Stephen McCurry, Udemy's Director of Product Management, explains why he joined the online education platform after working at marketplace businesses like Betfair and Stella & Dot. He argues that marketplaces unlock long-tail instructors and passive income opportunities while disrupting traditional education to make learning more accessible.
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Okay, so an example of, as you can see, not traditional education. This guy's come on the platform initially, he spotted an opportunity, created a course, he was very successful. He's gone on to become a very successful instructor and he does it with some amount of creativity. And this is what marketplaces bring about. It's long tail, If it wasn't a marketplace, this guy probably wouldn't have had the opportunity or the platform to do what he's doing today. A little bit about me, just for a couple of minutes. To me, why did I end up in online education? How did I end up at Udemy? I've worked for a number of different industries. My first My first product management position was with a gambling company called Betfair, and it was a peer-to-peer gambling marketplace. So I've worked in 4 different marketplace businesses, and to me marketplace businesses are the most interesting businesses. They bring about really unique challenges and they really stretch you in terms of thinking hard about complex business problems. When you change something on the instructor side of the marketplace, it has secondary effects on the student side and then back to the instructor. And you really have to think deeply about when you change things in a marketplace. So I love marketplaces. To me, the collaborative economy enabling people to build an income stream through things like Udemy. One of my roles before this, I worked for a company called Stella and Dot, which is a direct sales e-commerce company. And that business was all about allowing people to set up small businesses, earning commissions on jewelry. And it was very empowering. A lot of people left, quit their jobs that they hated, and kind of turned to the business full-time. Udemy is something similar. This allows people to create this— could be a passive income stream. It could be actually creating a business on the Udemy platform. And it's always interesting to see how people leverage the platform, what they do with it, and how successful they can be through platforms like Udemy. And then the third thing is just about disrupting education. As I mentioned, I myself, I've been through a lot of formal education. I did the MBA, and we can talk about that as well. But, you know, this is about disrupting an industry that is very stagnant, in need of innovation, and it's a huge, huge industry. And it's also critically important for, you know, for kids, for adults as well, to get the education they want, to be— for it to be accessible, for them to achieve their goals. So, you know, Udemy and a lot of the players in this space are offering opportunities that didn't exist before, and that's, that's very interesting to me.
