The Ledger, every show

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I think the number that's quoted usually is like three percent ish of GDP, but 70% of that is on salaries and benefits and people, right? And then there's a good chunk that goes into facilities and buildings. And so by the time you get to like, what could you …”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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?”

“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?”