Matchmaker has love of online education

This unhappy experience inspired in her a determination to enter the online English education sector. By the end of 2012, 91waijiao.com was set up.

It offers a one-to-one online English learning experience to people who want to learn or improve their English skills, especially their oral English, with teachers mainly from the US.

In addition to US teachers, they also recruit teachers from the Philippines, but the cost of a class with a US teacher is much higher than that with one from the Philippines.

Gong was greatly influenced by a picture of a rural schoolgirl having an online English class with a US teacher in Yunnan province. It prompted her to broaden her online education ventures to cover primary and middle school education.

"The little girl was very thrilled when she saw the US teacher talking to her on the screen," recalled Gong. "I was deeply impressed and began to realize how much the Internet could do to tackle the problem of the uneven distribution of educational resources across China."

Hard on the heels of this came the birth of Tizi.com, also in 2012. This was a platform containing abundant quality primary and middle school educational resources, where teachers could download courseware materials free of charge and arrange tests and students could take tests and practice exercises. In addition, parents could keep updated about their children's achievements.

Recently, Gong has been busy in talks with potential institutional and individual investors, establishing details for a second round of fundraising.

The first round of financing, in which a venture capital fund established by NetEase Inc injected $4 million, is small in comparison with the second round, which is expected to be around $24 million, although Gong declined to provide further details.

The fund will mainly be used to expand the team of employees and to fuel the development of educational materials and online teaching tools, said Gong.

At the moment Gong presides over more than 180 employees, among whom 50 are working for 91waijiao.com. She plans to expand the team to 300 people by the end of this year. The number of paying customers at 91waijiao.com has reached 3,000. Gong wants to increase the figure to more than 10,000 by the end of this year.

One thing Gong insists on with her current business is that she only develops content, not the platform. "If you choose to go for the platform, it requires a gigantic investment in the early phase and involves high risk too," she said.

Gong considers online education a business characterized by high investment, high risk, high return but a very low success rate.