Memory Champion to EdTech Entrepreneur | Ed Cooke, CoFounder of Memrise

The Balderton Podcast: Tech Investment | Venture Capital | Startup Funding

Ed Cooke -Memory Champion and cofounder of language-learning app Memrise - talks about the struggles faced by ed-tech entrepreneurs, the Membus project, and how memory-techniques can help entrepreneurs hone their investment pitch-deck... 00:44 At the moment, all the talk at Memrise is about a certain project... Ed explains exactly what the Membus is, and what it hopes to achieve. 02:05 Ed explains why using a brightly coloured, vintage bus to collate video clips of native language speakers isn't just a bit of fun, but it's integral to the collation of good quality video of 100,000 native speakers. 03:40 For those of us who haven't had a go: How does Memrise help a user to learn a language? 04:40 Do old-school book-learning methods not work anymore? 05:51 Ed Cooke has trod an interesting path towards entrepreneurship: previously competing (with some success!) in the World Memory Championships. 08:21 TIPS: Ed shares a brilliant tip for entrepreneurs raising funds: how memory tactics can immeasurably improve the structure of an entrepreneur's pitch deck... 11:41 Ed explains that memory isn't just a storehouse, it's a key factor in how we perceive and understand the world. 13:50 Bumps on the road? Ed talks about entrepreneurship's more difficult moments. In particular: driving user-growth and achieving uniformity across platforms. 15:15 Another tip for entrepreneurs: 100 things are always wrong with your business... try and fix the top three, and forget the rest (for now!) The help priorities, Memrise implemented a management methodology called 'Objectives and Key Results', that was most famously used at Google. 17:20 EdTech, as an industry, can be difficult to penetrate for a few reasons, one of the most pertinent being that learning processes are genuinely difficult and complex, and can be longwinded. Therefore making them simple and approachable for users is a challenge. Secondly, schools are usually slow to adopt new technologies, so you need to find 'another' way in. For more podcasts, news and insight from Balderton Capital, please sign up to our newsletter: http://www.balderton.com/news/sign-up-for-our-monthly-newsletter