Lives of Consequence
Daniel L. Rosensweig '83
President and CEO, Chegg
Daniel L. Rosensweig ’83 is the chief executive officer and president of Chegg. Since he took the helm in 2010, Rosensweig has re-envisioned Chegg from a textbook rental service into a digital hub that offers college students everything from textbooks, homework help and an eTextbook reader to room décor at a discount. Under his leadership, Chegg’s acquisitions include Zinch, Cramster, Notehall, and Student of Fortune. Today, the company enables students to share notes with classmates, download study guides from professors, and contribute to Q and A forums offering homework help.
Rosensweig has been tackling the student debt crisis, most recently with a 2019 series that “takes a hard look at the nation’s student-loan crisis — and gives millennials a chance to dig themselves out of massive debt,” as TheWrap.com reports. In “Going From Broke,” from executive producer Ashton Kutcher and the free streaming service Crackle, Rosensweig and financial expert Danetha Doe work closely with young people in the Los Angeles area “to help them change their habits, gain financial confidence and become CEO of their own lives.”
Earlier in 2019, Rosensweig appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” alongside the founder and CEO of Generation Hope, a nonprofit organization focused on the needs of teen parents and their children, connecting them with mentors, emotional support and financial resources to enable them to thrive, respectively, in college and kindergarten. Rosensweig announced that Chegg would pay off one young mother’s student loans as well as her textbooks.
Prior to joining Chegg, Rosensweig was president and chief executive officer of Activision Blizzard’s Guitar Hero franchise from 2007 to 2009. He joined Activision from Quadrangle Group, a media and communications private investment firm that has more than $6 billion under management.
A political science major while at Hobart, Rosensweig was a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity and studied abroad in London. After graduating, he worked for Ziff-Davis, where he remained for 18 years in positions including president of Ziff-Davis Internet Publishing Group, vice president and publisher of PC Magazine from 1994 to 1996, and president and chief executive officer of ZDNET Inc., which he took public and merged with CNET in 2000.
In 2002, he was named Chief Operating Officer at Yahoo!, Inc. where his responsibilities included marketing, advertising, product development and heading international and North American operations. During his time at Yahoo!, use of their search engine more than doubled — from 200 million users to 500 globally; the workforce increased six fold — from 2,000 employees to 12,000; revenues increased from $700 million to more than $6 billion, and market cap increased five times, from $8 billion to $40 billion in five years.
Throughout his career, Rosensweig has created internship opportunities for HWS students to work directly with him and offered students job opportunities following graduation. In 2008, he dedicated the Rosensweig Learning Commons at HWS. Located on the first floor of the Warren Hunting Smith Library, the Rosensweig Learning Commons has revolutionized the ways in which students and faculty members interact with one another and with information.
Rosensweig was a speaker at the gala launch of Campaign for the Colleges and participated in the Professionals in Residence series. He returned to campus twice as part of the President’s Forum Speaker Series, in 2011 and again in 2017, when he was awarded the Board of Trustees Career Services Award.
He served on the Colleges’ Board of Trustees from 2011 to 2013.