Udacity CEO Vishal Makhijani steps down; 5% employees were laid off earlier

Online education company Udacity’s Chief Executive Officer, Vishal Makhijani has stepped down from his post.

Post joining the company in 2013, Makhijani served Udacity as COO and board member for 5 years along with CEO as last two years. Previously, he had acted as a board member for a couple other companies such as Yandex, ProsperWorKS, Inc., and COO for Zynga. He has also taken up the role of SVP in Yahoo and Zynga in the past.

Besides, the Indian American is an active advisor and angel investor to several companies including Dapper, Slapshot, Pepperdata, Squla etc.

With such extensive experience, his leadership was much appreciated by the founder, Chairman and President of Udacity, Sebastian Thrun, who praised his work and has taken up the interim role of the CEO till the company completes the search for a new one, reports TechCrunch.

Makhijani isn’t the only person to bid adieu to the company in the past few months. Udacity had laid off almost 5 per cent of their 500 employees, i.e. approximately 25 in number, since August this year.

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Although a significant number of people have exited the company, Udacity claims to still be growing and expanding in other countries while hiring more people to play a key role. In hindsight, all the layoffs and CEO stepping down, doesn’t paint a positive picture.

As far as claims go, the online education platform competing with the likes of Coursera, Lynda etc. boasts of more than 10 million registered users across free and paid courses and 50,000 students enrolled in its nano degree programmes.

In March, the company had also revealed its financial figures for 2017 whereby it recorded a 100 YoY growth in revenue going up to $70 million.

Around the same time the US-based company had started betting strongly on the Indian market where it saw similar trends in users signing up for Python, ML, Big Data like global users.

Udacity is one of the many online education players in the market who offer courses like ML, VR, AI etc. Other competitors include Udemy, Unacademy, to name a few.