It's Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done - Sam Chaudhary of ClassDojo

Well, I don't want to miss this story. Uh-huh. Oh, sly grin. Yeah, so little known fact: one of your first investors was Paul Graham of Y Combinator. Yeah? Can you tell us about that meeting? What convinced PG to write you a check?

Yeah, it was hilarious. Yeah, so it was actually—it started at Demo Day, and I was lucky to be invited. So, we’d gone, we’d presented last, and we’d been told the whole time that like, you know, the goal was to meet lots of people, to get them to come by and like talk to you, right? And so a good way to do that is to have like good metrics, and we were lucky we had this good growth curve. But another way to get to do that is donuts. And so I had a box of donuts, and I said at the end that like, “Hey, they were over there. There’s a box on a table. Like goodbye.” And so, hmm. And so, so the presentations finished, and we were kind of milling around, we ride our little stand thing hoping that people would pop by, and who walks over but PG? And he goes to Liam. He’s like, “Hey, I read there’s one of the metrics we showed. I think there’s an engagement metric. He’s like, I really like that, but the look of that—do you remember what that was?”

“I don’t remember that. I’m sure I’ve got it in there. I think it was something about every three seconds.”

“Oh, you’re so rewarding feedback. Maybe I did. Do you remember?”

“And I do. Yeah, no, I don’t actually remember. It’s, I’ve got it in the pitch deck. Something I’m sure you guys have it too.”

Yeah, yeah. And so he’s like, “I really like that metric. Can you show me like what the growth curve and that looks like?” And then, like, I can’t even imagine what was happening for Liam because he and I had like read all of Peter's essays for ages, right? This is like a legendary person turning up and just like having a normal conversation with you. And so poor Liam was just like, come like a holy—you know, it’s like, “Oh my god! My idol is here!” And I’m like, “Wow! I don’t have it to hand, but I can pull it or whatever…”

And PG is like, “Oh yeah, you could just open terminal and do it in there,” right? Make it like base—like starts coaching him through their names like, names like very—he’s an amazing technology, very confident, right? When he’s like, “Oh yeah, I guess I’ll just do that,” and hits enter, but it’s going to take a while, and the donuts kind of bit us in the—you know, it bit us in the ass.

“Okay, I’ll just stand here and have a donut.”

Okay, so you’ve got this high-pressure data extraction happening for Liam, and in the end, Liam’s like, “Looks like it’s better than this. I’ll just email it to you straight after this.” And so, Paul gives us his email address and he’s like, “That sounds good,” moves away.

And so we go home, like breathlessly excited. I don’t remember like the rest of what happened at Demo Day, and we craft this email to PG, or DM. It’s like, “Hey, here’s the metric you want to look at, the growth curve, whatever.” And we send it off, and like nothing—like crickets. And we’re like, “I guess he wasn’t like that interested. Like, it was just polite.”

Right? But, being relentless with this stuff, two days later we email him again, and you know the numbers are small, so they’re growing. We’re like, “Look, it’s grown like 3X, 0.2.” And again, like no answer.

And we keep doing this for like, I think the best part of like a week, like every day or two, we’re just emailing like another chart, another, and then sort of it from Liam’s email. And then I get an email from Paul like a week later with one-liner where he says, “It is customary to respond to offers of funding.”

And we’re like, “What does that mean? Indeed, yes!” Yeah, and we’re like, “Yes, agree!” She won something else with that! And then we check. Liam has some kind of super juiced-up kind of Gmail inbox. Whatever, and it’s like in a spam folder somewhere. It’s like, like two days in, PG is like, “Okay, I’m in,” and like, whatever, I’ll write you guys a check and just come around, pick it up.

And we’re like, “We spammed PG for the best part of a week after.” And then, yeah, then Liam biked to his house to pick up the check, which is kind of cool.

Yeah. Think he’s having a nap in the shed. Tell us about who uses ClassDojo and what problem they’re trying to solve when they adopt ClassDojo.

Yeah, it’s—I think it’s important to understand, like, what—like why ClassDojo even exists, and then that gets like the problem is that we’re actually helping people solve. So the reason we started the company really is because I kind of thought that most kids like don’t get the education that’s going to make them be happy and successful.

And it’s bleak.

That’s bleak. Yeah! But the good thing about it is that I think like the answer is ready. They’re like, the answer isn’t like some magic technology or a magic policy; it’s actually like education is really a product that’s made by people in classrooms and in homes. And so our job as a company then becomes to help people in classrooms and homes create a better education experience for kids. And so, like, that’s really like what ClassDojo has been trying to do for a long, long time, right from the start of the company.

And then, so that the exact set of problems that we’ve tried to solve changes quite a lot, right? Depending on the classroom, depending on where kids are, what kinds of things teachers want to do. But I’d say like probably the two main problems we solve today, one is that there’s this weird like gulf between school and home.

So like kids go off to school for like eight hours a day and a bunch of stuff happens in a classroom, and then they go home and a bunch of stuff happens at home. And like the kind of the two halves of the day don’t really like connect and then, right, talk to each other. But that’s really like a kid's life growing up. It’s like usually you spend one of those two settings, and it’s a bit odd because in every other part of your life you’re connected to the things you care most about, and make like Instagram or whatever.

But it’s very odd for parents that they’re not more connected to their kids for like most of the day. And for teachers who actually really care about these kids that they don’t really get a view of what’s happening at home. And so we really like—that’s one big problem we try and help with is like bridging that gulf and creating more of a connect between school and home.

And then the second problem has a newer one, but it’s really this—it’s kind of like teachers have struggled for a long time to try new ideas in their classroom. So like the pace at which new ideas get introduced to classrooms is actually quite slow, and it takes quite a long time for a teacher to try a new practice they might have heard of.

Like, I know personalized learning or like something like a growth mindset, like a new idea. And it’s quite tough. And so we’re trying to like help teachers try more ideas in their classrooms and make it easier and faster for teachers to bring new ideas into their classrooms.

How does your product make that easier for them?

Oh, yeah. So the first people—so for the first part—and we basically just helped teachers share more of what’s happening at school every day. So teachers can share pictures and videos through the school day home. So this new bit was from like a couple of years ago where—and it wasn’t really like a plan; it kind of emerged from something one of the teams was doing. So we spend a lot of time in classrooms and always have.

And we kept hearing this thing about social and emotional learning. Like there are lots and lots of teachers who really want to teach their kids things beyond like reading and writing and math, but like software skills. And it was really tough for them because it’s a quite a fuzzy area. They’re like, “Well, what do we do next? Mike, I want to teach my kid—my kids about curiosity or creativity or empathy.”

These are like important things for people to learn, but we don’t really know how to teach them. And so a few years ago we went down to Stanford, and there’s a professor there, Carol Dweck, and she’s got this—you know, right now I don’t have everyone this thing knows, but you know, and she’s got this idea called the growth mindset. It’s a really famous TED talk and just got a book about it. And it’s basically the idea that like, you know, you’re not fixed in your abilities and that through practice and persistence you can get better at stuff.

But it’s amazing how many kids grow up without that idea really in mind, right? They’re kind of told, “You’re a math person.” No, “You’re not a creative person.” And these are really like quite limiting mindsets. And so we wanted to see if we could help teachers like undo that. Like just start with that one idea, see if we could help more teachers share this idea for growth mindset because they’d already talked about wanting it, and like we heard it from them.

And so we went to Carol Dweck and her team, and we were like, “Look, if we could get this idea to lots and lots of schools, what would we do?” And Noam and together came up with this idea of like making short stories—like animated shorts, three to five minute, you know, like thought starters or conversation starters for classrooms.

And so we produced—it’s the most like hack job I think we’ve ever done—that was like eight weeks from like the first conversation to getting this series done. We did it all in-house; it was like three people in like a tiny room. But we made this series of like five animated shorts about growth mindset, and they weren’t really like—you’ve got the Khan Academy car lectures—they weren’t really lectures; they were just like stories.

And at the end of the story, there’s a question, so it didn’t really give you the answer; it was just that the story like teeing up some interesting thoughts for you to discuss. And so we made this series and we put it out, we distributed it on ClassDojo so what every teacher about a Class Schedule account it popped up in the app one day for them. It’s like, “Hey, you can teach your kids about growth mindset.”

And it was crazy because we’d never done anything like it before, and we didn’t know how it would be used, but we ended up with something like—it's something that I think those videos have reached about fifteen million kids now in classrooms, which is like nuts! Yeah, and so that was the first time we ever did anything about this, like bringing new ideas to your classroom.

And then we did a follow-up with Harvard on empathy with Yale or mindfulness and there’s more kind—so it’s literally the teacher says we want to be able to do this, and you say we’ll create it for you.

Oh, we’ll find experts, don’t worry too much.

Yeah, but there are experts on it. And if we can, it’s not just facilitating things that happen in the classroom; it’s actually providing—it’s actually helping people move class’s misfortune.

If you really believe the thing that I said that most kids don’t get the education that they should get for now in the future and do you believe that teachers want to do the right things for kids, then I think it’s important to help teachers not just do what’s right even done more efficiently, but actually help them do new stuff.

Yeah, and how are you measuring the success of teaching your growth mindset?

Yes, really good question. So like the—there’s kind of two; there’s like an input and an output measure, right?

Yeah, and the input measure for us is read just like—do people use this? Okay, and so used meaning like user app? You watch the video? Do people watch the video? Do they do the activities in the classroom? Do they share home with parents?

Yeah, and so that’s quite good—a good way to measure. I think the real truth with the growth mindset stuff is that like the output measures, I think are like— from what we can tell from research, they like take a bit longer, thank you. They’re mostly like psychology research, and it takes a bit longer to really see if people’s mindsets have changed.

So I think like there’s this question that comes up a lot of like, “Should you do stuff that people use? Should you do stuff that’s like, like high efficacy?” I think it’s actually like a false trade-off, but I think you have to be clear about what today, we know how to measure and we don’t know how to measure.

Hmm. And the thing that like we can measure is like are people voluntarily adopting and using this, like is their demand for this? And the thing that’s going to take a little time to figure out is like, “Hey, is the whole world now having more of a growth mindset?” But what we do know is that like, you know, for fifty million kids, they’ve been exposed to the idea for growth mindset, and they’re using the words in the classroom, and they’re using things like “You know, it’s not that I can’t do this, I can’t do this yet.”

And like that’s kind of a cool starting point. I think I don’t think—we’re far from done with it.

Yeah, great! So from the beginning of the company, you’ve been very effective at talking to your users in such a way that you really understand their problems, I think here. And you’re describing now, you know, as the company grows, you’re gathering this from your users and giving them the things they really want for their classrooms.

Can you talk a little bit about how—in the early stage, before you knew what your product, or even maybe your audience was—how you figured out how you developed, like, what are strategies for developing that deep understanding of your audience? What are some specific things you did early on and that you continue to do to keep that connection so you can be building the right things solving the right problems?

Yeah, that’s a good one. It’s a really important theme in the company. We talk a lot about empathy a lot. I think like, so before we even came up with like the idea for the first product we ever built, actually like—I think something people might not know is it lasted—it didn’t actually start. I mean, you remember it, can’t I mean? It actually starts like a company. It came really from like, I had worked in education for most of my life, like in classrooms, around classrooms.

Liam had been my co-founder, had been doing a PhD in computer science focused on technology in classrooms. And so it recant more like a passion for educational stuff. And when we turned up in California to do imagine K12, like we basically didn’t know anyone in America at all.

Like we’d never lived in America; we never worked here. Like we’d met—like I called Jeff Ralston on my video call once, right? Like who—like Tim an hour on there as well. And so, it kind of enforced like a naivety either way.

Like, it kind of removed any sense of like, “Hey, we know what we’re doing, and we’ve got the idea, and we’ll go and do an idea.” So, it kind of enforced that like get out and like try and understand what people who are actually doing this need.

And so, the first like—for things like six weeks, yeah, we heard for six or seven weeks before we launched the first version of ClassDojo, seven weeks. And in those seven weeks, I—this is Mercy Me—but Liam was involved too.

I did basically anything to get in front of teachers, to get to classrooms, and talk to people. And so that like, on the easier side, it was some schools published like teachers’ email addresses just on the website. And so I’d like just email people, and it’s kind of a weird email, right?

So it wasn’t like a pitch for anything; it was more, “Hey, I told my bit about us, and I’d love to help in any way that we can with whatever you’re doing in your classrooms.” And Michael said, “What’s the worst problem that you face every day? Please, let us know,” as like a one—like asking for like a one-line respond, “Just let us know what the worst problem you face every day.”

And so we did that, I think I’m out a few thousand people, and it was like scraping email addresses. I’ve had a friend at Teach for America, I got the emails on the email list there.

I had friends who are teachers in the UK and Australia. We kind of emailed just as many peels as we could. But the other thing, which was like more probably like if you’d step up the difficulty of it, was we’d go to local schools.

And so like we were in Palo Alto; there’s a gun high school nearby. And I found it a few teachers there who were willing to talk to me, and I went towards summer school there in fact for like a couple of days just so they promised to like, “Like, if you can cook, if you could teach like summer school for an afternoon, sure, we’ll chat with you after.”

So I’m like, “Cool. I’ll do that.” We went to like teacher meetups. There are these things called ed camps. There’s actually one ed camp which was really like life-changing for us, which I’ll tell you about in a minute.

But like, we went to these teacher meetups or just like as much as you can to soak in the context of your users. Like that’s what we did. That’s what I did in the early days for a lot of it.

Made a particularly horrific one once where we had to go to Los Altos School District, and we were like pretty stingy Brits. And so we didn’t have like—didn’t want to get a cab. Uber wasn’t around then. We’d never get a cab, so we like biked for miles in like the steaming South Bay sun to get there and turned up just dripping with sweat.

There’s audiences in a re-read, but you kind of like—you couldn’t just do whatever it takes, right? Like when you’re two guys in a room and you need to get to understand how you can actually help people, you do whatever it takes.

I suppose I think three or four hundred people on Skype calls, face to face in those seven weeks and emailed a few thousand more. And then as the company’s kind of grown, that’s just become like an institution in the company.

Like I think there were only 30 people, but we may be unusual in that we have like research as a function in the company. Like there are researchers in the company who spend all of their time talking to teachers.

We have like lots of ways of bringing teacher context in and kids and parents know as well, but bringing that into the office. I could certainly—the stories up on monitors, like we have community groups, or we solicit feedback all the time. So I think like that—that’s a second important part of how we build ClassDojo.

Is that a vestige of you working in consulting, or do you think it just fits the company because I saw that you worked at McKinsey? And this is a very common question, like, “Hey, I’m working in consulting thinking about doing a startup. What do I do?”

Yeah, and it’s like this consultant versus entrepreneur like get your hands dirty mindset.

Right? Yeah.

Yeah, mine is a bit weird because like consulting was kind of the anomaly for me.

Okay, so I was in my teens—encounter—you know this, like in my teens, the school I went to actually insisted that you teach as well as learn. So I ended up teaching for like 20 hours a week for six years from age clearway—here’s to our peers.

Yeah, okay, well, and many of us thought it was crazy. It was, but it’s also one of the most effective things you can do. It’s like, you know, the high cost, low cost, high-quality interventions is peer tutoring. And so like we had this in our school.

We had like—I would teach regularly, teach classes of 20 to 30 kids for like around 20 hours of your subject.

That’s all of them, right?

Like, you know everything.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you’d go across like physics, chemistry, economics, maths. Is it really like one like really fascinating kind of school?

But see, so I taught for like a long time. When I got to college and I was an economist—like I’m a math person. I thought I would carry on with a PhD in that and I ended up going to teach straight after college instead.

And so like all the conventional consulting banking didn’t really appeal that.

Mm-hmm. That much.

But then McKinsey—you’re very good at the CRM system kind of follow-up. Then they’re like they track where you go. And I was like, “Oh, I’m going to teach.” And they’re like, “Howard, we’ve got this education team. Here, you should come and join to, you know, like do some education work, really.”

And there are a lot of advising governments on how to set up education systems. And so, I went there and I spent a bunch of my time there in education, and ultimately the reason you just said is the reason I left.

Like I think there’s only so long—like if you’re used to like getting your hands dirty, there’s only so long you can like advise people and not actually do the work.

Yeah, and so I think it was—that was more like the way that I’d always been. Consulting was like the kind of the left heard a bit, but yeah.

Okay, that’s good, but it wasn’t for me forever.

So you talk to these hundreds of teachers and released this first product. Tell us about the early days of growth, what you think drove that, and how that’s shifted over time. What have there been transition points where ClassDojo went from kind of this growth engine to this other one? Have you anticipated or managed those transitions, and what do you do now?

Yeah, no, it’s a—but tell us about that early growth.

So we had our first like seven weeks or six, seven weeks or so of talking to teachers, like building like little prototypes and things. And then week eight, I remember this because it was a Sunday morning, and we’d put the first version of ClassDojo like live for anyone to sign up for.

And it was quite early on Sunday. It was something like—it was like six or seven in the morning, and there was this IDI camp in in Oakland. So an ed camp is, yeah, just like a group of teachers coming together at the weekend to talk to each other about like new things they’re trying out. So it’s kind of like teacher professional development camp, but they’re doing it at Skyline High School in Oakland.

And we were in Palo Alto all the time. And I woke up at six or seven, I was like, “Oh man, like I make the sauce!” Like we’d been sprinting or we together this product out and I was—I probably just blow this off at like, “If you’d nice to have a line,” and I thought I’d—I don’t know what it was, but I posted, I think it’s on Facebook and I posted like, “I also don’t have a way to get there, as I can’t bike that far. Like the cab’s going to be really expensive in their back.” And so I post on—I think it was Facebook, and I said, “Does anyone going towards Oakland today? Like, on the off chance everyone’s going, I’d love a ride.”

And then, turns out another person from our imagined K12 class, Chris Reeder, in fact, was.

And he was like, “I’ll pick you up and go.” And I was—oh, so it’s a good lesson to, you know, trying to be the hardest working person in the room, right?

But I come—Chris tripped me out, went to the ed camp and basically starting there was like something at 80 or 90 teachers there, and we’re just chatting. They’re like, “Oh, like you’re not a teacher? What are you up to?” And I told me about this thing that we’ve been working on about ClassDojo and they’re like, “Oh, that sounds really fascinating.”

And they’re like two or three of them were like, “I might like check, like tell some friends about it as well.” And so we couldn’t have these two things though. The people we’d already spoken with, who you can imagine like the most magical experience you could get is someone turns up and says, “Hey, we just want to solve a problem for you,” and then goes and builds something that tries to solve the problem.

Like that’s like a good experience for you; it’s a very white-glove kind of service. And so a bunch of people got that—those does that was the 400 teachers or so that I’d spoken with. And then this new set were like, “Oh, that might work for me as well,” and then they started using it and they like tweeted out too.

Like, Twitter is actually big for us in the early days. They start telling like their teacher followers and friends about it, and a few of them turned out to be quite like influential, like thought leader type teachers.

And so by the end of that first week, we had fat something like 80 teachers using it every day, and we’re like, “This is amazing!” Over 280 was like just an unimaginable number for this in the summertime.

Why isn’t this was like that? Right at the end of the summer.

Okay, it’s like I think we’d go to the last week of July or first week of August.

So schools are not really in session for that. Well, you’ve got this is this one, the secret was like these teachers are already preparing for like what’s coming at the end of you, but it’s already trying things out.

They’re already like setting up classes and all that kind of stuff, so this was like kind of crazy. We’re like, “Wow! There’s people like virtually picking this thing up!” And then what happened was from then through Demo Day, which I think was like the end of August or September, early September.

Yes, is exactly a month—like four or five weeks or so, and it had gone from like 80 teachers to yes, an act like a few thousand people using it. And we’re like—like this is just blown our minds, right? We’re like this is kind of crazy that um, then it’s just Brennan.

And all of that was purely through the product. It was just like we had—we didn’t have a say through the product; it wasn’t like some clever viral flow or whatever. It was like one teacher using it or saying this will solve plumbing for me, and then spreading it to other teachers.

And so we’d find one teacher in school would pick it out, and then it would like travel through the whole school. And that happened a lot in the early days.

So that was kind of early stuff. It was kind of—we weren’t—we weren’t doing a huge amount on trying to drive growth, we were just like building a good product. But a little bit later, probably the biggest turning point—and it’s this thing that continues to this day—was we went to observe a teacher’s classroom at Bessie Carmichael Elementary here in the city, and her name is Jenna Klein.

And so, we went to sit in a classroom, and pretty awesome teacher—she’s a science teacher, I think. She’s a great classroom and whatever, and she’s using Dojo. And like if we thought nothing more of it, we had a bunch of research nerds went back to the product team is rubber two months later, I get an email from Jenna, and she was like, “Hey, I’m thinking of transitioning out of the classroom, and I’d love to come and do an internship with you guys. Would you be up for that?”

And, you know, we were like six people—everything there, like I don’t know what we’d do with an intern, and we’re like, “Yeah, sure, like, you know, we’ve probably got no like support or something that needs doing. Like, you can come and help out.”

And so, she joined for the summer, and she’s doing a bunch of like support stuff, and at the end of the summer, we’re like, “Well, I guess she’s going back to teaching now.” And she came to me and said, “Sam, I think we’re really missing a trick with community.”

And I was like, “What do you mean community?” I was like, “We’re building product; it’s right there.”

And then she was like, “No, no, no. I found this thing where like, you know, you’ll get one teacher in school who loves this, and then spreads it to other teachers, and it’s a real pattern, and here’s how.”

Like the growth rate of like she done basically the whole analysis of like how schools were—they were a with an influencer teacher whose friend—the word to grow faster than other schools, and she’s got these like—like she set up like a Facebook group for a bunch of these power—you she don’t do this like secret work basically in the summer on community stuff.

And I was like, “Yeah, I guess we could like—we can extend the internship for a few months.”

And just—yeah, I guess! But this was like one of the big secrets in the company was like teachers are like amongst the most underserved I think people in the world.

Like, if you think the average teacher, they get into this job, which is like, you know, pretty underpaid, well to most other jobs you could do, it’s like often underappreciated. It’s really tough, and you’re like on your feet with like 30 kids all day. Like, it’s a really tough job. And so if you can—if you turn up and you’re like, “Hey, we’re going to be the people who like really listen to you and help you change your classroom to be the one that you dreamed of rather than like think like you’ve got your hands tied the entire time.”

It turns out they tell people about that, and Jenna built this crazy—like, like, I shouldn’t say that, but it’s like a community of teachers who are just so enthusiastic about changing their classrooms and helping other teachers change their classrooms—making these connections among your—

Yeah, it’s going to say, yeah, you can you explain how that dynamic actually works, right?

So you say you’re looking for a teacher who will be an advocate in any particular school, right?

So how are you finding them, and then what happens from them?

Yeah, so usually they’ll find ClassDojo, and then we really support that mentor to spread the word and to bring all the teachers on—long if they think it’s good.

Like, we don’t want—we don’t want like a top-down implementation. We don’t want the principal to grab it and push it on there.

We want it to spread like in a grassroots way. And so Jenna built this whole community which is like supportive of each other and supportive like spreading the word, and that’s like a really—again, it’s a power—it’s a community with a purpose, which you class as a movement.

And that’s like a really powerful thing. And so I think the turning point versus Jenna, and like if strategy one was just like good product obsessively listening to people and and serving them.

Strategy two then was building a supportive community that is excited about like a different future for education. And I think that’s like a secret. The community stuff I don’t think many companies really understand well.

Hmm. Did Jenna stay with you?

Yeah, she’s still with us today.

Yeah, she’s awesome.

Good job, Jenna!

Yeah, that’s awesome!

So Jenna’s with you and you’re more than six people put it, ball team still?

It’s still a pretty small team and—and ClassDojo. So can you give us a sense of the reach, your reach now, in terms of the product?

Yeah, yeah. We usually talk about the percentage of schools that were in. So in the US, we’re in like 90 percent of K through eight schools in the country now.

There’s about a hundred thousand schools or so.

Okay, you’re in about a hundred thousand.

Oaks here and so there may be one teacher—maybe one; there’s more and more—it’s like whole schools, but it’s at least one being active.

Okay, and then this is actually the first year that we’re bigger internationally than in the US, so more schools outside the US now using—hem in the US.

So more than two hundred thousand schools using it then.

Okay, got it! And about half of those in the US.

So it’s so you’re you—you’ve used by all of these schools, and you guys have raised over thirty million dollars in funding, but you’re still a team of just thirty.

And well, it’s that unusual given that where you are, and was it a conscious decision to kind of keep the team at this size and run lean? Can you tell us about that thinking and and kind of how you make that work, if that’s unusual?

Yeah, I mean, judging by the way you’re asking, it sounds pretty unusual.

Absolutely, yeah. I think it’s like the average company would be much bigger, I think, that count.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s—so many something we’ve thought a lot about—it’s definitely intentional. There are a few things for me. One is that like I think it’s always surprising how much small teams can get done, and I think there’s actually like large diminishing returns like very, very large teams.

And so for Dojo—like we’ve kind of been informed by—there’s a great book called Team of Teams on this. I keep plugging this book everywhere, but I’m like, “Okay.”

But yeah, it’s—basically like how you create—I’m really interested in this as this area of personal interest is how you create high-performing teams.

And this book talks a lot about two concepts like empowered execution and shared context. And so I think the conventional way of—or a conventional way of building teams is that you hire like the VP who then like issues the instructions to the troops and the troops go and execute.

And I think in like fast-moving or uncertain environments, it’s far more interesting to have like a team of leaders who are capable of making decisions quickly and moving quickly.

So I think what we’ve done instead of building very large teams is build like—the 30 people are structured, and like even smaller teams, right?

Like we have prior development teams, which are anywhere between like three to ten people—a mix of engineers, PMs, designers, etc.

And so we—we try and have each of the teams having like a clear mission that they all believe in and and are empowered to execute on it. So they’ve got all the information they need. So internally in the company, everything is public.

Like we have board decks or public financials that are public. You have all the information to make like a globally optimal decision about what you should do next rather than just getting a sliver of information and having to to march forward on that.

And so I think that’s actually how you get them—like how you get the most from people is when people are like really bought in on a mission they believe in, and they feel like the owners of that mission.

And so I think we’ve obsessed a lot over building that kind of culture.

I don’t think we always get it right, but we’ve seen great returns to really obsessing of like the right kind of culture.

And so we could certainly do with many more people on the team.

Like I’m not saying that this is like, you know, this is where I’ll stay now. In fact, we’d like our first recruiter just joined last week, so I’ve done all the recruiting so far.

But, um, but I do think the small team thing is like really undervalued. I think even getting small high-performing teams working, you can scale those a lot.

And there’s actually something Amazon talked about a lot, but like the two pizza teams and things is if you can get small autonomous teams.

What is the two pizza—

Oh, like the whole team could be fed by two pizzas.

So life, yeah, okay.

I can eat two pizzas, so yeah.

That’s why I do all the podcasts on my own!

So what would you advise people who want to adopt that same strategy but they’re also used to doing all the stuff? They’re like, “I want to do all the recruiting because so far I’ve recruited thirty great people.”

Yeah!

And how do you like—how do you train yourself to let go?

Yeah, I think so specifically for me as CEO, I think it’s—there’s this great thing in Dalio’s book Principles of like what your job becomes.

And he’s got this diagram just based like goals, machine, results.

Okay? And the machine is just people in culture. And like, periodically, you kind of want to step back and think about like the design of the machine and like what your role is in the machine.

And then Ben Evans—actually, it’s a good post on this. It’s about Amazon; he calls it the machine that builds the machine!

Hmm. And I love that. But I think this is like an important thing to be able to get some distance and reflect on like what the right—the appropriate role for you in the company is.

I think actually Sam Altman said this, that you get to about 25 people and your job shifts from building the product to building the culture, and it kind of stays there.

And that’s—that’s so true, right? Like, my—the reason I’ve just replaced myself with an actual recruiter is that that’s not the right job for me anymore.

There are other parts of the culture that I need to focus on and build.

So I think to answer your question, I think it’s having retrospective loop on what your role as CEO is in but designing the whole machine and then your part in that machine.

Hmm, okay. What other books have been helpful for you in developing a leadership in you have product strategy?

Oh, there’s a lot. There’s—we have—we have pretty obsessive reading culture, and every month, like most people like do I think an hour or so of reading a day at least.

But, yeah, it’s—it’s quite good. But um, there’s been a few. So, total bad, team of teams. There’s extreme ownership is another good one.

There’s kind of like that convention, like the zero to one and if this startup people, this sort of—he kind of, yes, yeah, I’m trying to pull up my Kindle and think of what some of the unusual ones are, but I really love Principles when you write it a while ago.

Yeah, it’s only a little bit of extreme, but I think it’s quite good.

Hmm. There’s one called The Evolution of Everything, which like—the main message from it was I think it’s very easy to believe the world is like designed in some way, and embracing like emergence in the company for like—for instance, the growth mindset videos I spoke about, like that was an emergent idea.

That wasn’t CEO said we have to do growth mindset videos. That was like one of our product development teams came up with this insight, and now that’s like a major part of what we do at Dojo.

And so that—the embracing the idea of emergence is a really, really important.

And do you draw inspiration from books that aren’t about business?

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot. There’s one I’m really motor called The Diamond Age, which seems—there seems quite good.

Okay, yeah, I’m quite ready on it.

But um, I’m the ones that are coming to mind for me now with all the ones I’ve read recently.

Yeah, Karen!

Okay, what was Sam like in the early—what do you remember about him in the early days of American K12?

Sure, yeah, because we met when you moved to America to build this startup, but you didn’t know what this startup was yet.

It’s just valuable because so many people like listening to podcasts or watch videos—even like the authors you’re talking about, right? “Oh, this is Jocko’s book, he’s so hard! What’s the workout plan?”

Yeah! Just some guy!

Like, they’re just—he was an eighteen-year-old at some point, and the same is true for all of us, right?

So I think that perspective is would be interesting if you remember it early.

There’s a Sam I remember. I mean, you’re very easy to talk. Sam is very easy to talk to, and so that kind of stands out.

And I think was probably part of what made that early learning from customers so well. But yeah, I remember, you know, those early months, it seemed like a very stressful time because you didn’t know exactly what demo day was coming.

The product didn’t exist yet; the idea was taking form. But Sam and Liam would just kind of show up and be like, “Yeah, we’re working, we’re getting all this, you know, we’re talking with all these people and we’re kind of wondering what’s gonna come in this.”

What’s gonna come with this bed? And Mr. King, Plasto, and I have this vivid memory of Sam, you’re talking about your frugal British nature.

Sam would wear glasses—the glasses still holding them to his face because that was missing.

And is there a word for that? Like the love of like patching things together in the UK?

We can see it with houses too.

Yeah, you know, there’s like the idea of like the crazy British inventor.

Yeah, there’s—I think like the—one person to shadow ever, I think that’s actually Liam, that’s not me. But like—that’s—I think there should be a word for it.

Yeah!

It was just dangling, still seemed to serve their purpose!

Yeah, that you don’t need to really—it’s really proud!

And what has changed since you guys to just start? Like I’m sure you had it to some degree of vision, right, in the beginning and what you thought the product would be—what changed? What were some big realizations?

Oh man, yeah! That’s a big question!

What has been amazing is like the core thesis that I said at the start that like I actually think education is made by people, not by technology.

And the role technology is in service of people supporting them—that thesis hasn’t changed!

Like from those early conversations, it became pretty clear that like the best way we could have impact was by serving teachers, helping them like connect with the kids and parents, and then helping them improve their classrooms.

And that would be a way to both have impact and to scale.

Hmm! But like the product, I think the thing that’s changed the most is like the actual products that we’ve built.

So ClassDojo has never been like a one product company. I think like the first prom we ever worked on was helping teachers build a better classroom culture, and that was just—it was just a product for teachers to use inside the classroom.

Later on, it became far more important for us to share beyond the classroom to include the whole community—families, also other teachers and the principal in the school.

And so it became much more of a network product than just like a single-player kind of thing.

And then the thing that changed after that was that network could then be used to share more and more ideas, right?

And so that was probably the latest evolution, so it’s kind of like that the product I think has changed a lot.

Yeah, I think the thesis with a company has stayed largely the same.

Okay, and was there—were there learnings that maybe are counterintuitive that are maybe I guess it could be for EdTech specifically or just a startup in general?

I’m always curious to see what people pick up along the way that they didn’t expect at all in the beginning that you thought you would advise other founders to keep.

I actually wrote some of these down, I mean just know what holds up.

Yeah, I thought about this once I saw it, yeah.

I think like—what one of the ones for me is this thing of—we talked about it a bit, but like the small teams thing because the whole way we’ve always been pushed by investors to like just—you’ve got to like hire more people and grow faster and whatever.

And even me think about this a bit from—from the realities of the education world, like you work in school years, so there’s no point you being alive for like three out of the twelve months of the school year.

You better be around in twelve month like chunks, and so I know that’s counterintuitive, but it’s not obvious from the outside. You’d be like, “Well, we should just hire people in like January, and then, you know.”

It’s cool, but if that means you run out of money in June, then you don’t get another school year.

Yeah, so that was good! And I think like it’s been surprising—it’s always surprised to me how much small teams can do.

So that was a big one for me!

Another one for me was like—the emergence thing.

I think there’s a narrative in Silicon Valley that like you know some some kind of far forward-looking visionary will come down from the mountain with the plan and then give it to the troops and like the troops will just go and execute it.

And it may be true, right? Like there may be people who are just that brilliant like that. That’s—I think that is the case in a few instances, but for us, I think we’ve gone a great—we’ve got a lot of mileage out of just embracing the idea of like your job isn’t to like minimize the chaos.

Hmm! But it’s like him, empower people to think big and to be bold about the things that they might do.

And the only way you can really do that is one by making the company a psychologically safe place, and the team is a psychologically safe place.

Like if you’re always being judged on like success and failure at every moment, it’s really tough for people to think big.

How do you do that?

I mean, I guess if that’s an issue everywhere!

Yeah, so—one actually interesting thing we did recently, it wasn’t so much for products, but it was across the whole organization, was we started a running log of all issues in the company.

Okay? So this is really weird, right? And it’s internally public for everyone to see, and anyone can add to it.

You can add anonymously, you can add like with your name on it, and so it’ll be everything from like, “Hey, like the priorities aren’t clear,” to “Hey, like we’re really like creating too much trash—what happened with that, you know, that X project that we never heard about?”

Yeah. And so the idea is that like you—I think we really value building a culture where you can be like real with each other.

Hmm! And it’s never in like a hard or arrogant— it’s actually like the most empathic way that like we all think this mission is like really, really important.

It’s very important that like every kin in the world gets a better education in a reasonable period of time, and so we’re all here to do that.

And so any issue that’s standing in the way of doing that, like it’s far better to like drag it out into the light where it’s resolved than to like have it fester quietly.

And so I think that like building the kind of company that like quickly surfaces and resolves issues whereas letting them fester is really important.

So Mike, like for that one practice, it’s—it’s recent, but you know, we review that log every week.

The guarantee is that there’ll always be action taken on it.

Like we’ll prioritize and we’ll take action, but you can redo an Asana and you can like follow along.

So if you submit an issue, you know it’s going to get worked on. The idea isn’t a new one; it actually came from this plant called the New Me plant, which was the partnership between Toyota and GM and went from one of the worst car production factories in Fremont to one of the best in the world, and it did it by like really empowering the people doing the work.

And they would guarantee that any suggestion you put in the suggestion box would be acted on straight away, and if and if it couldn’t be at one for summaries, they would publicly announce within a week why it can be acted on.

And so it’s like you imagine what you imagine a factory looks like; it’s not—it’s not that.

It’s like you just do your little slice of the assembly line and move on any of it. But I think I was really counting to do that.

Like that—the standard narratives about what what great companies and great leaders do, which is you know, set the vision and tell people what to do, it’s like, we’re so far off for us.

And there’s strong parallels with classrooms.

I don’t think—I think great teachers don’t tell the kids what to do!

Yeah! You know, and so it’s a nice like golden thread from inside the company to out of it.

That’s a great insight!

I used to work at The Onion, and when everyone—it's something that’s not necessarily obvious, but The Onion doesn’t have bylines, and that anonymity is amazing for creativity.

Wow!

Yeah, because it’s so easier—I don’t know if this is like a little racy or this is like super weird, like I don’t know if I want my name behind this headline, right?

It doesn’t matter!

It’s all by The Onion or if I made up people, right?

It’s like—yeah!

Yeah, that’s true!

It was so handy!

And so, yeah, to your point, like I think if people could submit, you know, issues anonymously, but also see it tracked?

Yeah!

Super helpful!

Especially in a place like YC! Same thing!

Yeah, like we could do a better job!

Yeah!

So your product serves a—it’s, in a sense, it— in a sensitive space. You have sensitive audiences, right? You’re used in schools by teachers teaching young children, and everyone’s very interested in knowing what young children are touching and what kind of lessons they’re receiving.

And a few years ago, you had—you went through some kind of court of public opinion trials.

So I want you to share about that because I think you know, every company has to worry about how they’re perceived and how—and that court of public opinion, but it’s really amplified when you’re dealing with an audience that includes—when you’re serving customers that include young children.

Yeah!

So I want to see if you could share, you know, a little bit about that story and what you learned from it, the kind of as a company in terms of how you manage that side of what you—

Yeah, totally! Happy to share!

So you think like this is actually—I think in Magical K12 had an amazing role of plan this, no, no, not a bad way!

Like so, like five or six years ago, I think we—there was a new cohort of like EdTech companies that just like you launch into the world, and it was a really like uncertain world for like all of us.

I mean, you know, you guys were also building Imagine K12, and there were lots of learnings there. There were lots of learnings for us.

So we did the conventional thing which was like, build a product that people love, get out lots of people, focus on that, focus—and I think that—and all of us do it because that was—that was what we were as the—the conventional wisdom of the valley at the time.

And I think it was like a few years in, I forget exactly what year it was, but there was really like this sudden like, “Oh my god, like there’s all this technology in classrooms now! Where is it going? Is it good? Is it bad? What is it, you know, et cetera, et cetera?”

Like lots and lots of debate discussion about it. And it really like dragged a few things out to light for me, right?

Because like the naive way to build products is like we’ll just build a great product, and everything else will take care of itself.

And you gross often hear that would like founders who don’t want to do sales, for instance, right? But this one wasn’t sales of all, it was actually like clear communication.

And so as a company, which like—you know, we’re a lot of introverts in the company, and I used to be very extroverted, but more commonly over time like—you kind of forget that like that’s actually like really, really important!

Like it’s important to do it—you saying so what you do and to be clear in your communication!

And so you’d had like a few years ago you had, you know, a bunch of young startups who had suddenly got to scale, or some scale interesting enough scale.

There it was—it was relevant who had like boilerplate like terms and conditions or privacy policies or hadn’t updated the website and were guilty of all of these—I hadn’t updated the website to like to actually describe what you do or had cater to one audience like teachers but not to like districts.

And so like I think the thing that—and we actually know the—the finger was—they could start to solve in the areas—what was the criticism that you guys were dealing with?

The prison like—

Yeah, there are lots of criticisms for I think—not just for us, the whole industry.

But for us, it was like, “Well, like what happens with like kids’ information?”

Right? Like because the only parallel people have—and there’s actually two points where one is communication, the other is like like what’s your business model, right?

And so the first one in communication is important for everyone.

The second one, if you go back a few years now, the main example people had was like a business on the internet was like Facebook or Google.

Like these, like the companies that often get held up, right? And they’re like, “Oh! Like those companies like literally take users information, you give it to advertisers!”

And so when companies like are working in classrooms, I don’t think that’s acceptable at all.

Like that would be a really bad way to build and fund an education technology company.

And so the answer—the insistence in the first it’s important to be clear and crisp in your communication.

And I think many of us weren’t there like we—you know, I know a few of us at least rewrote all of our policies in like sixth grade language or sixth grade level English just so that anyone can understand, right?

Because they have Charlie terms of therapy, yeah, because legal—legal jargon is legal jargon, and it’s—sykes confusing and weird for everyone, right?

But if you write it like what does this mean?

That goes a long way!

Also being clear like, “Hey, this isn’t an advertising like company! Your data’s not going anywhere, it’s yours! You can delete it, you can change it! Like if you don’t delete it, we’ll delete it after like X years of inactivity or something!”

Right?

So because we don’t need it like it’s yours—like it doesn’t—we don’t need it to sell to ads, sell ads against!

And so then the second thing was like making sure your incentives are aligned with your users.

And so for us, like actually, the best business model in the world is also the oldest one in the world, which is like, “Hey, we’ll make some stuff for you, and if you really like it, you can buy some of it!”

You know, like asides, right? For like—that’s all we’re saying: well, like we’ll make a bunch of stuff for teachers and for—and for parents.

And we’re particularly interested for parents where like, well, most parents don’t really have very good choices.

Like most parents in the world, you have the choice of if you want to do something good for your kids’ education.

If you’re in the top 10 percent of the population, you can send them to private school for paying thirty thousand dollars a year.

But if you’re not, like what do you do?

And we’re like, “Well, if we could give you a better choice to make there which also affordable, etc., we could give you—we quote the education bundle for your kids—would that be interesting?”

And parents are like, “Yeah, that would be really interesting.”

And so I think just being clear about these things is something that we weren’t guilty of because we’re so had—we’re guilty off because we’re so heads down like just building products, because you know, make something people want, right?

Sure! And you know your intentions but hey!

And what I think is one of those things of like leveling up as a company where you realize like the scope of your responsibilities extends beyond like your own user base and beyond like your team and beyond—it’s people in classrooms who we are obsessed with and love extends to people who have never touched your product or used it, and they need to know too!

And that was like a whole different thing! We hired a head of comms to—

Yeah? And she’s still with us, and she’s amazing!

But that really like built a new function at the company, right, that we didn’t have!

As you expand internationally, as you said, you’re now used in more schools internationally than in the US.

As that is, is that kind of changing the communication needs?

I mean, you—there are different kind of privacy regimes.

And yeah, you—and so forth.

It’s—yeah! What do you think?

Yeah, I mean the short answer is yes!

Why do you do the right thing for every jurisdiction you operate in?

Anything kind of interesting or counterintuitive coming out of that?

Or it’s pretty straightforward.

You just kind of—a fine fine?

I mean, it’s pretty straightforward. The rules are all different, but they’re all in the same spirit, right?

Like, but in terms of communicating with hearing communities so that you know, or maybe—I don’t know, maybe penetration in those different countries that isn’t at the level where you’re getting that scrutiny kind of in the press and so on.

Well, maybe it’s— I don’t know!

Yeah, no, I mean like I said, I’m a majority international now.

So I mean, the growth is good, but I think like the EU is like kind of famous for, you know, being very buttoned up on privacy!

So there’s well, you know, a while ago there was like I’ve got it schooled mapped—it was like the Safe Harbor thing, and then there was the Privacy Shield, and so—so you just kind of have—we have like people in the company who like full-time is their top of that stuff, which you don’t have to think about when you’re with 80 teachers.

So I think it says like as the company grows, you have like more of these considerations to take into account when you’re building products.

I got products or go to then, we have like counsel who like looks to make sure they’re compliant with the different—but it’s managing the public conversation about you.

I have anything an interesting come up there that—no, not non-obvious thing that comes to mind, me—I’m racking my brains to think of one, but that’s good!

Yeah! No, no, no, this one—I mean, like I think in general just like being clearer in communication in all of our products like helps everyone, right?

It’s not like so scoped to jurisdiction.

If I give every parent is that—oh cool! Like I get to, you know, share in my kid’s school day now! Wonderful!

And the classroom’s getting better! Awesome!

You know, but we never say those things before!

It’s—you mentioned charging parents earlier for certain things! What does monetization look like for you guys in the future?

Yeah, I think we’ve always had this is one of the things that hasn’t changed in the start actually.

Yeah, we’ve had the same view on it that so a few principles: Like we—we really do want to reach like every classroom in the world!

Like it’ll be really good if like it’s—one that one that floors with the current education system is that I’ve already talked about wonders is that like there’s often stagnation; you can’t get new ideas.

And we meant it quickly; it’s all like what would you call them like type one decisions?

Whether they’re like big heavy weights, it’s kind of like do we do this or not, and if you can make it like a type two decision, make it really easy to try and reverse. Like wonderful!

I mean that—that’s where more innovation happens! But a second flaw in it is the inequality!

You know, people will talk about how education in the U.S. is broken!

Like it’s not actually for a few people! It’s really good for a few people!

And for most people, like the difference being the luckiest and the average is like large!

And so for me like that, if you’re working in education, there is almost like an imperative to work on the equity part of it!

And so we don’t want to do anything that’s that prohibits us or like gets in the way of that equity argument!

So we do want to get to every classroom in the world!

And on the other side, I think like the business models education have mostly been about selling to schools and districts!

And this is like slow! It takes a while—like, you know, it would get in the way of that!

But there’s a really interesting observation we had! I think I’ve already alluded to that like parents—like everywhere in the world for the most part really care about their kids!

Yep!

That’s something we’ve done in a long time, right?

For like—it’s like an evolutionary thing!

On this one, just a job! It’s just like we’re wired to you have to keep it alive!

Yeah, it’s a tiny person that depends on you!

And so we’re like, “Well, these are also people who are like really underserved!” In my view, I’m like—like I said, you have fairly limited choices!

You hope the school near you is really good and that the specific teacher whose classroom you go to is like that’s a really good teacher!

And maybe if you can afford it, you like move houses or move jobs or whatever to get to a better school!

But like, you know, for most of us, population, that’s pretty unreasonable!

Maybe you can go to a private school if you can pay the fees, but like again, pretty unreasonable, pretty out of reach!

And I’m like, “Well, if we could just create value for parents enough value that like there’s something that they want to pay for?”

Yeah!

That could be interesting!

And if it could be like relatively affordable and you know, the order of ten bucks, let’s say, sure! Like a month!

Like that’ll be amazing!

And so that’s kind of the general direction we’ve gone in!

We’ve—and that’s been the same direction that we’ve proceeded from the stop!

Mm-hmm!

So, yeah, another common question that comes in over the board a lot at YC is how is EdTech different than traditional or whatever startups, tech startups?

And actually probably both of you guys could answer this one!

Yeah, well, there’s like the obvious differences! I think that we’ve spoken about around like, “Hey, how distribution is different?”

And like those, kunia things around privacy and security! You need to be buttoned up on!

And how it’s not quite consumer or not quite enterprise amid, but I think the non-obvious one for me is, is how education isn’t—it’s not a tech product!

It’s—it’s really like pickup!

Like, unlike other industries, I think education is really just what happens between a teacher and a learner!

And so it’s really like a very human creation! And so the role of technology is—is really like to support that, not to like replace it!

And the knowledge I was use of the team is like if you—and I think this—this is very important because like the analogy I use for the team is the difference in a technical system and a human system.

And if you’re making like one perfect technical system, like Mike, a MacBook or a Tesla, let’s say, probably the right strategy is to have like a perfect design for it and then just like sell it to as many people as can afford it and hope it gets cheaper over time!

Like it’s like design first and then give it—then sell to people!

But—but I think if you’re working with a human system like a team or a classroom, you mean like it’s actually a really bad strategy to like design something and then just like impose it on people.

I think you actually follow the opposite order where you get to people and you help them design the changes they want to make in their sin—they’re like they leave their human systems!

And I think that’s like a non-obvious but really important mental model difference!

Hmm! Would you agree?

I haven’t thought about it in those terms!

But like you said, this is human system in—you need to be worried about— not worried about!

But conscious of the fact that it’s going to have—it’s not going to be consistent across every implementation!

Because you have humans evolved!

I would also say EdTech is a, you know, has a very compelling double bottom line!

You know, companies can get into this because they can—they can build interesting businesses, but they can also have a big impact on this equity problem!

That’s—that’s very interesting and—and compelling to work on!

It’s also—it’s also right before lots of solutions come in and make things more efficient!

I think if we look at kind of the administrative level in education systems in K-12, especially in districts, they haven’t been well served by enterprise products that are, you know, they try to adapt into the education system!

Or by a lot of the legacy education products!

So we see a lot of great companies being built around not being so focused on the classroom, but in this back office!

How do we do these things efficiently that we’ve figured out how to do well in price settings?

But—but something needs to be a little bit different in a school setting!

And so there’s just a lot of room to build interesting companies in this space still!

So it’s an exciting place to be working in!

Yeah, that’s great!

Yeah! Alright, well, thanks for coming in, Sam!

Cheers!

Thank you!

Good to see ya!

Take care!