Skip to main content
https://www.highperformancecpmgate.com/rgeesizw1?key=a9d7b2ab045c91688419e8e18a006621

Edtech unicorn Udacity lays off 125 people in global strategy shift

Learning platform Udacity is to axe a big chunk of its workforce — which looks to be between a fifth and a quarter — as part of a global reorganization effort, according to VentureBeat.

It reports the company is cutting 125 staff from now through early 2019.

We’ve also heard from a source that around 100 Udacity staff have been laid off, with affected employees mostly in content, video and services.

We’ve reached out to the company for comment.

According to VentureBeat’s report the firm will close its office in São Paulo, Brazil, with the loss of 70 employees. The remaining cuts will come from departments in the US related to creating courses, it adds.

Two months ago we broke the news the company had quietly let go of 5% of its global workforce.

VentureBeat says now the layoffs will leave Udacity with 330 employees.

The edtech firm was one of the early providers of MOOCs, before low pass rates seemingly triggered a reprogramming of its business model, with Udacity refocusing on the tech space — offering so-called ‘nanodegrees’ in topics like AI and blockchain.

After that shift co-founder Sebastian Thrun stepped away as CEO, handing over to Vishal Makhijani. However the latest cuts come hard on the heels of a reversal of that, with VentureBeat noting Thrun took over day-to-day operations and the exec chairman role last month, following the departure of Makhijani.

Since then the board of directors and Thrun have voted to downsize portions of the company, it adds.

In another notable reversal this year, Udacity suspended a money back guarantee for people who completed a Plus tier nanocourse and couldn’t find a job, pressing pause just a few months after it announced the guarantee.

Thrun told VentureBeat the guarantee remains on pause — with no decision yet taken whether to cancel it outright.

Update: A spokesperson has now sent the following statement, attributed to Thrun:

I founded Udacity so that everyone in the world could get a chance for an education. Today, we have 10 million registered students across more than 100 countries, 200 industry partnerships and strong revenue growth. Yet, for us to scale to the next level and take full advantage of the opportunity ahead, we need to realign our focus. To achieve this, the board and I have made the painful decision to part ways with 125 employees in the U.S. and Brazil over the next three months. We will increase our investments in growth areas like enterprise and career development. I am optimistic that Udacity is now set up to get to the next level of scale where more students can learn what they need to get the jobs they want to improve their lives.

TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec contributed to this report

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp steps back from board director role

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp is relinquishing his role as a board director and switching to board observer — where he says he’ll focus on product strategy for the ride hailing giant. Camp made the announcement in a short Medium post in which he writes of his decade at Uber: “I’ve learned a lot, and realized that I’m most helpful when focused on product strategy & design, and this is where I’d like to focus going forward.” “I will continue to work with Dara [Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO] and the product and technology leadership teams to brainstorm new ideas, iterate on plans and designs, and continue to innovate at scale,” he adds. “We have a strong and diverse team in place, and I’m confident everyone will navigate well during these turbulent times.” The Canadian billionaire entrepreneur signs off by saying he’s looking forward to helping Uber “brainstorm the next big idea”. Camp hasn’t been short of ideas over his career in tech. He’s the co-founder of the web 2.0 recommendatio
Post a Comment
Read more

Drone crash near kids leads Swiss Post and Matternet to suspend autonomous deliveries

A serious crash by a delivery drone in Switzerland have grounded the fleet and put a partnership on ice. Within a stone’s throw of a school, the incident raised grim possibilities for the possibilities of catastrophic failure of payload-bearing autonomous aerial vehicles. The drones were operated by Matternet as part of a partnership with the Swiss Post (i.e. the postal service), which was using the craft to dispatch lab samples from one medical center for priority cases. As far as potential applications of drone delivery, it’s a home run — but twice now the craft have crashed, first with a soft landing and the second time a very hard one. The first incident, in January, was the result of a GPS hardware error; the drone entered a planned failback state and deployed its emergency parachute, falling slowly to the ground. Measures were taken to improve the GPS systems. The second failure in May, however, led to the drone attempting to deploy its parachute again, only to sever the line
Post a Comment
Read more

ProtonMail logged IP address of French activist after order by Swiss authorities

ProtonMail , a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn’t log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation — in that case Swiss law. While ProtonMail didn’t cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users. For the past year, a group of people have taken over a handful of commercial premises and apartments near Place Sainte Marthe in Paris. They want to fight against gentrification, real estate speculation, Airbnb and high-end restaurants. While it started as a local conflict, it quickly became a symbolic campaign. They attracted newspaper headlines when they started occupying prem
Post a Comment
Read more