Udemy: A Product of Recession

This is Part 1 of a multi-part series in which I tell the story of Udemy. Here’s Part 2, and here’s Part 3.

When a recession hits, it feels like the world is falling apart. That’s how I felt in 2008. I was a recent college graduate with few marketable skills I had never heard of Silicon Valley. I had no idea what a VC was. My mother had just lost her job, and I was pretty sure I was about to lose my own job as a first-year analyst at Accenture.

All of us first-year analysts were freaking the fuck out.

It wasn’t clear what Accenture was going to do. It hadn’t yet responded to the economic crisis, and we were just waiting for the hammer to drop.

Finally, I got an ominous email from Accenture management. 

Paraphrasing the subtext, it said this:

To all first-year analysts, 

[As you know, the economy is going to shit. This has severely impacted Accenture’s business]. As part of our restructuring, we are asking some Analysts to move to Washington, DC where the government is still paying its bills and hiring us for projects! If enough Analysts move, we may just save all of your jobs.

Whew. Thank goodness I still have my job.

But shit, I thought. Washington, DC? I knew almost nobody there, and my girlfriend was still going to school at UC Berkeley. The Bay Area was my lifelong home, but these were desperate times. I moved to DC.

It was necessary, but it sucked. I knew I wanted to get back to the Bay Area, but didn’t think I could do it during a recession.

I did have one friend in DC: Vikrum, a high school buddy who was climbing the ranks on Capitol Hill. He was well-connected and smart. I told him about my hopes to go back to the Bay Area to work in tech. Then he gave me the most valuable tip I’ve ever gotten:

“You know, if you’re interested in technology, you should check out this blog called TechCrunch. It’s what all my friends read.”

Today, this sounds inconsequential. Anyone reading this knows about TechCrunch, VentureHacks, AngelList, and VC blogs. They’re practically mainstream today. But at that time, their existence was a revelation to me—a whole world of content and knowledge at my fingertips!

I couldn’t get enough. I read every damned article and clicked every link in every article. Soon, I was a TechCrunch junkie who knew way too much about the writing styles and personal lives of John Biggs, Leena Rao, and Michael Arrington. 

That was when I discovered the first secret to Silicon Valley: in order to get into the industry, you must act like an insider. Everything is online; you can watch people tweet and post and conduct business out in the open. Nobody takes you seriously unless you model the behavior and follow the unwritten code of conduct.

By obsessing over TechCrunch and VC blogs, I was working toward being an insider (mostly during the inevitable dead time I had working with the government). I didn’t know it at the time, but that would pay off very soon.

Two Big Breaks

One fateful week, two posts showed up on TechCrunch.

First was a post on MobileCrunch, TechCrunch’s much smaller and less important sister blog. They were hiring unpaid interns to write app reviews and other less challenging journalistic tasks.

Second was a post on the Founder Institute, a new technology incubator that was for companies in the idea stage. You didn’t have to have a co-founder, be an engineer or have an idea to join.

I applied, and got in, to both. It was a stunning and quick turn of events and I’d done it entirely based on “hacking” the system.

I got the job at TechCrunch because I knew the writing style of Greg Kumparak, the editor of MobileCrunch. I’d been reading his posts for months and copied his style to a T in my application form. Within hours, he responded:

You’re in. You start tomorrow.

I was stunned. I was about to go from not knowing that this world existed to writing articles for its top news site in 4 months flat.

A few days later, I also got into the Founder Institute using the same strategy. I’d watched plenty of YouTube videos about “what makes a good founder” and read Paul Graham’s various posts on the subject. So I wrote answers like that in my application form and was accepted.

Now I was both a “founder” and a tech reporter. For now, I was juggling those roles while still working at Accenture—but soon, my life was about to change completely. 

Taking Advantage of Opportunities

There were many interns at MobileCrunch and lots of founders in the Founder Institute. I had come a long way, but my chances of success were still slim. Most of my peers would eventually fail.

Why did I succeed?

I think I had the right combination of ambition and opportunism. And, of course, a bit of luck.

At MobileCrunch, I was obsessed with the numbers. I knew that if a post got on TechCrunch, it would have 5-10x more readership than if it was just on MobileCrunch. Soon, I realized that anyone—even interns—could write a post that got on TechCrunch. It just had to be about the right subject.

So I “hacked” my role at MobileCrunch by steering my efforts towards tech news and funding rounds. Soon, I went from some intern schmuck to a regular byline on the homepage of the technology industry’s top news site.

The Founder Institute was trickier. You can’t hack your way into being a founder: you have to actually build something that people want. I worked on lots of ideas and talked to lots of potential co-founders during that summer, but nothing was clicking.

I was a “founder” in name only. One of my ideas was a grand vision to build an online education company that would hire great in-person teachers to offer video courses online, but I couldn’t convince technical co-founders to join me.

Adeo, the founder of the Founder Institute, sent me a stern email: 

If you don’t have a company in 3 weeks, I’m kicking you out.

Adeo had a reputation for following through on such threats, and I was worried all my hard work was going to be for naught. Luckily, he gave me an out.

He introduced me to these “Turkish guys” who were starting a company called Udemy.

Udemy was similar to my idea, but with one key difference: instead of hiring the instructors, Eren and Oktay proposed that anyone could be an instructor. It was going to be like YouTube for education.

Many people missed this opportunity: there were 50 other business co-founders in the Founder Institute class who did not join the Udemy team for myriad reasons.

This was made harder because Eren and Oktay had thick Turkish accents, making them difficult to understand for most White Americans.

Fortunately, I had traveled a ton as a child and was used to strange accents. After a somewhat rough Skype conversation filled with “Can you repeat that?” and “Sorry, it’s hard to hear you,” we eventually got to the demo of Udemy.com.

That’s when I saw Eren’s vision, and I saw that it was 1,000x better than mine. Democratize education completely by enabling anyone to become a teacher? It was crazy, but I liked it. This was important: Eren was clearly the leader of this venture, and if I joined, I’d have to give up the CEO spot to him, to work toward his vision and his view of the future. But the vision was good enough that I agreed to try it out, and I started working with them within a few days. No contract, no title, no equity.

We were a trio of misfits. We couldn’t afford to go full-time so we kept our existing jobs. We had no savings, were new to the Valley, and had no prospects for raising money.

It was a start, though, and we forged ahead.

Going from Nobody to Somebody in Silicon Valley

In retrospect, there are a few keys to getting into Silicon Valley:

First, observe and copy. Watch how people act and mimic them. This will help you ingratiate yourself quickly.

Second, take shots. Perfectly said by hockey Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

Third, find your edge. For me, it was writing. Each person has a different edge and needs to find a way in. Take what you can get; don’t let your pride get in the way of a great opportunity. Use your talents every chance you get.

Finally, fake it until you make it. Don’t lie, though—it will come back to bite you. However, don’t undersell yourself either. Strike a balance.

Next post: the earliest challenges of Udemy — failing through 150+ investor pitches.

Thanks again for reading this. I write sporadically, but when I do publish something, I try to make it interesting. Subscribe here so you’ll never miss a post.