Sebastian Thrun had a nice gig. As Research Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and a Google Fellow, Thrun led the development of the Google self-driving car. But, Thrum just stepped down from Stanford to go start his own show.

Udacity is a free online university with a mission to “change the future of education”. The class currently being set up is a seven-week course that aims to teach anyone to build a search engine, no previous programming experience needed.

Thrun spoke at the Digital Life Design Conference about his ambitions for the program.