We thoroughly enjoyed last night’s dinner in partnership with Fluency.io. With over 30 edtech & education startups, we practically took over the entire restaurant. We chose the Open Kitchen in Shoreditch for this dinner, as it is the training restaurant for the London City Hospitality Centre. All students prepare and serve food and drinks as part of their vocational studies, putting its learners centre stage and providing a realistic working experience to support their professional development. We thought it was a nice fit for the evening and they did a really great job.

We were treated to an interesting and inspiring talk from Bernhard Niesner, founder of busuu, a language learning community. Just a few snippets. He has grown it to 40 million users and they are now getting 40-50k new users a day!. He talked about the pro’s of bootstrapping until the point it’s right to take funding and not getting disheartened if people say “no” to funding your company. Some of the people that said “no”, went on to invest in busuu 4 years later, at a very different price! He talked about (and doesn’t recommend) the trials of relocating a team (in his case from Madrid to London) and the impact it has on the business. At that time, during their series A, the team was at 11 people. It is now at 40. He emphasised the importance of analysing the lifetime value of a customer, A/B testing and using the “grandma test” on landing pages (if your grandma can’t understand it, do it again!) With busuu, Bernhard set out to create something that could be used by millions, which he has done, but there are still plenty of untapped markets globally. More to come!

Thanks to everyone that was part of the evening and who fought off the indigestion of regular seat moves! Some photos for you to enjoy.

You can read about our upcoming and previous #MeetandEat’s here.