Silvija Seres: Hello and welcome to Lørn.tech. My name is Silvija Seres and our topic today is ed tech. I am very lucky to have a guest from Costa Rica today. His name is Javier Chan and he's a CEO of a company called Processing Labs. Welcome.

Javier Chan: Thank you for having me Silvjia.

Silvija: So, Javier your company process simulations basically for educational purposes

Javier: Correct, we simulate processes so that students get to put to practice the theory that they learn in class.

Silvija: so, in a way, you gamify what they learn in class and make them compete in delivering on that in a virtual environment.

Javier:  Exactly, we have them making decisions and learning from the result of the decision ideas to incentivize them to put to practice their critical thinking skills, problem-solving and such.

Silvija: Okay. So, let’s start with yourself. Can you please tell us a little bit about who Javier is and what it is like to become an entrepreneur in Costa Rica?

Javier:  So, thing, I have a master's degree in microelectronics from university Autonoma de Barcelona. I used to work at Intel with one of the co-founders at processing lams who has been a friend of mine for almost 27 years as well. We worked at Intel for close to five years when we decided to take the jump…

Silvija: making chips?

Javier: Testing them actually back home. So, we decided to take the jump into the intrapreneurial world and start doing our own thing basically. The ecosystem in Costa Rica is very healthy. There are several events, there's more and more happening every day. More government funding and more private funding as well. So, is been nice to see the progression for us as the startups in conjunction with the ecosystem in Costa Rica and all the fellow entrepreneurs

Silvija: We talked a lot about how to incentivize innovation and entrepreneurship, and I think too many people talk about money. We need more IT education and we need more IT money, which I think is important but it's also important to have the people who get things started. Inspire people to become entrepreneurs, inspire people who want to solve problems on their own not just as a part of the existing companies. What did it do for you? I mean you have this friend, but what was the most important thing that made you become an entrepreneur? Make the jump. 

Javier: Quite honestly I was starting to feel a bit, my job is monotonous and then I wanted to do more, to have a bigger impact. To have what I do for a living have a bigger impact in the world and that's a big part of it and then, on top of that, luckily enough we ended up working with education because of the third co-founder at Processing Labs. We starting talking and we saw the possibility of joining our strengths and help improve the quality of education which has been extremely satisfactory for me personally and for us as a company

Silvija: Because you think education matters. Tell us what

Javier: Education is the key to progress. When you think of any problem out there in the world you can fix it directly or indirectly via education. Like educating people, they can be better at solving problems, like I was saying before, and having more people out there with better decision-making skills and problem-solving skills will help make the world a better place faster.

Silvija: So, you are based in Costa Rica and now you're visiting Norway because you're part of the accelerator by Catapult. How did that connection happen?

Javier: So, we were actually part of, actually part of a previous exploration program in Santiago De Chile. Start up Chile. And once we finished that program, our friends there at startup Chile recommended us applying to Catapult because of the focus they have on an impact-driven start-up and it was a great fit for us and what we do.

Silvija: So, you've spent a few weeks in Norway now or?

Javier: it's close to three months. A little bit over 3 months 

Silvija: Were you busy developing and raising money or?

Javier: We were part of the acceleration program and various fronts at the same time. So we were getting some mentorships and workshops on different aspects, perhaps the weaker points in each of our companies, and now doing the program, we focus greatly on growth. Marketing sales to improve. Most of the backgrounds in the team are engineering backgrounds and so we were lacking a bit of marketing and sales aspects. And the program has been a great help in that front but not only that so it was focused well on investment and getting investor ready and business development as well.

Silvija:  What was the biggest lesson learned for you for the last few months, you were saying this commercialization plan or? 

Javier: So, the go-to-market strategies and how important it is to be data-driven. Collect data from the users, from the campaigns that we do, learn from our users, learn from our audiences, when they see our advertisement, when they read our emails, what message did they get? Improve and get better at delivering the message that we want them to get. 

Silvija: So, help us understand your product. How does it work? Give us an example.

Javier: Sure, we work with the professors directly, university level so once they want to use our tools, it's very simple. They can go on a website, just select the amount of licenses they want. One per student and the student can download the mobile apps straight onto smartphones, Android or iOS, and they'll for example, for our biggest selling, our best-selling product. It is used in business schools all over the world. MBA programs, executive MBAs and the student would have a virtual company in their hands, in their pockets basically on their smartphones or tablets and they can literally manage it over time. They can hire employees, they can set the price of the products, manage inventory, buy machinery and make decisions to improve the performance of this company, put into practice the lessons that their professors have been teaching them and learn from the results of those decisions.

Silvija: Do you have to rewrite the story many times over, if this is running a company, but you could be building a city or I don't know how to find a perfect partner. How much help do you have to give people to create new problem areas? 

Javier: So, we actually developed assimilation into the game itself, but we work in person developing more simulations. The one that I was talking about is our best-selling, our first simulation but the second one, instead of a company, is a virtual country for example, so they get to rule over a country, and we work constantly on increasing our portfolio simulation. So, we will have in the future assimilation on how to do your own podcast perhaps, or how to manage a hospital, how to manage a restaurant and assimilation more oriented towards law students perhaps and that's the idea.

Silvija: How to bring up your kinds. I will sign up for that. Haha

Javier: Haha. Ideally, we will end up in the perhaps, three to five years timeline having a way bigger portfolio simulation and having universities and subscribing to a yearly subscription and perhaps and having access to all of our similations.

Silvija: So basically, you are making jobs into games.

Javier: Yeah. The idea is to find the middle ground between the college or university experience and the real world. Having them, because when you think about an internship, for example, it's not always that you get to make big decisions at the internship. You are most likely being assigned smaller tasks within the company. You are not likely making decisions on higher personnel or buying machinery or managing the inventory but with our tools, we let the student make those big decisions before they actually get to the real world and there's a lot of value in letting them experiment and try things out right there. If they happen to make the wrong decision it is not as bad as it would be in the real world. 

Silvija: Very cool. How did you discover the power of gamification?

Javier:  I wouldn't say it is hard discovery at all but there is a lot of research out there on the importance and the value of having, not only the students engage more with the content of their learning and that's something that we are very proud of the levels of engagement we get with our applications. So, during the time that the students are playing simulations, which can be between 3 to 5 days a week or so. We have higher engagement than what Facebook's FB does, during those days and that's very important. They are going to be using their smartphones during the period of classes so why not have them do it with something that they profit from. They benefit from learning and they, in some cases, don't even realize that they are doing so.

Silvija: How did you put together your team? By accident and then by design?

Javier: the core team, the three founders, it was, I wouldn’t say accident but like I said, Hans and I. We’ve known each other since the second grade in primary school. And we met our third co-founder through a cousin of mine. He was Louis' co-founder. He's a professor himself and my cousin was a student of his. He talked to both of us, he realized we were looking for opportunities to start our own thing and he saw the potential there. So, he got us in touch. And on the first meeting we saw ourselves and started working together and from then on we've been putting the team together in a more active way.

Silvija: How many do you have now?

Javier: 9 peoples at Processing Labs at the moment 

Silvija: Those are programmers?

Javier: mostly half of the team are programmers 

Silvija: Can you tell us very quickly some of the advantages of Costa Rica versus some of the advantages of Norway for building new stuff?

Javier: Costa Rica is very good for piloting things cause we’re a small-market, small country, so whatever you want to deploy. If you want to test out a marketing campaign. If you want to test out a certain future, you can deploy in Costa Rica and get feedback there. It's a lot cheaper than trying out on a bigger market and then you can, with the results of that you can, of course, send that everywhere else. And Norway has great advantages with, well, first of all, there's a lot of more capital over here to fund initiatives like ours and my fellow start-ups at capital for example. And Norway also has a lot of… You people care a lot about these things. You care about impact and making the world a better place. There’s a lot of initiatives about Oslo being the green capital of 2019, I believe it's the European capital. And there are a lot of initiatives towards….

Silvija: Social impact. I think you are right, that's good instincts, I think. And then what happens now with the Processing Labs?

Javier: So I am attending a conference in Helsinki mid-June and after that, I will go back home to resume what I consider a normal job, right outside of the accelerators program with all the workshops and mentorships and whatnot. So, going back home, starting to work on a more aggressive marketing campaign towards the United States, which is our biggest market at the moment, so we're trying to tap more into that, and we just got our first European client last April, so we want to work and build on that to start growing our reach.

Silvija: I have a US business idea for you. Make a game about how to become a president.

Javier: Haha

Silvija: with social media, I think you have quite interesting assimilations ahead. Anything that our readers can take away from this, sorry our listeners, with their everyday work. How would you recommend to them to start using educational gamification and any tools that are easily accessible, is there a way they could use your tools?

Javier: Yeah. First of all, we can go on the website and request more information. Request a meeting and we can gladly show them the way of using their tools. There are several use cases of our tools for corporate training, like corporate training solutions right and as well as recruitment. So for example if you're looking to hire a manager perhaps, you have your top candidates or the whole pool of applicants, you can have them play one of our simulations and get a picture, take a look into their personalities rather than just the resume for example. So you can see how they would make decisions in certain scenarios right now.

Silvija: How long is this simulation?

Javier:  We can configure that. We normally work with the instructor or the professor. He will set the start date and time, we typically recommend between 3 to 5 days for the business simulation. The other one, the one where there is a country, is called simulation. In that one, the student or the professor, they get to decide how fast the time advances or there's a button in the app that when you press on it the country moves forward five years into the future. So you can see the results of your decisions five years into the future. Make more decisions, then move five years into the future. So that one the time is more variable but typically is used in 2 to 3 hours lessons.  

Silvija: Hyper-speed me. Very interesting. So, what do you read? What inspires you? What would you recommend to our listeners?

Javier: Actually, I like to take my mind away from work when I watch a movie or reading something. So my recommendation would be just do something that you enjoy rather, yes of course, there's a lot of value and reading a book on X O Y  topics that could benefit your work, but when you're taking the time to do it for pleasure, I try not to mix things. If I'm reading something that's for my professional career as a benefit, I know the reason for that, and I know the value of reading that. So, perhaps it's, maybe I'm not enjoying it as much as when I'm watching a movie on something that just takes my mind out of It.

Silvija: I think my father is the best mathematician in the world and still when he needs to watch a film you always go to Steven Seagal. 

Javier: There you go. Exactly my point.

Silvija: Do you have a quote for our listeners?

Javier: I like this Chinese proverb. “I hear and I forget, I see, and I remember, I do, and I understand”. Which is very much the point of our simulation games. It’s actually put into practice, actually doing, learning by doing that you really get to increase the level of understanding. 

Silvija: Javier if people are to remember one thing from our conversation for summary what would it be?

Javier:  In a nutshell, the importance of education. Like, we need more effort. We don't want to have an educational crisis like we have a climate crisis right now. For how many years we've been listening that we need to do something about climate. We are in a good time to start acting now and improving educational systems, educational tools. So that will be my message. Start working on improving education now.

Silvija: Javier Chan, from Processing Labs. Thank you for coming and speaking with us in Lørn.tech and showing us why we need the Costa Rican to remind us of the, not just the pleasure of learning but the importance of doing and playing to get in new knowledge.

Javier: Thanks for having me.

Silvija: Thank you for listening.