A unicorn is a business that's valued at a billion dollars or more. They are rare beasts. Andrew Sutherland unwittingly created one in his second year at high school.
In 2005, Sutherland and his class was set a test by their French teacher. The challenge was to memorise the words for 110 animals for a vocabulary test the next day. So Sutherland, who knew a bit about coding, decided to build a tool to help him pass this test. He created a simple website which would make each word pop up one at a time and he used this mechanism to both learn and test himself at the same time.
He found the tool incredibly useful and started sharing it with his friends, who all found it just as useful. Without realising it, he had stumbled upon a a billion dollar idea. The site bounced around his friends until 2007 when he decided to launch the site publicly before heading to MIT to study computer science. He named it Quizlet.
While at MIT, Quizlet grew and grew as it became wildly popular. So, like many good entrepreneurs, Sutherland decided to drop out of college to focus on his creation that provides digital flashcards and revision cards for students. By 2009, Quizlet had one million unique visitors per month and had the world's largest database of flashcards. It had become one of the largest education websites in the world.
From there the business kept growing, raising millions of dollars in investment 2015 and 2020 to support its expansion. The 2020 funding round valued the business at $1 billion.
Today the business is doing an estimated $80m in revenue per year with more than 60m monthly active users worldwide. And it all started from a single French test.
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