On June 1, Udemy announced that their board had chosen Kevin Johnson as their new CEO. Until last month, Kevin was the CEO of Ebates, which is “an online shopping portal offering coupons and cash back from over 2,000 online retailers” according to Wikipedia.

I first learned about this when Dennis Yang, now the ex-CEO of Udemy, published a post on LinkedIn about him moving away from Udemy after five years. You can read the post here: Never Stop Learning.

There is very little information available on why this change was made, though there is a quote from a Udemy board member: “Kevin is a veteran leader who knows how to scale a fast-moving marketplace business with customers and employees around the world.”

Dennis Yang

Dennis joined Udemy in 2012 as the president and COO. Back then, Udemy had just fifteen employees. In April 2014, he took over as the CEO from Udemy co-founder Erin Bali. During Yang’s tenure as CEO, Udemy has grown a lot.

It has raised $173 million, reached 15 million students, and offers more than 45,000 courses. It is the world’s largest marketplace for online courses — it has over 20,000 instructors.