Plugdin Interview: When vision meets hunger: Interview with Gauthier van Malderen, CEO of Perlego

Students and academics need access to valuable research, but this often comes at a high personal cost. The alternative? Turn to second-hand books or piracy.

Noticing this trend – and the impact it was having on publishers – Gauthier van Malderen went all-in on his company Perlego with a vision to create the first all-in-one digital library for students, available in the same way you’d pay for Netflix or Spotify: through a small monthly subscription.

Eight years in, Perlego has been named by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 fastest-growing tech companies in the UK. We sat down with Gauthier to ask how he turned his innovative idea into a global powerhouse – and where he wants to take Perlego next.
 

Perlego has been described as ‘Spotify for textbooks.’ What inspired this idea and what has the journey been like up to now?

The inspiration for Perlego came from my own experience of being a university student, when I was spending £300–£400 on textbooks that I would only read once.

What I noticed was that these prices were pushing students towards the second-hand book market and piracy, which was cannibalising publishers’ profits. In fact, over the three years I was at university, the publishing industry’s revenues dropped from $30 billion to $19 billion. So, the pain point was obvious. It was just a matter of seizing the opportunity to disrupt the market.
 

You’re disrupting a sector that some would call quite conservative. How have you steered this disruption, and what challenges have you faced along the way?

Indeed. We came across the chicken and egg problem early. We needed to convince the publishers to add their books to our platform, but they wanted to see validation in the form of users first. However, we could only get those users by having books on the platform.

We got around this problem by focusing on data. We surveyed students and found there was a tremendous appetite for our platform. We then used this data as leverage to help us approach publishers. What’s funny is that, despite their initial reservations, as soon as these publishers signed up they started to see the advantages, and now they’re very positive towards Perlego.
 

Have you faced any big surprises along the way?

The biggest surprise has been cultural. I’m from Belgium, where business growth is gradual, you expand city by city, then nationally, and only later abroad.

In the UK, you’re encouraged to be far more ambitious. We were supported early by angel investors like Alex Chesterman of Zoopla and Simon Franks of LoveFilm, who taught us to take bigger risks, have a bold vision, show passion for executing it, and not to worry about the small details. I was only 25 when I founded Perlego, fresh out of business school where I’d spent my time studying models, which I thought was the right way to do things. That cultural difference has made a big impact.
 

You were recently named one of the Sunday Times’s 100 fastest-growing tech companies. What does this recognition mean to you at this stage in your journey?

It means a lot. Entrepreneurship is tough. It’s hard work, you face a lot of rejection, and there’s no guarantee it will pay off in the end. So, this recognition is meaningful in three ways.

The first is the affirmation that we are building something meaningful, something that people really want. The second thing it helps with is recruitment. We want to build a culture where people can feel proud to say they work for a company that’s growing fast and making a difference in the world. And the third thing it helps towards is business development. It shows that we’re a credible force in this industry. It shows that we’re trusted by a great number of publishers, universities and students. It’s important for attracting investors as well as customers.
 

Speaking of investors, I hear you’ve recently closed a $20 million funding round. What’s next for Perlego?

One of the big things for us is to continue to innovate from an AI perspective. We’ve recently launched Research Assistant, which leverages our library to help with academic research at a much deeper level than ordinary AI companies can manage.

We’re also focused on accessibility. In the world of academia, very few books have been converted into audio format. So we created Read Aloud to ensure that students can listen to their books on-the-go, with a variety of voices.

And of course we’re also focused on international growth. Already, 56% of our revenue comes from the US, but there’s still work to be done building our footprint overseas.
 

In such a fast-growing company, how have you managed to embed a culture of disruption?

Everyone in our team has a high element of accountability and impact. So, if we’re hiring someone, we’ll tell them that from day one, they’ll be contributing to growth, and they’d get to see the impact they were making. And because we have that culture of accountability, we know we can trust people to take ownership of that mission.

We’re also very data-led. We test everything, and use that data to always be making informed decisions. That allows people to be decisive and move quickly.
 

Can you share a time when Perlego’s culture led to a breakthrough or a valuable learning from failure?

One of our biggest failures, I think, was that we didn't internationalise quickly enough. I say that knowing that many companies try to go global too quickly and end up running into cultural differences and cross-border issues. But for us, in those first few years, I think we were too UK-focused.

That was until one day when we suddenly asked ourselves, hey, why don’t we test it? We had rights with a lot of publishers to sell globally, so we thought ‘let's open it up.’ And it worked, and now today the UK only makes up 10% of our revenue. So, I guess my biggest mistake was that we didn’t go international faster.
 

How do you ensure the publishers get a fair deal in all this? And how do you support academics and authors?

That’s something that’s very important to us, and we’ve spent time modelling the data to ensure everyone in our supply chain gets a fair deal. We’ve looked at the average cost of books, retail mark-up, and lifetime value of those books to students. But we also found that, in the UK, only 28% of students buy their books from new. So, by shortening the supply chain – cutting out print, distribution, and wholesale costs – we believe we can remove inefficiencies and return more money to publishers and authors. And it provides them with recurring monthly revenue.

The big thing we’re trying to do is solve the cannibalisation problem. We’re attracting people away from piracy and second-hand markets with a beautiful, convenient platform.
 

Have you faced difficulty communicating the benefits of your platform to academic publishers? What has helped them trust your business model?

It certainly helps that, today, Perlego has much more scale. We’re generating millions of pounds to publishers on a monthly basis.

But beyond that, the industry is becoming much more digitally savvy. And while I still love the feeling of a good book in my hands, the world is moving away from ownership models towards access models. People want to access their content without owning it.

And so, you put those two things together, and publishers start to see the benefits. It’s more profitable. And it’s more scalable.
 

How do you approach building your technology – do you build in-house or partner with others?

Well, certainly most of our development happens in-house. But when it comes to the question of buy versus build, we always try to weigh up our options. For instance, when it comes to processing payments we work with Stripe, which is very easy to integrate. And we do that because the time we save developing our own payments portal is time we can dedicate to building our own beautiful platform for the benefit of our customers.
 

Have you faced pushback from stakeholders who are uncertain about AI? How have you navigated that?

There’s a big conversation around IP infringement, particularly when it comes to translation. We’d love to be able to use AI to automatically translate the books on our platform, but doing so would count as infringement.

And you’ve probably seen what happened with companies like Facebook and Anthropic, who were using hundreds of thousands of pirated books to feed and train their models. So it’s natural that there’s a lot of frustration in the industry around the use of AI.

Having said that, from what I’ve seen, the publishers are actually very proactive in trying new solutions, so long as there’s a sustainable monetisation strategy for them. So, I think if we can build better frameworks and better playbooks where everyone can benefit from AI in a safe and fair way, that would really help the industry.
 

As Perlego expands globally, how will you balance growth with maintaining trust?

It’s quite simple for us. When we enter new markets, we focus all our efforts on these prestigious publishers, and if we’re successful, that gives us the credibility to expand in that market.

One way that we build trust in a new territory is to closely with collaborate with academics. So, we’ll approach professors and faculty members and offer them the chance to test our product. Getting a feel for Perlego makes them advocates, and that helps us to build trust, because we have the credibility of big names in academia promoting us. That’s worked very well for us in, for instance, South America.
 

Looking back on your journey as founder and CEO, what key lessons have you learned, and what would you do differently?

Funnily enough, I’m in the middle of writing a book about my experiences, and one of my biggest lessons is around hiring. We hired really well in the early days, we were very fortunate. But as we grew, I stepped back from the hiring process, and we ended up hiring some people who didn’t really fit our culture.

I’ve learned it’s better to hire people who are ambitious and eager to learn than those with decades of industry experience. That may sound strange, but experience isn’t essential when building something innovative – it can even be counterproductive.

So yes, one of my biggest mistakes was hiring very senior execs from big companies instead of hungry, curious people early in their careers.
 

Finally, what’s your vision for Perlego, and how will it shape the future of academic learning?

In terms of where we're going, we’ve split our vision into two main pillars. The first is to create the world’s best workspace for academics. Building on what we’ve already done, which is aggregating textbook content, we now want to expand into a platform that encompasses everything – slides, essays, notes, and so on – all in one beautiful space.

The second is to move away from being the ‘Spotify for textbooks’ toward an all-in-one learning ecosystem. Perlego will be a space where learners can find all their material in one place, with a community layer of professors and students. We’re building tools that let professors upload content and students collaborate with classmates, becoming more engaged with the material.

You could say we’re evolving into a marketplace and ecosystem. That’s our vision for the future.
 

How can we help?

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Whether you’re building new AI-driven learning tools, developing global partnerships, or shaping the future of accessible education like Perlego, we can help you create value, build resilience, drive the right culture, and manage risk, guiding you throughout to achieve your goals.

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