He could not order lunch in English when he landed in America at sixteen. Now he is building the machine that pairs every learner with the right teacher.
Ask most people what is broken about education and they will point at price, or curriculum, or screens. Scott Lee points somewhere quieter: the match. The exact, often invisible chemistry between a student and the person teaching them. Gooroo, the New York company he founded in 2015 and still runs as CEO, is a long bet that getting that match right is the whole game.
Today Gooroo runs as an AI-driven learning platform. Tutor matching sits at the core, wrapped in online courses, interactive clubs, screen sharing and progress tracking, all under one roof. The pitch Lee likes to use is blunt and a little cheeky: the Netflix of education. One place, personalized, that learns what you need and serves it up. The company says it now reaches thousands of students around the world.
The mechanism underneath is a matching algorithm. Its single job is to pair a student with the tutor most likely to help them with a specific subject, not the most famous tutor, not the cheapest, the right one. It is a deceptively simple idea that happens to be expensive and hard to build, which is roughly the definition of a good startup.
“The right tutor beats the famous tutor. The algorithm's only job is to find the right one.”
Gooroo did not start this polished. The first version was closer to an “Uber for tutors”: open the app, search by subject, location, availability and rating, and book someone vetted and background-checked. Many of those early tutors were Columbia alumni, people from Lee's own orbit. The model kept costs down by taking a smaller cut than the industry standard. From there it grew into the full platform it is now.
Leadership wasn't about holding a position of power. It was about building trust, having a clear vision, and rallying a team.— Scott Lee, on what the army taught him
Lee was born in Seoul. At sixteen his family moved to the United States, and he stepped off the plane without a word of English. The detail he keeps coming back to is not the hardship, it is who pulled him through: tutors and mentors. People who sat with him, explained things twice, believed he would get there. That is not a marketing origin story bolted on later. It is the reason the company exists. He experienced firsthand what a good teacher unlocks, and he built a business around making that less of an accident of geography or income.
He did not wait long to pay it forward. Still in high school, he founded PeerTutor, a nonprofit that connected underserved children with volunteer English tutors. It grew to something like 6,000 students and tutors, an early sign that the matching idea was less a product feature and more a lifelong obsession.
Then came Columbia, where he studied operations research and engineering management at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, graduating in 2014. Engineering is a useful lens here: operations research is, at its heart, the math of allocating scarce resources well. Good tutors are scarce. Students who need them are not. You can see the whole company hiding inside his major.
Midway through college he did something most of his classmates did not have to: he paused, flew home, and served two years in the South Korean military as a sergeant and squad leader. He has called it his real leadership education. He handled sensitive duties, trained on freezing mountaintops, took cold showers, slept little, and learned that authority on paper means nothing if the people around you do not trust you. He organized team-building, even helped lead a church rebuilding effort, all without much formal power. The lesson stuck.
After graduation he went where a sharp engineering grad goes: finance. He became an analyst in JP Morgan Chase's Chief Investment Office, working in treasury, learning how big money actually moves. It was stable, prestigious, and not the thing he wanted to do with his one wild life. In 2015 he left to build Gooroo. He also ran a side venture along the way, Mud Cafe, a niche online fashion retailer, because founders rarely do exactly one thing at a time.
Operations research is the math of scarce resources. Great tutors are scarce. Students are not. The whole company was hiding inside his college major.
Gooroo began as on-demand tutor booking. It grew into a subscription-style platform of courses, clubs and matching. Same mission, bigger surface area.
By keeping a smaller commission than the industry norm, Gooroo aimed to make quality tutoring affordable instead of a luxury good.
Every tutor background-checked and personally vetted. Many early ones were Columbia alumni from Lee's own network.
Partnered with the NYC Department of Education for middle school instruction in the Bronx, plus programming with senior centers.
A short film on why Lee built Gooroo, and the version of education he is chasing.
Ask people around Gooroo how Lee runs the place and the same words surface: humble, level-headed, hands-on. He does the unglamorous parts himself, from distribution to the investor pitch, and he keeps the team close with a steady rhythm of coffees and lunches. The army's lesson about trust over title clearly stuck.
There is a soft spot underneath the operator. He sponsors six children internationally through Compassion International. In Gooroo's early days, every completed tutoring session helped put a book in the hands of a child in Africa, through a partnership with Books for Africa. Teaching, for him, is not a vertical. It is a habit.
Lee's ambition is unfashionably plain: make great, personalized education accessible and affordable for everyone. One AI-powered platform that matches each learner with the right tutor, the right course, and the right community, for a lifetime of learning rather than a single cram session. He is not trying to replace teachers. He is trying to make sure the kid who lands somewhere new, unable to order lunch, gets matched with the one who will pull him through. Because he was that kid.
Send the Gooroo origin story onward.
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