John Ciancutti

John Ciancutti joined Coursera in November 2013 as the first Chief Product Officer. Coursera is an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. John is a veteran leader in Silicon Valley, known for his long and successful career at Netflix, where he went from one of the first engineers to running all of product engineering, and more recently for his leadership at Facebook. During his twelve year tenure at Netflix, John led personalization, search, social integration, and the Netflix user experience on web, phones, tablets and television-connected devices. In his earlier years as a software engineer, he helped design and develop the first personalization systems for the company, developing Netflix’s reputation as one of the most advanced movie recommendation services in the world. Following Netflix, John moved to Facebook, where he led product management and engineering as Director of Engineering for products such as Facebook Pages, Location Services, Photos and Video. John graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1997 with a B.S. in Computer Science and a focus in artificial intelligence and adaptive systems. He is a member of the 2012 Class of Henry Crown Fellows and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network at the Aspen Institute.