Today I am excited to welcome Gabriel Dalporto as our new Chief Executive Officer at Udacity. Gabe joins us from LendingTree, where he was instrumental in driving the company’s transition from a microcap, mortgage-focused marketplace to a multi-billion dollar, fully diversified financial services marketplace. He is highly strategic, with extensive experience in the consumer marketing space.
As Doug Lebda, the Founder, Chairman & CEO at LendingTree, told me recently, “Gabe was an instrumental component to our company’s growth and diversification and continues to be a valuable member of our board of directors. His leadership experience and analytical expertise will undoubtedly make Gabe a true asset to the Udacity team as CEO.”
With Gabe’s dynamic leadership style and outcome-driven approach, I know he is the right person to lead Udacity into our next phase of growth. And I will continue to support him as Executive Chairman of Udacity.
Gabe takes over Udacity at an opportune moment in time. Since June 2019, the company has been cash-flow positive, and it is growing aggressively. Special recognition goes to Lalit Singh, who joined us in February as our Chief Operating Officer, the Udacity Board of Directors, as well as the entire Udacity team.
In early May, we switched our direct-to-student business from fixed to monthly subscription pricing, so that individuals would be incentivized to move through our courses faster. We also launched a global technical mentoring program, with more than 1,000 active mentors worldwide. In the three months since we’ve initiated these changes, the consumer business has grown by more than 60%. Additionally, learners progress through their studies 20% faster, and NPS grew by 10 points. In fact, just this week we granted our 100,000th Nanodegree certificate, and we are days away from our 1,000,000th successful project submission!
Our enterprise and government businesses are also booming, with bookings each increasing by over 100% year over year. Our corporate clients now consistently report over 80% course completion rates, a far cry from MOOCs and other content-only offerings. And staying truthful to our social mission, we launched more than 50,000 new scholarships with AT&T, Google, Bertelsmann, Facebook, and AWS.
Building a great company is always a work in progress. As we expand our businesses, we will face new challenges. I draw enormous confidence from the fact that with Gabe at the helm, Udacity’s team of focused, compassionate, smart, and driven individuals will continue to make strides toward our singular goal of powering careers globally through tech education.
Welcome to Udacity, Gabe!
