Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Hengjie Wang and Alliv Samson, co-founders of Kami.

If you have any school-aged kids in your life, you’ll know all about the changes and fast-adoption of technology the education sector has seen this year. During lockdown us parents had what seemed like endless repetitive problems with Google slides, things not saving, appearing or formatting properly and generally just not working. 

But one New Zealand-based education tool has taken a bunch of these frustrations and made it easy to collaborate, annotate, work and see what others are doing in a shared online workspace. The app is called Kami – which means paper in Japanese – and it’s helping create a shared learning environment for millions of kids and adults around the world. 

The app is now used in more than one in three schools in the US. They are closing in on 20 million users worldwide, and you might have seen them in the news as they recently made an offer for all New Zealand schools to be able to use it for free for the foreseeable future. 

Kami was launched by three final year students at the University of Auckland, co-founders who picked up a chairman and a business plan through an entrepreneur challenge, and have now built the business into a global force in the highly controlled and highly contested education space. 

To talk about the journey, running the business over lockdown with a new baby, and what’s next, co-founders Hengjie Wang and Alliv Samson joined Business is Boring this week for a chat.

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