Building Accessible Tutoring Solutions with Chuck Cohn, Founder of Nerdy & Varsity Tutors

Send us a text 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. 😎 Stay updated with Edtech Insiders! Follow our Podcast on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyAmazon MusicSign up for the Edtech Insiders newsletter.Follow Edtech Insiders on LinkedIn! 🎉 Presenting Sponsor: This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for Education Entrepreneurs.  Founded by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work just as hard as you do.