Usually technology startups focus on building a cheap, and in some ways “people-less” organizational structure in order to cut salary costs and to scale growth far quicker and with fewer employees. That however, is not the case for Florida based startup OpenEnglish, which is a peer-to-peer learning platform that teaches English to Spanish speaking individuals. The unique problem faced by OpenEnglish is as mentioned above, because they required more and more teachers in order to scale up the company, thus increasing the company’s employee costs and bringing down the companies overall profit.

In order to maintain the companies profits OpenEnglish has turned to a unique venture capital and advertising approach that allows them to generate substantial consumer buzz through unique marketing purchased through the use of there venture capital funds. This approach is a major disruption in the tech start-up industry and the success of OpenEnglish is a testament to the effectiveness of a people oriented organizational structure in the technology world. The true disruptiveness of OpenEnglish’s business model has many technology companies that look to provide a similar service to consumers reevaluating their automated and people-less services and attempting to adopt the OpenEnglish business structure.

The very nature of the technology industry is disruptive to the rest of the market, however the scale of disruption has usually been focused on some new advancement in social networking or computer services. Therefore it is very unique that OpenEnglish’s point of disruption is in its organizational structure and not necessarily in the service it offers.