Kevin Stephens

Builder of stuff. Former CEO of (AI/CV) & Blink (acq Yahoo); worked @Google & Apple when they were tiny. Traveled to 58 countries; did business in 30.

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

You have to feel bad for Elon Musk. One day he’s a billionaire, the next day he’s not.

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

@zachtratar The guy in the quoted tweet just graduated college. Recent college grads being arrogant a-holes/know-it-alls online (and offline) unfortunately isn’t new, though there’s definitely more rage bait from older population segments.

[Michael Dell 🇺🇸 @MichaelDell]

Robert Reich forgot the 6th and most common way:

6) Build something millions of people actually want

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

I frankly am tired of Taylor Swift having a monopoly on music and of J. K. Rowling’s fraud. Wizards aren’t real!

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

There are basically 5 ways to accumulate a billion dollars:

1) Profiting from a monopoly

2) Insider-trading

3) Political payoffs

4) Fraud

5) Inheritance

Don’t believe the self-made myth.

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

@zalzally @ryajetha Congrats, Zal!

[Brian Halligan @bhalligan]

It turns out @RayDalio was right all along.

The top AI-pilled CEOs I work with use the recorded meetings that we're now used to (Granola, Otter, Fireflies etc) to get to ground truth.

Every insight is surfaced in a daily digest. Misalignments get flagged instantly against core priorities. Priorities updated.

The age of radical transparency and real-time alignment has arrived. Dalio called it over a decade ago. AI just made it unstoppable. 🔥

https://t.co/Qu2fzd8iLz

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

@EconBerger Nearly? I’d say it’s exactly 100%.

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

@StockSavvyShay @LeverageShares Not to take away from what Tim Cook did, but the ecosystem was Steve’s vision from the earliest days of the iPod.

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus gave commencement speech at Penn Engineering School in 2024.

He does version of Steve Jobs “paint both sides of the fence even if other people don’t know” attention-to-detail story…about screws for the Cinema Dislay monitor:

“Here’s my first [advice]: the care that you put into your work really matters. My first project at Apple was the Cinema Display. It was a large desktop monitor. It had a beautiful clear plastic enclosure that was held together with some screws coming in from the back. These screws were made of stainless steel, and the head of every screw was machined to have a pattern of concentric grooves that shimmered like a CD when light moved across it. I should probably say, if some of you have never seen a CD before, you can ask your parents afterward.

At some point in my first year, I found myself at a supplier facility. I was far away from home, it was well past midnight. I was using a magnifying glass to count the number of grooves on the head of this screw, which, remember, lives on the back of the display. And I was arguing with the supplier because these parts had 35 grooves, they were supposed to have 25.

I distinctly remember stepping back for a minute and thinking to myself, “What the hell am I doing? Is this normal?” And I thought about it, and I realized it might not be normal, but it’s right. It’s right because I’d already spent months working on that product, and if you’re going to spend that much time on something, you should put in your very best effort. Maybe a customer notices, maybe they don’t, but either way, whenever I saw one of those displays on someone’s desk, it mattered to me to know that my teammates and I had considered everything about it and done the very best job we could.”

***

H/T to @kevg1412 for flagging this: https://t.co/mXrkvpfMej

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

@HarryStebbings They aren’t building useless processes or allowing the org to be slowed down by people whining that their goals are too hard or that their manager holds them accountable when they don’t hit them.

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

@HarryStebbings Depends on how good HR is. Good HR drives business results through talent: attracts/retains top talent, pushes out mediocre or worse staff, & builds a culture of results and accountability. Great HR asks “How do we make the business stronger by upleveling talent & culture?”

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

@TEDchris What an epic run! I was fortunate to be at one of your earliest TEDs and several more along the way. Thank you for your leadership.

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

@gaganbiyani Thanks for the very honest insight.

[Gagan Biyani 🏛 @gaganbiyani]

People have asked me how I feel about Udemy’s sale to Coursera. Honestly, I’m kinda pissed about it.

I want to be clear - I’m grateful for the opportunity to start and benefit from Udemy’s success. It changed my life.

But there’s another side to Udemy. A story of what could have been.

After our Series B, founders owned less than 30% of the company. Our investors took over and installed their own CEO to run it. We all liked this new CEO and honestly, for years it looked like a brilliant move. The company kept growing and growing. They launched B2B and built a $500M ARR business. Eventually, the company IPO’ed for $3B.

Yet all along there were clear cracks under the surface. Over Udemy’s history, there have been 7 CEO’s. The board replaced the second CEO with dud after dud. I’d often try to meet with the board or the new CEO, and was completely ignored. Eren had influence as Chairman of the Board but Oktay and I were so ignored they didn’t even invite us to the IPO. LOL WTF. There are like 50+ people invited to these things and nobody thought: “oh maybe we should invite the people who fucking invented the thing we’re all celebrating.” It shows how little respect they had for founders and for product innovation as a discipline.

I think they wanted a CEO they could control, a buttoned-up suit instead of a brash founder/CEO that is risk-taking, visionary, but a bit of a pain. For awhile, it looked like it didn’t even matter who was CEO - the company was run by the incredibly talented team that reported to them anyways.

Well, it worked until it didn’t.

The company made no major product innovations for 15 years. Instead, they took the original idea (video-based courses) and sold it in every place imaginable. It got us to $800M run-rate. That’s no joke; that takes serious execution and a great team that hustled hard to win the market.

But eventually the consumer business stopped growing. The B2B business has now flattened out as well. Meanwhile, Coursera was catching up.

Original Coursera was a far worse product than Udemy, but it got a ton of press. Learning ivory tower bullshit from academics doesn’t get you a real education, but it does create prestige. They raised from better investors on better terms, and had better leadership.

Udemy to this day has more revenue than Coursera, but Coursera won the court of investor opinion. They got higher multiples from both private and public markets.

Coursera innovated heavily. They added corporate courses to their university catalog, built fully-online degree programs, and offered a B2B competitor that kept Udemy on its toes. Still, the Udemy B2B business (and team) out-performed and so the two companies were deadlocked. Coursera was better at B2C, Udemy at B2B.

A merger was inevitable.

But WHY IN GODS NAME did we sell to Coursera instead of the other way around? Why are the combined companies under $3B in market cap?

Three reasons:
First, edtech didn’t live up to its promise. While these two companies had solid revenue and cash positions, their growth slowed, and public markets balked. This meant compressed multiples and significantly lower valuations.
Second, the companies stopped innovating. They are selling a product to businesses that their customers don’t love. They were category leaders, but they lead the category into mediocrity. They captured a significant share of learning and development (L&D) spending, but L&D as a whole actually lost budget within their organizations. That’s Udemy’s fault, and it doesn’t even realize it.

That brings me to my final point: I personally believe Udemy traded upside opportunity for downside risk. Us founders were unproven and young. We made lots of mistakes, including fighting amongst ourselves. A good investor would have supported us through it because they believe founders drive the highest long-term returns. Instead, they brought in outside CEOs to replace us. I sometimes wonder if they recognize this error; everyone makes mistakes and maybe they learned from it.

Either way - the consequences are real. By ignoring the founders, Udemy failed to innovate, which led to slowing growth which led to mediocre public market results. Furthermore, they don’t have a good evangelist and public markets don’t like a headless horse.

I sold my Udemy stock awhile ago. I think the merger was critical for both companies’ survival. Now, though, the new combined entity needs to innovate again.

On B2B, Coursera needs to help L&D become the heroes of the AI era so the entire market starts growing again. On B2C, they need to build the most educational AI product on the planet. (I’d focus on the former, since the latter is a lot harder and riskier).

Coursera can still achieve our original vision and likely build a $10B+ company in the meantime. Even though I’ve got no stake in its future, I’m mission-driven and I REALLY hope they figure it out.

The current education system sucks and the world deserves something better.

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

@andrewchen If the candidate still has another job, companies that do this are getting themselves and the candidate get into a legally precarious situation unless they throw away the code the candidate writes.

[Zal Bilimoria @zalzally]

Google “Snippets” were so clutch. Back in the day, he asked everyone in the company to enter their accomplishments from the last week and their to-do list for the next week…and those Snippets were published to the entire company! 💪🏽

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

@joshelman @hnshah I always wondered why none of the other Star Alliance airlines followed Air New Zealand’s lead on this. Such a great feature, especially for traveling families.

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

@thepointsguy Airplane!

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

And it even costs the same! (It has always vexed me that nonalcoholic beer is more expensive than the regular kind. And yes I know it’s because it’s more expensive to make, similar to gluten free beer.)

[Kevin Stephens @kjstephe]

Nonalcoholic Guinness is indistinguishable from the regular kind. Exciting times for beer lovers that want to live healthier. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!