Museums could afford to be much more ambitious with interpretation.
Most can’t today — not because the will isn’t there, but because the math doesn’t work. Convo is a tour platform that collapses the production math so curators can write what they actually want to say, in every language their visitors speak, and update it as the collection changes.
Interpretation is a math problem before it’s a curatorial one.
Drafting an audio tour takes weeks, often with outside writers. Voice talent adds weeks and a budget line per language. Translation multiplies the project. A correction means re-recording.
The result is a logistical compromise that nobody talks about openly: most institutions can only afford audio for a fraction of their permanent collection, in one or two languages, kept current rarely. Rotating exhibits get audio last, if at all. Visitors who don’t speak the dominant language get the surface only. Curators with more to say end up saying less because saying more means another production cycle.
This isn’t a problem of will or talent. It’s a problem of math. That’s the problem Convo exists to solve.
Four lines we don’t cross.
These are the load-bearing decisions behind every feature we ship. They’re also the questions we expect a thoughtful curator to ask in the first five minutes.
A career spent on how institutions deliver knowledge.
Previously, Eric founded and led Pathgather, an enterprise learning platform that served hundreds of thousands of employees at companies including Walmart, HP, Visa, Capital One, Qualcomm, and Colgate. Pathgather was acquired by Degreed, where Eric served as VP of Product Strategy.
The throughline: a career spent on how institutions deliver knowledge to the people they serve — at scale, in the right language, with the expertise of the people creating it intact. Museums are the same problem in a different room.