About Us
Our Mission
Our mission is to bring accessible, affordable, engaging, and highly effective higher education to the world. We believe that higher education is a basic human right, and we seek to empower our students to advance their education and careers.
We Believe
Education is no longer a one-time event but a lifelong experience. Education should be less passive listening (no long lectures) and more active doing. Education should empower students to succeed not just in school but in life.
We are reinventing education for the 21st century by bridging the gap between real-world skills, relevant education, and employment. Our students will be fluent in new technology, modern mathematics, science, and critical thinking. They will marry skills with creativity and humanity to learn, think, and do. Udacians are curious and engaged world citizens.
Interested in working with us? View our openings.
Our Story
Udacity was born out of a Stanford University experiment in which Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig offered their "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" course online to anyone, for free. Over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled and not much later, Udacity was born. Now we're a growing team of educators and engineers on a mission to change the future of education by bridging the gap between real-world skills, relevant education, and employment.
Leadership Team
Sebastian Thrun
Co-Founder, CEO
Sebastian has set his sights on democratizing higher education. Co-founder and CEO of Udacity, Sebastian is also a Research Professor at Stanford University and a Google Fellow, as well as the inventor of the autonomous car and project lead on Google Glass. 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).
Vish Makhijani
President, COO
Vish believes the time is now to make higher education more effective, accessible and useful. Prior to Udacity, Vish led high growth organizations at companies like Zynga, Yandex and Yahoo. Vish is a dog lover and aspires to become a scratch golfer but is a realist.
Francois Dufour
VP Marketing
Francois loves connecting people to essential services and content that help them become more knowledgeable and successful. He believes bringing world-class education to as many people as possible worldwide will create incredible economic opportunity and that Udacity is ideally positioned to achieve this. He also believes in learning by doing and in learning from the best do-ers. Prior to Udacity, Francois led Marketing for Talent Solutions at LinkedIn and worked in marketing for Yahoo! Messenger, Groups, Mail, and Mobile.
Nitin Sharma
VP Engineering and Data Science
Nitin is passionate about using technology and data to make the online learning experience fun, engaging and effective so that millions around the world can achieve their potential. Prior to Udacity, Nitin worked on using massive data at scale to improve user experience at Groupon, Google and Yahoo.
Clarissa Shen
VP Business Development
Clarissa is an optimist about technology's impact on education, having co-founded a K-12 start-up, and led digital change at Apollo Group. In her past life she led a contemporary dance company and was in management strategy with Monitor Group. After discovering CS101, Clarissa had so much fun learning to code that she wanted her kids to have that same opportunity in the future—so she joined Udacity.
Brent Tworetzky
VP Product Management
Brent is dedicated to advancing learning through new technologies. Prior to Udacity, Brent was a business and product leader at Chegg, Mint, and WebMD. He holds several patents around digital learning environments and is an active mentor to NewSchools Venture Fund, Imagine K12, and several education startups.
Hsiao-Lu Lee
Director of Student Services
Hsiao-Lu is an avid learner and educator on a mission to make personalized education and mentoring more accessible for students everywhere. Her experience before Udacity ranges from teaching in person and online, mentoring other teachers, translating online courseware, modeling human diseases, to developing live cell microscopy. She now leads the Udacity mentoring team to help students reach their full potential by advancing their learning and their careers.
Kathleen Mullaney
Director of Content Development
Motivated by $30K in student loans, Kathleen joined Udacity in 2011 to help make education more affordable and useful to students all over the world. She now leads the largest team at Udacity, working with instructors, video producers and education experts to create amazing content. Before Udacity, she worked at Google, analyzing geo and user data.
Advisory Board
Carl Bass
Carl is president and chief executive officer of Autodesk, Inc., a maker of professional 3D design software and consumer applications, and was a co-founder of Ithaca Software, which commercialized HOOPS, a 3D graphics system.
William Bennett
"Bill" is former United States Secretary of Education from 1985 to 1988. He also held the post of Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under George H. W. Bush. In 2000, he co-founded K12, a for-profit online education corporation which is publicly traded.
Steve Blank
Steve is a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Translation: he has failed and—more often—succeeded, in a 21-year career building 8 Valley startups, including several with major IPO's. Along the way, he's learned an incredible amount, and has spent the last decade sharing what he's learned with entrepreneurs all over the world, including here at Udacity in EP245.
Cathy Davidson
Cathy is a Professor of English at Duke University since 1996 and was Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University from 1998 to 2006. In 2010, President Obama nominated her to a six-year term on the National Council on the Humanities. She currently serves on the Board of Advisors to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "Digital Media and Learning" initiative.
Peter Levine
Peter is partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a veteran executive from leading enterprise software companies. He is a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business and has also taught at MIT's Sloan School of Management. As an avid ice climber and mountaineer, he compares his mountaineering expeditions to building a company.
Laurene Powell Jobs
Ms. Laurene Powell Jobs is founder and chair of Emerson Collective, which works with social entrepreneurs and organizations to promote improved education, immigration reform, social justice and conservation. Ms. Powell Jobs also serves as president of the board of College Track, an after-school program she co-founded in 1997 to prepare underserved high school students for success in college.
George Zachary
George is partner at Charles River Ventures with 20+ years of operating and investing experience in computing and consumer technology. At CRV, he focuses on building consumer internet and infrastructure companies. He is on the board of Stanford SSE, Stanford's StartX, and is an advisor to the X PRIZE Foundation.