Play with a Pro

The first one we have tonight is a couple of old Podio gang members who've joined together to change music and build a great way to learn an instrument. So please welcome Adrian Rosler from Play With A Pro. Thanks Thomas. So yeah, my name is Adrian. I'm the co-founder of Play With A Pro. I'm going to try to not use too many passwords, so in simple words what we're doing is to make it easier and more convenient to really learn your instrument online. Before I'm going to explain how, just let me ask you a quick question. I can't really see you, but hands up how many of you have been playing an instrument? Okay, cool. And how many of you are still playing an instrument? Alright, well you guys are lucky because brain research has shown that when you learn to play an instrument, and of course when you play it, it has profound long-lasting impacts on your brain. So keep doing it and for the others, that's really what drives us here at Play With A Pro. Because there are millions of people around the world who still want to unlock their musical potential, and we really want to help them, no matter whether they have a small or a big ambition. The problem they face is that often the traditional ways of learning don't really fit their busy lives. Everyone knows that learning one-on-one from a real professional is the most effective way to do so, but finding the right teacher for you, scheduling the times, driving back and forth to lessons, that's not really that easy. Music schools are great, but often they're reserved for kids, and actually in Denmark the waiting list is over 15,000 people for that. If you look at other educational markets like language learning, you used to go to the local language school, even earlier you maybe used to go to the private math tutor, chemistry tutor, or whatever else you had a not good enough teacher at school. Today those have largely moved online, those markets. And I'm firmly convinced music is doing the same, and I believe that lifelong learning and the growing number of baby boomers that retire are a huge market opportunity. So what's our approach? Well, it's actually in times where a lot is about replacing the human being, we want to augment the student and teacher relationship, which means that are not possible in the classical, traditional, offline way. And we do that by connecting learners on any level to really, really outstanding teachers. And they can learn on our educational online platform. They can learn from true masters through high quality video tutorials, and they learn through one-on-one, online lessons through live video optimized for music, optimized for learning. And they're doing it around the world. We're currently in beta. This is a picture I really love. It's a selfie that the student on the right has taken in Baghdad when he had a lesson with his big idol, an Italian flute player. The lessons take place across countries. This is probably the longest stretching student -teacher relation from Osaka to Sao Paulo. But that's just the start. We want to be a really holistic educational platform, combining aspects of content, community, and coaching for a new learning experience. Just recently, we tried to push more boundaries, and we started what's probably the first chatbot for learning music through personal bite-sized video lessons. Today, we are a team of four. It all started with Adam, who brings the professional background of music, being a musician, being a teacher. And the other two guys, Daniel Podzemski, our CTO, Pete Lacey, our designer, whom I worked together with at Podio, as Thomas mentioned. And we're really grateful to have great entrepreneurs and investors who help us. So if you share the passion for learning, for music, drop me a line. Contact me. We're soon looking for more people to help us grow and really bring more joy to more people of playing music. Thank you.