Cindy Mi

Mi was born in the province of Hebei, China.[3]

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.[4]

At age 14 Mi moved to Harbin in north-eastern China.[5] She experienced a new learning environment and was severely behind the rest of her new class in math.[6] 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.[7] By age 17, she dropped out of high school to co-found ABC English, a tutoring company,[1] with her uncle,[7] where she led business development and campus expansion across China.[1] ABC English was a small company competing among large brick-and-mortar English language training institute. She did a little of everything to make the business run: sales, buying books, interviewing prospective teachers, teaching classes, grading homework. She worked early in the morning until 10 at night. 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.[6]

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.[8][9]

In the early 2000s, when the brick-and-mortar classrooms and private language schools were popular for English study, Mi realized that those classes were expensive and there was a lack of quality English teachers in some cities to match up with the high demand. With the problem Mi found earlier during her own education experience, she came up with the idea to connect fluent English-speaking teachers with young students for one-on-one 25-minute virtual tutoring lessons. The idea formed VIPKid. Mi set up the goal for VIPKid, which is to inspire confidence and self-expression in students.[3]

VIPKid is an online education technology company that connects K-12 students in China with teachers in North America for English tutoring. VIPKid was founded in 2013, has become one of China's leading education startups.[1] Fee based English lessons are in the core subjects of math, science, social studies and other subjects. Mi has also implemented a free group seminar which includes lessons in social studies, art, science, music, and coding.[3]

VIPKid is now valued at more than $3 billion.[6] It sees growth 40% month over month and receives investments from Northern Light Venture Capital, Innovation Works, Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital, YF Capital, Learn Capital and Bryant Stibel.[1] Mi has been successful in raising $500 million in financing.[6]

VIPKid now serves over 700,000 students from all of China's provinces, with over 100,000 teachers in the US and Canada.[10] VIPKid is regularly featured in the Chinese media and has won accolades from technology giants like Tencent.[1]

• Fast Company named VIPKid the 29th Most Innovative Company in the World 2018 and the 7th Most Innovative Company in China 2019.[11]
• Mi has spoken at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Boao Forum for Asia's Annual Conference 2018, ASU+GSV Summit, OZY Fest, Y Combinator's Startup School at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Y Combinator's Global Founders Summit (both 2018 and 2017) in San Francisco, among many others.[8]
• Mi was selected to join the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders Class of 2018[12] and was a recipient of the ASU + GSV Summit 2019 Power of Women Award.[13]
• The SCMP named her as one of the "2018 Who's Who of Women Leaders in China's Tech Industry"[14] and Forbes Asia named her as one of the "2018 Forbes Emergent 25: The Women Making Their Mark in Asia's Enterprises."[15]
• Mi has been recognized as one of Glassdoor's Top 100 CEOs in 2019,[16] one of only fourteen women to make the list. Crunchbase listed her as number one on the list of "50 Female Entrepreneurs Everyone Should Know".[17]