Alex Shevchenko
(Rotman MBA ’06) Founder and Product Manager, Grammarly
BOTH MY PARENTS WERE UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS, and I became fascinated by educational technology early on. My first company, Mydropbox.com, was designed to help educational institutions tackle the problem of plagiarism. My most important takeaway from that experience was the critical importance of focusing on solving a problem that is real, that many people have and that you really understand. After selling Mydropbox.com [to Blackboard Inc.], Max Lytvyn, Dmytro Lider and I set out to solve another real-world problem: To help people communicate better in English.
As an ESL speaker myself, I had witnessed firsthand how people like me miss out on opportunities due to a struggle to write correctly in English. Our vision for Grammarly was to apply artificial intelligence to help billions of people around the world communicate more accurately and clearly. We started with grammar, spelling and punctuation, and today, Grammarly also addresses the clarity and effectiveness of our users’ writing. We provide feedback on issues such as wordiness, vagueness and hedging; word choice (including suggestions for more inclusive language); sentence structure and — yes — plagiarism.
We recognized early on that the market for this problem is enormous: There are close to two billion people in the world communicating in English, and the vast majority of them can benefit from our product. Our more than 10 million daily active users represent a wide variety of people: They are students, professionals, job seekers and English language learners. They include all sorts of professionals, from engineers to marketers to journalists who write for a living. Everyone can use help from time to time.
Grammarly was actually bootstrapped for the first seven years, and I’m proud to say that we were already profitable when we raised our first financing in 2017. Very early on, we made a
conscious decision to delay seeking external funding for as long as possible. We believe that the best possible source of funding is always your customers, so we focused on building the best possible product to delight our users.
We were extremely selective when choosing investment partners. It was important for us to work with people who shared our mission and values. The funding process took some time, but it was well worth it. We ended up in complete alignment with our investors, without having to compromise who we are. We’re honoured to have General Catalyst, Breyer Capital, IVP, Signal fire and Spark Capital — some of the most prominent VC firms in Silicon Valley — among our investors.
Putting together an effective founding team is really difficult because it’s so important that the initial people have complementary skills and work together effectively. Making early hires is one of the biggest bets a start-up will ever make, and the process can’t be rushed. To this day, we maintain an exceptionally high hiring bar.
Another important and difficult thing is staying focused, which is much harder in practice than it sounds. It is really important to keep your eyes on the ball with a clear strategy. My advice is to do fewer things, but do them extremely well so you can focus on execution.