Udemy, Inc. (UDMY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

November 17, 2022

NASDAQ US Consumer Discretionary investor_day 175 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Dennis Walsh

executive
#1

Hello, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Dennis Walsh, Vice President of Investor Relations at Udemy. Before we begin, we want everyone to be aware that during the formal presentation and question-and-answer session that follows, members of Udemy's leadership team will make reference to forward-looking statements concerning management's expectations, goals, objectives and similar matters. Those statements are based only on information available to us at this time. There are many factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from the anticipated results or other expectations expressed in these forward-looking statements. Some of those factors are set forth in our annual report on Form 10-K, our most recent 10-Q, in today's meeting and other public disclosures. Our discussions and presentation today include information regarding GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. You can find a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results on our Investor Relations website at investors.udemy.com. Let's turn to the agenda. We're so excited for Udemy's first ever Investor Day and to share the plans our teams have for growing the business over the next several years. In a moment, Udemy's Chairman and CEO, Gregg Coccari, will kick things off with an intro and overview of Udemy's growth strategy. Then you'll hear from 3 leaders that oversee our content, product and engineering teams. Next, we'll provide an overview of Udemy's brand engagement and marketing strategies. After a short break, you'll hear from 3 Udemy business leaders, followed by a dive into our financial model and long-term outlook from our CFO. After another short break, we will open up the call for questions from Udemy sell-side analysts. Throughout the day, you'll also hear from Udemy learners, customers and instructors who will share the way working with Udemy has helped them meet their goals. Before I turn it over to Gregg, I invite you to you to meet Udemy. [Presentation]

Gregg Coccari

executive
#2

Welcome, everybody, to Udemy's 2022 Investor Day. Over the course of the next 3 hours, our leadership team will share how we are working to deliver on Udemy's mission to improve lives through learning. What excites me the most are some of the personal stories you'll hear today from instructors, learners, Udemy Business customers about how Udemy has helped them achieve their goals. A major shift is happening in the way people learn and work. Traditional education and training methods are quickly becoming outdated. A recent study found that companies estimate that in the next 5 years, 40% of the core skills will change and approximately 50% of the global workers will require reskilling. This is creating a massive opportunity as learners and organizations look for ways to reskill and upskill to keep up with the pace of change. Many of today's learning options have a number of shortcomings, including relevance, quality, breadth, scalability, and affordability of content. Udemy addresses these shortcomings and effectively connects the global ecosystem of learners to up-to-date knowledge from experts and practitioners around the world. We've built a world-class SaaS platform on the top of a vibrant consumer marketplace. This allows us to offer fresh, high-quality, affordable learning to organizations and individuals around the world and help them achieve their critical business outcomes. Udemy was launched in 2010 and has consistently delivered sustainable growth. We have a proven land-and-expand strategy for Udemy business that you will hear more about later from Greg Brown and his team, and we've built a comprehensive marketplace that has attracted more than 57 million learners from all around the world. Today, Udemy's platform allows individual learners and organizations access to affordable, relevant and up-to-date content across nearly every industry. Yet we're just getting started. We expect to continue executing our land-and-expand strategy in Udemy business. As we further integrate into the flow of work and deliver more immersive learning experiences, we anticipate sustainable high growth for Udemy Business. And finally, we continue to roll out innovative product offerings while expanding our geographic footprint. It's important that we set aspirational goals for what success looks like at Udemy. We only succeed when our partners succeed. We want Udemy to be the first choice for all learners. We want our instructors to have the best platform that allows them to build meaningful businesses. And finally, we want Udemy to be the primary solution for tech business and leadership learning. We've made great progress for each of these goals. In the presentations that follow, you will hear directly from the leaders that are making all of this happen. These are some of the leaders that are bringing our vision to life. However, we have more than 1,600 Udemys' from around the world, and their contributions are crucial to our success. With that, since it all starts with our best-in-class content, it's my pleasure to introduce Scott Rogers, our SVP of Supply Strategy.

Scott Rogers

executive
#3

Hi. My name is Scott Rogers, and I lead supply and instructor strategy at Udemy. And over the next few minutes, I'm going to talk about how our marketplace model works, and how it fuels our subscription businesses. I've spent the better part of 2.5 decades in traditional professional skills publishing. And I've learned that great content comes from 3 key elements: to create a great end result, you, of course, need expert creators. If the source material isn't good, the end result won't be either. But then once you create the content, you need audience engagement. You need to see how it's resonating with learners. And then when you get that learner feedback, you need to optimize the content. And the scale and the speed of that feedback loop is what can create truly great content. It's also what differentiates Udemy from traditional publishers. As a publisher, you can find expert creators, you create the course through your production system and then you put it on your platform. And you might not update it for 2 years or even 3 years. At Udemy, our instructors are incentivized to listen to learner feedback and optimize their content consistently. So over the next few slides, I'll explain how this works. Global experts flock to Udemy because of our scale. Tens of thousands of instructors have created hundreds of thousands of courses to serve tens of millions of global learners. So not only does this provide us with a tremendous amount of learner data, it also provides tremendous incentive for instructors to come to our platform. We paid $189 million to instructors over the past 12 months. And as a result, global experts come to publish. We are now averaging almost 5,000 courses published in our platform every single month. And each of these is a shot at innovation. You can innovate by understanding corporate needs that are emerging, for instance, the ESG course. You can innovate by serving learners better. When Angela Yu brought her iOS bootcamp to Udemy, there were 2 other courses that had a majority of market share in the topic. Now Angela has the #1 course on Udemy. You can also innovate by using the tools that we provide all instructors effectively. So in the case of Stephane Maarek, he uses our practice test functionality, so learners can actually use quizzes that he created that are timed -- that are proxy for the actual official Amazon exam so that learners will know if they're ready to go and take the official exam. And there are many different ways for instructors to innovate. One of the most predictable is simply being first or early to market on our platform to meet the needs of our millions of learners. And you can see this happen across all of our different topic areas, whether it's business topics like emergency COVID-19 preparedness course, which came to our platform before the shelter-in-place orders or time and time again in tech. And a key thing to note here is that our instructors are unconstrained by the traditional publishing model. Again, as a publisher, you create content with an instructor, you put it on your platform and you'll typically update it in 2 or 3 years. Our instructors have access to the Udemy platform, 24/7. So they're free to publish a month before the software release. And should the software change, they can go in that morning, that evening and update the content for their learners. Learners love it and our corporate partners love it. They are able to deal with digital transformation with content that is constantly first and refreshed. Our scaled feedback loops drive ongoing improvement, our algorithm tracks and tries to match learner need with the right course. And one of the key metrics that it tracks is ratings and reviews. And so if you're an instructor who has a course on the first page of the search and you get a poor review, it's in your financial interest to try and cure that learner problem. And of course, if you go in and do that, all future learners are going to get the benefit of that improvement as well. And there are similar incentives with our Q&A. Instructors who create loyal learners are more likely to have those learners purchase their next course in the marketplace or use their courses in our subscription platforms, which means instructors make more money when they serve learners well. It's not just the qualitative feedback loops. It's also quantitative data that our platform provides to instructors. You can see several of the examples here. Instructors are able to see what their learners are bookmarking that is, what do learners think is the most important thing that they want to go back to again and again. And so if you're an instructor, you might add more content around the topic. You might even add or create a new course if the topic is big enough. We also give instructors the ability to understand where do learners start a lecture and not complete it. And if you're an instructor, you might refilm with more energy. You might shorten the lecture. You might add a quick win to keep learners engaged. The specific intervention is up to you but our platform provides you with the knowledge you need and the data so that you can intervene in the right place. Our instructors love this. In fact, our top instructors update each of their courses an average of 4.5 times a year. And that's how we enable world-class experts at a global scale. I mentioned Angela earlier. She published her first course on Udemy in 2017. She now has 1.6 million learners enrolled in her courses and a 4.7 out of 5 average. Jose Portilla now has 3 million learners enrolled in his courses and a 4.6 average that is teaching at scale. And it's not just Angela and Jose, 19 instructors will make $1 million or more on Udemy this year and hundreds of instructors will make more than $100,000 this year. So that, in essence, is how our marketplace works, tens of thousands of instructors creating hundreds of thousands of courses, which compete against each other to best serve learner needs where the most effective courses rise to the top and we pick from the best of the best to fuel our subscription businesses, Udemy Business and personal plan. So when we're curating our courses, we look at a host of different factors. One of the key one is just the simple scaled learner behavior data from the marketplace in UB. What are our millions of learners searching for? What are they enrolling in? What are they consuming? We also look at average rating. We want to see and make sure that instructors continue to serve learners well over time. We, of course, look at instructor responsiveness. I've explained how we provide our instructors with data, qualitative and quantitative. We want to make sure that they're using this. And finally, input from our corporate customers, whether this comes from our hundreds of customer success team members who are constantly talking to our customers and giving us their input and guidance or through in-product functionality. A system that's unique to Udemy is to allow our corporate customers if they see a course in the marketplace, which isn't yet in Udemy business, they can request it. And if the course, meets our curation thresholds, we'll typically add it. In fact, in 2021, we added over 1,000 courses based on customer course requests with an average response time of under 4 hours. As you can imagine, our customers love this. So looking at our curation on a month-on-month basis, we will add typically 200 courses per month and remove 50 courses per month. When we remove courses, it's because they've fallen below our ratings guidelines or the content is simply not being used by our customers because there are other more effective options available. And as you see here, over the past few years, our collection has almost tripled from about 2,500 courses in 2019 to over 8,000 English language courses today. And as always, we want to make sure that our curation efforts are adding learner value, and we track a number of metrics. One of them is our Udemy Business learner ratings, so that is we track all employees at our customers. And over the last 90-day period, what is the average of those ratings. And as you can see here in September, it averaged 4.5, absolutely terrific. We also track our learner Net Promoter Score. And in Q1 of 2022, that was a 58 NPS considered excellent in the industry? I've talked about Udemy's marketplace. But Udemy is actually many different marketplaces, of which English is one. And these local marketplaces around the world, many of them now have scaled to the point that we can create local language collections for our Udemy business product. And as you see here, there are 14 collections, English and the 13 local language collections in Udemy Business. And if you look at the slide, the rings show how many local language speakers there are for each language, giving you a sense of the addressable market, which is huge. So it's not just that we have local language, we have local experts creating locally relevant content. And you can imagine how important this is. If you're a student in Japan and you want to learn business management, and you're listening to an American course that talks about McDonald's [indiscernible] or football examples, that's going to be less relevant to you than a Japanese businessperson with locally relevant context. Very, very important, and our learners love having this. So we're investing in building out these local collections. We now have 13 local language collections plus English with almost 11,000 courses in them. And in the first half of this year, we added 1,700 courses, which amounts to over 14,000 hours of new content. So the key takeaways from this session are scaled feedback loops incentivize and enable instructors to create high quality and relevant learner experiences in a way that the publishing model simply can't match. Our marketplace supply engine powers Udemy Business with broad coverage and freshness. And finally, our global language coverage by local experts provides competitive differentiation and learner value. Thank you for your time.

Prasad Gune

executive
#4

Hi, everyone. I'm Prasad Gune, and I'm responsible for the product team here at Udemy. I'm joined by Seth Hodgson, our VP of Engineering. We are excited to talk to you today about Udemy product and engineering.

Seth Hodgson

executive
#5

How do you folks?

Prasad Gune

executive
#6

We're going to be talking today about how our product and engineering teams help deliver on Udemy's mission through 4 pillars. First, a scalable, integrated platform that enables instructors, learners and organizations with a dynamic flywheel of content, feedback and incentives. Second, comprehensive learning where we support different ways to learn, whether it be on-demand, guided, immersive or cohort learning or a combination. Next, extensive integrations so that our rich content offerings are available on our own and third-party platforms. And last but not least, powerful data, which we leverage to drive outcomes for our customers. We believe that these 4 pillars allow us to offer truly differentiated value to our customers. So let's dive in, shall we? Let's talk about our scaled and integrated platform. We believe this is a major differentiator for us. The power starts with bringing together 3 key customers at scale: instructors, learners and organizations. Having all 3 of these customer types enables us to create tremendous value that exceeds the sum of the parts. Let's see how our 74,000 instructor partners or expert practitioners in their field. They dynamically expand our knowledge base by providing fresh, relevant content for our learners and organizations. This includes the immersive learning experiences you'll hear about from Seth. In turn, they're able to monetize their knowledge and receive learner feedback on their content. Our 57 million learners acquire knowledge and skills for career development. At that scale, we are able to rapidly learn and experiment to improve their experience. As you heard from Scott, we also gather qualitative and quantitative feedback in the form of ratings and reviews. This provides directional feedback to instructors and helps us curate the very best content for our UB collection. And to complete the flywheel, over 13,000 organizations are able to upskill and reskill with our learning content and analytics. In turn, they provide strategic insights on their areas of interest as well as content feedback from their learners. Organizational usage also validates our content quality to consumer learners. The integrated Udemy platform allows all these customers to drive to shared outcomes and the scale of our marketplace generates hard-to-replicate, high-value data and insights. We'll talk more about that later.

Seth Hodgson

executive
#7

As covered by Scott and Prasad, we're starting from the broadest, freshest learning content on the planet. On-demand learning is our foundation, and it drives the flywheel of our marketplace with dynamics that ensure content relevance, freshness and vibrancy. Today's on-demand learning is mainly video-based with supporting materials that learners engage with at a pacing of their choosing. I'm going to walk you through how we're building on this foundation to deliver an increasingly comprehensive and powerful learning platform. First, we add personalized and skill-based guidance. We let learners focus in on career and occupational areas that matter to them. And we produce Udemy-curated learning paths focused on key domains and skill sets. We also allow organizations to author their own custom learning paths. These are tuned to the organization-specific upskilling and reskilling efforts. Today, AI and machine learning power our personalized search, recommendations, discovery and learning experiences. And with the rapid progress taking place in deep learning, we're very excited about the novel, new applications that will benefit our learners, instructors and organizations. From here, we are focused on 2 key areas of professional skills development and mastery. The first is today's top technical skills, which must be learned by doing. Our emphasis is in authentic scenarios where we provide simple, low-risk access to fully configured workspaces and environments that our learners can practice in. They don't get stuck trying to set up their system and tools correctly. They can dive straight in and go. We provide feedback on their progress and mastery through assessments, and we're improving the authoring and maintenance tools and workflows for our instructors so that they can contribute and monetize their expertise through these learning activities. I'll share a short demo of what hands-on practice looks like for a learner in a bit. And this brings us to the second key skills development area, learning to lead. These skills cannot be learned simply by watching videos or reading on our own. They require a self-assessment, discussion and debate and real feedback from our peers with support from moderators and expert faculty. In order to build mastery and leadership skills, we must apply what we are learning in real life in the flow of our work. Our cohort learning offering is where we are working to scale and innovate the practice and mastery of these skills. What excites me most about our learning platform is that we're just getting started on some of these new learning modalities.

Prasad Gune

executive
#8

Thanks to our comprehensive learning platform, we can support our users throughout their learning journey. Learners can develop their skills through the different learning modalities, Seth shared with you, in order to achieve their desired learning, goals and outcomes. This includes watching videos, reading tutorials, doing hands-on practice and assessing their progress. They're then able to apply and share their skills driving true impact. This learning is based on solving real-world problems and integrate it with the way our users work and collaborate. And through machine learning, we can personalize their learning experience. The journey I walked you through reflects the experience of a single learner. But you can imagine how this applies in the context of organizational learning. At scale, this enables companies to drive their business objectives. Stephanie Stapleton, our Head of Customer Success, will share a few great customer examples with you. We've talked about the different ways we help our users learn. Let's take a quick look at our product offerings. For consumers, we offer à la carte or bundled courses from our instructors. This has been the foundation of our marketplace offering. We've recently launched a consumer subscription called Personal Plan aimed at individual learners who seek deeper guidance and practice. For businesses, we offer multiple products under the Udemy Business umbrella. Team Plan is our self-serve offering for business users with teams of 5 to 20 employees. For larger teams and organizations, we have our Enterprise plan, curated on-demand catalog of over 17,000 high-quality courses in multiple languages. In addition, we offer immersive learning through Udemy Pro. This product offers workspaces, labs and assessments in areas, including cloud computing, software development, data science and DevOps. We round out our Udemy Business offering with CorpU, our cohort-based learning experience authored by experts for all levels of leadership development.

Seth Hodgson

executive
#9

Against the backdrop we just shared, here's a quick look at what hands-on practice of technical skills looks like for a learner. First, we set the stage with an authentic scenario, and we offer several options for the amount of guidance provided. The scenario includes clear learning objectives and outcomes, what I'll do and what I'll learn. In this case, I'm working for a company with hundreds of stores, sales data and other features are tracked and available for each of these stores. I'll use this data to create a forecasting model to predict the sales for new potential stores. As the learner, when I launched this lab, I get batteries included. Out-of-the-box practice environment requires 0 complex setup. There is no provisioning or management overhead from my organization or for the instructor to worry about. I get to roll up my sleeves and start practicing. The environment for this lab is preconfigured with today's leading data science tools and technologies. And as I proceed, I learned about key software libraries and charting packages, I use them to perform several types of analysis, such as analyzing sales data using a histogram chart, and visualizing the correlation between sales and other features of our stores using this heat map chart. I wrap up by implementing a forecasting model for new stores based on training and test data sets that we can use to inform our expansion strategy. Learning by doing is the only way to truly master today's top tech skills and equips learners, instructors and organizations with immersive learning capabilities that unlock staff upskilling and reskilling. We are evolving our comprehensive learning platform using an API-first approach. This starts by looking at our business as a set of key entities and capabilities, and we define modular, interoperable APIs to represent them. This foundation fosters innovation across the customer experience and opens the door to faster, more efficient timelines to scale our offerings. It powers our first-party applications that include our customer-facing udemy.com website, our Udemy Business web experience, our native mobile applications and new experiences such as Apple CarPlay for learning on the go. But critically, it also powers an expanding set of third-party ecosystem integrations, through industry standard interoperability with learning management systems and learning experience platforms as well as other key business systems and tools, the set of opportunities that our learning platform can be applied to is far larger than what we could or should build on our own. And Cody Crnkovich, Head of Partnerships, will give you a deep dive into how these are accelerating our reach as well as customer and business outcomes.

Prasad Gune

executive
#10

So we walked you through a single platform and APIs. This unified foundation gives us visibility across key user interactions for our 3 crucial customer segments: instructors, learners and organizations. In the past, these customer segments often lacked a line of sight into the skills and outcomes that matter. Our global view enables visibility and alignment around those shared goals through skills insights. We can guide instructors on which skills to teach, help learners in achieving their career goals and assist organizations in driving to business outcomes. Let's go a little deeper for each customer. We help improve instructor outcomes by sharing insights on where the market opportunities are and how they can enhance their teaching capabilities. For learners, our marketplace unlocks valuable data for personalized recommendations. This helps learners know the skills needed to achieve their goals and how they can acquire those skills. And here, we are pursuing deep learning opportunities to predictively assist them in semantic selection of the best learning content and activities. And finally, we also power insights for organizations. For instance, which are the trending skills in companies like theirs and how they can address the most pressing skill gaps to achieve their business goals. I'd like to leave a few key takeaways for you. First, our scaled integrated platform drives powerful flywheel effects for our customers. Our API integrations allow us to quickly scale our learning experiences. And finally, powerful data and insights from our unified platform empower our instructors, learners and organizations and drive improved outcomes. As a product leader, I'm pleased with the marketplace and platform we've built thus far but even more energized by the opportunity ahead of us. Thank you for your time today. [Presentation]

Stacey Hara

executive
#11

Hi. I'm Stacey Zolt Hara, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications, and I'm here today to talk to you about Udemy's mission-driven brand. Udemy's mission is to improve lives through learning. We are learning evangelist. Everything we do is focused on engaging these 3 audiences in our shared mission, just as our platform brings these stakeholders together through inputs, outputs, data and insights, so does our mission. In the backdrop of a challenging economy, digital transformation and once in a generation changes to the way we work, Udemy is addressing a core business, individual and societal need. And if we are successful, each of these audiences will see a clear ROI, a connection between Udemy success and [ theirs ] and a connection with each other, engaging around a shared mission is how we will grow long-term brand trust and loyalty. As you'll hear today from my colleagues and from our learners, organizations and instructors. Those who use Udemy come back for more, that land-and-expand strategy is core to our growth, but our path to become the world's #1 learning company begins by boosting awareness. Udemy's brand awareness is actually overall pretty low, and it parallels low awareness in the EdTech category generally. Our awareness study from earlier this year demonstrates that there's still lots of room to grow. I've spotlighted a handful of markets on this slide that shows our Q1 2022 aided awareness in various markets. On the high end, you have India, with 47% aware of Udemy. On the lower end, there's Japan with just 8% awareness. And that's notable because Udemy is actually the market leader for adult skills education in Japan. We have 1 million learners, 2,200 instructors and 7,000 courses in Japanese. Together with our partner, Benesse, we serve 54% of the Nikkei 225 and yet we are clearly just getting started with lots of room to grow. Udemy benefits where we build conversation about the category generally because where the conversation about lifelong learning, reskilling and upskilling is happening, Udemy is front and center. In fact, our tracking data shows that Udemy share of voice is beating the competition with 53%. And we know that when people know Udemy, they love us. Udemy's Q3 marketplace learner study showed a Net Promoter Score of 51, excellent by industry standards. And among those aware of Udemy, 30% to 50% prefer our platform and 50% are aware of Udemy Business, which demonstrates that funnel effect from awareness to marketplace consideration to UB referral in many instances. So on which channels are people learning about Udemy. Not surprisingly, the top channels include social media, search engines and online articles and blogs. In fact, 24% to 40% of people are hearing about Udemy through personal or professional recommendation. Word-of-mouth is actually the #1 referral source for Udemy Business and more than 65% of organic udemy.com traffic originates from search and social. Therefore, our job to elevate the brand centers on 3 core tasks. First, we need to elevate the category, elevating the problem we seek to solve, discussion around the ROI that comes with prioritizing, upskilling and reskilling and what can happen when lifelong learning is accessible, affordable and agile. Second, we need to elevate brand awareness for that top-of-funnel activation. And third, we will focus and target audiences where conversation and engagement will build influence and increase consideration. So let's first take a look at how we're building top-of-funnel awareness for Udemy. We are building a brand that is globally consistent and locally relevant. As you heard from Scott earlier, this is about hitting skills and cultural context that resonates on the ground in our markets, with instructors and courses in local language. It's also about creative that resonates locally. Early in 2023, we will launch new TV commercials in Japan, Korea and India, and I'm so excited today to give you a sneak preview where you can compare our U.S. spot with our soon-to-be released spot in Japan, so you can get a feel for how we adapt our brand to be relevant and compelling in non-U.S. markets. [Presentation]

Stacey Hara

executive
#12

In addition to paid media, we have built a global earned media operation with PR teams on the ground across 15 markets. Our globally consistent, locally tailored narrative elevates the need for learning, the importance of upskilling and reskilling and ROI for companies who invest in cultures of learning. We are quite simply setting the agenda for the category and creating a favorable landscape for brand consideration while supporting our sales teams on the ground. You will typically see 6 key themes emerging across these global hits. While we are localizing the pitch according to local data and trends, we're also keeping these themes consistent globally to help us tell a unified story, our theme centered around upskilling and reskilling, digital transformation and aligning our messaging with government workforce initiatives that clearly can benefit from the Udemy platform. We are talking about hybrid workforce and learning models, how learning is changing with the distributed workforce, we talk about emerging technologies and what courses learners are taking to keep up with the nonstop pace of change. We talk a lot about local learner customer and instructor stories and finally, hyper-localized trends and data to make sure our stories resonate. Social media is where we are doubling down to engage in conversation where people are and build that trusted friend referral through expert voices, influencers our learners can identify with and success stories where they can see parallels to their own lives. Different from advertising where we talk at our stakeholders with a one-way message, this is where we truly engage them in a multidimensional conversation with Udemy and with each other over the long term. Our stories generally center on a few core themes: first, we are amplifying success stories, learner stories like this one from Ryan Tabor who shared on LinkedIn that he was waiting tables 5 years ago, making $350 an hour. After a $10 Udemy course, he's making over $100,000 a year with multiple income sources or in the middle column, we are connecting and engaging. This center image depicts our Global Head of Social Media, Molly Hampton, in a conversation with one of our instructors, Jimmy Naraine. It was an output of a social media cohort training that we did for our instructors where they learned from Udemy social media team about how to build their brand and then funnel that elevated traffic into their Udemy following. In this conversation on Instagram Live, we reached 30,000 live users and had 2,500 comments. After the conversation, Jimmy's followers increased by 6%. Finally, we built specific recommendations around courses and leverage third-party validation from influencers like this one. Nicole Young, a rising Instagram influencer, who posts regularly about her transition into the tech field through self-guided learning. Nicole today is working as a brand technical influencer for a company that provides Internet of Things infrastructure, and she rated one of Udemy's IoT courses as best-in-class. By investing deeply in social media globally, we are also demonstrating our global reach and the way that Udemy's platform connects learners everywhere with the very best instructors from around the world, leveling that playing field for them both. Here's but one example, a conversation between Vivian, a learner in Nigeria; and Erin, an instructor in Virginia in the United States with 12 million followers. Across our 18 social media channels globally, we are seeing industry-leading engagement around our content. Conversations between learners and instructors about skills acquisition and the power of learning to unlock new opportunities for everyone. It's this global perspective and commitment that sparks visceral reaction to broader societal goals. In fact, this year, Udemy became a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact, a voluntary initiative to implement sustainability principles and to take steps towards supporting the UN sustainable development goals. Of those goals, Udemy has centered on 3 areas of focus: quality education, decent work and economic growth, and reducing inequalities. We are engaging our core stakeholders in each of these goals in service to advancing our shared mission to improve lives through learning. These goals are embedded in our business, simply by growing our work, our footprint and dimensionalizing our offer, we are contributing to a world where education access knows no geographical boundaries where learning can unlock doors to progress and opportunity. The reskilling and digital transformation movement in Japan is a great example of this dynamic. In October, Japan's Prime Minister, Kishida Fumio, announced a plan to spend JPY 1 trillion or nearly USD 7 billion for reskilling programs for individual workers over the next 5 years. It reflects a shift in Japanese human capital strategy that aims to reshape generation's long career patterns. Historically, employees spent nearly their full careers at a single company typically and career progression was based mostly on tenure. This new program brings a focus on skills to hiring and ongoing training and development. Prime Minister Kishida says this is essential to support the Japanese economy and that it will take public/private partnership to get the job done. We believe Udemy has a clear role to play in advancing that ambition together with our customers and ultimately, the 1 million-plus Japanese learners on our platform. We are demonstrating our mission-driven brand through our products and services as well as in the way we do business. Three recent examples of this we are quite proud of that I want to highlight for you. First, for the second year in a row, Udemy was ranked by Sustainalytics as #1 in ESG risk ratings in the Internet software and services subindustry. Second, we were recently certified as a fair pay workplace. And finally, we have been recognized by Fortune and Great Place to Work as one of the best workplaces for women. We think it is absolutely critical for us to continue our work as a strong corporate citizen and build a halo effect that drives desire among stakeholders to be affiliated with the values Udemy stands for. Udemy's mission will continue to be core to our brand essence as we grow. I want to leave you today with 4 key points. First, Udemy is building a purpose-driven brand, elevating our shared mission to improve lives through learning. Second, we've got lots of room to grow, top-of-funnel awareness through globally consistent, locally resonate campaigns. Third, most learners and organizations are learning about Udemy through trusted sources of referral such as social media, news and word of mouth. And so finally, that is why we are focused on building conversation and amplification around learning by raising and elevating the aspiration of learning, we will elevate the problem Udemy's platform seeks to solve, learning and the need for access to agile, affordable and current skills education. Thank you so much.

Llibert Argerich

executive
#13

Hello, I'm Llibert Argerich, the SVP of Marketing. In this section, I'll talk about Udemy's global customer acquisition, engagement and retention. Udemy's platform is global in nature, with traffic flowing from 230 countries, receiving over 33 million unique visitors every month. Learners come to Udemy from all over the world. India and the U.S. are the largest sources of traffic with 7.1 million and 5.9 million monthly unique visitors, respectively. What's unique about Udemy, though, is a very long tail of countries that represent over 1/3 of the total traffic, giving us a truly global footprint. It's called the rest of the world in this chart. Those 33 million monthly unique visitors come to Udemy with a wide variety of learning needs, backgrounds and goals. Our platform caters to this variety, allowing each visitor to find the offerings that best suit their needs in an easy and frictionless experience. As you saw in the product presentation with Prasad and Seth, we have a broad range of offerings for both consumers and businesses. The one thing to add from a go-to-market perspective is that our products are designed to deliver incremental value and thus driving stronger selling motions. This slide represents the increasing value of our product offerings from left to right, from both consumers and enterprise businesses. As you can see on the left side, consumers can upgrade their learning experience by moving from free courses to more advanced paid options. For example, a learner who enrolls in an individual course will be incentivized to upsell to a subscription, so they can get access to more content and advanced learning experiences. A very common upselling path for consumer to business offerings is when individual learners promote Udemy within their companies after having experienced the value of our platform on their own. Team Plan is also a great efficient pipeline generation tool. It's an easy entry point for teams to understand the value of Udemy before rolling it out more broadly within their organizations. Udemy Pro and CorpU provide great bundle opportunities together with enterprise brands, providing more value to employees and organizations while increasing contract values for Udemy. All of this is made possible by the sophistication of our platform and our marketing engine, allowing us to acquire, engage and retain customers at scale. We have built a data and technology-driven marketing engine that allows us to acquire users across the globe efficiently. We have integrated our data flows with key marketing platforms to make near real-time decisions on bidding and targeting. We have also developed predictive lifetime value models or LTV models that allow us to identify and acquire the most valuable learners. This engine allows us to be in control of our cost of acquisition to grow customer lifetime value at the segment level and manage our budgets to hit our ROI goals, while being flexible to adapt in real time to external trends and factors. With only 18% of Udemy's traffic coming from the U.S., it's very important that our marketing adapts and speaks to the local audiences we're targeting. Our design communications and production capabilities allow us to produce creatives that while anchored on our global brand also adapt to the cultural norms of the countries we advertise in. We leverage our global infrastructure to produce assets at scale. While working with local language experts and native marketers to make the necessary adaptations for each country. We reach the audiences wherever they are, making sure that our messages resonate with their needs and motivations. As Scott mentioned earlier, Udemy's local content by local experts is a tremendous competitive advantage and is delighting our corporate customers and individual learners. Our pricing optimization approach fuels the local supply by making it easy and accessible for learners to purchase courses, which drive instructor earnings and in return more supply. To make it easy to purchase the courses from anywhere in the world, we have built a global pricing engine that allows anyone to have access to our products at prices adjusted to the local purchase parity power in the local currency and using payment methods they are familiar with. This pricing engine was a hugely strategic investment and it powers the global dynamics of our marketplace. The strong learner conversion resulting from this price engine also fuels our global pipeline for Udemy business. Once on the Udemy platform, we make sure learners get the most personalized and relevant experience possible, whether they're looking to buy a single course or enrolled in our personal plan subscriptions or an employee accessing Udemy Business, we aim at understanding the needs and goals by collecting and analyzing the data they volunteer as well as the data generated by their usage and interactions with our platform. Our research and recommendation engines powered by advanced AI and machine learning models make discovering the right learning experiences easy and engaging. The example on the left shows how we help busy learners within Udemy Business to make the most of their time by providing bite-size lectures that provide them with real-world skills they can apply right away. We also provide learning guidance to help learners progress in their specific professional fields, as you can see on the example on the right. The combination of our broad learning offerings, our personalized experience and, of course, the high quality of our instructor content drives a very engaged base of global active learners. In the last 12 months, more than 20 million learners have been actively learning on Udemy. Collectively, they've learned more than 11.6 billion minutes, which is the equivalent to more than 2,200 years of sequential learning in just 12 months. More importantly, each active learner has spent an average of 578 minutes learning. This is what we call learning at scale. To achieve the level of engagement, we just went over, requires significant investments in personalization technology and data science. This chart is a visualization of the infrastructure we have built that powers the personalization on our platform and our marketing. We have built a series of proprietary platforms that allow us to capture, structure and analyze the data that powers complex machine learning models. We use the outputs of all those models to personalize our recommendations across different learner touch points, whether that's on or off Udemy. We are continuously evolving those models to learn even more ways to drive learning engagement. All those investments help us foster adoption and power learning and support the success of our learners. Fostering adoption of our products by personalizing the discovery experience drives engagement, empower learners to achieve the learning goals by providing tailored guidance and immersive learning experience results in longer retention. Last but not least, supporting admins to manage their workforces by providing insights and trends leads to account expansion, supporting the land-and-expand strategy that Greg Brown and Stephanie Stapleton will describe in a few minutes. So to summarize this marketing section. We have a global platform that reaches learners and organizations all over the world. Our product lineup drives a strong conversion funnel and upselling motions. We lean heavily on technology and data to provide personalized discovery and learning experiences. And we're driving strong adoption, engagement, retention and expansion across our consumer and business segments. Thank you for listening. [Presentation] [Break]

Greg Brown

executive
#14

Hi. I'm Greg Brown, President of Udemy business. Today, I'm going to provide an overview of our business from a go-to-market perspective with a focus on sales. Let's kick things off. With the continuous growth and adoption of new technologies like blockchain, machine learning and artificial intelligence, organizational learning and skill development across the enterprise are now economic imperatives. 80% Of CEOs believe the need for new skills is their biggest business challenge. And for their employees, opportunities for development have become the second most important factor in workplace happiness after the nature of the work itself. Organizations recognize the need to foster a growth mindset culture to ensure their people and teams are agile, resilient and competitive. We win for the following reasons: first, our marketplace model enables on-demand access to superior, relevant content across the broad and deep range of topics, which remains a competitive advantage for us compared to traditional publisher models. Our sophisticated go-to-market approach has helped us develop deep, trusted customer relationships at all levels with specific focus on the C-suite. With our dynamic product portfolio from on-demand and immersive learning to a tailored cohort experience for leadership development, Udemy business supports skill development at all levels of the organization. And we continue to make investments in our global partner ecosystem to support direct and indirect revenue channels that help enable us to scale with agility across the global marketplace. With an 83% compound annual growth rate, Udemy business has continued to grow in its arguably the most turbulent environment in our lifetime, including the COVID pandemic, the Ukrainian war, dramatic inflation and economic uncertainty. This is a testament to the value our business delivers and the impact it's having on organizations of all sizes and locations. With customers in 133 countries, Udemy Business continues to experience significant growth in all regions, with 50% of our enterprise revenue coming from outside of North America. Over 50% of Asia Pacific revenue is driven by our new ventures group, which includes partnerships with Benesse in Japan, Woongjin ThinkBig in South Korea, Sanjieke in China and FUNiX in Vietnam. These are highly selective partnerships that meet stringent criteria and they're delivering stellar results. We'll dive deeper into our partner strategy later in the day. However, we wanted to highlight the revenue impact our global partner ecosystem is delivering and helping us scale as they're an important pillar of our growth strategy. Udemy business net dollar retention rate is 117% with an even higher NDRR for our enterprise customers at 123%, both of which are in line with best-in-class SaaS companies. Our ability to sustain enterprise net dollar retention above 120% over the last 3 years reflects the value we've been able to deliver to our customers over an extended period of time. Therefore, we're in excellent position to continue to deliver revenue growth with our customer base amidst the macroeconomic headwinds we're facing. Our customers continue to realize the value our Udemy Business platform delivers and continue to invest more each year. Today, we have 664 customers that have invested over $100,000 in ARR as we help to close critical skills gaps and drive greater operational efficiency. With 69% year-over-year growth in deals ranging between $100,000 and $250,000 ARR, 80% year-over-year growth in deals ranging from $250,000 to $1 million ARR and 138% year-over-year growth in deals above $1 million ARR. Our largest customers have expanded with us at an accelerated rate. Over the past 2 years, we've deliberately shifted our sales model from transactional and inbound responsive to one that is focused on building long-term strategic partnerships centered around driving business outcomes that our customers seek to achieve. With this new approach, we're able to support each customer on their unique journey to help them achieve near- and long-term business objectives as a trusted partner. This intentional shift has increased our multiyear contracts by 135% year-over-year, improved 3-year contract revenue by 104% year-over-year and delivered 57% of our bookings from customer expansions in Q3 2022. In becoming a trusted adviser to the C-suite, we have elevated our value proposition and expanded our engagements to support upskilling and reskilling across hybrid workplaces. Our executive team and customer success organization directly engage and support customer CXOs helping to strengthen and scale their learning and development strategies to deliver against key business outcomes. Our senior leaders strive to meet with our largest customers quarterly, and many of these meetings take place face-to-face as we believe in the value and impact of human connectivity. The insights and experiences our customers CXO share help guide and influence our product road maps as we continue to invest in building actionable skill and industry insights while optimizing existing tech investments through our partner integration ecosystem. This chart highlights the fact that our portfolio of solutions are broadly applicable and add value across the majority of industry verticals. Here's a sampling to show the breadth, depth and diversity of our global customer base. This chart also illustrates the primary verticals we're currently focused on further penetrating. Now I'm going to provide insight into a couple of high-impact stories that highlight our strategic customer partnerships. Since 2017, we partnered with this global Fortune 100 enterprise technology company to achieve the following business outcomes. First, we achieved a Net Promoter Score of 87, which was the highest amongst their learning partners. We supported revenue growth of 37% in 2021 in the Global Business Services group, and we continuously delivered high-impact value as we expanded seat license growth by 44% in 2021. Over the past 5 years, we partnered with this Big 4 consulting firm to deliver these strategic business outcomes. $1 billion in new revenue growth supported by Udemy business skill development in 2021. Our high-quality content enabled an 84% first-time certification pass rate and 4,500 new AWS certifications were achieved in 2021 alone that helped empower revenue growth. Now I'm going to provide an example of how our land and expand strategy has enabled us to continue to grow with the Fortune 100 professional services firm. We first landed this customer in 2017 when they purchased a Team Plan online, which you've heard Llibert speak to earlier. As mentioned, we strategically invest in the success of our customers to drive long-term value. As a result, within the same year, we launched a successful pilot for the cloud technology team that expanded to all access for their entire technical team in 2018. We then leverage our success with the technical teams to expand our on-demand offering to all business units the following year, which led to a wall-to-wall expansion with Udemy business for every employee in 2020. After launching Udemy Business Pro last year, which is our immersive labs and assessment solution, their technical learning team quickly took advantage and added this new offering. This year, we have further expanded our cohort leadership development offering which collectively has resulted in a 300% compound annual growth rate over 5 years and over $2.2 million in ARR across all 3 of our solutions. Given our land and expand sales strategy, Udemy business has penetrated less than 10% of potential licenses within our existing enterprise customer base. As we continue to focus on delivering value as a strategic partner to our customers, we estimate our expansion opportunity to be over $2 billion based on a 50% seat expansion growth. With over 13,400 customers and growing, our opportunity within our existing customer base is significant. With over 50% of Fortune 100 organizations as customers, Udemy Business is truly an enterprise SaaS solution that helps empower global companies to upskill its scale and close mission-critical skill gaps to remain competitive in ever-changing global environments. In summary, Udemy business has delivered strong growth with an 83% 3-year compound annual growth rate. With a 117% net dollar retention rate and 123% enterprise NDRR, Udemy Business is well positioned in line with best-in-class SaaS companies. Our consultative approach to helping deliver strategic business outcomes is driving multiyear customer bookings upwards of 135%. With an estimated $2 billion in enterprise expansion growth potential, our opportunity within our existing customer base is significant, which is complemented by new direct and indirect revenue growth. Now I'd like to introduce Stephanie Stapleton, Senior Vice President of Customer Success, who will provide a deeper look into our customer success organization.

Stephanie Stapleton Sudbury;SVP of Global Customer Success

executive
#15

Hi, everyone. My name is Stephanie Stapleton Sudbury, and I'm the SVP of Global Customer Success at Udemy Business. I'm so excited to talk to you all today about why customer success is so important to our Udemy Business customers, how Udemy's fundamental belief in customer success enables our customers to achieve their business outcomes through learning, and how we've built our organization for scale. Customer success is so critical to our customers. And the reason is because companies are going through massive organizational change. In a recent survey by Deloitte, 71% of CEOs said they're preparing for a talent and workforce transformation. Talent transformation is the process of developing the employee bases skill set to keep up with the ever-changing needs of the business. In this survey, they also talk about innovation being a high priority, keeping up with the pace of change of technology. And all of this is what we hear from our customers on a regular basis, having conversations with customers too, the pandemic has happened, we're in a post-pandemic world and leading and the skills required to lead has fundamentally changed. The war for talent is also impacting every single company, and so the need to reskill and upskill workforces to promote internal mobility is a top priority. All of these initiatives require a lot of complexity and strategic thinking in order to move the organization from one place to another. And leaders need strategic partners to help them develop the learning strategies to achieve these transformations. And that's why customer success is here. In addition to supporting the organization's strategy, we also need to help support the employee population and activating those learners. So a few years ago, we did a study of all of our Udemy Business learners. We found that about 6% of them are just always learning. The other 94% of them need to be activated. They need a reason, a motivation and guidance for what to learn. And so it's so important for us as customer success managers to partner with people leaders and organizations to give those learners guidance, to help them understand why they should be learning and to help them make time for learning. Now let's talk about how we do customer success at Udemy. It's important to understand where the industry has come from. So traditional online learning engagements were really focused on adoption first. Why don't we just get people in, get people learning and get people using it almost for usage sake. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing. We love learning. But the problem really comes when you're trying to understand the impact of learning on the organization. So what people -- what companies and leaders would find is that if they just focused on adoption first, they could never understand the impact of learning. Did we achieve the business results that we were hoping for, did we achieve learning outcomes? So at Udemy, we flipped this on its head and we at work by understanding the company's business objectives first. We want to know what the corporate strategy is, and then we partner with the leaders in the organization to develop programs tied to driving business results. We make sure that all of those programs are driving towards the right learning outcomes, developing the right skills and competencies in the organization and then we focus on driving adoption. And the customer success team partners with customers to make sure that all of this happens effectively. So how do we drive adoption. We have a number of tools that we bring, so all of our customers can get support across the entire customer journey. So first, we start with onboarding. We want to make sure, obviously, that we have great technical integrations and that we have a project plan and that managers are engaged, and they know their role in driving learning. As I said earlier, we do a lot of work on learning program design, content mapping. We have a number of adoption resources for the middle of the customer journey to drive engagement, communication templates, playbooks for how to make time for learning and then we bring a lot of data. And you heard a number of different presenters before me talking about leveraging data at Udemy. And we do this with our customers, too. We bring them benchmarking data so they can see what they're doing against their industry peers. We give them trend insights across the billions of learning interactions that we see on our platform so they can determine where to focus next. We've built a customer success organization to support our customer base as it scales. So we have an operational model today that supports 13,000 customers and growing. And we deploy a variety of different customer touch models depending on how big the deployment is. So self-serve here on the left. If they purchase Team Plan, which you heard Llibert talking about earlier, 5 to 20 seats. That's a fully digital customer experience. If a customer has a mid-range of seats between 21 and 100, they'll be served by our scaled customer success team. And this is a blended approach. We leverage technology and automation to create a personalized feel for customer journey, and we have teams of customer success associates that will engage with our customers in moments of risk or opportunity or important moments in the customer journey. And then lastly, we have our high-touch customer success team, which is more like traditional B2B SaaS customer success that you would expect. And this is where every customer success manager has a smaller book and is very hands-on throughout the customer journey. And we like to hire in regions so we can spend time with our customers face-to-face. And then underneath all of this, we have renewals teams that support the renewal journey, making sure we optimize that for both Udemy and the customer, professional services team that will support delivery for our cohort learning experience as well as high-touch engagements around learning architecture and content mapping. Customer support, if any license holder needs help or has a question and then our customer success operations team, which is there to make sure we have all the tools and resources to scale effectively. And it's not just our customer success team that's driving customer success at Udemy. One of the things that makes Udemy so special is that customer success is a fundamental Udemy belief organization-wide. So let me give you a few different examples of this. First, it's team selling. We often bring customer success into presales conversations with prospects so they can understand what a partnership with Udemy would look like and have confidence that we can help deliver on their business objectives. We'll also bring in learning and development often to talk learning strategy with leaders. We also have shared goals across all functions that are around the customers' success and impact. So a really great example of this is customer success, marketing and product, on commonly shared usage and adoption goals across products and feature lines. Lastly, we develop our product strategy in concert with our customers. And we have a number of different ways that we get customer feedback from our customers. We have an executive advisory council with over a dozen of the world's top CLOs. And then we have a lot of customer feedback coming in through support and through the customer success managers. And we use all of this to make sure that we're partnering with our customers as we build Udemy for the future. Now I'll tell a story about a large enterprise customer, Publicis Sapient, that we've been working with for a while. They came to us because they needed to do a couple of things. First, upskill their technical teams on cloud and digital technologies that were changing rapidly, and they want to improve employee onboarding experience. So we partnered very tightly with the Head of Learning and really understood the company's business goals, determined the measurement strategy for how we were going to gauge the impact of learning and then built out robust learning programs and communication strategies to make sure that the entire workforce that was eligible for these programs was engaging. And what we found was we were able to drive 335,000 hours of learning across Publicis tech teams. And this resulted in $280 million of revenue attributed to these learning programs because they could do things like win more client contracts. We were also able to, through their new hire onboarding program, decreased time to ramp from 3 weeks to 1 week, resulting in a 66% time to productivity, and this was both on technical skills and solution selling. We're not just driving results for our customers, all of this investment in customer success is really driving results for Udemy. On average, our Udemy business and customer accounts have a 69% adoption rate. That means for every license sold, 69% of them have already completed their first lecture. We have deep consumption as well. On average, every month, an active learner is learning 4.9 hours. And then we're also driving financial results. In 2022, 43% of our ARR that was renewed was renewed on to multiyear contracts. And we've been able to upsell 46% of our accounts in 2022. All right. So to wrap us up, I have 3 key takeaways. First, we have an outcomes-based approach that helps our customers achieve business results through learning. Second, we've built customer success for scale at Udemy. And third, we're helping our company achieve business results through customer success. Thank you so much.

Cody Crnkovich;Vice President of Partners and Business Development

executive
#16

Hi. My name is Cody Crnkovich. I'm the Vice President of Partners and Business Development here at Udemy. I'm really excited about the opportunity to talk about our partnership strategy and the impact we hope to have in the business. At Udemy, partnerships are a key vector for our long-term growth goals. As a team, we look to drive impact and growth across both our consumer and business offerings. And we focus our efforts around 3 key pillars: global expansion, extending our reach and meeting our business customers in the flow of their work. In all partnership cases, we have a global focus. While our English catalog is extensive, as you heard from Scott and our content team, we have a differentiated localized content catalog across a wide set of regions. We leverage this local content advantage by working with regional resell and co-sell partners. And when combined with our sales and customer success machinery, we increase our speed to market and local penetration. In some cases, there's a potentially large market where we don't have localized content, like the case with Japan about 6 years ago. We implement our high-touch New Ventures partnership model. Our new ventures model aims to leverage a key local brand to help develop our content catalog and have a local language version of UB once the quality of the catalog meets our high standards. I'll come back to that new ventures model in a bit with a very specific success story. In addition to our global focus, the partnership team seeks relationships that either extend our market reach or the capabilities and reach of our large sales go-to-market. Through relationships with key brands and regional leaders that have reached in scale in their own right, we increase the awareness and adoption of our offerings. For example, we're working with a large media company in South Africa, MultiChoice group to reach learners via TV and digital channels in the 14 sub-Saharan Africa countries MultiChoice services. As for UB in Latin America, as an example, we have strong Portuguese and Spanish catalogs, but a lighter direct sales force. So we work with leading education and training companies in a reseller capacity to increase the feet on the street selling Udemy Business in countries like Brazil, Chile and Mexico. Finally, a critical part of Udemy's success requires that we work with partners to enable our users to access Udemy content and the flow of work. We need to be where employees are learning already, for example, in LMS and LXP platforms. Also, our customers are asking that Udemy's rich data end up in key reporting and BI systems. As you heard from Seth and Prasad from our product and engineering team, our open nature focused on platform services and APIs enables the partnership team to build a robust integration ecosystem that supports our customers' ability to get the most out of their software investments and their investments in learning. I want to dive into some specific examples of partnerships to help make some of our motions a bit more clear. As I mentioned earlier, the New Ventures team has developed a high-touch model focused on regions that have a large addressable market, that are complex to enter, where Udemy doesn't have a large field presence already and where our local language catalog may be nascent. In addition to those market dynamics, we look for partners that, for an exclusive relationship, have the brand, the resources and the investment appetite to develop the market and their people to both sell into and support local customers. Japan is an example of how the New Ventures model has helped Udemy launch and grow quickly in a market that has traditionally been challenging for foreign companies to penetrate. We chose our Japanese partner, Benesse, for many reasons. First, they are the largest and most established education enterprise in Japan with an annual revenue totaling $4 billion. Second, they operated primarily in the K-12 space where they have 80% of the market share, but they have design to expand into the adult learning market. Finally, Benesse has the brand expertise, resources and investment appetite to build a business leveraging Udemy's product, platform and our domain expertise, a perfect partnership foundation. Japanese learners have a strong desire for learning in local language. So we've worked with Benesse over the years to expand the Japanese language catalog to over 7,000 courses. It gives us a massive advantage over our competitors. Our partnership with Benesse has also helped Udemy to localize our go-to-market strategy, helping to make us successful in Japan. The partnership started in 2017, and today, Benesse has over 100 people on the ground dedicated to Udemy. This has resulted in over 1 million learners in Japan, and Udemy's year-over-year revenue growth in the market has exceeded 100% throughout the partnership. Our Japanese customer base now covers over 50% of the Nikkei 225, Japan's equivalent of the Fortune 500. The example of Benesse in Japan shows the power of our New Ventures model. We are aiming to repeat that success in 3 new markets, in China, South Korea and most recently, Vietnam. Each of these regions has a very large total addressable market, a large potential customer base and a large learner population. However, each of these markets requires a distinct local language catalog. So we're leveraging our partners to help develop quality local language catalogs at an accelerated pace. Our work with Benesse is the blueprint we aim to repeat in 3 exciting new markets for Udemy. Now that you have a bit more of an understanding about our new ventures model and our exclusive relationships in Japan, China, South Korea and Vietnam, let's shift gears to talk about the rest of the world. As I mentioned, our partnership motions are global and are focused on extending our reach. Through partnerships, we engage a wider audience than our own marketing, sales and brand [ came ] on their own. Let's discuss some of our key global partner motions. Our reseller partnership motion is designed to drive source business from our partners. That means the partner brings the opportunity and relationship to Udemy business outside of our own pipeline development efforts. Partner source deals often lower our customer acquisition cost and time to close metrics due to the partner's pre-existing relationships and local market knowledge. We're seeing strong reseller momentum in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia Pacific, specifically when it comes to partner sourcing business for Udemy business. In fact, over half of our partnership business across the globe in the first half of the year came from source deals, and we expect that percentage to increase. Another category of resellers includes global technology partners like SumTotal, a leading learning management system recently acquired by Cornerstone OnDemand. As a leading LMS platform, SumTotal has hundreds of enterprise customers and their sales reps are now selling UB to their existing customer base and taking it to prospects. In addition to our reseller relationships, we also look for partnerships that give us access to recognized brands. For example, First National Bank in South Africa, one of the big 4 banks in the region includes the ability for each of their customers to consume up to 6 courses per year from a 400 course custom content bundle we put together for them. This is part of their eBucks program, a value-added services program for FNB customers where Udemy is a key benefit. The last category of partnerships I will mention is around our work with super scalers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. When it comes to cloud tech, we have the strongest content in the market. So we're working with companies like Amazon Web Services to position UB and our courses to their customer base. Speaking of, I'm really excited to dive a bit deeper into where we are in our relationship with AWS. As I said, we have the best AWS courses and instructors in the market, and we believe we've helped certify more AWS developers than any other training provider. To develop our partnership, we worked with AWS to pass their technical audit through the first half of this year. We then joined the AWS partner network and listed on the AWS marketplace this summer. And we've already been accepted into the invite-only ISV accelerator program, an unbelievable feet to get invited into that program so quickly. For Udemy, the benefit is obvious. First, quota retirement and other sales incentives for AWS sellers. This makes our already relevant product an obvious discussion point and add-on for AWS sellers in their accounts. Another critical benefit for Udemy is that AWS customers can actually leverage with what we call Amazon's enterprise discount program. This allows AWS customers to leverage spend they've already committed to AWS and redirect that to Udemy Business licenses. Finally, there are natural procurement benefits to working with AWS as we are now able to resell on AWS paper, a known entity to all procurement teams. This benefit will have a material impact on improving our time-to-close deals. While Udemy will see reach and lift in their relationship, for AWS, there is benefit to bringing UB's best-in-class courses and instructors to their customers as well. AWS customers that use UB to train their developers result in an accelerated consumption of AWS and higher retention, not to mention helping to increase the massive AWS developer ecosystem. Our content is known by both AWS employees and their customers and our scale proves that. In the past year alone, we had over 130,000 enrollments in the AWS certified cloud practitioner of course. And we've had over 1.2 million enrollments in our top 3 categories associated with AWS. As an aside, we've also heard from many AWS employees that they leverage Udemy courses to help pass their required AWS certification. We love that. A lot of great things are happening in this relationship, but we are early days. Today, we're focused on creating awareness in the AWS seller and customer base, mainly seeking AWS's support to help us move deals forward. As the partnership matures, we expect this relationship to materially impact our partner source deals metric not to mention reach and scale. There's a lot happening in the world of partnerships at Udemy. Hopefully, the topics covered have helped you understand a bit more about our partnership strategy. I talked about how partnerships are a key driver of growth for Udemy globally. And we drilled into some specific examples and partnerships that are already impacting the business. As a team, we're focused on finding, investing in and developing impactful partnerships to extend Udemy's go-to-market reach in both our consumer and business offerings. Finally, working with our product and engineering teams, we're committed to an open ecosystem, and we'll ensure UB is available in the flow of work to help our customers get the most out of their software investments and their learning investments. That's all for me. Thanks for the opportunity and time today. Appreciate it. [Presentation]

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#17

Hi. I'm Sarah Blanchard, Udemy's Chief Financial Officer. I'm excited to talk with you today about Udemy differentiated business model and to share details on our path to profitability. Udemy is addressing a massive and growing opportunity in corporate training and lifelong learning. Last year, the addressable market was estimated to be approximately $166 billion. That opportunity is expected to grow to almost $500 billion by 2027, representing a 19% CAGR. And the market is underpenetrated. We are barely scratching the surface. Udemy has more than 57 million learners and just over 13,000 corporate customers. Even though we have over 13,000 corporate customers, that is less than 1% penetration of global corporations. As you heard from Greg Brown, within our corporate customer base, we have under 10% of the seats licensed. This means there is a long runway for growth with both new and existing customers. There are many macro trends that are driving this growth. These trends include increasing digital transformation as more jobs are changed by automation and technology. That trend has presented a significant opportunity for the creator and skills economies, which experienced an acceleration of growth throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Our platform takes advantage of both. There is also a growing need to offer flexible training as more companies offer remote positions. Companies are employing a continued focus on L&D budget efficiency even during a challenging macro backdrop. And importantly, there is an increasing need to continuously reskill and upskill employees in a timely manner. Udemy has a differentiated business model. You've heard about our unique marketplace of high quality and fresh content in more than 75 languages that creates a huge competitive moat. Udemy has benefited from numerous tailwinds that I mentioned earlier. But importantly, through consistent execution and our diversified business model, we're driving sustainable long-term growth. We have a clear path to profitability as we make strategic and responsible investments in high-growth opportunities while driving operational leverage. I will share more on that in a moment. We have a proven track record of strong revenue growth and consistent gross margin expansion. The strength of our business model, coupled with persistent execution, has allowed us to deliver a 32% CAGR over the last 3 years. Through our continued focus on building Udemy business, which has a higher gross margin than our consumer segment and a focus on reducing costs and driving operational efficiencies as we scale, we've expanded our gross margin by 900 basis points over that period. In our first year as a public company, we reliably outperformed expectations each quarter. Considering the challenging macroeconomic conditions, our results are a testament to the durability of our diversified 2-segment model as well as our vast global footprint. We combine high-quality content, insights and analytics and technology into a single unified platform that is purpose-built to meet the specific needs of consumers, enterprises and instructors. Our complementary consumer marketplace and Udemy business segments create a symbiotic ecosystem and diversified revenue streams. Our Udemy business segment helps organizations upskill and reskill their employees. This segment now accounts for more than 50% of our revenue since Q3 2022, ahead of our expectations. Going forward, Udemy Business will continue to grow as a percentage of total revenue due to the strong growth we continue to see in that segment as corporations prioritize investments in employee skill development. Our consumer segment targets individual learners seeking to gain valuable job skills to advance their professional careers and keep up with the latest technology. From a geographic perspective, we have a very diverse footprint and revenue base. North America represents just over 40% of our overall revenue today, which provides some insulation from unfavorable macroeconomic impacts and the Asia Pacific region is one of our fastest-growing markets. We will continue to expand our international footprint as we've been building out our global go-to-market team, and as you heard from Cody through partnerships and local regions. Now I'd like to dig into our segments, starting with Udemy Business, which is our leading growth engine. Annual recurring revenue as of Q3 2022 was $350 million, which was up 70% year-over-year. We grew our Udemy business customer base by 40% or nearly 4,000 new customers, to more than 13,000 customers since our IPO. With a net dollar retention rate of 117% in the third quarter of 2022, our retention is on par, if not better, than many best-in-class SaaS companies. Going forward, macro factors out of our control are expected to be a headwind, primarily to our commercial segment, which represents small and medium-sized businesses as those companies are most likely to reduce their L&D budgets in a recession. However, even if L&D budgets are reduced during this tough economic period, the online learning budget share is still growing on both an absolute and relative basis and taking share from off-line learning. In particular, we see larger corporations increasingly shifting to online as more employees are working from home and they need to provide upskilling and reskilling continues to increase. As you heard from Greg Brown, we continue to execute against our land and expand strategy, driving significant growth in existing customers each year. This growth is a testament not only to our innovative products and effective go-to-market teams which is a way in which we partner with our customers to make sure we're able to help deliver their desired business outcomes. Nearly 100% of this expansion growth to date has come from seat expansion with existing customers. We are in the early stages of selling our newer products, UPro and CorpU and are happy with the progress we see there. Let's dive in a little deeper on what this looks like in a given customer over time. Our proven land and expand strategy is an investment in building long-term, high ROI relationships with our customers. You heard from Greg and Stephanie how we partner with our customers to understand their desired business outcomes and work with them to build programs that give their employees the skills they need to be successful. You heard from Scott about our high-quality, broad, fresh and localized content. And you heard from Prasad and Seth about our innovative products aimed at driving affordable, effective skills acquisition with measurable results. This unique combination of critical capabilities gives us a huge advantage once we start working with an organization. We get our foot in the door, oftentimes starting with a smaller deal size and quickly show them the advantages of working with Udemy, allowing us to build significant value for both parties over time. Our strong net dollar retention rate is a testament to this. As I've mentioned, the majority of our expansion to date has come from seat expansion. But with the recent launch of UPro and acquisition of CorpU, we are well positioned to build significant lifetime value through both seat expansion and upselling our new innovative products, leading to a strong ROI and sustainable long-term recurring revenue growth. Now let's take a look at our consumer business. As we've shared, our consumer business provides a solid foundation and a springboard for Udemy Business growth. It's encouraging to see the resilience of our marketplace given the uncertain and volatile economic conditions. Traffic to udemy.com is the highest in our space and monthly average buyers purchasing courses or subscriptions has been stable throughout this challenging macro environment. The traffic and active learner base serve as a solid lead gen engine for our SaaS business. Our scaled global marketplace has many competitive advantages, including our portfolio of highly rated, fresh content, engaged expert instructors, affordable learning experiences and dynamic pricing. Localization of content and payments drives deeper penetration of new markets and increases future Udemy business opportunities. Additionally, the scale of our marketplace allows us to test and iterate quickly on our product in a way that is not disruptive to our corporate business. Now I'd like to share more about where we are focusing our product investments. Given the large and growing addressable market and the strong foundation we've built with our unique business model and capable go-to-market team, we're thoughtfully investing in capabilities that will allow us to take advantage of the opportunity in front of us. We're investing in the platform across 4 main areas. First, driving increased, more measurable learner outcomes across both our Udemy Business learners and our consumer learners. Second, improving our instructors ability to create additional modalities and hands-on learning experiences. Third, continue to improve our ability to support organizations and their need to upskill and reskill their workforces efficiently, including leadership needs and cohort-based offerings. Fourth, investments in our consumer subscription offering, which will not only drive improved unit economics, but as it scales, become a large testing ground for us as we build experiences on the consumer side, test them and then port them over to Udemy Business. As I said at the outset, we have a clear path to profitability on an adjusted EBITDA basis by 2024. It has always been a part of Udemy's DNA to employ disciplined and efficient expense management. Since we've always been focused on balancing sustainable growth and profitability, we did not need to change our mindset and philosophy in response to the macro environment. We are monitoring the business carefully and taking action where it is needed. While at the same time, keeping an eye on the long-term opportunity in front of us. Through solid execution of our strategy, we believe we can expand our gross margin and our adjusted EBITDA margin steadily each year as we drive toward our long-term targets. I will provide more details on the levers to improve these margins on the next slide. But first, I want to address our updated long-term targets. Given that the revenue mix of Udemy Business and consumer has changed significantly since our IPO, when we first shared our targets and since we are almost at our original target of 60% plus Udemy Business revenue mix, we're updating our long-term targets today to reflect the Udemy Business being an even more meaningful portion of our revenue over time. We believe we can achieve at scale 25% to 30% revenue growth was 65% to 70% gross margin and 15% to 20% adjusted EBITDA margin. We also believe that at scale, our Udemy Business segment will account for approximately 75% of total revenue. Now let's dive into levers to achieve profitability. We are targeting adjusted EBITDA breakeven by 2024. On the gross margin side of things, as Udemy Business revenue continues to grow as a percentage of total revenue, we will see expansion in our gross margin due to lower content costs. We will also launch higher-margin innovative new products over time, as you heard from Prasad and Seth. Longer term, our personal subscription model will deliver stronger gross margins setting up our consumer marketplace to run at breakeven or better over time. The levers to increase our operating margin include improvement in sales and marketing efficiency as we scale and slow the pace of growth in our go-to-market team. We'll also see efficiency that comes from selling more products into existing customers and larger deal sizes. We will continue to see leverage in our R&D investment as we've built our platform to be API first and allow us to deploy our innovation across both of our business segments with minimal additional investment. We also continue to build out our lower cost, highly effective overseas teams. We also expect to gain near-term leverage on our G&A spend as we recently built out our team to support our IPO, but we'll continue to put systems and processes in place that allow us to scale efficiently. We are confident that Udemy has multiple opportunities to drive long-term sustainable growth, including increasing Udemy business penetration, more international expansion and localization, expanding learning experiences, launching innovative products that drive measurable learning outcomes and increased retention, increasing brand awareness, optimizing our business model and pricing and, of course, pursuing strategic acquisitions when appropriate. As you can see, we are really excited about the opportunity available to Udemy in the business we are building. I'd like to leave you with a few important takeaways. Udemy is addressing a massive and growing TAM with our unique business model, which gives us diversified revenue streams and a global footprint. Since 2019, Udemy has delivered a 32% revenue CAGR and expanded gross margin by 900 basis points. We have a very long runway for growth ahead of us. And importantly, we have a clear path to profitability by 2024 and compelling long-term targets. I want to thank you for your time, and now I'll hand it back to Gregg.

Gregg Coccari

executive
#18

Thank you, Sarah, and thank you to all of today's speakers. I want to quickly highlight 4 key takeaways from today. First, Udemy has a differentiated and efficient go-to-market strategy and global customer acquisition engine. Second, our global marketplace is data driven and is home to the most complete collection of high-quality and relevant learning content. Third, Udemy Business is growing fast, and our retention is on par with best-in-class SaaS companies. Finally, Udemy is the leader in a massive and growing market, and we have a clear path to profitability. I hope that you have enjoyed our presentation today and that you are as excited as we are for the journey ahead. We appreciate your continued support and trust in us. With that, we're here to answer your questions. [Break]

Dennis Walsh

executive
#19

Thank you, Gregg, and thank you to everyone joining us for the Q&A session of Udemy 2022 Investor Day. As you can see, we are joined by members of Udemy senior leadership team who are here to answer your questions about today's presentation. Questions will be asked by Udemy covering sell-side analysts.

Dennis Walsh

executive
#20

[Operator Instructions] Okay, let's get to your questions. Our first question is from Ryan MacDonald of Needham.

Ryan MacDonald

analyst
#21

Excellent. Thanks, everyone, for putting on such a great analyst presentation, great day today and all the helpful color with just diving deep into the business and the outlook moving forward. Maybe first for Sarah. As you think about this pathway to hitting adjusted EBITDA breakeven in fiscal '24. Can you talk about what are the assumptions you're making for sort of the broader macro environment as you progress towards that breakeven target? And then sort of how do you think about the ability to sort of flex investment level as we look into '23 and beyond to adjust with that?

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#22

Thanks for the question, Ryan. As we think about 2024 and 2023, right now, we are all facing some macroeconomic headwinds. That being said, we continue to see strength in Udemy Business. Our consumer platform is stable. And so for us, it's really about managing the business really carefully as we watch how this plays out. We do expect some of the quarters ahead to be a little bit bumpy. And we've been really responsive to the macroeconomic from the perspective of -- we've pulled back our marketing spend. We increased our ROI targets. We started slowing our growth, except where we continue to really see that strong demand in the enterprise side in certain segments, in certain regions. So for us, it's about managing the business carefully, being really, really thoughtful. We do expect 2023. We'll continue to see some of the same trends, the softness on the commercial side, but UB is growing strong and stable consumer platform. For us, the levers we have are really around making sure that we're balancing thoughtfully this opportunity in front of us and the growth opportunity with that path to profitability. And so just being thoughtful in where we invest around our immersive learning capabilities, around things that are going to continue to drive learner engagement retention, while driving operational efficiencies across the business.

Ryan MacDonald

analyst
#23

Super helpful. And maybe as a follow-up, this one for Greg Brown. Thanks for sort of quantifying, I guess, the opportunity or a large opportunity that lies ahead, especially within the customer base being less than 10% penetrated. As you think about sort of the components of that $2 billion opportunity, how much of that comes from seat-based expansion versus sort of the additional cross-sell or upsell and some of the more modules when we think about Udemy versus Pro or the CorpU cohort-based learning over time. And then as you're having conversations around this consolidation, what does the relationship with the CXO do in terms of unlocking additional opportunity for expansion within that customer base?

Greg Brown

executive
#24

Thanks for that, Ryan. As far as expansion and the drivers, it's really both. It's seat expansion. As we highlighted, land and expand has really been our entry point model and then onward to expansion from there. And it's been primarily on the tech side historically. That being said, as we talked about, we're really investing heavily in sales enablement and our sales and CS teams to be able to sell high into the CXO with a much broader value proposition, hence, the platform of solutions that we do have now, on-demand learning then coupled with immersive learning as well as cohort-based learning. So we're seeing really strong signals of demand coming to us now from the C-suite as a result of what's happening in the macroeconomic environment right now. Organizations, CXOs are looking to leverage digital platforms more now than ever to drive efficiency and economies of scale. And as a result of that, we're starting to see seat expansion both of on-demand as well as our additional suite of services cohort and leadership -- excuse me, leadership as well as immersive. An example of that, large professional services organization that we onboarded just about 2.5 months ago now, heavy user of on-demand and made the decision after a lengthy assessment to deploy 10,000 seats of our immersive UPro product, immersive learning product as well as bringing in cohort learning into the leadership arena in the organization. So we're starting to see more of that, and we expect that to continue, and we are really pleased with the early signs we're seeing out of our leadership development solution.

Dennis Walsh

executive
#25

And our next question comes from Jason Celino of KeyBanc.

Jason Celino

analyst
#26

I think just 2 questions from me. On kind of the implied 2024 guidance, it assumes we kind of accelerate from here. And I know the puts and takes, but I guess, is that acceleration just driven by mix shifts? And then any comments on what it might imply for consumer growth?

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#27

Yes. Thanks for the question, Jason. So you're absolutely right. We continue to see strength in the Udemy Business side. We know we're not immune to the macroeconomic environment. But that being said, our solution really is a great -- it's a great solution for what our CLOs are looking for right now in order to upskill and reskill. So we think we're going to continue to see that growth. And as Udemy business is now more than 50% of our overall mix and that mix shift continues to move towards UB, the growth rate was about 70% this last quarter. And so that's why you'll see that overall business acceleration. For us on the consumer side, what's most important is that, that platform is stable and the marketplace is really healthy. And what that means is we're able to attract new instructors and that existing instructors continue to produce this really high-quality, broad, fresh, local content that we then could curate into our Udemy Business offering. So stability on the consumer side, we expect to continue to see.

Jason Celino

analyst
#28

Okay. And then the EBITDA margin improvement, if you straight line it, it's 500 basis points each year, really impressive. But since the growth guidance is still unchanged, what gives you confidence that the level of expense management won't be disruptive to the top line?

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#29

Yes. So we've been really thoughtful about our investments. And as an example, our go-to-market team, which we've been building out pretty quickly over the past few years, we have a lot of reps that are still ramping. And so inherently without an additional body, there's growth in just our existing team. And so what we've been focused our investments on are the highest growth opportunities for us and just been really thoughtful. We feel like we have the team that we need. We're really pleased with how we've built out our skill set on the R&D side. So we have confidence that we're going to be able to push through what is likely to be some tough macroeconomic conditions over the next few quarters and continue on this growth path.

Dennis Walsh

executive
#30

Our next question comes from Rob Oliver of Baird.

Robert Oliver

analyst
#31

A couple of questions for me. I'll get them both in, and then I'll hop back into the queue. So Greg Brown, my first one is for you. Just love to get your updated take on the macro. You touched on it a little bit earlier in your response to one of the questions. And you made a comment on the last call and you've talked a little bit about the opportunity around vendor consolidation. So I wanted to just get a firmer sense of why you guys win in those context, why customers at the enterprise level choose Udemy? And then my follow-up question, could it be either for you, Greg, or for you, Sarah, just around how you guys think about pricing and whether any pricing levers are going to be pulled and whether any increased pricing, and I'm thinking particularly about UB are contemplated in the long-term targets at all? And if not, if that's an opportunity?

Greg Brown

executive
#32

Sure. I'll go first, Rob, thanks for the question. So on the enterprise side, we continue to be encouraged by the signals and the strength that we're seeing on a global basis in our enterprise segment. And case in point, just a week ago, we closed a very competitive, hotly contested RFP with a large European auto manufacturer for $650,000 expansion to make that customer our largest EMEA customer, add just under $2 million in annual recurring revenue. And so again, our teams continue to execute very well on the enterprise side, taking advantage of the opportunity to consolidate vendors, and this was a consolidation play to consolidate and become the primary platform that organizations are learning -- are using to upskill and reskill their employees. That being said, I mentioned this on the last call. We are seeing softness down market in our SMB business and that persists, right? So we have made appropriate adjustments. Sarah alluded to this. We slowed hiring significantly in our commercial segment over 6 months ago, and we're monitoring closely. But as things evolve, we'll be adjusting it right now. We really have throttled back in that segment. But on the enterprise side, it continues to remain very positive in terms of the signal. So we're optimistic.

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#33

I'll take the pricing question, Rob. So for us, it's really important that we continue to see traction in Udemy Business Pro and in CorpU. So well, I think there is some opportunity for a price increase over time, we haven't built it in and it's not something we're focused on. We were for a period of time seeing less discounting happening that may continue, it may stop for a few quarters as things are tougher and we're working with our customers to be really good partners to them as they're trying to work through this. And where we're focused on expanding our LTV is these new products, UPro, CorpU and then over time, some higher-margin products that we'll be launching.

Operator

operator
#34

The next question comes from Terry Tillman at Truist.

Terrell Tillman

analyst
#35

So I just had 2 questions, and it was great to get all the perspective from so many different executives. I think that's one of the most beneficial things. So thanks for everybody taking the time with us. The first question is just for Stephanie, on the customer success side. Not all businesses are feeling the impact the same with the macro right now. But either more hard hit industries or companies that have company-specific issues that are more great or greater, maybe give some examples of how you're actually able to still have conversations with them and actually expand ARR even though maybe their overall training and development budgets are lower. So it may kind of relate to a couple of the other questions, but I'm wondering if you could give examples on how you actually can win more and expand with tough situations with customers. And then I had a follow-up.

Stephanie Stapleton Sudbury;SVP of Global Customer Success

executive
#36

Okay. Cool. Yes. Thank you, Terry. That's a great question. So like Greg said and Sarah said, we're obviously not immune to the macro. But what we do know is that in times of trouble, companies really lean into learning as a way to both keep employees engaged but also to reskill and upscale workforces because skills required to lead or innovate when times are tough can be different, right? And we saw this during COVID. A couple of things I'll share. We were recently at our Executive Advisory Council Summit, talking a lot about the macro and how this is impacting L&D budgets. And we did hear from our enterprise customers that, for the most part, budgets for L&D are staying flat or increasing next year in the enterprise. And a couple of examples where we've seen some kind of early signals that this trend that we expect companies to lean into learning as a way to help their companies get ahead and keep their employees engaged, we're working with a large enterprise American retailer, recently went through layoffs, and they have a foothold with us in their technical audience. They've been using us for a little while to upskill on programming languages and cloud technologies. After they did these layoffs, we engage with them. We have a lot of industry research playbooks that our teams use to have discussions around what this really means for your organization going forward? What are the things that you're thinking about over the coming years, and here's ways that learning can help you get ahead? From that conversation, we identified there's actually a lot of leadership skills that they're hoping to build capability in their team in order to help them lead in different ways through this. And there's a lot of functional skills, new technologies that they really want to upskill their tech teams on in order to enable them to innovate in times of crisis. So despite having a rather significant layoff, we're talking right now about 10x in their seat count to cover all of their corporate functions because of these really important corporate initiatives. Another example I'll give you is, we're recently in a renewal cycle, large enterprise EMEA tech firm, and they have been using us for cloud technology skills because certifications on cloud are how they staff customer projects, and they need to keep up to date. And in the middle of this renewal negotiation, our main point of contact got laid off and the learning and development team was impacted. And obviously, they were having tight budget cuts. And despite that, the company still chose to renew, sign a 3-year deal and double their seat count.

Terrell Tillman

analyst
#37

That's great. And maybe I'll ask one more question as it shows my Internet connection is becoming unstable, perfect timing for me. The other question, maybe, Sarah, for you is, we've asked repeatedly across a number of quarters about the subscription offering or the personal plan. I think on the last call, you all had that available in 7 or 8 countries. I think India launched, which you have a lot of presence in India. . So I know it's only just been a few weeks, but I love a little bit more color on how the pricing is actually -- the realization on pricing versus what you assumed. And in this model through '24, when could you foresee materiality with the personal plan.

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#38

Yes. Thanks for the question. And I'm going to hand it over to Gregg to talk a little more about subscriptions. But I think for us, Terry, the thing to remember is we're being really thoughtful about this rollout, both on the pricing side of things, but also bringing our instructors along because we tend to -- a lot of our instructors, we are the way in which they make money. So we have a really thoughtful rollout that we're doing. But Gregg, maybe I'll turn it over to you.

Gregg Coccari

executive
#39

Yes. As we talked about in our last earnings, that we're in 8 countries right now. We're launching India at the end of this month. We typically don't do a major launch during our peak consumer period. So we were waiting after Black Friday, and then we're going to launch India. So we don't have any data on that currently.

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#40

From a pricing perspective, we're still doing some tests. We did a really interesting test in Australia. But again, we're slowly testing to make sure that we're bringing our instructors along and that we're not impacting their businesses and their revenue and their ability to make a living. Llibert, is there anything you want to share on those tests we're doing.

Llibert Argerich

executive
#41

So basically, as I discussed on the presentation, we do test based on price elasticity, right? So every time we enter a market, we assess what's the right price point that's going to cater to the vast majority of the audience and maximize the revenue for us. So we've been -- every market we enter, we do these price testing, and we price for the market specifically. So we'll have personal plan, the monthly version and the annual version at different levels across the U.S., across Australia, India and all the countries that we're launching in. And we continue iterating. We continue learning about the response rates, the retention, how long learners stay involved and retained in their subscriptions, and we adapt our product road map and our learning experience to really cater for that -- for those results.

Operator

operator
#42

The next question comes from Stephen Sheldon at William Blair.

Stephen Sheldon

analyst
#43

And thanks for the breadth and depth of info today. It's been incredibly helpful. So first question here, just as you think about immersive learning, I guess, where are some of the areas you could expand those solutions over time for your enterprise customers? It sounds like that's an area you'll continue to invest behind. So what could that look like? Would it be more organic development or could M&A maybe factor into there too?

Prasad Gune

executive
#44

All right. Thank you, Stephen. I'll take that one. Thank you for that question. And when you think about immersive learning, I think what we start with is, our focus on impact for our learners. And what -- the way we think about it is, which of the areas where hands-on authentic experience is most valuable. And they tend to be tech areas, as you mentioned. And so our road map is pretty expansive. We've started with cloud computing in the different areas of cloud computing, like AWS and Azure and others. And then we've also expanded into web development and data science. So those have been our initial areas of focus. We'll continue expanding in different areas of technology. The drivers, I think, are a combination of both organically. We are a tech company ourselves. We pride ourselves on sort of testing out internally first. So we know what the fast-growing areas of technology are. But we also talk to our customers in the UB space as well as hear from our learners. We learn a lot from our instructors as well. So I think it's a combination of sort of organic as well as request from customers that drives our road map. And our focus going forward is basically a combination of going broad, so that we cover more and more vertical areas, if you will, or domains as well as going deep because what we're looking to do is to be able to provide labs, workspaces, assessments, learning paths, everything that you need so you can have either just-in-time learning or if you so desire learn in great depth, whatever the need of the learner is. So that's the way we're sort of looking at it. In terms of where M&A activity falls, I'll turn it over to Gregg to comment.

Gregg Coccari

executive
#45

On the M&A front, we have -- it all starts with our long-term strategy. We have a 5-year plan. We know the kind of things we want to build. And if we could do technology tuck-ins, if we find a company that's out a couple of years that we could buy something that works for us, gets us there faster, we'll do a build versus buy, look at it, but those are certainly opportunities.

Stephen Sheldon

analyst
#46

Got it. And then just as a follow-up, I guess from a content creator's perspective, how do you think about the attractiveness of being plugged into Udemy's marketplace versus -- how do you think that's changed as you think about the last few years, especially with the growth in consumers and businesses that they can monetize. And I think a lot of these content creators have numerous kind of options to distribute and monetize their content. So are you seeing any major changes in terms of these creators focusing more on your platform? And what does that mean to overall content, quality and breadth?

Gregg Coccari

executive
#47

Thank you for the question, Stephen. We're seeing increased excitement from our instructors around the Udemy platform. As you might have heard earlier this morning, we're now -- over the last 12 months, we paid $189 million to instructors. So there's a massive pot of gold for those instructors who come to our platform and engage. And what we're seeing is that instructors love what our system provides, that learner feedback, that ability to understand what learners are consuming. You can't get this from other platforms. And not only can you get it from our platform, but you can use it to improve your solution and then impact not only the learner experience but your ability to earn on our platform. So as a result, word of mouth is increasing, instructor telling other instructors, our visibility of our brand is increasing and they're coming to Udemy to the tune of 1,000 new instructors, come to our platform every single month. And 40% of those are creating courses in local, non-English languages and that fuels our supply side. So every month, we publish or have published about 5,000 courses on our platform. So overall, what we see is an increasing awareness, which is driving increasing both instructors and supply coming to our platform.

Dennis Walsh

executive
#48

The next question comes from John Nutt at Piper.

John Nutt

analyst
#49

Just looking at the consumer side specifically, we've seen a fair bit of macro pressures surrounding general consumer spend. Do you still see an opportunity here for stabilization? Or is there a downside risk kind of looking into 2023?

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#50

Thanks for the question. Our platform continues to be stable. We pulled back our marketing spend on the consumer side pretty significantly this year, and yet we -- our traffic is up, our monthly average buyers are stable and even up a little bit. So no one knows what the future holds, and certainly, there are macro pressures. We think there is some countercyclicality to our business as unemployment has been at historical lows. And with the macro environment continuing to deteriorate a bit and unemployment rates increase, we actually think that provides some stability to our consumer platform.

Dennis Walsh

executive
#51

Next question comes from Josh Baer at Morgan Stanley.

Josh Baer

analyst
#52

I wanted to ask one to start on the partnership side. [ Albeit ] some total as a tech reseller, I'm just wondering, are there other relationships or potential relationships with learning management systems that you could build or that you have and really how meaningful is that part of the partnership program?

Greg Brown

executive
#53

Josh, thanks for the question. It's very meaningful. And we've made a big investment and we'll continue to make significant investments and integrating into really the entire tech stack that our HR leaders are using to enable learning to happen in their organizations. So Degreed, very close partner, may surprise you. We're integrated to LinkedIn's LXP, right? So we work closely with LinkedIn largely because our customers were telling both them and us that they wanted to be able to get access to our content through LinkedIn's LXP as they went live with that this last year. And so really, our approach is to integrate with all of the LMSs, LXPs and again, the entire tech stack to make it really easy for customers of all sizes to make the right decision based off the quality of the content, the quality of the experience that they're looking for and not have to make decisions based off whether or not we're integrated to the tech stack that they use. So it's a big area of focus and investment for us and really happy with the level of partnership we have with all of our tech partners. And albeit some total via Cornerstone, as you mentioned, LinkedIn, Degreed. Microsoft teams, Prasad talked about that as well as a number of other tech partners, and we'll continue to evolve that over time.

Josh Baer

analyst
#54

Great. Really helpful. And then one for Sarah, on the '24 targets. I guess just wondering if like to have the growth target out there and the EBITDA breakeven target, like if things out of your control, if the macro or the demand impact the growth side of things and you come above or below your growth target, say, 15% growth or 30% growth. How does that impact EBITDA? Is there a framework for thinking about that trade-off for growth and margins?

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#55

Yes. Thanks for the question. So it's really important to us that we are very balanced. And certainly, there could be macroeconomic conditions that are much worse than we expect or significantly better. If it's significantly better, I think that's an easier one. It's continued investment. There's a very large opportunity in front of us, and we are well positioned to take advantage of it. If it goes the other way, we're going to be just as focused as we've been this year on driving operational efficiencies. But balancing that with sustainable growth and thinking about the opportunities that we have in front of us, we think we have are really -- like it's in our DNA to be diligent and really thoughtful about our spend. We are committed to delivering on the profitability side of things, but we're going to be smart and thoughtful if it were to be too harmful to growth, that's something we have to consider.

Josh Baer

analyst
#56

Got it. And just a follow-up on the gross margins. I think it's really easy to see the path for expanding margins with the mix shift toward UB. But for the long-term targets, that 65% to 70%. I'm just wondering, like with UB pretty consistently around 66% the last few years. Does that imply a different type of content model or revenue from products that don't have content that would drive UB gross margins, I guess, above 70% to pull the overall up.

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#57

Yes. Thank you. That's a great question. So there's a few contributing factors. On the UB side of things, first and foremost, we are very protective of the investments that we make in content and our instructors. They are part of our secret sauce. The reason why our content is so high quality and so fresh and so broad and localized. But we are also sitting on a lot of data. There's a lot we can do with skills insights and different things that are Udemy built and our content that will sit on top of a growing base of the instructor provided content programs and products that we have. And so that's going to drive our UB gross margin. On the consumer side, over time, it will be the consumer subscriptions. Those are a higher-margin product as well. So the 2 of those are what contribute in addition to the shift toward Udemy business as -- from a revenue mix perspective to those long-term targets.

Dennis Walsh

executive
#58

Our next question comes from Tom Singlehurst at Citi.

Thomas Singlehurst

analyst
#59

Well, yes, thank you very much for both the presentation and doing the Q&A. It's Tom here from Citi. I had a question on partnerships to begin with and given Cody -- maybe one -- maybe it's for Greg. It obviously makes sense for partnerships in international markets, both access to local content and distribution. I'm interested in sort of English language markets, whether there's any scope to distribute sort of professional content on the platform. Given you've got such scale and such a great model, what does the content have to be sourced from sort of individual instructors? Or is there scope within the sort of the U.S. or the U.K. or other established markets to distribute?

Greg Brown

executive
#60

Thanks for the question, Tom. Yes. Happy to -- I'll provide a little bit more color on one of the partnerships that we announced not too long ago, which is with Amazon. And there's a tremendous opportunity for us with the super scalers, if you will, Amazon and the like, to provide very complementary content products and services to support their focus, which is to sell more of their technology and enable that technology to be used by learners within organizations, large and small. And in the conversations with Amazon, and this is very similar with the rest of the technology partners that we talk with many of their folks in the technology arena within the organization, the devs and what have you, they use our content today to upskill themselves and prepare themselves for the next release or what have you. So it's a very easy conversation with us to begin that dialogue and then to start to work through the mechanics around how a joint partnership would evolve in market. And that's exactly where we're at with Amazon right now. We're really happy with the progress we're making [indiscernible] team. and we'll be able to report more on that as we flow into next year, and it's that partnership evolves. But suffice it to say, there's a number of those conversations going on right now in English-speaking markets, North America and otherwise, that we'll be reporting on in future quarters.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#61

That's great. And then maybe a follow-up for Scott. I mean, we were just talking about the 1,000 new instructors coming onto the platform, 5,000 new courses. I'm interested in how you make sure that the quality is good enough. And also how you make sure that, that content is relevant. Some insights on that would be very much appreciated.

Scott Rogers

executive
#62

Absolutely. Thanks for the question. So in essence, our entire platform is about delivering high-quality experience for learners, and we do that through those feedback loops that I talked about earlier. So perhaps the most important is that ratings and review feedback, where learners can tell instructors exactly how the content is resonating with them. And then, of course, instructors can also see the data about learners that are using their courses and use that through the platform to update the courses to make sure that it continues to be relevant for their learners over time. And so when you take a big step back, there are hundreds of thousands of courses competing on our platform to each win out in any given topic area. So as that's happening, our algorithm is looking at the content in all of these interactions, the learner and the instructor and the behaviors and ranking content based on how effective or high quality that content is. And so at the end of the day, that's how we ensure that there is high-quality solutions for our learners. And it doesn't just impact our marketplace. It, of course, impacts our UB corporate offering. So we're able to see what is resonating and pick from the best of the best and add it to our corporate collection to serve our organizations around the world.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#63

That's very clear. And one final quick one for Prasad if that's okay. Personalization in product development, could you just put a bit more color around that, how personalization works and how you've implemented it?

Prasad Gune

executive
#64

Yes, absolutely. Thank you for that question, Tom. So I think the way to think about it is learning isn't one size fits all, right? And so everyone likes to learn in slightly different ways. And we try to apply personalization where we can. I'll give you one simple example, which is from the international space. When we expand into new markets, we are able to infer from a user's search queries what their preferred language is. And by knowing that and inferring it correctly, we are able to place courses in their preferred language higher than courses in English, for instance. And that's one way that in a market where they speak multiple languages, we're able to show them the content, which makes the most sense. And you can imagine that's not even by asking a lot of questions. It's simply by inferring their search queries. So that's one example. I think the other thing I'd say is that because of the amount of content and interaction data that we have, we are able to get very quickly both implicit and explicit signals about the topics and areas of interest that a person has. So as they land on the site, we can very quickly spool up homepages, which are very specifically focused on the topic area of their interest. And that gets them involved, that gets them into the product and gets them closer and closer towards their ultimate career goals. So those are a couple of examples of how both implicit and explicit signals are used to drive personalization for our users.

Operator

operator
#65

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from David Lustberg at Jefferies. I think you're muted, David.

David Lustberg

analyst
#66

I had a double mute on. I appreciate the time, guys, and thanks for the great presentation. Two, if I may, maybe to kick off on CorpU -- is there any color you guys can add into the penetration you guys have there against your current customer base? And maybe any color around the ARPU uplift and margin impact that you get from that product?

Unknown Executive

executive
#67

Yes, happy to take that for you, David. We're not disclosing and guiding on margin uplift by product. So I'll really give you a little bit more detail, which I think is going to give you some perspective on how excited we are about what we're seeing with the momentum in market. Most recently, as an example of a large U.S. multinational that we had already done quite a bit with and we're heavily engaged on demand side, but uncovered an opportunity that they had in their middle manager segment. There's 3,000 middle managers that they had a desire to really start to focus on training and enabling to get them prepared for the next opportunity within the organization and they didn't have the tools or resources necessary to do it. So when they learned and we -- our team started working with them and let them know that we had acquired this company, CorpU and everything that we were doing with leadership development. And as that unfolded, it became clear this was an ideal solution for them. So that resulted in a multiyear contract, 1.6 million a year that they're now spending with us to upskill and up-level 3,000 middle managers across the organization over the next 2 years plus. So that's just one example of the momentum we're starting to see in market, and it's been primarily focused on North America initially. But as we move forward and develop out our broader international strategy, we're going to start to do more in EMEA and then obviously move to Asia and Latin America. But yes, early signs are very positive and excited about the team's ability to execute.

David Lustberg

analyst
#68

Got it. And maybe just as a follow-up, taking outside the box a little bit. Obviously, you guys have the switch consumer data set of who's taking what course is there kind of skill, so to speak. You also have a great relationship with half of the Fortune 100, is there an opportunity for you guys to serve in some sort of HR capacity where company A is looking for engineers and you can kind of plug in knowing that someone has these credentials from the courses they've taken on your platform?

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#69

Yes, it's a great question, David. And I think long term, we're thinking a lot about how can we really help our organizations have the skills they need. Obviously, upskilling and reskilling is what we're doing right now within their organizations, but we will be able to see what skills learners have. And conversely, we'll be able to see what skills are needed by organizations that they might not have enough bodies or might not have enough adjacent skill set. So it's something longer term that we're thinking about. Right now, we really are focused on. We have a great product set with Udemy Business Pro with CorpU and with consumer subscriptions that we're working on our engagement and our retention and really learner success in driving measurable learner outcomes. But in the long term, we're definitely thinking about these things we're talking about.

Operator

operator
#70

The next question comes from Brett Knoblauch at Cantor.

Brett Knoblauch

analyst
#71

Thanks for putting us together today. It was really well done. I guess my first question is on the partner channel. It seems like what you're doing with -- is really executing on all cylinders. So I guess my question is you enter new markets, you talked about those 3 to markets. How does it take for you once you get boots on the ground to get the content breadth that is needed to really activate the UB motion?

Unknown Executive

executive
#72

Brett, thanks for the question. It really does vary based on the nature of the partner in each of these countries, the resources they have already in the organization to start to partner with us to identify the instructors and develop that content engine in market. So it does vary. But within all 3 countries that we are now in, in addition to Benesse Japan, which is in China, South Korea and Vietnam. We expect next year to really start to see some momentum in velocity as a result of the investments we made this year. So it really kind of is in the second year, but it does vary by partner and by country. There's nuances in each of these countries as well as the different size and resources available within each of the partners. But we expect next year to start to see some exciting momentum and movement in each of the 3, and we'll be happy to share that with you as we evolve.

Brett Knoblauch

analyst
#73

Perfect, looking forward to it. And then second question, I think we get a lot of questions about the UB reliant on the consumer segment. So I guess, is there a certain size or threshold that the consumer segment needs to be or to grow at in order to drive -- then drive growth for the UB segment? Or are we at a point where there's enough content on the marketplace that is constantly refreshed that keeps the organizations happy? Or do we need continued growth in that catalog to further drive UB growth? Does that make sense?

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#74

Yes. So I'll talk a little bit about size and maybe, Scott, you can talk a little bit about supply and supply gaps and how we handle that. But that flywheel is working really well for us. It's at a size that it is giving us almost all the content that we need and with the amount of publishing that's happening, the -- we have almost 5,000 courses that are coming on a month -- that's more than enough. It really is the cap courses that we need. And because the incentive structure is so aligned and we're able to attract instructors in the areas that -- in the categories that are most impactful for Udemy business, it feels like we're in a pretty good place, and it could go up or down a bit and really not impact UB at all. But we do have a supply strategy. And Scott, maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

Scott Rogers

executive
#75

Yes, sir. I think you nailed it. Essentially, the marketplace is healthy. I mentioned how much of our content is currently coming from local in addition to the English language course creators. And so essentially, what we're trying to do now is to continually improve those feedback loops. So enable the instructors on our platform to understand where they can best orient their next course and their creation efforts to provide the emerging supply, whether it's the organizations that are in the forefront of technologies or the data that we're seeing from our learners in the marketplace who are searching for content and so on. So in essence, as Sarah mentioned, very healthy, and the influx of new talent continues to increase the health of both the instructor and the core supply. And really, what we're trying to do now is reorient or provide additional information to instructors so they can make better decisions to serve learner needs, which we think will keep the supply engine working.

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#76

What are the other things that the consumer marketplace does for Udemy business is it provides a significant amount of leads -- but we've really invested in our outbound marketing engine on the UV side such that it's less reliant on those leads that come over. So we love them. We love that symbiotic ecosystem that we have, both from the content perspective, from the leads and the information that can go back and forth that allows our offering together to really be a differentiated offering, but we did build out that outbound motion starting about 2 years ago, and we're feeling really good about where that is.

Brett Knoblauch

analyst
#77

Perfect. And then if I could just ask one more, maybe on the long-term financial framework, targeting 15% to 20% on adjusted EBITDA margins. I guess stock-based comp last quarter was above 15%. So I guess on a long-term framework looking at kind of GAAP operating income close to breakeven. I guess how do we kind of reconcile that with kind of the -- what's envied right now in terms of kind of GAAP profitability and GAAP earnings -- should we expect stock-based comp to come down over the long term? Or just any color on that?

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#78

Yes, thanks for that. We did see an increase. And over the next few years, there is an increase in stock-based comp just due to the -- we've been hiring a lot of people. And so as just a percentage of the top line, but also our programs where we have a large number of RSUs that are vesting over the near term. But over time, you will see that. But for the next few years, we will have a decent amount of stock-based compensation in our GAAP financials.

Brett Knoblauch

analyst
#79

So I guess, any plans to maybe offset that dilution, which has been about 2 million shares a quarter, it seems like? Or a million?

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#80

The plan for us is -- the plan for us is really on driving that growth in that bottom line to drive the value over time. The investments that we're making in the team and focusing on these high-growth opportunities that's going to build that value.

Operator

operator
#81

The next question comes from Ryan MacDonald of Needham.

Ryan MacDonald

analyst
#82

It looks like from the hand raising, I might have driven a second follow-up train of questions. I'll open head plans today. Maybe first for Gregg Coccari. I thought it was interesting on the international opportunity. You called out in Japan and sort of the government and led initiatives there reskilling and upskilling over the next 5 years in terms of the incremental investment. We've seen that also in India as well. I think we want a 50% increase in gross enrollments over the next 5 to 10 years as well. As you look at continuing to go after some of those international opportunities given these sort of government-driven motions, what do you think is the best way for Udemy to go after that opportunity? Do you think it's on the consumer side? Is it on Udemy business? Or is there an opportunity for to move into more sort of government end market type business over time?

Gregg Coccari

executive
#83

Yes. I think that it's a big opportunity, I think, for us, and it tends to be on the Udemy business side. So they're upskilling and reskilling their people. And so it's very similar to a corporation. And we talked about Benesse, and Benesse is a very progressive partner of ours. And today, they're in 60% of the Nikkei 225, and we did that in just a few years. So they were able to scale our business quite dramatically, but they're also very progressive. They have good relationships with the government. And so we started with the Tokyo government, but we're looking to expand those in Japan and then using the learnings there to go into other countries. So we see it as a big opportunity long term.

Ryan MacDonald

analyst
#84

Excellent. And maybe as a follow-up question for Stephanie, just curious, as you think about the expansion motion within these customers, can you talk on how the engagement strategy helps to drive those expansions and whether or not there's a typical standard that your customers like to see in terms of engagement rate before hitting that expansion opportunity?

Stephanie Stapleton Sudbury;SVP of Global Customer Success

executive
#85

Yes. Thanks for the question, Ryan. So when we partner with customers on driving success, right, and success is making sure they use it, making sure they renew, make sure they grow with us. It looks like really understanding the company's business, making sure we really understand their business outcomes. And then we have a series of playbooks that help them drive success, right? And part of that -- so lots of guidance for the customer tools that we can give them. And then internally, sales and customer success, really partnered together on that team selling motion that I was talking about. How do we identify opportunities, where we can expand seats or new products. So typically -- so I'll give you -- let me give you an example maybe to illustrate like how this can work in practice. So I had a customer that came to us a large Australian bank, and they wanted to start with their tech teams, right? They're saying, "Hey, we know on-demand learning can be helpful for tech teams. So we want to start with a small pilot". And we partnered with them. And originally, we'll just get it out there, see if they like it. We know even self-directed learning needs to be directed. So worked with all of their business line units to understand the skills that were really important to each of the departments, developed learning programs, mapped content, and then made sure that we had a really, really strong launch. So we were able to get those pilot seats out super successful -- and then from there, and that was an $11,000 seed, it expanded over the course of the year, by the end of the year it was $550,000. So we like to set goals, make sure that we achieve those goals for launch, paint a picture for what's next, and then grow together once they start to see the value. So that's pretty illustrative of how we work.

Ryan MacDonald

analyst
#86

That's helpful. And sorry, maybe one just quick one more and more for Stephanie. We've talked a lot about this move from offline to online. I'm curious what you hear in your conversations or how your conversations go and trying to convince or sort of urge that motion from an organization that might be heavy off-line usage that is looking potentially to make that expansion online. Is that a speaking point for your customer conversations at all?

Stephanie Stapleton Sudbury;SVP of Global Customer Success

executive
#87

Not really. I think we definitely saw COVID help us in that way because everyone had to go to virtual really, really in a short period of time. And these learning leaders actually were called on doing really important things for the business, right? It was help us get through this crazy time that we're going through. And it worked when they did it virtually. They were able to convert all of their instructor-led programs to virtual onboarding, manager training, all the functional upskilling and there was great ROI for the business on these investments. And so we're -- we've seen now there's been a shift, right? So now online learning is actually the norm and most companies are continuing to invest their or in hybrid learning experiences. We were just talking at ESC in one -- 2 of my execs on the council were like, we're never going back. It's always going to be virtual 100%. So I think that's more what we're seeing and it's here to stay.

Operator

operator
#88

[Operator Instructions] The next question we have is from Terry Tillman at Truist.

Terrell Tillman

analyst
#89

Thank you. So maybe, Greg Brown, a quick question for you in terms of -- I don't think you all discussed this recently, but where are we in terms of -- I know you don't like to give sales headcount, which I could ask if you would at this time, but maybe you won't, that's fine. . On the enterprise side of UB maybe you could at least help us a little bit with where you are on ramped capacity, which I know is maybe not a real kind of clear definition. But folks have been on staff for a while and product -- some sort of productivity is playing out versus really unramped, where are you in kind of that ramp versus really not ramped it all? Because I'm kind of curious what kind of benefit this could have next year as you just unleash more productivity? And then the second part of that first question is just how are you thinking about sales hiring going into next year? Because I think the work for talent has been shifting. And then maybe it's a little bit easier, not that it's ever really easy, but maybe it's easier to get some opportunistic hiring. So how are you thinking about capacity growth from here?

Greg Brown

executive
#90

Yes. Thanks for the questions. So first question, in terms of leverage is what I hear you asking, when do -- do we expect to get leverage out of the hiring that we've done this past year? The answer, moving into next year is yes. Sarah touched on this a little bit. But it has been significant in terms of the ramp and scale that we've experienced this year as far as building out our sales organization. And our time to fully burden quota is roughly 9 months for our enterprise sales reps. So based on sales cycles and the ramp schedule that we have defined. And so what you're going to start to see next year is a number of those folks coming online fully ramped and fully productive. So yes, we expect to see leverage next year as a result of that. And then the second question, refresh my mind. Staffing. Yes. Look, those of us who have been through recessionary times, and we're surely moving into a deeper economic environment that's challenging. It is becoming easier. There's no doubt. And we're being very surgical with respect to the staffing that we're doing now in Q4 as well as moving into next year. Based on the signals we're getting from the marketplace. As we've talked about, we're not immune to the economic climate and the conditions that are transpiring right now. So as we move through the quarter and move through next year, we are going to continue to staff where we have signals of strength and we're going to throttle back where we don't. And as that transpires and evolves, we'll be able to share a little bit more. But right now, as we discussed, we feel good about the enterprise business right now, but again, monitoring very closely. And then we have already throttled on the commercial side of our business, down market in the SMB side.

Terrell Tillman

analyst
#91

Got it. And then, Sarah, maybe just a quick question in terms of the greater vitality and multiyear new business or expansion deals, does that have any kind of cash flow implications we should think about, assuming that you invoice folks upfront? Or will you not be doing multiyear invoicing upfront?

Sarah Blanchard

executive
#92

Thanks for the question. We don't do multiyear invoicing upfront, so it will not have an impact on cash flow. We just do an annual invoice on that. So we love to see these deals. We love that people are leaning in, especially in these times, the fact that 40% of our revenue is coming from multiyear deal, that's up 135%. I think that's a real testament to how we can help businesses get through what the next few quarters are going to look like in the upcoming years.

Operator

operator
#93

And our last and final question comes from Thomas Singlehurst of Citi.

Thomas Singlehurst

analyst
#94

Some pressure now. Well, I feel bad because it's a question actually for quick clarity, but actually about one of your shareholders, [indiscernible] process. I mean, obviously, a company that has a sort of constellation of investments in the education space. I was just wondering whether you can talk about what having process as a shareholder does for you as an organization and whether there is scope to cooperate with some of those other sort of process linked entities.

Gregg Coccari

executive
#95

So process has been a long-term shareholder. They've been in Udemy for many, many years. They were a very early investor -- and they've been a good partner, the whole way. And they have a big portfolio of adtech companies. They've invested in a number of them. They bought a couple of them recently. And we just see them as sister companies. So it's relationships that we have that we can talk to. We talk about it other ways we can work together and help each other. So it is an advantage. It's nice to have somebody that has that kind of reach, -- and so -- and it's helped us, right? So there's -- we're working on some partnerships with some people in their portfolio. And it doesn't always work, but sometimes it does. And -- but we have -- the doors are open for both of us. So it's useful.

Operator

operator
#96

And at this time, we've reached the end of our Q&A session. So I will turn it back to Greg for any final statements.

Gregg Coccari

executive
#97

I want to thank all of you for the time. We appreciate you spending the time with us, and we look forward to seeing you in February. So thank you.

Unknown Executive

executive
#98

Thanks, everybody.

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