Udacity, the online learning and talent transformation platform, has announced the additions of York Poon as Chief Product Officer and Aparna Vemuri as Chief of Staff to its executive team.
York joins with more than twenty years of experience in building innovative products, most recently from the AI-powered talent intelligence platform eightfold.ai. Aparna brings more than a decade of operations experience, joining from the edtech company Degreed.
York will oversee Udacity’s Product, Design and Content teams, utilizing his product experience from companies such as eightfold.ai, Globality, Upwork, and Elance. While at eightfold.ai, he worked closely with public, private, and government entities, which he will continue to do as Udacity expands its growing enterprise and government client base.
“Udacity’s focus on building strong skills-based programs means that global companies can continue to deliver on digital transformation initiatives by upskilling employees in cutting-edge areas such as AI, cybersecurity, and data science,” said York. “As I join the team, I’m looking forward to using my experiences to help shape Udacity’s product and cement our market leadership position.”
In her role as Chief of Staff at Udacity, Aparna will oversee the company’s operational rhythms, processes, and procedures. She brings over a decade of experience in Customer Experience and Operations, including her previous role at Degreed, where she served as the VP of Business Operations. She has also led solutions engineering organizations from infancy to maturity at 3 different growth stage start-ups, including Branch and Kahuna.
“Udacity is obsessed with building a better way to learn digital skills — which suits my own passion in using metrics to design better processes and, by extension, even better products,” added Aparna. “It’s an exciting time to be joining the company as we continue to power this global digital transformation.”
Arya has been a part of the Content & Research Team at Hrnxt.com. She is a keen observer of economic developments, emerging businesses, people in business and keeps a tab on latest happenings in the business environment.