When Chuck Cohn was struggling with a difficult college calculus class, he had a hard time finding the right place to access resources to help him improve.

So he decided to take matters into his own hands.

Chuck launched Nerdy, a direct-to-consumer platform connecting students and subject matter experts, with $1,000 from his dorm room. Now, Nerdy is a publicly traded company with a $1.7 billion valuation.

In this episode of The Empowered Challenger, Chuck discusses the path from upstart challenger to industry leader, as well as how he plans to continue to lead in an increasingly crowded field.

“It might just be how I'm wired, but I've always felt like I had a target on the back or a little bit of a chip on the shoulder,” he says.

Listen to the episode to learn about how Nerdy approaches customer acquisition and how Chuck thinks about Nerdy’s competitors in the online learning industry.