- During the pandemic, Coursera's revenue more than doubled.
- CEO Jeff Maggioncalda credits the accessibility and flexibility of its programs.
- Now the platform wants to help learners switch careers.
Late last February, after Japan's prime minister closed every school in the country due to a novel respiratory infection that beset the region, Jeff Maggioncalda made a prediction.
Maggioncalda, the CEO of the online-learning platform Coursera, was on his way to an airport in Texas after visiting Rice University. But before boarding his flight to Utah, he sent an email to his staff.
"Team," the email read, "Japan just closed every school in their country. I think this thing is going to become a pandemic, and all the schools in the world are going to close. We need to start working on this."
Maggioncalda's foresight was validated. In the days that followed, COVID-19 restrictions halted everything, forcing millions of people to hunker down in their homes. But Coursera staffers worked on a plan to minimize disruption for their customers, one of the biggest challenges the company has taken on since its founding in 2012.
According to the company's most recent quarterly earnings report, its efforts paid off. Coursera's total revenue for the first quarter was up 64% from a year ago, at $88.4 million. A testament to the explosive growth of digital learning during the pandemic, in March, Coursera's IPO debuted on the New York Stock Exchange with shares that closed at $45, bringing the market cap to $5.9 billion. Additionally, the company's reach has swelled to service some 82 million learners worldwide and includes 10 new university partners in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia.
"I think the first thing was recognition, seeing that something had changed here," Maggioncalda said. "And then it was organization, making sure everyone knows what their role and objective is. As a leader, I had to back away and support them."
Coursera has found a model that works but wants to improve it by emphasizing its ability to help learners switch careers from outmoded, on-site jobs to more digital roles.
"We're going to do most of what we've been doing but a lot more focus on rescaling and employability for people who maybe don't have a college degree but want to get into a digital career," Maggioncalda said.
Insider spoke to Maggioncalda about shepherding Coursera through the coronavirus era, the growth that followed, and where the company goes next.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Coursera showed strong numbers in the latest earnings report. What do you think is contributing to the organization's success?
A lot of it is this structural shift to online learning that has been happening for many years but really saw an acceleration during the pandemic. UNESCO tracks the number of colleges and universities out there, and they estimated in April of 2020 that 1.6 billion students — from kindergarten through college — had their schools closed, and almost every office closed. You have all these people working from home and studying from home; it really sets up nicely for online learning. A lot of it is the tailwinds from the pandemic. I think a lot of people had never done online learning before. They were kind of forced to try new things.
We have just seen a lot of demand across the board. Many people are seeing their jobs get automated, so they have to switch careers, but they don't have any background in cybersecurity or in social-media marketing or these new career fields that are brand-new. So we see lots of people coming to Coursera to get new skills to get new jobs.
There are lots of businesses that have crumbled because of the pandemic. What setbacks or challenges did the pandemic present for Coursera?
I think as CEO, you got a number of different constituents that you care about. Clearly, you care about your customers and your partners, and so when a pandemic hits, one big thing is: How do we make sure we can continue to serve our customers?
Our servers were getting hit five to 10 times harder in April of 2020. And so that means the team at Coursera was buying more disk space on Amazon and making sure we were finding the bottlenecks. It was kind of a fire drill. We were really trying to make sure our servers stayed up for individual learners. And then, a lot of our university partners had to move online, so we had to make sure we were there for them.
No. 1 is making sure you're there for your customers. And then your employees — everyone had to start working from home. Some people got sick, some people's parents got sick. When you think about a young person, who maybe lives by themselves, it was very lonely. So there were a lot of mental health pressures from some people in the company.
We found that parents who have young kids, it was sort of chaotic. You have two working spouses, and then the kids can't go to school. They're running around the house. We have some employees that have four generations living under the same roof. So it was a challenge to stay in touch with our employees and provide support for them. It was tough. And we're seeing worse experiences among our employees in India than we ever saw in the US. So it's really not even over yet when you think about it on a global scale.
Could you say more about the need that Coursera is fulfilling right now?
Adult education is where we focus, and people in the workforce obviously have jobs, but they also often have families. And so the idea of a higher-education system where you sit at a beautiful campus and dedicate all your time — you don't take care of kids or a family, you don't have a job — to getting your degree; that works for some people, but, increasingly, it doesn't work for people who don't have the money to buy a degree or people who have a job and don't want to quit their job. It's just not very flexible or accessible.
So I think digital solves that problem. You can learn from anywhere. We have a lot of people who learn on their lunch break at work, or they'll go home, have dinner, and after they put their kids to bed, they'll learn on their mobile phone or on their tablet. Coursera is mostly on-demand, and it's way more affordable — usually, it's about half the price of tuition. So it's more flexible, affordable, and accessible.
What separates Coursera from other companies that also specialize in digital learning, like Pearson, Udemy, or EdX?
I think most of the difference starts with the fact that we have 160 of the top universities in the world: Duke, Stanford, Yale, Penn. And in Europe: HEC Business School and Imperial College of London. The universities create these courses. So getting high-quality courses from top institutions is a big one.
We also work with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, and Facebook. They create courses as what we call industry partners. Those are very job relevant.
It's not just content; it's also credentials. So you can earn a professional certificate or an industry certification. You can earn a bachelor's, a master's — I mean these are full degree programs. Most others in the market only offer content. A lot of the traditional players don't have the branded content, and it's not really a destination that people can come to.
The most expensive degree we offer is $45,000, but we have a range of different price points. Most of our competitors just have one product they sell at one price.
It seems like Coursera is in a sturdy place. What is the company's long-term strategy for growth?
I think that the business model is kind of my product, and I've got to design it, I've got to deliver it, I've got to iterate it, and I've got to improve it. And people talk about predictability: You want to grow really fast and have a predictable business model. So for the most part, we're going to do what we've been doing.
We really are pushing hard on gateway credentials. Especially post-pandemic, there has been a lot of unemployment, and even people that are unemployed are trying to switch careers into digital jobs. They've just seen how much more money you can make. We have these entry-level professional certificates that assume no college degree and no background in the field. We now have 13 of them, and they're going to become a lot more common.
What's most important to you as a CEO right now?
The founders of Coursera, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, founded this company because they wanted to provide much broader access to high quality education to everyone in the world. That's their mission. That's why they called it Coursera.org even though it's for-profit. I have to be true to that mission. We need to actually deliver on that promise that the founders created.
The other part that goes hand-in-hand with this is building a great company. We're not going to change the world if we can't hire people, build great software, and attract a great degree program. It takes money to do that. So it's those two things: Deliver on the promise and build a great company. I spend almost all of my time doing that.
