Female Founders: Vivian Lei Of LearnerYou On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Take your time to experiment before building a product. Oftentimes this initial stage of deliberate experimentation saves a lot of time later in the development process. For example, we spent a lot of time tweaking the product as we were building it when it would have been much easier had we critiqued and experimented with the design before we committed to a specific build.

As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Vivian Lei.

Vivian Lei is the founder of LearnerYou, an online platform for social learning. LearnerYou disrupts the existing e-learning paradigm by providing a truly interactive and social experience to individual learners seeking knowledge and skills online. You can find us on the Apple App Store.

Vivian is a cancer survivor. Before starting LearnerYou, she received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. She also taught undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

My name is Vivian Lei. When I was growing up, my parents, who were medical doctors, encouraged me to pursue an academic career. For the longest time, I thought this was how to best prove myself, and so I followed their wishes and started my Ph.D. at Columbia University. However, my life turned upside down in 2016, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. After 3 months of arduous treatment, my doctor told me that I can consider myself cured. This experience of confronting my own mortality pushed me to ask questions that I previously never considered. It was like waking up from a dream. For the first time in my life, I became obsessed with discovering what greater purpose my life served. I began to look around. At the time, I was doing research and teaching undergraduate students at Columbia. I found that people needed a way to continue to grow and learn new skills after graduating, without necessarily pursuing a post-graduate degree. I asked myself: Is it possible to develop a digital space where individuals from different stages of their lives can work virtually with experts and peers to grow themselves? I was excited about this question and began discussing it with a group of friends, and we began to see the immerse democratizing potential of this vision: if we can make learning more available, social, and affordable, it could help unleash the potential of individuals across the socio-economic spectrum. We quickly started to work together to figure out what this space looks like and how we can make it economically viable. It is from this that LearnerYou was born.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

In 2020, I have been working on the system and UI design of LearnerYou for a while and was hoping to find an developer to get the project off the ground. I had been asking around my network but nobody seemed to fit the bill. At the time, I was teaching a philosophy class at Columbia. A quiet student at the class, Michael Harley, shared a story about his academic studies for a class exercise, and it turned out he is a senior majoring in computer engineering. I told him about LearnerYou and he became excited about it. Michael eventually became LearnerYou’s first CTO. He helped us build our first landing page to test the idea’s validity. He also played important technical and strategic roles during the first 6 months of LearnerYou’s inception. Sometimes life is serendipitous, the right person just shows up at the right time.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

When we started building the current version of LearnerYou, we wanted to build a virtual classroom interface for our learners. We went through this whole ordeal to try to build a customized solution. After several design sessions, we realized we could just use integrate our collaboration tool into our App! Lesson learned: sometimes the answer is right in front of you.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I am grateful for my husband Wonny, whose unconditional love has given me the strength I need for this entrepreneurial journey. When I decided to found LearnerYou, we had just gotten married. He had started a new job which took him to Washington DC, but we both knew New York was a better home for LearnerYou. My husband worked with his job so that he could commute to DC via Amtrak every week so that we could keep living in New York, where I would keep working on the company. We managed to make this work because of his commitment to support me and my desire to succeed as an entrepreneur. For this, I will always be grateful.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience, what is currently holding back women from founding companies?

In my view, today’s society offers a lot of great opportunities for women to create impactful companies. However, I suspect that, culturally speaking, entrepreneurship has not been celebrated as a conventional career aspiration for women. Perhaps that is why not many women pursued this path and got funded. However, the thing about culture is that it is always shifting. 100 years ago in the US, women were absent from many professions, and look how much things have changed today! I do believe this gap in the statistics will close, perhaps sooner than we think. As a woman founder myself, I feel I am contributing to this exciting shift, and I hope LearnerYou’s story will help inspire other women to become entrepreneurs.

Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?

I believe the catalyst of change lies at the individual level, so let me focus on that. Traditional school education often has the unintended effect of making students feel small and powerless in the face of what others have done and created before them. This mindset surely doesn’t prepare individuals to become aspiring entrepreneurs and pursue their own creations. For women particularly, the old gender norm still has its imprint on our psyches, making it more challenging to break out of this learned powerlessness. To address this problem, one of the key ideas that inspired the creation of LearnerYou is the idea of learner-centered design. We hope to empower the learner to use new knowledge and skills to develop their own potential, rather than becoming a vessel for knowledge created by others. It is our hope that the LearnerYou platform will allow individuals to take their power back by engaging in this style of learning.

This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?

I want to share 3 reasons why more women should become founders:

1. Women represent an untapped creative force that could bring much benefit to society. The fact that only 20% of funded companies have women founders suggests to me that there is much more potential here.

2. I have heard people saying that today’s corporate America celebrates a culture of aggressiveness. I’d like to think women founders have the opportunity to bring a bit more love, grace and gentleness to the business world.

3. Last I checked, half of all consumers are women, yet 80% of funded new companies that are offering new services and goods are founded by men. I think women would have a competitive advantage on thinking about what services and goods would appeal to women.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?

The №1 myth about being a founder is that the most important thing is to have a great idea. What I have learned is that rather than having a great idea, having the discipline to test out the validity of different ideas and the faith to execute on a vision are way more important. The world is full of people with great ideas, but the entrepreneur, as the origin of the word suggests, is a “do-er.”

Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?

This one is hard to generalize. But in my personal opinion, I think that being a successful founder requires the following traits:

1. A long-term view, a vision

2. The drive to keep innovating and working even if there is no instant reward to your efforts, amenable to delayed gratification

3. The courage to learn from mistakes

4. The discipline to keep learning new things and improving existing solutions

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Take your time to experiment before building a product. Oftentimes this initial stage of deliberate experimentation saves a lot of time later in the development process. For example, we spent a lot of time tweaking the product as we were building it when it would have been much easier had we critiqued and experimented with the design before we committed to a specific build.

2. Have the courage to change your initial ideas. The best companies and products evolve. Amazon started as an online bookstore. Netflix was delivering DVDs to individual homes before they became a streaming service. The one key innovation you initially had can quickly become obsolete. Therefore, it is more important to keep learning and growing.

3. Get comfortable to share your story. When I first started LearnerYou, I didn’t always share my story with my co-workers, until someone reminded me that I am missing out on the opportunity to connect with others. When I began deliberately sharing who I am and why I am doing what I do, the authentic stories fostered trust and teambuilding.

4. Find a way to remind yourself why you wanted to create the business in the first place. For me, I think a lot of my drive to build LearnerYou comes from the obsession with serving learners everywhere and building LearnerYou is the best way I could think of to share my love with the world. Of course, sometimes you feel not as connected with your “why”. Over time, I have developed a system to remind myself of my purpose through reading and re-reading the books that inspired me. I believe the “why” is different for everybody, and it is important to form a habit of reminding yourself of your unique “why”.

5. Made friends with setbacks and what you don’t know. When I was starting LearnerYou, I consciously removed the word “failure” from my vocabulary. One cannot truly fail unless one stops trying and improving. The same goes with handling what I don’t know. There are always going to be things that we don’t know, but that is what a team is for and part of the journey.

How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I think the best way to make the world a better place is to make ourselves better every day and help other people to become better. That’s why LearnerYou’s mission is to provide a truly interactive and social experience to individual learners seeking knowledge and skills online, so everyone can have a space to work on self-improvement and mutual support at scale. Personally, I have tried to make sure I do this myself and also helped people I come across do the same.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I think the movement that I’d like to inspire is to allow people to realize the positive impacts they potentially could have on this world and to have the courage to act upon them.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

I think I would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with Jeff Bezos. I would love to hear the stories of the early days of Amazon and learn from them.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.