My Klassly pitch to Tim Cook
First of all Wow!!! If one day someone had told me I would have a meeting with Tim Cook, here in my living room, I never would have believed them! I must confess, Apple has always had a very special place in my heart.
One could almost say I was born into a Mac. My father was already an Apple II developer back in the 70s. And in 1983, a few years after I was born, Apple gave my father a Mac, 3 months before the launch, to bring his software from Apple II to the Mac. So my father was one of the first Mac developers in the world and for sure the first one in France. I grew up with Apple and its “Think different” motto. So yes, meeting with you today is really something incredible for me.
Let’s talk about Klassly.
5 years ago, with Damien, my childhood friend, we decided to start the craziest adventure of our lives. At that time Damien was getting divorced in NY and he obtained very limited rights for his 4 year old daughter, to the point he couldn’t be involved in her education at school. In Paris, at the same time, with terrorist attacks, they didn’t allow parents to access schools. I had no access to my 4 year old son’s teacher anymore, cutting any possible daily communication. Without our involvements we saw the negative impact on our kids and we wanted to change that. Actually, even having a basic relationship with your kids’ teacher, when you’re a parent is not that simple, not only when you’re divorced. Also when you don’t speak the local language or when you don’t have time because of your job, etc. And it’s a shame.
That’s why we decided to create Klassly, to bring kids, class and family together.
Klassly is a great way to create that link. We built a very user friendly interface which looks like a social network everybody knows how to use already. The teacher creates a class which looks like a feed, invites families and engages them by posting messages, photos, videos, announcements, events, polls… in a private, non intrusive and secure environment. Teachers receive instant gratifications thanks to the families comments and reactions. It looks like a social network but it’s not.
We believe children grow better when parents and teachers work together. We strongly believe that. Parental involvement and engagement are key for children’s success and should be easy and accessible to every parent and every teacher.
Honestly, we were far to imagine that our vision would have such an impact on education especially in parental involvement. We grew to 1.2 million users with 92% weekly active users and 21 people in the team. Thanks to our auto-translation function, we managed to include thousands of families who don’t speak the local language into their children’s school life. We brought joy into classrooms by gratifying the work of thousands of teachers. Every day we are receiving love notes from teachers and parents thanking us for helping them improve education.
A big part of our success besides the product itself is due to our focus to ensure the security and the privacy of our user data and by providing dedicated attention to each of our users.
For all those reasons, Klassly has been a game changer in the education world in France.
This was true when we started, but the pandemic acted as a catalyst for all the needs we are answering. With the shift into digital, Klassly enabled families, educators and students to maintain that crucial human connection at a difficult time. I remember that teacher that told me Klassly saved her school year because she was able to transition to remote teaching in no time. This is something we are very proud of.
Now, we have 20% of our classes outside France. Our conviction is that every teacher and every family deserves Klassly. Our new challenge is reaching new countries, as the USA, where we already have hundreds of classes. Once the public health crisis ends, the problems of learning loss for children will become a clear priority. Parents and teachers have been through a lot with the pandemic and they will need to work well together in order to have the energy and effectiveness to help children overcome the COVID learning slide. Klassly makes this possible because this is what we do.
Everyone thought at first we were completely crazy to start a business in education. They told us there is no money, that it’s not profitable enough, that the field of education doesn’t change because of an app… but we knew they were wrong, we wanted to make something that matters, and we know that the people who will help us reach our goal will have the same willingness to make things right.
My entire team is so proud that I got to talk about Klassly with Tim Cook. Thank you again.
