TechGen Startup Spotlight: Slang
A few weeks ago, we sat down with the team from Slang, an English learning app for advanced and professional English learning. Sitting in the vibrant CIC (Cambridge Innovation Center) workspace, Slang’s content director Patrick Brand shared their story and we took a peek at their hiring process.
What is slang and what problem are you trying to solve?
It’s similar in concept to Duolingo. What’s different about us is that we are teaching specialized content. Most of the software solutions out there for English or language teaching more generally are focused on teaching the same set of the most common vocabulary, or what the designers of the product considered to be the most common vocabulary for everybody. We are focused on teaching vocabulary specific to certain disciplines. For instance, we have an accounting course, a project management course, a finance course, and so on. Slang is designed for people who want to learn English and become proficient in these professional fields.
We originally came to this approach because one of our cofounders is from Colombia, and in his previous career he found himself frustrated that, while there are a lot of companies offering English classes and software, they all basically teach the same thing and don’t advance you beyond a certain level of proficiency. Learners in this situation are thinking “well, I am a product manager, I need to talk about my job and none of these things is teaching me how to do that”. That’s the problem we are trying to solve, and we do that with a more personalized approach. We allow the users to identify the vocabulary that they already know, so they can essentially customize the pool of vocabulary and focus on the words that they don’t recognize.
What is your background?
My background is in foreign language education and publishing. I worked for a publisher for four and a half years doing editorial work for foreign language textbooks, primarily in Spanish. And before that I was a grad student in Spanish linguistics.
How did you find out about TechGen?
It was originally something the CIC sent in their newsletter. They advertised for it last year and this year as well. And we discussed a little bit as a team and decided to take advantage and see where it would take us, which ultimately turned out to be a great success for us. We had Abigail as our intern last year and hired her full-time when she graduated, and for this summer we have Laura with us.
How did you find your interns?
When we first started hiring full-time employees for content, we were recruiting on LinkedIn. We got a lot of applicants there and many of them were completely irrelevant. I had to screen them all and there were hundreds of them. Finally, I interviewed maybe 10–12 people, out of which we hired 2 at the same time. That was the big foundational team.
Then we found out about TechGen and we posted the job there. One of our employees is a UMass alum from the linguistics department and she reached out to them, sending our TechGen posting over to the department faculty and circulating it there. We received a lot of applicants and Abigail was ultimately the one we went with. This year we repeated the same strategy and hired Laura. For linguistics students, it is kind of hard to find non-academic jobs, so those of us with that background often end up leaving the field if we can’t find an academic posting. I discovered this third path, working in edtech, and was interested in bringing other people with similar backgrounds into it.
What does the onboarding process look like at Slang?
We have evolved that over time; one of my employees has written up what is essentially an onboarding workbook, like a checklist. It plans out all kinds of projects and the interns do these things and check them off as they go. It’s pretty structured and streamlined at this point and serves as an introduction to all the core responsibilities of the job in a hands-on way.
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