Hi, I’m the founder of Quizlet, the most popular online learning service in the US. Ask Me Anything!

Hey, where can I get a Quizlet shirt? I'm known as the "Quizlet King" in my school and I make quizlets for all my classmates. I would like to wear your logo with pride!

Hey, awesome! DM me your address and we can send you one in the mail! We'll just send it to you since you were the first to ask :)

I'd be curious, for everyone else...if we made a store where you could buy shirts or stickers or socks or whatever, would you buy something and what would you buy?

First of all, you are a god, quizlet got me all the way through high school and now in college. (I'm actually using it right now) Do you have any plans (like new study methods) coming up for quizlet?

We've got lots of big plans. Since you asked about new study methods, we're working on a totally new way of studying on Quizlet that we're beta-testing right now. It's going to be much more intelligent about what it thinks you know, and also much better at gradually introducing material and getting harder as you go.

You can sign up for the beta here: https://quizlet.com/blog/790

Are sound flashcards at all in Quizlet's future? I have been using Quizlet in med school and being able to make flash cards for heart sounds would be helpful.

Hmm! We do allow audio recording via Quizlet Plus. Would that work? Or would you like to upload files? Or would you like it if you just got the content directly from the publisher?

Yes, how do you address rumors that you're actually an X-Man and created Quizlet to recruit people to your school for gifted youngsters?

https://media.giphy.com/media/VwFa2C1vJ7rvq/giphy.gif

What are some insider tips for using Quizlet to its fullest extent possible to aid in studying? Any quizlet secrets to share?

Let's see!

If you don't get a single answer wrong on Spell mode, you get a special surprise.

A few useful power features:

1. Use stars to filter just the terms you need to study the most. At the end of a learn mode session, you can star all the terms you've missed the most.

2. If you are studying for a final or a midterm, you can use the Combine feature from the set page to combine multiple sets. You can also make a folder, and study all of the sets in a folder together.

As I've created sets, I've discovered hidden Quizlet formatting tricks:

• Use (parentheses) with parts of terms in the English language to not force it to be typed in Learn, Speller, Test, and Space Race but to include extra information -- e.g. photosynthesis (process for plants), only type photosynthesis in Space Race to make earning points more efficient and assess only what's important.
• Use * one asterisk * with a term or definition to make it bold. This is useful in longer definitions.
• For custom images (Plus/Teacher only), download an image, and put a question mark on the term if mentioned so it's easier to understand what part of the image you're referring to.
• Use the description, especially if you want to tell the user "best if studied from definition to term" or give a link to extra resources, image credits, etc.

Organization strategies:

• Include the textbook name, edition, and author on your set/folder if known so people who aren't in your class at school can study similarly-formatted material.
• Use Google Docs or similar to document important set notes if you have a lot to say in the description.
• Don't use the term in the definition as best as you can. Use a _____ (blank) or hint to the term in some way.
• Make your definitions succinct (i.e. not too wordy, in your own words) so they don't require too much understanding of the wording, and more understanding of the material.

I forgot about some of these! Better tips than mine :)

Hello Andrew, on behalf of me and all of my friends, thank you for creating the site that got me through high school, and into my dream school. Quizlet always comes in clutch and you sir, are a legend. One question for you: what do you feel are some flaws to a service like quizlet? Do you feel that the site, while very useful, allows students to take "shortcuts" in their reading material? Would be amazing to hear back :)

Some flaws in Quizlet today: It's very limited by the types of content you can create. It's really best for learning vocabulary with terms and definitions. If Quizlet had a more flexible model with other types of content (images, diagrams, videos, maps, rich text formatting, etc) it would be useful for a much broader range of subjects.

In terms of students taking shortcuts -- yes, I think a lot about that. My hope is that over time Quizlet itself can be a place where you can learn in richer ways. It would be really great if Quizlet helped you more deeply understand the stuff you're learning by seeing it in context (e.g. in a paragraph or in a video), and also helped you apply what you're learning (e.g. making your own video).

Hi Andrew, when can we get a feature allowing Plus members to add pictures to the "term" side of a card? Sometimes having to put the picture on the definition side messes with my feng shui.

Hey -- thanks for the request. It's a great question and we hear this one fairly often.

The reason it's not trivial is that many of our study modes require there to be a way to type in some text. If we allowed images on both sides it would be possible to not have anything to type.

But that's mainly an excuse...there are definitely ways to work around that by changing how we ask questions.

In the shiny future, I'd like Quizlet to have a much more flexible content model with unlimited sides for terms and the ability to attach as many pictures/videos/audio clips as you want.

Why didn't you just make flash cards instead of making a giant website?

Flashcards weren't very useful to me, because they don't really check if you know something. You just have to ask yourself if you know it, and be honest with yourself.

The first feature of Quizlet was "learn mode," which is pretty similar to today's Learn feature. I wanted it to force me to reproduce the answer, and only give me credit if I could write it out correctly. I found that that gave me much more confidence in remembering things than simply saying them in my head.

So, having a computer program check my understanding was a way more efficient study method for me than flashcards.

What exactly happened in between the time in when you created Quizlet and then when it was launched?

When I started it, I wasn't thinking about doing a startup or anything...it was just a tool for me and my friends. I was building it from my bedroom in the afternoons and weekends.

So for the first year and a half, I was just playing around with it. After getting about 100 people (mostly friends from the internet) to try it, I decided it would be worthwhile to make it public so anyone could make their own sets.

Here's what Quizlet looked like on the day it launched: https://web.archive.org/web/20070217002951/http://quizlet.com/

Is the reason I never heard of this until now, is because I am almost 30 and haven't been to school in 10 years?

Is the reason I never heard of this until now, is because I am almost 30 and haven't been to school in 10 years?

Yup, that's pretty much it :) Most of our users are in school, so if you're not then it's unlikely you've heard of it!

Andrew, have you considered allowing creation of "super decks" which might collect all cards on a focused subject like "machine learning" and weed out the dups? How about the idea of allowing at least thumbs up or hearts for the decks we like? The search could then return decks based on key words and favor. BTW I just recently started using Quizlet and love it. EDITed to add: BTW I had a hard time finding this AMA and had to know it was under IAMA. I searched several different ways. Maybe twitter message could tell people more exactly how to get here.

Re: super decks, yes! We've made some prototypes of this. For example, we've played with a feature for our search system that would let you synthesize a deck in real-time based on a search query, with all the most common terms for that query. We'd need to work on it a lot more to make it really solid but I think it would be quite cool.

And re: thumbs up/hearts, we had a thing that let you "high five" someone for awhile, but it didn't get used that much. We may add it back though if we figure out a good way to use that data. In the meantime, we get a pretty good signal for how useful a set is from when people decide whether or not to study it.

Does it ever worry you that huge companies like Google would ever decide to directly compete with you? For example before Google Classroom, there was a company that had a similar classroom setup per student known as MyBigCampus. Google decided that they were interested in taking part of that business and now MyBigCampus can't compete so they just stopped. Clearly this comes to every developers mind of coming up with a concept and other more well resourced company stepping in, only to take your concept based on your rate of profit. You must have some really good VC funding.

To be honest, part of the reason we raised money a year ago was that we wanted to move the business and the product along much faster so that we would be much stronger before serious competition came at us.

What is your legit highscore in quizlet match? Mine is 4.2 This is the best app at my school that we can use like a game but we're not considered gaming. Thanks

My legit best score was 6.6 seconds which I got in 2013!

What's the most interesting thing you've learned as a founder?

When you get company t-shirts, you should pay more for super high-quality ones because people will wear them a lot more, and remember you for how soft and nice they are. :)

The most important thing I've learned as a founder is that just because you're the founder doesn't mean you're right or special. You have to keep earning your position and your role every day or people will quit, ignore you, or work around you. We've grown to 45 people now and with every 10 new people my job and the whole company has changed a lot, so you have to be cool with that and ready to learn new skills.

A more difficult question:

I'm sure you are aware that many many users are using your service to cheat on not only homework and quizzes, but actual exams as well. Is Quizlet actively looking for ways to deter this use of service or do you prefer to take a laissez-faire approach and let your consumers do as they wish?

Have you been approached by any universities or textbook publishers that are unhappy about the inclusion of free copyrighted materials on your website? Any significant legal issues?

Thanks for the good question.

It's very, very important for me, and everyone on the team, that Quizlet be a force for positive change in education. And that means fighting cheating on the service as much as we can. Cheating on Quizlet is a very small minority of our usage, but people definitely do it and it is a problem. Most of our users are using Quizlet as intended -- as a studying and learning tool. We have millions of teachers who love Quizlet because it helps their students with its intended goals.

As an open content platform, it's difficult for us to tell when someone uploads content whether it will be used for cheating. That said, we've built some models for what we think cheating content looks like, and we actively remove the content either completely or remove it from both google search and our search. We also have ways for our users to report content. We have also explored working with publishers to preemptively block all their test-bank material. Our data shows that our work on this has had a significant impact in reducing cheating-related content usage.

In the short-term, removing probable cheating content hurts some of our business numbers, but in the long-term it's very important to our business and our brand that we distance ourselves as much as possible from that (unfortunate) use case.

What was the most unexpected consequence of Quizlet that you've noticed?

I never anticipated the full range of uses Quizlet would have. I started it for my French class and wasn't thinking much beyond that. Today there are NFL players using it to learn their routes, Whole Foods checkout people using it to learn vegetable codes, sailors using it to learn nautical terms, etc.

Who has the highest score in Pokemon Go out of all Quizlet employees?

Just asked around and we have several people at level 27 but I'm at level 28...

Proof: http://imgur.com/a/xyyU3

Go mystic!

Hi Andrew, we worked together at Freewebs, congratulations on your success. Did you gain any valuable experience during your time there?

thanks -- and yes I did! I believe that was back in 2006. I got a lot out of it (my first summer internship). It was my first time working on a team as a software engineer so that was really eye-opening and useful to me!

Did Harrison start the fire?

(Also, do you wish that you had gone full-time with Quizlet earlier than you did? Or do you think you stuck around MIT for just the right amount of time?)

I think I stuck around just the right amount of time! I had an awesome time at MIT and wish I could have stayed longer! There are so many interesting and smart people there.

Thanks for Quizlet and all the new features! Using it for university courses, just wish I knew about it earlier!

Any plans on adding a quick way to change the viewing settings on multiple decks in a folder or class?

shirts are not available...yet!

would you mind clarifying a little more what you mean by changing the viewing settings?

Hey, I'm in the UK and I use Quizlet pretty often to learn anatomy... I don't really have a burning question but just wanted to say thanks. Since I have to ask a question to post here... do what do you actually do when the app is all set up- I don't really know about business so do you still do the actual app development or is it all admin?

Glad it's helpful!

I don't do much coding anymore, though it is really fun when I get a chance to.

My time is roughly:

• 40% recruiting and interviewing people to work at Quizlet (we're hiring! https://quizlet.com/jobs). I've interviewed well over 1,000 people at this point. It's really fun to meet a lot of people but it also does get tiring.
• 25% 1-1 checkins with engineers and other people I work with. I find it's really important to talk with people on the team to learn what we could be doing better and help them solve problems they're working on.
• 25% product reviews, design reviews, engineering reviews, planning, etc. We have about 10 different teams working in parallel on lots of different stuff at any given time, so there's lots to talk about.
• 10% responding to emails and doing code reviews.

Do you hire graduating high schoolers? I've been interested in a Quizlet internship for a long time now and am looking to get a position there in the coming summer.

Unfortunately not right now! We're mainly looking for people with more experience right now.

That said, in the past we've had some great success with high school interns (apart from me, of course :)). In fact, the first version of our iOS app was built entirely by a high school intern, and was very successful.

[deleted]

not for now :(

Hi there! Congrats on the success of the site. As a paying Teacher member, I thank you for the robust and continuously growing platform.

Are you planning on rolling out more interactive games a la Quizlet Live? I'd love more game modes to use in class.

Yes! I definitely see Quizlet Live as a good start, but we need to build out a bunch more games for the classroom in the future.

And thanks for paying! :)

Aside paying for Quizlet premium and maybe some ads, how does quizlet make it's revenue?

Quizlet makes money in two ways: advertising and subscriptions. Since we have a ton of traffic (we're a top-30 website in the US! [1]) we can have some minimal advertising and make a good amount of money.

For subscriptions, we have two low-cost self-service packages you can buy: Quizlet Plus, which is for students, for $20/yr; and Quizlet Teacher, which is for teachers, for $35/yr. We like selling directly to our end-users because they are making an affirmative decision to use us instead of being told to use us by their principal or their district office.

[1] https://quantcast.com/quizlet.com

Hi, I use Quizlet like all the time for languages revision and I have to say it is one of my favourite things. Thank you so much. I was just wondering, what inspired you to make Quizlet? Why did you decide on the name Quizlet? Thanks again for your website! Shen :)

In 2005 I had a french exam I was studying for where I had to learn 111 French animals in one or two nights. It was kind of a crazy assignment. I decided to build a program that would keep track of all my words and just test me on the ones I didn't know yet.

The name comes from "Quizlette" which is what my French teacher used to call the little vocabulary exams she would give us.

What's up man. I love your service and I have YEARS of Quizlet sets on it. Any plans to collaborate with other services like Evernote, wunderlist, calendar etc.?

That's awesome!

What would you like to see in terms of collaborations? We have no specific plans right now...

What do you use for the basis of the site's code? It looks very elegant, so I assume it's a custom framework. Maybe JavaScript? (If you do use JS, you're quite the beast tamer...)

The front-end is almost all React these days. It's super fun to write in and also super fast when you can do hot-reloading of CSS AND javascript -- that is, you can save those in your editor and they instantly change the page you're on without reloading.

The backend is a combination of php/hack, go, and python.

Server-wise, we run about 200 hosts on Google Cloud.

Would you ever consider making an interactive classroom activity like Kahoot? A lot of my Spanish teachers have used Quizlet and Kahoot but don't find it easy to import and export to each of the different platforms.

Have you tried out Quizlet Live? It's really cool https://quizlet.com/features/live

Hi, thanks for making Quizlet! I've found it really useful for learning vocabulary.

With the recent redesign, I've noticed that you seem to be putting much more emphasis on the apps than the website, and I'm curious what the division is between the two. How popular are the apps vs. the mobile website vs. the desktop website? Are those numbers changing, or have they remained mostly the same over time?

The apps have grown faster than the website, but they are growing from a smaller base. We've definitely emphasized a lot of work on the apps because we think more people will be using Quizlet from their phones in the long-term than from laptops.

That said, our website is very actively changing. This week we launched Quizlet in Japanese (yay!) and we re-launched all our study modes in the new design. The main set page is coming very soon. Our challenge has been that the website has significantly more features and pages, so it's taken longer to complete the redesign than it did for the apps. But it's still very actively happening!

Finally, with stuff like Quizlet Live, I think we can grow our website's usage a ton!

What's your favorite part about your day?

I don't do this every day, but my absolute favorite part of the whole job is going on class visits to nearby schools and talking to students and teachers.

We do visits at every type of school (public schools, private schools, charter schools, art schools, ESL schools, etc). It's incredibly rewarding to walk into a classroom with a Quizlet shirt on and see the excitement of all the students. It's also super valuable to do product research by talking to people in context instead of just coming up with new ideas from a conference room at our office.

What are your future plans for the Quizlet website?

Are there going to be any new games or ways to organize content in folders or on sets? Maybe you could have a user-created games page using the Quizlet API.

What is the best way to get your sets out there? Is there a way to create a profile page with featured sets/folders and links to extra resources?

Yes -- there will be new games in the future. Have you used Quizlet Live? That has been really successful for us and we'd like to do more like that.

We don't have a featured set section of the website right now, though we've thought about it. Most Quizlet users just use the sets they made themselves or their friends/teachers made.

Would there be a way to list students in classes automatically and be able to create custom groups for Quizlet live ahead of opening the set? I have classes of 30 and doing it on the spot would waste some time. I admit I've avoided it because I'm not so confident I'd be fast enough. Is it a drag and drop?

We do allow you to make custom groups, though we've found most people are quite happy with the random teams and it doesn't waste that much time for students to move around. I originally thought that was a bad idea, for the same reasons you did, but when we tried it in classrooms it worked really well. If you'd like to see a video, check out https://quizlet.com/features/live

Hello!!! Glad to hear from you!! Quizlet helped me build a lot of concepts right through medical school. I tend to use it a little less now that I am in residency. My question is: when can we expect a major update on the Android app? It lacks several features, including viewing images in full size on learning mode. I love the learning mode on it but not being able to see the pictures is a big limitation

Cool!

We are working on some big updates to the learning modes on both iOS and Android. I will pass along the suggestion for full-size image viewing. Thanks!

Hey Andrew, Sadly I missed your AMA last night, but hey if you still happen to be cruising and see this, what was Albany High School Like back in 2005?I am from the class of 2014, just curious.

From what I can tell from my recent visits, AHS was...pretty similar to how it is now. Many of the same teachers are still there :)

Hey Andrew, because of you I have to say thank you for my bachelor's degree in accounting. Staying up until 3 am at night studying while working full time, with a family seemed impossible until I found Quizlet. Also, where might I be able to purchase a Quizlet shirt too--totally a rad shirt!?

Great story!

We don't have a store right now but seems like some people might want us to make one ;)

I remember Quizlet used to have split screen integration for the android app. What happened to it? It doesn't work anymore after the huge UI upgrade. I liked fooling my teachers, making it look like I'm studying. But it also helped me put in definitions quickly without having to copy+paste

Thanks for the q -- I've passed that along to the team so they'll look into it.

Thank you so much for creating Quizlet! It has changed my studying life from boring and non-productful to fun with a lasting memory of what I've studied. My question is: Do you plan to bring back the categorizing subjects to make it easier to search by subject?

Hey -- very happy to hear that it's helped you :) And yes, we definitely need to improve the categorization/organization stuff. I don't think we'll bring it back like we had before though. Have you tried folders?

Hi, I run HausaDictionary.com and love quizlet to further help me memorize terms/translations! Favorite tool or function is the multiple choice and T/F self-examination. Also love the easy to use (at least on a desktop) audio recorder. I wish there is a way I can integrate the content I create on my site (MediaWiki) with quizlet.

Anyways, is there a way to order physical flash cards (e.g SAT's Flip-o-matic booklet) for when you're offline?

For integration, we do have an embed feature that you could use with Mediawiki (I'm pretty sure) to put Quizlet study modes into your site.

Re: physical flash cards, nope! We work pretty hard to make sure Quizlet works offline though. You can even create sets and study them without a network connection, which I think is pretty cool.

Hey, my school uses Quizlet to help us learn Spanish. Are there any plans to add more games? Scatter and Gravity are fun, but surely there are other ways to let children learn while having fun. Thanks!

Yes -- a central premise of Quizlet is that it's a fun way to study, so we will definitely be building more in the future. In addition to those two games, we have Quizlet Live (https://quizlet.com/features/live) which is a game designed for the classroom. Try it out if you haven't already!

Is there a way to connect Quizlet accounts?

You mean like merge accounts? There isn't today, unfortunately.

Hello! Big fan of quizlet now that I am back in school. I have 6 people in my small class and I got us all set up using the "class" feature. Are there any plans to put sub folders for us to use in the class feature? As of right now all of our sets are building up and will get quite confusing when there are >20. It would be really nice to be able to subdivide and organize our class sets.

Good question! We wanted to do folders-in-classes originally, but it got really complicated when we had to figure out all the edge-cases with permissions (e.g. some sets are private to certain classes).

I think we do need to improve our organization features though so we'll figure this out eventually.

What other apps or websites have inspired your team or given ideas for features to add to Quizlet? Thanks for the great website, it's helped me so much!

Quizlet Live was in part inspired Space Team, a really fun group mobile game.

Thank you so much! Quizlet's been very helpful for me for so many years, and still is now. I guess my only question is, do you plan to improve the flashcards feature? Maybe at the bottom of the term/definition, there could be a field where we can add sidenotes and whatnot. Thanks!

thanks for the suggestion -- yes, that's definitely something we talk about a lot, get a lot of requests for, and plan to do!

What are your future plans for quizlet live? A lot of teachers have moved over to it from Kahoot so on a business level it seems to be successful but are you planning on adding anything to increase teamwork. When I get in groups with people we just do our own thing and choose the answers we have there isn't too much teamwork. On a side note are there any upcoming patches set up to fix the bug where when you star a card you can't see the star become yellow or any yellow outline. Thanks!

Good question! Quizlet Live has been very successful for us. I see it as the first step of many classroom-specific activities we should build. My hope is that the next games we build require even more classroom discussion and interaction than Quizlet Live.

Can you say more about the stars bug? We may have just broken something and would love to fix it.

it's been around for a while but basically sometimes when I star something no yellow will appear anywhere. I'm not sure what causes it, it happens out of nowhere but the only fix I've found is if you scroll back or forward one card and scroll back to it. I should also mention this is on desktop running chrome I haven't really used quizlet on anything but chrome and on mobile I haven't encountered the bug on the current version or any beta clients

Thanks -- I'll take a look at that. That's on the main set page?

no sorry when running through the flashcards mode

Can you try it again? we've just redesigned that page in the last 2 weeks and think it may be fixed now.

What's the advantages of Quizlet Live over Kahoot? Are you planning on expanding on the group study games like Kahoot?

First, I think Kahoot is great and I really like the team working on it. I think it's perfectly good if people want to use both. To me, the advantages of Quizlet Live are that it rewards accuracy over speed (it's not just who can answer fastest) and it seamlessly integrates with the rest of Quizlet (same content, multiple ways to learn).

Thank you for directly saving my ass multiple times throughout college and highschool. What has been the best thing to happen to you as a result of creating Quizlet?

The best things are mostly the people I've met as a result. First, the team we've built is a really fun, honest, hard-working group and it's really enjoyable to work with them. I've also met a ton of teachers and students along the way, and I've learned a lot from seeing what they do in their classrooms.

At age 26, I feel like I've learned a ton about education and business in a very short time. So I feel very lucky for that.

Quizlet's also given me financial security and means I don't need to worry about money too much for me + my parents.

How do you know it's the most popular service in the US?

Fair question! If you look at Quantcast or Alexa, we are the most visited website for learning (Quantcast has us as among the top 30 US websites, for example). Our apps are also regularly at or near the top of both app stores' education categories (which includes some apps that are more for school communication than learning itself).

Really? Wow, we use Quizlet in the UK too!

Awesome, we have just launched a UK-English "translation", for what it's worth ;). Would love to hear if you have any tips for us as we try to expand in the UK.

Can I just say thank you?

Yes? :)