(upbeat music) - I feel like I'm being a part of something bigger than me, which is great because there are doors that are being opened to people like me, women, minorities.

And I think that's amazing.

(upbeat music) - Hola, my name is Marina and I am the co-founder and CEO of Time2Talk.

Time2Talk is a mobile app that connects Spanish students in the U.S. and Canada with native speakers in Latin America on-demand.

I met my husband in Barcelona.

We were already studying French because we were planning on moving to France.

And then we moved to Cleveland.

We found it very hard to keep practicing our French when we moved to the U.S.

There's a gap in the language learning process in general.

There's a gap between what people learn in the classroom and then applying it in the real world.

And then there's a gap in the language learning market.

We were thinking, how cool would it be to have an on-demand service?

That you can just call whenever you want and you feel like it.

You speak and you pay for the time that you spoke.

That's how Time2Talk started.

We spoke to so many people, did so much research to understand if there was an actual place for something like this, and realized no one is solving the problem like this.

So we thought, well, it could be us.

We handpick the coaches from Latin America.

(speaking in foreign language) - They are all super friendly people that are super excited to help other people improve their speaking skills in Spanish.

(speaking in foreign language) - We always talk about this, how a language is not just words.

It is a culture that comes with the language.

There's so many countries in which Spanish is spoken and all these countries, yes we all speak Spanish, but we have different accents, different cultures, different traditions.

So it's very interesting for people that are using Time2Talk to realize, wait I'm not only practicing my Spanish, but I am also speaking to new people from different countries and learning about, their daily life, their cities, their traditions.

And it goes back to why people learn languages.

The backstory of that is to communicate to people that speak that language and communicate and be connected to other people around the world.

So I think it's very inspiring and it's very exciting to see how people love connecting, and love speaking to other people.

Knowing that we are actually helping people improve their language skills, and also we are giving people the opportunity to have an additional income.

So we're creating jobs, which is an incredible feeling.

That is the fuel that keeps us going every day.

(upbeat music)