Building the "Spotify of Textbooks" with Gauthier Van Malderen, Founder @ Perlego
Gauthier van Malderen breaks down how he transformed student textbook frustration into Perlego, a subscription platform that's raised $50M by prioritizing publisher relationships over self-published content. His contrarian approach—building a great business first, then maximizing social impact—offers a refreshingly honest take on mission-driven startups that actually need to make money.
Key takeaways
- •Build exceptional business fundamentals first, then layer on social impact—not the other way around.
- •Quality control trumps content volume when building publisher relationships and user trust.
- •Remote work can kill startup culture formation, especially in early-stage companies that need rapid iteration.
- •Non-technical founders can excel at fundraising AI solutions by focusing on vision and market positioning over technical details.
- •COVID accelerated digital adoption by forcing traditional professors to embrace platforms they previously resisted.
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Best moment
EdTech founder raised $50M during COVID boom while balancing profits and social impact
“One, everyone was going remote.”
One, everyone was going remote. So sometimes professors who were like, oh, I want my students to study in print, they totally appreciate it. They have to, you know, use digital. Two, a lot of the publishers were like, wow, our print business completely declined. Here, you can have digital. You can have e and you can sell globally. And then the third is edtech really picked up as a boom during COVID, and that's when we raised, you know, a 50,000,000 round, and we were able to scale quite quickly. So that helped us up, helped us massively. And that got us the critical mass of content, critical mass of users to have a lot of scale to then get the remaining publishers we were missing.
Yeah. And the I mean, you you guys are in a fortunate spot where it seems like there's a a really big business opportunity, but it's also has a very positive impact on society. Right? Which are definitely seen often as at odds with each other. You know, whether you can build a sort of positive social impact company that's also a huge business. I wonder how you've balanced those two things, like, whether they have ever felt like they're at odds with each other,
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