From Underestimated to 50 Million+ Users: Leveraging AI to Empower with Vu Van, ELSA

Some notable quotables from Vu Van:

1. ON THE CURRENT MARKET, AND EXPLOSION OF CHATGPT:

“We’ve been doing this work long before it became exciting, it is accelerating what we wanted to do, in terms of the market acceptance and the adoption of it.”

While the market can feel tough, there is an undercurrent of excitement on the possibility of artificial intelligence since it is now more widely understood by the masses. The challenge for ELSA is in staying steadfast to the goal, and delivering quality to the user.

2. ON TURNING REJECTION TO FUEL YOUR FIRE:

ELSA was inspired by Vu Van’s own journey as an immigrant in the United States, where despite her grasp of English, her Vietnamese accent was hardly understood by others. She relates a particular incident in Stanford where her idea was ignored, but when later retold exactly by the next person, was celebrated.

“And I was sitting there really silently thinking, how did I not get the same attention? I was literally trying to say the exact same thing five minutes ago. The feedback from my professors and classmates was embarrassing: the delivery of my message was hard to understand”

She realized the very problem she faced, was what 90% of the 1.5 billion people learning English struggle with as well: and she was determined to solve it.

3. ON JUST GETTING STARTED:

Interestingly, Vu Van did not have the ‘Cold Start’ problem—ELSA had virality long before the product was perfect.

“We didn’t know what the product was and just put out a landing page about an AI that could help users learn English: 10,000 people signed up. And so they became our key user group where we improved upon their feedback.

When we went out to the market, in the beginning of 2016; we just debuted the product at SXSW. We won, and within the first 24 hours, we had 30,000 people downloading and like crashing every single server that we had!”

Vu Van’s purpose was clear: to put something out that focused on first, getting as much data as possible to train the model.

Tune in to more as we discuss:

– Vu Van’s approach to building

– Her vision for ELSA and staying ahead of the curve

– Seeing opportunities in crises: a 300% revenue jump in COVID?

ABOUT VU VAN

Vu Van is Co-founder & CEO of Silicon Valley-based ELSA, the world’s best and smartest English pronunciation app. She worked with leading speech scientists, machine learning scientists, and linguists from around the world to create ELSA. Powered by the company’s proprietary AI and speech recognition technology, ELSA scores a learners' speech to pinpoint individual syllable and phoneme level mistakes with real time feedback.

Prior to founding ELSA, Vu lived and worked in Vietnam, Singapore, Denmark where she experienced the challenges of an English language learner abroad. She served as an Engagement Manager at Booz & Co, one of the top four global management consulting firms. Vu earned an MBA and a Masters in Education from Stanford University and is originally from Vietnam.

Billion Dollar Moves is THE show for the audacious next generation leader; featuring the top global funders & founders. From the growing pains of a unicorn journey to IPO, scaling a venture capital firm, we cover it all in the world of venture & business. Learn from the crème de la crème so YOU too, can make #billiondollarmoves — in venture, in business, in life.