Sam Chaudhary’s seven-week education

Sam Chaudhary’s first Silicon Valley sleeping arrangement came with a fairly clear division of labour. Liam Don would write the code. Don would also get the bed. Chaudhary got the sofa. The two had moved from Britain to build an education company, and a one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto served as both accommodation and headquarters. There are more comfortable ways to express faith in a colleague.

They had met only months earlier. They had left jobs, familiar places and friends behind. What they possessed was a shared interest in education, an accelerator place and an urgent need to discover something teachers actually wanted. The company that became ClassDojo began with this modest admission: its founders needed an education themselves.

The sofa is a useful place to begin because Chaudhary’s career looks tidier from a distance. Cambridge economist. Teacher. Consultant. Founder. Chief executive. Arrange those labels in a row and they resemble a plan. Up close, the route contains detours, conversations and ideas surrendered after meeting the people expected to use them. Listening has done quite a lot of the steering.

The pupil at the front of the classroom

He grew up in the Welsh countryside before moving to Abu Dhabi as a teenager. The change took him from a small school to an international school with about 3,000 pupils. Its distinctive practice was to have students teach as well as learn. For Chaudhary, explaining things to other children became an ordinary part of being a child.

That arrangement gave him an early view from both sides of a desk. A lesson looks different when you are responsible for whether anybody understands it. Years before he would ask teachers about their working day, he had encountered the gap between knowing something and helping another person know it.

At Cambridge, where he studied economics from 2004 to 2007, he expected to continue into academic work. Teaching intervened. A professor asked him to help at a school; he went on to teach economics and mathematics. He later worked in McKinsey’s education practice in London, seeking a wider effect than he could have in a single classroom.

Each move increased the distance between him and an individual pupil. Eventually, he wanted a more direct connection again. His path also included product work at the accommodation startup onefinestay. By 2011, he was looking for a way to build something in education. The precise thing remained negotiable.

A weekend, a plane ticket, seven weeks of questions

Chaudhary and Don met at a startup weekend in Cambridge. Don brought computer science and experience building games; Chaudhary brought teaching and economics. They applied to Imagine K12, an education accelerator in California, and crossed the Atlantic. Their initial work included a tool for arranging pupils into groups. It did not become the foundation they needed.

Instead, they went looking for the problem. Over their first seven weeks in the Bay Area, they spoke with hundreds of teachers, contacted thousands more and cycled to schools. A startup can acquire a remarkable vocabulary for avoiding a customer. These two made themselves available for a conversation.

The practical difficulty that kept returning was classroom culture: helping a group of children settle, participate and treat one another well enough for teaching to happen. The first ClassDojo offered a simple way to recognise constructive behaviour. A teacher could give a child feedback immediately, using a tool designed for the classroom rather than a distant administrator.

In the first week, 80 teachers signed up. Four weeks later, the number was 12,000. Those figures mattered because teachers were telling other teachers. The founders had found a useful entry into a working day already crowded with demands. A colleague’s recommendation could carry the idea into the next classroom without a sales presentation.

The school day finds its way home

The more consequential change came from watching what teachers did next. Some were taking information from ClassDojo and sending it to parents themselves. They had found a use beyond the product’s original boundary. A classroom tool could also help a family see something worth talking about at the dinner table.

Chaudhary and Don followed that behaviour. Parent accounts, messaging, photographs and video brought more of the school day into view. The exchange became less dependent on a child remembering a detail or a parent waiting for a scheduled meeting. A teacher could share a small success while it was still small and fresh.

“It’s simple technology; it’s not rocket science,” Chaudhary said in 2015. There is a useful lack of ceremony in that sentence. The interesting work lay in making the exchange easy enough to happen. A photograph of a project gives a parent a better opening than the reliable, usually doomed question about how school was.

“It’s simple technology; it’s not rocket science.”

Sam Chaudhary, 2015

A conversation with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman helped sharpen the business thinking around that connection. Networks could be durable foundations for consumer companies. Here, the relationships already existed: teacher, child, parent. ClassDojo could become useful by bringing those people together, then earn the right to offer them more.

The bill could wait. Trust could not.

Chaudhary allowed years to pass before introducing the company’s first paid family offering. ClassDojo spent roughly seven years developing its network before beginning to monetise it. In an industry accustomed to selling contracts to institutions, he was building a business around people who chose to return.

The eventual offer, Beyond School, was an optional family subscription. The underlying classroom connection stayed free. Its successor, ClassDojo Plus, continues that distinction between the everyday service and extras a family can choose. The approach places a particular burden on the paid product: it has to offer something a parent wants enough to purchase.

There was also a decision about advertising. ClassDojo promised it would not build its business by targeting children with ads. Keeping that promise while financing a growing service required an alternative source of revenue. Optional family products gave the founders a way to pursue one without charging every teacher who wanted to use the app.

Patience is easier to admire after it works. While the company was still young, waiting meant running a business without a settled answer to a basic business question. Chaudhary had to hold a direction while leaving room for the actual product to change. A timetable alone could not supply that judgement.

A bookshelf with room for hobbits

His reading offers another route into that judgement. Roald Dahl’s autobiographies appealed to the boy from Wales, partly through their mischief and adventures away from home. Tolkien supplied an absorbing imagined world and a group pursuing a shared undertaking. Jessica Livingston’s Founders at Work helped make Silicon Valley feel like somewhere he and Don could go.

There is a practical shelf beside the adventurous one. He has described The Logic of Failure, about decisions in complex systems, as influential enough that new ClassDojo employees received a copy. Team of Teams helped shape his thinking about sharing information and giving people responsibility. The reading list suits someone whose work involves choosing how much direction to give and when to let other people lead.

His own university activities were less sedentary. At Magdalene College, his listed roles included captaining water polo, basketball and volleyball. These are useful details to set beside the chief executive title. Before the global education company, there was a student with an unusually crowded sports calendar.

People who knew the early company remember a more economical accessory. Karen Lien, who worked with the founders at Imagine K12, recalled Chaudhary wearing glasses with one arm missing. She also remembered how easy he was to talk to. The second detail helps explain the teacher conversations. The first suggests the business had not yet developed an eyewear budget.

What comes after the classroom connection?

In June 2025, EY named Chaudhary a Bay Area Entrepreneur Of The Year award winner. By the following year, the subjects he was discussing had expanded: tutoring, children’s games and AI-assisted reading. His June 2026 conversation with Phil Carter returned to how the network had grown and what could now be built upon it.

The products give those ambitions a concrete shape. Dojo Tutor offers private online tutoring. Dojo Islands lets children build spaces and play together. Dojo Sparks provides early reading activities, including phonics and sound blending. They ask ClassDojo to become useful in more parts of a child’s life than the messages that first brought a parent into the app.

ClassDojo now describes its reach as spanning 180 countries. That is a very different scale from the apartment. It also makes the original question harder: what do these particular children, teachers and parents need? A service that crosses countries cannot assume one classroom or one family speaks for the rest.

The need for those conversations has hardly disappeared. On 22 October 2026, ClassDojo and Project Tomorrow released research on school communication: 80% of district leaders believed families were satisfied, while 56% of families reported satisfaction themselves. The gap describes a familiar difficulty for anyone trying to serve other people. You can send the message, count the recipients and still need to ask how it landed.

Chaudhary’s stated ambition remains to give every child an education they love. The phrase has room for both the economist’s interest in scale and the teenage teacher’s experience of helping another pupil understand. The next chapter will be judged in those smaller encounters: a child practising a sound, a parent understanding a project, a teacher finding a little more room to teach.

For someone who once arrived in California without a finished answer, it is familiar work. There are more people in the conversation now. He still has reasons to listen.