Author: Sebastian Thrun

Sebastian Thrun is a scientist, educator, inventor, and entrepreneur. As the founder, president, and now executive chairman of Udacity, Sebastian’s mission is to democratize education by providing lifelong learning to millions of students worldwide. He is also the founder of Google X, where he led projects including the Self-Driving Car, Google Glass, and more. Previously, he led the Stanford Racing Team whose robot “Stanley” won the DARPA Grand Challenge. Sebastian has been named the 5th Most Creative Person in Business (Fast Company), among the 50 Smartest People in Tech (Fortune), and highlighted in 50 Best Inventions of 2010 (Time). He is the first recipient of the inaugural Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Education, and is also featured in the recent film Lo & Behold: Reveries of the Connected World by award-winning writer and director Werner Herzog.

Since we launched Udacity’s Enterprise business in 2017, a growing number of companies have enrolled their employees in Udacity’s Nanodegree programs, indicating that leading organizations are increasingly investing in Udacity’s Nanodegree programs to upskill their own employees while helping to close the talent gap in the labor market. We’re proud to have partnered with Fortune 500 companies to help them transform their workforces. Today, we’re thrilled to announce our latest partnership with the worldwide consulting leader Accenture.

Learning with Udacity supports Accenture’s mission to help solve their clients’ toughest challenges. Through this pilot program, selected Accenture employees will have the opportunity to enroll in one of five Udacity Nanodegree programs in pioneering technology subjects such as Self-Driving Cars, Deep Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision.

When I met with Udacity graduates at Accenture last month, we spoke about the changing nature of industries worldwide. Transportation, for instance, is undergoing multiple parallel changes with the advent of electric and self-driving cars, as well as new ridesharing models. Lifelong learning is a crucial tool that enables students to catch up to the latest in these fields. By becoming expert learners in subjects such as self-driving cars and machine learning, students will be able to move in tandem with these innovations, remaining on the pulse, and transition into new capabilities as experts in their fields.

Andrew Smith, Managing Director and Head of Industry X.0 at Accenture, completed Udacity’s Deep Learning Nanodegree program earlier this year. “Continuous learning is important in every job. But in consulting it is vital to stay ahead, especially as the speed of technological advancement accelerates every day,” he said. “Udacity’s programs teach the exact tech skills we need at Accenture. They offer a great learning experience that can be flexibly integrated into your schedule regardless of location and course hours.”

By launching this pilot program with Accenture, Udacity is taking another step towards our mission to power careers through tech education. A warm welcome to all the new learners at Accenture. We look forward to watching your continued progress and seeing what you will build. Thank you for learning with Udacity!

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Announcements

Udacity Welcomes Gabriel Dalporto as Our New CEO

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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.

Announcements, Featured Blogs

Taking Udacity to New Heights

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Today, we are taking a huge step towards becoming the “University of Silicon Valley.” In the past decade, Udacity has become a global educational leader in fields such as Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. But to double down on student success, every student will now have technical mentors, expert reviewers, career coaches, and personalized learning plans on their side, in every Nanodegree program. Our learning programs — built with the best in Silicon Valley — have always been world class. But, the changes we have implemented today will take them to a whole new level.

School of Programming

The Audacity to Change

Find the right nanodegree program for you.
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How a 6-month technology course at Udacity helped Anna Preis — and thousands of other people this year — change her life through a new career in tech.

Udacity - The Audacity to Change

Eight years ago, Anna Preis, originally from Poland, found herself in Dublin, Ireland, in a dead-end job working the phones for a payday lender. She hated getting people to take out high-interest loans she knew they could never afford to repay, but she had to meet her quotas to keep her job. “It was heart destroying,” she says. She talked to customers all day long but was never able to truly help them. A string of customer service and customer retention jobs followed, until late last year when a particularly awful day at work caused her to question everything. “I wanted to do something about my life,” she says.

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Our Next Chapter

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I founded Udacity to democratize education. Since 2011, Udacity has been on a mission to provide global access to education and economic opportunity. We have educated millions of students in over 190 countries, enabling many to pursue careers in cutting-edge fields like artificial intelligence and self-driving cars.

In 2013, I recruited Vishal Makhijani as my trusted partner. Vish joined Udacity as COO and President. In 2016, with my full support, the Udacity Board of Directors appointed Vish as our new CEO, and I became chairman and president.

Over the last five years, Vish worked with hundreds of tech companies to build curriculum focused on opening up new career opportunities for our students. Under Vish’s leadership, we launched more than thirty Nanodegree programs in areas such as artificial intelligence, data science, self-driving cars, and digital marketing. We expanded our operations into China, India, Brazil, the Middle East, and Europe, and we started a fast-growing new enterprise division.

With Vish at the helm, Udacity grew from a niche startup into a global educational force, one that stands for educational excellence and true economic gains for our students. Vish recruited a world-class team, growing our company from 50 to more than 500 talented and devoted people. Without Vish’s leadership and relentless dedication, Udacity would not be where it is today.

Today I am sad to report that Vish has decided to move on to new challenges. Our Board of Directors has initiated a CEO search, led by Peter Levine from Andreessen Horowitz. In the interim, as Udacity’s founder and now executive chairman, I will work closely with Udacity’s leadership team to run the business and collaborate on a search for our new CEO. Going forward, our commitment remains to our students and partners to deliver true career outcomes and economic gains. We all believe education is a basic human right. We will not rest until everyone on this planet can have an equal seat at the table of economic opportunity.

I am grateful to Vish and our incredible team for what we have already accomplished. And I am incredibly excited for what comes next.

Thank you, Vish!

Sebastian Thrun

Featured Blogs, School of Autonomous Systems

Self-Driving Cars for Everyone!

Get started with self-driving cars in our Intro to Self-Driving Car nanodegree program.
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Get on the road to a Self-Driving Car Career - Udacity - blog

I am super pumped to announce a new Udacity Nanodegree offering: an introductory program to Self-Driving Cars. As you all know well, I have been working on self-driving cars for over a decade. I founded Google’s self-driving car team, and launched Udacity’s Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program last year at this time. This program has already educated more self-driving car engineers than all universities combined. And while the first group has not even graduated, nearly 60 students have already found new jobs at companies like BMW, Lockheed Martin, NIO, Volvo, and Amazon Robotics.

However, our existing Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program has many prerequisites. It is built for seasoned software engineers, who wish to dive into the nitty gritty details of how to make a self-driving car.

Our new Intro to Self-Driving Cars Nanodegree program lets anyone with minimal programming experience taste the thrills of building self-driving cars. We empower you to understand the essentials of programming a self-driving car: from machine learning to object-oriented programming to probabilistic robotics. When you graduate from this program with your very own Nanodegree credential in hand, you won’t quite be an expert (yet). However, you will have experienced what it means to build self-driving cars, and hopefully will engage in a path of learning that will forever change your life. You will get guaranteed admission into the advanced Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program upon completion.

Announcements, Featured Blogs, School of Autonomous Systems

From Grand Challenge to Nanodegree Program

In 2004, DARPA held the first Grand Challenge for an autonomous car to drive 142 miles through the Mojave desert in under 10 hours. Fifteen cars participated, none finished. In 2005, the Challenge was repeated and 23 cars entered. Four finished under 10 hours and our car “Stanley” won in 6 hours and 53 minutes—11 minutes ahead of the next car. Then, in 2010, the Google self-driving car navigated 1,000 miles of public roads in California, an unbelievable advance from that first challenge.

Today, six years later, autonomous cars have become one of the hottest areas for innovation. The Boston Consulting Group estimates the market for autonomous cars will hit $42 billion in 2025. The World Health Organization reports there are 1.2 million traffic fatalities globally every year and driverless cars could be poised to save no less than 1 million lives per year.

Technology companies, automotive manufacturers, media giants, and start-ups around the world are rapidly pushing new advances in this space, whether it be hardware or software. And, they all need talent.

This is where Udacity comes in. Today, we are announcing that our Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program is open for students to apply. It is the first and only program of its kind where most people with an internet connection—from Detroit to Damascus and from Adelaide to Aleppo—can learn the skills they need to work in one of the most amazing fields of our time.

Author: Sebastian Thrun

Announcing our newest client: Global consulting leader Accenture