35 Mr. Alexander So: Founder & CEO of ABC Group, Host of Life Insider, Cambridge Masters Graduate in Entrepreneurship
愛必思教育科技集團行政總裁、Life Insider主持人、劍橋企業學碩士蘇志康先生 Mr. Alexander So: Founder & CEO of ABC Group, Host of Life Insider, Cambridge Masters Graduate in Entrepreneurship @ Fireside Interviewer 採訪者: Riya Didwania Riya: Can you start by telling us a bit more about yourself and especially about the company that you founded, ABC EdTech Group. Alex: Definitely. Hi everyone, my name is Alex, I'm 23 this year and I am the CEO and Founder of ABC EdTech Group. I grew up in Hong Kong and I'm a third-generation American born Chinese actually. My Mom grew up in the US and Canada, my Grandma grew up in the US and Canada and I was born in the US and then we suddenly moved back to Hong Kong. I think it was a bit of a culture shock in that regard. I grew up not really knowing my own identity in some sense, being kind of mixed between the two, missing Hong Kong and the US and not knowing where I fit in. Being called Gweilo, or Gwaijai, which means ghost kid or white person. And when you go to the US, you get questions like ‘Do you ride a panda to school?” I know they are just jokes but it did blur the lines for me. I went to a school called the Hong Kong International School which was an American curriculum, based in Hong Kong as well. And I went to the UK for my undergrad which is another surprising thing - most people thought I’d go to the US. I went to a school called University College London. I studied Social Sciences with Quantitative Methods. What that is basically, is politics, economics with data science and AI developing models and stuff like that. So that’s my background. And my post-grad currently, I'm at the University of Cambridge, where I’m doing Entrepreneurship which is where this journey takes me because I started my startup, ABC EdTech Group, and this is where I’m developing it so Cambridge was fortunate enough to believe in me, and want to invest in me, their time and energy. So that's why I'm there. Now in regards to ABC, what we're doing, what we're trying to do, and what are we, ABC, is focused on creating a market solution towards making education more affordable. And this is a huge problem to tackle. I think affordability and accessibility in education is a topic that's been coming up in a lot of the UN meetings and poverty index. A lot of people talk about these issues yet there haven't been many changes to them. How we see the issue, is that we can create a market solution, which is by putting everything in one place. Like Amazon, having all products in one place lowers the price. We won't do that with education. So what we're doing beyond that is to implement AI - artificial intelligence - to be able to sort through people's learner profiles. Looking at their psychometric test, looking at their competencies, their level, looking at their multi-modal learning stuff. For example, are you a visual learner or are you a learner that learns off logic? Looking at this type of information, looking at your interest and then using AI to build a curriculum from the products that are online available. Students can really decide where to go and what to learn that are suited for their levels and for their interests. That's what ABC is. Riya: Wow, that's very impressive. That you are 23 and you've also founded your own company. You're also doing a master's degree. You're doing a lot of different things at the same time. Can you talk a little bit more about how you came up with the idea of starting ABC EdTech Group and what that process looked like for you? Alex: Definitely. I didn't know I was going to be in this field, to be honest. My background was in finance and consulting, so I wanted to continue my path in finance... Please kindly refer to https://bit.ly/3sBculI for the full transcript. Editor: Connie Lo
