Exciting leadership news at Udemy

Hi all,

We announced this morning that Ramji Sundararajan has joined Udemy as our new President of Consumer, reporting directly to Hugo, our CEO. He’ll be leading our global Consumer business, including the marketplace that connects your courses with millions of learners around the world.

Ramji brings deep experience growing digital platforms and using AI in thoughtful ways to make learning more personal and engaging. He’s helped teams drive real impact from retention to reach, and his leadership will be key as we make the marketplace stronger and expand subscriptions. That means more ways for people to discover your courses and for you to reach learners around the world.

As Ramji steps into his new role, we’ll be sharing more about his vision and the opportunities ahead.

I will partner with Ramji as I continue to lead the B2B and corporate marketing, overall content, and instructor functions for Udemy.

I’m excited to welcome Ramji and look forward to partnering with him and Ozzie as we work together to deliver experiences that deliver value for learners, instructors, and organizations around the world.

Thank you as ever for being on this journey with us.

Best,
Genefa

Full Press Release here

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Comments

Welcome Ramji!

Welcome Ramji!

Good Luck Ramji.

Great news, congratulations!

Coach.Hector

Welcome.

peter_dalmaris

Welcome and wishing you success, Ramji.

AMLearning

Our sales are dropped anyway

TonyAlicea

Welcome Ramji!

DiegoHernán333

Great!!!

Shahtajbhutto

Welcome Ramji!

Col (Dr) Shabbar Shahid (Veteran)

Great news. Welcome Ramji. Looking forward to a bright future together

SivakamiS2017

Great news 👍️ Hopefully the marketplace will get a lot more focus now.

Welcome Ramji!

hoş geldin Ramji

☺️

Welcome Ramji and great news. In the press release I liked when Hugo wrote "Our marketplace remains the heartbeat of Udemy's ecosystem."

TonyAlicea

I think when instructors hear “marketplace” they’re thinking of direct sales.

From Ramji’s announcement on LinkedIn: “That’s why I’m thrilled to join Udemy working with Hugo Sarrazin to lead our consumer business globally and drive the transition to a subscription based AI-powered skills acceleration platform — democratizing access, accelerating learning, and preparing everyone for the future of work.”

Curious what “making the marketplace stronger” will look like, while Udemy is being very open about focusing on subscriptions.

I am very interested in seeing how Udemy will navigate education for the AI-Influenced work world.

SivakamiS2017

Good point, @TonyAlicea !
It will be good to know what exactly "making the marketplace stronger" means.

Boris035

Exactly…especially when we know that 85-90% of courses are out of any subscription program.

GenefaMurph976

Ramji will share more - but one thing is clear the transactional model is still a key part of our model - as it provides one of the lowest barriers to entry to learning - what we need to ensure we perfect is the upsell motion from freemium > transactional > subs > subs with transactional etc and we also ensure that we lower the customer aquisition cost (CAC) for the transactional model using organic marketing channels so that we so that we can continually add value for the learner and the instructor and ensure we are running an effective and efficient business.

PanoraM Akademi

Welcome Ramji!

TonyAlicea

@GenefaMurph976 Transactional as a road to subscription makes a lot of sense I think.

I wonder if fremium should limit how much of a course you can watch (say 50%) and the CTA is either to buy the course or subscribe.

SekhmetReiki

Congratulations Ramji

NoorFakhry

I hope Udemy also considers focusing on the ad program and giving instructors the option to make our courses free with ads, while splitting the ad revenue with us. This could open up a huge audience of learners who can’t afford courses yet, while still compensating instructors fairly and helping Udemy reach more users organically

Zakia

Welcome

GenefaMurph976

Interesting idea @TonyAlicea– we do that with our product tour on the UB side (obviously that’s for lead gen, not a paid course) but progressive gating is definitely something we can look at. https://business.udemy.com/product-tour/

TonyAlicea

We instructors do this as well by setting lectures to allow preview. I think gating would be a natural extension of both the current product tour and previews to me, avoids fremium abuse, and allows students to get far enough along that they want to finish.