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013: Dinesh Thirupuvanam of Udemy | The Revolution in Online Education

Broadcast on:
28 Mar 2013
Audio Format:
other

Hey everybody and welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, episode number 13. This is John Corcoran in this episode. I talk with Dinesh Therapavan of Udemy.com, which is an online learning platform where you can take practical and innovative courses in a range of subjects. We talk about how Udemy's founders went from growing up in a one-room schoolhouse in Turkey to founding one of the fastest growing online learning platforms on the web today. And we talk about how companies are really helping meet students' needs by creating a more innovative learning environment, which combines video, audio, text, and other learning methods, and how there are real opportunities for any professional, whether you're a photographer or an accountant or a web developer, to teach online courses and make a little side income. So let's get started. Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution. Revolution. Revolution. Do you want a revolution? Do you want a revolution? The revolution, it's going on right now. Welcome to the revolution, the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, your source for how to grow your small business without working 24/7. Now, now your host for the revolution, John Corcoran. Hey, everybody, and welcome to the latest episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. Thanks for joining us. And today we're talking to Dinesh from Udemy. And Udemy is this really interesting company, and this is why I wanted to have them on this show, because I really think it's going to be huge, and I'm not saying that because I have any money invested in that I don't, I've got no stake in the outcome. But they're doing this really innovative thing. They're finding and meeting a need to teach people about very practical topics like learning Excel, or HTML, or developing management skills, or learning to be a better photographer. And they're doing it in a very innovative way. They're providing these courses that combine all kinds of different technologies, like chat rooms, and video, and audio, and different text, and live and recorded, and really meeting the needs of, like its founders, people who maybe grow up in an area that doesn't have great educational systems and want to learn something more that they can't get their needs provided where they live. So, you know, those guys came from these humble beatings in Flash Forward 20-30 years. Here they are with this company that's doing some really innovative stuff around education. Now, I want to emphasize, this is not a for-profit university along the lines of University of Phoenix or the kinds that you hear advertising. In fact, those online universities are really trying to take traditional education, like four-year university education, and bring it online, versus Udemy is really, they started out teaching more technical content, like computer programming. And since then, they've moved out into other areas like photography and art, but still areas that aren't, needs that aren't really being met by traditional education. And they're really growing like crazy. Now they have a number of high-profile teachers who are currently or are going to be teaching courses through the platform, including the author of the Lean Startup, Eric Reese, Jack Welch, and Pat Flynn from the Smart Passive Income blog, which is quite popular, met him before, great guy. But the cool thing is anyone can teach a course. That's what I think is so amazing about it. And you get to keep such a great chunk of the revenue. It's between 70% and 85% of the revenue goes to the creator of the course. So with traditional colleges and universities, you've got huge amounts of tuition, especially at private universities, but professors and teaching assistants, often they don't make very much. And so here you've got a much larger share of the revenue is being shared with the creators of the course. And I think that's really cool. This actually reminds me a lot of my earlier interview, I believe it was episode number nine with Hollis Carter and Johnny Andrews, a velocity house publishers. If you didn't listen to that podcast interview, I'd encourage you to check it out where they're really democratizing the publishing industry. And in that industry, traditional publishers, I mean authors don't get paid hardly anything. They're lucky if they get 10% of a book's price. But velocity house and other similar companies are sharing revenues with authors to a much greater degree, 50% or even more. So what Udemy and Velocity House are doing is they're really democratizing knowledge and allowing the next generation of kids in a small one room schoolhouse to access information that they would otherwise not have access to and also doing it in really innovative ways. So I hope you'll enjoy the interview. We did have some technical difficulties, so there may be a couple of little interruptions throughout it, but hopefully we piece it together okay. And finally, if you like this episode, I encourage you to go into iTunes and subscribe and you'll receive future episodes of the podcast sent directly to you. And I also hope you'll sign up for my email list at smartbusinessrevolution.com so that we can keep in touch. So with no further ado, here is Dinesh. Okay, welcome everyone, this is John Corcoran and I'm very pleased today to welcome Dinesh and Dinesh is from Udemy and I'm not going to butcher your last name, so can you pronounce it from me? Yeah, it's the Rupa model. Great, thanks Dinesh and thank you so much for taking time to talk to me about Udemy, which is a really cool, really interesting online learning platform, which allows people to take courses online and is really been growing like crazy. It's got some amazing cutting edge technology and incorporating video and audio and things like that for people who take courses. But what I love about it is there's this humble story about one of your founders going to school in a one room schoolhouse with five different grades in Turkey when he grew up. So can you tell us a little bit about that Dinesh? Yeah, absolutely. So that's Aaron Bali, one of our co-founders and our CEO. Yeah, you know, just amazing kind of humble beginnings to Udemy's story. He grew up in a small village in Turkey, actually the same village as one of our other co-founders Octaikaglar and they're kind of childhood friends and he basically was in a one room schoolhouse where there were kids from a big number of different grades, just all kind of in one classroom trying to learn as much as they could. But you know, as you can imagine, that's pretty challenging thing to do, right? I couldn't imagine with five classrooms, five different grade levels. Yeah, I mean, I can't even imagine. So, but Aaron's always been a pretty bright guy and always kind of been pretty entrepreneurial. And you know, one day his parents had the opportunity to get access to a computer and to the internet for, you know, I think a few weeks or maybe just a couple of months and he started getting on it every afternoon, every night and it basically changed his life. You know, he found a bunch of math forums that he really started engaging with really heavily and doing different problem sets and really just started going kind of way beyond his years, you know, in kind of all the different math subjects. And he ended up placing first in the national math Olympiads in Turkey, you know, he kind of went on to compete there and then he ended up getting a silver medal in the international math Olympiads. And, you know, it all kind of started for him with getting access to some of that knowledge and some of those learnings that he was able to reach through the internet. And I think that's always just kind of like been in his heart in the early days and kind of knowing how big of an impact that had on his life. You know, there's always been this, this mission, this idea of, you know, is there an ability for me to help others get those same opportunities, get those same chances? And you know, that's, that's a big part of, of what Udemy is about, right, enabling kind of anyone, anywhere in the world to be able to get access to that top quality education to those real experts who can, who can help them change their lives. So it sounds like this is a real personal project for him, but I imagine it wasn't the first thing he worked on. So what happened between the founding of Udemy and being in that one room schoolhouse? What did he do in the intervening years? Yeah, yeah. So it's been a pretty long road, right? So he went to college in Turkey, Middle Eastern Technical University, along with Octi, one of our other co-founders. And you know what, he studied computer science in college. And Aaron's just always been a very entrepreneurial guy. He's always had kind of a wide variety of different projects going on. And actually the beginnings of Udemy go, go all the way back to those days in Turkey. And Aaron and Octi were, were basically working on an early version of Udemy, a very, very early version that had more of a focus on live learning. And they were building out a platform there and, you know, they, they were in school and they were also doing kind of some night jobs, DIO desk and e-lamps and those sorts of things for different Silicon Valley companies. And you know, I think they kind of started to realize that they were on to a fairly big idea with this early version of Udemy, but that, you know, Turkey at the time wasn't really the right place to launch it. So they started-- And when was this that they were starting to work on it? What's that? What year was this? This is about six years ago, I'd say. So yeah. What's that? About 2007? Yeah. So, you know, Aaron's probably just finishing up college around this time or maybe kind of a year out. And so, you know, they're, they're basically working on it during the day and then kind of doing double duty and doing a whole range of different projects for, for engineering projects for various startups in Silicon Valley by night to pay the bills. And, you know, eventually they realized, okay, they need to get over here. If they really kind of want to make this thing big and, you know, be able to get funding for it and kind of, you know, really give it the opportunity it deserves. And they were working pretty closely with this one company, speeddate.com. And so, speeddate ended up hiring both Aaron and Octai and they came over and they started working for speeddate and, you know, they basically started working for speeddate full time and kind of shelved Udemy for a few years. Yeah, you know, I mean, that, that thing I just kind of, it had been in them for us the early days. It's kind of the type of thing that you can't really shake, right? So they, they had some awesome success at speeddate. They helped grow speeddate. They were, they were one of the first couple of engineers there and helped grow it from zero to 10 million plus users. So, some pretty awesome folks to have on your team if you're building a web business. And they probably learned a lot that they're applying to Udemy now. Yeah. Well, yeah. A lot, a lot about kind of how to build a product for, you know, a really kind of fast-market audience. Right. And we'll get into the users later. But can you say how many users do you have now and how your user growth has been going? Yeah. It's been going great. We're up at 500,000 students now, which we're really excited about. Kind of just hit that big mile marker at the end of 2012. And we've seen some really awesome growth on the user side. You know, I'd say that number probably grew by 500% in 2012. Wow. So going, going back though to, to where you were in the story, they were, it sounds like they were working at speeddate. They had the idea in them, they were struggling a little bit. How many people did they shop the idea around to before they found someone who was going to invest in them? Yeah. So it was quite, it was quite a few, you know. So they synced up with, with an American co-founder over here, Gog and Bionny. And then they started kind of exploring a little bit, you to me a little bit more in the evenings, right? And starting to build out the platform a little bit more, shifting from just live learning to more of these on-demand courses and incorporating a lot of the multimedia elements that she mentioned earlier. And you know, kind of had the, had the core product built and started talking to different investors. And this is kind of early 2010. And, you know, they just got rejection after rejection after rejection. You know, it was literally, they went out in like, February, 2010 and, and just got riddle, probably 50, 60 different rejections, just, you know, the education space these days, you look at it and it's just exploding, right? I mean, it just feels like, wow, how could people possibly ignore this? But back then, it was just like, you know, well, who's really making money in this space? Is there a real business model behind it? There's so many people deeply entrenched. You know, is there really a big consumer play to be had here? Just a lot unknowns, a lot of questions. And, you know, credit to these guys, they are serious, serious hustlers, you know. This is before I came on to the team, I came on in about May 2011, but they basically went back out and just generated traction, right? Just kind of hacked and figured out any way possible to get there, you know, whether it's just getting a little bit of like press articles, whether it was, you know, getting featured on a newsletter, whether it was importing creative commons licensed forces, right, to just have some kind of supply to where some baseline of courses that students could enroll in, right? Or, you know, building a tool that allowed us to import in some YouTube content. So we find YouTube playlists are really high quality courses and just, you know, have them be available for free on the site. But be able to give some liquidity to our students so they felt like, okay, there's something here, you know, the value for me that I can enroll in. And then, you know, that got them to about 10,000 users, that got them to a couple, maybe a low hundreds of courses and showed some of that early traction and hustle that then when they went back out to raise funding in August, 2010, you know, they went out to raise 500K of seed Monday and they ended up raising a million dollars. They got oversubscribed. They were one of the first companies to go through AngelList, you know, had the product showed the hustle and, yeah, and then were able to get the money to kind of help take it to the next level. That's great. So I'm going to flash forward a couple of years now that they definitely went through their struggles and now things seem to be doing a lot better. I mean, you announced, I think a couple of months ago, that Udemy received 12 million in series B funding and also an interesting tidbit that the top 10 teachers in 2012 earned 1.6 million in revenue. So tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, absolutely. So that was really exciting for us at the end of 2012, yeah, raised $12 million round led by Insight, you know, just some fantastic guys over there. You know, there's a lot of things that go on between kind of, you know, raising the seed round, having maybe 10,000 students on the platform and then getting to 500,000 and being able to raise a $12 million B, right? And for a marketplace business, it's all about solving the chicken and egg problem early on, right? And it's about just doing that in all of kind of the lo-fi, hacky, just like find a way to get it done kind of means that allow you to just start providing liquidity to both sides of the place. And when I mean liquidity, for us, that basically means for a student, when you come over to Udemy and you're interested in taking a course on something, you can take a look around and you can find a course that looks awesome and that you're like, okay, I want to dive into this thing. For an instructor, for the most part, it means, you know, if you put in a good amount of work, right? Our normal instructors put maybe 40 hours of work into building courses, you know, these are pretty robust high quality courses, three to 10 hours of content, that there's going to be a reward for that, right? And whether that reward is you're going to be able to earn a significant income from those courses or whether that's, you know, you're just going to be able to get a lot more exposure, thousands or tens of thousands of students enrolled into those courses. So, you know, basically between those years, kind of mid 2010 and now, it's just about build slowly provide, but both sides of the marketplace to make that happen, right? So types of things we would do would be things like getting featured on newsletters where, you know, we thought that the newsletter audience would be interested in some of the content we'd have on Udemy, right? And then we'd maybe feature a course on how to build iPhone apps, right? That course would make a bunch of sales. You'd be able to then have a case study of an instructor who's done 20, $30,000 of sales. You'd be able to share that with some other instructors, get them excited about the opportunity and then get a little bit more content on board. And then you also have a few more users because a bunch of folks came over and were able to sign up for the course. And yeah, you know, basically just kind of inch by inch built both sides of the marketplace and then, you know, we're able to start doing things like you said where we were able to announce that the top 10 instructors made 1.6 million. And that really then allowed us to kind of start expanding into a lot of different categories and really start taking more of a mass market approach, right? When we first started out, we really kind of zeroed in on the technology and entrepreneurship sectors. Yeah, because those are the early adopters, right? Yeah, exactly. There are early adopters and just overall it's a lot easier if you just focus in on one vertical, right? And then you know that you're bringing on all students who are going to be interested in all of the content in that vertical. So, you know, so we were smart about that, but then, you know, kind of once you get to a certain point where you kind of have a established amount of success for your instructors and a healthy number of students on board, then all of a sudden you realize, hey, those students actually have a lot of other interests as well, right? A lot of those programmers or startup geeks are also into photography. And you know, our photography courses have been hugely successful. You've got a bunch of instructors up over 10 or 20k, you know, a couple up over 40 or 50 there. And so, you know, that's kind of really allowed us to broaden out and that's going to be a big part of what 2013's about for us, right? Really kind of expanding both the breadth in terms of verticals as well as the depth of our content catalog. And now you mentioned that was a great overview, by the way, of how far you've really come in a couple of years. But you mentioned there were some other players in the marketplace that were providing these types of services, at least online learning platforms. So how did you see Udemy as being different from those who came before you? Yeah, great question. So I think it comes down to really three main things. And the first was about our vision and that, you know, we're kind of really focused on empowering experts and putting the power in their hands to actually own and operate their content and to teach students directly. And we believe that's the way that you actually democratize education is kind of by putting the power back in the hands of the students and the experts. The second is just that we're a very technology driven company. So, you know, we're really focused on the student user experience, the UI, the instructor user experience. I think we're particularly proud of and really I think kind of have the best product on the web in terms of putting up a course. And then the third piece is that, you know, when you look at the content on Udemy, it's really designed to be very actionable and very tactical and designed for you to be able to put to work tomorrow, right? You know, courses that help you accelerate your careers and accelerate your lives, right? Whether that's you need to learn Excel that way you can, you know, take care of that analysis project that's coming up, you know, whether it's you need to beef up your management skills so you can, you know, get that promotion, whether that's you're just really passionate about photography and, you know, you've got a wedding coming up and you want to take some awesome photos. So, you know, we're kind of much more focused on that real actionable content as opposed to kind of a more academic or more intellectual content. As opposed to the romantic era of Europe in the 1700s or whatever it was. Yeah, you know, a little bit less of that stuff. Maybe you know, we don't have as much tiered or content on this side, but maybe one day it comes around. Now, I want to focus on a couple of different things. One is the teacher experience because I think it's really interesting from an entrepreneur's perspective, how they can help to differentiate themselves in the same way they would with a book by teaching a course online, as well as to earn extra revenue, which we've talked about a little bit. But so I want to talk about that. I also want to talk about from the student's perspective, although we've talked about that, the benefits to taking an online course. But you kind of opened the door to a question I was thinking about. You mentioned education system is broken. I think I'm not putting words in your mouth, or at least I'll say it. Have you thought a little bit about, you know, the academic system has all these regulations to it in terms of curriculum and teacher qualifications and states and local education systems are heavily involved in determining these things? Have you thought about, maybe this is a long-term public policy question, but a responsibility or do you monitor what goes into the courses at this point, you know, making sure that it's accurate, making sure that bad information isn't getting out? Have you thought about those sorts of things or is that down the line? Yeah, so great question. So you know, we have thousands of hours of content being put up on you to me every month, right? So I mean, there's a lot of new stuff and cool stuff out there. And I think that's, I mean, that's one of the things that allows us to kind of be a really special marketplace, right? Is we can have courses on how to play the ukulele, right? But you know, there's also a downside of that, which is that, you know, it kind of prevents us from, you know, from really doing any kind of fact-checking against the courses, right? And we try to build other things into the platform that allow students to really feel comfortable about the quality of courses, right? So the first piece I'll say is we do actually review every course that comes up onto the platform for certain quality standards, right? And those things include the instructional design of the course, right? Is the course designed in such a way that the students are actually going to be able to achieve their learning objectives? The second piece is the production quality, really high on the course, right? So it's actually going to be a good experience. And then the third is what's the perceived quality of the course like? But you know, we don't check for content accuracy specifically. But then, you know, we also try to build in just other things which will help students get a good feel for who the instructor is and whether they're going to have a good experience. That's things like reviews on courses or, you know, making sure that all the instructors have a really meaty bio, ideally with a link out to a couple different social media profiles. You can really kind of understand who you're learning from. Maybe something we have to explore down the road, but you know, with this type of marketplace model and kind of operating at the scale we're at, it's pretty challenging to do that. Well, it's interesting because there are some social feedback options, you know, way more robust than something like a "rate my professor" type of thing where you could kind of crowdsource to figure out if there are content flaws or, you know, what's the most rewarding type of course? Imagine you have tools like that that are built into you doing. Yeah, absolutely. And that's a lot of the type of stuff that we can explore more of in the future, right? You know, I think a lot of other folks in this space have kind of done a pretty cool thing related to this as well where they allow for peer-to-peer grading, right, of assignments that you have to submit for a course, right? Yeah, you know, when you have hundreds or thousands of students taking a course, then it opens the door to a lot of these types of things, which is pretty cool. Yeah. So let's talk about it. From the teacher perspective, the value to someone teaching, because you've got some big names, you know, like Eric Reece and Kathy Pressland, who are already published authors who are teaching on the platform, and maybe you can tell us about some of the other people who are coming along as well. But what about for someone who is a ukulele, maybe someone's a ukulele teacher, and they're trying to expose themselves a little bit more and get a little bit more exposure and press or introduction to new students and diversify their revenue? What's the value to people teaching on this platform? Yeah. So, you know, I think there are a couple of pieces that folks really get a lot of value out of, or basically kind of, you know, why they come to you to meet and teach, right? You know, one piece is, and this is probably the biggest piece, is, you know, they want to earn an income from teaching. They're really passionate about a certain subject. They've built years of expertise in that area, and, you know, they want to see if they can earn an income, and, you know, we've actually been lucky enough to have a couple of our folks quit their day jobs and just start teaching on you to me full time, which has been pretty cool for us. You know, the second piece is that folks really want to expand their communities and expand their brand names, right? So, you know, I think kind of Eric Reese is a great example here, and he's kind of done both of these things. He's up over $50,000 of sales with us, but he also has 20,000 students in one of his courses, right? And it's just a great way for him to build his community more, to get the Lean Startup brand out there more and be able to connect with those folks on kind of a deeper level where you get feedback on some of your concepts. So that's really important to folks. And then, you know, there's a third piece around just sharing what you love, right? You know, we have some university professors, Margaret Soltan, it's a great example. She teaches a poetry course on you to me, and she's just really passionate about poetry, and just wants to share knowledge and just get it out there and, like, impact more people's lives. And, you know, maybe the fourth is, and this is for folks who are kind of getting a little later stage in their careers, but, you know, there starts to be a question of, kind of, what do you leave behind, right? What's your legacy? And, you know, all of these folks, I think, publish books, right? And, you know, reach a ton of people that way, but I think a course in many ways can just be a more dynamic experience, right, where you're kind of really talking to your students face-to-face, where you're able to interact with them on the discussion boards and folks kind of, you know, really like exploring that potential as well. Yeah, and actually, I want to explore that a little bit more, because my wife is a teacher, and I think that there has been an acknowledgement in recent years that everyone learns differently. You know, some people learn really well with reading, some people learn through writing, some people learn through videos, some people learn audibly, and it seems like you to me is bringing all that together in a way that is very difficult in other platforms. So, can you talk about the different types of learning methods that are available? I assume, you know, we've touched on them, but video, audio, that kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. So, video is the biggest, you know, I think we have a lot of visual learners who come over to Udemy who want to be able to look their instructor in the face or watch the screencast as they walk them through how to, you know, how to do that layering and Photoshop. So that's really huge. You know, I think one of the drawbacks that people kind of feel about videos sometimes is, you know, I just want to jump ahead, right, and skim the article and move quickly. And we've tried to be responsive to those types of things, and, you know, as an example, you can watch Udemy courses at one and a half or two XP, right? So video's a big one, audio is also pretty big, right? And you know, I think this really kind of dovetails in with one of the value propositions for us on the student side of our business, which is about learning on demand and being able to learn in a way that fits in with your busy lifestyle, right? And, you know, if you're on the subway and you can pull up your course and listen to that audio lecture about new, lean startup principles, well, you know, that allows you to kind of squeeze it in and keep going. And then, you know, there are also PDFs and articles that people can put up. And then one that's a little bit more unique to us is kind of a mash-up of a video and a presentation where basically you have a video side-by-side with a presentation and you can time tag in the slides on the presentation to certain segments within the video. And that I really kind of like because you get the connection with the instructor, right? You're kind of talking with them face-to-face, but you also, it really helps kind of deliver on the learning objectives, lecture-by-lecture, chapter-by-chapter, because you're able to see those with the PowerPoint. Yeah. And I want to wrap up here because I've taken a lot of your time. I really appreciate you taking time to talk to me about it, but where do you see it going? You know, in the future, either stuff that, whatever you can reveal, but also, you know, what crazy ideas, is it going to be 3D, is it going to be more live classrooms, more social integration? I mean, what kind of exciting learning ideas are down the pike? Yeah, I mean, there's so much there, right? You know, when I talk about kind of, you know, big picture a couple of years off for us, where do we just see the market going, you know, we really believe every expert in the world is going to be teaching online, and that, you know, these days when folks think about, okay, how do I, you know, really share my knowledge with a massive audience? They think about publishing book, and, you know, I think that paradigm is just going to absolutely shift, and when, you know, when folks think about, you know, how do I start just teaching anyone anywhere in the world, they're going to be thinking, I should build an online course and, you know, have a community that I can really engage with on kind of a deeper level. So that's, I mean, you know, big, big long term, that's just really exciting for us, and we think that happens in every vertical out there. You know, there are then, I think, a bunch of cool things that can start to happen from a technology standpoint as well with the actual learning experience and with the teaching experience. You know, so the learning experience as an example, you know, I think it gets a lot more social, and, you know, I think you start to see students doing projects together, doing assignments together, sharing their notes collaboratively across courses, right, and sharing them publicly. You see some of that in, like, some of the folks who do, like, digital textbooks, you know, like an inkling or something, and I think that type of functionality is really cool. I think the experience also just starts to get a lot more interactive, where, you know, you're not just kind of sitting back and, you know, listening to an audio lecture, watching a video lecture, you know, you are, you're doing a quiz every couple of minutes to make sure that you're, that you're on pace, you're, that quiz becomes adaptive, right? So you took kind of a benchmarking quiz up front that said, okay, you have these skillset, so we know that actually we should be asking you these questions, or actually you can go ahead and jump down to section two, because, you know, from the benchmarking, it looks like you already understand conditional formatting in Excel, right? We can just jump you straight into pivot tables. So I think there's a lot of cool things there, and I think there's also a lot of cool potential for us to start building kind of more vertical specific learning features for students. So what do you, what do you mean by that vertical specific? Yeah, so, you know, I think I'll credit my code academy, I think has done like a killer job of really building this out, where you can just start coding directly into the browser, right? So, you know, I think kind of that's an awesome example of one on the programming side, but I think you could imagine a lot of those different types of features in many different verticals, right? You know, maybe for math courses, it would be super helpful if you had a graphing calculator right next to you, right? And that's kind of, you know, something that you could install right into the course. You know, maybe for courses to do with med school, it would be helpful to have like 3D models of the human body that you can rotate around and kind of look at on a deeper level. So I think there's a lot of cool stuff that we can explore there. So yeah, I mean, you know, it's kind of, it's both on the content side, and then, you know, as well on the tech side, but you know, this space is kind of, it's really just starting to get going. So the next couple of years are going to be a lot of fun. Yeah. Well, cool. Thank you so much for taking the time, Denis. So, last thing, it's Udemy.com, U-D-E-M-Y.com, I'm not getting any sort of kickback or anything from doing this interview, I just thought it was really interesting. But how should people get started if they're interested in it? I know there's some free courses on the site, is that the best way to get started? Yeah. You know, for students, there are a ton of free courses. Just hop over to Udemy.com, you know, you can search for a course you like, you can browse around our different categories, we feature a bunch of courses like that. If you're an instructor, it's Udemy.com/teach, and you can just kind of start creating your course directly. It's entirely free for instructors. You know, and if anyone has any questions, I'm available, we're a super open team. Just Dinesh at Udemy.com, D-I-N-E-S-H at Udemy.com, so, you know, happy to chat with folks. Great. Very cool, Denis. Thank you so much for taking the time. It's really interesting. Sure thing. All right. Thanks, John. Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com and while you're there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution and be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution podcast. (dramatic music)