World's Largest English Learning Platform for Children
Cindy Mi is the Founder and CEO of VIPKid, an education technology company that connects students in China (and 63 countries around the world) with the world’s best teachers for real-time online English immersion learning. Founded in 2013 and formally launched in 2014, it's a 1-on-1 education online platform that pairs K-12 students with tutors in North America to learn English. VIPKid is China’s leading online education startup with over 500,000 paying students and 60,000 teachers in the US and Canada.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJVTnVVJtgY
Mi was born in the province of Hebei, China. Mi grew up with a natural interest in education. As a child she was curious about the world outside of China, and would spend her lunch money on audio cassettes and magazines to teach herself English.
At age 14 Mi moved to Harbin in north-eastern China. She experienced a new learning environment and was severely behind the rest of her new class in math. With many students in one class, the teacher was not able to pay attention to each student and explain concepts in detail and Mi could not fully understand the answers for questions. Mi found this as the problem in which the lessons were not personalized for students and students may be easy to lose confidence in the learning process.
She continued to teach herself English, and by age 15 she began to tutor other students. By age 17, she dropped out of high school to co-found ABC English, a tutoring company, with her uncle, where she led business development and campus expansion across China.
When she finished the work from ABC English, she continued to work on her own studies until 2 a.m., eventually earning a bachelor's degree in English literature from Beijing Foreign Language University through China’s system of incredibly difficult self-taught exams.
Later she got her MBA from the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and attended Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management in the US as an exchange student as well.
