Tofugu was started by ‣ in 2007.

Instead of registering for another university class, he convinced a professor to let him start Tofugu instead (and get college credit for it).

After graduating in 2008, he continued to work on Tofugu while at the same time working at an education-related startup in San Francisco, CA. While there, he started to develop his interest in education. Both how to teach, and how to learn.

At the end of 2009, that start-up ran out of funds which meant laying off all the staff. Jaered started TextFugu, an online Japanese textbook membership site. There he was able to start applying some of the things he had learned about teaching and learning, and it was a big hit (for the time, at least). We scrapped advertising entirely and never looked back since.

With this stream of revenue, Tofugu hired its first employee in 2010. In 2011 ‣ joined as our first developer, and we built WaniKani, our program for learning Japanese radicals, kanji, and vocabulary.

WaniKani is currently our main source of revenue (we’ve retired TextFugu and are no longer developing it). As it grows, we’ve been growing our team and capabilities. We’re also figuring things out as we go along. That includes organizational structure, culture, and what it means to work at Tofugu. Because of that, Tofugu’s a really different place to work. We’re trying to change, and we’re trying to get better. We hope you can join us in doing that.