About me(That’s me ⇨)
Hi Friend!
Welcome to asuth.com. I built this website so you can get to know me a bit.
My main thing these days is math. I work on giving kids hard problems to solve at Art of Problem Solving. We train the most intense math kids in the U.S., and lots of medium-intense ones too.
Previously, I founded Quizlet, an educational software company serving millions of students and teachers worldwide. After working on Quizlet from age 15 to age 30, I left the company in 2020.
Between Quizlet and AoPS, I was in a goofy and exploratory phase of life. You might have called it retirement. I was saying yes to lots of adventures, and finding projects that kept me up late into the night. That was when I had time to build this website, and I LOVE building websites, so that was good.
Inventing Quizlet
One day, my French 3 teacher (pictured avec moi) gave me an impossible assignment: learn 111 French animals and their English translations in 48 hours. In my struggle to learn them all, I built a website that would ask me questions repeatedly until I could answer each one correctly. With this new tool, I aced my next quiz. Then I shared it with my friends. They loved it. Quizlet was born.
After high school I went off to MIT. It was an intellectual wonderland. I was surrounded by ambitious and excited peers who had big expectations of themselves, which rubbed off on me. I studied computer science, researched speech recognition, and took classes on education. I continued to work on Quizlet, sacrificing sleep along the way.
In 2011, I left MIT to move to San Francisco and focus on making Quizlet an amazing tool for learning. Over the next 8 years, Quizlet’s team grew to 200 people. We built it into a ubiquitous tool in education, helping tens of millions of students learn in a new way. We built revenue to make it sustainable and raised several rounds of venture capital funding. After working on Quizlet for almost fifteen years, I decided it was time to take a break and think about what I wanted to do next.
The Andrew Construction Zone
To construct the post-Quizlet me, I immersed myself in new environments. I taught a course about learning at MIT, drove for Lyft, helped run a San Francisco municipal election, and led crews of teenagers into the wilderness.
I also installed myself for a period à Paris, which is the superior city in the category of all cities. Unlike Americans, the French know how to sit outside, have a glass of wine, and have an unbothered chat about life. Life sparkles in Paris.
As time passed however, I couldn't shake my American yearning for long working hours. I became obsessed with education and housing policy. I helped found Abundance Network and joined the board of California YIMBY. A lack of housing is the secret rotten core of many of our society’s problems, from wealth inequality to sidewalk poop. We are on it!
You need a challenge
We all seek meaning and purpose in life. My period of personal reconstruction was joyful and meandering, and it gave me the clarity of purpose I sought.
I want to live in a world with excellent education, excellent cities, and excellent computers. These are worthy problems to work on over many decades. For now, computers can wait. Today, I am quite involved in working on cities, while my full-time focus is on education.
Educational excellence is rare. My high school French teacher challenged me in a way I had previously never been challenged. Her work led to so many of the good things that have happened in my life.
I joined AoPS because it's a company that presents kids with hard challenges, at scale. We get kids sitting with a single hard math problem for hours. I'm quite optimistic we can be leaders of a movement towards rigor, challenge, and excellence in education in this country. It's also wonderful to be working with kids again, because kids are funny as hell.
That's all for now, thank you for reading this far!