Osman Rashid

Osman is a serial entrepreneur who has already left a strong impact on the world of education, as the founding CEO of Chegg. Chegg is the innovative texbook rental company that has saved more than $200 million dollars for millions of college students at practically every campus in the U.S.

As CEO of Chegg, he grew the company twenty-five fold since its launch and turned it into a scalable operation before handing the day-to-day responsibilities over to the current CEO, so that he could focus on Kno. He continues to serve as Chegg’s Chairman.

Like most successful businesses, Chegg sprung out of a deep-seated passion; Osman never forgot that the cost of textbooks was a crushing burden when he was in college, and he wanted to solve that problem for others by creating a bold new model.

For his leadership and vision in creating a world-class consumer focused, data driven, marketing and logistics operation from scratch, Osman was named the 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year for the coveted Northern California region by Ernst & Young.

Osman’s first entrepreneurial start-up was eBot, Inc., an e-mail management company which he started eighteen months out of college, and which was sold in less than year. After that, he held key positions in marketing and sales for a leading call-center company (where he learned how to treat consumers as brand assets) and Chordiant, a publicly-held enterprise software company focused on customer management. Mike Maples, an early investor in Digg and Twitter, has said that “Osman Rashid is a world-class entrepreneur with the courage to be non-consensus and right and the right Jedi moves to pull it all off.”

Those Jedi moves can be traced back to London, where Osman was born, Pakistan, where he grew up, Ghana, where he spent time during his childhood, and America, which provided the launching pad for his entrepreneurial drive. Osman came to America to attend college at the University of Minnesota, where he earned a Bachelors in Engineering. He is married to Renee and they have two daughters who will go to college and learn everything there is to know, on the Kno.