Advait Shinde, Co-Founder and Former CEO of Educational Software Company GoGuardianspent a decade building a company that optimizes digital learning experiences at scale — achieving a $1 billion valuation.
It all began in 2014, when Shinde and his co-founders Aza Steel, R. Todd Mackey and Tyler Shaddix “accidentally got the timing right,” Shinde says. Entrepreneur. Although investors gave them “pretty discouraging” feedback about the size of the market and its challenges, the trio bet the whole lot on the influx of devices into classrooms, including Chromebooks, and succeeded.
GoGuardian closed a Series A funding round in 2015 but didn’t spend the money because school districts paid for multi-year contracts up front, making the model “very cash-generative.”
Shinde became CEO of GoGuardian in November 2017 and has led the company through an impressive period of growth. With Shinde at the helm, GoGuardian acquired edtech corporations Pear Deck, Edulastic, and TutorMe; launched its gamified learning product Pear Practice; and secured investments that propelled the company to unicorn status.
“The challenge of running a company of that scale was very different from the challenge of running one 10 times smaller.”
However, earlier this 12 months, Shinde decided that he now not wanted to function CEO of GoGuardian.
“Running a company of that scale was a challenge, and it was very different from running a company 10 times or even 100 times smaller,” Shinde says.
“After a lot of reflection, I realized that the things that excite me most and that I am best at have much more to do with early stage product development and working with smaller teams.”
According to Shinde, GoGuardian needed a leader who could help the company proceed to grow at its current level and beyond. So after several conversations with management, the company decided on the ideal candidate: someone who could fit into GoGuardian’s unique culture and had a knack for solving problems. Those criteria led them to Rich Preece, former COO of legal services firm LegalZoom.
Image Source: Courtesy of GoGuardian. Rich Preece.
“Do I have unique experience that allows me to add value?“
Before joining LegalZoom, Preece spent 17 years at Intuit and saw the growth of TurboTax and QuickBooks, but he had no experience in edtech and admits that becoming CEO of GoGuardian “wouldn’t have been the most natural fit.” Still, Preece kept an open mind and considered several issues that ultimately solidified his decision to take on the role.
“There is one, Am I passionate about space and mission?“Preece explains. “The second thing I look for is the quality of the products. And the third thing I look for is, Do I have unique experience that allows me to add value?“
Preece said Shinde’s enthusiasm was infectious from their first conversation.
What’s more, as the father of a 12-year-old, Preece had personal experience with “one of the fundamental problems in education in the U.S. and around the world” — that teachers with dozens of scholars “necessarily set the standard for the middle third.”
“If you’re in the top third, you’re not necessarily accelerating as much as you could,” he says. “GoGuardian Products [unlock] customization and personalization for teachers [and] let the teacher pull the lower third up, meet the middle third where they are, and speed up the upper third past where it otherwise would have.”
Preece felt his expertise might be useful to GoGuardian in the future.
“I’ve been fortunate to gain insight into how companies grow and how to create operational rigor around those good products, and how that operational rigor benefits both employees and customers as we grow,” Preece says.
“[We] work closely together in terms of the future strategy and overall architecture of the company.”
Preece moved into the CEO role in April, and Shinde became chairman of the board. This is Preece’s first time serving as CEO of any company, and he says people warned him that it might be an interesting and difficult dynamic with the founder still involved. But Preece and Shinde have taken steps to be certain that working together won’t be a problem.
From the starting, Shinde and Preece had open conversations about their roles to ensure alignment. “He and I work closely together on the future-oriented strategy and the overall architecture of the company,” Preece says. “But on a day-to-day basis, Advait is still very much involved in the engineering community, where he is an innovator and a leader.”
Despite the rise of distant work relationships, the duo has purposefully met in person multiple times. They even made up a situation over dinner where they disagreed to establish how well they might work through their differences. “These are relationships you want to build for a significant period of time into the future,” Preece explains, “so putting in the work up front and putting in the extra time, care, and attention definitely paid off.”
“Anticipate where there may be differences in approach, value system, or principles.”
Shinde agrees and advises all leaders going through a similar transformation to do the same.
“Be fully aware of how high the stakes are and how emotional intelligence will be key to navigating the road ahead,” Shinde says. “Then anticipate where there might be differences in approach, value system, or principles, and work ahead to identify where you agree and where you disagree. We’ve done a lot of this work up front.”