Congrats. That’s great. So was it working at Apple? I mean that must’ve been kind of a surreal time to be there with Steve Jobs and did that have you thinking this is really cool and also I want to do my own thing someday. I want to start my own, if not Apple, I want to start my own tech company.
Xavier:
Yeah, I actually never felt like I, I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but at some point, I guess when I reached my thirties, I realized I was working on a project that was not necessarily something I was excited about. And I’ve always been excited about education. I think teachers are superheroes and I had a really good friend who I met at Apple who is a thousand times smarter than me, who’s a brilliant software engineer, maybe the best I’ve ever met. Both his parents are teachers and he was at a house azerbaijan telegram screening party actually, and Ben and I were chatting and I would love to build an education startup with you to serve teachers. And we started this company and that was five years ago.
Brett:
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I always felt, not to get too philosophical here, and I love capitalism as much as anyone, but I feel like it’s a great failure of the capitalist market, the fact that teachers are so underpaid, as you said, and that’s something where there hasn’t been a market solution for it. So it’s very cool that you’ve made that your mission and helping with Koala. So how does coming up with that mission of helping teachers and bringing their salaries up to market rate, how did that inspire a while ago?
Xavier:
I think it’s a combination of things. The one thing that we thought was also a big problem is that Zoom is used a lot in education, and Zoom is great for what we’re doing right now for chatting to adults, having a conversation. It’s very convenient. I use it a lot, but is it the best tool to engage an eight year old online? Probably not. So what we build with Koala is an alternative to Zoom if you’re teaching teaching child between five and or even three and 15 years old, and it feels a lot like Minecraft. So often we define our product Koala ago as the Minecraft for teachers, and I’ll give you a short demo later.