Shawn Young: [00:00:00] You don't know all of the things that you're going to need to know, like, four years down the line when you start a startup. And that's a good thing because it allows you to keep moving forward. If we knew all the things we would need to do, then, like, maybe it would have paralyzed us.
Andy Molinsky: [00:00:23] Welcome to From the Dorm Room to the Board Room, a podcast where we provide insights, tips, and inspiration for college students and young professionals, so they can make a really successful transition from college life to the professional world and beyond.
Andy Molinsky: [00:00:40] My name is Andy Molinsky, and I'm your host. I'm also a Professor of Organizational Behavior and International Management at Brandeis University's International Business School, where we record and produce this podcast.
Andy Molinsky: [00:00:59] Okay. So, our guests today are a brother tandem actually. We have Shawn and Devin Young. Shawn and Devin are the co-founders of Classcraft, which is an award-winning engagement management system used by five million students and educators worldwide to, as they say, gamify their classrooms. And as a professor and as someone who has been through a lot of schooling, I'm super interested in hearing about their business and about this episode.
Andy Molinsky: [00:01:34] Shawn's background, let's see, he taught 11th grade physics for nine years, holds a bachelor's degree in Physics and a master's in Education, and is a seasoned web developer. Devin is a serial entrepreneur, creative director who previously ran an ed tech company and a production company with all sorts of great clients. He's on—they've both done all sorts of really cool stuff. And I think I actually want to jump right to them. So, Shawn and Devin, thanks for being here. Shawn, let me actually, just so—so, you all can identify each other's voices. Shawn, thank you for coming on.
Shawn Young: [00:02:06] Thank you. Thanks for having us, Andy. It's a real pleasure.
Andy Molinsky: [00:02:09] And Devin, thank you for coming on.
Devin Young: [00:02:11] Thanks so much. Really happy to be here.
Andy Molinsky: [00:02:13] Okay, cool. So, let's hear about Classcraft. Tell us about it. Tell it. How would you describe it to someone who knows nothing about it?
Shawn Young: [00:02:22] Well, it's a pretty unique thing. Basically, what we realized is that there's a huge cultural shift happening. And by happening, I mean it's already happened around engagement and the vehicles for engagements. And when you look at gaming and where gaming is as a medium today, there's just been a tremendous explosion around mobile games, online games, e-sports. And gaming now is a prevalent cultural medium for young people. And by that, I mean that when you look at the size of the gaming industry, it's more than double, and music, and film combined. So, massive cultural vehicle. And at the same time, really powerful engagement mechanism, right? Why are games so successful as a medium? Because they're built to foster intrinsic motivation. We play games. We spend a lot of time playing games as a society. And we do that because they're built to drive intrinsic motivation.
Shawn Young: [00:03:26] And so, when we built a Classcraft, we really like those two pieces. It's like, "Hey, there's this culture that is shifting for young people. We need to bring it into the classroom if we're going to relate to them and teach them." And at the same time, we need to leverage the psychology of games to make school meaningful, and how kids care about it, and interconnect. When you look at kids that are in school today, they're more connected than ever online. But, you know, 40% of them express feelings of chronic loneliness. They're 60% more likely to develop stress and anxiety about their future. So, we really need to like address these social emotional issues by understanding this culture.
Shawn Young: [00:04:04] And so, Classcraft is a platform that empowers teachers to do that, to manage, sustain, develop engagement in school by making it feel like a game. So, it's not a video game. It's really a platform where teachers can give points to students for completed work, for showing empathy, for helping each other as they go through the quest lines and adventures. They'll play coursework and level up their
character. And they have avatar that will be in tune. So, imagine like Dungeons and Dragons for the classroom, and it kind of give you a sense of what's happening.
Andy Molinsky: [00:04:35] So, that's cool. So, it's not—so, when I was thinking about games, I was thinking about a specific subject, for instance. What you're saying is that it's really the experience of being a student in the class that's gamified.
Shawn Young: [00:04:48] Correct. So, it's not—maybe, you know, maybe it's [indiscernible] or Oregon Trail. It's not game-based learning. It's really gamification in the sense that we're completely transforming the social and real-life interaction to the classroom by adding new layers of interaction like, "Hey, you can protect your teammate," or you can build that, or you leveling up. So, all these things that make games really compelling, which don't exist in school, which is, "Hey, do a test, get your grade three weeks later, and there's no immediate feedback, there's collaboration in that experience. And so, really transforming the experience. And so, it means we can walk across any grade, any subject, any country, which is why Classcraft has kind of grown to the scale it has in just five years.
Andy Molinsky: [00:05:37] So, let's rewind, and let's go back to college. Because this is a really cool thing. You guys have hit on this based on what's happening in the world of education, you're creating something that's really innovative, something that's scalable, and so on. It's really—it's a really cool thing. But I imagine that this is not something that you were thinking about necessarily in college. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but tell us, maybe each of you, a little bit about your college experience, and then how you transitioned from there into your early professional career.
Devin Young: [00:06:07] I think that the interesting place to start is probably before college, which is just in school, Shawn and I just didn't have a good time there, right? So, I think, I had issues with bullying. Shawn was pretty bored basically. And so, that really kind of created a little bit of—I don't know. We were always kind of thinking a little bit out of the box, trying to find our own path, I guess.
Devin Young: [00:06:38] And so, I ended up studying graphic design in college. And then, I actually dropped out before completing a couple of classes that I had left, and just started working, and freelanced basically my whole life until like Classcraft, which is my first real "job." And Shawn ended up really digging into studying physics, and then becoming a teacher. And we ended up actually working together, me as a creative director, and him as a developer for about a decade.
Devin Young: [00:07:12] So, Shawn was teaching by day, and then programming by night. And I was—I, eventually, moved to Montreal, and then New York, and started a couple of startups, ran a production company, got pretty big clients and built out teams. And so, yes. So, I think that the typical model of school, for me, anyways, didn't really work as well as I think it was intended to. And it, sort of, prompted me to be more self-reliant, and to just, sort of, learn on my own, and to hustle basically, and make things happen. And then that, eventually, kind of led us to, after working together for a decade, the idea of Classcraft came out of Shawn's classes. And then—and it gave us something to sort of focus our attention on.
Shawn Young: [00:08:04] Did we-
Devin Young: [00:08:04] I don't know if you want to add stuff to that, Shawn.
Andy Molinsky: [00:08:06] Yeah. Actually, let me—I do want to hear Shawn's perspective, especially how—what you did after college, Shawn, and how that kind of emerged into an interest in Classcraft. But Devin, first, you mentioned freelancing. I think a lot of people who are listening to this either do freelancing, think about freelancing, live in a gig economy, or focusing on developing skills. And I just want to hear about that experience a little bit, because people on this podcast talk about sort of the contrast between a traditional education in the United States, let's say liberal arts, or even like a business—studying business and college versus sort of building skills, getting out there, being in the real world, and so on, and so forth. Do you have a perspective on that?
Devin Young: [00:08:56] Yeah. I mean, I think that there's different types of learning, different ways of learning, right? And my preferred approach is very hands-on. And so, I really appreciated the autonomy that freelancing gave me. I think that when I was doing it, when I was like 18, 19, 20, like it was not cool. Now, it's like being an entrepreneur, and it's all sexy, and all this kind of stuff, and like fail fast, and all this. But at the time, it was really just like there's an independence that it afforded me. It was a hard path. Like, I'm not, you know. But I think a lot of parts are hard, and that this shouldn't dissuade you or anybody to go down that path. I think it's just that you need to get yourself back up and be like, "Okay. Whatever didn't work, what am I going to do now?" And then, you usually come up with some kind of next step, and you try that out, and then you kind of break the ice, and identify a path forward.
Devin Young: [00:10:04] So, in my formative years, I was in Montreal. And it was—kind of the cost of living was kind of low there. And it allowed to—I also played a lot of music, and I did that for a number of years. And then, eventually, when I got to New York, it was—I mean, I got my butt kicked for like a number of years, basically. And it was pretty stressful. But I—and Shawn was kind of with me in those experiences vicariously through all these freelance projects that we're working on. But we really developed, I think, a level of professionalism, and just being able to problem solve, and think on our feet and stuff.
Devin Young: [00:10:46] That was really critical to feed into Classcraft's success now. I think that people like at Classcraft are like, "It's so amazing. You guys are growing so fast," or whatever, but there's like a 10-year run up to that where Shawn and I are, basically, going through all these learning, real-world learning experiences. Like one of our clients was Chanel. We worked for Microsoft, and some projects at Intel, and we got to raise money in the valley with startups I worked on. So, there was just—we had a pretty solid running start, I think, because of all those experiences when we actually got to working on Classcraft.
Devin Young: [00:11:19] And it was liberating to just sort of have the room to not deal with a client, and just be masters a little bit of our destiny, and make moves that we thought were the right ones. And thankfully, do to that and a million other factors. And I
should really include that our third co-founder is our dad. And he sure shores up the financial and legal side of the business. And it would be impossible to do anything we're doing without him. But yeah, a lot of those experiences.
Shawn Young: [00:11:48] If I can just jump in now, I think that like for me, when listening to Devin talk about this, what really jumped out at me is that there's like both Devin, and I, and Lauren, our dad, are really lifelong learners. And what Devin is saying is that basically all of his career up until Classcraft was him learning new stuff and always being like, "Sure, I can figure that out." The number of projects we pitched to finance that we had no idea how we were going to do it, but we pitched it, and just like, "I told them we could do this." I'm like, "I don't know how to develop that, but we'll figure it out."
Devin Young: [00:12:24] "Actually, we'll be fine. We got it."
Shawn Young: [00:12:24] So, just, you know, there's a theme for us, like a common trait between the three of us. And specifically, Devin and I, it's really this propensity to learn on our own, to figure things out, to want to do it, and to set limits on ourselves. And I think that like that's been part of our success, but it's also defined our careers. And I think that anybody going into any profession or any entrepreneurship in the future, like, that has to be your one superpower because the economy is changing, jobs are being created out of new technologies all the time. And the only way that you can actually navigate that is to continuously learn.
Andy Molinsky: [00:13:13] Interesting. And tell us about—speaking of continuously learning, it sounds like you taught physics for a long time, Shawn. And Devin was saying that some of the ideas for Classcraft came out of that experience. Can you speak to that?
Shawn Young: [00:13:26] Yeah, totally. So, just my school career was like a pretty classic in some ways. I just finished high school, went into college, picked Physics. That's the only thing I can't learn on my own probably. I was right—I wanted physics in your basement. And realized quickly that I didn't want to do applied research.
And—because it was—you know, you're in a lab, in a basement with machines. That's what physics research looks like. So, it's—I kind of started trying to figure out what I could do with that and just got into teaching by accident really. I was the only person on this substitute teach service for my whole area. So, I was—you know, could basically work full time if I wanted to, but I was studying. So, I was just teaching on the side.
Shawn Young: [00:14:26] And then, I got into it. When I finished college, I started teaching. And I went on to get a masters degree while teaching and while working with Devin with projects. And, for me, like the goal for education as a teacher was to make school meaningful for kids. And teaching is a pretty interesting job because it's—you're actually an entrepreneur as a teacher because you have customers which are in a market which are your students, and you've a lot of freedom. Basically, nobody's coming into your class every day telling you what to do. And you have clear KPIs that you need to hit around student success. And then, you have all these intangibles of making your product, which is your class, and your experience, meaningful for your users.
Shawn Young: [00:15:19] And so, kind of, had like a very design-thinking approach to teaching. And so, like, I built a lot of really cool, innovative pedagogy as an engineer as well as, so I could just start programming tools. And out of that, there was Classcraft that is like these kids are engaging. The classes are super fun. And so, that's not a problem. But what is a problem is that they—my students don't relate to one another. They're competitive. They're not helping each other when they should be. This is a hard class. They should all be working together. How do I make that happen?
Shawn Young: [00:15:54] And so, I wrote my master's thesis on using digital platforms to create community in classroom and seeing how the digital interactions could translate to real-life collaboration. And that's really like kind out of that thing that Classcraft kind of emerged as an idea. And so, I had the idea of running my classroom as a game built over those scrappy prototype over a weekend and just started doing it. And I just did that for three years. It was a very like, "This is cool. I am going to keep tinkering." And as I would like it, build cool stuff with that, and bring some of the stuff that I learned from the programming side, and incorporate that in my little side projects.
Shawn Young: [00:16:36] And after three years of that, building on my platform on my website just to talk about it like, "This is cool. I think teachers should try something like this." And the day that it went online, 130,000 people came to the website. By the end of that week, it was a quarter million people unique visits. And it happened because it was turning on [indiscernible] gaming, and we were getting, basically, a call to do an interview. Just getting like a hundred emails a day from teachers like, "How do I download this? This looks super cool." And like, "You can't. There's no product. There's no company. There's like—basically, all you have here is like the concepts."
Shawn Young: [00:17:17] And so, from there, Devin and I were like, "Man, there's a real opportunity here." And I didn't actually—like Devin—Devin would have to like convince me. He's like, "This is our chance to, like, you know, stop working for clients and work our own sake." And I'm like, "I don't know. What's that?" And then, finally, we did a Kickstarter to try to get some funding going, and it failed pretty miserably, mostly, just because the rewards were very niche. She like, "You will get a teacher's license," but like, who cares about that at Kickstarter? How many of those people are teachers sponsoring projects? So, that's when we brought in our dad, and wrote a whole business plan, and applied for a massive grant from the county governments and got it. Devin—it was right through back to school. So, Devin and Lauren wrote the whole thing in 10 days. And then, we applied on this really competitive brand and won. So, it's kind of the story.
Andy Molinsky: [00:18:16] Wow, that's really interesting. And so, you basically applied for the grant but, at that point, didn't have a prototype, and didn't have results, and so on. It was really a concept.
Shawn Young: [00:18:29] Well, I had my prototype that I built and had been using, but you needed to code to give kids points. Like nobody else could use that except me. And so, it really wasn't like anything else then the embryo and like all the press that we had. We had, by then, a hundred publications have talked about Classcraft even though there was a company. So, on the back of the strength of the prototype and the obvious interest for the schooling market,w e were able to sell the business case.
Andy Molinsky: [00:19:00] Can you give me an example? As I'm listening to the story, I'm listening to the business side of it, but then I can't help but, as a teacher myself, try to really understand what's going on. So, can you give me just like an illustration or an example of someone earning a point; and thereby, like sort of like exemplifying your goal of trying to not just have competition but have sort of cooperation?
Shawn Young: [00:19:25] Sure. And so, probably, like people listening to this have played an RPG before or know what it is. But basically, in Classcraft, you're like a team of adventurers, and you win and die as a team, right? So, you're working together. And just like a sports team. And each student has a character. So, like a warrior, healer, mage. And based off of that, you get a specific role in the team. And you level up as you do stuff. And so, you gain points for whatever the teacher wants to give points for.
Shawn Young: [00:19:57] So, in your case, you're teaching, you're a professor. So, you'd be teaching, and you'd be like—let's say you're teaching undergrad. You would say, "Hey, if you show on time, I'll give everybody a hundred points if everybody shows up. And if you did all the reading you were supposed to do, I'll give you points. And if you participate in this class, you'll get points. And if you do your—if you participate online and look for online class between classes, I'll give you points." And so, basically, you would—whatever it is you want students to be engaged around doing, you would give them points for that.
Shawn Young: [00:20:33] And if they get those points, they level up, they unlock powers, and powers that are things like you can eat in class in middle school. But then, in undergrad, it could be like you can give your papers two days later. And so, things that they really care about as players. So, you're incentivized to be empowered around your own destiny as a learner by doing the things that make you a better player. And the kids can like—if they have lives. So, if you do bad things, like if you did it one more time, you'll lose some lives. And then, the other students can heal you, and they could protect you. So, you're working as a team to navigate the experience of being in school.
Shawn Young: [00:21:12] And then, attached to that, there's a whole quest engines. So, you could put all your homework assignments into that. It's like choosing an adventure type of experiences to complete assignments. They level up. And there's a whole story world that we've built - well, Devin and his team mostly have built - around the actual universe of Classcraft and all these stories that are attached to these quest lines. So, it's kind of what feels like and looks like in a classroom.
Andy Molinsky: [00:21:47] Well, that's so cool. You know what it actually reminds me of? I have to say it reminds me vaguely of Harry Potter where they would do something, and one of the teachers would say, "You've earned 300 points for Gryffindor."
Shawn Young: [00:22:01] It's actually like kind of crazy. We've—so, Classcraft has kind of grown to the point where we're over six million people on the platform - students, teachers, parents. We are in 165 countries. We're in 11 languages. And we—there's just this thing going on in Spain where it's hard to understand exactly why, but one in five students in Spain has a Classcraft account. And some schools have gone completely like all in, and it turned their school into Hogwarts. And they like houses across the grades, and it culminates their school year into these big moments of like dance competitions in the gym or dance-offs.
Shawn Young: [00:22:44] So, we're just checking social media one day. I see these new folks coming out of the school and staying. And it's that. It's really like hundreds of kids dancing in this gym in Spain with Game of Thrones music on. And they cut out costumes. And they have our logo, basically, on each kid's chest as they're dancing to this tune. Like, "What is going on?" This is so crazy." But it's kind of become, now, like our version of—that's what, like, the maximum expression of what this toolbox, essentially, of gaming mechanics in the school setting do. And it's pretty visceral when you see those videos.
Andy Molinsky: [00:23:28] So, that's so interesting. It's so cool. And what a, sort of, serendipitous journey you guys have taken. I just want to step back now and just, sort of, talk a little bit about advice that you might have for college students entering the
workforce or young professionals considering creating something? What are some lessons you've learned through this experience?
Devin Young: [00:23:57] There's a lot in that. I think that I bootstrapped a startup when I moved to New York. And we had some friends who built a similar type of—it's like a listing directory for alternative health schools. And we thought, "Oh, we'll do one for music. This will be great." And they made a fair amount of money doing it. And so, in the end, like the business model wasn't exactly right. And they have the context for doing it within health schools was one way or worked a certain way. And with the music schools actually worked a different way.
Devin Young: [00:24:34] And so, I put in like about a 100-hour weeks, 110-hour weeks for two years straight. Like ask me when my last day off was, and it was like nine months ago. And at the end of that, when we kind of decided to pull the plug, I went out for dinner with a friend, and I was just like—I don't know. I was just so crushed, and exhausted, and been kind of strung out trying to—bootstrapping a startup is super hard financially because you're kind of trying to do other things while you're juggling that. It's just it's a bit complicated.
Devin Young: [00:25:08] And he looked at me. It's like, "This is a down payment on your eventual success." And I was like, "Okay." He's like, "The education you got out of those last two years, there's no—nobody can take that away from you. Nobody—like you know these experiences inside and out." You've seen the causal effect of like we're going to get—I don't know, spend $20,000 on SEO. And then, you don't realize that it actually takes a long time for that to actually kick in, right? So, you're like expecting something to happen a month after, and it's like a six to twelve-month commitment or something. You know what I mean?
Devin Young: [00:25:42] So, it's just a lot of those values or, sort of, the experiences and lessons were really critical to build the other things. And so, I think that, like, try stuff would be a big thing. And things will probably fail and that, ultimately, it's the learning that's the most important thing. Like someone can take away a business. You can lose a business partner. Like things happen, but the actual education, and your internal
thought process, and your ability to critical think, and to inspire people to work for you, and to lead, there's just no way to learn that stuff other than doing it.
Devin Young: [00:26:23] And so, those have been just really valuable kind of experiences along the way. And I think that it's, again, just super east to look at like, "Oh, my God. Things are so great today." It's like going to a rock show or a concert or something. Like, "Oh, my God. That was an amazing show." You don't see the 10 million hours that went into practicing before then. So, running instrument, getting comfortable, learning how to play with other people, like you name it. So, yeah, anyways. So, I think that those were things that really served me as I was kind of going through the ups and downs of the journey to get here.
Andy Molinsky: [00:26:55] Yeah, interesting. Shawn, do you have any thought on that one?
Shawn Young: [00:27:00] Absolutely. I think, for me, like there's—like even—I am just—I am going to talk about like the Classcraft period here a little bit. Like, even since we've started this company, I feel like we've been on a continuous learning journey. Like our jobs as teams significantly-
Devin Young: [00:27:19] Seriously, like trade places.
Shawn Young: [00:27:20] Multiple times. It started with just the three of us. And so, like, I was doing all the customer service. Like tradeoff, I was developing the platform. Devin was doing all the marketing on his own, product design, creating our logo. Like, it's just like very specific things. And now, we have 50 employees. Like we've gone through really just multiple stages there. I think that like, for me, there's a ton of takeaways from that experience. One is back to like, "Hey, you need to continuously be learning and developing yourself." Like the growth curve of Classcraft is just synonymous to the growth of us as individuals, right? And so, I feel like I've grown a lot since we started this.
Shawn Young: [00:28:17] Specifically, like I think that there's the—from the human standpoint, I think like value of having a team, and developing a team with that, empowering people, and creating scalable processes. All the like human resources of actually running a company were pretty new to me. I could borrow from like, hey, like managing kids in a classroom, and like these are humans that you work in the room together, and that's not what a company is. So, like, we borrow from there, but like it's also really, really different and learned a lot there.
Shawn Young: [00:28:59] Also, like, just like the amount of skills. Like we've raised multiple rounds from venture capital. That's like things we've never done before. And now, I know all this stuff about finances and all the stuff you need to learn as you go to start a business. And then, like, mental standpoint, well, it's just you don't know all of the things that you're going to need to know four years down the line when you start a startup. And that's a good things because it allows you to keep moving forward. If we knew all the things we would need to do, like maybe that would have paralyzed us. You know what I mean? So, like, there's a bit of like ignorance is bliss and you got to just be adding to your bag of knowledge as you go. But, basically, scale yourself. And I think that that's a pretty interesting piece.
Shawn Young: [00:29:54] I think another one is like as young people, we don't think about this a lot. Like the value of your relationships outside of work are really important. Both Devin and I have kids. We really do our best to have, like, a healthy work-life balance, even though we're running a startup, traveled a lot. Both have spouses who have careers. And so, I think that there's—we can't underestimate the value of the friendships that you would have now, and maintaining them, and put it on the side for your relationships. I think that that's pretty easy to forget on an entrepreneurial journey. And, ultimately, if you don't do it, a part of you pays the price. So, I think that that balance is something we don't think about often as young people going into our careers, but that the older you get, the more important it becomes.
Andy Molinsky: [00:30:57] Yeah, very wise, wise perspective on all this, and such an interesting story. I have so many other questions, but I think we're going to—I think
we're going to pause here. So, if people want to learn more about Classcraft, I imagine they probably will, where can they go?
Shawn Young: [00:31:14] Classcraft.com. That's the easiest, you can find out about our company, our values. We're a b-corp. There's a whole bunch of interesting things about Classcraft other than us and the specific product, and a lot of the stuff, which is on the website, like around the work that we're doing to move education forward more broadly than just through the product but also through policy work and all kinds of stuff that we're working on. So, that's the first place to start, but if you just, sort of, Google us to find stuff about it.
Andy Molinsky: [00:31:45] Cool. And what an interesting platform. I think after we hang up, I am going to go dive in there myself actually. So, thanks so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it.
Shawn Young: [00:31:59] Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Devin Young: [00:32:01] It was our pleasure. Keep up the good work, Andy.
Andy Molinsky: [00:32:07] Thank you for listening to From the Dorm Room to the Board Room. If you're interested in learning more about the work that I do in helping people step outside their comfort zones and transition successfully into the professional world, please visit my website, www.andymolinsky.com. That's A-N-D-Y-M-O-L-I-N-S-K-Y dot com. And also, feel free to email me directly at andy@andymolinsky.com with any feedback or ideas for guests for future podcasts.
Andy Molinsky: [00:32:37] This podcast is brought to you by Brandeis University's International Business School. By teaching rigorous Business, Finance, and Economics, connecting students to best practices, and immersing them in international experiences, Brandies International Business School prepares exceptional individuals from around the globe to become principles professionals in companies and public institutions worldwide. Thank you so much for listening.