Dr Shane Smith

In January 2007 California-based Apple launched the first iPhone and by the year’s end had sold 1.4 million of them. Up the road in the state of Washington, Apple rival Microsoft ended a five-year wait for Windows Vista and by the end of 2007 had shipped 100 million copies of the PC operating system.

In the same year in a bedroom in an Auckland suburb brothers Shane and Craig Smith gave the world Education Perfect, an online ed-tech product and company they co-founded as the offshoot of a spare-time hobby project.

Demonstrating that you don’t have to be a multibillion-dollar US tech giant to clock up eye-watering sales, in little more than a decade they built a business with millions of users and a recent valuation of $435 million, though the brothers sold to a private-equity firm in 2017 for a more modest sum.

Given their youth, inexperience and slender resources – Education Perfect was launched with a $20,000 grant – their accomplishment arguably puts the American firms in the shade.

What Shane is proudest of, however, is the countless kids whose learning they’ve assisted and the team Education Perfect brought together.

“I think the commercial success has been a result of a focus on creating great teaching and learning experiences,” he says.

At the time of Education Perfect’s launch, Shane was studying medicine at the University of Auckland. But the company’s genesis goes back to when he had just left school.

Inspired by Craig’s experience learning French and Japanese, the brothers created vocabulary revision tool Language Perfect, which proved to be the forerunner of Education Perfect.

“Over 10 years Education Perfect grew into a comprehensive online learning tool used by more than a million students and teachers,” says Shane.

The company today employs more than 250 people worldwide. Students have answered billions of questions on the learning platform, which became invaluable for schools during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing, says Shane. They learnt the best products come from a deep understanding of the needs of the people you aim to serve.

“This came to us the hard way. When we built Language Perfect, we were the end users. We’d just left school and we understood the realities of what students wanted and needed to succeed.

“But five years later when we decided to branch out from teaching languages to cover other core-curriculum subjects, we’d somewhat lost touch with what really mattered inside the classroom and the product we first built had a lukewarm reception.”

He credits the input of many inspirational teachers whom they consulted at that point for getting Education Perfect on track.

Although the learning platform became his career, Shane says junior-doctor training gave him the ability to rapidly pick up new knowledge and skills.

“Being able to learn and adapt is useful in any field and particularly in a start-up where your role is continuously evolving.”

In 2009 he took a year out from med school and was able to hone his computer programming skills by sitting in on database lectures in the University’s computer science department.

“I have a deep-seated belief that anything is learnable. We started off this project as complete novices and taught ourselves everything we needed to know along the way.”

Imparting learning is a component of Shane’s post-Education Perfect life in marine conservation advocacy.

He runs the free online Sustainable Oceans competition that educates New Zealand and Australian students about marine ecosystems and helped set up Fiji’s Drawaqa Marine Conservation Trust to fund coral-reef preservation work in the Yasawa Islands.

“Coming to a problem with fresh eyes can help you cut through the layers of how things are traditionally done to reach goals more quickly and effectively,” he says.