Sep 3, 2025 · 1h 12m · in-depth
Starting an education giant in a “bad market” | ClassDojo’s story | Sam Chaudhary (Co-founder & CEO)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
ClassDojo co-founder and CEO Sam Chaudhary breaks down how the company transformed the difficult EdTech sector by prioritizing a consumer-first network model, achieving massive zero-dollar viral growth, and evolving from a classroom behavior tool into a multi-product platform with tutoring and AI learning.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Brett holds 8.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Brett as informed peer 4.3 Guest teaching 5.5 Guest disagreement 0.5 Brett pushing back 1.6
speaking balance: gold is Brett, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 31:35 Pushing back on demo day donut banter
Sam playfully rejects Brett's suggestion that bringing donuts to Demo Day signaled low confidence, framing it strictly as a deliberate strategy to pull investor attention to their traction.
Hardest push from Brett ▶ 48:05 Challenging the value alignment of PLUSBrett directly challenges Sam on how simple features like photo albums and stickers mapped to the ambitious claim of being the best hundred dollars a parent could spend on education.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 5:19 Deconstructing edtech's structural enterprise trapSam provides a masterclass on why edtech companies fail in B2B school sales, citing that 70% of budgets are locked into staff salaries while the remaining discretionary funds carry heavy procurement friction.
Brett holds their own ▶ 1:06:55 Defining the true test of organizational valuesBrett articulates a sharp organizational insight that a value is only meaningful if both trade-off sides are positive, rejecting false dichotomies like integrity versus lying.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Brett as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Brett pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Choosing a Consumer Focus Over Enterprise School Sales | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Brett probes why edtech is historically considered a terrible market despite massive top-line government spend. Sam breaks down the structural incentives, noting 70% goes to salaries and the misalignment between selling to districts versus serving kids directly. | |
| Reframing Education Market Size Through First Principles | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Brett asks about market sizing during early ideation. Sam counters conventional TAM analysis using Spotify's CD sales analogy to demonstrate how first-principles thinking unlocks latent consumer demand in education. | |
| Sam Chaudhary's Early Background and Finding a Co-Founder | 3 | 4 | 0 | 1 | Brett guides Sam through his unconventional background moving from Wales to Abu Dhabi, consulting at McKinsey, and meeting Liam at a London hack weekend. | |
| Establishing Co-Founder Alignment and Shared Vision | 4 | 4 | 0 | 1 | Brett inquires about co-founder alignment and whether early compatibility was based on similarity or difference. Sam describes writing down their ambitions on index cards within 90 days of arriving in the US. | |
| Pivoting to Classroom Management and Positive Reinforcement | 4 | 7 | 1 | 2 | Sam explains how advice from Reid Hoffman on networks shifted their strategy to focus entirely on teachers as the gateway. He details interviewing hundreds of teachers to uncover that emotional burnout stemmed from classroom management rather than grading. | |
| Viral Classroom Adoption and Demo Day Success | 5 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Brett playfully challenges Sam on whether having donuts at Demo Day reflected low confidence in the business. Sam defends the growth trajectory, emphasizing that 10,000 teachers adopted the product organically before Demo Day. | |
| Transforming into a Full Parent-Teacher Communication Platform | 4 | 6 | 0 | 1 | Sam recounts discovering teachers printing behavior snapshots to send home to parents, leading to the insight that ClassDojo was fundamentally a communication network rather than a classroom tool. | |
| Zero-Dollar Customer Acquisition and Teacher Communities | 4 | 6 | 0 | 1 | Brett asks how ClassDojo maintained rapid growth without spending money on marketing. Sam explains teacher champion communities and leveraging mandatory professional development days with turnkey presentation decks. | |
| Navigating the Pre-Monetization Years Under Extreme Pressure | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Brett presses on how the founders maintained the resolve to reach Series C with 30 employees and zero dollars in revenue. Sam recounts the extreme psychological pressure of burning runway while holding fast to the network-first thesis. | |
| Launching ClassDojo PLUS and Initial Monetization | 5 | 5 | 1 | 3 | Brett pushes back on whether early PLUS features like photo memories matched the grand vision of being the best $100 spent on education. Sam concedes it started as a premium tier but served as an essential stepping stone. | |
| Scaling the ClassDojo Tutor Marketplace | 4 | 6 | 0 | 2 | Sam explains how ClassDojo pivoted away from providing tutoring directly to building a marketplace run by former startup founders, unlocking latent demand from parents who had never hired tutors. | |
| Expanding into Dojo Islands and Sparks AI Literacy Tutor | 4 | 6 | 0 | 1 | Sam details launching Dojo Islands to create a safe, closed virtual world for kids, followed by Sparks, an AI phonics tutor that achieves early literacy in 15 minutes a day without adult intervention. | |
| Cultivating Founder Density and an Action-Oriented Culture | 4 | 5 | 0 | 1 | Brett asks how ClassDojo scales multi-product initiatives. Sam outlines their hiring mandate where over half the team consists of former founders, fostering autonomy and zero-to-one velocity. | |
| Strategic Heuristics and Trade-Off-Based Company Values | 5 | 5 | 0 | 2 | Brett probes the risk of internal friction with high founder density. Sam discusses framing company values strictly as trade-offs (e.g., candor over harmony) and closing reflections on co-founder equanimity. |
Statements from this episode (24)
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.”
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.”
Chaudhary: 70% of education spending goes to personnel, leaving little for tech
“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 …”
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.”
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.”
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 reached roughly 10,000 active teachers by YC Demo Day
“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 parent receives meaningful school updates only twice a year
“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.”
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 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.”
One in five US families uses ClassDojo on a weekly basis
“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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
ClassDojo co-founder Liam Don helped build the iconic game RuneScape
“He'd helped build one of the world's biggest games for kids back in the day called RuneScape.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”