Our Team
David Miller
CEO |
Brett Miller
CTO |
David Miller CEO
David founded SlugBooks in 2008 as a senior at UC Santa Cruz where he majored in Business and Economics. Over the past few years, David has worked with startups including Like.com (acquired by Google, 2010) and the Dealmap (acquired by Google, 2011). He has also seen every episode of The Office at least twice. He's a techie and designer at heart and won't stop building apps until every single college student is satisfied. That's what she said.
Brett Miller CTO
Brett has been with SlugBooks since the beginning (of the company, not time) and coded the very first version of the site in 2008. Unlike the rest of the SlugBooks team, Brett isn't afraid of heights and enjoys rock climbing, hiking, and catching salmon with his bare hands. He studied Mechanical Engineering at University of New Hampshire with a focus in Computational Fluid Dynamics. Outside of Brett, no one knows exactly what Computational Fluid Dynamics means (and wikipedia doesn't help much), but we hear it's great for making drinks.
Our Story
In 1996, a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz founded Slug Books Co-op. Slug Books was a student-run cooperative committed to saving students money on textbooks by providing a guaranteed cheaper alternative to the campus bookstore. Just one year earlier, Amazon.com was founded, based upon the idea that people could save money by moving the entire book marketplace to the internet. Both Amazon and Slug Books Co-op accomplished what they set out to do, but unfortunately, in 2006 the co-op could no longer compete with the Amazon's and eBay's of the world and closed its doors.
A UC Santa Cruz student and former Slug Books Co-op employee, David Miller attempted a different approach toward the same goal - instead of competing with cheaper internet resellers, a more useful cost-saving service in the radically evolved textbook market would be to partner with the same vendors that likely put the co-op out of business. Inspired by the spirit of the defunct co-op, SlugBooks.com launched in 2008.
By aggregating all of the information and purchasing options in one place, SlugBooks provides students with a fun and powerful savings tool. The SlugBooks service has expanded significantly from its humble beginnings at UC Santa Cruz and now serves most of the largest universities in America. While SlugBooks' information offering has increased, at its core is the same simple goal: saving you money on your textbooks.
