Aza Steel once sold his neighbors moon dust. The containers were old film canisters; the neighborhood was in Santa Cruz. It is an agreeable beginning for an entrepreneur: an ordinary object, an extravagant proposition, and someone willing to knock on a door. Years later, the merchandise would become software. The appetite for making something and seeing whether anyone wanted it was already there.
At UCLA, Steel worked on a service that let students request dining hall menus by text message. Hunger offered a fairly direct form of customer research. He graduated in 2013, having spent considerable energy on businesses alongside his studies. His degree was in sociology. His next consequential piece of education would arrive from people who were trying to run school computer systems.
Today, Steel is the GoGuardian co-founder and former CEO building CoDream in Kauai. Between the campus projects and the Hawaiian venture sits a company that reached a valuation above $1 billion. But the interesting continuity in his career is smaller and more personal: he keeps arranging circumstances in which people can try things, and keeps discovering that other people have useful ideas about how.
The customer he hadn’t planned for
Steel taught himself programming in his dorm room and built a Chrome extension intended to help locate a stolen laptop. Its weakness was almost comic: a thief had to use Chrome for the tool to reveal useful activity. This was detective work with a browser requirement. Still, putting the extension into the world gave people something concrete to respond to.
Schools responded. Their problem extended beyond missing hardware. Classrooms were filling with inexpensive Chromebooks, and adults needed ways to manage the internet on those machines. Steel listened to the administrators describing their difficulties and adjusted what he was building. GoGuardian followed in 2014.
He described making new features within 24 to 48 hours of conversations with districts. That speed shortened the distance between a customer explaining a problem and discovering whether the proposed answer helped. A sales conversation could become a product review almost before the participants had cleared their inboxes.
Business casual, with a contingency for waves
Steel remembers growing GoGuardian to roughly 80 employees. His recollection includes hard work, soccer after work, and board shorts worn beneath business casual clothes in case surfing became possible. The outfit deserves some respect as operational planning. Plenty of executives prepare for a change in the market; Steel also prepared for a change in the swell.
He says the team raised $5 million that it did not end up spending. The business was bringing in money. Advait Shinde later explained that school districts paid for multiyear contracts upfront, creating a cash-generative model. The company’s financing story therefore included an unusual luxury: investment capital could remain available while customers helped finance the operation.
The early business also depended on people whose contributions looked different from Steel’s. R. Todd Mackey was an early investor and co-founder. Tyler Shaddix became a co-founder whose work shaped the products. Shinde brought his engineering background and eventually took over as CEO. The extension had started with an individual’s experiment; the company required a team.
In 2016, Forbes included Steel and Shinde in its 30 Under 30 education list. The recognition captured them early in a business that was still changing shape. It also offers a useful pause in the chronology: a sociology graduate had helped build classroom software, learned enough programming to get started, and found colleagues who could carry the work further.
The company kept growing
Shinde became CEO in November 2017. Under his leadership, GoGuardian expanded through acquisitions including Pear Deck in 2020, Edulastic in 2021 and TutorMe in 2022. Keeping that sequence in view matters. Steel’s founding work belongs in the story, and so does the work of the people who led the company through its subsequent expansion.
In August 2021, Tiger Global invested $200 million at a valuation well above $1 billion. GoGuardian said its technology then reached more than 22 million K-12 students in the United States. What began around the practical demands of classroom computers had become a much broader education software business, with tools for engagement, assessment and classroom management.
Rich Preece succeeded Shinde as CEO in April 2024, with Shinde moving to executive chairman. By then, the company said more than 25 million public K-12 students used one of its products. These are milestones in the institution Steel helped start. His own next chapter would involve working with people at a considerably earlier stage.
Free money, and a fairly literal name
In January 2018, Steel founded Free Money for Founders to offer student entrepreneurs cash and mentorship without taking equity. The name left little room for a branding consultant to improve the proposition. Students could receive help without surrendering a piece of the business they were still learning to build.
The organization ran pitch events and connected teams with relevant mentors. One participant, Alvin Vuong of gaming startup Escality, described introductions to people with experience at Snapchat and Discovery Communications. Another student’s startup, NxtPitch, received money for marketing. These were specific forms of assistance, directed at the next obstacle a young business faced.
For Steel, helping students learn had value apart from generating an investment return. That choice helps explain the link between his ventures. After building a company, he was willing to use his money and connections to make someone else’s beginning less difficult. Experience could travel through a conversation, an introduction or a small amount of cash.
A different kind of work in Kauai
CoDream brings that interest into a shared physical setting. On the north shore of Kauai, the project describes itself as an experiment in creativity, community and self-exploration. Its work-trade model exchanges participants’ skills for housing, food, mentorship and practical experience. The invitation includes making things together, tending the property and leaving time for the island outside the working day.
The details keep the idea grounded. Volunteers are asked for six hours a day, five days a week. Typical stays are described as six to eight weeks. Travel is the participant’s responsibility, and the creative residency is unpaid. This is an arrangement with duties and terms, even when the surroundings make the recruiting photographs look suspiciously persuasive.
The work itself has moved beyond an exclusively digital brief. CoDream’s projects include a solar-powered farmstead and popsicle stand, alongside caring for the land and planting food. Steel’s newer setting makes room for useful things that can be held, eaten or grown. The distance from browser software is considerable; the satisfaction of making something people use is recognizable.
Community extends beyond the residents. CoDream describes dedicating six hours each week to local volunteering, including beach cleanups and fundraisers. Its River Campus sits among trees beside a river, a short drive from the main property. The setting gives the venture much of its character, while the weekly commitments give that character some practical weight.
The soundtrack is his, too
Steel has also taken an unusually hands-on approach to explaining CoDream. For one teaser, he wrote the words, assembled footage he already had and used music he had composed on an Ableton Push. He described the pieces coming together with uncommon ease. The founder was doing the editing as well as supplying the premise.
That detail adds another dimension to his work. A venture needs a product or a place, but it also needs a way to make people curious enough to approach. Steel’s teaser used his own creative tools to make that invitation. The same person who once built a campus menu service was now fitting music and images to an idea about working together.
His public experiments retain a sense of proportion. Announcing a CoDream livestream with Ruchir Kavulli about money, success and identity, he joked that their previous broadcast had attracted four concurrent viewers. A founder associated with a billion-dollar company was perfectly willing to advertise a very modest audience. The joke made room for another attempt.
The question that took a decade
In June 2025, Steel returned to a hiring question Mackey had asked in the early GoGuardian days: was a candidate moving toward something or running away? He admitted that he had once dismissed it. Hiring for CoDream had made the distinction more interesting. Persuading someone to arrive and finding someone eager to do the work could produce different results.
His retrospective was an appreciation of Mackey’s steadiness, trust and belief while the young team was still unsure what it had. It included an acknowledgment that he had undervalued those contributions. The later founder could see forms of work that his younger self had been too busy, or too certain, to recognize.
“The value of belief”
Aza Steel’s heading in his 2025 reflection on Todd Mackey
That is a useful place to leave him: building again, reconsidering old advice, and making space for other people’s experiments. The scale has changed more than once. So have the objects being made. Between a film canister, a Chrome extension and a Hawaiian popsicle stand, Steel keeps finding a reason to ask whether something might work.