Our Investment in Quizlet

We are thrilled to announce our investment in Quizlet, which we co-led with Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures.

Quizlet is the leading product learners use when they really want to learn something on the web, iOS or Android. Despite not having any marketing or active distribution partnerships, 100m user generated study sets and its first billion study sessions are already in its back pocket. And yet, there is still so much more potential. We see huge growth opportunities in continuing to improve user experience, improving search and navigation and expanding Quizlet’s international footprint.

The Quizlet team has done an amazing job over the past ten years with limited resources; only this year did they become a team of 30. Quizlet has never raised venture capital and, therefore, lived within its limited cash envelope. What they accomplished in “bootstrap” mode creates an amazing platform for what comes next. We are proud to partner with the team, including founder Andrew Sutherland, to advance the cause. Since the story will be told so well in many other places, I’ll just summarize here that Andrew started the company as a high school sophomore to help him study French. He started aceing his tests, and his friends did too. He went on to MIT before eventually dropping out to work on Quizlet full-time. There is a great core of talent on the team — and we are all excited to be able to grow the team and get more done faster.

It is always a great asset to have a clear mission (the leading learning tool users turn to) and combine that opportunity to build a big and important company. Arguably, we have two other such companies (Acme Ticketing and NovoEd) and our experience demonstrates that a mission driven company can be a huge advantage in attracting, retaining and motivating great teams.

The market context is also very interesting as education technology seems to have survived the trough of disillusionment and is coming out the other side with some very exciting and impactful businesses. Learning clearly has many different elements and it is intriguing to see many of them prospering: 1) Coursera, Udacity, and Udemy on long form video courses largely around technical subjects, 2) Grovo in “micro-learning” (short form video) for digital skills, 3) Guidespark in compliance and regulatory training, and 4) NovoEd in social and collaborative learning for “soft skills” in business.

Our core belief is that Quizlet’s audience and growth demonstrates that learning foundational knowledge plays a critical role worldwide in helping learners across category and ages improve their skills, performance, and life opportunities.

We are thrilled to be part of the team for the journey ahead!

For more information, read the full press release here.