The following video excerpt was taken from an interview with Steve Swad, CEO of Rosetta Stone (RST +0.00%), in which he talks about his business philosophy and how it is driving success both for language learners and for the company itself. In this segment, he discusses how his products are helping people learn through technology.
Matt Argersinger: So you mentioned technical expertise. When a lot of people think of Rosetta Stone, they think of education, which is obviously what you guys are doing, but you guys are really a technology company in a lot of ways, and so I am wondering if you could talk about that and also kind of what's going on in Boulder, Colorado.
Steve Swad: Boulder's sweet, notwithstanding the beautiful office we have. I actually find it to be the best place in our company to work. But back up, on the company, I think of the company with three pillars and the core, and you mentioned it, is learning. We're a company about learning. We succeed if our customers learn; we fail if our customers don't learn. We enable that learning through technology and so we use technology to bring learning to life, and the reason we do it is lifestyle, to change people's lives. So pillar one, learning; pillar two, technology; pillar three, change people's lives.
That's our company. That's our company yesterday. That's our company today. That'll be our company tomorrow. Boulder is part of that technology pillar, and it has invented speech recognition software that enables the learning. It's really critical software. Think about a tutor that is one-on-one and measures you by the minute. That's what our speech recognition software does in language.
So you say, "hola." The speech recognition software listens to you, grades you, and gives you feedback. If you pass, we give you a green signal. If you fail, we repeat the words: "hola." You listen and then you try it again. And that's all designed out of Boulder. They're wonderful people and it's wonderful technology.
