Sam Chaudhary
Co-founder & CEO, ClassDojo. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutive@samchaudhary ↗LinkedIn ↗classdojo.com ↗
Sam Chaudhary is the co-founder and CEO of ClassDojo, an education technology platform launched in 2011 connecting teachers, students, and families. Prior to founding ClassDojo, he taught high school economics and worked in McKinsey & Company's global education practice in London.
2shows
2appearances
42statements
10resolved
8supported
0contradicted
80%fully supported
Everything Sam Chaudhary said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Chaudhary: Apparent lack of market is often a packaging problem
“It could be that what everyone is pointing to is like a lack of a market is actually just a product and packaging problem.”
Sparks AI teaches kids early literacy in months without human intervention
“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.”
ClassDojo mandates that over half its workforce must be former founders
“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.”
Transforming an industry means serving consumers, not incumbent suppliers
“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 US schools is like selling to 130K low-budget bureaucracies
“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.”
Series A investor rejected co-CEO structure to have someone to fire
“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…”
ClassDojo has never spent a single dollar on paid user acquisition
“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.”
ClassDojo retained users at 6x the rate of typical consumer apps
“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.”
ClassDojo raised a Series C at year seven with zero revenue
“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.”
Two-thirds of ClassDojo Tutor customers had never hired a private tutor
“But the thing that really blew me away was something like two out of three families paying for that had never paid for a tutor before in their lives.”
Companies decay when they tolerate errors of inaction while punishing initiative
“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.”
Chaudhary: ClassDojo monetizes via $10/month parent subscriptions, not school districts
“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…”
Chaudhary: Most EdTech companies remain small and fail to scale
“Most education companies basically just like remain small businesses. Yeah. They never reach billions of people. They never reach tens of billions in revenue. They never reach hundreds of billions in market cap.”
Chaudhary: Market risk is the most exciting startup risk
“It's actually the most exciting form of risk where there's one or two assumptions that if you are wrong about, or if you're right about as an entrepreneur, you suddenly unlock an enormous market that no one knew was there.”
ClassDojo is currently used in 90% of US schools
“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.”
Chaudhary: Consumer apps should avoid tight specifications to allow emergent behavior
“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.”
ClassDojo PLUS generated single-digit millions in its first year
“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.”
Chaudhary: Millions of tutoring sessions have occurred on ClassDojo
“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.”
Chaudhary: ClassDojo chooses candor over harmony when facing cultural trade-offs
“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.”
Chaudhary: Choosing depth over product breadth was right for seven years
“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.”
Chaudhary: Peer tutoring is among the most effective low-cost educational interventions
“It's also one of the most effective things you can do. It's like, you know, the high cost sorry, low cost, high quality interventions is peer tutoring.”
Chaudhary: ClassDojo does not pay for user acquisition
“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.”
Chaudhary: ClassDojo is in 90% of US K-8 schools
“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.”
Chaudhary: ClassDojo shares board decks and financials with all employees
“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…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Sam's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 IN DEPTHLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, ClassDojo | 1 | 24 | 83% 5/6 | full record on In Depth → |
 Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, ClassDojo | 1 | 18 | 75% 3/4 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |