two founders as we built our business.
Another obstacle we ran into was the bias by some educational institutions, especially in Japan, to prefer the more expensive and harder to use software made by a large brand name company over a young startup’s creation. The way we overcame this was to focus aggressively on our customer’s needs, nurturing relationships by meeting with them regularly and building our reputation. Reputation is built over time so it was important to always be positive, stay focused, and keep at it.
Who are some of your mentors and business role models?
Steve Jobs and Mark Cuban, because of their aggressive pursuit of perfection and relentless drive to succeed.
What’s next for Language Cloud?
We will be releasing the Language Cloud App Center in Spring 2013. Here, teachers and students will be able to purchase premium Language Cloud features and digital textbooks, practice tests, and e-learning apps from third party providers. These apps will all be designed with UX in mind, thus ensuring their ease of use and effectiveness as learning resources.
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