Interview with Chris Tudor Founder and CEO of MASSOLIT

MASSOLIT Front Page

G: Tell us about your business: What do you do? What did inspire you to start?

MASSOLIT is an online education company that gives teachers access to an extensive library of video lectures in the arts and humanities. The great thing about MASSOLIT is that the lectures are designed by some of the most senior academics in the country. Earlier this week, for example, I filmed Bart van Es, who is an Associate Professor in English at Oxford University, who was talking about Shakespeare as a businessman and his relationship with his actors. Bart literally wrote the book on this, so it was fascinating stuff. What’s more, it means that any school in the world could start their English lesson with a world expert telling them a few things about Shakespeare, which I think is really exciting.

I founded MASSOLIT because I thought the current providers weren’t doing a good enough job with their arts and humanities content. I remember being really excited about a course on Ancient Greece on Coursera, but when I came to watch it, I thought: “Whoa – this is a great idea, but it’s been executed really badly”. So I got in touch with a couple of my old tutors at Oxford who I thought would be interested in putting a lecture together and started building the basic site, and it’s just grown from there.

G: What is innovative  about what you do?

At the moment, MASSOLIT is one of the only providers that is focused solely on the arts and humanities. As I’ve already said, there are a few providers who do a bit of it, but it’s not really a focus. If you look at Khan Academy, for example, they’re absolutely brilliant for the maths stuff, but when you look at their humanities courses, they’ve only got 1-2 options. I want MASSOLIT to be known as the provider of content in the arts and humanities, and I think there’s a gap in the market to do this.

The other area where MASSOLIT is a little bit different is the fact that we’re focusing on the schools market. There are a load of companies out there doing adult learning, especially the MOOCs, which leads to problems like accreditation and low completion rates. The great thing about building a product for schools is that you don’t have to worry about accreditation, because they are working towards their exams, while teachers can pick and choose the videos that are most useful for what they are learning, so it’s not like we have a ‘course’ that needs to be completed. The most important thing is that schools really like what MASSOLIT provides: I don’t think there’s much else out there which does the same kind of thing.

Finally, I think schools have been really impressed by the people we’ve managed to get on board. We’re doing something with Edith Hall in a couple of weeks, who is Professor at King’s College, London and one of the most senior Classicists in the country. Diane Purkiss, who did the course on the English Civil War, and Bart van Es, who I mentioned above, are both Associate Professors at Oxford. We tried to get Boris to do something on Ancient Rome but he told us he was too busy!

MASSOLIT Module The Aeneid

G: What were the biggest obstacles launching the start-up and how did you overcome them?

The biggest obstacle I faced in the first couple of months was getting in front of schools. Teachers take a lot of care over what they show their students, so I had to work pretty hard convincing them that what I was doing with MASSOLIT was going to be really high quality. It helped that I had a background in Classics myself, I think, but I’ll always be grateful to my old tutors for contributing videos really early on: they are both pretty senior academics at Oxford, so when they got involved it really improved the credibility of the site and made it much easier to get in front of schools.

G: What would you say has been your most memorableexperience while developing your startup?

I went through a phase of filming twice a day in Oxford, which meant getting up at 5am, working all day, and only getting back home by 10-11pm, at which point I had to start on the editing, which would last until about 2-3 in the morning. It was pretty crazy for a while, but thankfully things are a little more relaxed now.

Other highlights include walking for hours through the English countryside to get a school, having a ten-minute meeting where the school said they weren’t interested, and then having to walk all the way back. I remember it was about about a five-hour round trip in the end. I remember walking past cows in a field thinking, “What am I doing here?”

Most of the experiences have been happy ones, of course. I really enjoy having an academic to myself for 3-4 hours. I’m genuinely interested in all of this stuff, and it’s been wonderful to learn about so many different topics.

G: Why do you choose Shoreditch to run your business?

To be honest, coming to Shoreditch was based on luck more than anything else. I was moving out of my old flat in Golders Green and it just so happened that a friend of mine had a spare room in his flat on Columbia Road, so that was that.

Nevertheless, clearly Shoreditch is a great place to be doing this kind of thing. I’ve been to a few events at Google Campus over the last couple of months which have been great, and there’s a sense that the area is gaining a reputation as a great place for start-ups to be.

G: Who/what are your favorite CEOs/Businesses in Shoreditch?

I really like Songkick, who I think were one of the first companies to set up in Shoreditch and in many ways are responsible for the whole Silicon Roundabout thing. I’ve know Ian and Michelle [the founders] pretty well, and they’ve both given me loads of advice over the last couple of months, for which I’m really grateful. I love what they’re doing as well, so I really hope it goes well for them.

G: What are your favorite places in Shoreditch?

For breakfast, I love getting a coffee at Caffe In on Hackney Road before going to the Premises Café for their cooked breakfast. For dinner, my flat-mate and I often go to the Stringray Globe Café on Columbia Road, which does some pretty amazing pizza. Either that or one of the Vietnamese places on Kingsland Road. I went to Brawn for the first time last week, which was just fantastic. In terms of pubs, it’s got to be the Reliance on Old Street.

G: What does the future has in store for your company?

MASSOLIT Predictive Search

I’m really excited about the year ahead. MASSOLIT is already being used in 40-50 schools across the country and I’m hoping to hit 200 by this time next year. I think there’s real scope for MASSOLIT to be a global business: I had an e-mail the other week from a school in Australia, who were quite interesting in trialling the product, and I’m sure there’ll be a few schools in the US that would love what MASSOLIT provides.

As well as expanding our customer base, I’m really keen to keep improving the product. At the moment, our lectures tend to involve just one academic, but I love the idea of having bigger debates which teachers and students can continue in the classroom.

Personally, I quite like the idea of doing more work with actors, directors, and musicians – having Sam Mendes talk about his production of King Lear, for example, or Daniel Barenboim talking about Beethoven’s Symphonies. I guess this all depends on what schools want, however: it’s important to remember that it’s them that I’m building the product for, not myself!

Social links:

Twitter: @christudor (or @themassolit)

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/massolit

Website: www.massolit.co.uk