Chegg
American education technology company based in Santa Clara, California, that offers online textbook rentals
Chegg, Inc., is an American educational technology company based in Santa Clara, California. It provides homework help, digital and physical textbook rentals, textbooks, online tutoring, and other student services, powered by artificial intelligence. The company has 6.6 million subscribers.
History
Founding and early growth
Chegg originated as Cheggpost, a Craigslist-style message board for Iowa State University students launched in October 2000 by Josh Carlson, Mike Seager, and Mark Fiddleke. Carlson teamed with Osman Rashid, an avid user of the site who recognized its potential to disrupt the textbook market, and together with Aayush Phumbhra they incorporated the company in 2005, initially offering scholarship searches, internship matching, and college application advice. That same year, the founders purchased 2,000 textbooks and launched Textbookflix.com, a rental service modeled on Netflix.
After Carlson's departure in February 2006, Phumbhra and Rashid rebranded the service, launching it as Chegg in December 2007 with Rashid as CEO. The name Chegg is a combination of the words chicken and egg, and references the founders' catch-22 feeling of being unable to obtain a job without experience, while being unable to acquire experience without a job.
Growth was rapid: revenues exceeded $10 million in 2008, and the company surpassed that figure in January 2009 alone. That June, former Ask.com and Match.com CEO Jim Safka replaced Rashid as CEO, and in November 2009 the company raised $57 million in a financing round led by Insight Venture Partners.
Expansion and IPO
Dan Rosensweig, formerly CEO of Guitar Hero, took over as CEO in February 2010 and began shifting Chegg from a textbook rental business toward a broader digital learning platform.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Chegg” is american education technology company based in Santa Clara, California, that offers online textbook rentals. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Chegg, American and education, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chegg” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.