How Quizlet CEO Kurt Beidler grew Quizlet to $139M revenue and 1M customers in 2025.

hello everyone my guest today is matthew glotzbach he is the ceo of a company called quizlet he joined the company 12 years ago at google where he was most recently vp of product management at youtube before youtube he was on the founding team of google apps matthew studied mechanical engineering at cornell and grew up in fort wayne indiana matthew are you ready to take us to this off i'm ready nathan great to see you good to be with you all right i want to know what quizlet offered you to get you to give up the big gig at google how'd that work uh the biggest uh the biggest part of it was the opportunity to have a global impact on the way people learn uh so you know i loved my time at google you know had a lot of success first building google apps and then uh spent five years at youtube and doing some great things there but the opportunity at quizlet as the largest consumer learning platform was you know really the opportunity to fundamentally change the way people learn and uh it was just too good an offer to pass up so tell me more about that what give me an example of a customer or consumer that uses you guys pretty regularly sure so quizlet is now used by over uh half of us college students and two-thirds of u.s high school students so we're literally used by almost everybody who's uh who's learning something and the the magic and the beauty of quizlet is it's it's all user-generated content so whatever it is you're trying to learn you can use quizlet in conjunction with that so specific examples let's say you're a high school biology student studying for the ap biology test you can use quizlet to help you study uh let's say you're uh you know you've got a part-time job working at a grocery store you can use quizlet to learn all the vegetable codes at the uh at the at the checkout you know uh i was just talking to a uh uh somebody who graduated from west point and he said oh yeah i use quizlet all the time i said what before he said i've been learning farsi uh as as part of my training so you can literally use it for anything and so i just sign up to work the cashier's desk at target i want to memorize the code for bananas because i feel like everyone gets bananas and i hate opening the little booklet to do it every time like why would i go home that night log onto quizlet and like input these codes versus using my my healthy little flash card there on the cashier stand well the first thing is uh there's a high likelihood in that example that you don't have to go in and enter it because somebody already has so quizlet has amassed over 300 million study sets of content ranging from everything from the banana codes for target to uh zero one by the way there you go four zero one one uh organic is four zero one two uh all the way to you know organic chemistry or anatomy and physiology or or anything in between and so um number one you don't have to do the work somebody's probably already done it for you number two though is quizlet really helps you learn that information in the most effective and most efficient way possible so flashcards are a great model that's actually how cool it started out is basically digital flash cards but then we've grown from there where you know for instance you're not just learning bananas you're learning all 427 vegetable and fruit codes the target has and we're going to help you spend the time on the ones you need more time on we're going to bring back you know bananas you know that one pretty well obviously so once we know that you've mastered it we'll put it to the side and revisit it less often and we're also going to create different types of learning activities different types of games different question types and we'll do that automatically in the background to give you the most optimal path to learning that information yeah i was very close to virginia tech with the guys that created coofers and i remember them launching a flash card app to basically help people and they just they could never get uh like the network effect the velocity to kind of take off what have you done to make that work the flywheel get you spinning yeah so quizlet has been around for over a decade now actually going on 12 years and all of the growth has been really organic and viral and there's basically two things that have happened there one is word of mouth sharing so you know you me and 25 of our closest friends are sitting in the same lecture hall at university or sitting in the same you know high school class and let's say you're that diligent student you're you know you're studying for the test two weeks ahead of time i'm that kind of slacker crammer that that goes the night before your quizlet content is perfect for me it's exactly why i need to study because we're taking the same test can i sell it to you but i was thinking i would take the notes and then sell the notes can i sell those to you not yet but that's a great idea um so so you get that viral word of mouth spread in fact we hear all the time especially in kind of elementary school middle school high school classrooms that teachers will oftentimes hear about quizlet from one of their students and then share that with the rest of the class they'll say oh you know sally has created the quizlet set for next week's quiz here's a link to it so everybody can study it's equivalent to like bottoms up in enterprise sales that's exactly right um and then the other effect that we have is we've amassed this really rich high quality set of spam free educational content so you know when you do a search for that content you're you know you're that back to me the night before the test going i need to learn that ap biology stuff i do a search on google and quizlet shows up number one or number two and i click through and wow that's exactly what i need to study and i dive right in so a combination of that viral word of mouth sharing as well as seo has really driven us to uh to the point that we're at now okay so this is all great but we haven't talked about one big thing and that office behind you is not free in san francisco how do you make money so it's a freemium business model so the vast majority of our users use the product for free and have a great product experience we have an ads model to help offset the costs of that for the free users and then we have subscription products that are very low price subscriptions for both students and teachers that upgrade you into more features so uh our quizlet plus product which is our most popular student product is twenty dollars a year that's a year not a month so less than two dollars a month and with that you get more advanced features obviously you get ads free you get offline on our mobile apps but you also get some advanced creation features that allow you to create and customize the content a little bit more towards you and then we also have a teacher offering that's 35 a year that includes all of those features and gives the teachers some additional uh statistics tracking and allows them to organize their students into classes and that sort of thing okay now you joined so the company founded into 12 years ago you said i think in 2006 you joined you said two years ago that's correct yeah i joined in early 2016. okay and what have you guys scaled to in terms of total kind of students and teachers using you on a paid account i think you said 5 million sorry you said half of college students yeah so we're now over 30 million users using us actively studying on the platform on a monthly basis and that number is growing rapidly you know 50 plus year on year and we're seeing a lot of expansion internationally so quizlet's been around the u.s and has been used throughout the u.s and grown virally and just you know really when i started on we started pushing for international expansion so we've localized the product into 19 different languages at this point and now making it available globally and so we're seeing triple digit growth outside the u.s you know for example last year in brazil we saw 350 year-on-year growth as we made the product available in portuguese and started doing some marketing there so we're really seeing pretty rapid user adoption yeah and then look back in 2009 there are many reports my research team is so good but dave was talking about hey look we're in the millions of revenue at this point i mean can you generally sense uh can you give me a general sense of where you are now in terms of total customers using the platform so we don't disclose uh we don't disclose our financials obviously as a private company but what i can tell you is we're focused on growing both the free user base and the revenue side equally you know we i very much believe in building a a strong healthy business that's financially viable and sustainable and so we're doing really well on that front we're seeing triple digit year-over-year revenue growth okay so just be clear you're doing north of 100 year over year growth in terms of revenue that's correct okay great and then a funding history how much have you raised to date so we've raised 32 million uh in venture funding to date we did our first round of funding in the fall of 2015 and that was led by costa nova and union square ventures uh we raised 12 million and then at the beginning of this year in january of 2018 uh we raised another 20 million that was led by icon ventures and and and why why i mean i know once you're on the you're either kind of stay bootstrapped and do bootstrap but once you're on the train you have to kind of keep raising so maybe why is a bad question but why raise another 20 million well so it was really to go after the opportunity right the opportunity is so massive and we've we've amassed this very large user base this massive content base which are two key assets but then third is we have more study data on how real people are studying and learning than anyone else on the planet right we do over a billion learning transactions per week and so a learning transaction is i ask you a question you give quizlet asks you a question you give quizlet an answer and then quizlet gives you feedback so we've got literally billions and billions of data points on how people learn what the most effective and efficient paths are and so where we're really directing our efforts going forward and the reason we we push to raise some additional funding to scale the efforts obviously the international expansion that i talked about but then also really building up our data science and machine learning capabilities to create uh this ai based tutor and so what we're the longer term vision of what we're doing is taking all of that data in this great user platform and building an ai based tutor that will help anyone learn anything what's your team size today so we're a little over 100 people uh here in mostly here in sf with a few a few folks scattered scattered around and that's been growing pretty significantly when i started the company was right around 30 or so people uh so we've more than tripled the team in the last two years triple the expenses that means triple the growth hopefully too right absolutely i want to know something because i remember again when i was close to the cooper got cooper's guys they always have this issue usually when you have a success metric you want that to drive wallet expansion in a user not the you know the finality of them using your product uh when i'm studying for my ap biology test and i study you and i pass and then i graduate and move on right or go get a job et cetera you then essentially have to convince me that you've got content for me and whatever that job is that i can learn etc or i potentially churn so tell me about your current churn and how you think about these open hooks to drive me into the next round of learning sure um you know and this is where i think we've got a lot of tailwind because the way the world is going you know we used to be in a world where you went to school you know well frankly you know our parents generation you went to school for 12 years you had a high school diploma you were set that was a great middle class job you were set for the rest of your your life you might do some on-the-job training here and there you know our generation it was four-year college or graduate school right so you go to school you get a diploma now you're good to go my kids generation you know they're i've two daughters 11 and 13 and i tell them yeah you've got it harder than i do because we're moving into a world where learning is becoming both unbundled and continuous so you're constantly learning right that four-year degree probably serves you for the next year or two and you've got to be continuously learning new skills is this reflecting itself though in your number i'm curious if it actually reflects itself in your numbers though it absolutely is you know we've been around long enough now that we can see cohorts and we can look at users who you know signed up and first started using quizlet in sixth grade and then when they graduate graduated into high school they took us with them and then they use quizlet all through high school and they go to they go to college they take it with them they go to graduate school they take it with them they go to the professional world whether that be you know more white-collar type professions you know doctors lawyers nurses etc or more you know vocational or blue-collar type professions so we're actually watching people as they age up through quizlet continue to take quizlet along and i think that's the that's a big differentiator between us and what i would call most ed tech companies so i differentiate quizlet's a consumer learning company not an ed tech company so and sweet matthew's right i'm going to cut you off but if we just look at the student cohort on the platform or teachers for a second just the student cohort i mean what is annual logo churn or annual student churn in that cohort well it's so it's hard to it's hard to pin that number i actually don't have that number uh kind of off the top of my head um because the user base is so vast and so broad like on an annual basis you know we believe that the overall turn in terms of you use this this year at least once or twice and you don't use this again next year or last year this year is very very low but i actually don't have that number off the top of my head okay that's interesting so you you don't know that the turn or retention data off the top of your head it's you don't you don't focus on it at all we we look at it on a much more granular basis so we look at uh you know our dow over mao obviously we look at how frequently you're using us on a regular basis what that engagement looks like okay and but daily active users monthly active users those are kind of code for you know freemium what i guess what i'm saying is maybe you've got good confidence in what your conversion rate is at certain activation metrics on your free users into paid so you just ignore paid and just trust it'll happen if you focus on monthly active and daily active no no not at all obviously we look at paid a lot uh you know one of the first things i did when i joined uh the company was moved from uh the the subscription model actually wasn't a subscription it was a one-time purchase so we put a recurrence in place obviously um you know and saw and saw uh renewal rates shoot up uh through the roof from what to what quantify that yeah we don't sorry we don't disclose the specifics of the financials but i can just say it was a it was a very large jump okay it's hard it's hard for me to say guys listen listen what he's saying though if we can't quantify this right no no i i hear you but uh my advice to uh to your to your viewers to your listeners would be you definitely need to know those metrics you need to look at your uh your you know at every step in the funnel so we look at uh a free user who comes to us in a logged out state so a lot of users first discover us as i said through seo or through some a friend sharing a link and we actually give them a great preview experience logged out then we look at conversion to logged in so now we know who you are then we look at activation and what we call activation is okay you've used the product once or you've used this to study one thing how do we become part of your regular study habits and then we look at active from an active user to a paid user and we don't actually try to you know i think an important point is understanding your cohorts of users we don't try to monetize elementary school kids like my goal isn't to try to get twenty dollars out of of course greater um but we look at them through that life cycle and say okay as we as you progress with us you know when you're moving into from your sophomore year in high school and your junior year of high school that's a really big turning point when you go to college you just raise the stakes right when you're in graduate school it's a whole different ballgame than when you're in undergrad so we look at the life cycle and we understand each of those different types of users and take different tactics in terms of monetization when do you think you pass called a million paid students and teachers on the platform when when did we do do you or is that like an upcoming goal um i again probably don't can't uh can't disclose the financials what's your so i'm gonna assume based off what you just said you're past a million at this point i mean what is that when you guys look at the paid engine you guys are building what i know you're going to say it's activation it's just focus on a good product but what's the goal when you have board meetings you're saying hey is it a financial goal is it just a quantity of user goal is it expand our poo goal what's the kind of revenue side goal we we have three goals that we look at and we treat them you know it's a it's a three-legged stool that you need to keep in balance so there's obviously a revenue goal because that's around sustainability and and drives our growth right the way in terms of the growth of the company um i always tell my team that you know we need to be a profitable sustainable business so that we can reinvest in the mission and really fundamentally change global learning you're not going to throw them out today are you pardon me you're not profitable today i'd be shocked because you just raised so much money uh again don't uh we don't disclose the financials okay um so we've got a revenue goal just be clear hold on there's you couldn't point out a company in history i don't think would i just raise 20 million dollars and and they just sit on it and do nothing with it i mean you take dilution for that you better be spending it which means you're not going to be not profitable sure i know some i know some that have really um so we've got a revenue goal we've got a overall total active user goal so we look at 28 day active users which is basically have you been active in the last four weeks so we look at that as an overall growth metric on how many people are we impacting and then as we talked earlier we look at an engagement goal of like how frequently are you using it so it's great if you come and use us once but if you use us twice in a month that's even better and if you use us you know twice a week that's even better and we know we know how those goals interrelate so we understand pretty well how as you become more active again depending on which user cohort you're in what your likelihood to buy is and we also know you know our free users make us money as well uh off of ads so we actually have a pretty good understanding of the value of a free user based on their activity yep makes good sense let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what is your favorite business book so i read a lot of business books but given the field i'm in i also read a lot of education books which is my business uh and so one of my favorites that i read recently was a book called how we learn the surprising truth about when where and why it happens it's by a new york times author named benedict carey and i think it's an excellent survey course on on how people learned i'd highly recommend it number two matthew is there a ceo you're following or studying right now there's not really one in particular my my view is i try to stay up to speed on kind of everything that's going on and i'm very much a believer on take take the back tonight i can learn a lot from it i i kind of try and take more of the survey course of a lot of different things now i will say a good personal friend of mine is the ceo of a company called sendgrid which recently went public his name is samir delakia i have a tremendous amount of respect for him and so uh he's somebody i i follow uh closely as a friend and seek advice from number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business uh i'd say uh g suite uh formerly known as google apps now like i said a little bias i fully admit the bias but uh it's a set of products that i use literally continuously both in my professional and personal life and can't imagine a world without it so number four how many hours i sleep to eat every night uh the goal is seven uh but uh you know too often it's closer to six but the target is seven and what's your situation married single kiddos i know you've got two kiddos married with uh with two kids yeah yeah and how old are you uh well how old are we 43 43 okay last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew know i was thinking about this um recently because i asked somebody else uh are you familiar with the the the concept of growth mindset by carol dweck i haven't studied carol no uh so there's a there's a great uh psychologist based off stanford named carol dweck she wrote a book probably about 10 years ago called growth mindset and it's all about the the notion of of understanding how we master things and that you know your your abilities and your skills aren't fixed they're actually malleable and that struggle you know struggle and challenge is actually that path to mastery and i wish i'd love to say that i knew that all along and i've always been that way but i read that book probably right right about when it came out about 10 years ago and it really was game changing for me changed my perspective on life i wish i wish i would have i wish it would have been out when i was 20. guys there you have it always have a growth mindset the struggle is what helps push that stuff forward all your skills are very malleable and you can improve them from matthew again join quizlet back two years ago the company was created in 2006 has since grown to helping over 30 million students on a monthly active basis that students and teachers really learn educate themselves even folks that are out of the field or sorry they're in the field already out of school helping them they've got folks paying students paying uh call it 20 bucks a year teachers paying 35 bucks a year sounds like they've passed about well north of a million customers paying 100 over 100 year-over-year growth a team of 100 people in san francisco and about 32 million dollars raised matthew thank you so much for taking us to the top thanks so much nathan