ClassDojo

“If you're building Airbnb and you want to transform hospitality, you don't start by selling software to hotels that might make hotels a little bit better, a little bit more efficient, whatever. But it doesn't massively transform the experience for the end user…”

“Selling to schools, it's a bit like selling to in the U S like a 130,000 pretty bureaucratic, very small businesses with not much budget.”

“I remember in our series A, We had like an org chart because that seemed important to put in the deck when we turned up and we had like co-CEO on there for me and him. And one of the investors like this, what is this? Like, what is this nonsense? I need someon…”

“And then we turned up at demo day and we had this like crazy looking hockey stick job. We'd gone from zero to like, I think it was like, 10,000 teachers using it out of the gate.”

“The median experience of a parent is I don't know what's happening at school. I'd maybe go to a parent teacher conference once every six months. And sometimes I get a piece of paper home in a backpack.”

“To this day, we still haven't paid a dollar for user acquisition. So a hundred percent of our growth has been some combination of word of mouth, virality you know, some community stuff, like basically zero marginal cost programs.”

“If you look now, Dojo's used in nine out of 10 schools in the country, and maybe two or three times as many as that internationally.”

“In the consumer side of things, we're very careful not to overbuild and really tightly specify how you must use this product. We actually kept it kind of open to see what would emerge.”

“Once we hit a certain level of scale, like in the US, you know, something like one in four, one in five families in America use Dogen every week.”

“You see companies with consumer apps usually have five to 15% retention to 30 days later or something. And we were at like six X that like six months later, you know, and it was wild.”

“We got to seven years in, and we were 30 people, and we'd done the Series C at 30 people, right with zero dollars of revenue.”

“Year one was like single digit millions. Yeah. Yeah. It was 2020. But that's, that just scaled very quickly, like a growing percentage of our base was like, actually, I want this.”

“So they joined Dojo, rebuilt the product on Dojo and it's just exploded. You know, it's like millions of tutoring sessions happening on Dojo.”

“He'd helped build one of the world's biggest games for kids back in the day called RuneScape.”

“We can take a kid from not knowing how to read to early literacy in like three or four months in about 15 minutes a day with no humans involved. That's never been possible before.”

“We have a value in the company we call candor over harmony. It's not that we don't like harmony, but it's like, if we have to pick as a trade-off, we'll pick candor.”

“There's always the choice to go deep or do you go broad. And it's basically almost always been right for us to go deep. And that's all we did for the first six or seven years until we found some like kernel of delight.”

“One of the pernicious things that companies get into is they start to tolerate errors of inaction. They're like, well, I didn't do anything, so I can't be wrong. And they start to punish errors of initiative and boldness.”

“We basically just had the mandate. We're like, look, we're like more than half the company is going to be founders. I think it was more than two thirds at some point, but it's like, I'm one half is going to be founders or founding team members.”

“They have, like, super high retention, amazing revenue already in six months you know, doing multiple millions of dollars a year in revenue with zero dollars in paid marketing, and what seems like the perfect team, it's the guy who created the school at Elon's…”

“Two days in PG is like, okay, I'm in and like, whatever, I'll write you guys a check and just come around and pick it up. And we're like, So we basically spammed PG for the best part of a week after already having a lot of funding. And then, yeah, then Liam bi…”

“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, I think those videos have reached about, like, fifteen million kids now in classrooms.”

“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 yet.”

“So, I spoke to, I think, three or 400 people on Skype calls, face to face in those seven weeks, and emailed a few thousand more.”

“We're 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.”

“Yeah, so it was, like, roughly a month, like, four or five weeks or so, and it had gone from, like, 80 teachers, like, something, like, a few thousand people using it, and we were, like, this has just blown our minds, right?”

“It's still primarily organic, and we still don't pay for user acquisition, so so it's all, like, word of mouth, but once it gets to a school, then we really support that mentor to spread the word and to bring other teachers along, if they think it's good.”

“So in the US we're in like, 90% of K through eight schools in the country now. Okay. Which is about a 100,000 schools or so.”

“And then this is actually the first year that we're bigger internationally than in the US. So we've got more schools outside”

“So internally in the company, everything is public. Like we board decks are public, financials are public. You have all the information to make like a globally optimal decision about what you should do next, rather than like just getting a sliver of informatio…”

“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 so true, right?”

“We have a pretty obsessive reading culture at Dojo. We have a book club every month, and like, most people like do, I think an hour or so of reading a day at least”

“And so when companies like are working in classrooms, I don't think that's acceptable at all. Like that's not like, that would be a really bad way to build and fund an education technology company.”

“Like we, you know, I know a few of us at least wrote our, rewrote all of our policies in like sixth grade language, or sixth grade level English, just so that anyone could understand them, right?”

“It's one of the flaws with the current education system is that, I've already talked about one, which is that, like, there's often stagnation. You can't get new ideas implemented quickly. It's all like what would you call them? Like, type one decisions, right?…”

“If we could just create value for parents, enough value that, like, there's something that they want to pay for. That could be interesting, and if it could be, like, relatively affordable on, you know, the order of 10 bucks, let's say. Like, a month, like, tha…”