Already, people in rural India are tutoring U.S. students in math and science. Read more in The Knock-On Effect Of Global English.
SM: I find it interesting that your market is not a cutthroat environment. The European companies are focused on Europe. DD: They do compete with us in some parts in Asia, Brazil, and Mexico. They are truly global. Yes, the competition is there, but the challenge for us is not from online competitors. The competition
SM: How many people are learning on GlobalEnglish today? DD: About 130,000 people. We have a lot of TAM still available. Brick and mortars, traditional classroom providers, are still dominant. There are a few companies online as well. Englishtown is based out of Europe and is a subsidiary of English First, which is a huge brick
SM: As you have been building your business, what are the different geographic dynamics that you have been seeing? A lot of obvious applications are in India with the call centers business, where the accent in spoken English is a challenge. This seems like a perfect application to address that. DD: We have some customers
SM: When you enter a global corporation on a local pilot program, how big are those deals? DD: The pilot can be a two to three months for a couple of hundred employees. We are not trying to prove the solution works, because we know it works. We just have to prove that it works
SM: In the past 20 years English has evolved significantly as a language. DD: Exactly, and it has evolved in its own manner. There is an academy in France that decides what constitutes a French word. There is no academy that decides what an ‘English’ word is. It is very much an open source language.
SM: When you left Time Warner, you said you joined a dot-com. What did that entail? DD: I became CFO for a company out of Hong Kong that was in the online advertising business. The idea of the company was to take many of the models that we have in the United States and create
Deepak Desai is the president and chief executive officer of GlobalEnglish Corporation. Deepak has over 20 years of financial and operating experience, most notably with Time Warner. From 1995 to 1999, he served as general manager and CFO for Time Life Asia, managing the children’s education, ESL, and direct marketing businesses. He holds a B.S.