LingoAce: Accelerate Growth with Moonshot Talent

"We need to do the hardest thing. If you choose the easy things to do, many people choose that way. That route is very crowded." It’s this mindset that propelled Hugh Yao to grow LingoAce into a global startup with a team of over 4,500 teachers. The EdTech platform, which was launched in 2017, started out offering Chinese language courses for kids that used gamification to make learning fun. In 2022, the platform rolled out its English program in just three months – something Hugh credits to hiring and acquiring teams quickly. On this episode of Moonshot, LingoAce founder Hugh Yao chats with Sequoia India & Southeast Asia Managing Director Abheek Anand about how he saw opportunity in tough times, what it takes to hire moonshot talent, and how the LingoAce team rolled out its English program in such a short span of time.

Show Notes:

• Differentiate yourself: Choose the hardest way to build a global company (08:00)
• Be ambitious about hiring moonshot talent (10:50)
• Hire and build out teams quickly (16:04)
• A good hire accelerates everything (17:44)
• Focus on what you can control (21:36)