"well I don't want to miss this story uh-huh Oh sly grin yeah so little known fact one of your first investors was Paul Graham of why company yeah can you tell us about that meeting what what convinced..."

"got it in there I think it was something about every three seconds oh you're so rewarding feedback maybe I did you remember and I do yeah no I don't actually remember it's it's I've got it in the the ..."

"like the rest of what happened at demo day and we craft this email to PG or DM does he's like hey here's the metric you want to look at the growth curve whatever and we send it off and like nothing li..."

"the shed tell us about who uses classdojo and what problem they're trying to solve when they adopt classdojo yeah it's uh I think it's important understand like what like why class surgery even exists..."

"can every other part your life you're connected to the things you care most about and make like Instagram or whatever but but it's very odd for parents that they're not more connected to their kids fo..."

"really tough for them because it's a quite a fuzzy area they're like well what do we do next Mike I want to teach my kid my kids about curiosity or or creativity or empathy these are like important th..."

"classrooms which is like nuts yeah 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 wit..."

"think I don't think well I think we're far from done with it yeah yeah great so from from the beginning of the company you've you've been very effective at talking to your users in such a way that you..."

"so it kind of enforced like a naivety either way like it kind of removed any sense of like hey we know what we're doing and we'll just we've got the idea and we'll go and do an idea so it kind of enfo..."

"so we did that I think I'm out a few thousand people and it was like scraping email addresses it was like I've had a friend at Teach for America I got the emails on the email list there we I had frien..."

"context of your users like that's what we did that's what I did in the early days for a lot of it made a particularly horrific one once where we had to go to Los Altos School District and we were like..."

"company like its I think there were 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 tim..."

"anomaly for me okay so I was in my teens encounter you know this like 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..."

"that much but then McKinsey you're very good at the the CRM system kind of follow up then they're like they track where you go and I was like oh I'm going to teach and they're like Howard we've got th..."

"but tell us about that early growth so we had our first like seven weeks or six seven weeks or so of talking a teacher is like building like little prototypes and things and then week eight I remember..."

"the cab's gonna be really expensive in their back and so I post on I think it was Facebook and I said does anyone going towards Oakland today like on the off chance everyone's going I'd love a ride an..."

"white-glove kind of service and so a bunch of people got that those does that was the the 400 teachers or so that I'd spoken with and then this new set we're like oh that might work for me as well and..."

"turning point and it's this thing that continues to this day was we went to observe a teacher's classroom and Bessie Carmichael elementary here in the city and her name is Jenna Klein and so so we wen..."

"for the summer and she's doing a bunch of like support stuff and at the end of the summer we're like well I guess she's going back to teaching now and she she came to me and said Sam I think we're rea..."

"was like teachers are like amongst the most underserved I think people in the world like if you think the average teacher they get into this job which is like you know pretty underpaid well to most ot..."

"say yeah you can you explain how that dynamic actually works right so you say you're looking for a teacher who will be an advocate in any particular school Yeah right so how are you finding them and t..."

"like a secret the community stuff I don't think many companies really understand well mmm-hmm did Jenna stay with you yeah she still with us today yeah she's she's awesome good job Jenna yeah that's a..."

"thirty and well it's that unusual given that where you are and was it a conscious decision to kind of keep the team at this size and run lean can you tell us about that thinking and and kind of how yo..."

"book called team of teams on this I keep plugging this book everywhere but I'm like okay but yeah it's it's basically like how you create I'm really interesting this as as area of personal interest is..."

"we've obsessed a lot over building that kind of culture I don't think we always get it right but we've seen great returns to to really obsessing of like the right kind of culture and so we could certa..."

"I think so specifically for me as CEO I think it's the there's this great thing in dahlias book principles of like what your job becomes and he's got this diagram just based like goals machine results..."

"few so total bad team of teams there's extreme ownership is another good one there's kinda like that convention like the zero to one and if this startup people this sort of he kind of yes yeah I'm try..."

"remember I mean you're very easy to talk Sam is very easy to talk to and so that kind of stands out and I think was probably part of what made that early learning from customers so well but yeah I rem..."

"come with this bed and mr. king plasto and I have this vivid memory of Sam you're talking about your your frugal British nature Sam wear glasses the glasses still holding them to his face because that..."

"to both have impact and to scale hmm but like the product I think the thing that's changed the most is like the actual products that we've built so cluttered has never been like a one product company ..."

"holds up yeah I thought about this once I saw it yeah I think like what one the ones me is this thing of this we talked about a bit but like the small teams thing because the whole way we've always be..."

"you're always being judged on like success and failure at every moment it's really tough for people to think big how do you do that I mean I cuz if that's an issue everywhere yeah so one actually inte..."

"important so Mike like for that one practice it's it's recent but you know we review that log every week the guarantee is that they'll always be action taken on it like wheel prioritize and we'll take..."

"helpful especially I mean place like YC same thing yeah like we could do a better job yeah so your product serves a it's a in a sense it in a sensitive space you have sensitive audience right you're u..."

"who have never touched your product or used it and they need to know too and that was like a whole different thing we hired a head of comms that yeah and she's still with us and she's amazing but that..."

"you're getting that scrutiny kind of in the press and so on well maybe it's I don't know yeah no I mean like I said I'm a majority international now so I mean the growth is good but um I think like th..."

"so scoped to jurisdiction if I give every parent is that oh cool like I get to you know share in my kids school day now wonderful in the classrooms getting better awesome you know it but we never say ..."

"you know people will talk about how education the u.s. is broken like it's not actually for a few people it's really good for a few people and for most people like the difference being the luckiest an..."

"and I'm like well if if we could just create value for parents enough value that like there's something that they want to pay for yeah that could be interesting and if it could be like relatively affo..."

"like replace it and the knowledge I was use of the team is like if you and I think this this is very important because like the analogy I use for the team is the difference in a technical system and a..."

"know has a very compelling double bottom line you know companies can get into this because they can they can build interesting businesses but they can also have a big impact on this equity problem tha..."