At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Tade Oyerinde and Teddy Solomon made one thing very clear: growth is cheap, but real community is hard.
Oyerinde, founder and chancellor of online school Campus, and Solomon, co-founder of college social app Fizz, walked the Disrupt audience through how they’ve managed to scale fast without losing the people who make their products matter.
Campus: subscriptions for lifelong upskilling
Campus looks, at first glance, like a modern community college. It offers associate degrees in areas like information technology and business administration, plus certificates in specialties such as cosmetology and phlebotomy.
Under the hood, it’s trying to rewire how people pay for — and stay engaged with — education.
Oyerinde said Campus now serves more than 3,000 students and works with over 100 professors at least part time. The school leans on the U.S. Pell Grant system to keep tuition within reach, and Oyerinde was blunt about how his investor list changes the pressure equation.
He has “a team of billionaires” on the cap table, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Discord’s Jason Citroen, and said that means he doesn’t feel pushed to squeeze every dollar out of students.
“They don’t need the money,” he told the crowd. “What they really want is to fundamentally shape the way that education works in this country for the better.”
That long-term mindset shows up in how Campus thinks about engagement. Instead of treating degrees as a one-and-done transaction, Oyerinde is betting that education will look more like a subscription over time.
Campus has started rolling out à la carte courses after hearing from employers who wanted targeted classes to train workers on very specific skills — he cited examples like “vibe coding.” The signal, he said, is that people aren’t done with school when they get a diploma. They’re constantly trying to upskill.
Oyerinde told the audience he believes “everyone will have some sort of membership or subscription service” that helps them keep learning throughout their careers. Campus wants to be that layer.
“Everyone in this room, not just two-year degree-seeking people, will be able to go to Campus and learn with us,” he said. “Live, online classes, taught by amazing people.”
The implication: if Campus can keep delivering useful, live instruction from teachers students trust, it doesn’t have to fight churn the way a typical consumer app does. The relationship is designed to last across multiple stages of someone’s life.
Fizz: from anonymous posts to a campus-wide marketplace
On the other side of the Disrupt stage, Solomon talked about what it takes to keep college students coming back to a social app that launched in 2021 and now operates on more than 200 campuses.
Fizz originally focused on college communities and at one point even expanded into high schools across the U.S. The company has raised more than $40 million from investors including Owl Ventures and NEA.
To keep students engaged, Fizz has layered in new reasons to open the app beyond posting text to an anonymous feed.
Solomon said Fizz:
- Added a peer-to-peer marketplace that has listed more than 100,000 items
- Introduced a video element so posts don’t have to be just text
- Is now working on "Global Fizz" to extend the experience beyond the U.S.
He spoke more about that roadmap on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, where he mapped out how the company wants to grow without losing the tight-knit feel of individual campuses.
Monetization without killing the vibe
Audience engagement eventually has to meet a business model. For Fizz, that means ads — but, Solomon argued, done in a way that doesn’t scare off the very users that make the app valuable.
Solomon told the Disrupt crowd that the company is actively exploring how to monetize its audience and is currently focused on advertising.
“We’ve already worked with companies like Perplexity,” he said, referring to early ad partners. While he acknowledged that “subscription models have worked well with apps,” he was clear that Fizz’s near-term energy is elsewhere.
“Right now we’re focused on our ads business, and we’re focused on building a great product that keeps our users around and makes them happy.”
Then he underlined the core principle that ran through the entire session: “The users are everything.”
Community as the real moat
Campus and Fizz live in very different corners of the tech ecosystem — one is accredited education, the other is social media — but both founders described the same playbook for building engaged audiences:
- Design for long-term relationships, not one-off transactions
- Add new features that increase reasons to come back (à la carte courses, marketplaces, video)
- Use funding and patient investors to avoid over-monetizing too early
- Treat the community itself as the main product, not an afterthought
That’s also what TechCrunch Disrupt is selling. As TechCrunch reminded attendees, previous Disrupts have brought more than 250 industry leaders from companies like Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, and a16z to its stages.
The next round is already on the calendar: Disrupt returns to San Francisco from October 13–15, 2026, with a waitlist open now for early bird tickets.
For founders trying to build products that people don’t just try once and abandon, Oyerinde and Solomon’s message was simple: if you want an engaged audience, start by building something that’s designed to stick with people for years, not quarters.
