Today's guest is Ray Blakney, a social entrepreneur that defines himself as a global nomad. He'll talk about his experience in life and business so far and about his interesting future projects.

Facts

Ray Blakney was born in the Philippines to a Filipina mother and American father.

At 11 months old, his family moved to Turkey where he spent the next 15 years.

At 15 years of age he moved to the US to finish high school and college

After 10 years of working in the US as a computer engineer in Silicon Valley start-ups and fortune 500 companies he ditched it all and joined the Peace Corps as a volunteer.

He was sent to southern Mexico to work with indigenous communities for 2 years.

There he met his Mexican wife and after finishing his 2 years in the Peace Corps they started their journey of entrepreneurship together.

Over the next two years, Ray has founded and sold a wide variety of companies. All of these companies have a social entrepreneurship and cultural understanding as a core part of the business model.

His businesses have included a chain of brick and mortar language schools in Mexico (sold 2012), a chocolate factory in the Philippines (sold 2017) and a travel agency in Mexico.

He currently owns and operates – along with his wife – the online language school www.livelingua.com. The goal of Live Lingua is to help facilitate the understanding of language and culture around the world. Being social enterprise, in addition to teaching languages (with both paid and free resources) they also have a free repository of dying languages. This includes material to learn them.

Part of the proceeds of Live Lingua's paid language lessons goes to sponsoring children around the work through Save the Children USA.

Quotes

"So my fist word was Turkish. A few days later I said something in Filipino. In Tagalog, specifically. And I said something in English a week or two later. So when I applied to college, I just liked to say that English wasn't my first language"

"I guess that limiting belief was I thought I knew everything. It wasn't till I tried a second business that didn't work. And a third that didn't work. And a fourth that didn't work. Then realized there's more to this. It wasn't as easy as I thought the first time. [I thought] 'I got lucky. Let's start learning.'"

"I don't really associate with any kind of nationality. I have passports. I have two citizenships. Actually culturally I'm similar to Turkish, (...) but that makes me feel like a global citizen. And on the flip side of that, I've an aversion to nationalism of any kind."

"You need to plan your rest with as much detail as you plan your work, if no more so."

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/raymondblakney/

www.livelingua.com

http://www.rayvensoft.com/

http://www.teacherindie.com/