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Building the "Spotify of Textbooks" with Gauthier Van Malderen, Founder @ Perlego

November 5, 2025·44 min·2 clips

Students spend $100 on a textbook to read 2 chapters—that's the problem every education startup misses.

Gautier opens with the textbook bill that bothered him in college. He says he was spending 300 pounds on a book, reading a couple of chapters, and then never touching it again. Friends were already finding workarounds, from illegal downloads to photocopies and secondhand copies. Pellego came out of that mess, not a boardroom brainstorm. He first tried to turn it into a subscription product while doing a master's in the UK. Publishers said no, so he shelved it. He then took a job, put some distance between himself and the first failure, and came back a few months later. The second attempt stuck. Funding followed, and the company has been moving ever since. The conversation keeps coming back to how hard it is to change publishing incentives. He is clear that Pellego does not want every possible book on the platform. Quality matters more than sheer volume. That means being selective about publishers and resisting the easy self-publishing route. He also says some publishers simply waited longer than others. Once the business showed more revenue and scale, those conversations became easier and easier. The founder side of the story is strong, too. He has a co-founder CTO, Matt, but says he still handles fundraising and publishing deals himself. He does not romanticize solo founding and thinks a three-founder setup can be ideal for scale. Asked what he would do next, he says he would want to build with a close friend again. The episode ends with him sounding bullish on a separate hacky idea around public-domain content that is beautifully typeset and easier to sell.

As heard by us

A founder story about turning expensive textbooks into Pellego after an early failure.

This episode tracks Gautier Van Malderen from a personal textbook headache to Pellego, with the first attempt failing, a return after another job, and funding that let the idea keep moving.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a founder story built from textbook pain, this one stays close to the mechanics.

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