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Chuck Cohn is the Founder, Chairman & CEO of Nerdy (parent company of Varsity Tutors). Chuck founded the company in 2007 during his junior year of college after experiencing frustration finding the personalized help he needed for a calculus course. He spent his early career working in energy & power investment banking at Wells Fargo Securities (Wachovia) and healthcare private equity at Ascension Ventures, an $800M AUM private equity fund. Chuck bootstrapped Nerdy before leaving his private equity role to focus on growing Nerdy full-time at the end of 2011.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How Varsity Tutors scaled from a startup to a public company and the evolving business model for reaching individual and institutional customers.
- The critical role of “high-dosage tutoring” in overcoming learning loss and why regular, personalized sessions outperform on-demand solutions.
- How AI tools are enhancing personalized education by creating adaptive lesson plans and optimizing tutor-student matching.
- The challenges and strategies in transitioning from direct-to-consumer to B2B in the K-12 education sector.
- The future of AI in tutoring, including real-time translation and adaptive content, and how it’s reshaping the role of human tutors.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:03:07] Chuck’s founding story of Nerdy and his vision for accessible tutoring
[00:05:20] Scaling Varsity Tutors from individual tutoring to institutional partnerships.
[00:07:27] Early entrepreneurial lessons from bootstrapping and finance
[00:13:17] Ensuring quality through effective tutor-student matching.
[00:16:45] Why high-dosage, relationship-based tutoring drives better outcomes
[00:24:10] Balancing logistics with personalization in tutoring.
[00:30:46] Chuck’s outlook on sustainable tutoring post-ESSER funding
[00:35:00] How AI enhances personalization and tutor matching at Varsity Tutors
[00:41:03] Consistent tutoring's impact on improving school attendance
[00:50:06] The promise of real-time language translation for ELL students.
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