Simbi: Setting Up the Next Generation
There is global concern for the current state of our world: a climate emergency, growing income inequality, the learning crisis — the list goes on. However, within this uncertainty lies a distinct opportunity to create positive, sustainable change.These realizations have forced the corporate world to rethink its operations and through it, a new business entity has taken a foothold — the social enterprise. Social enterprises seek to generate revenue like any other business, but profits are often used to support the mission of achieving a social, economic and or environmental outcome. NBR had the privilege of interviewing Aaron Friedland, Co-Founder of Simbi and Simbi Foundation, a budding Vancouver-based social enterprise and registered charity, respectively.
Aaron’s background is rooted in academia; he received his Bachelor of Arts in Economics from McGill University and he is currently a PhD Candidate in Econometrics & Development Economics at the University of British Columbia (UBC). As such, Aaron certainly didn’t imagine himself becoming an entrepreneur when he entered his Master of Arts program in Applied Economics and Development Economics at UBC. It was Aaron’s time in rural Uganda where he worked on his thesis for his Master’s program that served as his foray into the world of social entrepreneurship. During his Master’s program, he researched the positive influence that concurrent reading and listening to an audio narration of the same text has on one’s fluency (the same approach that taught Aaron as a student with dyslexia to read). Aaron decided to execute on his findings and create a prototype for the technology he was using to run his initial research. Together with his co-founder Alex Gillis, a UBC Sauder alumnus, Simbi was founded.
Simbi grew out of a not-for-profit organization, now called ‘Simbi Foundation’, with a mission to improve access to education and support learners across the world. Simbi Foundation is focused on education research and the building of physical education infrastructure such as BrightBox solar powered classrooms in remote, rural, and refugee communities with limited access to electricity.
Today, Simbi and Simbi Foundation share a ‘simbi-otic’ approach to improving access to education: Simbi builds software to improve reading while Simbi Foundation builds solar powered classrooms that provide rural communities access to quality educational resources as well as solar power and electricity. Through their work in these communities, the Simbi team quickly realized that there was a gap in the available reading technology. Building off of Aaron’s initial prototype, ‘Simbi’, the eReading platform and for-profit corporation, was born. Simbi currently engages over 130,000 learners across 66 countries through its platform and global library of books. Using its technology, a student in Vancouver can record their narration of a book that is then played back by a reader on the other side of the world to help them learn how to read (or vice versa!). Simbi’s process has helped students double their reading fluency in just three months while simultaneously empowering them to contribute to a global community built on uplifting literacy. Readers can track their fluency progress as they read books out loud, and see the extent of their progress with weekly progress reports detailing the number of individuals across the world who have benefited from their narrations.
It’s important to note that literacy rates are not just a problem confined to lower income nations. Recent research has shown that literacy rates in developed countries, such as the United States, have actually been dropping. This can be attributed to a number of factors, but one that Aaron cited specifically was the rise of a culture of instant gratification. This has fundamentally shifted the human relationship with novels and long form text. It fuels Simbi’s mission to ensure that students learn to cultivate a lifelong passion for reading at a young age. This strong sense of social impact is what keeps Simbi moving forwards.
The enormous growth that social enterprises have seen in recent years parallels the rise of positive sentiment towards social impact in the C-suite, with over 78% of C-suite executives ranking it as a “very important” priority for their business in 2018. Despite the surge in recognizing its importance, the interconnectedness between social cause with profit generation continues to be overlooked. If anything, it is because of the focus on a social good, that social enterprises are able to in fact generate sustained amounts of revenue. For Aaron,
“it’s very simple […] when we are generating revenue, we’re able to reinvest and we’re able to build a more engaging platform […] and expand to the cutting edge of exciting reading experiences.”
When seeking to innovate in a socially-conscious manner, Simbi generally follows a three-step process:
- Analysis of its current position and the innovations required to improve the experiences of users in a way that helps Simbi reach its ultimate goal.
- Refutation of proposed solutions by evaluating the negative externalities associated with any one decision.
- Evaluation of the possible solutions using a decision matrix to determine the best fit for their specific goals.
Simbi has excelled in leveraging this innovation process, notably in how it reconciles equitable profit generation through usage-based pricing. Educators can join Simbi for free, and as the product becomes more useful to them, in terms of how their classroom could benefit from features like reading assignments, assessments, feedback, and increased data analytics, educators can choose to opt into a payment plan. This ensures that Simbi has value creation for its users at the forefront and that it is constantly seeking to innovate to improve the user experience in a way that will keep them competitive.
Recently, Simbi has entered into an exciting phase of growth as the need for engaging online learning platforms has become increasingly prevalent. Last year, Simbi signed an agreement with the United Nations to bring their product to an additional 1.3 million learners in refugee settlements across the world. Beyond expanding their reach to students through notable school districts in Coquitlam, New Westminster, and the Toronto District School Board, Simbi has also been partnering with various corporations including Salesforce, RBC, and Deloitte to increase employee engagement and volunteer activity. Corporate groups can participate and compete in online Read-a-Thons which help expand Simbi’s catalogue of available reading materials for children across the globe. NBR was proud to participate in a read-a-thon for Simbi last year. It is an incredibly meaningful way to volunteer and create positive impact conveniently from one’s own home (especially during the Covid era).
Simbi’s achievements also include being selected to join the Google Voice AI Accelerator Program, where it plans on optimizing it’s machine learning and its natural language processing capabilities. Currently, Simbi is also in the middle of raising funds to improve their technology and make it available to a greater number of individuals globally. Aaron and the team’s unwavering efforts to grow Simbi and the power of books is driven by Neil Postman, who was quoted as saying that “[Aldous] Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.” For Aaron, Huxley’s prescribed future catalyzed Simbi’s mission, which has become a tremendous case study on the alchemy of social impact and innovation. Both Vancouver’s startup ecosystem and global literacy rates are being elevated by Simbi’s innovation and purpose-driven mission.
