The Quizlet Story
For lack of a professional writer working for Quizlet, here are some ramblings from me, Andrew Sutherland, creator of Quizlet, president of Quizlet LLC, web developer, and college student.
Hello.
Quizlet is how I occupy my free time and even some of my non-free time.
My mission for Quizlet is to make learning not a chore. For example, I know a lot of teachers assign vocabulary to students, but few students actually "absorb" words into their vocabularies after they take their test. Which kind of defeats the purpose, right? So Quizlet is my response - it aims to make learning fun, thus make learning effective. At the very least, it can help students do better on quizzes and tests even if they don't fully "absorb" their words.
I started Quizlet in October 2005, back when I was a mere 15-year-old (human years). I had just received a list of 111 French Animals to memorize from my magnanimous French teacher. I was puttering along with my dad with some call-and-response type quizzing. "Man, I love doing this" was NOT what I was thinking. So I put my thinking cap on, and the first line of code for Quizlet was written that night. Of course, that code was all deleted when I thought about what Quizlet would be. You really should plan first.
Quizlet is a lean, mean operation. For its first 420 days, it was the work of only myself. I did all the designing, programming, debugging, and perfecting. The project had no product managers, no marketers, and no venture capitalists. It was just me and my testers. Recently I've realized some things are out of my field of expertise. So there are a bunch of other people involved these days. In November 2009, Dave Margulius became CEO of Quizlet LLC after working with me on the site for 2 years, while I remain President and CTO. We now have an office in San Francisco where our small and growing team works on Quizlet every day. Together we're working on making Quizlet a great business that remains true to its roots.
Quizlet is free and will remain free to all users. We show advertising on our pages and also offer a premium service, Quizlet PLUS, which lets users upload images and browse ad-free.
Now that Quizlet is out of its infancy, it has millions of users who use it every month. I'm humbled that so many people have found Quizlet useful, and that's what continues to motivate me every day. I recently took a leave of absence from MIT to join the rest of the team in San Francisco.
Let's see, what haven't I covered? Ahh, the name Quizlet comes from Quizlette, the name of the "little" quizzes my French teacher gave in high school.