Gregg Coccari feels torn. Its early June, and the coronavirus pandemic has thrown tens of millions of people out of work. But the company he runs, online learning platform Udemy, is thriving. Of course were very excited about that, he says. But were also watching people get laid off, and we see them struggling.

A lot of those people are flocking to Udemys selection of 150,000 online classes, most of which sell for from $10 to $20. In May alone, the company logged 25 million new enrollments, compared to 9 million the previous May. Its Udemy for Business division, which sells annual subscriptions for $360 per user to companies including Adidas and Toyota, is booming, too. Among the most popular classes: best practices for Zoom videoconferencing and how to manage a virtual team.

Udemy CEO Gregg Coccari

From March through May, Udemys sales were double the total for the same period in 2019, says Coccari. Surging demand will likely drive revenue above $400 million this year, according to two sources with knowledge of Udemys finances. (Coccari says that number is in the ballpark.) He says Udemy would be profitable if it werent planning to hire 200 people this year and investing in overseas expansion. It already has courses in 65 languages and customers in 190 countries.

Clad in a roomy grey T-shirt, Coccari, 67, is running things from a bedroom in his 1920s Spanish colonial home in Santa Monica, California. Starting in early 2019, when he became CEO, most Mondays he caught a 6:30 am flight to San Francisco, where the ten-year-old company is based, or he headed to one of its branch offices in Denver, Dublin, Ankara, So Paulo or Gurgaon, India. Now his life imitates a Udemy course, and hes not thrilled about it. Yesterday I had ten hours of Zoom meetings, he says. Id like to break my laptop. I prefer human interaction.

But Udemy is benefiting from worldwide social isolation. While K-12 schools and colleges struggle to teach online, Udemy is simply opening the spigot on a business model it pioneered. Its platform hosts unaccredited courses taught by instructors who independently create videotaped lessons and answer email questions from students on a Udemy message board. The company collects a share, usually 50%, of the course fees. Users determine which courses get the most traffic by posting star ratings and reviews.

LEFT Udemy Founder Eren Bali. RIGHT Bali in Udemy's first office in 2013.

Founder Eren Bali, 35, who chairs Udemys board, got the idea for the company after growing up in an impoverished village in southeastern Turkey where he pursued his math obsession by researching problems on the Web. He believed that great online instructors didnt need fancy degrees. We wanted to create a marketplace-based education company where any expert in the world could teach their own course, he says. He tried launching a livestreamed version of the site in Turkey in 2007. It flopped but SpeedDate, a live online dating site based in Silicon Valley, recruited him as an engineer.

He and two cofounders bootstrapped Udemys U.S. launch (the name is a portmanteau of you and academy) in 2010 after more than 200 funders turned them down. Edtech investor Daniel Pianko of New York-based University Ventures regrets passing on the opportunity. I thought the idea was too crazy, he says. Online education at the time was dominated by accredited for-profit giants like University of Phoenix. It was a totally revolutionary concept, that someone unaffiliated with a university could teach a course, he says.

While K-12 schools and colleges struggle to teach online, Udemy is simply opening the spigot on a business model it pioneered.

The first Udemy courses included how to make money playing poker online and how to pick up women. But the founders soon realized that coding and business skills like data science and team-building were more in demand. Those courses make up two thirds of Udemys selection. But the platform is still open to anyone who wants to teach. Portrait drawing and Reiki massage courses have been popular during the pandemic.

Competing online education sites including LinkedIn Learning and Coursera work with university professors (Coursera) or they heavily screen would-be instructors (LinkedIn Learning) and reject most applicants. By contrast, Udemy instructors just have to satisfy six items on a checklist of minimum requirements like posting at least 30 minutes of video content per course. All subject matter is welcome aside from a shortlist of no-nos like porn, firearms and hate speech. A handful of top Udemy instructors earn as much as $1 million a year. Read about one here.

Coccari says several hundred instructors make at least six figures annually, and that number will likely double this year. They include Teresa Greenway, 61, who earned $12,400 this May from her bread-baking courses. A high school dropout who married at 21, she had 10 children including a son with autism before she escaped her abusive marriage a decade ago. I had no degree, no work history and I was pretty battered emotionally, she says. In 2015, she stumbled on Udemy and put together a three-hour sourdough course.

After escaping an abusive marriage, Teresa Greenway discovered Udemy, where demand for her sourdough bread baking courses is spiking.

She now has 13 courses, which feed several other income streams, including eight self-published books, which she sells on Amazon. She records all her Udemy videos in advance. Once posted, they run on autopilot. Her only interaction with students is through a Udemy message board where students post questions. She spends 20 minutes a day writing answers. Last year Udemy accounted for the biggest chunk of the $78,000 she earned. This year she expects her income to double.

Bali left as CEO in 2014 and the company churned through two more bosses before Coccari took over last year. (In 2014 Bali cofounded a San Francisco startup, Carbon Health, where he is CEO.) A Wharton grad and serial startup CEO, Coccaris last job was heading Milwaukee-based premium pet food purveyor Stella & Chewys. One of that companys backers, Ken Fox of New York-based venture firm Stripes, is a Udemy investor and board member. He asked Coccari to take the CEO job and manage Udemys expansion.

In February Coccari closed a $50 million investment from Benesse Holdings, the publicly traded Tokyo-based education and senior care conglomerate that owns the Berlitz language schools. The deal brought Udemys total capital invested to more than $200 million and vaulted its valuation from a reported $710 million to $2 billion. Though Japans pandemic lockdowns were less restrictive than other countries, Udemys Japanese revenue in the first five months of 2020 tripled sales for the same period in 2019, according to Benesse CEO Tamotsu Adachi.

Udemy welcomes all subject matter aside from a shortlist of no-nos like porn, firearms and hate speech.

Coccari is cautious about predicting how the pandemic will shape the future of education. But online learning cheerleaders like Chicago edtech investor Deborah Quazzo of GSV Ventures believes the virtual education market will hit $1 trillion in 2026, more than double what she expected before the pandemic. She says Udemy is poised to balloon in size and regrets that she didnt fund the company. I was stupid, she says.

Coccari says hes concentrating on the present. Were just really focused on making sure we can handle these massive spikes in traffic, he says. We dont know what the world is going to look like at the end of all this.

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Anyone Can Teach Anything On This Education SiteAnd Thats Why Its Worth Billions - Forbes