1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Seong Kim, Corporate Strategy & Development at Chegg Inc. (Part 1)

Seong Kim, Corporate Strategy & Development for Chegg Inc. discusses exit strategy within EdTech.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a little bit of introduction. What path have you pursued in the industry? Then we’ll get into some specific topics.

Seong Kim: I’ve been working in Corporate Strategy & Development for the past six and a half years. To me, it’s important to articulate my role in that way because the strategy part must lead the development part. The characteristic that most differentiates what I do now versus what I did prior is the strategy part.

It’s more than closing deals. It’s more than yielding IRR’s or even sector-based investing. Any acquisition I advocate for need to support, enable, or extend the strategic growth capabilities of the company I work for. Prior to corporate strategy and development, I spent the balance of my career in technology growth equity, private equity buyouts, investment banking, and investment research.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. We are strategy aficionados. We believe in great strategy deeply. I actually believe that you can cut off a lot of slab and unnecessary Brownian motion that doesn’t produce any movement by doing good strategy and positioning. We are going to dive into that. Let’s start with some perspective on your current role. What does corp dev M&A play in the Chegg world and EdTech world more broadly?

Seong Kim: Maybe I can start with how we think about acquisitions. We typically start at a very high level by asking a very simple question, “What’s inevitable?” Working at an EdTech company, we might say that the skills demanded by employers will continue to be specialized and that the half-lives of those skills will get shorter. Learners will see shorter educational pathways to get to income. These pathways need to equip learners with marketable job-relevant skills.

At the same time, your daily life will continue to impede access to education – the need to make money. What else is inevitable? Education will need to be less expensive, more accessible, more adaptable relevant to the jobs that learners want. Once we answer that question, this paints a picture of the ecosystem that needs to exist. It gives us a sense of the kind of company you need to be to win in that future. Then we build a bridge from where we are today to what we need to become. The steps of that bridge become our strategy.

Sramana Mitra: In that process, there are boundaries. What is the world that you want to play in? The EdTech world is broader than the world that Chegg is playing in. How do you define that boundary? To what extent does your strategy work play in expanding that boundary?

Seong Kim: When we build that bridge, we need to take stock of what our competencies and assets are. What makes us uniquely qualified to play the role we need to play? We think about the audience that we need to serve and the ways in which we need to serve them.

Also whether or not those capabilities are the ones we have or can leverage, or whether there are capabilities we’ll need to invest to get there. Things that extend our capabilities beyond what we currently offer to existing audience and to expand our reach beyond our current base to a broader audience whether that’s on the basis of territory or a different demographic.

As we continue to zoom in and establish those guard rails, we ask really simple questions. In addition to the simple questions of what’s inevitable, we ask ourselves what problem is it that we’re looking to solve. Is that problem big enough to matter? Does it influence enough people? It is a pain point that impacts a large aspect of our society. How do we define success?

As we go through the process of answering those questions, we tend to converge on a good view of what are those things that will move the needle. What are those things that are outside the scope of what we should be thinking about? Do we build? Do we partner?

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Seong Kim, Corporate Strategy & Development at Chegg Inc.
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