About me(That’s me ⇨)
Hi Friend!
Welcome to asuth.com. I built this website so you can get to know me a bit.
I’m in a goofy and exploratory phase of my life. I am indulging my curiosity, saying yes to adventures, and finding projects that bring me joy and keep me up late into the night.
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.
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 to 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 New Andrew
INSERT CONTENT HERE.
Haha. But seriously. To construct the new me, I’ve been immersing myself in new environments. That’s the fastest way for me to learn. Recently, I’ve taught a course about learning at MIT, driven for Lyft, helped run a San Francisco municipal election, and led crews of teenagers into the wilderness.
My narrow set of interests, if you could call them narrow, are education, housing, and climate. Education, because I love helping kids learn and kids are funny as hell. Housing, because a lack of good housing is the secret rotten core of many of our society’s problems, from wealth inequality to sidewalk poop. And climate, because it is the mega-problem that if we fail to address we’re all gonna burn.
I also love programming and computers. A day spent programming is like a spa day for me: luxurious and restorative. I want computers to help me think thoughts I couldn’t otherwise think, which you could say makes me a "Tools for Thought" person.
Having some extra free time has also meant I could build this website, and I LOVE building websites, so that’s good.