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Advait Shinde, co-founder and former CEO of an education software company Go Guardianhas spent a decade building a business optimizing digital learning experiences at scale and has grown its valuation to $1 billion.
It started in 2014 when Shinde and co-founders Aza Steele and R. Todd McKee “accidentally timed the market perfectly,” Shinde says. entrepreneurWhile investors gave “fairly disappointing” feedback about the size of the market and the challenges that come with it, the three companies bet big on the influx of devices into classrooms, including Chromebooks, and it paid off.
GoGuardian closed its Series A round in 2015, but didn’t spend any money because school districts paid for multi-year contracts up front, making the model “very cash-generating.”
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Shinde became CEO of GoGuardian in November 2017 and has led the company through a period of impressive growth. Under Shinde’s leadership, GoGuardian acquired edtech companies Pear Deck, Edulastic and TutorMe, launched Pear Practice, a gamified learning product, and secured investment that brought the company to unicorn status.
“The challenges of running a company at this size are completely different from the challenges I faced when it was one-tenth the size.”
However, earlier this year, Shinde decided to step down as CEO of GoGuardian.
“The challenges of running a company at this scale are very different from the challenges of running a company 10 times smaller, or even 100 times smaller,” Shinde says.
“After a lot of soul searching, I realized that what I’m most excited about, and probably what I’m best at, has a lot to do with early stage product development and working in small teams.”
According to Shinde, GoGuardian needed a leader who could help the company continue to grow at its current size and beyond. So after several discussions with the board, they decided that the ideal candidate would be someone who could fit into GoGuardian’s unique culture and have the ability to solve problems. Based on that criteria, they chose Rich Preece, former COO of legal services company LegalZoom.
Image courtesy of GoGuardian. Rich Preece.
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“Do you have experience that you can add unique value to?“
Prior to LegalZoom, Preece spent 17 years at Intuit, where he saw TurboTax and QuickBooks scale, but he had no experience in education technology and acknowledged that taking on the role of CEO of GoGuardian “wouldn’t have been the most natural choice.” Still, Preece kept an open mind and considered several options before ultimately deciding to take on the role.
“one, Am I passionate about space and its mission?“The second thing we look at is the quality of the product,” Preece explains. “The third thing we look at is the product quality.” Do you have experience that you can add unique value to?“
Preece said Shinde’s enthusiasm was contagious from the moment they first spoke.
Plus, as the father of a 12-year-old, Preece experienced firsthand “one of the fundamental problems in education in the U.S. and around the world”: teachers with a few dozen students “inevitably set middle-class standards.”
“If you’re in the top third, you’re not necessarily maximizing your acceleration,” he said. “GoGuardian’s product [unlock] Customization and personalization for educators [and] Educators can lift up the bottom third of students, catch up with the middle third, and accelerate the top third beyond the level they should be achieving.”
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Finally, Preece thought his expertise would be useful for GoGuardian’s future.
“I’ve been fortunate to gain knowledge about how companies scale, how they deliver operational rigor to those great products, and how that operational rigor benefits both employees and customers as they scale,” Preece says.
“[We] We will work very closely together on the future strategy and overall corporate structure.”
Preece became CEO in April, and Shinde became executive chairman. This is Preece’s first time as CEO of a company, and he said people warned him that having a founder involved could make for an interesting and challenging relationship. But Preece and Shinde took steps to ensure their work together would be smooth sailing.
From the beginning, Shinde and Preece have been open and aligned about their roles. “He and I work very closely together on the forward-looking strategy and overall structure of the company,” Preece says. “But in the day-to-day work, Advite remains very engaged in the engineering community and is an innovator and leader.”
Despite their increasingly remote work relationship, the pair made it a point to meet in person multiple times. Over one dinner, they brainstormed situations where they might disagree and how they could work through their differences. “This is a relationship that we want to build for a long time to come,” Preece explains. “So doing that work up front and taking the extra time and care and attention has definitely paid off.”
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“Anticipate where there may be differences in approaches, values and principles.”
Shinde agrees and advises leaders going through similar transitions to do the same.
“Be fully aware of how high the risks are and how important emotional intelligence is going to be in navigating the journey ahead,” Shinde says, “and anticipate where there might be differences in approaches, values and principles, and identify where you are aligned and where you aren’t aligned before that happens. We did a lot of that work up front.”