- The speaker shares a story about how they convinced Paul Graham of Y Combinator to invest in their company, ClassDojo.
- They used donuts as a way to attract people to their presentation at Demo Day, and Paul Graham showed interest in their metrics.
- After multiple emails, Paul Graham agreed to invest in their company.
- ClassDojo aims to bridge the gap between school and home and help teachers try new ideas in their classrooms.
- The product allows teachers to share pictures and videos with parents and provides resources for teaching social and emotional skills, such as the growth mindset.

- ClassDojo introduced a growth mindset feature to teachers, reaching about 15 million kids in classrooms.
- They followed up with Harvard on empathy and Yale on mindfulness, with more collaborations to come.
- The company aims to help teachers bring new ideas to their classrooms and move education forward.
- Success is measured by the usage of the app and videos, while the long-term impact on mindset change takes time to measure.
- The company prioritizes empathy and understanding the needs of their users, which they achieved through extensive research and direct interactions with teachers.
- The early days of growth were driven by the founders' passion for education and their efforts to understand and address the problems faced by teachers.
- ClassDojo continues to prioritize user feedback and research in order to build the right solutions and solve the right problems.

- The founders of ClassDojo experienced early growth through word-of-mouth and organic spread among teachers
- They focused on building a good product and serving teachers' needs
- The company realized the importance of community and built a supportive network of teachers called the Mentor Community
- Jenna, a teacher who used ClassDojo, played a crucial role in building this community and is still with the company
- ClassDojo is now used in about 100,000 schools in the US and more than 200,000 schools internationally
- The team at ClassDojo is small, with only 30 members, but they have raised over $30 million in funding

- The company believes in the power of small, high-performing teams rather than large teams.
- Each team has a clear mission and is empowered to execute it.
- The company values a culture of shared information and decision-making.
- The CEO's role shifts from building the product to building the culture as the company grows.
- The company has a strong reading culture and draws inspiration from various books.
- The core thesis of the company, that education is made by people and technology supports them, has remained the same.
- The product has evolved to become more networked and focused on sharing ideas.
- The CEO advises founders to reflect on their role and the design of the company as it grows.

- The speaker discusses two important lessons they learned as a founder.
- The first lesson is about the value of small teams and the importance of managing finances in line with the school year schedule.
- The second lesson is about the importance of empowering employees to think big and create a psychologically safe environment for them to do so.
- The speaker also shares a practice they implemented in their company, which involves creating a running log of all issues and ensuring action is taken on them.
- The speaker then discusses the challenges they faced in the education technology industry and the importance of clear communication and aligning incentives with users.

- The company focuses on aligning its incentives with its users, particularly parents who have limited choices for their children's education.
- The company has hired a head of communications to manage public conversations and ensure compliance with different privacy regimes, especially in the EU.
- The company aims to reach every classroom in the world and prioritize equity in education.
- Monetization is focused on creating value for parents and offering affordable options.
- Education technology (ed tech) differs from traditional tech start-ups in terms of distribution, privacy and security concerns, and the human nature of education.
- Ed tech companies have the opportunity to have a big impact on equity in education and improve efficiency in administrative processes.

- ClassDojo, a company aiming to bridge the gap between school and home, convinced Paul Graham of Y Combinator to invest in their company through the use of donuts and showcasing their metrics.
- The product allows teachers to share pictures and videos with parents, provides resources for teaching social and emotional skills, and has reached about 15 million kids in classrooms.
- ClassDojo prioritizes empathy and understanding the needs of their users through research and direct interactions with teachers.
- The company experienced early growth through word-of-mouth and built a supportive network of teachers called the Mentor Community.
- ClassDojo is now used in about 100,000 schools in the US and over 200,000 schools internationally, with a small team of 30 members and over $30 million in funding.
- The company values a culture of shared information and decision-making, and the CEO's role shifts from building the product to building the culture as the company grows.
- The core thesis of the company, that education is made by people and technology supports them, remains the same.
- The company focuses on aligning incentives with users, particularly parents, and aims to reach every classroom in the world while prioritizing equity in education.
- Education technology companies have the opportunity to have a big impact on equity in education and improve efficiency in administrative processes.

Sam Chaudhary - https://twitter.com/samchaudhary_ - is the cofounder and CEO of ClassDojo - https://www.classdojo.com/. They've raised $30M and have 30 employees.

Karen Lien - https://twitter.com/karenlien03 - is an Edtech Principal here at YC.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - https://twitter.com/craigcannon

So little known fact, 1 of your first investors was Paul Graham of Y Combinator.

So it was actually, it started at Demo Day and

Yeah, so, and we'd gone, we'd presented last and we'd been told the whole time that the goal was to meet lots of people and to get them to come by and talk to you.

And so a good way to do that is to have good metrics, and we were lucky we had this good growth curve.

And so I had a box of donuts and I said at the end that like, hey, we're over there, there's a box of donuts on the table, you guys should come by.

And so the presentation's finished and we were kind of milling around.

We were at our little stand thing hoping that people would pop by.

And he goes to Liam, he's like, hey, It was 1 of the metrics we showed, I think it was an engagement metric.

He's like, I really like that, like the look of that.

I think it was something about every 3 seconds.

Oh yeah, people giving feedback or something.

And so he's like, I really like that metric.

Can you show me what the growth curve in that looks like?

And Liam, I can't even imagine what was happening for Liam because he and I, we'd read all of PG's essays for ages.

This is like a legendary person turning up and just having a normal conversation with you.

And so poor Liam was just like, kind of like a holy shit.

And Liam's like, well, I don't have it to hand, but I can pull it or whatever.

And PG's like, oh yeah, you could just open terminal and do it in there, right?

And like, but he's like, starts coaching him through it.

And Liam's like, Liam's like very, like he's an amazing technologist.

Yeah, right, and he's like, oh yeah, yeah, I guess I'll just do that.

But it's going to take a while, and the donuts kind of bit us in the ass, where PG's like, that's okay, I'll just stand here and have a donut.

And so you've got this like high pressure like data extraction happening for Liam, and in the end Liam's like, look, better than this, I'll just email it to you like straight after this and so Paul gives us his email address and he's like that sounds good and walks away And so we go home like breathlessly excited.

I don't remember like the rest of what happened at Demo Day.

And we craft this email to PJ or Liam does.

He's like, hey, here's the metric you wanted, look at the growth curve, whatever.

And we send it off and like nothing, like crickets.

And we're like, oh, I guess he wasn't that interested.

But being relentless with this stuff, 2 days later, we email him again.

And the numbers were small, so they're growing.

We're like, look, it's grown like 3 X in the other 2.

And we keep doing this for like, I think the best part of like a week, like every day or 2 we're just emailing like another chart, another chart.

And then, so from Liam's email, and then I get an email from Paul like a week later with 1 line where he says, it is customary to respond to offers of funding.

And then we check out, I think Liam has some kind of super juiced up kind of Gmail inbox, whatever.

And it's like in a spam folder somewhere, it's like 2 days in, PG's 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 proper funding.

And then, yeah, then Liam biked to his house to pick up the check, which was kind of cool.

Tell us about who uses ClassDojo and what problem they're trying to solve when they adopt ClassDojo.

Yeah, I think it's important to understand why ClassDojo even exists and then that gets like the problems that we're actually helping people solve.

So the reason that we started the company really is because we kind of thought that most kids don't get the education that's going to make them be happy and successful.

But what's happy, the good thing about it is that I think like the answer is already there.

Like the answer isn't like some magic technology or magic policy.

It's actually like education is really a product that's made by people in classrooms and in homes.

And so our job as a company then becomes to help people in classrooms and homes create a better education experience for kids.

And so like that's really like what ClassNet has been trying to do for a long, long time, from the start of the company.

And so the exact set of problems that we've tried to solve changes quite a lot, depending on the classroom, depending on where kids are, what kinds of things teachers want to do.

But I'd say probably the 2 main problems we solve today.

1 is that there's this weird gulf between school and home.

So kids go off to school for 8 hours a day and a bunch of stuff happens in the classroom and then they go home

the classroom and then they go home and a bunch of stuff happens at home and like the kind of the 2 halves of the day don't really like connect and don't really talk to each other.

But that's really like a kid's life growing up.

It's like usually you're like 1 of those 2 settings.

And it's a bit odd because like in every other part of your life, you're connected to the things you care most about, like Instagram or whatever.

But it's very odd for parents that they're not more connected to their kids for most of the day.

And for teachers who actually really care about these kids, that they don't really get a view of what's happening at home.

And so we really, like, that's 1 big problem we try and help with is like bridging that, that gulf and like creating more of a connection between school and home.

And then the second problem, as a newer 1, but, it's really this, this, It's kind of like teachers have struggled for a long time to try new ideas in their classroom.

So like the pace at which new ideas get introduced to classrooms is actually quite slow.

And it takes quite a long time for a teacher to try a new practice.

They might have heard of like personalized learning or like something like a growth mindset, like a new idea.

And so we're trying to help teachers try more ideas in their classrooms and make it easier and faster for teachers to bring new ideas into their classrooms.

How does your product make that easier for them?

Oh yeah, so the first part, we basically just helped teachers share more of what's happening at school every day.

So teachers could share pictures and videos through the school day home.

So this new bit was from like a couple of years ago where, and it kind of, it wasn't really like a plan.

It kind of emerged from something 1 of the teams was doing.

So we spend a lot of time in classrooms and always have.

And we kept hearing this thing about social and emotional learning.

Like there are lots and lots of teachers who really want to teach their kids things beyond like reading and writing and math, but like softer skills.

And it was really tough for them because it's like quite a fuzzy area.

Like, I want to teach my kids about curiosity or creativity or empathy.

These are like important things for people to learn but we don't really know how to teach them.

And so a few years ago we went down the road to Stanford and there's a professor there, Carol Dweck, and she's got this, you know, right?

I don't know if everyone listening knows, but you know, and she's got this idea called the growth mindset.

It's like a really famous TED talk, and she's got a book about it, and it's basically the idea that you're not fixed in your abilities, and that through practice and persistence, you can get better at stuff.

But it's amazing how many kids grow up without that idea really in mind, right?

They're kind of told you're a math person, or you're not a creative person.

These are really quite limiting mindsets.

And so we wanted to see if we could help teachers undo that.

See if we could help more teachers share this idea for growth mindset.

Because they'd already talked about wanting it.

And so we went to Carol Dweck and her team and we were like if we could get this idea to lots and lots of schools what would we do?

And together came up with this idea of making short stories, like animated shorts, 3 to 5 minute little thought starters or conversation starters for classrooms.

And so we produced, it was the most like hack job I think we've ever done.

It was like 8 weeks from like the first conversation to getting this series done.

But we made this series of like 5 animated shorts about growth mindset.

And they weren't really like, you've got the Khan Academy kind of lectures.

And at the end of the story there was a question.

So it didn't really give you the answer, it was just like a story like teeing up some interesting thoughts for you to discuss.

And so we made this series and we put it, we distributed it on ClassDojo.

So every teacher who had a ClassDojo account, it popped up in the app 1 day for them and it was like, hey you can teach your kids about growth mindset.

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 15 million kids now in classrooms, which is like nuts.

And so that was the first time we ever did anything about this, like bringing new ideas to your classroom.

And then we did a follow-up with Harvard on empathy, with Yale on mindfulness, and there's more coming.

So it's literally, the teacher says, we want to be able to do this.

We're like, we're not the experts on what it's mindset, but there are experts on it.

It's not just facilitating things that happen in the classroom.

It's actually helping people move classrooms forward.

Like, if you really believe the thing that I said that most kids don't get the education that they should get For now in the future and and and you believe that teachers want to do the right things for kids Then I think it's important to help teachers not just do what's really been done more efficiently, but actually help them do new stuff

Yeah, And how are you measuring the success of teaching a growth mindset?

So like the there's kind of 2, there's like an input and an output measure, right?

And the input measure for us was really just like, do people use this?

And so use meaning like use the app, you watch the video?

Do they do the activities in the classroom?

Yeah, and so that's quite a good like like effort to measure I think The the real truth with the growth mindset stuff is that like the output measures I think are like From what we can tell from research, they take a bit longer.

They're mostly like psychology research, and it takes a bit longer to really see if people's mindsets have changed.

So I think there's this question that comes up a lot of, should you do stuff that people use?

Should you do stuff that's high efficacy?

But I think you have to be clear about what today we know how to measure and we don't know how to measure.

And the thing that we can measure is, are people voluntarily adopting and using this?

And the thing that's going to take a little time to figure out is like, hey, is the whole world now having more of a growth mindset?

But what we do know is that like, for 15 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, It's not that I can't do this, I can't do this yet.

And that's kind of a cool starting point, I think.

I don't think, I think we're far from done with it.

So from the beginning of the company, you've been very effective at talking to your users in such a way that you really understand their problems, I think.

And you're describing now, you know, as the company grows, you're gathering this from your users and giving them the things they really want for their classrooms.

Can you talk a little bit about how in that early stage, before you knew what your product or even maybe your audience was, how you figured out, how you developed, like what are strategies for developing that deep understanding of your audience?

What are some specific things you did early on and that you continue to do To keep that connection so you can be building the right things solving the right problems

It's a really important like Theme in the company we talk a lot about empathy a lot I think like so before we even came up with like the idea for the first product we ever built, actually like, I think something people might not know is that like Class Data didn't actually start, I mean you remember, we didn't actually start as like a company.

It came really from like, I'd worked in education for most of my life, like in classrooms, around classrooms.

Liam, my co-founder, had been doing a PhD in computer science focused on technology in classrooms.

And so it really came from more like a passion for education-y stuff.

And when we turned up in California to do Imagine K-12, we basically didn't know anyone in America at all.

Like we'd never lived in America, we'd never worked here.

We'd met this guy called Jeff Ralston on a video called Once, right?

And so it kind of enforced like a naivety in a way.

It kind of removed any sense of like hey we know what we're doing and we've got the idea and we'll go and do an idea.

So it kind of enforced the like get out and like try and understand what people who are actually doing this need.

And so the first like 4 I think it was like 6 weeks, yeah we were here for 6 or 7 weeks before we launched the first version of Class Dojo.

And in those 7 weeks I, it was mostly me but Liam was involved too I did basically anything to get in front of teachers to get to classrooms and talk to people and so that like on the on the easier side it was some schools publish like teachers email addresses just on the website and so I'd just email people and it was kind of a weird email because it wasn't a pitch for anything.

It was more, hey, I told them a bit about us and I'm like, we'd love to help in any way that we can with whatever you're doing in your classrooms.

And so what's the worst problem that you face every day?

It's like asking for a one-line response.

Just let us know what the worst problem you face every day is.

And so what we did, I think I emailed a few thousand people and it was like scraping email addresses.

It was like I've had a friend at Teach for America.

We had friends who were teachers in the UK and Australia.

We kind of emailed just as many people as we could.

But the other thing which was like more probably like if you'd step up the difficulty a bit was we'd go to local schools.

And so we were in Palo Alto, there was a gun high school nearby and I found a few teachers there who were willing to talk to me and I went and taught summer school there in fact for like a couple of days just so they promised to like, like, hey, if you can, you've taught, if you can come and teach like summer school for an afternoon, sure, we'll chat with you after summer school.

There are these things called the EdCamp.

There's actually 1 EdCamp which was really like life-changing for us, which I'll tell you about in a minute.

But like we went to these teacher meetups and we're just like as much as you can to soak in the context of your users.

That's what I did in the early days for a lot of it.

We had a particularly horrific 1 once where we had to go to Los Altos school district and we were pretty stingy Brits and so we didn't have like, we didn't want to get a cab, like Uber wasn't around then, we didn't have a cab so we like biked for miles in like the steaming South Bay sun to get there and turned up just dripping with sweat to this audience of teachers.

It was really, really, really, yeah, really lovely.

But you kind of like, you can just do whatever it takes, right?

Like when you're 2 guys in a room and you need to get to understanding like how you can actually help people, you do whatever it takes.

So I spoke to I think 3 or 400 people on Skype calls face to face in those 7 weeks and emailed a few thousand more.

And then as the company's kind of grown, that's just become like an institution in the company.

Like it's, I think, you know, 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.

We have lots of ways of bringing teacher context in, and kids and parents now as well, but bringing that into the office.

Like the story's up on monitors, we have community groups where we solicit feedback all the time.

So I think that's just an important part of how we build ClassDeja.

Is that a vestige of you working in consulting?

Or do you think it just fits the company?

Because I saw that you worked at McKinsey and this is a very common question that we get.

Like, hey, I'm working in consulting, I'm thinking about doing a startup, what do I do?

And it's like this consultant versus entrepreneur, like get your hands dirty mindset, right?

Yeah, mine is a bit weird because like consulting was kind of the anomaly for me.

So I was in my teens, and Karen you know this, but in my teens the school I went to actually insisted that you teach as well as learn.

So I ended up teaching for like 20 hours a week for 6 years from age 12

But it's also 1 of the most effective things you can do it's like you know the high-cost low I'm sorry low-cost high-quality interventions is peer tutoring and so like We had this in our school.

We had like I would teach regularly teach class of 20 to 30 kids for like around 20 hours a week.

across like physics, chemistry, economics, maths.

It was a really fascinating kind of school.

I got to college and I was an economist, like a maths person.

I thought I would carry on with a PhD in that, and I ended up going to teach straight after college instead.

And so all the conventional consulting banking didn't really appeal that much.

But then McKinsey are very good at the CRM system kind of follow up.

And they're like, they track where you go.

And they're like, Oh, we've got this education team here, you should come and join the, you know, like do some education work.

And they're like kind of advising governments on how to set up education systems.

And so I went there and I spent a bunch of my time there in education.

And ultimately the reason you just said is the reason I left, that like I think there's only so long, like if you're used to like getting your hands dirty, there's only so long you can like advise people and not actually do the work.

And so I think that was more like the way that I'd always been consulting was like the kind of the left turn bit, but yeah.

So you talked to these hundreds of teachers and released this first product.

Tell us about the early days of growth, what you think drove that, and how that's shifted over time.

Have there been transition points where Class Dota went from kind of this growth engine to this other 1?

Have you anticipated or managed those transitions, and what do you do now?

So, so we had our first like 7 weeks or 6, 7 weeks or so of, of talking to teachers, like building like little prototypes and things.

And then week 8, I remember this because it was a Sunday morning and we'd put the first version of ClassDigit live for anyone to sign up for.

And it was quite early on Sunday, it was something like 6 or 7 in the morning, and there was this Ed camp in Oakland.

So an Ed camp is really just like a group of teachers coming together at the weekend to talk to each other about new things they're trying out.

So it's kind of like teacher professional development camp.

But they're doing it at Skyline High School in Oakland and we were in Palo Alto at the time and I woke up at 6, 7 and I was like, oh man, I'm exhausted.

We'd been sprinting all week to get this product out and I was like, I should probably just blow this off and be nice to have a lie in.

And I don't know what it was, but I posted, I think it was on Facebook, and I posted like, I also didn't have a way to get there.

Like the cab's going to be really expensive and I'm back.

And so I posted on, I think it was Facebook, and I was like, is anyone going towards Oakland today?

Like, on the off chance anyone's going, I'd love a ride.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

It's Surprising How Much Small Teams Can Get Done - Sam Chaudhary of ClassDojo