Pengkai Pan and his Saybot

Pengkai Pan, Founder and CEO of Saybot Inc.

Each term my daughter will bring a pamphlet of “Alo7 (an Game-based English learning environment)” from her school. The tool is recommended by her English teacher to help her learning English at home. I took a look at the venture behind this tool, Saybot Inc.

Saybot was founded in Boston by Pengkai Pan in 2004 after his Ph.D graduation from MIT media Lab. He turned his research of speech recognition into a “saying robot” and connected this idea to the vast market of English-learning in China. He got a strong endorsement from his mentor Nicholas Negroponte and Leonard Keinrock, both were digital media gurus, who brought Saybot initial advises and investment by a group of VCs. Pan is still CEO of this venture, his management team consists of experts in ESL, software, marketing and visual design. I think that properly covers all aspects needed for a learning venture.

The major product of Saybot is “an engaging English learning environment” called Alo7, in which children “travel” around with their pets to complete tasks and challenges, while learning English, geography, history, and culture of many countries. I must say such a learning game is not fresh in the market, but what makes Alo7 different is its tight binding with primary textbooks. The Chinese parents always like to see good numbers in their kids’ score sheets, so they open wallets. And Alo7 successfully turns teachers to their salesmen, as there are pressures on teachers to improve their classes’ English scores. I’m not one of those parents opening wallets, but I can see the venture capability of Saybot to accurately catch the pain point of local market, and understand their customers from learners, teachers to buyers. The original value behind this venture is that it helps to make the mandatory boring English learning easier for children. It’s a step to the right direction. I haven’t found the financial report of Saybot about how it profits from Alo7, but it’s running. Personally I think learning language is a process of inter-human interaction, so it would be the direction of Alo7 to extend its human-robot interaction to a learning society where students can talk with each other and with teachers directly.

In Saybot I can see it’s not easy to start and run a learning venture. You need to have innovative ideas (the speech recognition robot), plenty of luck (help from the gurus and VCs), insight of market (textbooks based e-learning), strong leadership to collect know-how staffs, and above all, passion and persistence throughout years to go in the right direction.

Reference:

http://www.alo7.com/site/historyEn.html

Posted in: Week 04: Entrepreneur Bootcamp