This week, Jessica sat down with Greg Brown, former CEO of Udemy. Greg is a lifelong advocate for growth through learning, with a leadership journey shaped by a childhood surrounded by educators, a growth mindset rooted in family, and a belief that learning creates economic opportunity.
Greg shares how that philosophy guided his decision to join Udemy, where he helped transform the company from a consumer marketplace into a $500 million enterprise learning platform used by global brands. They discuss AI’s impact on learning, the future of higher education, and why Greg believes corporations have a growing responsibility to educate the next generation of workers. Plus, the power of embracing change, whether it’s stepping away from the CEO seat or learning to surrender what you can’t control.
About Greg Brown
Greg Brown is a senior software executive with over 20 years of experience in enterprise software and technology companies. He served for four years as the CEO of Udemy, a leading global platform for online learning and skills development, where he was instrumental in reshaping the company’s strategic direction, expanding its enterprise learning solutions and integrating advanced AI-driven learning technologies. Before joining Udemy, Greg served as CEO of Reflektive and has held roles at companies including Blackhawk Network, Achievers, Mindjet, PivotLink, and WebEx.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregsbrown/
Jessica Kriegel:
Website: https://www.jessicakriegel.com/
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicakriegel
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jess_kriegel/
Culture Partners:
Website: https://culturepartners.com/
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TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: This week on Culture Leaders, I sat down with Greg Brown, former CEO of Udemy, and a lifelong advocate for growth through learning. His leadership journey is deeply personal, shaped by childhood, surrounded by educators, a growth mindset rooted in family, and a belief that learning creates economic opportunity. Greg shares how that philosophy guided his decision to join Udemy, where he helped transform the company from a consumer marketplace into a $500 million enterprise learning platform used by global brands. We talk about AI’s impact on learning the future of higher education and why he believes corporations have a growing responsibility to educate the next generation of workers. He also opens up about his discipline, daily routine, his current pursuit of a pilot’s license, and the power of embracing change, whether it’s stepping away from the CEO seat or learning to surrender what you can’t control, it’s a conversation about purpose, evolution, and how to lead with both ambition and humility. Please welcome to the podcast Greg Brown. Greg Brown. Thank you so much for joining us. So my first question, what is your why?
Greg Brown: First, Jessica, it’s wonderful to be here with you. I appreciate the opportunity to spend some time together.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I’m so glad you’re here.
Greg Brown: My why in terms of why Udemy, the company that I’ve been CEO for the last four years, that really stretches all the way back to my childhood. My dad was a lifelong educator, and I grew up in a household that was filled with learning and the notion of a growth mindset and how important it was from an economic opportunity perspective for folks to have access to education. My dad was a foster child and he had a very, very difficult upbringing, but because he was a good athlete, he had an opportunity to go to the University of Oregon and play football. But that gave him an opportunity to get an education, and it was the first child in his family to have a college education, and that, as you can imagine, impacted how he thought about education and skills development and how important it was so impressed on myself, my brother, and my sister from a very early age.
And I grew up in a household that was all about learning and growth and development. So when I had an opportunity to join Udemy and I learned more about the mission and the vision and all about transforming lives through learning, it was an opportunity I just couldn’t pass up to have the chance, the fortunate opportunity for me to bring the skills that I’ve developed over a lifetime of developing a career in leadership and running software companies, to be able to come in there and have that type of an impact on individuals and transforming their lives through learning, as well as leading an organization as exciting and formidable as Udemy is.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So I’d love to dig into what that looked like, because when you were a kid, we’ll leave the Udemy stuff to later when you were in your childhood, was it you’re going to learn violin and you’re going to stick with it for the next 18 years? Or was it try violin if you don’t like it, try lacrosse. And if you don’t like that, try. I mean, was it curiosity or was it deep learning? Did it manifest as one or the other?
Greg Brown: It’s a good question. It was mostly the latter in that my mother and father were big believers in exposing all three of us kids to anything that we had an interest or a potential passion in and encouraging and supporting us in all of those endeavors, and then just allowing us to migrate in the direction our interests flowed. And for me, that ended up being in sports. We did have a piano in the house. I did take piano lessons. It was something that I tried. Unfortunately, I wish I had that skill and I wish I would’ve stayed with it. But nonetheless, sports was a direction that I took, and some of that had to do with young boys, your dad’s always your hero, and that surely was the case for me. So my dad was a three sport athlete and ended up going to college, as I mentioned, to play football, and I was fortunate that I got some of his genes and I was reasonably good at those sports.
So anyway, I migrated in that direction. My brother did as well. My sister tried all different types of things and played the piano for longer. So they encouraged us to really be as diverse as possible, find our passions, and they encouraged us in whichever direction we so chose. But that also included learning. I mean, through all of that, sports were great, but getting good grades and most importantly, it was more about the learning process and getting a passion and developing a passion for learning and the grades would follow. That’s kind of a core tenet that I carry forward till today in my leadership, is that the results, the scoreboard, don’t focus on the scoreboards, focus on the process. If you do the right things, the leaderboard and that scoreboard is going to take care of itself. That’s really how they thought about education. So that really manifested early for me, and fortunately for me has been something that I’ve carried throughout my life.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, my mom, I remember she wrote me a letter when I graduated from high school that said, my goal was to expose you to as many languages as possible. And by language she meant all the different things that we can learn, right? Actual language, language, but also musical languages. And she took me to the theater and I did engage in sports. I mean, I did two weeks of soccer and one semester of swim and two years of violin and two years of guitar and two years of piano. And as soon as I would move on, she would let me move on and find another language to go explore, which there’s pros and cons to that, right? On the one hand, I’ve been exposed to a lot. On the other hand, I only really have deep knowledge and expertise in one or two things, as opposed, it’s the width versus depth argument. And in today’s day and age, now we can start to transition to talking about the workplace and what we need as modern humans that are employees of corporations. Do we need more width or depth as top performers? What benefits me most?
Greg Brown: That’s a really good question. As it pertains to your point, as we transition to the corporate environment, we’re a learning company, so we’ve got some fairly strong opinions on this and that it really is about providing that growth opportunity for employees in whichever direction they so choose, or the management leadership fields. They would be a valuable asset to move into, whether it be in the line that you’re currently in from a junior level sales position to mid-level to senior level, or potentially into management, or it could very well be from sales into marketing and to provide those vehicles within the organization and to really develop an organization that’s very a people-centric learning organization that I think the best companies in the world. And what we’ve seen in our customer base is that the most progressive companies in this area that are all about skills development, providing opportunity for employees to move laterally, horizontally, obviously vertically up in the organization or the organization that tend to have the best retention, best employee engagement scores, and ultimately the most vibrant cultures. So it’s about providing, I think, lateral as well as vertical opportunity.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, the answer is there is no answer yes and right. It depends, is the real answer.
Greg Brown: Well, it really is, yes, because I may be an individual that from early on, I may have known I want to be an ex, I want to be a marketing manager, account-based, development marketing manager or director and what have you, and I’m going to stay on my track where there’s other folks like me. Early in my career, I didn’t necessarily knew what I wanted to do, so I went into sales. I felt like it would be the closest proximity, but able to provide the same type of juice, so to speak, that I had as an athlete competing in college and what have you. And fortunately enough that worked out and I went and did my thing. But there’s a lot of folks that just don’t know. So it’s providing opportunity for folks to try things and see if that’s something that they’re passionate about, see if that’s something they have a skillset in that’s going to add real value and impact to the company and be something that they’re passionate about. If not, then give ’em an opportunity to move in a different direction if they’re somebody that’s got a lot of talent and somebody that’s got a lot of desire to learn and grow.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So I’m sure you’ve seen all of the studies out there and the way that everyone talks about it, most of the learning happens on the job. So as a company, how do you counteract that or message the value of partnering with Udemy when people feel like, yeah, you can take a course, but really you don’t get it until you do it?
Greg Brown: Another real good question. So I think the biggest area of impact that we have had and we’ll continue to have is for individuals and organizations that have a desire to continue to improve and grow. And so for an individual, it’s about understanding what skills do I have today and what skills are a skills gap for me? What are the skills that I don’t have that are the gap that I need to fill to enable me to get to the next level on my journey in terms of where I want to go in my career? And that’s really where we focus, which is helping organizations develop that capability to identify that skills gap, and then developing a very curated personalized learning experience to enable that employee to learn exactly what they need to learn to address that gap, to prepare them so they can take that next step in their career.
A lot of learning does happen on the job, regardless of what role you’re in, whether you’re a developer or a salesperson or anywhere in between on the finance team. And inevitably, there’s going to be skills that you’re not going to be able to learn on the job because you haven’t been exposed to those scenarios or situations that are enabling you to learn on the jobs. You’ve got to get that access to that knowledge somehow some way. And that’s where we step in. And so that’s the type of partnership we’ve been developing with organizations for years now. We’ve got over 18,000 customers. A lot of the work we do with them is about helping them identify skills gaps for individuals, teams and functions, and then putting personalized curated learning journeys and learning paths in place to help them address those gaps.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So when I used to work at Oracle, I was there for 10 years, and one project I will never forget was facilitating a meeting of 25 deans of the top academic institutions across the nation in one of these client engagement type things. They were the advisory board for the education product that Oracle had. So we brought them all together and it was talking about future product roadmap stuff, but also help us learn more about the industry so that we can develop the product roadmap that will really make a difference. We did two day scenario planning, basically where we were looking 25 years out into the future of education with these deans to think, what is the future of the academic education system, right? College and grad school, et cetera. And at the end of the day, the overwhelming consensus was that it was dying a slow death and might not exist in 25 years. And what they suggested was that it would be up to the corporations to pick up the torch and to educate young people with Google University or Oracle University or Udemy, that institution, the system wouldn’t survive. And so there have to be a new system that replaces that. And so what’s the future of Udemy or just this industry generally? Do you agree with that? Do you see it happening already? I mean, let’s go out 20 years.
Greg Brown: It’s a really good question. Look, generative AI is going to transform so much of how we work and live, and without question, that’s going to impact how we learn. So 20 years from now, it’s very difficult to call, I would say in 10 years. And the reason I say difficult to call because the world’s changing so fast now, right? No,
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I love that because so many people say, I know what 20 years from now will be, and it’s like you’re selling something shut up. Nobody does.
Greg Brown: Right now, based on the pace of transformation that we’re going through, none of us really knows even five years what the world’s going to look at. But I can give you a little bit of prognostication to the best of my ability. No, I don’t think universities are going away anytime. So I’ll tell you why. So my son’s graduating from high school right now, and we just got done doing the college tours, and that was so much fun, and I love being on the campuses and seeing the energy and the virus and the passion that the young kids have, but I think college is as much about the experience as it is about what you learn in the classroom. So that’s one, right? So we set that aside. There’s a lot of individuals around the world that don’t have the economic means to go to a traditional university.
And so I think the question is, are we going to see more and more of those folks be able to come to a university like Udemy, develop the skills necessary to be gainfully employed in the role of a developer, or you name the role an accountant and what have you? I think the answer to that is unequivocally yes. And we’re seeing that today. We’re seeing companies like Google and Walmart and IBM take education requirements out of the job specs completely for a large percentage of the jobs in the organizations. We’ve done it here for every role because our strong belief is if the individual has the skills to do the job, it should not matter how they acquired those skills.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: And they’re arguably discriminatory because of systemic injustice. So you’re saying you need a degree from some four year university to sell software? I don’t think so, right?
Greg Brown: No, and I completely agree. The answer is no. You do not need a degree. You need to be capable and competent and have the skills to be effective at selling software. If you’ve got that, that really is all we should care about. But the transformation over time is, I mean, look how long it’s been. I’m 56 years old. I went to university, and this has been, I mean the Khan Academy, I mean online education has been around for a long time, and we still have universities right now, the admittance rates, I can tell you it’s harder to get into colleges now than it was when I was going to school.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Oh, yeah.
Greg Brown: So I do not see the traditional university experience going away anytime soon, but what I just mentioned is going to start accelerating, which is the opportunity for us to provide real skills development and economic opportunity for folks anywhere on the planet, and for those folks who acquire skills necessary to be employed in these jobs and roles, we’re seeing that accelerate and it’s going to continue to accelerate for the reasons we just mentioned. That’s exciting. I mean, that’s why I’m so passionate about what we do here. It’s the opportunity to provide true skills development capability and economic opportunity for anybody, anywhere, and that really is our vision. So yeah, I see that accelerating.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Well, it’s one of those rare places where corporate capitalism demands align with doing the right thing, which they’re often at odds, and here they’re not because the birth rate has dropped significantly. I mean, that was a bigger headline a few years ago before we realized the impact that AI would have. I mean, I’d like to talk about AI and skills replacement, the fear that people are experiencing around there and what you see and also what it means for the business. I mean, I would imagine your ability to develop courses is a lot faster now than it was before, right? I mean, it’s got to be. And so how are you navigating becoming an AI company? How do you communicate that? I did a newsletter, I’m not going to set you up right now. I did a newsletter last week about three different CEOs responses to ai, how they announced ai, and it was the good, the bad, and the ugly and the good was the honest, this is going to happen. It will have some impact. The bad was we’re people first forever and always. Also, we’re going to move to ai also, we’re going to start to replace contractors, and then we’ll see which feels very two-faced because people know what’s coming.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: They know that certain roles will get replaced, and so to pretend like that’s not happening feels inauthentic. And then the third one was just like, ah, crisis ai, we’re all going to die. So how have you messaged the move to AI as a leader, but also to your customers?
Greg Brown: Yeah, it’s very pertinent. So strong believer in these types of transformations. And by the way, this is the biggest one that we’ve lived through in my lifetime. I went through the.com bubble and everything in between, and by the time we’re done and we’re not going to be done with ai, it’s going to be here with us for our lives and beyond. It’ll be the most transformational technology development that we’ve ever seen. For sure. You embrace it. And so what we did initially is leading from the front. We did it put everybody through, everybody in the company, all 1500 employees through a bootcamp that we developed from courses on our platform, as you can imagine, to develop just a basic understanding and general capability, generative ai, and how we need to think about it as an organization and then functionally for the various functions in the organization. The second thing we do is we brought in an AI consultant to work with our senior leadership team to help us understand how we need to lead in this new world with this capability that is changing. As we just mentioned, every month it seems like something else is coming out that is almost transforming how we think about it.
And so how do we need to be leveraging this technology to run the company and to be making decisions and so on and so forth. And so we’ve done that, and that’s something that’s ongoing. I’ve got an AI consultant now a CEO companion, a CEO consultant that I access on a regular basis to ask questions and just to be quite frankly, a copilot. And we were able to feed information in proprietary information because we’re able to keep the GPT internal just to our organization. So I’m doing a lot and we are doing a lot to make sure that we’re maximizing the impact of generative AI in terms of how we’re running the business now in terms of how we message to the employees and to our instructors. We’ve got 75,000 instructors around the world to develop content.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Wow.
Greg Brown: That they make available into our consumer marketplace, and we take the best of the best content, curate it and make that available to over 18,000 organizations to help them develop skills. So you mentioned earlier that there’s one scenario that you saw that CEOs just kind of turning a blind eye and saying, everything’s going to be great and everything’s going to be great. No, look, I mean, I think you have to be honest about it. This technology is going to transform learning. There is no question it’s going to transform our lives holistically and how we work and live. So what are we doing about that? We’re enabling our instructors, as you alluded to it earlier, with the click of a button to develop transcripts, to enable them to develop courses faster than they’ve ever had the ability to develop them before. Then get 70 to 80% of a transcript on a new course they want to develop, leveraging generative AI and the click of a button and then refine that, and then off they go. Then they layer in their expertise, their life experiences, their examples and so on and so forth to bring the content to life, really to make that class feel as authentic to them and make it unique. Coding exercises. All of that now for our instructors is being done. They used to have to do the coding exercises for the folks who are developing coding courses. It would take them hours to develop these. Now it’s a click of a button. We’ve gave them that capability in platform. We’re developing more and more capability every day to make our instructors lives easier, to develop content, richer content to get it to market faster, to keep up with the pace of change. That’s one thing that we’re doing. The second thing is you talked about learning and learning transformation. One of the things that is going to become a very commonplace for all of us is learning is just because of the pace of change, learning is just going to be a part of our daily lives. So we have to make it accessible in the flow of work.
So what does that mean? It means integrated into all of the applications that we use to get work done. So we’re doing a lot of work to make learning accessible so that you don’t have to go to another website, you don’t have to go to another locale or what have you, that if you’ve got 15 minutes and you need to learn something, you’ve got access to it with the click of a mouse, one click, you’re learning exactly what you need to learn and off you go. And that means access to our platform regardless of what application you’re currently in. So there’s a lot we’re doing with respect to ai, and it’s going to continue to make it a more seamless learning experience.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So how are you competing with Gen ai? I mean, so for example, literally 10 minutes before this podcast started, I was trying to figure out why I have no hot water, and I go into Chachi pt and I’m like, what do I do? Because thinking I might be able to figure this out with Cha GT’s help. It’s a very specific timely challenge. He tells me how to figure out if it’s gas or electric, I don’t know. And then I find out it’s gas, and then he tells me he, it’s a friend of mine, he Chachi pt, my friend chat. He tells me how to check the pilot light, blah, blah, blah. I mean, I asked a question, he walked me through it and I’ve got hot water now. Someone just lost a job. I would’ve in a week ago or a year ago when I didn’t have chat GPT, I would’ve called a guy and said, come fix my hot water, and he would’ve charged me way too much money for basically lighting my pilot light. So that’s on demand in the moment specific question to what’s going on right now. So how do you compete with that when you’re in a course format? It’s like, well, I don’t want to learn about hot water heaters, right? I just want to solve this problem.
Greg Brown: Yeah, it’s a really good question. I think we’re working on that right now. That desire to be able to just ask a question and get the answer, which we all have access today, as you mentioned at CHE GPT, but to have that same type of experience through a learning process, a learning journey, developing skills. So one of the things we’ve already developed, and this is probably pretty intuitive, is an AI assistant. So if you’re going through a course, you’ve got the ability to be asking questions through the entire process of taking that course, maybe flesh out a little bit more the why.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Oh, about the content?
Greg Brown: Yeah, you got it.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Oh, that’s cool.
Greg Brown: So what we have the ability to do, because we have transcripts of all the video courses that are on our platform, we have been able to give those transcripts or make the LLM has access to those transcripts, so make those come to life in the form of an AI assistant. So the assistant has access to all that information so you can ask questions and have a dialogue as you’re going through that course with an assistant right alongside you taking that course or series of courses. It could be a curriculum that you’re going through. So you’ve got access to all of that right now. So I think that’s exactly right, and the blended learning experience, which is what you’re talking about and what I’m highlighting right now is going to become more integrated as we move forward. And that’s one of the other areas we’re really working on right now with our customers to understand what’s the optimal experience of being able to engage with an AI assistant while you’re listening to a world-class instructor teaching you how to code Python, whatever it happens to be. And so yeah, I mean, it’s that blended learning that is going to become more and more pervasive as we go forward.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I’m also curious, I would imagine 75,000 instructors in all these courses, there’s got to be contradictions in the content, right? I mean, there just is, right? There’s different leadership approaches, there’s different right ways to correct or different paths to the answer. And so do you think about that in your content curation? I mean, well there’s one way and then here’s another way and they don’t agree.
Greg Brown: What I mean, I do. One of the things our customers love about our platform is that, let’s use the Python example that I just used a minute ago. We don’t just have on platform one instructor teaching that course or series of courses depending on whether you’re a level one, level two, level three developer. In our enterprise collection, there may be 10 different courses from 10 different instructors on level one Python skills development. You’ve got the ability to go through and sample. There’s three to five minute samples of each of those instructors teaching that course to see which instructor you resonate with style wise.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: There’s a vibe.
Greg Brown: There’s a vibe because we all know that we’ve had those instructors in high school or college that we could not wait to get to that course because that instructor was engaging. They spoke to ’em, you connected with them,
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Even if the topic was completely oceanography was mine, I don’t care about oceanography, but I loved that class of the instructor.
Greg Brown: You love learning from that instructor. It’s the same thing on our platform. So the fact that we actually have variety in each one of these courses that quite frankly talk about Python, I mean hundreds of thousands of courses taken on an annual basis, Python courses really that diversity really is a strength for us. So we’ve got access to different learning modalities, different styles, and what we do do though is we curate for all of the things that you would imagine that we would have to curate for to be enterprise grade. We do business with some of the largest multinational organizations in the world. So it’s the language used, the context, and all the kind of stuff that we filter for to make sure that you’re getting an enterprise grade experience when you take one of those courses.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, it’s funny because when I was at Oracle, I was working very closely with the l and d department. I mean, this was the big headache. How do you upskill? How do you upskill by region? These stories don’t make sense here that at an enterprise level it’s really challenging, but I also think there’s a responsibility there because if you think about learning through time, we used to learn in the town square, we get together, we run into people, we learn that way, and then we learned in church and then we learned now, I mean the learning once you pass school, it really happens at work. I mean the learning happens at work or it doesn’t. So there’s this responsibility from our employers to help upskill us, which like I said, is good for them because they want us to be upskilled. And so I would imagine, so did Udemy start as consumer facing and then move to enterprise? It did. Yeah, that’s got to be, tell us about that journey because that is an entirely different market and different product really. How do you lead that transition and that change for a company that size?
Greg Brown: So that process took place before I got here, but as you can imagine, I have an intimate understanding is terms of how it all took place. So Aaron Bley, who is back in the company right now and with two co-founders started the business, just the simple notion that there should be an opportunity for somebody that has expertise in a specific area or domain to develop content, make that content accessible to anybody else in the world. Very basic concept.
They started the company on that premise, built a marketplace, and then it got to escape velocity. It really started to scale. Then some smart folks in the business figured out based on some inbound demand on the consumer side, they just kept seeing with data, there’s 500 people from IBM, there’s 2000 people from Citigroup that are leveraging our platform. I bet if we packaged up the best there’s market here. Yeah, there’s an opportunity here. And so the concept of Udemy business was formed, but it was a slow uptake in terms of getting that off the ground. It took a number of years for them to really start to get momentum to crack the code on how to sell to the enterprise a product or a platform or series of courses that came in from a consumer marketplace. So that whole process took a little bit of time to vet and develop, but once they did, it really started to take off. Then before you know it, when I joined the business four years ago, the Udemy business business unit had just crossed a hundred million in a RR, and we’re north of 500 million now. So over half a billion dollars right now of consumption of our courses on our platform from organizations around the world. So that’s really well done. Yeah, that’s cool.
It’s been a fantastic journey. And so that’s really been the flow, if you will, or the progression of me starting as a consumer business and then transforming. Today, 70% of our revenue is from the enterprise business. When I joined, it was 30%. It was inverted. But the reason why, so if you want to boil it down, so why has this business, the Udemy business business unit grown so fast? It’s the quality of the content because we have world-class instructors around the world that have access to our platform to develop the best content in the world and monetize both on the consumer side as well as if their content’s good enough, they monetize when we sell to the enterprise. So they get to double dip and we’ve, so they’ve got the quality, but we’ve got international catalogs and local learning that happens in countries around the world where over 130 countries where that content’s developed in country by in-country instructors. It’s not English courses dubbed in subtitle, which enjoy all of our competitors pretty much do. So we’ve got that localized experience of content developed in country as well as the quality and the breadth and depth of experience on platform. So that’s really the reason why we’ve had the success we’ve had and the opportunity now is to take it forward and build on it with generative AI as a catalyst.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So before we move on to the opportunity now, what was the underlying belief that you held as the CEO for those four years that you think was the key to success of getting it from a hundred a r to 500?
Greg Brown: Well, I mean it’s the reason that I joined was I just strongly believe then and as I do now, the organizations need a partner to help them continue to develop the skills in their organizations necessary for them to achieve the organizational outcomes, that it’s a strategic imperative and the world’s moving faster today than it was even four years ago as a result of genai, which we’ve just got done talking about. So I just felt like there’s an opportunity for you to me, to be the dominant player to lead that.
Greg Brown: You believed in the product and the need, the market. I believed in the product and I believed in the need and I believed in the tam, the total available market, it’s massive right now today, depending on who you listen to, it’s 60 billion for enterprise learning and I just mentioned we’re half a billion. So there’s a massive opportunity there. And then I love the team, I love the culture. It’s a mission-driven and a very purposeful culture and what have you. So those are the reasons why I jumped on board.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Was there resistance though? I mean, there’s got to be in a change that monumental to pivot. There’s got to be internal resistance at some level. Would’ve the complaints been complaints? What were the change resisters saying throughout this journey?
Greg Brown: I’ll tell you what happened is COVID was a huge catalyst right before COVID Enterprises were many of.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Oh, right, hello. So you started when in 2020?
Greg Brown: I started COVID. I started in 2020.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Oh, well, yeah. Everyone’s like, what are we going to do at home?
Greg Brown: At home? Everybody’s at home and organizations that were resistant now had no option. They had to give this opportunity a try because they had to continue to develop their talent and there was no option to do it. So look, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that COVID was a huge catalyst for the acceptance of online learning as a prominent, if not core way to develop skills and develop your people. And we’ve taken that going forward out of COVID. Now granted, as you can imagine coming out of COVID, the growth rates have slowed Zoom and everybody else because everybody’s kind of back to normal, whatever, normal is the new normal as we like to call it. But still the opportunity is massive and there’s much more of an open mindset to it. And like I said, we do business with some of the largest name brands in the world, hundreds of thousands of employees. Every individual in the organization has access to our platform. So now it’s much more mainstream and it really is now about for us, again, integrating AI into the overall experience and providing broader and deeper capability beyond just the content. It’s about the richness of the learning experience and we can get in more of that if you want to, but anyway, that’s a little bit of the product direction today, but yeah, organizations are much more open to it now than pre COVID. There’s no question.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: And so tell me, now you’ve stepped down as CEO, there’s a new CEO, you’ve moved into the role of advisor. What’s that about?
Greg Brown: Yeah, look, I am helping Hugo come up to speed. I’m still on board through June, and then I’m going to be an advisor through the end of the year and I’m hugely invested in the success of this business. Spent four years here and I’m always going to be a unimate as we like to call ourselves, and I’m going to be available as necessary to help Hugo navigate any hurdles or any obstacles that come in his way for the balance of the year and beyond. And I’m still fulfilling my board requirement as well.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah. So what are you going to do next?
Greg Brown: That’s a good question.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: You’re 56, you’re too young to retire.
Greg Brown: I’m too young to retire, there’s no question. I’ll tell you what I’m doing right now and I’m having a blast doing it. Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time is get my pilot’s license.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: No way.
Greg Brown: Yeah, I’ve wanted to do it. And I’ve got two high school boys and my boys have always been my top priority bar on, and so I was never willing to compromise and sacrifice the time away from them to put the amount of time you have to put into do this. It has to be fairly intensive for about a four to six month window. And so I’m taking a plan sabbatical, I’m getting my pilot’s license and I’m spending time with my boys. My oldest is going off to college and what have you, but right now I’m going to be in the air in a few hours. I’m going to be flying today.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Okay. My follow-up question, are you insane flying small planes? Aren’t those the scariest planes to fly? Are you married?
Greg Brown: I am not married. I have a long-term partner.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: And she’s okay with it?
Greg Brown: No, I wouldn’t say yes. She’s okay with it. She’s supportive. Is she excited to get in the plane? Plane? The answer to that would be no, but I told her, I said I’m not going to have her or the kids or anybody else that I’m close to get in the plane until I’ve got well over.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So you know what you’re doing
Greg Brown: Well over.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So why pilot? Why pilot’s license? Growth mindset?
Greg Brown: Life is short. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I have the time now. I have a window of time, I am going to go back and I’m not done. To your point, I’m 56, I’m too young and I’ve got a ton of energy, so I’m not done continuing to invest in leadership and leadership development. I’ll probably go do something else in as a CEO at some point, but it’s again, something I’ve wanted to do and this is the perfect time for me to do it. So I’m diving in headlong.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Okay. Lemme ask you another question In our research on you, you’re like discipline guy, right? Cold plunges meditation. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Greg Brown: Yeah, I’m fairly disciplined and very much into health span and plan on living to well over a hundred, and I do a lot to
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: What’s your routine? Give us your morning routine.
Greg Brown: I’ll tell you, I was up at five this morning, got in cold plunge for three and a half minutes, meditate for 20 this morning. My son and I had a seven o’clock call. He is a high school quarterback, so we had a video call at 7:00 AM with one of his coaches, remote coaches and what have you, and then got him off to school. When I get done here, I’ll go back, I’m going to get a weight workout, I workout with weights three days a week and cardio the other three days a week and take one day off. And I’ll be in the sauna tonight getting my 20 minute sauna. And there’s a huge health benefit to doing that four days a week and everything in between. And then it’s, for me right now, I’m investing my time and becoming a pilot. So it’s using my brain and continuing to develop skills and doing something that really is fueling a lot of my mental energy right now. So that’s a little bit of the day for me today.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: What is your meditation practice? Do you release the thoughts? Do you have a mantra? What do you do?
Greg Brown: Yeah, I’ve got an app that I love. It’s called The Way, in fact, I just got introduced to me by Tim Ferriss and I don’t know you know who Tim Ferriss is, but he’s a fairly prominent blogger, came out of the tech.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, no, I know Tim Ferriss, he’s super famous
Greg Brown: And Henry Shukman, and it’s a fantastic, fantastic experience. I’ve tried a lot of the different apps I’ve meditated without apps. I happen to love this one. So it’s 20 minutes a day for me and it’s guided, but he’s fantastic and that’s what I use every day.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: That’s very cool. Joe, Terry and I, you’re a friend of Joe Terry. We have co-authored a book, which is going to be coming out later this week called later this week, later this year called Surrender to Lead. And the whole premise of the book is that if you really want to drive results, the most powerful tool that you have is to surrender, which sounds totally counterintuitive. And from a guy like Joe who you remind me of, Joe, I mean he’s an Iron Man athlete, former NFL player. He’s incredibly disciplined. He’s doing his routine every day, meditating. I mean, he literally makes us meditate in executive team meetings. I love that.
Greg Brown: Yeah, I’m going to have to bring that up next time I talk to him.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Oh, totally. I mean, I remember one of my very first executive leadership, Patrice, he’s like, okay folks, we’re going to do a guided meditation now everyone close your eyes. I’m like, what planet am I on? But it was fabulous and it actually bonded us more than ever. So I can see why you guys are friends and a lot of the book we had to spend explaining that surrender is not about giving up. Surrender is like controlling the controllables. It’s just letting go of all this stuff outside of your control. I can’t control the administration. I can’t control the executives that are above me. I can’t control the people who work for me actually, even though my title says I can. The reality is they’ve got free will. All I can control is the experiences I create for myself and for others, and that is surrender and can shape the right beliefs. I’m curious. I’m doing some market research now. If you saw a book called Surrender to Lead on the bookshelf, would you be like, that’s interesting, or would you be like, that’s touchy feely, I’m not going over there.
Greg Brown: Not touchy feely at all by title. The title doesn’t necessarily describe what you just mentioned in terms of the essence of the content. The other thing we haven’t talked about is I’m a big zealots, probably overstating it, but of stoicism and one of the prime tenants of stoicism is control the controllables. And those things that you can’t control, you let go, you let them fly by. And I talk about it all the time in the company when I was running the business, the companies I’ve run with, my kids, I just mentioned my son’s a quarterback. Well, he is coming back from an ACL injury. And my conversation with him quite frequently is just about that you control what you can control with respect to your recovery and what you can do and what have you, and let the rest of it go, let the rest fly by and what have you. So anyway, I’m a big fan. The title, we could talk offline, the title may not nail exactly what you describes in the book, but I love what you just mentioned is in the book and I’ll read it because of that.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Okay, great. Well, I’m in. Thank you. We are still working on cover, so there may be time to change the title. We’ll see. Okay. My last question, and this is my favorite question, which is what is something that you don’t get asked about very often in these types of interviews that you wish you were asked more often?
Greg Brown: I think one would be what’s been the most transformative decision that you’ve made that’s had the biggest impact on your career?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Ooh, that’s great.
Greg Brown: And it’s an easy one for me because I had an opportunity when I was at WebEx. I was fortunate to have picked a winner in my first foray into technology back in 2000. I was one of the first 50 employees in the company and I had an opportunity to stay there and develop my career and skills for almost eight years. The last opportunity I had was an opportunity to move to Europe and run AMEA from a sales perspective. And that was the opportunity of a lifetime and it transformed me as a person as well as in my career. I mean just the opportunity at that age before kids and before marriage and all that kind of stuff. And Tara did come with me. My girlfriend at the time became my fiance and moved to Europe with me. And we had just a fantastic experience in Europe.
I got to learn how to as an American, bring the best of my knowledge of how we built this fast growing dynamic company, WebEx and adapt the best of what we learned to the different cultures and how to sell into Germany and the UK and France and the various markets of Benelux where I lived, I lived in Amsterdam, very international city and had an opportunity to just embed ourselves for three plus years in the culture and the environment. And it was so enriching in so many ways. I could talk about it for an hour, but yeah, that was without question. So I encourage everybody that has an opportunity to move abroad in their career and to take that type of an opportunity, encourage ’em to lean in and go do it, because it’ll change you in the best of ways forever. And I had my first son there, my oldest son is a Dutch born baby.
So it’s something that I hold near and dear that experience. I’m grateful for super ir the CEO at the time of WebEx for tapping me on the shoulder and giving me that opportunity and very encouraging anybody. In fact, to the point to where as my kids are going to college, it’s not optional because dad’s paying for college, they have to do a semester abroad because of the positive impact living in another country and a culture and experiencing all that had on me. I want them to have a taste of that early in their life. So hopefully it encourages them to travel and experience and what have you as they grow older.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, that’s beautiful. I did a semester abroad in high school to Thailand, and it was even more, I was born in France and my family’s French, so I spent all my summers in France and to go to Thailand and to see Asian culture, I bet it was such a culture shock that, I mean, it opened me up to exploring Buddhism. It was like a spiritual journey beyond just being a culture journey. So I cannot agree more. My father also had that same mantra, get your kids out there. When I graduated college, I moved to Italy and lived there for three years. And it’s just wild how different it looks the same on paper, but it is so different in their hearts and minds. So I totally agree.
Greg Brown: Yeah, no, I think the biggest gift you can give somebody a child or what have you, is the gift of travel and that experience, especially living there. And last thing I’ll say is what I’m doing because of that, what I’m doing for each of my kids as they graduate high school, my Braden, my oldest, we’re going to be embarking on this is a trip anywhere in the world. They want to go for 10 days just with dad, just the two of them.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Oh my goodness, that’s so great.
Greg Brown: Braden has always wanted to go to Japan. So we’ve got a 12 day trip planned in Japan next month, and we’re going to four cities. And fortunately I spent quite a bit of time in Japan in my business travel. So I’ve got good connections though. We’re going to have a fantastic time. But again, I think that that’s also just a part of what we’re talking about, the enrichment that you get from xxperiential learning. Yeah, different folks, different culture and learning and everything that comes with it.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: That’s great. So Udemy’s next business product is going to be trips abroad organized by Udemy.
Greg Brown: I’m going to come back and lead that business unit.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Great. Perfect. I’ll be your first customer. Thank you, Greg, so much for coming. This has been such a fun conversation. I’m so grateful that Joe put us together and that we were able to have this chat.
Greg Brown: Thank you. Yeah, Jessica, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it as well. Thanks so much for having me.
