The Man Behind the Button
Picture 2010. Sameer Shariff - Princeton engineering degree, Stanford master's, five years deep inside Google's search quality machine - is on vacation in Argentina. He's studied Spanish for four-plus years. In classrooms. With textbooks. And now, standing in Buenos Aires, he can barely hold a conversation. Then something clicks. He starts talking to people. His Spanish takes off in weeks. That gap between what school teaches and what conversation actually does - that's the whole company.
When Shariff and his co-founder Kevin Law left their roles at blip.me, a small San Francisco startup with poor structure where they'd bonded as the only two engineers, they built the simplest possible product: one screen, one big red button in the middle. It said Practice English. Press it and you'd get Shariff or Kevin on the other end of a video call, because they were the tutors. They literally answered calls mid-coding session. This was Cambly.
The insight was directional: the world wasn't short on Spanish speakers or French speakers who wanted to learn English. There were 1.5 billion of them. The global hunger for English fluency wasn't a lifestyle preference - it was economic necessity. A factory worker in Brazil, a nurse in South Korea, a professional in Turkey - English access meant income access. Classroom English couldn't deliver it. Conversation could.
Anyone trying to learn English should have access to high quality, affordable, effective education.
- Sameer Shariff, Co-Founder & CEO, CamblyCambly joined Y Combinator in 2015. YC brought structure to the chaos, and a seed round followed. What came next was the defining chapter: the failed Series A. In 2017, when the fundraising circuit wasn't buying the English-learning thesis - too many previous language startups had flopped, and too many Silicon Valley investors didn't feel the problem in their bones - Shariff did something counterintuitive. He stopped trying to raise. He ran the business instead. Within four months, Cambly was cash-flow positive. Not because he had to cut corners, but because the model worked when you actually built for it.
The irony is old as fundraising itself: the moment Cambly no longer needed the money, the money arrived. Investors who had passed on the Series A were suddenly calling. Benchmark's Sarah Tavel came in. Bessemer's Jeremy Levine too, along with Monashees and a constellation of others. The Series B, $60 million raised in June 2022, completed a total funding story of $122 million - most of it still sitting untouched in the bank. Shariff is fond of pointing out that Cambly has more cash in the bank than it has ever raised.
What Shariff built alongside the financial story is something rarer: a localization operation so thorough that users in Seoul, Istanbul, and Sao Paulo each believed they were using a homegrown local product. Country managers on the ground. Language-specific marketing. The feel of a neighborhood brand with the reach of a global platform. Cambly has ranked #1 in app stores across 150 countries. It generates roughly $128.9 million in annual revenue with a team of around 3,100 people.
His roadmap isn't metrics-chasing. "I want to figure out mechanisms allowing long-term scaling rather than just hitting next milestone," he's said in interviews. For someone who once answered video calls himself between debugging sessions, that patience is the product. Building a startup is a long journey, he insists, and impactful companies take time. His favorite book - Brian Christian's "The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us about Being Alive" - tells you something about where his head is, long before AI became a startup requirement.
