500 Startups-backed team is building the Babel Fish for business meetings

Photo credit: langstrup / 123RF.

English might be the “global language of business,” but as anyone who has negotiated a cross-border business deal knows, navigating local linguistic nuances matters, especially in high-stake situations.

“We would take business trips to China, to Taiwan, to Japan, to Korea and [companies] would pay for business class travel, but they wouldn’t think about, oh, should we provide an interpreter for these actual meetings,” Matt Conger, co-founder and CEO of Cadence, tells Tech in Asia.

“We were very confident that we’d be able to get through business meetings with our own skills, language-wise,” he says. “That quickly got proven wrong.”

In an increasingly globalized business world, clear communication between investors and company executives is crucial. In a 2012 working paper by Harvard Business School that studied more than 11,000 conference call transcripts, researchers discovered that company executives who couldn’t “speak plainly in a way investors could understand” during earnings calls faced lower trading volume, restricted price movement, and inconsistent analyst forecasts. Company executives from countries like China and Japan – “linguistically more distant from English” – suffered the most.

Company executives who couldn’t communicate clearly with investors faced lower trading volume.

Cadence is hoping to capitalize on that pain point. The startup offers a remote interpretation service that connects simultaneous interpreters to clients in real-time. In particular, the startup is targeting hedge funds and investors, who often have to conduct due diligence or listen in on key earnings calls with foreign companies and executives.

That means that interpreters staffed by Cadence not only have to be linguistically competent, but also business-savvy and equipped to talk about specific verticals, such as the industrial gases market. Currently, the startup sees the highest demand for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese interpretation.

“If you go on Google and type ‘hire Chinese interpreter’, you might get someone for [US$116] a day. If you ask a Western law firm, they’ll say, oh yeah we’ll be happy to do it, but they’ll literally charge [US$2,900],” says Matt. That’s what he saw at his previous job at a private equity firm.

These might not be professional interpreters either – just paralegals or university graduates – and have little knowledge of the industry, he adds.

Cadence founding team (left to right): Phil Kohn, Matt Conger, Jonathan Rechtman. Photo credit: Cadence.

The three co-founders, Matt, Phil Kohn, and Jonathan Rechtman met in Beijing, where they founded Cadence in 2014. Both Matt and Phil came from a financial background – private equity and the lottery business, respectively – while Jonathan, who was one of the startup’s earliest investors, was a simultaneous interpreter. Together, the three Americans built the company’s network of freelance simultaneous interpreters, at first focusing primarily on on-site projects, such as conferences and focus groups.

Now, the startup is turning its attention to phone and conference calls. In February, Cadence joined 500 Startups, a US-based accelerator, in San Francisco, where it will prioritize closing partnerships with conference-call providers such as Zoom and Twilio, a fellow 500 Startups company. The service charges US$10 per minute for on-the-line services, and US$150 per hour for on-site interpretation.

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