#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Eric Tao, Co-Founder & CEO, MegaMinds
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Creating Successful Learning Outcomes with Immersive 3D Worlds
MegaMinds was created out of a need to make learning more creative, fun, and hands-on for students. In our conversation with Co-Founder and CEO Eric Tao, we learned about the growing popularity of immersive learning, the tricky regulatory landscape for a product like MegaMinds, and what it’s like for many first-time entrepreneurs to build businesses.
Tell us about your background. What led you to create MegaMinds?
Though our company has only been in-market for less than a year, the genesis of MegaMinds was about eight years ago. I was a production lead on a team at Google tasked with finding ways to scale up Google Cardboard. The product provided people with immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences you could activate with a smartphone. We actually ended up partnering with a school for autism in New Jersey for a special project–they needed a new therapeutic tool to assist a child, and we were able to create an immersive experience for them that accomplished what weeks of therapy could not. That was my “aha” moment, where I realized that the possibilities for VR were far beyond what we were doing with it. I went down a rabbit hole and learned that education researchers had been seriously studying virtual worlds since Second Life came out in 2008.
By the time I began creating MegaMinds, there was already almost a decade of research proving that immersive learning leads to better outcomes. I thought, what if we could package it with the same process that my team was doing and make them accessible on web browsers on any device? From there, MegaMinds was born.
What does MegaMinds do?
We are an educational platform where students learn through creative play and interactive activities in 3D social online spaces. The platform is flexible, and we built it that way so that it could be used synchronously in class or asynchronously since it’s a virtual world that is always “on”. Our first customers were online schools, but we've made remarkable traction with in-person school districts recently. We’re currently closing deals with customers that will allow us to hit a huge growth phase soon.
Since you serve students, how do you navigate the regulatory landscape and open policy questions in this space?
The regulatory landscape is top of mind as you're building a product like ours, and after looking at what others have done in the space, we made the intentional decision not to have student accounts. Instead, our model is one where teachers send students a link, and they access the learning experience that way. Teachers are the only ones with accounts and have full access to all student worlds, and it is up to them to distribute lessons and content to students. This way, we don’t collect student data and can comply with the rules. In our next phase of growth, we want to develop an online tutoring product, because our value proposition that has made us useful for online schools is attractive for online tutoring as well. As we build that, we’re going to quickly start encountering these rules in a new and more complex way. We will probably need to know the ages of the students and we’ll probably have to build a new process around that.
Our platform has a unique advantage over others in that we offer a multiplayer networked space for peer-to-peer learning, but another tough nut to crack is that there can be unintended consequences of having these kinds of open spaces. Much like we put teachers at the center of our current product, we plan to put parents at the center of the tutoring product. Parents will be the ones administering it to their kids. We’re also looking at what others are doing in this space to learn from their approaches, successes and mistakes.
What’s been your experience navigating first-time entrepreneurship and what are the resources that helped or would have helped you?
This is an important topic for me—right now I need mentors who can help me navigate different business aspects like school sales, for example. I’m not a natural salesman, and selling to schools can be tough and complicated, so I've had to develop a unique sales process. Early on, I didn't have a clue about how to do much else related to building a business either, and the way I’ve tried to solve that is by seeking out as many opportunities to get mentorship as possible.
I’ve noticed a giant chasm between my position and how well-connected friends of mine can easily access capital and launch their businesses. I had 15 years of work experience, but it wasn’t the right type of experience—I simply didn’t know the right people. Getting access to mentorship and participating in incubators, especially ones that cater to people of color and other underrepresented groups, played a big role in my success.
What are your goals for MegaMinds moving forward?
AI is going to be a big thing for us in the near future. We’re figuring out how to incorporate embodied Virtual Teaching Assistants and leverage the technology to provide even better and more personalized learning experiences. The value proposition our platform provides educators and schools is twofold: The first one is student engagement. The second is personalized learning at scale. Students have control over what they're learning and how they're learning it. And we have a set of creation tools that allow them to craft their own virtual worlds. Incorporating AI will allow us to provide teachers with deeper insights as well. For instance, we’ll be able to inform them of when learning moments occurred, like how long a student is engaging with something like a video or other content, and whether they've picked up the 3D model and examined it and how many times, etc.
As new AI models like Sora come out and we can incorporate personalized video content generated specifically to a student’s skill set, we’ll start to see some groundbreaking things in education. That’s what we're focused on right now.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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