Language opens doors in negotiation - Kate Liburdi - S6 - E17

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Website: https://conversifi.com
Platform: https://app.conversifi.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kateliburdi/

What happens when a project burns through a million dollars and still doesn’t work?

In this episode, Kate Liburdi, Co-Founder and CEO of Conversifi, shares one of the most valuable lessons of her career, how a failed software project became the foundation for everything she learned about leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Kate discusses building Conversifi into a platform used by more than 100 universities, helping language learners connect with native speakers around the world through authentic conversations and cultural exchange.

We also talk about startups, family, productivity, focus, language learning, and why entrepreneurs often need to remove complexity instead of adding more to their business.

What you’ll learn:

• The leadership lesson behind a $1 million failure
• Why focus is one of the most valuable entrepreneurial skills
• How Conversifi is changing language learning
• The importance of feedback and collaboration in product development
• Why subtraction often creates more growth than addition

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to A Founder's Life. I'm your host, Leo Gestetner. On the show, we dive into the real stories behind the highs and lows of entrepreneurship and how we pursue a more balanced and meaningful life along the way. This podcast is sponsored by Thankz helping founders like us scale with reliable remote talent. I'm excited today to be joined by Kate Liburdi Kate, thank you for joining us. Would you like to introduce yourself to the audience? Sure, thanks, Leah. I'm Kate Liburdi I'm co-founder and CEO of Conversify. Conversify connects language learners with native speakers over video chat so that people can practice the language they're learning in a real conversation and learn a little bit about the culture at the same time. for example, if you were taking a Spanish class, you'd learn the grammar and vocabulary in class, and then you'd come on our platform and talk with a real human being in Spain or Venezuela or Argentina. and stay on the topic that you've been studying, but also have an authentic experience where you learn a little bit about their lives and you put it in context and it's at the right level for what you're learning. So it's been a really fun journey kicking this off. We're in over 100 universities now. We keep adding languages. Every language is kind of new adventure for us. Last one we added was American Sign Language, ASL, which we thought would be a really easy addition. Interesting note actually, ASL is a really fast growing language and it's now I think the third biggest language in the US. It's right up there with French, but French is shrinking a little bit and ASL is growing. So, it's really important language. We thought it would be a easy one because we thought it was just English with your hands. So, instead of saying house, you do house. So we thought, fine, we speak English, you we'll learn some signs. They're the American sign language, so the culture would be a culture we're familiar with. We're all here in the U.S. We'll just add it right in. And it was not at all what we expected. For one thing, ASL is not just English with your hands. It's a completely different language with its own structure, syntax, grammar. The grammar is in your face, it's in your body. We had to rethink a lot of what we were doing with tech. And then on top of that, deaf culture has a lot of depth. It's a very rich culture that we knew nothing about. It's very different from hearing culture. So we continue to learn more and more about deaf culture as time goes on. We've got a great ASL lead, Lily, who is constantly educating us and keeping an eye on everything we do from that perspective. So every bit of it is a journey for us. I'm sure that you do definitely a better job than I get from Duolingo trying to learn my Portuguese, which I've been doing for over a year and I'm not sure I'm any good. Well, I know I'm no good. I'm hoping to never have to learn ASL. I only say that because I'm 75 % deaf. So always a risk that I lose the rest of my hearing, hopefully not. actually went to a conference Disabled In a couple of years ago. And they had on the main night, they had on the party and they had on the stage a singer and they actually had someone doing sign language to the words of the song. It's quite interesting. I've never seen that before. It's like dance, isn't it? It's wonderful. And tell us a little bit about the journey that brought you from the beginning to where you are today. And obviously you've told us a little more about the business already. So, Conversify was not my idea, it was my co-founder's idea, Steve. He's wonderful and I won't tell his story because he tells it better and it's his story. But the short version is that through his own experiences and his own fluency in other languages, he discovered that being able to speak to somebody in their language... really changes the nature of a negotiation, whether it's in business or politics, it opens doors and it makes a big impact. And so he had the idea to do this. We were friends from business school. went to business school together and we were out one night in the bar with some other friends from business school in DC when he told me this idea. At the time I was working with a company in Shanghai and I was trying to learn Mandarin Chinese and it was not going well. So I don't know whether it was because I'm not a kid anymore and it's harder to learn languages as you get older. Or it was that Mandarin is a really hard language. Or it was that I was using Rosetta Stone, which maybe wasn't the right tool for me for that language at least. But what he was talking about really resonated. I got excited about what he was doing and we kept in touch over the next couple of months. We worked on risks for his business and when he had problems with the tech team, he would call me and I was like, kind of phone a friend for tech. And after a few months, he called me and said, hey, this is, this is bigger than I thought it was going to be. Will you come on and do this business with me, which was a hard decision because I had a pretty comfortable lifestyle at that time and this was not my first startup so I knew what it meant. I knew it was going to be long days and unexpected crises and lower pay and you know everything would be different but slept on it a little bit and decided to jump in and it's been wonderful. It's been a really wonderful ride. I love the challenge, the problem solving, the learning about different cultures. It's really fun to work with a friend as a co-founder. We work well together. And we're in a lot of universities right now looking at the space now outside of universities. So there's always kind of a new horizon to go out and conquer. And that makes it a fun challenge. And what are some of the things that you did before this? I originally was a language person. I studied Spanish and French through high school and college, then picked up Italian because it was close, a little bit, and my Italian's not great, and then I... played around with Russian and some other languages, and was a French teacher and an ESL teacher a little bit right out of college. So I taught for a little while. And then I took a turn into business and worked for a Fortune 50 company for a decade or so. Got a lot more experience in engineering tasks and things that were more complex and software development. So got a lot of exposure to innovation. My first startup was a corporate startup in that business. And then I went to business school and everything sort of changed for me. My perspective changed. I tried a little startup on my own outside of the big corporate venture. quite a different experience when you're bootstrapped. Ended up consulting for a while and I really loved consulting. I loved getting a glimpse into other people's companies and solving those problems. And then, Dean came to me with this idea and the rest is history, as they say. Lovely, talk to us little bit about what family looks like for you. I have a husband, Rich and I three kids. The oldest is out of college. She's a user experience designer, UX designer. She does magical things with. how somebody experiences a digital platform. And then the younger two are twins. They're in high school. So we're just at the stage where they're getting driver's licenses and thinking about college. So everybody right now is in a phase where most of the time they want to be with their friends, not with us. I feel that loss a little bit, but we value the time that we can get with them that much more because we don't have as much of it. Yeah, think you get less time, it just becomes more appreciated from both sides and you use more quality time together. I often sort of talk about health as the different aspects. So you've got mental health, physical health, nutrition, fitness, however you want to look at it. How does your health journey at the moment look for you? health Health is so important because you can't be productive in the other things you need to do if your health is becoming a distraction or slowing you down. For me, physical health, I try to work out four or five times a week and in the winter that might be an F45 class, functional fitness or running on a treadmill or skiing. I ski on the weekends a lot. In the summer, a lot more variety of things that I can do, you know, run outdoors or go hiking in the woods, play tennis or you know playing the water canoe whatever so you know I'm outside whenever I can be I prefer that and then food I eat pretty healthy most of the time I love chocolate so not all the time For me, the biggest health challenge is sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep. Because I get excited about what I'm doing during the day and I'm trying to pack a lot in. It's hard to get myself to go to bed at a reasonable time, spite good intentions. And then I wake up with more ideas and I wanna go tackle them. And so I am not very good at sleeping in either and the sleep always suffers. I'm always trying to carve out more time for it. Yeah, going to bed is actually not a big issue for me except when I get stuck into AI coding or something which just gets fun. You you're moving at such an accelerated pace. You're doing like a month's work in a day and it actually, you know, it gets a little exciting. But apart from that, going to bed at a decent time isn't the problem. I just wake up ridiculously early. Like my mind, I often say to people, the good and the bad news is when I'm awake. I'm wide awake. Like within 10 seconds of waking up, I'm wide awake. The good news is I'm wide awake. I can do anything. I can go for a run. I can jump from my laptop, whatever I want to do. The bad news is I'm not going back to sleep. This morning I woke up at 4.45. It was ridiculous. Yeah, I mean it was ridiculous, but I know I wasn't going to go back to sleep, so I might as well get up and do stuff. Like my mind's like up, you know, you're awake. There's plenty of stuff to do. Get up. Yeah, that's tough. I hear that. What do you like to do for fun? I don't have a lot of time for fun. Got a pretty full life. but, I really value time with people I love. one of my favorite things to do is just to go out and have a long dinner with friends or with family and drink some wine and talk. there are lots of, you know, more active things that I really enjoy doing. And I think what brings it all together for me, absolute favorite thing to do is travel, especially internationally, especially if I'm going someplace where there's something unusual, there's some adventure, there's some challenge there. And especially if I'm going with friends or with family, that's really my happy place. Travel's always fun. when you get to do it with family, In March, I went to Japan for the marathon and my son joined me for 10 days. He had spring breaks, it was perfect. We traveled around Japan. And in three weeks, actually, I'll be going to see my son in Rome because he's there for school. so at the end of his trip, we're going to go spend a week visiting Rome. So I think it's always fun to combine. travel with a family. And in fact, actually, my daughter, I was just talking to, we might go to Costa Rica together in the summer. So I think, you know, I travel a lot, but I've always said to my kids, wherever I'm going to be, there's always room for you to come stay. yeah, it's, and it's that. Yeah, and it's good quality time together. So wherever it is, yes. And so for you, looking at the different aspects of your life, how do you find that you lead a... sort of a balance across those things. Overall, not sort of a permanent in balance, none of us are, but overall, how do you sort of balance across those things? I can't say that I really prioritize balance per se. I'm a unitasker. I focus on one thing and I get kind of deeply into that one thing. And there's some science to back this up that says that nobody is a multitasker. There's no such thing as multitasking. You're just switching tasks really quickly if you think you're multitasking. But I came to that early because I really am bad at multitasking. So it sounds like I wouldn't get much done because I'm doing one thing before I do another thing. But I'm actually really, really productive. Most people who know me will say that I get more done than the average person. a day and it's because I can get deeper into a sense of flow, that's data flow, which is very efficient, productive, reduces errors. It's, you know, I can really power through something and then I move to something else and I do that. That's my preferred way of working, at least when I can, but it's inherently not balanced in any given moment because I am not, you know, juggling all of these things in the same, in the same instant and one thing I do is step back and look at my calendar and kind of time blocks so that the things that are important to me all have places on my calendar including things that are personal things that are family life. So I'm a planner but I'm not rigid about my plan. If something comes up that's important there are blocks that I can move and I know where they are and I do that I really do that all day long so constantly kind of rejiggering so that the next thing that I'm doing is the most important thing for me to do during that time. That sounds pretty balanced. don't think balance is permanently in balance. It's finding time for the different aspects. And I definitely agree with scheduling. I often say to people, you know, they're like, I don't have time for a workout or I don't have time for, you do, you just need to schedule it. If it gets scheduled, it gets done. it doesn't, I mean, if I don't block out time in my diary, my calendar is grabbing every free moment I have. That's right. And then, so for you, what has been a pivotal moment in your life? There have been a number of pivotal moments, but maybe the most useful for the listeners of this podcast would be one that happened in the earlier years of my career when I was working for this big company, this Fortune 50 company. I was asked to lead an initiative to develop this enterprise software solution that managed... large equipment and maintenance utilization, things that happen with that large equipment. I was in a role where I had learned a lot about the sort of requirements for something like that. And so they asked me to go build it. I did not have experience building software, but the company had an engineering firm that they worked with for things like this. And so I was partnering with an organization that did have that expertise. So it seemed like it would work out well. And I got to bring a couple of people on to work with me, we spent a couple of months, think, writing up the requirements in great depth, documenting everything, 100 page document, everything it needed to do, everything that needed, you all the functions, all the use cases, and then... threw it over the wall to this engineering firm. Requirement space is done. Document goes over. And they sat down. They did the design. They did the implementation. They threw it back over the wall for us to test. We sat down to look at it and realized that it was really not in good shape. There were bugs all over the place. So we were a little disappointed. We thought we'd be further along, but we sat down, we documented all the bugs, screenshots, everything ready, threw it back to the development team for them to fix. Again, they took a month to do it. It was a long, long list of bugs, threw it back over to us and we tested again, hoping it was going to be done. But we found that they had fixed some of the bugs, but they had not fixed all of the bugs. A lot of them were still there. and In addition, a bunch of new bugs have been introduced a lot, not a few. They were all over the place. So again, sat down, documented everything thoroughly, sent it back to them. They fixed, they sent it back to us. And once again, some bugs fixed, some bugs not fixed, and a lot of new bugs introduced. And we went through that cycle a number of times until what should have been what we were hoping would be a three or four project turned out to be a year. and no end in sight. didn't seem that it was getting better. It seemed that it was getting different, but not better. So at that point... I called in a consultant and the consultant spent a couple of weeks looking at everything, came back with a number of findings, but it boiled down to two things. One was that the architecture itself of this platform, of this software, was not the right architecture for the problem we were trying to solve. And so it was not fixable. There was no amount of fixing that was going to make this architecture work for what we were trying to do. We had to throw it all out and start fresh. the only thing to do in this situation. So that was tough news. And the other thing was that they introduced us to agile development and felt that that would be a better solution for what we were trying to do where it was such a new area that we needed to discover pieces as we went along. That was important because this was really in the junior years of my career and agile was not. It was not mainstream at that point. was something the crazy developers in their mom's basement were doing, but it wasn't, or startups in Silicon Valley, but it wasn't acceptable in a big Fortune 50 company. It was a really, really different way of thinking. Wasn't that long waterfall engineering process. So I had wasted a million dollars in a year of time, way over schedule, way over budget, not sure what to do, knowing that I needed to start again to get anything done or somebody, whoever came after me when they fired me for this needed to get it done. And so my boss suggested that I go on a kind of listening tour. And I set up meetings with about a dozen executives in the company that had a stake in what we were doing and talked to them what we'd experienced, what had gone wrong, what needed to be done to make it right. Gave them all the information that I had and listened to them. They all had advice from me too. They all had ideas or things to consider and took all of that in and in the end they did approve me to go ahead and build it completely over again and I picked a new organization to do it, one that specialized in Agile and we did build it. I gave them the requirements, they went off to work on architecture but their architecture was collaborative with us. So they talked to us throughout, they were asking questions, we were giving feedback, we were working on it together. Then they developed in, I think two weeks sprints But they were meeting with us daily in a daily stand-up. And at the end of each sprint, we would test and we would give them feedback. And they would adapt. And we were constantly redirecting. The bottom line is the whole thing was completely rebuilt in three months. And... it worked perfectly when it was done. And not only did it meet all of our requirements, but it exceeded our requirements because we had discovered things we didn't know we needed that they were able to build in. So I learned so many things, so many lessons from that experience about software, about processes, about working in the work world and communicating better with the people who are stakeholders. At one point in the middle, my boss, I had a wonderful boss, Steve O'Flaherty. I'm so lucky to have him because this wouldn't have happened without him. At one point I told him I think they're going to fire me for this and or that he would have to fire me for this or whatever. And he said, you know, we've just invested a million dollars in your education. So we would be really foolish to do that. Go take what you learned and do it right this time. And that inspired me to get it done. That was a very pivotal moment for me. this story and nice to be able to do that on someone else's dime not yours. And what's one piece of advice you'd give to an inspiring entrepreneur? think the main thing is focus. I interact with a lot of other entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs in general are really creative people. They're coming up with ideas. That's why they're starting companies. And more ideas come up all the time, and you want to pursue them, or different ways to do what you're doing right now. So there's a tendency to take on too much and to... to look at it too many different ways and launch it in too many different markets and add too many bells and whistles. Because those are all great ideas. But what is more successful is to pare back, to subtract, to find what's essential and concentrate on that and get that done. And then you can add something else. And over time, builds. all the businesses you want to start, you can start. I mean, you you've done that yourself, I think. So focus. Its self-editing. I think is probably the best advice I can give. Excellent. Well, thank you for all of your thoughts today. How can people find you? People can find me on LinkedIn, Kate Liburdi L-I-B-U-R-D-I, and that's probably the best way. Conversify. Come on, app.conversifi.com. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. thank you for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to subscribe to the channel, tell your friends, and please leave a review.