Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this first virtual day of the 27th Annual Needham Growth Conference. I'm Ryan MacDonald, and I lead Needham's EdTech research efforts here at the firm. I'm pleased to be joined for this Fireside Chat session by Udemy CEO Greg Brown and CFO Sarah Blanchard. Greg, Sarah, thanks for joining me today.
Great to be with you, Ryan.
Thanks for having us.
Absolutely. So for those of you who are listening in, this is a Fireside Chat session. We've got about 40 minutes for discussion. I'll run through a number of questions, but if you do have questions for Greg and Sarah, please feel free to enter them into the chat box, and then we'll make sure to get those asked and answered over the course of the session here. But with that, let's dive right in. Greg, Sarah, how about we start with a brief overview of Udemy for those who are less familiar with the business?
Yeah, sure. Happy to, Ryan. So Udemy is the world's largest online skills development marketplace and learning platform with a global reach, serving customers in over 150 countries and ARR exceeding $500 million. We're profitable on an Adjusted EBITDA basis and operating two synergistic segments, which I'm sure we'll talk quite a bit about today: our enterprise software platform, which provides corporations with on-demand, immersive, and cohort-based learning solutions, and our consumer marketplace, which is our foundation, which connects more than 75 million learners around the world to the largest catalog of courses globally, created by more than 75,000 subject matter experts, our instructors. So it's the ultra-creator platform for skills development.
And one of the areas we've been investing in heavily over the last couple of years is providing curated learning experiences, learning paths, and delving into more specificity around career development, providing learners with the ability to today prepare for over 200 of the most in-demand professional certification assessments to validate skills proficiencies and stay ahead of the changes that we're all experiencing, accelerated by generative AI. So it's an exciting time for us, and we're thrilled to be with you.
Yeah, absolutely. And we'll dive into definitely parts of the business and the investments that you've made in a bit. But I wanted to start at least with a discussion on the macro environment. Obviously, we're starting here on the cusp of a new year. And first, kind of looking back on 2024, it was a bit of a difficult year in the reskilling and upskilling market. Corporate L&D budgets remain challenged. Consumer demand for upskilling content softened a bit relative to 2023. So maybe start, Greg, as we sit here in early 2025, are you seeing reasons for optimism that maybe some of these challenges in 2024 on both the enterprise and the consumer side can start to improve?
Yeah, that's a really good question. So I'll just say at the onset that to remind everybody, we're not providing guidance today. So we're just a little bit ahead of that. But yes, the macroeconomic environment is dynamic, as you just described. But we are optimistic. And it feels like, I'll use a sports analogy, we're entering the second half of a tough game with some momentum. And it feels like that momentum is shifting in our favor. But like any good coach in any team, you're not going to get too optimistic. And you've got to focus on execution and delivery. And that's where we're at. So for us, it is about focus and execution in 2025.
But we're encouraged by early indicators that we've seen coming out of 2024 that corporate L&D budgets are starting to loosen and that we are seeing more and more organizations prioritize upskilling for AI-driven transformation, which we're all talking about right now and hopefully most of us are starting to act on. But look, we continue to be, I believe, the Gen AI. Look, we're on the front end of a long-term transformational curve with respect to how generative AI affects how we live and work. And 2024 was a foundational year in many respects.
At least that's how we believe it based on interacting with our customers in that companies were just trying to establish a general understanding across their organizations as to how to think about generative AI, the basic fundamental tenets of how it operates and works, and that 2025 is going to be the year we start to see organizations operationalize and by function start to implement capability, could be agents, and we hear a lot about agentic AI, but it's going to be more about leveraging generative AI to drive real transformation in their organizations, and coupled with that, they need to upskill and reskill their employees to take advantage of these technology advancements, so most recently, to substantiate that, the 2025 World Economic Forum report just came out, and 80% of employers plan to reskill and upskill their existing workforce between now and 2030.
And it's being driven by generative AI, knowing that it's going to be an imperative that we as organizational leaders invest in upskilling our employees to take advantage of this transformation. So exciting time. It has been, as you just alluded to, 2024 and 2023, I would say. It has been a bit tumultuous, but we're optimistic going forward.
That's great to hear. And like you said, you can't really affect the macro, but what you can affect is execution and how you prepare yourself for this sort of next wave of innovation and change within, I think, workforce development. And so within that sort of sense, I want to start on the Udemy business. And you've made the decision to sort of refocus your investments on the enterprise segment and market within that business, really targeting companies over 1,000 employees. Can you talk about some of the initiatives that you've put into place, how the new CRO has helped to impact this, and how we think about sort of the timeline for some of these investments to start to bear fruit?
Sure. First, I'm thrilled to have Rob. I couldn't be luckier to have him on board. And now he's been on board for over six months. We're seeing the impact of his focus in the key areas that I'll touch on and the execution therein. So some of those key areas are we talked on the last earnings call. We're now intently focusing on, with respect to resourcing and our outbound effort, our five strategic verticals in the large enterprise. And those are IT consulting, financial services, manufacturing, tech, and retail. And building out specific playbooks for our sales team and customer success team to use to be much more readily equipped and conversant in the language that the buyers speak in each of these verticals, understanding the problems they're trying to solve and how we can best solve those problems from the vantage point that we're coming from.
So all of that said, that's a big investment, sales enablement, and to make this shift. In Q4, we are starting to see some of the fruits of that labor, and we expect to see that continue. A lot of that's based on data as well, so we've had to repurpose data and start to leverage data in different ways to make sure that within those verticals, we're spending our time and shooting our arrows at the targets that are easiest first to hit. Then from an upsell perspective, we've talked a lot about the fact that in prior calls that we're less than 10% penetrated in our large enterprise customer base, and that holds true in these verticals.
So we've got a massive opportunity to sell through these existing customers that are already big fans of Udemy and getting significant value in these key vertical markets where we've had a disproportionate amount of success than the other verticals, which is why we chose them. So it really is about focus and execution, playbooks, sales enablement, exec sponsor programs, a lot of the tactical things that Rob has put in place that add up to it's never just one thing. Usually, it's many things and paying attention to the details that add up to, as you're executing a quarter and then moving forward, looking at a year that add up to success at the end of the year. And ask any ball coach, they'll tell you that as well, that it's largely about paying attention to the details. And that's what Rob's doing.
He's doing a great job of it. So yeah, happy with what we're seeing coming out of 2024. Expect to see that continue in 2025.
Excellent. And Sarah, perhaps as you kind of go through and these initiatives are being put into place, what maybe metrics are you tracking internally to sort of gauge success of these initiatives? And then maybe what are some of the external metrics that investors should really be focused on as signal points that you're starting to see progress from these initiatives?
Yeah, that's a great question. So internally, we track a lot of metrics. We track our pipeline and how quickly it's building. We track progression through the funnel, how fast are our opportunities moving from stage to stage, win rates, retention rates, upsell rates, deal sizes, you name it. Internally, you can imagine we're tracking a lot. Externally, two really important metrics that we share, ARR and Net Dollar Retention, very important metrics. To date, we've been breaking out our large customer segment within our Net Dollar Retention metric. We will be doing additional disclosures in 2025 as we think about helping support investors' understanding of what's really happening with the large customer segment. As we shifted our investment to focus up market, we pulled back investment and team size on the SMB side of things.
And so what we're thinking about is really helping external parties understand what's happening as we announced about a $20 million decrease in capacity on the SMB side. So that was a headwind for us. And showing progress in what we're doing from a large customer and key verticals is important. So more to come on that. But ARR and net dollar retention, always a great place to start as far as keeping your eyes on what's important.
Absolutely. Greg, there's been a lot of change in the competitive landscape over the last few years here. You had Pluralsight really struggling last year. You saw Udacity getting acquired by Accenture too, you having some disruption in your core business, but kind of forcing them to lean in more onto the enterprise channel and even Guild reconfiguring their strategy a bit. Given all this change, can you talk about how you're positioning yourself to continue to gain share within this market and whether that's spurring a bit of a refresh cycle for reskilling and upskilling content within the enterprise?
Yeah, sure, Ryan. Good question. So look, shifts like this in the competitive landscape with companies like Accenture coming in and getting into the game through the acquisition of Udacity, I mean, I think, sure, it definitely highlights the dynamic nature of the industry. It also validates the opportunity we have. Otherwise, you wouldn't see companies like Accenture making those investments and getting into the fray. So that's one thing I'd say. I think in terms of our position, look, we feel good about where we're at from a competitive perspective, confident in our ability to gain market share. And look, our approach has not changed in terms of the fundamental pillars that are under our stool, so to speak, that give us competitive advantage and will continue to do so. And that really is the relevant dynamic content that our marketplace generates.
It's the broad platform that we built out, cohort leadership and development, and the core capability with generative AI layered on top to meet the needs of both our consumers and enterprise customers. And then it's our best-in-class services. And you wrap all that together, and it's a very differentiated solution and offering. And everything that we do specifically in the enterprise is focused on outcomes, driving organizational outcomes. It's not learning for learning's sake. We have a strong orientation, and this is where the services side of our business comes in. And it's, by the way, now more important than ever when organizations are looking to rationalize, how should I be thinking about deploying a platform and thinking about strategically endeavoring to upskill my employees around generative AI? We've never done this stuff before. We've never had access to the technology before. They need help.
They're coming to us. We've got just under 20,000 customers, many of which we're on the forefront of leveraging generative AI to completely reshape how they're operating to drive efficiency. We're helping them do that. We're building boot camps, and we're doing all kinds of things right now with organizations, with our services team. Then we're taking those best practices and imparting those best practices across the sales org so they have access to that information when they're selling. But more importantly, we're able to execute against it in the engagements with customers. It's that strategic services capability that we bring that's very unique. Our competitors don't have it. We know that. We're anchoring on that to support the relevant dynamic content that is differentiated that comes out of the marketplace that we've talked a lot about in prior calls and earnings announcements.
And then again, the broad product platform. So for us, it's the three legs of the stool and that combination that make us very unique and that continue to enable us to win a disproportionate amount of the opportunities we're engaged in.
That's excellent. And we've now had a few years of this sort of spend rationalization and consolidation within enterprise L&D budgets. Are we through the consolidation trend now, or is there sort of incremental runway for expansion from continued consolidation here?
Yeah, we're still seeing it. I'll talk more about it in the upcoming earnings announcement. But no, we're not through it. And I'll tell you largely, there's a couple of reasons why. Organizations have cycles by which they have agreements with existing vendors, right? And those contracts can sometimes run two, three, four, five years. And so as those contracts come up for renewal, that's when typically those organizations are reevaluating their strategy and in many cases, who they're working with, the partner that they're going to move forward with. And so as a result of that, as you can imagine, we're building relationships sometimes years in advance of those renewals to make sure that when that does happen, that we're well prepared for that opportunity.
As a result, what we're seeing is we see a continued, I would say on a quarter-over-quarter basis, a continued flow of those opportunities. Again, we're very fortunate right now that we're winning a disproportionate amount of those. Don't expect that to change. In addition to the fact that L&D leaders are still looking to pare down the number of vendors and partners that they're working with, right, to make their jobs more straightforward and, I would say, easy to manage in terms of the technology platforms. The other thing is you get economies of scale, right? If they're working with one primary skills development partner versus three or four, it stands to reason that you're going to get a better outcome in terms of price per unit, price per seat, and what have you as a result of working with one partner.
There's a lot of reasons why, but we expect to continue to see it for some time.
Excellent. So I reference this often, but there's a great HCM survey conducted by Sapient Insights each year that gives some really good insight into expected spending trends over the next 12 months. And one of the interesting data points from this year's survey was that investment in learning and training technology dropped to the fourth and fifth priority in sort of the mid-market and large enterprise, but became this top spending priority in the SMB. And I realize there's an increased emphasis on the enterprise for Udemy this year, but are you seeing any signs of this increased demand within the SMB? And if so, is the level of demand to a point where it's prudent to maybe reallocate some spend to ensure you have enough capacity down market to sort of take advantage of that?
Yeah. Again, good point, good question. And I want to make sure that I'm glad you asked that question, by the way, because it's going to give me the ability to maybe clarify something that wasn't maybe as clear in the last earnings call when we talked about our resource allocation. Look, we've always had a very strong presence in the SMB. In fact, today, we've got just over 17,000 customers, roughly 12,000 of those customers. Our organizations have less than 1,000 employees. So in terms of logo count, we're heavily weighted to the SMB. And we're going to continue to support the demand coming into us from that segment and take advantage of it. That is not going to change.
The shift that we made is the resources we're investing from an outbound marketing perspective and resources to support all of our outbound demand generation programs and what have you. And so that's the key. As we see demand increase from the SMB segment, we are going to and are today staffing to beat that demand, right? So I think it's important that that's a key takeaway from this is that we're not in any way going to remain understaffed as demand increases in that segment. That is not how we're going to play the game. And that is not how we're playing it today. So yes, the answer is, Ryan, short answer is we're going to continue to staff up to meet inbound demand. And as that demand increases, we'll staff accordingly. Are we seeing an increase in inbound demand? Yeah, actually, we are.
Now, we're not seeing hockey stick-like increases at this point, but there's no question that we're seeing signs of strength, especially in certain regions in the world. And we're taking advantage of that. And we're making sure that we're staffed appropriately to harvest that. So that's really how we're playing the game right now in that area. And we're excited to see it, right? Because again, if that demand's coming in, that's an opportunity for us to take advantage and harvest it and add to the 12,000 customers we have today.
Excellent. That's an important clarification too. We got a question from the audience about just asking generally about sales capacity as you sort of sit here in early 2025 across the organization between enterprise and SMB. Do you feel like you've got the appropriate amount of capacity from a rep perspective heading into the year relative to the demand you're seeing? Or if not, what's sort of the expectation for growth in rep counts this year?
Yeah, and I'll let Sarah comment as well on this. But right now, as it sits, we've gone through a big capacity planning effort preparing for the 2025 year, and I feel good about where we're at. I feel good about what we're seeing as far as the data supporting the plan right now. We are going to be surgically adding headcount throughout the year as we trend to the middle of the year and the back half of the year. That's in the plan, so yeah, I feel good about where we're at. Sarah, I don't know if there's anything you want to add.
I think that's exactly right. Feeling good. We did pull back some of the SMB capacity. But to Greg's point, we're going to continue to support inbound demand. And how we really think about it is the unit economics of each of the segments. So on the large customer side, those unit economics are the strongest. There's a great business case and ROI on building those and continue to progress those outbound capabilities. SMB now, really, we're capturing demand. And over time, we'll be building out our self-service functionality to increase the retention and the deal sizes on the SMB side of things. So it really is about matching your capacity to the demand that you can either build or that's coming in. And to Greg's point, surgically, we will be adding throughout the year in the right places because it's a massive opportunity, right? We're so global.
Lots of potential and area of opportunity ahead for us.
Excellent. Excellent. Greg, so you obviously talked earlier about the opportunity here with generative AI and how that's going to change sort of how we work and how employee development happens and skills training, and that's obviously something that I think investors get really excited about as a potential unlock or catalyst for growth, not just with Udemy, but across a number of different industries. Udemy's developed some really interesting generative AI functionality over the course of 2024, including Skills Mapping and Skills Insights and the Udemy Learning Assistant. Can you just talk about what customer feedback's been like for Udemy's Gen AI functionality thus far?
Yeah. Customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. And we'll have more to share at earnings. But generally, we're seeing strong usage of our Skills Mapping technology by our enterprise customers. And we and they believe this has the potential to pretty significantly reduce L&D teams' workload, right, as this has been a manual effort historically, mapping skills to jobs and roles. Tedious process takes months and it never stops for organizations. So really excited to see the positive feedback and momentum right now with regard to Skills Mapping . And the customers that deployed earlier are already starting to see a pretty material impact. So that's all for us up and to the right as far as how we're viewing those investments. But we're just getting started, all right? Eren Bali, our founder, one of our three founders, just came back into the CTO role and is driving the product roadmap.
Thrilled to see the velocity, the innovation, and the creativity that he and the team are bringing to the 2025 roadmap. Expect to see some significant strides being made. Leveraging generative AI, some of the investments we've already made, but then some new investments we're not quite prepared to talk about today, but really excited to talk about throughout the year as we get closer to release on those capabilities. All said right now, the investments we're making are paying off and panning out exactly how we'd hoped.
That's great to hear. Now, obviously, interest in usage is one thing. And what we've learned in the past year is that with generative AI, there's a lot of functionality, a lot of interest in it. But monetization has been a little bit slower, I think, across multiple industries here. Just curious, as you see the solutions that you've rolled out today, one, are you finding that they're having sort of the knock-on effect of it's sort of helping Udemy get over the hump in terms of winning a customer? And so it's sort of that leading to monetization in that form? Or is there an opportunity to sort of separately monetize one of the capabilities? And sort of how do you think that plays out in 2025?
Yeah, it's a great question. So the first thing you want to do when you put out new capabilities as a product is really get that usage, get people adopting it, engaging it, learn from that usage. And so we're happy with what we see there. From a monetization perspective, there are everything that you spoke about from win rates, from deal sizes, from our ability to upsell. You can monetize in that way. You can also monetize from having different product SKUs and that sort of thing. So we've been working on pricing and packaging. We mentioned that on the last call as well. We're not ready to lay out exactly where that's going. But we do anticipate being able to monetize that through many of those means that I just mentioned.
Excellent. Excellent. Maybe to wrap up the Udemy business discussion, international has been an area where Udemy's performed well and sort of had a strong first mover advantage historically. Despite the fact that employee development and upskilling has lagged as a corporate strategy internationally relative to the U.S., can you frame up for investors the international opportunity for Udemy? Talk about how penetrated you are outside the U.S. and how should we think about the mix of growth, domestic versus international in 2025?
Sure. So the global corporate e-learning market, as broken down by us as well as analysts, is really broken down into three key segments: small enterprise, less than 1,000 employees; midsize enterprise, 1,000 to 5,000; and then you've got large enterprise above 1,000, excuse me, above 5,000. So we estimate total market size for the enterprise business was about $260 billion in 2023. And that's collaboration with the analysts we work with. And it's expected to grow approximately 14% CAGR, compound annual growth, to about $570 billion by 2029. So the global opportunity is massive. 90% of the global population by 2030 is going to need new skills to meet the shifts in demand. We talked about that earlier. And 50% of all the skills that we have today to do our jobs are going to change in the next five years.
That came out in that World Economic Forum report as well. So there's massive global opportunity driven by the need to upskill and reskill associated with these transformational technologies like generative AI that we're all in the midst of digesting and incorporating into our lives. International for us is a key growth driver. We've talked a lot about that in the past. Currently, we have Udemy customers in over 150 countries. Latin America is our fastest growing market, granted off a small base, but still really excited about the momentum that we have in Latin America. I was just in Mexico City for an event this last weekend with some of our large customers in Mexico. India is another key market for us. We've got more traffic coming out of India than any country in the world. Some of our largest enterprise customers are in India.
And we're going to be investing significantly to take advantage of the opportunity there and the momentum we already have. And we've got 14 international language collections on Udemy and growing, right? So we actually serve local markets around the world in a very unique way in that our content is in these markets developed by instructors in country, native language, native tone context, and what have you applied to all the learning that is developed. So we're unique in that most of our competitors dub and subtitle, right? So we've got the advantage of this global marketplace to harvest. So as we focus on market, and just now we're about 5,200 enterprise customers in our large enterprise cohort, look, we're just scratching the surface. There's 130,000 enterprises worldwide in that large segment that we're going after.
Large enterprises are moving faster than SMBs right now to take advantage of generative AI. We've been seeing that. We continue to see that. The investments they're making and the need for strategic resources, i.e., services in addition to platform and content is really the key for us in terms of our competitive advantage and our ability to take advantage of this opportunity as we move forward.
Excellent. All right. So maybe shifting to the consumer business. It's been an area that obviously Udemy's de-emphasized a bit over the last couple of years. But the declines in 2024 accelerated a bit. I was wondering if we could maybe unpack what sort of you were seeing in that business in 2024. Was it simply less interest in generative AI content from consumers? Was it broader softness, something else, and I guess based on what you saw in 2024, what are your kind of expectations in 2025 for that segment?
Yeah. So demand for Gen AI content on platform remains very strong. In fact, we saw nearly a 10x year-over-year increase, right? So that in and of itself substantiates the value and impact that that content is having. So more than 7 million enrollments since ChatGPT launched and more than 3,000 Gen AI courses. So we've got a broad catalog with, we believe, and our customers tell us, the richest array of content in the world in one platform. We've got nearly 40 million unique visitors to our marketplace monthly, with the majority of those visits coming from outside the U.S., over 85%, right? So we are truly a very global platform in terms of the traffic and the visits to come to our platform. That said, as you alluded to, we've talked about the fact that we pulled back on performance marketing.
The LTV wasn't where we needed to see. And we've got good reasons why we've moderated some of those investments. But we've hired a new head of consumer growth. Excited to see what Caleb is doing right now and what he's going to be doing as we move forward to implement several of the initiatives that he's put forward that we believe are going to give us the ability to turn that graph around, that growth trajectory back up and to the right. And as we've also stated, though, we're not looking to drive significant growth in the marketplace. We believe that marketplace can be a single-digit grower. And we're very committed to that endeavor. But we're not going to make investments to try to move beyond that. But that's something that we're very committed to.
Quite frankly, with Caleb and Eren and the work they're doing, I have a lot of confidence that we're going to get there. I'll also state and remind that the consumer business now is less than 40% of our total revenue. So as Udemy continues to grow and outpace the growth on the consumer side, the weight of the consumer revenue has less and less impact, right? And as we trend to 70/30, which is the direction we're going, 70% of our revenue from Udemy, 30% from consumer business. So that's a little bit of context. Going forward, we're going to be taking more of a career focus. Excited about this.
Some of the changes that you'll see over the course of the year and beyond in the consumer marketplace and the consumer experience to allow learners to come and really navigate from a career mindset or standpoint, which we know is something that is going to resonate. We've done the testing. We've done the surveys and done the work. And that's something right now that our teams are working on. And as we get closer to it, we'll pull the veil back a little bit and share a little bit more around how that's going to manifest and look. But we know that the majority, the vast majority, over 80%, close to 90% of the folks that come to our platform come to develop professional skills for the purposes of economic impact, right? So we're going to align the experience on the site to why folks are coming.
As I mentioned, more to come. We're convinced that that's going to have a pretty material impact on not only the experience, but revenue and growth as we move forward.
That makes sense. Sarah, given the sort of more difficult macro environment, and we've seen obviously top-line growth slow a little bit, the company's really pivoted its focus towards operational efficiency. And you've set some pretty impressive targets for EBITDA margin expansion over the next several years. They get to roughly 20% margins by fiscal 2027. Can you talk about how much of this comes from operational efficiency versus improving leverage in the business model over the next few years here?
Yeah. One thing I'd like to point out is we're focused on operational efficiency, but also being very balanced. So really balancing growth and profitability. And we've set out a few targets. The first is for 2025. On our last call, we shared that we would be delivering $70 million, at least in EBITDA, for the year. We have a $130-$150 million target for 2026, and then a 20% target in the following year in 2027. A number of things and initiatives will help get us there. The first is we shared on our Q3 call that we identified $50 million in cost savings from operational efficiency initiatives. We had an original target of $25 million. So really pleased with the team for being really focused on operational efficiency and targeting our investments where they're going to have the most impact.
As a reminder, those cost savings will start after we get through the fourth quarter and the first quarter. We were transitioning some of our teams overseas into lower-cost geographies. So that is one big step forward in achieving those EBITDA targets. We also have about four and a half points that are really baked in from the instructor revenue share changes that we've already announced and the continued mix shift of our revenue toward Udemy Business because that business has a higher gross margin profile. We'll get another point and a half from gross margin improvements, particularly customer support and customer success optimization and leverage over time.
And another four points that'll come from operating leverage, primarily in sales and marketing, especially as we continue to focus up market where those unit economics are stronger and as we build out self-service capabilities to drive unit economics on that side of things. So all of those things combined give us a lot of visibility and confidence in delivering on our EBITDA, but again, being very balanced with the growth profile that we've talked about, which is after we get through this transition year of 2025, Udemy being a sustainable double-digit grower, consumer very modest single-digit growth. And we're excited about it. We continue to deliver and overdeliver on our EBITDA targets.
That's great to hear. Yeah. I think a nice balance on the growth and profitability side really sets an attractive fundamental profile. Maybe with the last few minutes, just touch on a couple of quicker topics. But first is on the consumer side of the business, you obviously talked about the massive amount of flow of traffic we see to the website on an annual basis. We start to see this change in the search environment with Google AI Overviews, and it's affected sort of traffic to some of the education content vendors. Are you seeing any impacts from those changes? And do you have to do anything different on the marketing side to sort of drive discoverability on the Udemy platform?
It's a good question, Ryan. Yes, we're looking at it, as you can imagine. It's something we're paying a lot of attention to because now we all have the ability on Google to just do a normal Google search or click on Gemini and go. So we're not seeing a significant impact yet. But we're anticipating as more and more folks become adept at understanding the difference between just a standard Google search and Gemini and when to use the respective capabilities, that invariably we could see more traffic start to ship that actually starts to impact our search results. So definitely something we're paying attention to. Don't have more detail to share on that other than very aware, not having a material impact today, paying a lot of attention to it, make sure that we're adapting and adjusting as necessary.
Makes sense. Obviously, to continue to drive the growth in the business, one of the core tenets of that at the core is more content, right? And you get more content from more and high-quality creators. So we're now a little bit over a year removed from the instructor fee changes. Just curious to get an update on what sort of content creator instructor retention has been like as you've kind of processed through these changes over the past year and kind of continue to roll them out.
Yeah. I have no concerns at all about instructor retention. Full stop. And we'll talk again more about this at the next earnings call. But we're seeing really strong momentum with respect to new instructors on platform, as well as content creation on a quarter-over-quarter basis. So for us, the way we're viewing that is that's in the past. That's gone. That's behind us now. We had a very strong instructor summit in addition to the data I just shared that we got our top 100 instructors together, flew out and met face-to-face and spent three days together. Again, they are the lifeblood of this business. So we treat those relationships as near and dear to our long-term success. And the feedback we got from those instructors was overwhelmingly positive. They understand, although not thrilled with the change, but understand the reasons why.
Right now, all in the boat and all in to help us continue to get Udemy back to double-digit growth, which is really the catalyst that fuels their long-term economic opportunity here. Lastly, I would say we've had zero of our top instructors decide to opt out and transition off the platform. Right now, I feel really good about the work our teams have done in partnership with our instructors and the momentum we're seeing from a numbers perspective. Again, we'll share more about that in the next earnings call.
Excellent. Maybe lastly, since the IPO, Udemy has really driven growth solely via organic investment. But as you stand here today, you've got $360 million or so of cash on the balance sheet, no debt. Is M&A something you contemplate as an effective use of cash at this point? And if so, are there any functional areas you think you look at to continue to enhance the value Udemy provides to its customers?
Yeah. Ryan, we continue to remain very active from a corporate development M&A perspective. We don't have anything right now that we're either late stage or progressing and close. But there's definitely opportunity out there. We believe there's going to be opportunity. And as I've said in the past, when we find the right opportunity, we will strike. We've got a solid balance sheet, as you just alluded to. We've executed a very successful share buyback. But we are very committed to keeping dry powder on hand so that we can take advantage of an opportunity, whether it be an acquisition that's going to give us geographic expansion faster than we would do organically.
It very well could be learning modality or a capability that we want to bring on platform that we don't have today that would be complementary, both in the enterprise segment as well as on the consumer side, and we're looking at that intently, as well as there could be opportunities to, as we're taking more of a career focus and career orientation on the consumer side that will flow into the enterprise side. In support of that shift, there could be opportunities for us as well that we're taking a look at, so all said, absolutely active, want to put those dollars and that capital to work when the right opportunity presents itself, and that's where we're at.
Excellent. Well, we're out of time for today. Greg, Sarah, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed the discussion. And thanks to all of you that logged in and listened to the Fireside Chat. Good luck to everyone with the rest of the conference. And have a great day.
Thanks so much, everybody. Thanks, Ryan.
Thanks, Ryan. Take care.