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ClassDojo’s first eight years as an edtech consumer startup could look like failure: zero revenue; no paid users; and a team that hasn’t aggressively grown in years. But the company, which helps parents and teachers communicate about students, has raised tens of millions in venture capital from elite Silicon Valley investors including Y Combinator, GSV, SignalFire and General Catalyst over its life.

If you ask co-founder Sam Chaudhary to explain how the startup survived so long without bringing in money, he responds simply: “When you have something that you think will be for the long term you can put [in] a lot of energy. So, we always kind of maintained the belief that like bringing people together and helping them be connected, especially last year when they needed to be apart, physically apart, was going to be really important.”

In layman’s terms: ClassDojo has been playing the long-game in edtech since 2011, quietly aggregating free users-turned-fans across the world’s public schools, which are notoriously hard to sell due to tight budgets. Every engineer on the team serves a population that is the size of the city of San Francisco. The company has been intentionally frugal throughout the process. Its core service, which is an interface that allows parents and teachers to communicate updates and stay involved in the classroom, is free for anyone to download.

“Our view from the start was actually that the idea of districts isn’t the customer of education, [that’s] kind of backwards,” he said. “It’s like Airbnb saying we’re going to transform travel by selling to hotels.” The route has helped ClassDojo gain traction with 51 million users across 180 countries.

Two years ago, ClassDojo tested this customer love. It launched its first monetization attempt in 2019: Beyond School, a service that complements in-school learning with at-home tutorials. Within four months of launching the paid service, ClassDojo hit profitability. In 2020, the added dimension of COVID-19 helped ClassDojo triple its revenue and grow to have hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers.

It’s a lesson in how a venture-backed startup can successfully live for years without any plans to monetize, grow a super-fan user base, and eventually turn those users into paying customers if the fit is right.

The acceleration of ClassDojo’s business got noticed by Joshua Buckley, the new CEO of Product Hunt and a solo capitalist.

“For years, they’ve quietly been building the most adored brand in the industry; kids, teachers and families they serve love it. Their business model follows that vision; they’re focused on serving the consumers, not the ‘system’” Buckley said.

Buckley led a new $30 million financing round for ClassDojo, he tells TechCrunch. The round also includes Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra, Coda CEO and former Youtube head of product and engineering Shishir Mehrotra, former product lead of growth for Airbnb Lenny Rachitsky, and others.

The financing comes nearly two years after ClassDojo raised a $35 million Series C round led by GSV. When new capital is less than the preceding round it usually signals a downround, but Chaudhary says that ClassDojo had a “significant markup on valuation” with the extension round. The trend of opportunistic extension rounds has grown for edtech startups recently as the pandemic underscores the need for remote learning innovation.

ClassDojo’s next act

With new financing and massive scale, ClassDojo is now trying to evolve from a communication app into a platform that can help students get better learning experiences beyond the one they get from schools.

Chaudhary says that they plan to double ClassDojo’s 55-person team, invest in product, and enter new markets.

“For me, I’d always thought ClassDojo could enable a better future, specifically one where kids’ outcomes aren’t entirely determined by what their ZIP code can offer them,” Chaudhary said. “That’s the kind of future we’ve been building toward.” He likened ClassDojo’s goal as similar to Netflix: provide a broad scope of material for a broad scope of people, not just on-demand political dramas.

ClassDojo is already creating content around topics not discussed in school such as how to fail and how to become an empathetic person, as part of its Big Idea series. The Beyond School offering helps students set goals and track activities, as well as find activities such as dinner table discussion starters or bedtime meditations.

Image Credits: ClassDojo

ClassDojo charges $7.99 a month, or $59.99 annually, for its premium content. The platform is finding small ways to add personalization and spice to its content, such as customized avatars, but further innovation will be key in making its next phase work.

While ClassDojo certainly has a strong user engine to monetize off of, the content game is difficult to win at. Content, to an extent, is commoditized. If you can find a free tutorial on YouTube or Khan Academy, why buy a subscription to an edtech platform that offers the same solution? The commodification of education is good for end-users and is often why startups have a freemium model as a customer acquisition strategy. To convert free users into paying subscribers, edtech startups need to offer differentiated and targeted content.

The United States continues to be a dominant market for ClassDojo, which also has users in the United Kingdom, Ireland, United Arab Emirates and more. While the United States consistently lags in consumer spending in education, Chaudhary thinks it’s an unfair assessment.

“To believe that, you have to believe that families don’t care all that much about their kids. And I just don’t think that’s true,” he said. “All the ways that American people express their care for children, there’s such a range, from extracurricular to sports camp to moving to the right zip code.”

And with that mindset, ClassDojo thinks that it can become the brand that families turn to when they think about a child’s education.

“I think there’s just like a missing brand in the world right now,” Chaudhary said. “There’s a blank, a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/classdojos-second-act-comes-with-first-profits/

June 4, 2019 should have been one of the happiest days of my life.

At 11:30 a.m., a press release hit the wire announcing that the cybersecurity company I had spent more than eight years building was being acquired by a larger cybersecurity player.

What’s not to love about a successful exit? I’d be set financially, the investors who had given us $70 million would make money, and the technology we created would get new legs in an organization with broader reach and resources.

Still, I had regrets. For one thing, I initially hadn’t wanted to sell. (More on that later.) For another, I was nagged by the feeling that our company had fallen short of its true potential, and that the reason was me — specifically, several rookie mistakes I made as a first-time entrepreneur.

I don’t stew about those errors any longer. In fact, I believe my miscues at my first startup will help define my career from here on out. That’s why, as I grow my next company, I’m thinking about not only the things I want to do but those I’d never do again.

Here are five of them.

Trying to do too much myself

In management theory terms, I was a “pacesetter.” I’d be the first to jump into any project or task, I’d execute it as quickly as possible and I expected everyone else to keep up. I thought that was how a startup leader acted — super helpful and scrappy.

But it came at a big price: disempowerment of the team. I was hoarding not only control — nobody felt like they personally owned anything — but also the institutional knowledge that needs to be spread around as a company grows. I became a human GPS: People could follow my directions, but they struggled to find the way themselves. Independent thinking suffered.

After a few years, I had a frustrating sense that I had all the answers and no one else did. Well, no wonder.

I’m now leaving the pacesetting to NASCAR and marathons.

Thinking people can read my mind

I believed all I had to do was say something once and everyone would get it. I became irritated when that didn’t happen. “We talked about this three months ago,” I’d bark. Intimidated team members would say to themselves, “Yeah, but we really only got 50% of it.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/the-5-biggest-mistakes-i-made-as-a-first-time-startup-founder/

S’More, a dating app that’s focused on helping users find more meaningful relationships, announced today that it has raised $2.1 million in seed funding.

S’More (short for “something more”) ensures that users can’t focus on physical appearance, because photos are  initally blurred — they gradually un-blur as you interact with someone. The startup has introduced new features like video chat (also blurred initially), and it launched a redesigned app of the beginning of this month — CEO Adam Cohen-Aslatei said it’s a “completely rebuilt product” with new features like real-time conversation prompts and the ability to pay to promote your profile.

Cohen-Aslatei also said that S’More’s focus on “anti-superficial relationships” is attracting a real audience, with 160,000 downloads in its first year and “thousands” of paying users, including a 50% increase in subscriptions after launching the new app in January.

Looking at how dating will evolve after the pandemic, Cohen-Aslatei suggested, “I don’t think we’re going back to the way things were.” He pointed to a recent survey of S’More users in which 80% of respondents said they hadn’t gone on a single live, in-person date in 2020.

“Do you want to meet for casual encounter on Tinder, or do you have to want to have a conversation get to know a real person on S’More?” he said. Assuming that many people will choose the latter, the next question is: “How do you make discovery fun? There’s got to be multimedia, video, audio, games, all of those features are part of our product roadmap … S’More will feel like Hinge meets Nextdoor.” (Apparently, there’s “a huge cohort” of users on Nextdoor who are single and looking for relationships.)

Image Credits: S’More

The new funding comes from a long list of investors: Benson Oak Ventures, Mark Pincus’ Workplay Ventures, Gaingels VC, Loud Capital/Pride Fund
SideCar Angels, AppLovin Chairman Rafael Vivas, Joshua Black of Apollo Management, Plus Grade CEO Ken Harris, Harvard geneticist George Church, former Meet Group CEO John Abbott, former IMAX CEO Brad Weschler, Aaron and Sharon Stern, Justen Stepka/Enterprise Fund, Boston Harbor Angels, Grit Daily CEO Jordan French, Kind.Fund founder Marty Isaac, Craig Mullett and Dating Group.

Cohen-Asletai told me the funding has already allowed him to hire what he’s calling a “founding team,” including chief architect Long Nguyen, head of operations Sneha Ramanchandran, head of product and design Regina Guinto and senior developer David Lichy.

S’More is also announcing that it has signed a production deal with producers Elvia Van Es Oliva and Jack Tarantino, who have worked on shows like “90 Day Fiancé.” Cohen-Asletai said the startup will work with them to create “anti-superficial” dating content for digital platforms and TV networks.

This deal builds on the success of S’More Live, the startup’s celebrity dating show on Instagram Live, which has aired 60 episodes so far.

“We’re using that show to build our brand, to gain awareness and then …
we’re actually able to leverage all of the viewers and retarget them with content from S’More, which has made our cost to acquire a user [very affordable],” Cohen-Asletai said.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/smore-seed-funding/

Apple has released iOS 14.4 with security fixes for three vulnerabilities, said to be under active attack by hackers.

The technology giant said in its security update pages for iOS and iPadOS 14.4 that the three bugs affecting iPhones and iPads “may have been actively exploited.” Details of the vulnerabilities are scarce, and an Apple spokesperson declined to comment beyond what’s in the advisory.

It’s not known who is actively exploiting the vulnerabilities, or who might have fallen victim. Apple did not say if the attack was targeted against a small subset of users or if it was a wider attack. Apple granted anonymity to the individual who submitted the bug, the advisory said.

Two of the bugs were found in WebKit, the browser engine that powers the Safari browser, and the Kernel, the core of the operating system. Some successful exploits use sets of vulnerabilities chained together, rather than a single flaw. It’s not uncommon for attackers to first target vulnerabilities in a device’s browsers as a way to get access to the underlying operating system.

Apple said additional details would be available soon, but did not say when.

It’s a rare admission by Apple, which prides itself on its security image, that its customers might be under active attack by hackers.

In 2019, Google security researchers found a number of malicious websites laced with code that quietly hacked into victims’ iPhones. TechCrunch revealed that the attack was part of an operation, likely by the Chinese government, to spy on Uyghur Muslims. In response, Apple disputed some of Google’s findings in an equally rare public statement, for which Apple faced more criticism for underplaying the severity of the attack.

Last month, internet watchdog Citizen Lab found dozens of journalists had their iPhones hacked with a previously unknown vulnerability to install spyware developed by Israel-based NSO Group.

In the absence of details, iPhone and iPad users should update to iOS 14.4 as soon as possible.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/apple-says-ios-14-4-fixes-three-security-bugs-under-active-attack/

Sony is making a play for the top end of the professional digital camera world, where videographers and sports photographers demand immaculate image quality at high resolutions in short order. The new Alpha 1 beats pretty much everything on the market on paper, but it’ll set you back a cool $6,500.

This is, of course, well above the price range for ordinary consumers and even spendy enthusiasts and “prosumers.” It’s a professional tool, and in this range Canon has historically been the go-to with its 1D series, and more recently its R5, a full-frame mirrorless that leapfrogged the competition to great acclaim last year. But Sony clearly means to leapfrog the R5 in turn.

The Canon R5 ticked all the right boxes: full frame sensor, 45 megapixels at 20 frames per second, an excellent EVF, in-body image stabilization, and 8K video. Sony ticks them all too… but harder.

Image Credits: Sony

The Alpha 1 will send down its 50 megapixel stills at 30 frames per second and with no viewfinder blackout (plus the backside-illuminated sensor will be more sensitive); its EVF has nearly twice the pixels and can refresh twice as fast, 240 fps; its 8K video is born at a higher resolution (the Sony uses the full 8.6K and downrezzes); it’ll shoot for half an hour without overheating (an R5 quirk); and so on and so forth.

Sony seems to have deliberately outdone Canon’s flagship in every way possible, though with no consideration for cost: the R5 goes for about $3800, while the A1 is $6500.

Yet photographers are no strangers to spending that kind of cash on a tool of the trade (a lens can run you as much or more). Anyone who shoots sports or nature knows that 30 fps instead of 20 fps may mean the difference between getting a cover shot and nothing at all. Visual effects artists who work closely with footage peep pixels all day will be able to tell an R5 8K from an A1 8K. Will it matter? Maybe, maybe not. Would you take the risk or pay extra to eliminate it?

Image Credits: Sony

If it’s merely a question of money to get the best instead of almost the best, there are a lot of people out there who will write that check without a second thought. Of course, the R5 was released half a year ago and its successor (the “Mark II”) may change that calculus again.

To be clear, the R5 and A1 are both far more camera than most people will ever need. They’re the bleeding edge of the industry — an industry that has been shrinking steadily for years. Battling fiercely now over professionals may have long-lasting effects as bit players get edged out, unable to compete. It’s an investment in the markets that they think will last despite the constant creeping encroachment of smartphones.

More importantly for the rest of us, competition like this in the camera industry is good because it produces advances that trickle down to the models we can actually afford. Not that anyone really needs 8K, but that improved sensor readout and EVF sure would be nice to have.

You can read more about the Alpha 1’s specs here.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/sonys-tempts-professionals-with-the-top-shelf-top-tier-alpha-1/