Former Coursera Senior Manager joins BitDegree as Product and Strategy Advisor
BitDegree’s newest advisor, Roberto Santana, is an entrepreneur and former Senior Product Manager at Massive Open Online Course provider, Coursera. Whilst at Coursera, he helped it scale to a global level and acquire over 27 million learners worldwide. Roberto has three engineering degrees, including an MBA from Stanford University in the United States.
Before Coursera, Roberto assisted with scaling several startups by managing their project and business development. These startups included Danish customer service software provider, Zendesk. Due to its rapid growth since founding in 2007, Zendesk relocated to San Francisco in 2009. Roberto was responsible for increasing its number of paying customers by 60 percent. Prior to working in Silicon Valley, Roberto was a Senior Engineer at Shell, where he led a cross-functional team responsible for the delivery of products, which accounted for $400M USD in refinery revenues.
Roberto flew from the Valley to visit the BitDegree office where he met our CEO Andrius Putna. Watch the short interview below to discover more about Roberto, why he joined BitDegree, and why he believes our project will start a revolution in education!
Transcript:
Andrius Putna: Roberto, welcome to our office!
Roberto Santana: Thank you, I’m pleased to be here!
AP: I wanted to ask you a few questions whilst you are here, so tell us more about your background.
RS: Absolutely! My name is Roberto Santana as you know. I am an engineer by training. I have three engineering degrees, and a Stanford MBA. Most recently, I was a product manager at Coursera where I led three initiatives. I led user acquisition, recommendations, and discovery.
AP: This is huge. We’re glad that you’re joining BitDegree, and why do you find BitDegree interesting?
RS: It’s a revolutionary approach to education. Blockchain enables three things that I think are very distinct. The first one is the possibility of having a decentralized educational platform. It would be the very first time that such a project takes place. The second one is having tokens. It allows you to solve many problems that I saw in my past experience between the different stakeholders who are students, content providers, instructors, and then employers. The third piece that blockchain allows, is co-creation of value — the more that the community contributes, the more valuable it becomes. This is a virtual cycle.
AP: How do you think BitDegree will revolutionize education?
RS: Many of us have had the fortune of travelling to many countries, particularly the third world. What ends up happening, is that many people cannot afford to go school. They drop out because they don’t have the money, and they have to make a living. Many competitors — including a former employer — talk about giving content away for free. But we all know that free is not enough. So now, for the very first time, you have a system and the possibility of earning whilst you learn, and earning whilst you teach others. This [BitDegree] just changes everything.
AP: This is what we are doing here! So, thank you for joining us. It’s nice to have you!
RS: You’re welcome!
BitDegree is sure that Roberto’s experience in MOOCs and online education with Coursera, plus his proven background in assisting startups with massively scaling-up, will lead to BitDegree meeting its growth targets. Moreover, Roberto is the third Stanford alumni — alongside Dr. James K. Scarborough and Electronic Arts co-founder Jeff Burton — to join BitDegree’s team of international advisors.
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