The Origin of Eggbun Education
This blog post is to clarify Eggbun’s origin and to state which direction the company is headed going forward. A bit of my background history is included as a starter, but this doesn’t mean I have neglected to mention the great efforts of my co-founder Mimi Kim when we launched Eggbun and my team members up until this point.
I was born with tan-colored skin, which is a bit more tanned than the statistically median color of Korean people. It’s been a pleasure since I never ever had any skin trouble and I have always liked it personally. But this has gotten me into fights for more than a decade with people who viewed my skin as black or taunted me as being like black coffee and such. Not sure when this changed, but it got on my nerves and it did bother me a lot at the time. (And yet, in retrospect, I have always been in a leadership position during primary and middle school years, very weird how that could be…)
Many years later, I arrived in Paris, stood in the middle of a corridor in Pyramid Station, and without stopping, my tears flowed. I realized,
“People here are so diverse, my little skin color difference from other Asians was definitely not that big a deal.”
After that, I felt like I belonged to society, I fell hard in love with the French culture, and also met loved ones and friends. I liked the way people here were very different, and how nobody hurt each other based on their minor differences. Although once before, I did get a racist attack from an uneducated French person. Now when thinking about the incident again, I feel like it’s not a big deal. At that time, this got me to think about a lot of things. Since I loved the culture, I tried to figure out why it happened. My conclusion was that people are originally biased toward outside groups, and this can only be solved with proper knowledge. (I don’t want to write too much about the in-group out-group bias and about my previous efforts to back this up with psychology theory at this time.)
The incident motivated me to want to learn other cultures. It got me to think that if people could easily learn other cultures, something good could happen. I also thought that the essence of a culture must be its language. So I started working on learning as many languages as possible starting with English, French, all the way to Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and more. For some languages I put in much effort, thus I became capable of speaking them rather fluently, but for the others, I didn’t put in enough effort so I couldn’t speak them as well. But overall, the discovery throughout my efforts was that it is very hard to build up rudimentary foundations when learning a new language due to the lack of good material. I wanted to solve the problem, and I decided to move toward that direction.
I returned to Korea, went into a gaming company thinking that this was the fastest way to build up a relevant network and to learn IT related skills. Above all, I was introduced to Mimi from my co-workers in the company who had been working for Samsung Electronics. After a few meetings, I gained confidence that we could make something great together, so I asked her to help me solve the problem I found together.
It has been more than a year since then, and have we solved the problem yet? Not even 5%, which is bad, but did I find any clues on how to solve it? Yes I did. I think that if there could be a cyber tutor who guides / motivates / teaches people, then we can build up a great foundation to learn languages. And there are lots of tools to help mid-to-intermediate learners to reach the advanced level. And I realized I needed to found a company where people could help make the solution in cooperation with others. So I must define the company, what is Eggbun. The starting point to define Eggbun is that Eggbun is a global company that helps beginners reach conversational fluency.
I greatly appreciate diversity in the company due to my personal experience. On top of that, Bunners, our customers, are from everywhere. It is perfectly logical that we pursue diversity and a global market. Since English is the company language, we are attracting team members from everywhere in the world, people who think and solve problems during the creation of a cyber tutor platform that is the right fit with their dreams.
This time, I gained the opportunity to go to London with the support of my investors (I will disclose them once I finalize the process). I think is a great starting point toward becoming a global company in terms of having people from different backgrounds together and to make a great product.
Ok, I’ve written about the start of Eggbun’s vision. I am unable to make it shorter. I want to fully state the vision about what Eggbun is and where we are heading toward at this very moment, but that will have to wait for another article. I want to conclude this post by summarizing my thoughts about why I decided to start Eggbun.
I believe that if people with different backgrounds could easily understand each other, there won’t be such racism and international problems. Language is the essence of culture, therefore, we can contribute to making the world a better place if we could help anybody learn language easily.
If you feel excited about joining our team, please don’t hesitate to email us at fernando.moon@eggbun-edu.com
