Team
The people behind Rumo.
A founder shaped by a household where meaning came before grammar and an advisor who has spent her career arguing that language is, above all, a social practice.
Founder
Hiroshi Mendoza
Hiroshi Mendoza is a first-generation immigrant with a unique background growing up in a Japanese and Spanish speaking household. At age 10, he moved from Mexico City to Miami, Florida, and learned English not through instruction but by using it in everyday language. His brother is deaf, so he is also familiar with American Sign Language. He was inspired to build Rumo for his two CODA nieces. He realized that all reading apps are focused on phonics and no other reading app focused on the visual approach to learning to read and draw meaning from text. He is a firm believer in language use as a social practice, having learned every language without first knowing the specifics of its grammar.
He attended MIT and earned a B.S. and M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. After spending five years working as an engineer at various high-tech startups in San Francisco and Boston, he enrolled at Stanford to earn a Master’s in Design. He has taught various undergraduate classes on Design at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school).
Advisor
Guadalupe Valdés
Guadalupe Valdés is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education Emerita at Stanford University. She joined the Stanford faculty in 1992 and held a joint appointment in the Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese (now Iberian and Latin American Studies) until 2008.
She is an elected member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education. She is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and a recipient of its Distinguished Contributions to Research Award. She is also the recipient of the American Departments of Foreign Languages Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession.