Meet the Campuswire Team: Tade Oyerinde
Campuswire’s founder talks us through the company’s inception– and what’s coming next.
Tade Oyerinde knows pilot programs. Whether he’s in the cockpit of a Cessna 172, or starting a company, Tade feels most at home when he’s moving fast, solving problems and taking calculated risks. That’s why deciding to start Campuswire, a course communication tool that helps professors better engage with their students, came naturally to him. We sat down with the ed-tech entrepreneur to discuss aviation, engineering, and steering Campuswire to new heights.
Hi, Tade! Can you introduce yourself for us?
Hi, Sanna. Sure.
I’m Tade Oyerinde. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, with my twin brother Tosh and older sister. My parents came from Nigeria during university, loved it and decided to raise us here.
Where did you go to university?
A couple of places, actually. I always knew I wanted to be in aerospace– I was really into rockets as a kid. I finished high school at 16 and went to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach to become a pilot.
During my first semester, I decided to switch my major to aerospace engineering. After the first year, I transferred to Leeds University in the UK.
So you were already deeply invested in the aerospace industry before you were ever educated for it?
Yeah– my brother and I went to space camp.
Did your twin brother, Tosh, have any interest in the field?
No. But when you’re a twin your parents try to make you have all of the same experiences, so we both started flight school at age fourteen.
In terms of aviation — actually, this is kind-of a funny story — I applied to this program called OBAP ACE Academy, which is a partnership between Delta and the Organization for Black Airline Pilots.
So I applied to the program… and didn’t get in. Tosh, who had no interest in the program… got in. I guess he wrote a more convincing essay than me or something.
Fortunately, my dad knew that I’d wanted to be a pilot since I was a child. So he said, “Tade– you’re going to go to orientation day as Tosh.”
I was going to say– totally Parent Trap-able.
I went to the program’s orientation wearing the uniform and my twin brother’s name tag. Tosh came, too. My dad walked us both up to the head of the program, introduced us, and said: “Surely there’s someone who’s supposed to be here, who isn’t. Is there any way you can accept my other son?”
And, fortunately, there was a kid from Singapore who never showed up. So– right place, right time.
Good play. Now– let’s fast forward a couple of years. Let’s talk Campuswire. Why did you decide to start this company?
When I was studying aerospace engineering at Leeds, I was forced to use this thing called Piazza.
It was interesting– I thought that Piazza served a real need, in a way that other apps at the time didn’t necessarily. The problem was it had poor UX and was really just too unambitious. There were other similar tools at the time, but no one had really nailed class communications yet.
Class communication, overall, is a really interesting problem space. Most of the communication that needs to happen in a college course is Q&A and the subject of the Q&A is essentially static. Physics 1 has been the same for decades, for example, and so you can actually predict a lot of the communication that’ll happen in a course and do some really interesting things to optimize it, which is the entire point of the company.
When did you put that idea into practice as Campuswire?
The end of 2016.
But Campuswire wasn’t the first company you founded.
Correct. This is my second company– the first was a roulette-style chat tool.
Walk me through that.
Chatroulette was blowing up at the time. And I thought, this is really interesting… what if you could limit to university students?
At the time, we [Tade, his flatmate at the time, Patrick, and his twin brother Tosh] thought it could be a cool way to meet people on your campus or other campuses across the country. Maybe you get lucky and get randomly paired with that person you have a crush on from one of your classes who you see in the library all the time.
We built it over the Easter holiday and then launched it as soon as everyone got back to campus. We did a bunch of guerilla marketing — we’d go into the largest lecture halls five minutes before class began and show a quick video about UniRoulette. At the end, the class would be giving us a standing ovation while the teacher chased us out into the hallway.
So when did Tim and Robbie come into the picture?
After Uni-Roulette. We spent two and a half years trying to grow the company, but when the hype subsided it turned out there was no long-term value — it was a fad. We shut that down and started focusing on other campus-specific problems that we could fix using technology.
A few days after shutting down my first company, I got started on Campuswire.
I enlisted Robbie to help write the backend code. I wrote the initial front-end along another friend I hired as a contractor. We thought it would be fairly simple — “it’s just a chat and Q&A app” we said. Turned out that was wrong and we decided we needed to rewrite the front end from scratch (we were originally using Angular, which sucked) in React. Tim [Routowicz, now Campuswire’s lead engineer] was the best React guy either of us knew so I brought him onboard.
How challenging were those first few months of trying to get the tool off of the ground?
Pretty hard. Back then, I was less balanced and super hardcore about work. Like what is sleep? Who needs that?
We all worked really hard. We’d pull regular all nighters– it’s funny, we actually haven’t done that in so long. Back then, we’d just stay up all night coding and drink tons of Redbull.
What was the biggest challenge that you faced in this time period?
Probably getting our first actual professor to use Campuswire in their class.
And who was that?
Josh Samani, a physics professor from UCLA. He switched over from using Piazza.
So there was a bit of a personal stake in that for you, having used Piazza at Leeds. That must have been really gratifying.
Exactly. And he was really smart, and thought and communicated super clearly, so I figured that even if he didn’t like it — because we knew it would be buggy — he’d give great feedback. Josh is exactly the kind of person who you want to give feedback in the early days.
At that time you were based in San Francisco. When did you move Campuswire to New York City?
In November of 2016, right after we closed our first round of funding, we moved to NYC. I knew that I’d spend the next ten to fifteen years of my life building the company so I had this one chance to decide where I’d want to be long-term.
I think that the move to NYC makes sense, based off of what you were saying about pulling all of those all-nighters. New York has an energy that runs parallel with that lifestyle.
Definitely. I love New York. In every way that you could want a city to be great, it is. It’s diverse. It’s high-energy. You could go out at any hour and find something going on.
What do you do outside of work?
[laughs]
Nothing.
Nothing?
Well…. I have a lot of friends who are also founders. We give each other advice on our companies and just chill. I also try and travel for fun sometimes.
Yes, you do– you just got back from Mexico City! Where’s your next vacation? Or your next workation?
“Workation” would be California. Always San Francisco. My next holiday… I might go to Colombia for Thanksgiving.
You’ll have to let me know how it is! Okay– I’m going to ask you some rapid fire questions. Just tell me the first thing that pops into your head.
Got it.
What was your favorite subject in middle school?
I guess History. I’m kind of love World War II history.
Because of the planes?
Well, because of everything. It’s one of the greatest stories ever. The most evil villains. The allied powers as the underdogs. And it was so well-documented– I love to read about it.
If you were an ice cream flavor what would you be?
Coffee.
Not Red Bull?
I don’t think they have that. Thank God.
How many cups of coffee do you drink a day? Wait, you don’t drink coffee. You drink Yerba Mate. Why do you like Yerba Mate so much?
[laughs]
Because it’s God’s gift to productive people. The caffeine intake from coffee is, like– well, it’s easy to overdo it. The crash hits hard. With Yerba Mate, the caffeine comedown hits a plateau and gradually fades out.
Where is your favorite place in the world?
Probably London. I spent my coming-of-age years there. There are a lot of memories. Also, I loved being an American in London. And I have a lot of university friends there, as well as my twin brother and his friends.
If you were an animal, what would you be?
Obviously, a flamingo [laughs].
If I could choose to be an animal… I’d probably go for an eagle, or a gorilla.
An eagle? That explains the top rank in Campuswire’s Reputation Score.
I’d love to have that freedom of flight. But I also like gorillas, because gorillas are family-oriented.
What’s the longest you’ve gone without sleeping?
Probably when I was shipping Uni-Roulette. I don’t think I slept for three straight days.
Were you hallucinating at the end?
Oh yeah.
Tell me about a time that you were embarrassed recently.
It’s pretty hard to make me embarrassed. I’d say… well, in the chaos of v3’s launch, we shipped a bit of buggy code. A professor user who we’d chatted with a lot over the summer pointed out the obvious flaws, which kind of made us look like we were in the JV team… that frustrating and kind of embarrassing.
What’s your pet peeve?
How much time do you have? [laughs]
I think close-mindedness is the worst. It’s one of the things you can’t really respond to or address. If you’re not open to hearing other ideas or perspectives, there’s nothing that can be done for you. I feel similarly about bad communicators. It’s frustrating when people don’t know how to express or explain an issue well.
If you could only watch one movie for the rest of your life, what would it be? A WWII thriller?
If I had to watch it over and over, it would have to be something happier. Maybe The Sound of Music.
A classic.
Hey, would you consider yourself an extrovert? Or an introvert?
I’d consider myself an extrovert.
As a kid, I was 100% an extrovert. Now that I’m getting older, I find myself becoming slightly more introverted.
I’d say that you’re an extravert. Your presence is very commanding. I feel like introverts fade when introduced to a room.
My sister once articulated it very well, in terms of energy. Do you get energy from other people, or do you get energy while you’re alone?
I definitely get it from other people.
That was unambiguously the case for me for most of my life. Now, though, I’ll be at a party and there’s that feeling of– wow, I’m way too sober to be here. That never used to happen to me.
So, what does a typical day look like in the life of Tade Oyerinde?
Normally I wake up, worry, and say a prayer to calm myself down. Then I look at my calendar. I try to have one thing that I focus on per day– usually it’s product. When I’m fundraising, it’s that. Sometimes it’s hiring for internal growth or trying to increase engagement.
When I get into the office I check in with Tim or Brian to get the high-level updates on where Campuswire is at. Then I try to help everyone else get their jobs done.
What’s your favorite part of your job?
Celebrating when things go well. [laughs]
No, it’s definitely product.
Oh, so it’s not Growth and Engagement? Wooooow. That’s fine.
Well, it’s just that product is engineering. And I love solving problems. My natural approach to engineering is to rapidly fire out ideas, then refine them until I have one that makes sense. It’s a lot of fun.
What are you most proud of at Campuswire?
V3, for sure. But also Campuswire’s company culture. We’re just now getting to the stage where we can have an actual company culture– we’re open-minded, no big egos. It’s somewhere I’d want to work even if I wasn’t the CEO. Which is exciting, because we’re doing a lot of hiring right now.
What’s something that you didn’t expect about starting a company like this?
I didn’t expect it to be this hard. A lot of people think that building a chat-based tool is easy. But chat is an iceberg– communication, in general, is an iceberg. You can only see what’s at the surface. There are so many subtleties, little design complexities that need to be addressed. It’s extremely hard to build something that is actually just works.
What are you most excited about for the future of Campuswire?
The most exciting feature that we have on the horizon is hosting video office hours. I think that will be a game-changer. There’s no other tool that allows you to go live to answer questions from your students, so we’ll be the first. That drive to be the first, that excitement over a product feature… it motivates me.
I can’t wait. ●
Campuswire is a course communication system built with the specific needs of professors and students in mind. Get to know the rest of our team through our Meet the Campuswire Team series, or by sending us a message on campuswire.com.
