PrairieCast: Aayush Phumbhra of textbook rental website Chegg
This week on PrairieCast our guest is Aayush Phumbhra, co-founder and senior vice president of Chegg, a Santa Clara, California-based company often described as the "Netflix of textbook rentals."
A
ayush earned his MBA at Iowa State University in Ames and joined forces with the founders of Cheggpost.com, a local website focused on saving students money. Several iterations and years later, Chegg now boasts more than 120 employees, a headquarters in Santa Clara and a shipping operation across the street from Zappos in Louisville, Kentucky. According to a TechCrunch post last month, Chegg has raised more than 140 million dollars in venture capital and is on pace to generate 130 million dollars in revenues this year.
In the interview, Aayush gives us insights on Chegg's venture capital raise, how they've scaled their business model and adapted it around changes in technology as well as how they brought on an executive team that he could continually learn from and much more.
Each week on PrairieCast, we start with a Week in Review segment where we catch up on highlighted posts from the past week as well as discuss Silicon Prairie News events and features within the site.
PrairieCast can be streamed or downloaded from PrairieCast.com or by subscription in iTunes or RSS.
PrairieCast is recorded weekly at the 48Web Studios in Des Moines and is a co-production of Silicon Prairie News and 48Web.
ARCHIVED COMMENTS
I rent texts from Chegg every semester, which is much less than buying them from the bookstore. I wanted to share a code that will discount your rental. Use code CC123047 for a discount on your order or for an extra $5 back when selling Chegg your used texts. Put in the code when ordering and hit the "apply" button.
This code does not expire so it can be used every time you order or sell books to Chegg. Feel free to share it with others!
I first stumbled on Chegg a year ago while looking at options for a class I taught at Creighton and even wrote a post about them because I thought the idea was so smart. http://www.bozell.com/insights/1277/a-simple-solution-to-... I also passed their link on to my daughter in college. It's a simple solution to a very costly part of the college education.
Textbook Rentals are great. They have really changed the way college students spend money during the first week of class. But let's not forget about http://www.textbookstop.com, Book Renter, Campus Book Rentals to name a few . They all have their benefits. My favorite feature on TextbookStop is that you can rent or buy new or used. Sometimes you just want to know the book will be new...