Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Coursera Adds Kleiner Perkins Partner Lila Ibrahim as President

Lila Ibrahim, an operating partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, will become president at the online education startup Coursera.

That’s a lot of leadership at the top of the growing startup, which was founded less than two years ago. Ibrahim will focus on engineering and internal operations, while co-founder and co-CEO Daphne Koller will continue to lead university operations, and co-founder and co-CEO Andrew Ng will lead pedagogy and business development, said a spokesperson.

Coursera, the massive open online course — a.k.a. “MOOC” — provider has jumped ahead of rivals in securing relationships with top universities around the world. It now has 86 university and institution partners, 428 courses, 4.4 million registered students and 9.4 million course enrollments.

Ibrahim had worked closely with the company for the past year, as Kleiner Perkins invested in both a $22 million Series A round and a $43 million Series B round.

Ibrahim had been at Kleiner Perkins for three years after 18 years at Intel, starting as a microprocessor designer and ultimately working on online education there. At Kleiner Perkins, she worked with portfolio companies, for instance helping arrange the recent deal for Carlos Slim to invest $40 million in Shazam. Ibrahim is also co-founder of Team4Tech, a nonprofit that helps bring education technology to developing countries. She has an electrical engineering degree from Purdue.

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus