Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Coursera First Quarter Fiscal Year 2021 Earnings Call. And please be advised that today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Cam Carey, Head of Investor Relations. Mr. Carey, you may begin.

Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q1 earnings conference call. With me today is Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera's Chief Executive Officer; and Ken Hahn, our Chief Financial Officer. Following their opening remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Our press release, including financial tables, was issued after market close and is posted on our Investor Relations website where this call is being simultaneously webcast. Additionally, downloadable versions of our prepared remarks and supplemental slides have also been made available. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure can be found in today's press release and supplemental presentation. Please note that all growth percentages refer to year-over-year change unless otherwise specified. Additionally, I remind you that all statements made during this call that relate to future results and events are forward-looking statements based on current expectations. Actual results and events could differ materially from those projected due to a number of risks and uncertainties. We assume no obligation to update our forward-looking statements. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Jeff.

Thanks, Cam, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our first earnings call. I've been a CEO for almost 25 years, and I have never been so excited about spending my time and talent to help build something so important. Coursera was launched in 2012 by two Stanford computer science professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. They put a few computer science courses up on the Internet, and they were stunned when more than 100,000 people signed up. These learners came from around the world, from many countries across many age groups and from many walks of life. And most importantly, they included people who did not otherwise have access to a great education. Our number one goal has been and always will be to serve learners. Now since those early days, Coursera has grown into a global learning platform with 82 million registered learners at the end of Q1. Our mission is to provide universal access to world-class learning so that anyone anywhere has the power to transform their life through learning. Today, I'm pleased to report we're delivering on that mission. We grew revenue 64% to $88.4 million. Each of our business segments, Consumer, Enterprise and Degrees, saw strong double-digit growth, reflecting the continued trend of individuals and institutions embracing online learning to develop skills for a digital future. In particular, we saw strong demand for our entry-level Professional Certificates that are redefining the opportunities people have to get jobs. Learners with no college degree or background in the field are coming to Coursera to earn a Professional Certificate and to learn the skills needed for an entry-level digital job in less than a year. Professional Certificates can also provide access to career pathways, which connect these learners with hiring partners looking to fill open digital roles with candidates from nontraditional backgrounds. But it's not just career pathways. Coursera also offers degree pathways to learners who complete certain entry-level Professional Certificates with our university partners able to award academic credit towards a college degree. Programs like this powered by institutional collaboration between universities, businesses and governments allow anyone to develop skills online at low cost, earn a Professional Certificate, get a job and then start their degree while working. This is what the future of learning looks like for many adults, and it is being driven by several global fundamental forces at play. Our world is accelerating driven by technology and globalization. The force of technology, especially the Internet, cloud computing, social media, mobile and AI, is transforming industry after industry. And just about every person in every job needs to keep learning throughout their life to stay relevant in a fast-changing workplace. But higher education, one of the largest industries in the world at $2 trillion, has seen relatively little innovation over the past three centuries. Traditional college degrees are not affordable to many people. Their monolithic, four year structure doesn't meet the needs of lifelong learners. Degrees often lack relevance to today's employers, and they're not designed for working professionals who don't want to quit their job or move their families to a college campus to get a college degree. Coursera is a platform that is enabling the digital transformation of higher education and adult learning more broadly. Our platform is transforming the way learners learn. It is transforming the way educators teach. It is transforming the way employers upskill and reskill their employees. And unlike many other platforms, Coursera is more enabler than disruptor because Coursera works directly with leading universities and higher education to enable them to do a better job meeting the needs of all learners in this new digital world. We believe the world needs high-quality education to be more accessible, and the need for this kind of change has never been more urgent. 1.3 billion people around the world are projected to reach working age over the next 10 years, and they'll be entering a labor market that looks nothing like what we've ever seen before. The world is becoming more digital, and jobs that are repeatable and predictable are being automated by technology. Jobs most at risk of being automated, like freight movers, retail clerks and waiters, are typically held by lower-skilled workers making lower wages. These are also the jobs that have been most impacted by COVID-19. The pandemic has accelerated trends that have been at play for decades. We've been fast-forwarded to a new normal of online learning, digital skills, digital jobs and remote work. 84% of employers report that the pandemic has increased their intent to rapidly digitize work processes. And businesses and governments around the world are looking to upskill people so that they have the knowledge, the skills and the credentials to enter digital jobs. We believe that the Coursera global learning platform is designed to meet this challenge with a number of advantages over other players in the market that now I'll discuss in more detail. First is our educator partners. Coursera has a three sided platform that connects learners, educators and institutions in a global learning ecosystem. Our large, growing learner base and global brand makes us an attractive partner to educators who want to reach a global audience of learners and deliver high-quality, affordable education at low cost. More than 150 universities and 60 industry partners have come to Coursera to teach the world, and we're proud to have recently welcomed more, including 10 new university partners spanning the globe from the US and Latin America to the Middle East and Asia; and just last week, a new collaboration with industry partner, Microsoft, with a beginner specialization on Microsoft Azure to help kickstart our learners' cloud careers. Additionally, our enterprise channel allows these partners to also address the evolving needs of the workplace. More than 6,000 institutions, businesses, governments and campuses have used Coursera to upskill and reskill individuals in data science, cloud computing, business and many other skills required to compete in today's economy. Whether learners need to quickly grasp a new skill at work or pursue life-transforming degrees at their own pace, the power of our global ecosystem allows industry and university partners to continuously deliver more job-relevant skills, content and credentials and to do this at greater scale and lower cost. The second big advantage is our content catalog. Our stackable system of branded, high-quality, freemium content enables us to attract learners at low cost and serve them at a range of price points, from free to $45,000 for a master's degree. Content on Coursera is modular and stackable, designed to meet the needs of learners across all stages of their lifelong journey. Bite-sized learning, like hands-on projects and short courses, can build towards a broader course of study, such as a professional certificate or multiyear, accredited bachelor and master's degrees. And our catalog of world-class branded content and credentials continues to grow. At Coursera Conference last month, I was proud to announce some exciting new products from our educator partners, including: five new degrees from leading international universities, including the first degree programs on Coursera from universities in Brazil and India; six MasterTrack programs from leading universities around the globe, including our first MasterTrack program from an Ivy League university, our first Spanish-language business MasterTrack certificate and our first MasterTrack program from Australia; and three additional entry-level Professional Certificates from leading technology companies, including IBM and Salesforce, for today's most in-demand skills. With these recent additions, the Coursera catalog now includes: over 1,000 guided projects that offer hands-on learning; more than 5,000 courses and 550 specializations; over 40 certificates, including Professional Certificates that require no college degree; and now 30 bachelor's and master's degrees. The final competitive advantage I'll mention is innovations to our learning platform. To further enhance the learning experience on Coursera and make it easier for educators to create in-demand content, our product team continues to introduce a number of new platform innovations. For learners, we're introducing real-time, personalized content recommendations, preferred language subtitle translations for over 2,000 top courses and WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility for learners of all abilities. Innovations for educators include scalable tools to author content efficiently and effectively, including upload-based authoring and LMS content ingestion to Coursera, which speeds up the authoring process. And innovations for institutions include the Data Science Academy and SkillSets to help organizations develop, measure and benchmark skills. Individually, our key advantages, including leading educator partners, world-class, branded content and credentials and continuous product innovation, increase scale, reduce acquisition costs and increase the value of customers on Coursera. But the real power is the way that these advantages reinforce each other on Coursera's unified platform and produce a flywheel effect as a growing selection of content and credentials attracts more individuals and institutions, which in turn motivates educator partners to create more content and credentials. We believe that the shift in higher education is only in the early innings, and we see many opportunities to drive growth for Coursera in the coming years and decades ahead. First, we will continue to invest in our growing enterprise channels using a land-and-expand strategy that focuses on acquiring new customers and efficiently growing our relationships with existing customers. In particular, we launched our Coursera for Campus offering in October of 2019, and we see a large market opportunity developing as universities and colleges around the world turn to online learning to keep pace in a digital world. Second, on the degrees side, we will look to grow the number of students in current degree programs and to expand the number of degree programs offered on Coursera. Today, more than 160 university partners author courses on Coursera, but fewer than 20 of them currently offer degree programs on Coursera. We believe there is a big opportunity for many more university partners to offer degree programs on Coursera. Third, we will continue to grow our learner base and build our brand, investing in increasing the number of registered learners on our platform. We will also continue to grow our content and credentials catalog and our network of educator partners. And finally, we are seeing some of our fastest growth in emerging economies, and we will invest in localizing certain content, pricing, payments and content discovery. When I look at the fundamental trends driving our growth, branded, high-quality content, world-class educator partners and a scalable platform model continuously delivering new innovation, I believe that Coursera is in a unique position to deliver the in-demand skills, programs and degrees that our learners and learners around the world need today and going forward. And now I'd like to turn it over to Ken to discuss our financial results in more detail. Ken?

Thanks, Jeff, and hello, everyone. Our first quarter performance marked a strong start to the year as we continued to build on the robust momentum we saw throughout 2020. Total Q1 revenue of $88.4 million was up 64% as compared to the year ago quarter driven by strong execution across all three of our business segments. For the remainder of the call, I will discuss key operational metrics as well as non-GAAP financial measures excluding pro forma adjustments, unless otherwise noted. Gross profit was $49.6 million, up 71% from a year ago and represented 56.2% of revenue. That gross margin percentage was approximately 230 basis points higher than the year ago quarter. Let's look at the two components of our cost of services and how they have changed in the past year. The first is our content costs. Content costs will vary depending on the revenue mix amongst our segments and the content margin rate for each of these businesses. To illustrate the effect of mix shift, in rough terms, our Consumer business has a 57% content margin. Our Enterprise business has a 68% content margin, and our Degrees business is 100% margin given it has no content costs. So the relative mix of volume affects our overall gross margin rate. Over time, we expect this to be a significant driver of our overall financial performance and profitability as our Enterprise and Degrees segments become a larger portion of our total sales, driving structurally expanding gross margins. The content margin percentage rate for each of those segments can also vary. This quarter, our Consumer segment content margin rate increased from 54% to 57% year-over-year due to a larger consumption of lower-revenue share content. The second component of cost of services is non-content costs. On a year-over-year basis, our non-content costs decreased as a percentage of total revenue from 10.7% to 9.7%, resulting in a 100 basis point improvement in overall gross margin. Next, I'll provide some details of our operating expenses. But first, I'd like to be sure we are clear about definitions as related to stock-based compensation. In Q2, we expect a large stock-based compensation charge associated with restricted stock units for which amortization began with the completion of our IPO. The non-GAAP income statement measures that follow in today's remarks exclude stock-based compensation and related payroll tax. Please refer to the reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results in the appendices of our earnings release and supplemental presentation for additional detail. Total operating expense was $62.7 million or 71% of revenue compared to 76% in Q1 of last year. Sales and marketing expense represented 35% of total revenue, down from a prior 37% as there were lower investments in media spend in Q1 this year. We expect our overall sales and marketing expense in 2021 to represent a similar percentage of total revenue as in 2020. Research and development expense was 23% of revenue versus 27% in the year ago period as our strong growth has provided higher leverage. We expect our overall R&D expense in 2021 to represent a similar percentage of revenue as in Q1 of this year. General and administrative expense was 13% of revenue versus 12% in the prior year given personnel, consulting and systems investments ahead of our IPO. We expect this higher expense as a percentage of revenue to continue in 2021. Net loss was $13.4 million or 15.1% of revenue, and our adjusted EBITDA loss was $10.1 million or 11.5% of revenue. We have been consistent in our communication that 2021 will be an investment year, focusing on growth in our learner base through sales and marketing, expanding our content offering and driving innovation on our platform. We anticipate that we'll continue to incur losses for the foreseeable future, though we plan to incrementally demonstrate scale and leverage on an annual basis. Free cash flow was a use of $8.6 million or $1.3 million better than the $9.9 million figure a year ago. Looking at the balance sheet. We ended the quarter in a strong cash position. As of March 31, we had over $280 million of unrestricted cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities. On a pro forma basis, taking into account the $525 million of net proceeds from our IPO we closed in April, total cash equivalents and marketable securities would be over $800 million with no debt. Regarding capital allocation, we are in the early stages of our life cycle and believe we have substantial growth opportunities ahead of us. We intend to continue to invest aggressively to pursue these opportunities and ensure ongoing scaling and leverage in our business model. Turning to our business segments. We report our results in three segments: Consumer, Enterprise and Degrees. While each segment benefits from our unified platform of content and credentials, technology and data, they are unique in how revenue is generated and the associated segment margin, which we define as segment revenue less content costs in our audited financial statements. First, let's discuss our Consumer business. Consumer revenue was $51.9 million, up 61% year-over-year on broad-based strength across all regions and strong initial adoption of recently launched Professional Certificates. While we have a freemium model where learners can view course lectures and other content at no cost, we earn Consumer revenue when a learner purchases a specialization or Professional Certificate subscription, subscribes to Coursera Plus or pays for a certificate of completion. Segment gross profit was $29.7 million or 57% of Consumer revenue as we benefited from a lower content cost rate during the quarter. Our Consumer segment is important because it serves as a top-of-funnel source for our Enterprise and Degrees segments, and we added 5 million new registered learners during the quarter for a total base of 82 million. Next is Enterprise. Enterprise revenue was $24.5 million, up 63%, with strong growth in new and existing customers across all institutional categories. We earn Enterprise revenue when these institutions, businesses, governments and campuses purchase seat licenses that provide access to our partners' courses, specializations and professional certificates in order to upscale and reskill their employees, citizens and students. Our net retention rate for Paid Enterprise Customers was 113%. Segment gross profit was $16.6 million or 68% of Enterprise revenue, which was slightly lower on a percentage basis than the prior year due to a lower content cost rate in Q1 of 2020. And finally, our Degrees segment. We earn Degrees revenue when learners take a university degree program hosted on Coursera. Our Degrees revenue was $12 million, up 81% as prior student cohorts scale and new students embrace our expanded offerings. With the recent announcement of five new degree programs, our portfolio now includes 30 degrees from university partners spanning the globe from the US and Latin America to the Middle East and Asia. And our total number of Degrees students reached 13,493, up 88% from a year ago. Segment gross margin was 100% of Degrees revenue as there's no content cost attributable to Degrees segment. Students pay tuition directly to the university and the university pays us a fee based on the amount of tuition. Now moving on to our financial outlook. We have fairly good visibility into the revenue on a quarter-to-quarter basis, particularly in our Enterprise and Degrees segments. However, we don't have perfect visibility as revenue in our Consumer segment is impacted by our large and growing registered learner base where individuals can pay in the form of onetime, single courses or as a subscription. For Q2, we're expecting revenue to be in the range of $89 million to $93 million. This represents a growth rate of 23% at the midpoint of the range versus Q2 of 2020. As a reminder, next quarter, we will begin to lap difficult compares from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Q2 of last year, our revenue grew more than 60% from the prior year. For adjusted EBITDA, we're expecting a loss in the range of $9.5 million to $12.5 million, which translates to an adjusted EBITDA margin of negative 12% at the midpoint. For full year 2021, we anticipate revenue to be in the range of $369 million to $381 million, representing nearly 28% growth at the midpoint of the range. For adjusted EBITDA, we're expecting a loss of $45.5 million to $52.5 million or an adjusted EBITDA margin of negative 13% at the midpoint. Our outlook for full year 2021 reflects additional investments in personnel-related costs, sales and marketing and product development as well as incremental general and administrative costs associated with being a public company. We manage our business for the long term and do not plan to optimize for any single quarter. We run our business on an annual cadence for expenses and adjusted EBITDA. As our business grows, we intend to continue to invest as we see opportunities to expand our competitive moats. We plan to pursue growth opportunities in the transformation of online learning while also demonstrating scale and leverage over time. Before passing to Jeff for closing comments, I'd like to summarize several highlights of our business model. First, in addition to the rapid sales growth we're experiencing, we expect to have clearer forward visibility on our top line in the years ahead as our mix of revenue evolves, including a greater contribution from the Enterprise and Degrees segments. Within Enterprise, our annual recurring revenue is growing strongly with customer cohort growth that increases predictability. This includes early customers, along with the layering of new customer cohorts as we sign multiyear contracts. Additionally, our Degrees business has even better forward visibility. Second, we believe we'll have ongoing structural gross margin expansion over the long term driven by a mix shift to higher-margin business and by our scaling platform. And finally, our business benefits from our freemium model, which enables us to attract new registered learners at low acquisition costs. In summary, we're proud of the business we've built, and we're just getting started. With our key advantages, we see a significant opportunity ahead of us to attract new learners, institutions and educators to the Coursera platform, rapidly grow revenue and expand our margin profile over time.

Before we open the call for questions, let me leave you with a few thoughts. We believe that learning has the power to transform our world, from illness to health, from poverty to prosperity and from conflict to peace. It has the power to transform our lives for ourselves, our families and our communities. No matter who we are or where we are, learning empowers us to change, to grow and to redefine what is possible. We believe that access to education creates more equal opportunity, and more equal opportunity creates a more just world. That's why in February, Coursera became a B Corp, which means that we have a legal duty to balance shareholder needs with the needs of society more broadly. We announced more than 18,000 scholarships for underserved learners with Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Goodwill, Black Girls Who Code and Women in Cloud. And on April 27, Time Magazine included Coursera in its 2021 100 Most Influential Companies list, alongside companies like Tesla, Airbnb, SpaceX and DoorDash. It's a testament to how the world views Coursera's ability to impact lives and the world. We embrace this responsibility wholeheartedly, and we always have. The desire to help, to serve, to move humanity forward was the reason that Andrew and Daphne started Coursera in the first place. It's what has drawn our employees to join Coursera and inspires us to work hard every day. And it is what has attracted leading universities and companies to join us in our mission. If we can unlock the full potential in every person, we will help transform lives and help transform the world. With that, let's get to Q&A. Can you please introduce the first question? Thanks.

And for our first question, we have Josh Baer from Morgan Stanley.

My question is on the COVID relief efforts. And as it relates to the enterprise side and just the timing of those efforts, wondering where we are as far as the monetization potential of converting some of those institutions from free to paid?

Obviously, we started doing the workforce recovery initiative back in March of 2020, and then the campus response was first with the campuses, and then the workforce recovery was with governments, and that was in April. I would say that we are starting to see an acceleration of uptake in the conversion of those free workforce recovery relationships with government agencies. That seems to be happening at a quicker pace. And I think one of the big reasons is the level of unemployment and the urgency of getting people back to work and into new digital jobs is definitely higher now than it was a year ago. Another thing that we're seeing is that most government agencies didn't have experience with online training programs. I mean they were doing it kind of the old way. They were all forced to embrace online-based workforce development programs. I think they're seeing how modern it is, how effective it is, how scalable it is, how cost-effective it is, how well it works in the pandemic environment is all working pretty well. So we're making good progress with the conversion efforts there. On the campus response initiative, we think it's a bigger opportunity just in terms of the number of institutions out there. We continue to move along, but different regions around the world have different policies and regulatory stances. Faculty have different levels of influence and power. I'd say we're making good, steady progress. It is not, in Q1, like a hockey stick of conversion on the campus side. We're seeing good, steady conversion of the pipeline that we have built in 2020.

If I could just ask Ken a quick one on Degrees. We know segment margins are 100%. I was hoping you could talk through some of the other costs of Degrees. What does OpEx look like for that segment?

So we do not plan to break out specific costs, of course, on the different segments of the operating line. But to discuss the structure and what it looks like, the biggest cost or the biggest group supporting that effort is the university partnership team who both bring in new universities, expand degrees and operate and help on a day-to-day basis with those clients to ensure that they have what they need. So there's a group dedicated to doing that, and that lives in our operating expenses.

Another thing I'll just add, Josh, is as you can probably imagine, we're a technology company. We love seeing human processes that are automatable. We're doing a lot on the back end to automate the capabilities associated with serving degree programs. And I'll also just point to a pretty big accomplishment that Andrew and Daphne and the team in the early days achieved, which is for the most part, when you look at course authoring, just single courses, those are pretty much all self-serve. Our partners know how to use the tools, the professor is not the author; they author, they post, and it goes through a QA process. But for the most part, that is self-serve, and we can see a lot of leverage over time as it relates to building more scalable, repeatable automated processes on the degree side as well.

One general add-on I'd add to that, which is why we haven't broken out these various costs is because, and it's part of the overall business model that benefits and helps us scale differently than other competitors, is the fact that that technology is used across all of the businesses. And so the only distinct one is the university partner people for that segment.

For our next question, we have Stephen Sheldon from William Blair.

Congrats on the successful IPO and strong first quarter. But first, I guess, within the Enterprise segment, really strong trends there this quarter and nice acceleration in Paid Enterprise Customer growth. Can you maybe give an update on the size of the direct sales force there and the trends you're seeing in productivity, especially for the additions you made to the enterprise sales force in the second half of 2020?

I would say, Stephen, that we utilized a significant portion of the surplus we received from the COVID tailwind in the second and third quarters. The sales and marketing figures for the third and fourth quarters indicate an increase in our direct sales team. We are progressing well with hiring and ramping up, and we are optimistic about our advancement in closing various opportunities in the enterprise sector. Everything appears to be on schedule. Ken, do you have anything to add?

Yes, just the hiring has been consistent to plan, and we pay a lot of attention to that because it's sales capacity. You asked the question for an obvious reason. And we're right on track with our sales capacity on the Enterprise group.

And then just continuing to see advertisements from Coursera on different media types. So can you maybe talk some about plans for marketing spend over the remainder of the year? And how much that could be helping brand awareness and pulling in more registered users in the Consumer segment?

Last year in Q4, not unlike some of the additions we made to the direct sales force, we also made some investments that were atypical in the portfolio of marketing mix. We had an interesting co-branded campaign with Disney Soul. We ran more TV than we had in the past just to see in different markets what the ROI might be. It left us feeling that we really love the basic freemium model. I mean it is hard to build cost effectively awareness and brand with just advertising dollars. So I would say that through those experiments as we roll into 2021, we are going to go with our pretty standard marketing mix. We're highly leveraged, love just a freemium model, high SEO, word of mouth, some affiliate marketing, which seems to do pretty well with our partners' content and credentials. But generally speaking, more in line with the kind of sales and marketing that we've been doing earlier in 2020 than we were in the later part of 2020. And you might see more TV advertisement; it might be the case that you're just noticing them more. We're not really pushing heavily dollars against that channel. Ken, anything you'd add to that?

I'm very glad you asked the question actually because we didn't have a Q4 earnings call because we weren't a public company. But we're hitting on something that will be a recurring theme, which is that as we plan our expenses, on an annual basis, we want to show leverage in the business. We plan to see EBITDA margins getting better year-to-year. We're not going to focus on that quarter-to-quarter, and the discussion we're having right now around Q4 is spot on. We expect to do that again in the future. We're going to manage the business to show more leverage and to get better on an annual basis. But in between, we may experiment and accelerate our spending within that band to capture this market.

For our next question, we have Terry Tillman from Truist.

I'll echo the congrats on the IPO and also on the quarter. Maybe the first question, I'll just throw it out there. In terms of specializations or the special certificates, maybe an update on how meaningful this is as a proportion of the business, where you see some of the most notable traction. And how does Microsoft fit into that? So unfortunately, that was a three-part first question. I have another one behind that.

As we think about specializations, these are a product that launched around 2014. It was one of the first times that the monetization of Coursera began taking off. The first specialization was the Johns Hopkins data science specialization. It was either four or five course series at a time when it was really difficult to earn any credential with data science. It attracted many advanced data science learners onto Coursera. When you think of specializations, generally, you'd be thinking business technology and data science, often from universities at intermediate or advanced levels. There's another similar product, also a multicourse series, subscription-based, which are Professional Certificates. These generally come from our industry partners, not universities. There are certain types of Professional Certificates, which are the entry-level Professional Certificates. These are created by Google and Facebook, as well as IBM. They're teaching you online in less than a year the skills that it takes for an entry-level, high-demand, well-paying job. Those entry-level Professional Certificates are what we are seeing a lot more uptake across almost every segment: consumer, business, campus, and government. We think that the portfolio is growing, and the higher incidence of unemployment really resonates with this offering. We put more texture around this in the script. We see promising numbers here, and we think that this is well-suited for today's job market.

Maybe the second question, I thought it might be easy, but maybe it's not an easy one. I don't know if you want to give this to Ken or you want to take it. But the vitality of the Consumer business going forward, the registered learners, I mean, you still are adding a nice amount. Obviously, it's not quite at the COVID levels. But we're going to get the question a lot about post-COVID. If there is such a thing, how does the vitality of your Consumer segment look?

It is a tough question, so I'll turn it over to Ken. No, let me give you a real quick sort of here's how we think about it. In the longer term, I want the top of the funnel, the number of registered learners, to be generally pacing with the business. So generally, we want to grow 30% or more per year. We want definitely double digits on that number over the longer term. Of course, you can generate more revenue by getting conversion rates higher and getting a shift in the mix. If we have more products to monetize, you get higher conversion rates. Overall, we do want to be growing the top of the funnel. I think on the revenue side of the Consumer segment, a lot of it will be these career-oriented credentials. In a world where unemployment is a significant issue and many are switching towards digital jobs, we think that this will provide double-digit, longer-term growth rates. Historically, it's been mid-teens to high-teens. We think we should be able to do that and better for some time.

For our next question, we have Ryan MacDonald from Needham.

I want to start in the Consumer segment. You talked about Pro Certs being quite strong in the quarter. Would love to understand how free to paid conversion has been trending in the quarter and if you're seeing any improvements there. And on top of that, has Coursera Plus contributed to any of the success at all?

Yes, I'll do it at a high level, and then I'll see if Ken wants to add anything. The Professional Certificates; one of the things that we are noticing is when we think about who's buying these; from the time in 2018, when we launched the first one, well over 75% of the people that bought that first one came from off-platform. There has been a question of whether they are monetizable. As we've launched more of these Professional Certificates, a higher and higher percentage of the monetization is coming from on-platform learners who are more representative of learners post-COVID. When someone's thinking about changing careers, the ROI they're assigning to that, the commitment they're assigning to it, the value they assign is causing them to be more likely to pay. So we see that these entry-level Professional Certificates do seem to be a compelling value proposition. Ken, anything you'd add?

And as a follow-up, just on the Enterprise segment, it looked like a near-record quarter in terms of new paid enterprise addition. Just curious what the role of Coursera for Business had in those strong additions and what you're hearing from enterprise organizations in terms of prioritizing reskilling and upskilling.

On the Enterprise side, we see that it's useful to look at the number of paying customers. Obviously, customers come in all shapes and sizes, so I think it's a useful metric. There could be a quarter that looks great and that number doesn't look so good or vice versa. A lot of this is reflecting the combination of businesses and governments realizing the world's changing. Given the rise of AI and digital transformation, they need to move faster in skilling people. We've not seen that need abate. In addition, governments seem to be much more interested now than they were pre-pandemic in using online skill training programs. So we see good uptake there, and I also note that campuses, in a tougher job market, are looking for credentials that distinguish themselves in the job market. We're seeing good tailwinds across all three types of enterprise institutions that support our growth.

Nothing to add there.

For our next question, we have Yun Kim from Loop Capital Markets.

Congrats on a solid start to the year, Jeff and Ken. Jeff, just a high-level strategic question around the international market opportunity. I assume that you're seeing different user dynamics or learner dynamics on conversion rate and preferences between US and international users. Also, I'm assuming there's a considerable difference in LTV, lifetime value, between US and international learners. Can you just talk about how you are balancing the different economics and dynamics between those two types of learners in your business, especially regarding the acquisition model?

A simple high-level way that we think about this is at different stages in someone's life, and also if you think regionally at the stock of human capital in a given region, it’s about creating human capital and then through employability turning those human capital skills into financial capital. If you don't have a lot of financial capital, you're not going to see high conversion rates. The longer-term play is clear; today, the highest conversion rates and revenue are coming from North America and Europe. As we build our funnel at low acquisition costs, we believe over time the international markets will mature, and that will create more opportunities for revenue growth.

And I think one minor increment on the consumer piece is that beyond institutions, we're getting credit for SEO search. The reason we have so much traffic is the quality of the content we have and the links to the universities. When topics come up in SEO search, consumers are naturally drawn to the site. So building on free content, SEO search as well as general brand awareness helps in building that funnel.

So along that line, Ken, was there any material change in the paid versus organic new learner acquisition mix this quarter? And how do you expect that to trend for the remaining of the year?

There were not any notable differences this quarter. We haven't provided projections. It's an independent effort that the marketing group primarily kicks off. So not much to say on future plans, but it's been consistent historically for the last couple of quarters.

And for our next question, we have Jason Celino from KeyBanc.

Maybe a follow-up to a previous question. As enterprise budgets recover this year and spending for a new version of hybrid work emerges, are you seeing any uptick from customer budget tailwinds for the Enterprise business right now?

I would say that not necessarily. It seems that in EMEA, right when COVID happened, there was emergency action to not fire or furlough people. It was more about training and engagement. I don't know that the budgets are necessarily coming from employers, but were subsidized by mostly EMEA governments. Now companies are stepping back in and saying we're reopening, and we need to skill our people. We haven't seen a big opening of the wallets as businesses are coming back online. I think it's been steady.

And then your academic partners likely know your learner base comes, like 80% from outside the US. But for your US colleges, if they look to digital learning to diversify and tap new markets of students, will they look to international students for these digital offerings? How do we think about that opportunity?

The primary value proposition we offer to educator partners is reaching a global audience. Pre-pandemic, it was about reaching more people. In a pandemic-influenced world, the ability to reach a global population helps build their brand. The demographics look much more favorable in emerging markets where there are a lot of young people growing the enrolled student population. The US demographics don’t seem as attractive long-term. We see partnerships securing international students becoming more important as we expand education offerings.

For our next question, we have Brian Peterson from Raymond James.

Just one question for me, and it's actually a follow-up to Jason's question. But Jeff, as you think about the Degrees business and how some of your partners would be looking to utilize that solution post-pandemic, when do you think we'll start to see an inflection point? I'm curious to get a higher-level comment on when people would really be looking to deploy that.

I think it's kind of a wide variety of responses. If you look at the degrees we've announced in the last six months, they have been disproportionately international. Degree partners who have already done one degree on Coursera are more likely to do multiple degrees on Coursera. I do think that if there's going to be an inflection, a part of it is globalization. If there's going to be significant growth, we expect the demographics and need for global education will contribute positively to that effect.

We have time for one last question. It's from Brett Knoblauch from Berenberg Capital.

I have one on student outcomes. I was just curious, maybe what you guys do different in the Degrees segment to keep engagement high and if you could offer any quantitative or qualitative data about student engagement and outcomes regarding the Degrees segment.

One of the things that's useful about degree credentials compared to other types of content on Coursera is that degree credentials are pretty well known. People have a good idea of what a college degree is. Because the degrees our university partners offer are generally identical to the on-campus program, employers don’t differentiate between earning it online or on-campus. Our understanding is that outcomes would generally be the same. We've heard only positive feedback from students and our university partners.

And then maybe just one quick follow-up. As I think about the Consumer segment progressing throughout the year, should we think about that potentially improving on a revenue base as we progress throughout the year, or is there difficult comps we should watch out for?

In year-on-year percentage terms, I would say no because we're not expecting to do 59% year-on-year revenue growth in the Consumer segment in 2021. In absolute dollars, Ken, generally speaking, how are you expecting us to play out over the next three quarters?

We don't guide to the individual segments, but what we've talked about is we have no reason not to expect it to continue in the low single digits as it did before COVID.

Thanks, everyone. That wraps the Q&A. A replay of this webcast will be available on our Investor Relations website along with the transcript in the next 24 hours. Thanks for joining us today.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.