Gabriel Wyner is the Founder and CEO of Fluent Forever, a startup that aims to help anyone learn a language quickly and remember it forever. He launched a bestselling book 4 years ago and now has the most successful app Kickstarter of all time for his Fluent Forever app. As of this episode, he has raised over $430,000 and he still has another week left. 

Gabe is not your typical founder. He is a former opera singer/engineer who has a passion for learning new languages and just recently got thrown into the tech and startup world. He has a lot of great advice and brings a unique perspective to not only learning languages, but also building products. 

In This Episode You Will Learn:

• Why Gabe had to learn multiple languages to become a better opera singer
• How lying on a french test led to his discovery of spaced repetition
• Why starting by translating a language is the wrong approach to learning new languages
• Gabe speaks eight languages but doesn't believe he has an innate skill for it
• The importance of learning pronunciation at the start
• How he decided to make an app after having a successful book and flashcards
• The value in making flash cards yourself
• How he thinks about budgeting and spending the Kickstarter money
• How Gabe approaches bootstrapping vs raising money for his company 
• Gabe's view on the future with translation services and whether the desire to learn languages will ever wane
• Why founders need to develop a circle of advisors

Favorite Books:

• Sandman Series by Neil Gaiman
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Chris Gladwin is the CEO and Founder of Ocient, a startup building software that enables sophisticated users of data to handle massive amounts of information fast enough to make real-time decisions.

Two years ago Chris sold his data storage company Cleversafe to IBM for $1.3 billion. Cleversafe was the largest and most strategic object storage vendor in the world. The technology he started generated over 1,000 patents granted or filed, creating one of the ten most powerful patent portfolios in the world.

Prior to Cleversafe, Chris was the Founder and CEO of startups MusicNow and Cruise Technologies, and led product strategy for Zenith Data Systems. He started his career at Martin Marietta, and holds a mechanical engineering degree from MIT.

In This Episode You Will Learn:

• The story of Chris’s senior prank and the lessons around forming a team, have a vision, and setting goals that translate to being an entrepreneur
• The importance of not being too far ahead of the market and how you know if you have the timing right?
• His experience developing a tablet computer 20 years before the iPad
• Why Cleversafe was able to get a multiyear head start on everyone else in the industry 
• How storage worked before Cleversafe
• Why Peter Barris, Managing General Partner at New Enterprise Associates, doesn’t think Cleversafe could have happened in Silicon Valley
• How the sale to IBM came about
• Why you want to be bought not sold
• What it was like delivering the news of the sale of Cleversafe to everyone
• The impact on the Chicago ecosystem of the Cleversafe exit minting 80 new millionaires
• How Chris landed his first reference customer for Cleversafe
• How Chicago tech has changed since his first company in geography and scale
• Why we still need a Chicago tech anchor
• Chris's thoughts on Chicago's potential for Amazon HQ2 and what they should be indexing on
• Why Chris requires 5-8 nonstop flights a day to any satellite office location
• Chicago's biggest advantages over Silicon Valley? talent cost and talent retention
• The similarities between being a founder and a poker player
• Why you have to put yourself in a position to realize your ambition
• What Chris focuses on? Building the team, raising money, and building a pipeline of customer information and feedback into the company 
• The similarities between being a founder and a journalist

Favorite Books:

• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
• The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn