How can we translate rejection into personal power?
Founder Vision is a one-on-one podcast that digs into deep conversations with business leaders from emerging markets as they get vulnerable about their experience in the early- to median-stage moments of their founding journey.
Koala was built to end Zoom-classroom boredom forever — by putting learners into an interactive, kid-friendly, Minecraft-style, 3D environment, complete with avatars.
Brett’s conversation is with Xavier Moretti, Koala’s Co-Founder and CEO.
Catch the full episode on Spotify, Audible, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you prefer to listen.
Key Takeaways
Don’t Underestimate Fun
“My co-founder and I are both ex-gamers. We actually still game sometimes over the weekend. We have always seen a lot of value in the virtues of using gaming to engage and to learn. We were strong believers in that, and I mean I think that’s something that COVID made clear to parents, teachers, and to everyone in the world: it is really hard to engage an 8 year old on a Zoom session with 30 other kids for an hour. It just doesn’t work, but those kids have no problem being focused on Animal Crossing, Fortnight, Minecraft, or Roblox for three hours straight. What’s the difference? What’s the fundamental difference? Is it because one is entertaining and the other is about learning? Or is it because of the medium? Our thesis is that it is about the medium, and we think that we can build a tool that looks like a video game but that is actually meant for teaching and learning.”
Keep Pitching Until Someone Catches
“My co-founder and I had no credibility in this space. […] For obvious reasons, it took me many, many pitches to close our first round of funding.
We started the company about two years ago. We did try to raise money from the very beginning, but I only just closed our first round of pre-seed a couple months back. Now we are on a better track and we have very credible investors in the Tap table, but it definitely didn’t happen overnight.
“I live in San Francisco, and I think people know that rent in San Francisco is not cheap. For about a year, I was sleeping in my friends’ spare rooms, and that’s how we were reducing burn as much as possible to run the company.
“I did 256 pitches total, and maybe 240 of those said no, and 16 invested. After you have done this, after you have gone through this kind of experience of the constant no, you become so much stronger. That’s my favorite thing, I think, about founding a startup is that you are constantly at the edge of your comfort zone. I’ve been living at the edge of my comfort zone for 2 years now, and I have stretched my comfort zone so much wider than before. You end up feeling invincible, and now I realize that I have problems every day. It is part of my job to solve problems, but every problem can be solved — just put one foot in front of the other. I am very confident in our ability to solve any problem that comes at us now.”
Be Ready for the Pivot
Originally, Koala was built for virtual reality. With the benefit of hindsight, Xavier considers that the team’s biggest mistake.
“We were bullish on VR adoption. We thought VR was going to ramp up quickly and we could build a consumer product in virtual reality. But when you want to raise money from VCs, you need exponential growth, and to have exponential growth, you need to have very little friction. […] On paper, yes, VR is the best tool to build Koala, to host engaging, remote classes, but nobody has a VR headset or very few people have a VR headset. Therefore, we needed to distribute those VR headsets. We had to build a free trial system where we would send VR headsets, send it all to people for free, and then they would do the first class. If they liked it, they would keep the VR headset. If they didn’t like it, they would need to send it back to us. The whole value of starting a software business is that you can make a lot of mistakes and you can move fast, etc., but there was this hardware dependency that added a lot of friction and that made things slow. You can’t be VC fundable if you are slow.
“I am just really happy that I don’t have to deal with VR anymore today. Maybe when VR picks up, and I am hoping it will pick up one day, Koala will be the first app supported there, the first education app in VR.”
Dig That Self-Awareness
“When you’re building a startup, you learn so much about what you are good at and about what you are not good at. At the beginning, when you start a company, you have to do everything and you realize, ‘Whoops, I really suck at design.’
“[Success] is about surrounding yourself with smart people and asking them, and being self-aware enough so that you know what you are not good at and work on those things. Now we have about 15 people on the team, and I’m able to hire people much smarter than me who help me do those things.”
