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...