A piano school where kids actually practice daily and find purpose in music
Originally written on Medium: May 6, 2020

As our piano education company, Oclef, continues to grow amid an almost three-month “shelter in place”, I’m now realizing that we‘ve accomplished the most basic version of our initial mission.

This all started back in 2014 when I was finishing a 6 month long touring season as a concert pianist. My Aussie tour manager, Tim, had just left to return back to London and this time I decided I wasn’t going back. I decided I was done with touring for multiple reasons, but mainly because I didn’t see myself expanding to a 9 month schedule after 5 seasons of intense preparation and constant travel.

Education bookings were up substantially that final season and as a result, I met with lots of college students and children. It was relatively new to me, but I loved it. I would often include masterclasses and Q&A’s after performances and this exposed me to the pain in piano education. The most common questions and conversations were usually based around one of these three topics:

The reality is that all three of those questions hit me with surprise. I honestly was confused the first few times I heard it. I was unexposed, until that point, to the fact that people who learned piano, didn’t enjoy it. I guess I was just naive. Growing up, my little brother and I practiced a lot. I mean 3PM — 9PM every day for years. Although he ended up going into medicine, he played piano all the way through college. Now he works as an Anesthesiologist at Mount Sinai in New York City.

Back to those parents. I realized that moving back to the United States, maybe Boston or Silicon Valley would be a great place to build a piano education company to solve their problem. Maybe I could start a company that would figure out why everyone fails at piano…🤔

So I moved to the SF Bay area and intentionally looked for an antiquated piano school with “20+ years of experience”, to see what was going wrong in the trenches.

What did I find?

Nothing major at first. After a couple months, my initial observations showed me that there was almost no community and high amounts of isolation. This felt like the opposite of how education should be. So I created monthly events and recitals - which became popular. Next, I opened group classes for theory and beginners (Keynote). And then I began building out an online solution for students and parents to connect almost daily — it was called Oclef. “One Clef” or “One Key” where all students and parents could come together to share their learning experience in a virtual community to combat the isolation and lack of connection almost all piano students felt.

Soon after this, I met my co-founder, Phong Le. Of course I couldn’t do this journey alone. His daughter was studying piano with me, and he was concerned that she was not doing well. I was lucky enough to find my co-founder early on, and the back and forth mental tennis matches allowed us to iterate and re-iterate. It took us about 4 years and launching an education software company to understand the full complexity of the problem.

Over the last 10 months we’ve built out Oclef as a school where kids love to learn piano. Where they connect socially. Where they connect with teachers daily. And where the skills they learn lead them towards independence.

You can say we’re a piano education company, but I see us as a child development company using piano as our subject. Regardless of the classification, our mission to design education that helps a majority of kids succeed is happening. And at this time, dealing with Covid-19, when most piano students are feeling more isolated than ever, our students are happily logging on 1–3 times a day, 5–6 days a week — to connect, to learn, and to grow.

The tortoise always wins,
JT