Sam Chaudhary is the cofounder and CEO of ClassDojo, an education platform used in roughly 95% of US K-8 schools and by tens of millions of children across 180 countries around the world. Born in the UK and raised in Wales and Abu Dhabi, he studied economics at the University of Cambridge, taught at Charterhouse, and advised governments on education reform at McKinsey before leaving to build something himself. In 2011, he cofounded ClassDojo with Liam Don after the two met at a Startup Weekend and went through the Imagine K12 accelerator together. Under Sam's leadership, ClassDojo grew bottoms-up, teacher by teacher, into one of the most widely used education products in the world, reached profitability, and is now expanding into kids’ gaming and AI with Dojo Tutor, Dojo Islands, and Dojo Spark. He was named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2025 for the Bay Area.
Key Takeaways
- After meeting at a startup weekend, joining a startup accelerator, and deciding to build an education company together, Sam and his cofounder Liam spoke to hundreds of teachers and even spent time teaching summer school themselves to deeply understand and empathize with the needs of their target customers.
- Their first product - a simple tool that allowed teachers to give positive feedback to their students - quickly went viral, resulting in over ten thousand teacher registrations by the time Sam and Liam had graduated from the Imagine K12 startup accelerator.
- After digging into usage data from their early adopters, Sam and Liam realized that the teachers who were engaging and retaining on ClassDojo over the long-term were those who had decided to not only use the product with their students, but also with those students’ parents. This three-sided network effect became the key to not only driving cost-efficient organic growth, but also extremely strong user retention rates.
- After years of only offering a free product, ClassDojo finally monetized its business through ClassDojo Plus, a premium subscription that offered parents additional features to enrich their children’s education. It maintained a freemium model so that most users could continue using the product for free, which bolstered teacher trust and preserved the strength of the app’s core organic growth loops, but with enough premium value behind the paywall to convert 5%+ of users into paying subscribers.
- ClassDojo is now used in ~95% of US K-8 schools and by tens of millions of students across 180 countries worldwide. Recently, the company has leveraged its scale and network effects to launch three new products - Tutor, Islands, and Sparks - that use AI and gamification to deliver additional value to parents and students.
- Looking ahead to 2030, ClassDojo’s mission continues to be helping every child thrive by giving them access to a great education they love at an increasingly low cost. Sam believes AI will play a key role in realizing this mission by reducing the need for human capital, thereby making education more affordable and accessible to all.
Sam Chaudhary
Phil Carter
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