Are you interested in starting —or scaling— your own online coding course?
In this episode, we’ ll hear from a tech field-to-classroom expert on his professional experience, his transition into teaching, and the incredibly successful online coding business he grew from the ground up.
Yumio Saneyoshi will join us live on the Lifelong Educator Show to share:
An insider’s look into coding education, from the eyes of a former businessman in the very field these students may someday work.
Advice on how to be successful in the virtual coding space, including how to effectively start a course, grow a student base, and scale your business.
And so much more!
Yumio is building the next generation of coding experts. Are you ready to do the same?
Are you interested in starting —or scaling— your own online coding course?
In this episode, we’ ll hear from a tech field-to-classroom expert on his professional experience, his transition into teaching, and the incredibly successful online coding business he grew from the ground up.
Yumio Saneyoshi will join us live on the Lifelong Educator Show to share:
An insider’s look into coding education, from the eyes of a former businessman in the very field these students may someday work.
Advice on how to be successful in the virtual coding space, including how to effectively start a course, grow a student base, and scale your business.
And so much more!
Yumio is building the next generation of coding experts. Are you ready to do the same?
Hello educators. We are excited to have Yumio Saneyoshiwith us today. He's the founder of the penguin coding school. Yumio began his career in the tech world and later made the switch to teaching, giving him a very unique perspective that we honestly look forward to hearing about. We're going to start by covering Yumio's beginning his old tech job and why he left, we'll find out what motivated him to make the switch, whether or not the process was smooth sailing. I imagine it probably wasn't. We'll dive into penguin academy, Yumio's coding school that Has found great success in the online space. And we'll even take in tips and tricks to grow our own online courses, whether they cover coding or something completely different. So we're excited to hear this unique story and grow as course creators ourselves. We can't wait to see where this inspirational interview and it will be takes our community online. Today, so welcome you mijo and Dotan, of course, but first welcome Mumia.
Yumio Saneyoshi:Thank you, Josh. I'm excited to be here.
Joshua Chernikoff:Awesome. All right. And Dotan, of course, my cohost flying this plane with me. Welcome to you.
Dotan Tamir:Thank you. Excited to be here again in the, in the cockpit flying this.
Yumio Saneyoshi:Yeah.
Joshua Chernikoff:You know, and, and interesting. Dotan and I have basically been flying planes in the in-person education, afterschool and summer camp space for decades, basically decades at this point. we're moving into the online space. You, Mayo is a little bit. and I think we're going to kind of welcome him into this fraternity a little bit today because he's really new to, to kind of owning his own business and running it online and it's super inspirational. So without further ado, you know, give us the, the long elevator pitch of how you got here and left the west coast.
Yumio Saneyoshi:Sure Josh. So I, I worked in the tech industry, in San Francisco bay area for about 15 years. And I've worked in big companies like Yahoo and Google. I've worked in medium companies. I've worked in startups that had successful exits. So I kind of had a, you know, a great experience in all kinds of companies, all kinds of roles. but I never had my own company. so. You know, when we, the family moved to the east coast, Boston five years ago, due to my wife's job, I decided this was a great transition point to, you know, start my own business. And I, you know, to be honest, I had no idea what that was going to be. but kind of, you know, as a. That's tight guy stuff five years ago. I started building an iPhone app for recommending, food and restaurants. You know, this was like pre door dash. So while I was building this iPhone app, you know, I was doing what most developers do, which is like, you know, looking up things on stack overflow, copy pasting things and trying to, you know, kind of mashed together this app. This kind of experience, taught me three things. So first, you know, there's a lot of free information out there on how to code, right. but that's not really well organized. You know, it's a lot of people asking their very specific questions and you kind of have to know enough to modify it, to fit your needs. second, you know, there's something great about. You know, something out of nothing, especially with code, because you literally can have nothing in front of you except for some, you know, typing in things. And all of a sudden you have a product, right. And then number three, is that you don't really need a computer science degree to code, to learn to code. You know, obviously you need to understand a lot of things, but it's not really a degree that you need. I think it's more a way of thinking. So these three things kind of taught me. It was great. And during this time I had, two kids, there were like nine and 11 kind of pre-teen. And so, you know, I had a lot of free time cause it was, you know, I was on my own. I started teaching them what I was learning, which is I'm coding. Right. And. I've always enjoyed teaching kids, but this was kind of a new experience. Cause I was learning things kind of on the fly and I was immediately transferring that knowledge to my kids. and it was exhilarating experience. And so I was like, oh, this is kind of cool, this like teaching thing. and so I kind of decided, yeah, maybe I'll do it for a wider audience. so I rented like a Sunday school classroom and our local church just started doing like free coding lessons on the weekend. and so this was five years ago, so, you know, coding for kids wasn't so mainstream back then, but there was immediate demand. Like we, I would put up a Google form for sign up and like, you know, within hours they were full. so, and then, from then on it just kind of grew and the side gig turned into my full-time job. and we've been enjoying kind of double digit growth ever since.
Joshua Chernikoff:Very cool. before Dotan asks, I think some probing questions. I'm going to ask an easy one. Talk about the name of the school and the people behind you.
Yumio Saneyoshi:So, I'm from Japan and I don't know if you know about Japanese culture. You know, we'd like cute things. There's this word Kaliey, which is all about cute, you know, animate doctors and we turn anything into, you know, emoji anime. Right. and so when I started my own company, I wanted to call it something, but I didn't want to call it like some tech name, like, you know, you know, coding tech or whatever. I wanted to call it something cute, especially cause it was for kids. You know, throughout my life, I've always loved penguins. So I decided to call it, you know, penguin, coding school. another reason was, I'm a dad. And at that time I was kind of a stay at home dad and taking care of my kids, you know? and, little known fact, is that an emperor penguin? It's one of the few species where the dad actually. Stays with the egg and like, you know, warms it the entire time while the wife goes out and hunts for food. And so that's kind of a fitting metaphor that I was, this like penguin trying to, you know, take care of kids while my wife was out there in the real world. making the dough for her. I
Joshua Chernikoff:love it. And, I, I hear you on that because my wife is on the dough for us as well. So I'm with photonics
Dotan Tamir:real Cubist, the cutest name for a coding school out there for sure. I mean, you're already number one at this for sure. everything he has is like you said, like coding tech, and I mean, there might be great schools, but the cutest name is definitely penguin.
Yumio Saneyoshi:Yeah. We also were able to trademark this name because it is unique. but we actually got I, when we trademarked it, we got a letter from a penguin random house, you know, the publishing company saying. You know, they're okay with us calling it the penguin coding school, but we couldn't publish any books with the penguin brand because you know, penguin books is like a big, obviously they're like, you know, very protective of that name. So we can't publish books, but we can teach, coding through our penguin brand.
Dotan Tamir:So I have so many questions about, about teaching coding and without, and about figuring out this, this field, obviously there are so many players in the field. and, and when you started, you probably knew about all those players, right? So you were, you know, easy, easily. Can you can easily Google and find so many codings clues for kids. What, what, what was unique in your approach? Why didn't you want to do differently? Not including the name that's already different.
Yumio Saneyoshi:so when I first started five areas, it wasn't as popular. but you know, now obviously it is, and I think part of that was also the switch to online with the pandemic. you know, I didn't get into the. the, coding education is one of the few things that does that we can do very effectively online. And so when the pandemic hit and everything switched to zoom, we were able to, transition very seamlessly. And I think other players in the ed tech space found that as well. but we have always done things I think, differently than other, players and that we've always focused on teachers. we've always paid more than others, for our teachers. we've always, invested in teacher education. Other people don't do this, but for us it's always been, part of our mission is not just to like teach the kids, but teach the teachers as well or trained the teachers. coding is a fairly new field in terms of education and there are very few, kind of, you know, standards on how to teach coding. there are very few, Teaching academies for coding specifically, right? There's lots of places where you can learn how to teach math or English or history, but I don't think there's really any place that teaches how people, can teach coding effectively to kids. so I think we've invested a lot in that space. And so we have great one great teacher retention. We have a lot of long-time teachers and we, I think we have. Highest ratings for all our classes, because we've invested in teacher training. The, the, another
Joshua Chernikoff:interesting thing that you, you did differently, and I'm going to get made fun of for printing stuff out. But this article here, I love the headline. Why a non programmer programmer is starting a coding school. So the staff that you have that you pay well, that seems to really enjoy what they're doing. Do they mind that their principal or their emperor. The non programmer and he's teaching it or is that, does that
Yumio Saneyoshi:make it right? I think that actually is one of our strengths actually, is that, you know, I think one of the things that you learn when you're trying to learn coding is that when you get a teacher who's really good at. it's really hard for them to understand why you don't understand something. I think, you know, maybe people have had an experience when the teacher's too good at something it's really hard for them to understand our mere mortals, how something can be hard to understand. Right. And I think, in some ways I had an advantage, because I was learning things, you know, from the ground up. I had to really understand it. Right. And well, that's one of the nice things about teaching is when you teach something, you really have to understand. So even though I was kind of learning as I was going along, I really had to understand it. I understand it at a very basic level that then translates well to teaching, you know, kids, especially they need, you know, kids need not like formulas and, you know, kind of abstract and your acronyms. They need. Very tangible ways of explaining things and understanding, you know, what is a variable or what is a function. And I, we try to use kind of cute analogies as much as we can so that kids can really kind of understand things at a very intuitive. So, yeah, I think that's actually worked out in our favor and, a lot of our teachers actually don't have coding backgrounds necessarily, but they've, you know, they have the skills to teach it because they are either good teachers. They have some, you know, obviously some stem skills. but that translates very well to coding education.
Dotan Tamir:I want to focus a little bit more on, on that angle of the teachers and finding the right teachers. I am a true believer in that in my previous business. I had a, not just a coding camp, but a camp that teaches coding, but 40 different workshops around this, This, area. And, I always believed in, finding, instructors in our language, that are, that have the passion to work with kids, to take the kids from point a to point B in their journey, basically. Lead them be the leader, be the role model, show them how fun it is. Pass on the passion more than the knowledge, more than the skill, because those, I always say, you know, when you teaching kids, than for an adult to learn what he needs for teaching the kids, it's not, it's not going to take a lot. They can easily learn the skills that in need to teach, but they have to be. amazing leaders and engaging teachers. Do you, I want to hear what you think about it and, and do you, how, how do you do it? Like, is it, it's not easy to, to identify those superpowers that, those teachers,
Yumio Saneyoshi:yeah, I think that's the key to our success early on is that I know that some of our, you know, Bigger companies in our space. you know, they just go out and hire anyone with a computer science degree or some experience. Right. and what we found is more important than a degree, or, you know, some classes you've taken in that space really, you know, wanting to teach kids, cause that's a special skill or not just even a skill, it's a passion that you have to have cause otherwise, you know, having this kind of, you know, weekend and week out teaching, classes where, you know, the material you already know pretty well. So it's not like, you know, exciting for you, you know, having to, you know, kind of go through the same curriculum over, or that can become a drag unless you really enjoy the process of, Sharing that knowledge and seeing the kids, I get excited and, you know, light up and then, you know, later having their parents tell you that, you know, how the kids are excited. It's the first academic thing they've been excited and ears. So that has to be the motivation. And so we, again, and when we interview for teachers, that's what we've look for. we look for one, do they have experience, you know, teaching kids before, did they enjoy that experience? And you can kind of tell in a, you know, even in a zoom interview, just from their facial expression or how they say that, right. whether or not they truly enjoy that, or they're just saying they did. That's the interview question. and so, you know, You know, we interview hundreds of candidates. We only pick a few. And, part of it is because we're looking for that intangible quality. We don't just hire any, you know, college student that understands coding. We look for, do you want to teach kids? And do you have enough of an understanding to. You know, in part that, a lot of the coding knowledge and especially for younger kids, like, you know, anyone with a decent amount of education can learn to do, I think what's more important is that you want to do that. You know, especially when, you know, in coding, if you have those skills, there are many more ways to make a lot more money doing what they do. So there has, I think it's a. kind of person that wants to spend even a few hours a week, teaching that instead of, doing something else.
Joshua Chernikoff:When I was prepping for this interview, I came across an article that featured your location in park slope in Brooklyn, beautiful Brooklyn and Europe. You were listed like right below ID tech. You know, who we know is, is a monster in the space. And, I was just a little bit surprised to find out that you have an in-person location in a very nice place. So can you talk about. Balancing the business literally as of today, in-person versus online is, is one part of the business, you know, giving you signals to follow it more than another. How do you balance that?
Yumio Saneyoshi:Yeah. So, you know, like many other afterschool activities, we were a hundred percent in-person until the pandemic pretty much. And, independent, you know, March, 2020, we switched, you know, a hundred percent to online. And, we were able to do that, you know, within a week, really, pretty seamlessly. And a lot of that is, you know, there's a lot of nice. software now, online coding software. That pretty much mimics like allowing, you know, just like Google docs. You can have co-edit, privileges. You can have coding platforms that have co-editing privileges. So teachers can pretty much see what the T you know, the student is coding, in real time and they can do comments and, you know, in many ways it's, superior to what we used to have with in-person. And so I think, you know, again, coding education, one of those things that online works really well. but we did keep our in-person. we actually even expanded into Brooklyn, New York, during the pandemic. So we've been in, a suburb of Boston called Lexington for the last five years. But, we expanded into Brooklyn, New York because we were actually during this pandemic and the online, expansion. we started noticing that we had a cluster of, students from the Brooklyn area in New York. and part of that was because we were now advertising in those areas. You know, once we knew that there was kind of a, audience for this or our customer base for that we decided, you know, and the pandemic also lowered some of the commercial rents and the New York city area, as you may have heard. So we were able to open, in-person experience there. And I think there's definitely a place for both, right. Online is great in many respects. there's a lot of, friction that has taken away, like having to drive your kids to a certain location, having the teacher, you know, geographically co located, although friction. You know, is taken away and online and we've been able to expand our teacher space pretty much the 50 states in the, in the country. thanks to online. but I think especially with younger kids, the in-person experience, even with coding, is special in that, you know, some kids learn better with, you know, just having, being physically being there. Kids just like, you know, talking to each other and you can do that obviously with zoom and chatting, but, you know, there's something different about in person. and with younger kids also, there's, you know, the parents actually want to drop some that drop their kids off. Right. And, you know, have a little hour or hour and a half to themselves. so in certain. I think it makes sense to keep the in person. we also have a robotics program and you know, a lot of robotics. Yes. We actually were able to do it online, through the pandemic, but there's something again different about actually, you know, physically being there with robotics. so there are certain things that we, you know, specialize in within person, younger kids, robotics, and then online has a more general kind of appeal. And obviously that geographic reach 50 states or the country. Yeah. Congratulations. Yeah. I
Dotan Tamir:had a lot of questions, as I said, but do you feel that it's easier to, sell a market and online class compared to an in-person or vice versa? Is it the same in terms of, you know, marketing cost and resources and time and. Oh that, is it easier to sell the online or to sell the in-person?
Yumio Saneyoshi:I think they have different pros and cons, like anything else. So, you know, I think with in-person, the. Advantages, obviously, you have, in some ways, fewer competitors, because you know, you can't have hundreds of the companies, all co-located in one location. there's a lot of word of mouth, that can happen in person. so I think there's kind of advantages about that. the. Online space. I think the competition is, certainly, higher in terms of D just because, you know, we have a bunch of national change. We have, you know, we have even like, not just American companies, but, you know, global companies. Who are interested in this space. and you know, a lot of the advertising is national. So, you know, there, the advertising budget is higher for that, competing, you know, and, you know, Google ads on Facebook ads. it's more expensive in many ways. But it also does give us more opportunities because now we can find, you know, students in Utah and the students in Texas, even though we don't have a physical presence there. And, you know, as long as we continue, I think delivering high quality and we get, you know, good online reviews, you know, we still have the opportunity for, you know, word of mouth. And, so yeah, I think they both have their pros and cons. but I think. You know, to us, I think, we like having both, kind of this hybrid, approach.
Joshua Chernikoff:Let's let's talk about scaling a little bit. So I'm going to simplify this, but you know, scaling in the in-person world, you got to add rooms, you got to add buildings. Okay. Simplifying it, but scaling in the online world a little bit different. we've got, people in our audience who are looking to scale their online business. So can you talk about, you know, you said. in, in our pre-interview and just now that you pivoted pretty quickly, you know, and probably grabbed easiest tools that were there. And so how do you plan to scale the online business? much like you want to scale the in-person, but how do you get to scale the online business using the right tools
Yumio Saneyoshi:shows. so right now we're using, you know, like anything else, kind of an amalgamation of different tools. we use zoom for our video. We use, a tool called replica for our online coding. We use a tool called Sawyer tools for registration. it's it's definitely, you know, only possible the scaling is only possible with the right tools. You know, I think you guys know the experience of we, when I first, when we first moved online, we, I was doing everything on Google docs and Google spreadsheets and manually copy pasting people's registration information. And, you know, you can only do that so many times before you need just, you know, a much more streamlined, tool for that. Yeah. I mean, I, every time we have a free trial lesson week or something like that, I'd be up until 4:00 AM, you know, trying to, you know, send all the invitations to the right people. Any startup goes through that phase. but then, you know, hopefully quickly realizes that there are tools that can solve that. so know, I think, as we're growing and growing, we are seeing the need for, more sophisticated tools because, you know, when we're trying to compete with the, you know, again where the global brands and, you know, ones with a lot more funding, they have the tools to, you know, quickly. A, interested, you know, student or parents and quickly kind of put them in that funnel to get them into a classroom. we're still kind of making, you know, making do with a ton of different tools to do that. we have like, you know, different online CRM with different email marketing. And so we are now looking seriously at streamlining. No the less time I can spend on worrying about that, the infrastructure, the software infrastructure, the more time I can spend on improving our curriculum, improving the teaching teacher training, which is really our product. and you know, that's what I want to focus my energy on.
Joshua Chernikoff:Yes. Yeah. And all I speak, but I just would say one thing from, you know, entrepreneur to entrepreneur. One, one thing I don't think you need to think about and doTERRA and I completely see eye to eye on this is the company. You know, you know, we there's, there's so many kids out there, especially in the online space that are looking for coding and you've got those big players fine. Let them do their thing. I think you we've already decided in the first couple minutes of this discussion here, that penguin brings something unique to, you know, so you focus on you and I think it's gonna work out super well. and, and so, yeah, I mean, you got lots of, as, as entrepreneurs, as business owners, we've got. too many fires to fight each day. but I don't know, in the penguin school, if you got to worry about your competition, there are people are going to be super attracted to, to your product and who you are. So that's my 2 cents.
Yumio Saneyoshi:I
Dotan Tamir:know. Thank you for listening for listening, to you. it makes so much sense for, for a person that comes from the product management or product development angle to build a successful business because the products you, you analyze the exact needs. And you build the exact solution. many people in the education space don't come from there. They, they have, you know, they have their agenda. They have, they're, they're they're impact driven, which is very important and in great, but sometimes on their way, they're doing many, many, many mistakes, building a product. For the wrong needs or a product that answers not exactly the exact problems. I see that in many conversations that I have with others, You know, companies, sometimes they really want to, sell both drop-ins and four week courses and eight-week courses and this and that. And they're not thinking about making it simple, you know, a simple solution, a simple structure, something that can be simply sold, something that can grow. And if I remember correctly from one of our previous conversation, you developed this. kind of a user journey that starts with one product and then moves onto the next product. Talk, talk more about that from, from that angle and how that should serve your business best.
Yumio Saneyoshi:I think, I'm not a hundred percent sure if this is what you're talking about, but, we, you know, I think it also helps, like you said, as a product centric, you know, company that. I'm also a consumer of aura, you know, the target audience, I'm a parent of kids in this kind of age range. And, you know, I know exactly what I would need, to sign up for a service, and the amount of information. I think, you know, when you've been in the kind of the internet product space, you understand that, you know, people have such limited attention spans and so they're so busy and anything that's makes that easier is, You know, as an instant win, even if the product itself is, might be, you know, the quality of the education might be, you know, different or superior, you know, parents just want to get to the right thing, you know, as quickly as possible. So, that does help and kind of honing in on, okay. As a parent, what do I need to know if I want to. If I'm going to be motivated to pay money, to sign up my kid on an online thing that I've never really heard of, but it looks good. But then you look around and like, you know, all these online companies say the same thing on the website. Right. So how do you want to differentiate that? And then to, how do you make it easy for them to make that decision? and, We, you know, we not, we, but just, I, you know, I think the way that you kind of want to get into something is you want to try it, right? This is an experiential. Good. and. You know, a lot of times, like, like I said, every website will say the same thing about what wonderful coding education they're able to provide, but you really need to know by actually experiencing it with not just you, but your kid. Right. because it's, if they don't like it, it doesn't matter how much you think it's going to be great. It's not going to last very long. so anyway, a very extensive free trial program. So when kids can try it, they can see that the kids, you know, parents can actually see the kids enjoying it. and then once we get that entry point, you know, we have a way of kind of guiding them through a curriculum. you know, that our multi-years to actually build. something that at the end of the day, we want the kids to love the coding and love the tech enough, so much so that they're going to build their own thing. Right. That's really the, I think at the end of the day, right? The goal of coding, which may be different than other subjects is that. You don't want to kids learning coding so that they can take a test at the end of the journey and be like, oh, I got an a on my certification test. Right? I think sometimes you still think that way, because that's the way that education has been delivered in so many other subjects, but coding at the end of the day, they can't use it. If you can't actually build some. I think we've failed. And so we want them at the end of the journey to build something that they can probably call their own and, you know, no matter where the entry point is and we want them to get there. And so, once we have the kid, you know, the student really enthusiastic about the coding, we think we have a lot of different courses and classes and teachers that can guide them. Endpoint. so anyway, that's kind of a, we think of the customer journey is, you know, you got to try it, right. We, if you don't try it, you can't, how do you know? but once we try it, we have the confidence that they're going to like it, we know that, and then we're going to give them enough tools and classes to get to where I think most parents would want them to be, which is, you know, A student or a child that is confident in the technology in this world. Right. I don't think it can be an effective citizen, without understanding something about tech and having some confidence, in dealing with tech, because tech is in so many parts of our world and lives. Now that I think it can be overwhelming and scary even. Right. and I think, you know, Skills and knowledge. I think, kids, no matter what they end up doing, right? You can become an artist, but understanding tech and be having that confidence and talk is going to help them no matter what they do. I,
Joshua Chernikoff:I hate to ask this question because it's such a crappy question, but I have to, because I love your, your approach. I would imagine to life and to business, but what's the five-year plan
Yumio Saneyoshi:for. you know, I think, I was as he recently, because it's been five years since we started, I was looking at what my five-year plan was five years ago. And it's pretty funny, you know, I think it's always a good exercise and what I thought was going to work out and what things that I, you know, totally unexpected directions. we want, you know, our mission has been, we want kids. To code with a smile on their face. And I say that without it being kind of a marketing thing, we want them, we want to get to a point where coding is something that kids truly can enjoy doing. and so, you know, whether that's in us, you know, really becoming great at teacher training or we, you know, combine that with a curriculum that really, you know, You know, different differentiated kids into that same kind of goal of, you know, tech, confident kids. I don't know. we're know, kind of figuring that out every day. but that is our goal. in five years, I want penguin coding school to be known as a place where, any kid, any child in any, you know, tech background or experience can take our classes with our teachers. And at the end of the. You know, come out as a tech confident kid and I'm not, I can't, I don't know what, you know, combination of ingredients that's gonna require, but I think that is our goal. And hopefully in five years, we'll be a lot closer than we are today.
Joshua Chernikoff:I think as entrepreneurs, the combination of ingredients changes on a daily basis. That
Yumio Saneyoshi:seems like, yeah, You know, three years ago, I would never have guessed that we would be, you know, this much invested in online. We were, I remember we were testing it out. We were going on some online courses, you know, doing some hybrid because some kids wanted to stay home. but again, I think. You never know what the world's gonna throw at you. So we just have to, you know, ride the way that no, I'm sure you
Dotan Tamir:were planning for a pandemic
Yumio Saneyoshi:where
Dotan Tamir:everybody did. No. I think your, your. earlier, on the previous question where, really valuable, for, for other schools in many, not only in coding, I think in, in other enrichment, fields. And, and we, you know, we, the team here at click tweet, we really believe that, enrichment online can actually. You know, become more accessible now it's online. So there are more possibilities, more options. We can reach kids that never had the access to such a high level, a high standard of education and so many options to choose from. And, so, so we are, you know, we, we always love to, to, to help the, those enrichment providers. To find also their right business, the business path. I, again, like what, something that I really liked about how you present the courses is the simplicity, how simple it is to understand, to try and to continue because you have this very structured way. You're not offering. Tons of different, structures. It's a very simple structure that replicates to different levels and, and, and, and, and themes. and I'm, I'm, I'm sure it's working. I had a question. I forgot. So Josh move on. Yeah. Yeah.
Joshua Chernikoff:Listen, I think Dotan is being actually very humble in what he's saying. And, he's, he, you know, he's been studying penguin school. Like he studies all the other enrichment providers that we get to meet, on the click to site here. And so I. extend, you know, don't tons time, which is very valuable and there's not so much of it. You know, I think basically he's been very, generous with his time to all the, you know, the enrichment providers in our community. We've got this Facebook community, we've got other people that come to us and, you know, spend a lot of time, especially Dotan looking under the hood at some of these companies and saying, you know, Maybe click two's a solution for you, but anyways, just please try this or please try that, you know, because I know it's going to help you. And, and, and again, kind of goes back to, I think our shared belief on competition. There's so many kids out there in-person especially online that we just want the rising tide. I wanted to ask one last question of Umea. You know, you've given such Sage advice. I think that you give to get. You know, when it comes to coding and I'm hearing it as a parent as well. what, whatever happened to the door dash app that you were working on, and what's the advice you give to yourself is that thing shelved, is that thing gonna make it, what are you going to do with the door dash app?
Yumio Saneyoshi:Yeah, that's actually a funny story of, so the DoorDash app, I was trying to make it, I actually thought, you know, like, engineer or entrepreneur, you want to kind of have a beta product, right? Test it out. So instead of a food recommender, I actually pivoted and was like, oh, I'm going to make a, a website that recommends afterschool activities know I was like parent. And I was like, there's so many after-school activities, but there's no, actually, even to this day, I easy way to be like, okay, what's the afterschool activity. I should sign up. My kids do. And so I actually built that, and it's live somewhere. but what's it called? I may have taken it offline, but it was called after-school Leo. So it was like afterschool.io. I even had that. Cool. I think, I think it is offline, but, anyway, I do have that, I made that all on my own and. I do, you know, since, you know, we're actually getting, because we're, about five-year anniversary. We have some kids who have been taking our courses for five years and now they're building their own like apps and websites. And so, you know, maybe it is my time to go back to my capstone project and actually finish that. Because I think it's, you know, it's kind of, you know, I it's, unfinished business, I guess in some way. Yeah, yeah.
Joshua Chernikoff:This, this has been the beautiful, inspirational story that I think we thought it would be. And depends on a, with a question of what are you going to do, you know, and take your own advice. So don't take down the last word. It's, 1111 here in central time. you have the last word.
Yumio Saneyoshi:Yup.
Dotan Tamir:I remember the question, it was actually, and I don't think I'm going to ask, I'm going to let you answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway, because I believe at the time, so the question was, was actually you were talking about the competition about the experience of the kids. There's also competition with a lot of, those, services that teach. Code two kids without an instructor not live, not in the group. Right. And I was wondering, what, what's your thought about it? And maybe you, we do have the time Josh, if, if you allow it,
Yumio Saneyoshi:we'll just run one less commercial. So
Dotan Tamir:share a share. I want to hear what you think and about it. And then I do have one last question
Yumio Saneyoshi:to. All right. I'll keep it short. yeah, I think, you know, there's many ways to get to the same objective. I think there is something special about, especially with kids, like live teachers, you know, even with adults, it's hard to go through those like online tutorials that have no thing and you're, you know, you know, what do you really get out of it at the end? And also there's a thing of like, when it's just like you and the computer. Where's the motivation, right? There's something about, again, a live teacher that motivates you to keep on learning that joy. I think that's hard to do with, you know, pure, kind of, you know, online driven or whatever product only solutions. but you know, I think, I guess one thing I would want to analogy. With all the years of like piano training, right? Piano learning how to take a piano lesson. We still have the most dominant way of how someone learns, how to play a piano or any musical instrument is one-on-one with a teacher with a live teacher. Right. So not to say there aren't ways. Have technology, fast forward some of these solutions, but there is something, you know, that's very time-honored and something about humans learning from other humans.
Joshua Chernikoff:Which is a perfect segue because our next webinar is a music webinars. So thank you for leading us there, but Dotan, you had another question. No,
Dotan Tamir:true. Yeah. Just mentioned. you know, we were just so click to is a, it's really a company. you know, challenged by this opportunity of companies like penguin and other companies who are looking at the online without fear, basically as an opportunity to serve the masses, served, serve kids everywhere with this kind of experience. so this is, this is what we're here for. We were just elected, to be part of the elite 200 companies in ASU GSV. That's happening in San Diego in April, so April. So we're going to be there. and we are, inviting, in case you, in case you're going to be there, maybe. I dunno. Yeah. We'd love to meet you there. Josh knows all the. Oh, the great bars in San Diego showed it to me last time. So are we inviting you inviting all the other companies that are in this space to meet with us? And we are also planning, some interesting serious of this show, leading towards the, San Diego conference. this is an interesting time for, for education and I think, Right on it. So you have this, you know, perfect timing probably, and, and interesting path, very inspiring, talk today. So thank you so much
Yumio Saneyoshi:till the time you said no fear, no
Joshua Chernikoff:fear fears. No fear. You can't have fear in the, being an entrepreneur and Umea. You demonstrate that and have talked about it today and we're all living it. as educators not intrepreneur. So thank you everybody for joining us. Let's continue the conversation on our, in our Facebook community. I know, you know, Dotan will lend a hand. I'm happy to Umea is going to join and he'll put his hand out there to rising tide. So everybody have a great day. We're out in 45 minutes. Awesome show. Very inspirational. Thank
Yumio Saneyoshi:you. Thank you, Josh. Thank you. Bye bye.