Bringing Online Study Tools to Students Around the World: Q&A with Thompson Paine, Former Vice President of Operations at Quizlet
By: Golub Capital Social Impact Lab
Tags: Education, Quizlet, Social Impact, Expanding Access, Tech Toolkit

Millions of students around the world use Quizlet, the free online service providing study tools for subjects from Spanish and Chinese to history and music. Individual students create and share Quizlet’s content, designing, for instance, vocabulary flash cards or quizzes on spelling and punctuation. With so many users, San Francisco-based Quizlet has had educational and social impact in underserved and under-resourced areas both in the United States and internationally.

Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab spoke with Thompson Paine, Quizlet’s former vice president of operations. Paine is also a graduate of Stanford GSB and Stanford Law School.

How did Quizlet begin?

Quizlet was started by a 15-year-old high school student in Albany, California, in 2005. He was in a very difficult high school French class where he had to memorize a lot of vocabulary every week, so he built a computer program that would quiz him on vocabulary words. He called it “Quizlet” because that’s what the weekly quizzes were called in his French class. Other students loved it. As Quizlet’s popularity grew, he continued to invest his time and energy into it, all through high school and in college at MIT.

Why has Quizlet scaled so well?

Quizlet is a great example of product-market fit, where the founder was a user. He was building for the user and solving an immediate and real need — studying for tests — that most students face. User-generated content was and continues to be a very powerful growth driver for Quizlet. It’s very flexible and customizable to what the student or teacher needs, whether it be math, history, medicine, you name it. Quizlet now has hundreds of millions of sets of user-generated study content. Additionally, barriers to adoptions are very low. Quizlet’s core functionality is free, students do not need to create an account to use it, and you can use Quizlet as a supplemental tool to your current curriculum or other resources.

Quizlet taps into existing networks very well: teacher-to-teacher, teacher-to-student, student-to-student. Data early on suggested that 70 to 80 percent of teachers found out about Quizlet from another teacher. In other cases, a teacher creates the content, shares it with students, and it spreads among students. Or, a student is creating a study set for the exam on Friday. Other students see that and say, “Hey, can I study that too?” And they say, “Sure,” and send the Quizlet link.

How does Quizlet measure satisfaction and impact?

We survey teachers, parents, and students to understand the impact of Quizlet. We get feedback like, “That’s what helped me in school,” and, “My daughter just knows how to study now thanks to Quizlet.” And it’s amazing when you see a student who makes straight C’s suddenly making A’s, and how much more confidence they have in themselves. We have found that over 90 percent of students score higher on tests when they use Quizlet, and two out of three students say they have more confidence in school because of Quizlet.

What are some lessons that Quizlet has learned that are applicable to other entrepreneurs?

There is a tendency in Silicon Valley to treat the student like a computer program and think that if I can just build the perfect algorithm, then it’s going to help students learn, versus going in and really saying, “What is the problem here? What is the need that the student faces every day?”

Once or twice we have built a feature that leveraged technology to provide what we believed to be a higher-quality learning experience, only to find limited impact on our user base — in part because it was not clear students wanted or needed the new feature. And I think that’s a really interesting lesson for responding to user needs and what’s truly going to help them.

Another piece is the incremental nature of what Quizlet offered. Quizlet was always supplemental. Students could start using Quizlet on top of what they were doing, and that is a really good lesson for any consumer company, but also for a social impact company. When you want to improve your diet, you can clean out your kitchen and go all vegan, or you can just start with an apple a day. Quizlet is such that you can start using it once a month, once a week, or every day.

Is there a positive feedback loop between mission-driven employees, a healthy culture, and diversity?

I think you pretty much solve the majority of company problems at hiring. We think the best way to achieve our mission is to have the best talent, the best engineers, who reflect our diverse user base and believe in Quizlet’s mission. We were competing with Google, Uber, Facebook, and Airbnb for talent all the time. But we knew that a big part of our pitch was, “Hey, you have these great talents, you have these skills, here’s a chance to do some good with it.” We’d take them on a class visit and we’d say, “This is where your talents are really going to go to impacting people’s lives.” So everyone who came through our front door as a new hire believed in and was motivated by the mission. The mission definitely drove many aspects of the company culture.

From early on, Quizlet was ahead of where other tech companies were on diversity. Our first two product managers were female, and they were core leaders in building our culture and company. Our first VP of product was female. And that happened pretty organically. We likely indexed high in terms of socioeconomic diversity as well, compared to Silicon Valley peers. We certainly saw candidates who had come from less advantaged backgrounds who deeply valued the opportunities afforded to them by education and thus were motivated to work in education and provide similar opportunities for others.

Given economic and social inequality, how does Quizlet increase access?

One wave we rode was the expansion of broadband access in the United States. Without access to devices and connectivity, we wouldn’t have had the business or the impact we’ve had. As you look to international markets, particularly in the developing world, you do tend to attract the wealthier students first because they are often the first to have access to technology. That’s something we’ve been conscious of.

We tried to ensure that Quizlet was available to everyone, regardless of resources. Wi-Fi access is going to be worse at some schools and in some countries. So our platform has to perform in those environments. In every country, you measure performance every way you can to make sure that page load is going to be as fast as possible on mobile and on desktop. The other piece was design. A school might have an old projector that they bought 15 years ago, and it won’t be able to project designs with subtle color contrasts that look great on a high-end Apple monitor. You have to make sure that there’s a connection between the designer in the nice office in San Francisco and the actual end user.

More broadly, we felt that we needed Quizlet to be usable by every student. We needed to figure out how to be available for a student from a school that has bad Wi-Fi, or one with a hand-me-down Android phone from 2013.

Quizlet is free; the vast majority of our users are still using Quizlet for free. From a mission perspective, we wanted it to continue being a free product for as many students as possible. And then as you think about what features are paid, you want them to be features that don’t gate learning for the students with less financial resources, but there have to be enough paid features to build a sustainable business and fund the free usage. And that was a frequent topic of discussion when we thought about paid features.

If you had philanthropic funds for product development or marketing, but you would only get paid if you showed increased distribution or impact on low-income people, what would you do with those funds?

The first idea that comes to mind is international expansion. We tended to prioritize international markets with a higher financial return, among other factors. Growth-stage companies have limited resources. With philanthropic funds, we could have promoted adoption in more markets — for example, through distribution or content partnerships. I’d estimate over 75 percent of content is market-specific, and more for non-English-language markets, so to get a market going, we’d need to build up the initial content base so that early users discover interesting content. Also, in more underdeveloped markets, philanthropic dollars could have potentially funded products for flip phone users or offline desktop apps, so that users lacking smartphones or viable internet connections could use Quizlet.

More broadly, a double-bottom-line business always tries to align the business goals and the mission goals. I think the interesting challenge for a for-profit social impact business is that every year you figure out your product strategy and you have to make trade-offs. We consistently emphasized internally that every dollar we make goes back into our impact. But when you’re really figuring out, “I have this many engineers, this many designers, this many product people, there’s only so much we can build this year,” that’s where you have back and forth on building the next great learning tool versus building something that’s going to generate the revenue that makes possible that learning.

How was Quizlet funded?

We didn’t raise venture capital money until 2015, instead funding the company on revenue and staying lean and scrappy. Education can be a tough market due to unique monetization and regulatory challenges. There have been some great edtech companies that raised big rounds, which in turn can put undue pressure on them to focus on monetization at the expense of developing a successful education product and revenue model. When we did take on outside funding, we were deliberate and fortunate to find investors who believed in our mission and grasped the differentiations in the education space. This enabled Quizlet to build its robust business and revenue model it has today at the right pace.

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Learn more about the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Follow us @GSBsiLab.

Learn more about Thompson Paine.

With writing help from Louise Lee.