How GoGuardian Reached 18M Students With Vertical SaaS

Omer (00:10.000)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I took to Advait Shinde, the co founder and CEO of GoGuardian, a suite of products that provide K12 schools with content filtering and monitoring, classroom management software, and a suicide prevention tool.
In 2014, Advait and his two co founders built a Chrome extension to help schools with web filtering, but it seemed that no one was interested in their solution and their outreach emails didn't get much of a response either.
They were almost ready to give up on their idea.
Luckily, one of the co founders wasn't ready to give up just yet and kept contacting people despite the lack of interest and rejections.
Thanks to his persistence, they found some early users which helped them to start collecting valuable feedback from their target market.
Later, when the founders tried to raise money, they were rejected by investors.
They were told that they were too young and inexperienced and investors warned them that the K12 market didn't have money and that focusing on Chromebooks was completely the wrong strategy.
Fortunately, the founders didn't listen.
Today, GoGuardian is used by 18 million students, which is about a third of all K12 students in the U.S. the company now employs over 300 people and generates north of $50 million in annual recurring revenue.
In this interview we talk about how the founders overcame the rejection and lack of interest from their target customers and investors, why customers don't care about your features and what you need to focus on instead to grow sales.
Why Advite regrets raising $5 million in funding and his advice for founders who are looking to raise money, which might surprise you how a channel that the founders initially didn't even know existed now drives over 50% of their sales today.
And we talk about the fear and uncertainty Advite experienced as a first time CEO and some of the interesting lessons he's learned from that.
It's a great conversation, it's authentic and it's also a great story, so I hope you enjoy it.
Advait, welcome to the show.

Advait Shinde (02:49.210)
Good morning.
Great to be here.
Very excited.

Omer (02:52.410)
Do you have a quote, something that inspires or motivates you or just gets you out of bed that you can share with us?

Advait Shinde (02:58.490)
Yeah, my quote is Know thyself.
It actually comes from ancient Greece and it was one of like the the core maxims that was written in the temple at Delphi and I'm a huge fan of Greek philosophy and Stoic philosophy and even Eastern philosophy.
And this quote is super relevant to me because I have accumulated as anyone really a ton of cultural conditioning, societal pressure that manifests itself as like fear and insecurity and compulsion.
And I think what I've discovered is that a lot of that is almost entirely out of my conscious control.
And so the way that I've reacted to to situations or experiences is almost like it's a happening and unfolding outside of my desire to want to experience something in a particular way.
So for example, if I have like a intense, like heated discussion, I'll often react in like a fear based way, even though I would desire to not react in a fear based way.
And so I've spent an enormous amount of time understanding my own internal psychology and developing a self awareness around how I react in certain situations and what strategies I could put in place to essentially change my natural conditioned response to certain situations.
And over time I've just gotten like a very, very good handle around who I am and how I operate.
And I've actually in turn managed to change my default reaction to things as a result.
And so that I think has been a really fulfilling and extremely interesting experience.
And so I think Know Thyself as a maximum really just summarizes it.

Omer (04:41.110)
So I've got to say that is probably the deepest explanation that I've had a guest give me on a quote.
And my mind is like just spinning.
It's like we could spend an hour just talking about what you just said and trying to unpack that.
And obviously we've got other parts of your story to tell as well.
But I do want to ask you one question about that.
When you said, you know, my kind of natural response was maybe a fear based response and I've had to sort of work at that.
Give me one example of like what you've done to overcome that kind of response.

Advait Shinde (05:18.220)
Yeah, so, okay, look, running a business is super challenging and you're almost guaranteed to have very high stakes, intense situations nearly every day.
And for me, I didn't have very much experience running a business.
On the business side of things, I was extremely comfortable in the engineering side of the world because I have an engineering background.
But when it came to, for example, making a decision on hiring an exec, or making a decision on having to let a critical person go, or deciding how you want to structure your go to market, or managing a board, almost always I was approaching those situations without prior experience and therefore without an inherent confidence that my intuition on what the approach should be was actually solid.
And that is the perfect recipe for massive insecurity.
And so what I found myself experiencing is just like intense emotions of does the other person realize that I have no idea what I'm doing?
And do I actually have any inherent value?
Because I actually feel like I don't have any idea what I'm doing?
And because I was experiencing these every single day and the intensity of the emotion was just so high, it wasn't really a matter of dealing with it logically.
It was more a matter of if I keep pushing my brain and my body through these experiences every day, I'm going to implode, because that's just how intense it was.
And I was essentially just forced to reconcile with a different approach of understanding what's actually going on.
The experiences were so intense that it was almost like going through, like, trauma.
I hate to be hyperbolic about it, but that's kind of how it felt.
Like, where I didn't know what was happening in the moment.
And afterwards I had to almost introspect and unpack, like, what was said and how I reacted and how I felt.
And so what I did is I actually found a coach.
And this is not really like a traditional exec coach.
It's more of like a person who was really, really solid in the world of like, spirituality as well as like, mindfulness and emotional intelligence and self awareness.
And we would essentially just unpack each of these experiences together and get to the root of how I was experiencing, like, an experience negatively was actually rooted in some deeper insecurity that I hadn't really understood about myself, maybe from childhood or from societal pressure or from my parents or whatever.
And that addressing that at the root, as well as developing an awareness in the moment that, hey, I'm having this particular emotion and that it's going to color my thoughts thought patterns in this particular way.
But because I have an awareness of what's happening, I almost have this escape hatch that allows me to escape out of my default emotional state and almost think logically for just a moment, even if it's in this corner over here, and in some cases just override the emotional response and willfully push myself to like, an alternative response.
And I think that practice of developing an awareness of the conditioned response and, and superseding it with a desired response over time allowed me to really chip away at all of my conditioning to the point now where insecurity is maybe like 3% of my total emotional experience.
Whereas before it was like 95%.
So it's been this like guardrail to guardrail shift.
And I think having a coach as well as just like a genuine curiosity around how I work and an introspection practice, I think over the course of four or five years has been the thing that's really turned the tide.

Omer (08:56.400)
Well, I really appreciate you sharing that.
You know, it's sort of lowering the guard, it's being vulnerable.
But I think it shows a lot of authenticity and I think it's something that a lot of people struggle with but don't talk about.

Advait Shinde (09:11.230)
Yeah.
So yeah, I think the interesting thing is that everybody has insecurity.
Right.
It's a fundamental condition of being human.
And as soon as you come to realize that, then you're no longer judgmental about your own insecurity.
And then you're also interested in how other people are expressing their insecurity.
And what I found is there's some people that express it in a, in an introverted way, let's say, where they say less and they kind of recede into the corner and.
Whereas other people express insecurity in an extroverted way where they kind of overcompensate for their insecurity by being blusterous or maybe even like arrogant.
But ultimately you can start to see in literally every human the root of where people are fearful.
And you can, in understanding about yourself as well as understanding it in other people, you can start to experiment with communication and approaches of how you engage with people.
They either push them further into an insecure state or pull them out into like a safe state.
And as you become a master of that kind of communication, I think that that's the source of just a tremendous well of like leadership and inspiration and genuine human connection too, that I think very few business people in the business world actually talk about, which is a little bit strange because I think it's actually the source of a tremendous amount of power.

Omer (10:30.580)
So let's talk about GoGuardian.
For people who aren't familiar with the business, can you tell us what does the product do, who is it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

Advait Shinde (10:44.550)
Yeah, so to understand Goguardian, I think you need to understand that in K12, a major shift has basically happened over the last, let's say starting five or six years ago, where at that point the first batch of schools started to adopt low cost laptops paired with high speed Internet and they would give out these laptops to every single kid in exchange for the old school textbooks and the expectation was that every aspect of a learning experience, whether it's in class or homework at home, or even like exams, was intended to happen in the context of these devices.
So it's a huge shift.
So out with the paper worksheets and the paper textbooks and in with Google Docs and so on.
And if you go to a classroom today, especially obviously in this remote learning era of COVID every aspect of the educational experience, or nearly every aspect of it, is happening in these devices, right?
So kids are doing research on Wikipedia and typing up their essays on Google Docs and they have headphones and they're listening to YouTube videos that are instructive and they're using tools like Pear Deck to have back and forth engagements with the teacher.
And it looks very different than what the world looked like before.
And when we noticed that that shift was happening, we were really motivated by it, because as kids we were deeply inspired by the Internet and it was like the place where we really unleashed our curiosity.
But when we were in school and in class, it was like the most dry and frustrating experience.
And we were doing it kind of entirely begrudgingly.
And the gap between these two experiences of the Internet versus our experience of K12 was so large that created this angst in me that we need to be able to do better.
And what I think I found five, six years ago, when this first shift happened in K12, was a huge opportunity to reconcile this gap.
Meaning the same engaging experiences that we had online as kids would now be potentially possible for 55 million students in the country or even all the students globally.
And we wanted to play a part in that.
And so the broadest framing of goguardian is how do we enable the Internet to drive more engaging and effective educational experiences?
Because we have this philosophical belief that learning, if you maximize the potential of a learning opportunity, it stands to fundamentally shape that human and kind of inform who that person is and how they think about the world.
And learning is not this just like mechanical thing where you just accumulate a bunch of facts to be able to solve problems.
Like, yeah, there is that aspect of it, but there's this deeper opportunity that I think that exists.
And we think that the Internet, with all of its content and the real time nature of teachers being able to engage students much more interestingly and novelty wise, we think that all of that is going to be the way that we actually create these learning experiences.
And so that is the broadest framing.
What we specifically do is when schools started to adopt the Internet, they realized that it wasn't easy.
There was a potential that the Internet in an unfiltered way could cause a bunch of damage to young kids like you imagine giving us the Internet.
To a second grader who has no idea what the world is like or what the Internet is like.
As a parent or as an educator, there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty or fear.
And if there was any fear in educators minds about using technology in an educational way, then that would essentially be a non starter for realizing the fullest potential of all of this technology.
So we started off by building solutions that essentially addressed the fear responses in educators and parents minds and gave everybody a sense of confidence that the devices can be used safely and productively.
And so our two products in this domain are GoGuardian admin, which essentially focuses on the safety elements.
So giving the second grader the laptop, you can be entirely sure that nothing harmful is going to happen to them.
And then GoGuardian Teachers is our second product and it focuses more on the real time nature of learning, meaning teachers need to have visibility into what students are doing on their devices in class and need to have a level of control of being able to push Everybody to a YouTube video, for example, or turn off all the screens at once to be able to give instruction or chat with students that happen to be stuck and so on.
And so those two products are essentially, I think the very beginnings of goguardian where we feel that we're finally at a point where we've addressed the psychological concerns on behalf of educators to use technology in the classroom.
But really we're just getting started because the goal has always been how do we maximize the potential of educational experiences using digital learning and the Internet and so on.
So that's essentially kind of what we do.
Maybe that's a little bit abstract.
You can, you can tell me.

Omer (15:42.980)
Yeah.
So I mean if we boil it down, goguardian, I think I got this from your website somewhere as just like it provides things like analytics, web filtering, classroom management for schools.
Initially you started off on, on, on Chrome OS and focusing on, on that those devices and now GoGuardian works everywhere.
And I also noticed that there was a sort of an additional.
I don't know if it's a separate product, but this, this thing called Beacon, which was basically like pitched as a, as a suicide prevention tool.
So this is what sort of feels like started out as analytics or web filtering has grown into a whole bunch of different things that are needed in this environment as the world is changing and, and certainly over the last year is changing Much faster than many of us expected some of these things to happen.

Advait Shinde (16:35.860)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I would almost like flip it and say that our ambition was always to figure out how to drive engaging learning experiences.
But what we realized when we started to talk to educators is what they actually needed was an Internet filter that they were really confident in or a classroom management tool that they could use to actually drive useful and productive experiences in the classroom.
And then along the way, we discovered with our data that the volume of compromised student mental health that we were seeing on our platform was just so staggeringly large that we felt compelled to go out of our way to address it in the form of if we are noticing that a student is in need of help, meaning like searching for things like how much bleach do I need to drink in order to die?
Is like a real search that has happened from a young kid.

Omer (17:27.270)
Wow.

Advait Shinde (17:27.890)
Yeah.
I think for us at goguardian, we dropped everything and we said we need to solve this problem.
And so we built an escalation tool that once we realize that a student is in need in that way, that we bring in the school or we bring in the parent, or in some cases we bring in local police to mobilize extremely rapidly.
Because in several cases it's been literally like a moment to moment, life or death kind of thing that we were able to preempt.
And so that's where Beacon came from.
But all of these things are initial prerequisites that I would suggest that we're checking in order to get into this newer era of really what's possible with digital learning.
And I would suggest that we're just at the beginning of realizing what's possible.
It's a very exciting time.

Omer (18:15.180)
So let's go back to, I guess, 2014.
You had two co founders, Asa and Todd.
Neither of those guys are around now.
But when you started out, what was the concept of the mvp?
What did you guys decide you were going to build to start off with?
And then how did you go out and sort of validate that idea?

Advait Shinde (18:41.750)
Yeah.
So the original product was essentially a Chrome extension, which did Internet filtering in a different way, I guess, than Internet filtering was being done before.
Meaning it took into account the actual content on the page, the actual text that the student was looking at, to make a dynamic filtering decision instead of just pre classifying websites and domain names, which is how Internet filters work before.
And the approach to build it was essentially speaking with real IT administrators who are responsible for making sure devices are being used safely and production productively and Understanding their needs and iterating extremely rapidly.
I remember in the very beginning we would have a conversation with a customer in the morning.
We would code all evening and all night and get their requested functionality in production form and then have another call with them the next day showing them the actual feature that we built.
And they would just be blown away by the speed.
The really interesting thing about that is that K12 is very different from other verticals where schools don't really compete with each other, meaning the best practices that work in a particular school, administrators essentially talk about those with other peers in other districts.
And so we saw this like a tremendous amount of viral word of mouth growth where people would essentially find out about us through the grapevine.
And that was essentially the source of a lot of our growth in the early days.

Omer (20:17.270)
So when you found those first few customers where you were getting the feedback and iterating the product, how did you find those people?
How did you get their attention?
How did you get in front of them?

Advait Shinde (20:27.750)
Yeah, so I think this was really the source of my co founder Aza and just his ability to be persistent.
He's by far the most persistent person that I know in the world and where all of us had essentially just given up when we got a no or no response from people.
AZA would just keep emailing and keep calling and inevitably get on the phone with a lot of these customers and he would just find a way through.
And that was something that I learned a lot from him.
Just like the idea that when you think that the game is over is not even close to the line of when it is actually over and you can just kind of willfully keep pushing through, getting access to people when you think all hope is lost.
That's essentially what he did.
We were able to just with sheer brute force and persistence get access to so many customers.
One other thing that we noticed is that in K12 there's such a lack of good software.
I think that that's because there's relatively less capital in K12 maybe compared to other verticals like B2B SaaS where you can just raise ridiculous amounts of money.
And unfortunately, I think that that's like a misunderstood, like preconceived notion about what K12 is and perhaps like the lack of money in K12.
We could talk about that in just a second.
But what I'm trying to say is that because there was just a severe shortage of high quality software, as soon as we were able to put a good product in the hands of IT administrators, they just Loved it.
And they soaked it up and they talked about it nonstop.
And that, I think, is a really underrated thing.
Like, if you're able to genuinely solve a person's problem and a person who's ordinarily in severe need, meaning, like nobody's in need of a photo sharing app or social media app.
Right.
But people in K12 are in tremendous need.
And there's probably so many other pockets of the world and the economy or a similar kind of need exists.
And if you're able to genuinely solve these needs, people will love you for it.
And that's essentially what we did.

Omer (22:38.650)
So I want to talk about how much money there is in.
In K12 or how.
How much people think there is and some of the challenges that you face along the way.
Before we do that, let's give people a sense of the.
The size of the business.
So how many schools, how many students are using GoGuardian today?

Advait Shinde (23:02.080)
Yeah, so it's about 18 million students.
There's about 55 million students in America today.
So that represents about a third of all students in the country.

Omer (23:10.400)
Wow.

Advait Shinde (23:11.280)
And roughly a third of all schools and a third of all districts.

Omer (23:14.640)
And how big is the team?

Advait Shinde (23:16.960)
The team?
I think we're mid 300 now.
In that ballpark, it's tough to pin down the actual headcount number because it keeps growing.

Omer (23:27.390)
Yeah.
And I know you don't talk specifically about revenue, but give us a ballpark in terms of where you are.

Advait Shinde (23:34.270)
Yeah.
All I can say is we're well north of 50 million in revenue, let's say.

Omer (23:39.069)
Okay, awesome.
So that sets the context for where you are with the business and the general size of the business.
And now I want to go back to some of the challenges that you faced along the way.
And why not why?
But what some people told you this was maybe the wrong product or the wrong market, the wrong vertical to focus on.
So maybe let's.
Let's start with when you were raising VC money or trying to raise VC money.
I know this was one of the pushbacks that you got, that K12 doesn't have a lot of money.
Like if you were selling something to an enterprise business.
And then also the fact that you guys were only focusing on Chromebooks at the time also seemed to be an issue that, you know, you were going down the wrong direction.
So tell us a little bit about that and what you were hearing from VCs and other people about what you were doing wrong.

Advait Shinde (24:36.440)
Yeah, it was exactly that.
There was this, and I think continues to be this tremendous Bias against focusing on K12.
People's comments are there's no money in schools, the sales cycles are really long, people in the space are not really interested in improving, they're very kind of stodgy and so on.
And what we found in our personal experience in operating in K12 was really the exact opposite.
Where educators are really progressive, they're extremely earnest in terms of wanting to improve educational outcomes for students.
There's a tremendous amount of money in the space, meaning we spend as a Society over $12,000 per student per year, just across state and local and federal government in terms of educational spend.
And that is a lot of money, especially if you consider that there's over 55 million students.
So the total amount of money being spent in education is tremendous.
Now maybe the budgets are a lot more rigid and fixed compared to other verticals where there's a lot more risk that you can take and people are more interested in driving revenue and so on.
So there are certainly some valid criticisms.
But to paint a broad brush stroke on K12 and say that it's just fundamentally not a good vertical, I think is obviously wrong.
And you can look at our business and so many other K12 businesses that I think had emerged over the last five, six years that are growing pretty rapidly in the face of this digital learning transformation.

Omer (26:05.140)
And you're also told that as a team you were too inexperienced and too young to take on a problem like this.
So what kind of things were you hearing then?

Advait Shinde (26:17.040)
Yeah, so I mean it's just the classic stuff.
I think it's more of like a catch all piece of feedback as opposed to like a genuine criticism.
Like I think people were just averse to like the idea of a Chrome extension business in K12.
What the heck is that?
And five, six years ago maybe that was a valid perspective.
But what ended up happening over the last five, six years is that Chrome is now by far the most dominant platform.
It's like 80% of all devices and schools or Chromebooks or something like that.
And obviously we moved on from Chrome and now we support all platforms and things like that.
But I think the general feedback that we got was that investors just didn't understand K12.
They didn't understand digital learning, they didn't understand what would be the importance of this huge digital learning transformation that that was about to happen.
And therefore they just characterized our business as like not worth looking at.
And I look forward to looking back to all the VC rejected emails that we got.
5, 6, 5 told you so.

Omer (27:21.060)
All right, so I Want to dig into what's driven the growth.
I know you, you said that a big part of the early growth came from word of mouth.
When you're helping, you know, one school or school district that the word spreads and you're getting a lot of inbound interest.
But there's a lot more to this story.
It's not that easy just to go from 0 to 18 million students on your platform.
So walk us through what you guys did in those first few years to start driving this growth.

Advait Shinde (27:53.550)
Yeah, so I think the first critical prerequisite is to have really strong product market fit and even going beyond that, to create extremely high quality user experiences that drive emotional satisfaction on behalf of your users.
I think one of the things that really sets GoGuardian apart compared to a lot of the other K12 tools in the space is that we've just paid an inordinate amount of detail into user experience.
And we want the experience of a teacher and a student to be one of delight and excitement every time they use our products.
And if you can solve a user's problem critically well, and you can create that positive emotional experience every time they click on a button or start a session or whatever, that is going to be the source of your growth.
And no amount of tactical overcompensation in the form of marketing or growth hacks or things like that is going to be able to overcompensate for fundamental product market fit and delighted users.
And the inverse is also true, meaning if you're able to get that fit and user experience right, then that actually becomes the source of growth and you don't actually have to rely on a lot of tactics.
And so for us, we had that and we were in a place, like I suggested, where there was a lot of viral word of mouth and probably the first $20 million of business that we did was entirely inbound, meaning customers finding out about us from conferences or from the ether and coming to us saying, hey, I heard about voguardian, I'm really interested, can I try it?
And so we didn't have to do anything in terms of outbound or SEM or even.
We didn't even think about SEO.
People just found out about us.
And so there's something to be said, I think, truly, about starting with product and everything kind of emerging from there afterwards.

Omer (29:49.550)
How many other products or alternatives in the market do you think were around at that point?
What I'm trying to figure out is like, was there like such a lack in terms of a solution that you guys weren't having to do much and people were just coming to you, or were there a number of other options?
And the reason people were coming to you was because of specific things that you were doing with the product and solving a problem in a way that other people weren't.

Advait Shinde (30:24.380)
Yeah.
So if you think about it, Internet filtering has been around for decades.
And so when we built our first Internet filtering product, the reason it worked really well is because the old Internet filtering solutions were meant for enterprises.
They were extremely stodgy and clumsy to work with.
And they work fine for like the computer lab era where you use the computer for one hour a week.
But now, when the entirety of the learning experience was meant to happen in the context of these devices, a misconfigured or sucky Internet filter would be essentially like the end of the learning experience.
It would cause a lot of distraction and things wouldn't work.
And so when the big push from the progressive school districts happened, they call it one to one in K12, where the ratio of devices to students is one to one.
So when the first school started going one to one, they started to notice that all of their Internet filtering infrastructure was just not serving the one to one era.
And that's exactly where we came in.
And we just did things entirely differently.
We focused on ux, we focused on really understanding the problems that the educators were experiencing.
Meaning it's not about Internet filtering, like Internet filtering is a tactic.
It's about creating psychological confidence on behalf of the educator that when you hand a second grader device, it's going to be used safely and productively.
And that distinction is super important.
And obviously like the network level tools that have been around for 30, 40 years, we're not predicated on this idea of creating emotional confidence.
They're predicated on the idea of technical Internet packet filtering or whatever.
And so that difference is essentially what I'm trying to articulate.
I think it's a generalizable difference.
And if you're able to really tap into that, I think it's the source of really tremendous businesses.

Omer (32:17.770)
Yeah, I think that is a really important point.
And just as a personal experience, as a parent, I've gone through that experience myself.
And I mean, the solutions are a little different when you're talking about the home versus a school.
But when you have kids who are bringing in school laptops, which have one level of filtering and whatever, they're using their own devices at home, they have a mobile phone, they're browsing the Internet and it's as a parent and I'm a pretty tech savvy guy, but it's a nightmare trying to figure out how to control that, how to do it consistently.
Well, you think you've got on top of something there and then they figure out a different way to do something else on a different device.
And it's just like playing whack a molecule.
And honestly it got to, for me, it got to the point where it's like every time there's an issue that, you know, we have with the kids, like, oh my God, it's like we just found out that, you know, one of the kids was watching Netflix for five hours a day when they were supposed to be in front of the computer studying or something.
And it really, I can really feel it like, you know, this stomach churning kind of thing in terms of oh my God, I can't get on top of this.
And I often wonder if I feel like that.
And I kind of understand technology.
What does your average non technical parent have to deal with?
And it goes back to what you just said earlier.
It's not about filtering or screen time or the number of hours.
What you really need to get to is giving people peace of mind that your child is safe and that they're not excessively using the devices, I guess is what I'm coming to.
Right, so that is much more important than the features that this thing has.

Advait Shinde (34:08.670)
Yeah, that's exactly it.
The shift from features to understanding and empathizing with the emotional state of the users and pushing them into a better emotional state is the whole point of why you build products.

Omer (34:21.630)
So tell me a little bit about the product today just in terms, I mean we don't need to go into deep into the sort of the technology.
But how is it working today?
I mean, you explained sort of the Chrome extension and really you're looking at the contents of the page and figuring out whether it's, it's appropriate or not.
When you then start saying, okay, we're going to support all devices and now we're on Windows and whatever, it obviously becomes a little bit more complicated to do that.
So how is that working today?
Just in terms of like the architecture or the general design of the product?

Advait Shinde (35:02.260)
Yeah, so we essentially have clients that run on all of the various operating systems.
And abstractly we just look at the content, whether it's like an app that's running or a website that is running.
And our philosophy is that we looking through the eyes of the student, like what do they see?
They see text, they see images and they see videos.
And because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, where most of the content that we look at is actually user generated in real time, you can't pre classify the Internet.
So any semblance of like, categorization is just, it's an archaic way of thinking about filtering.
And so you have to dynamically classify content based on the actual pixels that the student is looking at.
And so we built a series of models that classify text and images and video.
And over time we've refined those to develop a basically precise understanding of everything from appropriateness to things like violence, to things like suicide and self harm.
And so that classification essentially informs what actions we take.
So do we want to block that content or do we want to notify a parent, or do we want to send a message to a student saying, hey, we noticed this might be inappropriate, do you want to keep doing it?
Or we essentially trust you to make good digital citizenship decisions.
So we have a slew of various actions that we can take and then separately from that, a lot of the ways that our teacher product works essentially revolves around the real time nature of learning, meaning you need to get the information or the state of the device, the student device, and put it in front of the teacher in a way that's actually useful, that helps them really understand what's actually going on in the student's mind.
And then you need to give an element of control in the teacher's hands to be able to influence the student learning experience in the form of pushing them in one direction, maybe opening up a tab or sending Everybody to a YouTube video, or chatting with a student that may be stuck, or starting a group video call.
We support all of these things and that aspects of what the product does essentially is all about like the real time back and forth information sharing.
So we have classification on one hand, we have actions that we can take on the back of that classification, and then we have real time back and forth like information sharing and commands.
And that abstractly summarizes essentially how our products work.

Omer (37:29.780)
Right.
So a traditional web filtering solution might say, you know, www domain.com is good or bad and we're going to filter that.
And you're sort of taking more of a search engine, like a Google type approach in terms of let's actually look at the page, let's actually see what's there in terms of text and images.
What does that infer, what's the intent, how do we classify that?
And then you're reaching your own decisions in terms of whether that piece of content is relevant or not.

Advait Shinde (38:03.070)
That's Right.
We've had students on our platform use facebook.com to collaborate on group projects.
And we've had also students on our platform use Facebook to buy guns.
And so the fact that they're on facebook.com tells you literally nothing about what they're actually doing.
And you need to go much deeper to really have a sense of confidence that the devices are being used safely.

Omer (38:25.430)
Now, you raised money a few years ago.
Can you talk about how much you've raised?
But I know also the more interesting part of that is not that number, but the fact that I don't think you spent any of it.
Right?

Advait Shinde (38:40.400)
Yeah.
So, yeah, most bizarre story we have here where we raised $5 million in a Series A in 2015, we sold a third of the business for it and we didn't spend a dollar of that 5 million.
And what we didn't realize at the time is that our business was actually tremendously cash flow positive.
And this is actually a huge benefit of building a K12 businesses.
And so for those of you who are entrepreneurs that are thinking about starting a business and are worried about K12, the biggest plus point is that school districts typically buy an annual or multi year increments and they're willing to pay all that money up front on day one, even though they have a three year contract, let's say.
And so you're booking these huge contracts and collecting the cash on day one.
And we essentially were cash flow positive extremely early on and, and maintain cash flow positivity through today.
So it's very dissimilar to maybe a traditional tech company which has to raise and raise and raise and use external capital to keep growing.
We've been cash flow positive and we didn't think critically about that and instead we just assumed that in order to build a real tech company, you need to bring on a vc and you're not a real tech company without being VC backed.
And so we sold a third of the company to have essentially this rubber stamp and that now is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
There's this huge mistake I guess that we made and I think that there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there that think about raising capital in a similar way.
They think that it's this like existential thing that you have to do and you're just not a real business without it.
And I think it's much more useful to think about capital as a thing that unblocks you in a particular domain, meaning there's some aspects of your business that are genuinely capital constrained.
Meaning if you have server costs or hiring needs and so on.
There's aspects of your business that are genuinely blocked there, but there's other aspects of your business that are not capital constrained, like for example, iterating on product and especially in the cloud era where there's almost like very little capital cost required to drive millions of users.
And so I think if you're an entrepreneur, you need to really think critically about where are you capital constrained, where are you not capital constrained?
Push the envelope on the non capital constrained parts of the business as far as you can and only raise money in the context of the capital constrained parts and only raise the amount that you actually need.
And we weren't thinking about the world in that way at all.
We just said we need VC money and once we get VC money we'll be on TechCrunch and we'll get this big article and then it's going to be the source of growth, which is just the entirely backwards way of thinking about it.

Omer (41:22.910)
Yeah, I love that.
I think a lot of people start out and with exactly that same assumption that we need money for whatever reason and maybe if they challenge themselves they could find ways around that.
And I think you're a great example of even if you raise money, you might look back at that and say, I wish I hadn't raised money.
So think carefully.
Now, the other thing about the GoGuardian business is that when we were talking earlier, you told me that 50% of your revenue today is coming from the channels, the resellers, and that this was something that was kind of completely off your radar sort of earlier in the sort of the business.
Can you just sort of set that up for us in terms of what actually means in terms of a reseller channel here?
And, and how did you discover that, that opportunity and sort of, how long did that take to sort of come about?

Advait Shinde (42:29.890)
Yeah, so I'll fully admit that when I started as an engineer, I had no semblance of understanding of what the channel was, let alone like the fact that it may or may not be like really valuable in our context.
So the channel here in K12, you can think about it this way.
When a school needs to buy a bunch of desks and a chalkboard and chalk and a bunch of Chromebooks, they don't want to go to five or six different vendors to buy all those things because they have to buy so much.
And they would much rather prefer to go through a single vendor that essentially resells all of those other items so that they can essentially have a seamless procurement process and they don't have to go through the legal hoops of signing MSAs with a bunch of different vendors and vetting them and so on.
And so one of the biggest such vendors in the space is called cdw.
They have like a government division called cdwg.
And the vast majority of all Chromebooks I think are actually bought through cdw.
And so in realizing this, we figured if a school is buying Chromebooks through cdw, they should also just buy goguardian at the same time.
And the CDW rep that's incentivized to drive more sales for the school is can essentially pitch goguardian while the school district is buying their devices.
And so we are super happy to give up margin to our channel partners because there's so many of them out there.
There's hundreds of reps out there that are selling all kinds of stuff to schools.
And to the extent that they're incentivized to also sell, goguardian has been a tremendous source of our success and our growth.
Huge fans of the channel.
And there's players like companies you've never really heard of, like Dell has a huge channel business in K12.
There's another company called SynX.
And as a traditional consumer or technologist, you don't know about this stuff.
And so I think the general learning here is that you need to, with utmost humility, put aside your preconceived notions about how a particular ecosystem works and look at it very critically, as if you're sort of an explorer landing on an alien planet trying to understand how everything works.
And once you understand who the players are and how they buy and how they think about budgets and how they think about trade offs between cost and value and how it all fits together, it's really only from that understanding that you can put together a solid go to market.
And it took us years and years and years of understanding and trial and error and iteration to get to this understanding.
But from this understanding we're able to have really high level of confidence that our go to market next year and the year after is going to work well.
And so I guess from the perspective of an entrepreneur that's thinking about the world in a purely technology first context, this is like a great approach.
You just need to really be inquisitive and curious and understand how money exchanges hands and how people think about all of the ecosystem of buying and so on.
And I think from that understanding you can be just way more effective at driving sales.

Omer (45:43.480)
So when you first sort of identify this Opportunity.
Hey, there's this.
We could be working with these resellers.
Did you get any pushback?
Did you get objections to this?
How hard was it to do that?
Kind of a biz dev deal?

Advait Shinde (45:56.600)
Yeah, so initially it was super hard because we were nobody.
Right.
And you kind of have this chicken and egg problem.
So one approach that we took, which I think is generalizable, is that we were so optimistic that in the long term that the channel was going to be critical to our success, that in the short term, we did the entire sales cycle on behalf of the channel.
So we found customers came to us, we ran the trials, we got them excited about the product.
When they were ready to buy, we called up our friends at CDW and we said, hey, this customer is ready to buy.
We just want to book them on your paper and you can take the commission.
And so these reps literally had to do no work.
And they were super excited, obviously, as a result, because they were just getting commissioned for very little effort.
And in turn, what they found was that customers were very passionate about GoGuardian, and when the renewal came later, they were excited about renewing.
And Obviously, in the SaaS era, like, the recurring revenue model is just phenomenal and tremendous.
And so pre incentivizing channel partners by doing all of the heavy lifting in front, essentially starts up the flywheel, which ends up being really, really valuable in the long term.
So that's an approach that I would strongly recommend in your vertical, where channel partners are essential.

Omer (47:18.950)
Yeah, that's awesome.
All right, we're going to have to wrap up.
So one thing I want to ask you before we get onto the lightning round is it's been quite a journey.
When we sort of look back at you sort of launching this business just six years ago to where you are today.
If you could go back to 2014 and give yourself any advice, what would that be?

Advait Shinde (47:43.640)
I think I would give myself the advice of when you're having a challenging experience, meaning if you're feeling uncomfortable or if you're feeling like the challenge level is high or the emotional intensity is high by default.
As humans, we have this tendency to avoid discomfort.
And instead, if you're able to override the tendency to avoid discomfort, instead kind of level up.
It's like square up to the challenge and kind of willfully push yourself through the experience.
What inevitably happens is massive amounts of growth and learning.
And so if you ever find yourself in an intense experience like this, like, you should have the awareness that, like, it's not just discomfort, like the Superficial discomfort that you're seeing is not just like, superficially negative.
Like, really, there is a learning that is going to happen as a result of this discomfort.
And therefore, you should get excited and willfully step up to the plate and kind of push through.
And if you truly internalize that, you almost become, like, addicted and excited about, like, challenge and discomfort and these, these opportunities because you know that there's.
There's really gold on the other end every single time.

Omer (48:59.800)
Yeah.
Yeah, I love that.
Yeah.
And from a personal experience, I mean, back in the days when, you know, I was.
I was at Microsoft, there were times when I found myself in situations which were, you know, high pressure, you know, maybe you're doing some sort of exec review or something.
And this was sort of this self awareness that I kind of started to develop, which was I realized I was always looking forward to how quickly I could get over this thing, how quickly can I get it to end?
And when I started to shift that a little bit and say, this is actually a growth opportunity and how can I grow from this?
This opportunity still was like, you know, it was still challenging, but it was a different mindset.
And I felt more.
More present through the process rather than just get through it, get through it.
So, yeah, good, great, great, great advice.
All right, let's get on to the lightning round.
I'm gonna ask you seven quick fire questions.
Just try to answer as quickly as you can.
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

Advait Shinde (50:09.860)
So I'm a huge fan of Ray Dalio, and he has one of his principles is that the fact that mistakes are inevitable and every single person makes them, but learning from these mistakes is an absolute requirement.
So that essentially lowers the guilt or judgment associated with making a mistake, but it increases the level of responsibility of doing the introspection afterwards to level up and learn.
And I think that that is, like, the most prescient, like, useful advice that I kind of live by every single day.

Omer (50:44.920)
Ray Dalio is quite a superstar.
I saw an email from him yesterday where he was basically giving away money that you can sign up for and give to whatever charity you want.
And I think he's just created this fund and.
Yeah, certainly a really interesting guy.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Advait Shinde (51:02.220)
I would recommend Waking up by Sam Harris.
As I talked about earlier, know thyself is a critical maximum.
And the process of introspection, or becoming more aware of your conscious experience, I think is a critical discipline in order to be able to know thyself and this book essentially provides a framework for how to understand your conscious experience in a way that's sort of devoid of all, let's say, like dogma or superstition.
And it's a very empirical recipe and approach for how to make progress in this domain.
I think it's been the single most impactful book that I've read.

Omer (51:41.170)
Wow.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

Advait Shinde (51:45.410)
I think thinking from first principles, meaning not inheriting the beliefs that are popular from society or investors or the world, and instead being able to understand how the world works through your own interpretation and then putting together ideas and approaches on the basis of your unique understanding.

Omer (52:03.890)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Advait Shinde (52:07.410)
I think it is sleeping.
I sleep a lot.
I sleep almost like eight and a half to nine hours a day.
And what I found is that the quality of my thinking as a result of sleeping, let's say an extra hour, is just so much higher compared to losing that hour that I would forego the actual hour of the day because the remaining hours are just that much more effective.
So I just go out of my way to sleep.

Omer (52:35.070)
Love it.
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Advait Shinde (52:40.590)
I'm a huge fan of this whole concept of the brain computer interface.
I think it's like probably one of the most critical problems that we need to solve, society speaking.
And if I had more time, that that is something that I would absolutely be working on.

Omer (52:57.890)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Advait Shinde (53:02.210)
I'm working on my private pilot's license now, so flying a bunch during the course of the week and it's fascinating.

Omer (53:11.010)
Nice.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Advait Shinde (53:15.760)
I'm a big chess player, so I play a ton of chess.
I'm just extremely passionate about learning in general across all domains.
And I really enjoy just helping a lot of other entrepreneurs who are earlier on in their business avoid a lot of the mistakes that I made.
So that that really gives me a lot of fulfillment and joy.

Omer (53:35.680)
Well, thank you so much for joining me today.
I think that you've shared a lot here and it's really hard to unpack six years of so much activity and growth and so on.
But there's been a lot of useful advice I think that's come through from here, that based on your own experience, that people can take away and figure out what does that mean to them or how can they think differently about what they're doing?
If people want to check out goguardian, they can go to goguardian.com and if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Advait Shinde (54:14.880)
Just send me an email.
Adviteauguardian.com awesome advice.

Omer (54:19.600)
Thank you for making the time, and I wish you the best of success.
And say hi to Zach for me as well.

Advait Shinde (54:29.120)
Sounds good.
Right on.
Thank you very much.

Omer (54:31.440)
Cheers.

Advait Shinde (54:32.240)
Take care of.