Adrian Graham and the teachers who changed the picture

The teachers kept using the app. That was the useful clue. Adrian Graham and his collaborators had built a way to tell stories with photographs, and the general public had supplied less enthusiasm than they needed. In classrooms, though, the pictures had work to do. Children could show something they had made, then explain it aloud. The people returning to the product were helping its creators see a different future for it.

Graham had already worked at Google and Facebook. He had helped build a travel recommendation business with Carl Sjogreen and Charles Lin. This next venture, Shadow Puppet, offered a familiar pleasure: showing somebody your photographs and talking them through the story. Teachers took that pleasure into lessons. Some became informal advisers as the team developed the product that launched in 2015 as Seesaw.

There is something pleasing about a software company receiving an education from its users. The founders brought experience in making consumer products. The teachers brought the classroom. Between them sat a deceptively small problem: how to let a young child show what they know without making the software another assignment.

Before the school gates

Go back to June 2006 and Graham is introducing Picasa Web Albums as a Google product manager. People using Picasa, Google’s desktop photo software, had asked for an easy way to share pictures online. His announcement described selecting photographs, uploading them to an album and sending friends a link. The initial service offered 250MB of free storage. In the language of that moment, this was room for about 1,000 wallpaper-sized photographs.

The details are a small time capsule. Access was initially by invitation. Friends could download an entire album into Picasa. Arrow keys moved between pictures, while photographs were fetched in advance to keep browsing quick. These were practical answers to the question of how much effort someone should need to share a memory.

“It’s all about the photos.”

Adrian Graham · Picasa Web Albums introduction, 2006

That sentence gave his announcement its title. It also makes a useful starting point for following his work: photographs as things people want to pass between themselves, with as little machinery getting in the way as possible.

Nextstop moved the subject from pictures to places. Graham co-founded it with Sjogreen and Lin. The travel service collected short recommendations, and in 2010 Facebook bought most of its assets as the team joined the company. Its announcement also set a closing date for the Nextstop website. An acquisition can send the people and the product down different roads.

The small business of removing a step

Before that move, Graham wrote a detailed account of Nextstop’s mobile website for the Google Developers Blog. Published in April 2010, it reads like a tour through the inconveniences a phone owner should not have to endure. Mobile networks were slow. Downloading multiple files could delay the start of an app. Asking a traveller to type an address was an unnecessary interruption when the phone could supply a location.

His examples were specific. Store data locally and fetch likely next items in advance. Reuse application files instead of downloading them again. Combine the phone’s location with a map and nearby recommendations. For adding a place, a list of nearby businesses could spare the user a search.

Graham’s technical account belongs to its era; the browser features and devices he described were those of 2010. Its attention to the person holding the phone is easier to carry forward. A saved step means the person can spend more time on the thing they opened the app to do. Later, the people using his team’s products would include children for whom typing was a considerably larger demand.

A photograph finds its voice

Shadow Puppet arrived in 2013 as an iOS app created by Graham and Sjogreen. Graham’s earlier experience included three years as Picasa’s product manager. The new app gave photographs a narrator. A person selected images from the phone’s camera roll, pressed record and talked through them. Zooming, tapping and moving between photographs became part of the recording.

The person receiving the story could watch without installing the app. That matters to the social transaction: the sender has already asked for someone’s attention. Asking for a download as well adds paperwork to a friendly gesture.

The design captured something people already did when they showed friends pictures on a phone. The photograph supplied the subject, while the person holding it supplied what the photograph could not explain by itself. A tap could say where to look. A spoken account could say why it mattered.

In a classroom, that combination could serve another purpose. Schoolwork can be photographed, but a finished picture leaves questions unanswered. A child’s explanation supplies another part of the work. It lets the person looking at it hear the child’s account, rather than requiring the adult to supply the entire interpretation.

Five years old, with something to say

Seesaw’s January 2015 launch described a learning journal children as young as five could use independently. They could capture learning through photographs, video and their own voices. Parents could receive a notification when something new appeared, then see and hear a particular piece of the school day.

The announcement began with a familiar domestic exchange: a child comes home, a parent asks what happened at school, and the answer is that nothing happened. An impressively economical account of several hours. A learning journal gives the next conversation an object: the drawing, the project, the explanation that would otherwise remain at school.

Teachers around the country had piloted the app. Angela Gadtke, a kindergarten teacher in Minnesota, described children reflecting on their learning and documenting it independently. Graham’s stated ambition at launch was to help students take ownership of their learning and provide a safe place to share it. The independence was part of the point.

The mechanics of a learning journal also gave teachers decisions to make. They could control student likes and comments, and review material before publication to a class blog. Students could add a voice recording or text to reflect on work. Joining a class could involve a code, with a QR code among the ways to access an account. Those choices put classroom routines inside the product’s design.

For Graham, the change in audience also changed the meaning of sharing. A holiday photograph asks a friend to enjoy the view. A piece of schoolwork asks someone to notice an effort, understand an explanation or offer a response. The same camera can begin either exchange. What surrounds the picture gives it its job.

When the classroom moved home

In 2020, Seesaw became part of the move to remote lessons. Its team adapted features and expanded support while demand rose. The company held frequent town hall meetings for teachers and helped them use its library of classroom activities. It received an Inc. Best in Business education honor that year, when the company reported that revenue had tripled.

Graham described the platform as something that “creates conversations around learning.” The phrase gives the business a human unit of measurement. There is the upload, and then there is what people do with it: a teacher’s response, a family’s question, the child explaining a choice.

A portfolio also lets work accumulate through the school year. Individual pieces can be returned to, placed beside later attempts and talked about again. A sheet of paper has many virtues, including surviving a dead battery. Finding the right sheet several months later is an achievement of a different order.

A company has to grow up, too

By October 2021, when Providence Equity Partners announced an investment in Seesaw, Graham was CEO. The announcement counted more than 10 million teachers, students and family members across more than 130 countries. These were people in several roles, not a count of paying schools. Financial terms were undisclosed. Graham and Sjogreen were to continue leading the company.

The responsibilities also included responding when something went wrong. In September 2022, Graham addressed a credential-stuffing attack through a company recap for the Seesaw community. Fewer than 0.5 percent of individual users had been affected. Compromised accounts were used to send a message linking to an inappropriate image. The company disabled messaging, blocked the attacker, removed access to the image and alerted users. A school district shared the response with its own community.

That episode belongs in the account of a classroom platform alongside its product launches and investment milestones. A learning journal carries contributions from children and conversations with families. Keeping those exchanges dependable is part of the work the company takes on. The teacher who brings a tool into class also has to answer to the people who use it.

That is a milestone in Graham’s history, rather than his current CEO title. Seesaw now names Matt Given as chief executive. Graham is listed as a co-founder and board member, and corporate records also document his directorship. The distinction keeps the chapters in order: developing a product, leading a growing company and remaining part of its governance are different kinds of work.

His route to Seesaw gives the classroom a consequential place in a career that began elsewhere. People using Shadow Puppet showed its creators another use for the technology. The team followed them far enough to build something around it. Graham had spent years helping photographs travel. At Seesaw, a child could send an explanation along with the picture, and someone beyond the desk could listen.