Paul Gollash arrived at a sales meeting in Madrid with Spanish learned in Chile. The prospective customer laughed, summoned his colleagues and asked the American to speak again. His accent had become the entertainment. For someone trying to sell automotive services, this was an unconventional opening. He laughed along. Long before he built a language company, Gollash had discovered that knowing the words and knowing how you sound are separate qualifications.
He went on selling. Years later, he would describe selling a vision as a central part of his work as a chief executive. The connection is easy to appreciate: both require another person to see something your way, preferably before the meeting ends. His career would carry him through General Motors Europe, business school, consulting and Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. The experience that stayed with him was more ordinary: trying to work in somebody else’s language.
A warehouse supplied the vocabulary
Gollash grew up around Milwaukee and graduated from Dartmouth with an economics degree in 1997. At 22, he headed to Santiago, Chile, without speaking Spanish. He found work in an automotive parts warehouse. It was a particularly practical arrangement for learning a language: the vocabulary came with things to do, people to understand and a working day that refused to wait for fluency.
He later recalled making progress faster than expatriate friends attending language classes. That was his personal experience, rather than a controlled experiment, but it left him with a question that would occupy much of his working life. Could a course borrow the relevance of the workplace? A person trying to do a job already has a reason to learn. The lesson designer’s task is to make use of it.
Madrid followed Chile. Then came an MBA with honors from Chicago Booth in 2004, work at Booz Allen Hamilton and a place at Virgin. Gollash helped develop and launch Virgin Hotels. Hospitality gave him experience building a business inside a recognizable brand, with the substantial preparations that a hotel venture requires. A room, unlike a software update, is troublesome to ship.
Twenty dollars for an honest answer
Voxy’s early research had little need for a conference room. Gollash made paper prototypes in PowerPoint and approached prospective English learners in New York. He offered $20 for 20 minutes of feedback. The screens were sheets of paper; the people reviewing them had actual reasons to want better English. A prototype can be rudimentary and still ask a useful question.
He also placed an advertisement in a Spanish-language newspaper and arranged research conversations at Dunkin’ Donuts. Putting his own mobile number in the advertisement proved rather too effective: calls began at four in the morning and continued for days. Customer discovery had acquired an alarm clock.
Gollash hired a videographer to record the conversations, then used an edited clip in fundraising. Subtitles helped prospective investors hear from people they might otherwise never meet. The exercise gave the pitch something beyond a founder’s enthusiasm: customers explaining their own needs. It also established an appealing habit for a business selling communication. Before asking anyone to learn, listen.
Paper screens. Real learners. A small payment for the chance to hear where the idea fell short.
The newspaper becomes the lesson
Gollash co-founded Voxy with Gregg Carey in 2010 and launched it at TechCrunch Disrupt that year. Even the name had a previous life: the company later disclosed that Voxy.com had belonged to a nail salon in Thailand. A domain can change professions more easily than most people.
The proposition was to teach through material connected to a learner’s life. News, everyday situations and personal interests could provide the language, while software helped turn that material into exercises. Mobile delivery offered the possibility of studying in the gaps of a day, without requiring the day to arrange itself around a classroom.
“Language learning is like learning how to cook or how to surf.”
Paul Gollash, 2012
That comparison makes his approach easier to picture. Reading a recipe has its uses; eventually someone has to chop an onion. Voxy combined material to study with opportunities to practise, including live tutoring. The learner needed to use a skill in a recognizable situation. An interesting article could draw someone in, and a conversation could make the vocabulary earn its keep.
Underneath that approach was the problem of turning ordinary material into something teachable. Voxy used natural language processing to create lessons from text, including business documents. An employer’s own material could therefore become part of the learning environment. The software had to handle the conversion; the value depended on whether the result helped someone understand and use the language. It is a useful way to think about personalization. Choosing an appealing topic is one step. Helping a person handle the words they encounter in their actual responsibilities gives the technology a more specific purpose, and the lesson a test beyond the screen.
By June 2012, Gollash reported 1.5 million users. In February 2015, Voxy put the figure above three million. These were milestones in the company’s early history, and they belong to those dates. They show how far an idea tested on paper had travelled before the business settled into its later corporate focus.
When the customer changes
Popularity left a commercial question unresolved. Reaching individual learners cost money, and larger competitors had larger marketing budgets. Voxy moved from selling to consumers toward selling to institutions and businesses. Gollash later recalled undertaking the transition with ten months of cash available and roughly 70 people in the organization.
The product could carry over more readily than the company’s routines. Direct sales, customer success and a different marketing operation needed attention. His account of the change is candid about the managerial difficulty. A founder may become comfortable with a new direction before the people expected to execute it do. Explaining the decision once does remarkably little to settle that difference.
He identified perseverance and adaptability as useful personal qualities, while recognizing that patient communication had become more important as the business grew. The shift is revealing. The energetic salesman who could get an idea moving had to become a leader who could bring colleagues along. Voxy’s own history dates its exclusive corporate focus to 2017.
The learner remains at the centre. The buyer now also needs a reason to renew.
Brazil required a boarding pass
Gollash’s explanation of enterprise selling contains a refreshing amount of actual travel. He recalled making about 30 trips to Brazil over two years for customer and prospect meetings, before building local teams. The company had been founded in New York, where he valued the mix of design, engineering and commercial talent. Its customers required him to look well beyond it.
An early university sale involved a few thousand licenses. Watching textbook salespeople had helped him recognize the opening for a different kind of offering. He described selling around the results a buyer cared about: productivity, internal promotions or employee retention, depending on the organization. English training needed a connection to the work the customer was trying to accomplish.
There is continuity here with the warehouse in Santiago. A university wants students ready for what comes after graduation. An employer wants people able to contribute. The reason for learning supplies the shape of the course. Gollash’s commercial argument kept returning to the practical one that had first persuaded him.
A different seat in education
In April 2023, ETS announced Gollash as general manager of its reimagined K-12 business and an officer of the organization. The appointment put product development, marketing, sales and global operations within his remit. Amit Sevak, ETS’s CEO, brought in an executive whose experience included both starting an education company and taking it through a change of business model.
The work broadened his focus to student assessment and educator preparation. In February 2025, he was among the executives announcing Praxis Bridge, an alternative route for eligible teacher candidates who had narrowly missed passing their test. The program aimed to address gaps in knowledge while maintaining certification standards. Assessment was becoming a place to identify what a learner needed next.
ETS’s current leadership page lists him as senior vice president of TOEFL and GRE. In April 2026, he joined a podcast conversation with ETS and PSI security executive Wally Dalrymple about trust in remote testing. Their subject was how testing programs judge security through evidence and outcomes across delivery methods. For a career built around language and opportunity, it is a consequential problem: a score must be credible to the institution receiving it.
Gollash now works on a different part of the learner’s journey. A language course helps someone build a skill; an assessment helps someone demonstrate it. Between those two activities lie university applications, professional plans and decisions about crossing borders. His own early move abroad gives that sequence a personal resonance without making every learner’s experience identical to his.
The work outlives the first pitch
Voxy continued developing after his years as CEO. In November 2025, KnowledgeMotion announced its acquisition of the business, describing a platform serving more than 500 corporate clients. The announcement placed adult language learning alongside the group’s other education offerings. It is a later chapter in the company’s history, rather than a measure of Gollash’s personal proceeds.
His career has made an unusually concrete circuit: learning Spanish to work, selling a business idea about learning, then leading education and assessment businesses. The Madrid customer who asked him to speak again could hardly have requested a more durable encore. Gollash kept returning to the same useful question: what does a person need the language for? A warehouse had given him his own answer. Building Voxy meant taking other people’s answers seriously.