ClassDojo

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”