In the past three years Coursera has grown from 7 million learners to 26 million registered learners, and from 65 employees to close to 300 employees — all with Rick Levin as the CEO. Coursera now makes over $60 million/year and has launched fully-online masters degrees, as well as an enterprise learning product: Coursera for Business.

Rick has now handed over the reins of Coursera to Jeff Maggioncalda, who took over as Coursera’s CEO earlier this month.

Last year, during an interview with Bloomberg, Rick was asked where Coursera will be in five years. He answered: “we will be public by then.” The new Coursera CEO comes with that experience.

Jeff Maggioncalda

New Coursera CEO: Jeff Maggioncalda 

Before becoming Coursera’s CEO earlier this month, Jeff Maggioncalda was the co-founder of Financial Engines, along with Nobel Prize winner Bill Sharpe. Jeff was the CEO of Financial Engines for eighteen years. During that span, Jeff took the company public and ran it for five years as a public company CEO.

As the new CEO of Coursera, Jeff probably brings a number of other qualities to the table, but his experience with taking and running a public company will be very valuable to Coursera’s future plans.

Rick Levin did leave a gift for Jeff: a $64 million Series-D funding round.

Brief History of Coursera’s CEOs

• Jan 2012 — Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller founded Coursera as co-CEOs.
• March 2014 — Coursera hires Rick Levin as the new CEO. Rick was the president of Yale for twenty years. Andrew becomes the chairman of the board while Daphne becomes the president.
• May 2014 — Andrew leaves his full-time role at Coursera to join Baidu as Chief Scientist. He stays on as chairman of the board at Coursera.
• August 2016 — Daphne joins Calico as Chief Computing Officer. She becomes co-chairman of the board at Coursera, beside Andrew.
• June 2017 — Jeff Maggioncalda replaces Rick Levin as Coursera’s newest CEO.