Courtesy of Varsity Tutors
Chuck Cohn came up with the idea for Varsity Tutors during his junior year at Washington University in St. Louis. Two of his friends had just successfully tutored him to a great grade in calculus, and it made him think back to the successful—and not so successful—tutoring sessions he had previously experienced.
He wished that he’d always been able to find good help.
“I ended up asking those two friends if they wanted to be the first two tutors, borrowed $1,000 from my parents to start the company, and the business was born,” says Cohn, who currently serves as Varsity Tutors' CEO. “The feedback we got from the first few clients was so positive that I knew there was a real opportunity.”
Cohn describes the early days of the company as “really modest. We were on a shoestring budget, and I was juggling phone calls between classes.”
Since he was still completing his bachelor's degree at the time, one challenge was “convincing people that we were a credible operation, and that they should entrust us with their kids’ education and learning,” says Cohn. “I realized early on that this was a really labor-intensive industry, and I needed to invest in technology to keep track of it. I was focused on how we could create a platform that would allow us to provide a higher quality service at a lower cost and in a more convenient manner.”
"Hopefully we’re showing that it’s possible to build a successful internet company that matters here in St. Louis,” says Cohn.
When Cohn started building Varsity Tutors, he saw the other available tutoring services as "kind of like going to Blockbuster." Students would often have to go to a strip mall, sit through an hourlong, one-size-fits-all approach—or you'd need a lucky word-of-mouth referral.
"We're trying to create a Netflix-like experience," Cohn says.
At first, that simply meant that students could sign up online for an in-person tutoring session. But in 2014, Varsity Tutors unveiled their digital platform.
"We can pair you with the best person for your needs nationally. The entire experience is recorded; we built a logistics engine so you can do real time matching. You can click a button and be video chatting with someone in a live session in almost 200 different subjects,” says Cohn.
Today, Varsity Tutors' online platform is more popular than their in-person services.
Courtesy of Varsity Tutors
And Cohn and his team are beginning to expand their platform to “categories outside of tutoring, such as technical training and music, in geographies outside of the United States.”
For around $55 per hour, Varsity Tutors' students can receive tutoring in 1,000 different subjects. The company has worked with over 100,000 students since their founding in 2007, and facilitated over 3 million hours of tutoring.
Their current customers are primarily kindergarten through university students, but an increasing number of adults not seeking a degree also use the platform. “We want to be a platform for knowledge transfer,” says Cohn. “We’re beginning by focusing on categories that are closest to tutoring and working farther afield.”
Last year, the company expanded internationally by purchasing the U.K.-based company First Tutors. The purchase will be aided by their recent Series C round of funding, which raised $50 million from notable sources including Learn Capital, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and Technology Crossover Ventures.
“We’re going to be focused on doing a really great job and adding more and more categories and more and more countries, and eventually, if you add enough countries and enough categories, you become the destination.”
Even with significant portions of their more recent funding coming from California, Cohn says they feel no pressure to move their home base from St. Louis (with a co-headquarters in Seattle) and plan to keep the office open for years to come. Their St. Louis office employs about 140 people; the company employs around 500 people nationally.
“St. Louis is, in my opinion, a great place to grow a business," he says. "There’s a lot of talent, a low cost of living. You can have a great lifestyle, and there’s a lot of great universities to produce well-educated students.” The company also has offices in Seattle; Victoria, Canada; and Phoenix.
"Hopefully we’re showing that it’s possible to build a successful internet company that matters here in St. Louis,” says Cohn.
