On the occasion of our portfolio company Quizlet‘s announcement of a new round of funding today, I thought I’d talk about what led us to Quizlet and why it is poised to be a game changer in education.
Quizlet is the world’s largest user generated learning platform. Founded in 2005 in founder Andrew Sutherland’s bedroom (he was 15 at the time), Quizlet has become the wikipedia of the education sector. Over the last twelve and a half years, users have posted over 200 million study sets to Quizlet. A study set is a list of things you want to learn. Think of what happens when flashcards meet the Internet and mobile devices. A study set can be French Adverbs or Heart Muscles or a Pre-Takeoff Flight Safety Checklist. You can study these things anytime and any place that you have a mobile phone on you.
That was all already in place when we invested in Quizlet in the fall of 2015. I wrote this post talking about Quizlet at the time.
What wasn’t there, and is now, is the machine learning team to make sense of all of these study sets. Take 200+ million study sets and 30+ million monthly users and you have a ton of data about what people are learning, how they are learning, and how their learning evolves over time on Quizlet. From that data will come new modes of learning on Quizlet and a lot of help figuring out what study sets are best to learn something.
The other place Quizlet plans to invest in is expanding Quizlet internationally. Over the last year, the Quizlet team has localized into 18 languages. Now, over 90% of the world’s population can use Quizlet. And because Quizlet is free to use for everyone, that means this user powered learning model can be used by students all over the world. Quizlet intends to aggressively expand its content base and user base internationally in the next few years.
Just because Quizlet is free for anyone to use doesn’t mean it is not a good business. Quizlet has two primary revenue streams right now, advertising and subscriptions, both of which are performing very well and there will be more revenue opportunities for Quizlet as they build out their content base and user base around the world. Quizlet was a profitable business when we invested in it back in 2015 and has remained at or near profitability even with the significant investment we have made in the business since then.
Quizlet is a great example of how you can build a very good business while expanding access to knowledge dramatically around the world. One does not have to come at the cost of the other if you architect your product and business model appropriately.
