College Dropout Series: The Whiz at Quizlet

This is the second of a two-part series on the lives of two entrepreneurial college dropouts who graduated from . Miss Monday's installment? .

Andrew Sutherland dropped out of MIT earlier this year to be the chief technology officer of Quizlet, the company he created when he was a 15-year-old sophomore in 2005.

Quizlet is a free digital flashcard website. Students can create flashcards on Quizlet and use them to study SAT vocabulary, a foreign language or any subject that requires memorization.

Suzanne Becker, an Albany High sophomore, said before using Quizlet, she reviewed her Spanish vocabulary by covering up the English translation in her text book with a piece of paper. However, she would sometimes cheat herself by reading the English translation through the paper.

Quizlet solved her problem.

“There is no way to look through the paper with a computer,” said Becker.

During the last school year, Quizlet received 3.5 million visitors per month. If past trends hold, Quizlet will double its visitors in the upcoming school year.

I spoke with Sutherland, who looks like a typical Silicon Valley computer programmer, with his trendy black glasses and black flip-flops, at his office in San Francisco to hear Quizlet’s Albany High origins.

FROM GAMER TO PROGRAMMER

Sutherland, 21, started computer programming as an  student after his father, Howard Sutherland, noticed he was playing a lot of computer games.

“If you spent all the time you put into computer games into programming, you would probably make something,” Howard said he told his son.

Sutherland said he followed his dad’s advice. He learned computer programming by reading an HTML handbook his dad bought him and asking questions on Internet forums. By high school, he had designed business websites for his friends’ parents and invented several plug-ins for Wordpress, a popular blogging website.

FIXING A PROBLEM

One night in high school, Sutherland said he was studying a French vocabulary quiz with flashcards when he noticed a significant flaw with his approach.

“It’s very easy to lie to yourself and say, ‘Oh, I know that,’ and put the flashcard in the I-knew-it pile,” said Sutherland.

Later that night, he coded Quizlet with the goal of creating an objective testing system.

WIKI HIGH

The next day, Sutherland shared Quizlet with his classmates and received widespread support.

“We would all be up on Quizlet, uploading our words together and studying them together. It made studying vocabulary from a solo thing to a group thing,” said Brian Aller, a former classmate of Sutherland's and a UCLA student.

Nikki Muench, another former classmate, and a current UC Santa Cruz student, said their French class became a forum where Sutherland could test Quizlet.  

“When Quizlet didn’t work right, or they had an idea to improve it, they would say, ‘Hey, you should add this,’ and that was what I would do,” said Sutherland of his classmates.

For the next 420 days, Sutherland worked on Quizlet at home after school. In 2007, he launched Quizlet.com.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Quizlet is Sutherland’s nickname for quizlette, his Albany High French teacher’s name for little quizzes. The domain name for Quizlet.com was originally owned by another person, and Sutherland said all the substitutes he came up with for Quizlet were lame.

So Sutherland made the first major business decision of his life. He purchased Quizlet.com for $3,000 with money borrowed from his father.

COLLEGE DROPOUT

After graduating from Albany High in 2008, Sutherland studied computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said he enjoyed MIT’s creative and entrepreneurial atmosphere.

He recalled when his dorm assembled a wooden roller coaster as big as the Trojan Horse to woo prospective students. He attended talks given by engineers who used new technology to create innovative websites, such as Dropbox and Reddit.

But Sutherland said he could not be a college student and a startup owner at the same time. Quizlet had quadrupled from half a million visitors per month during the 2008-09 school year to 2 million visitors per month during fall 2010. Administering Quizlet’s daily operations and fielding Skype business conference calls from his dorm room were no longer feasible.

Also, he said, school taught him few practical skills. He said his classes focused on the fundamental and theoretical aspects of computer science, like how a microchip works and why computers communicate in zeroes and ones, which were useful for his intellectual development, but irrelevant to managing an Internet company.

After finishing his spring semester earlier this year, he dropped out of MIT to work full time at Quizlet.

IN THE REAL WORLD

Quizlet has a team of seven people, most of whom are older than Sutherland. Sutherland, who now lives in San Francisco, said he has won older employees’ trust and respect with the website's success.

Will Vincent, Quizlet’s director of operations, is 30 years old and has a master's in business administration from Dartmouth. Vincent said he joined Quizlet because he could see Quizlet’s popularity. It would have been a different story, he added, if Sutherland was a 21-year-old with a website idea but no tangible results.

As Quizlet expands, Sutherland said he tries to keep Quizlet grounded in its for-students-by-students roots. In that vein, he recently enrolled his programming team in a Spanish class so it could experience the same challenges as high school students studying a foreign language.

MAN ON A MISSION

When I asked Sutherland if he has any hobbies, he laughed. Running Quizlet, he said, is a 24/7 activity. In the week before launching a new feature, he stays past midnight in the office with the programmers.

But Sutherland added that it's worth it, because he believes in his job.

“I really want to make a big impact on education," he said. "If it is on Quizlet as of now, or if it is on Quizlet and we completely change how it works, or if it’s on some other thing related to education.”

IF NOT NOW, THEN NEVER

Looking back, Sutherland said if he hadn't created Quizlet when he was an impulsive 15-year-old, then the company might not exist.

“If I had actually done some market research and seen what was out there, I might have found something (else) that might had been useful to me,” said Sutherland. “But because I didn’t, I built Quizlet and Quizlet is now 20 times bigger than any of the things that existed then, and things that exist even now.”

Everybody makes mistakes ... ! If there's something in this article you think should be corrected, or if something else is amiss, call editor Emilie Raguso at 510-459-8325 or email her at emilier@patch.com.