In a lengthy post on social media, Biyani said a decade and a half of investor-led decisions led to the sale of the company for under $3 billion, a valuation it had gone public with in 2021.
“I think they wanted a CEO they could control, a buttoned-up suit instead of a brash founder/CEO that is risk-taking, visionary, but a bit of a pain,” he wrote.
After Udemy’s Series B, founders owned less than 30% of the company, and investors moved in, he said. He said the investors pushed out the founders and brought in one “dud CEO” after another, which impacted the company’s strategic edge. Over the company’s lifetime, it burned through seven CEOs.
But for a while, it was going well. The business kept growing and a B2B pivot scaled to $500 million annual recurring revenue (ARR).
However, he watched from the outside in. Biyani said he was routinely ignored when he tried to engage with the board or new leadership. When Udemy went public, neither he nor cofounder Oktay Caglar was invited. “There are like 50+ people invited to these things and nobody thought: “oh maybe we should invite the people who f***ing invented the thing we’re all celebrating.”
But the real damage, Biyani said, happened to the brand and the company. He argued that Coursera had the weaker product, but it kept growing slower but smarter. It added corporate courses, built fully online degree programmes and offered a B2B competitor that “kept Udemy on its toes.”
Meanwhile, he said, Udemy made no major product innovations for 15 years. “Instead, they took the original idea (video-based courses) and sold it in every place imaginable. It got us to $800M run-rate. That’s no joke… But eventually the consumer business stopped growing,” he said. (sic)
“Udemy traded upside opportunity for downside risk,” he wrote. “A good investor would have supported us through it.”
The deal
Coursera announced in December last year that it would buy rival Udemy in an all-stock deal, valuing the combined company at $2.5 billion amid a consolidation in the industry after a post-pandemic slowdown and heightened investor scrutiny.
Coursera and Udemy said at the time that a combined platform will be better positioned to capture corporate demand for workforce training, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI), data science, and software development, as employers invest in reskilling workers amid rapid advances in generative AI (GenAI).