SkillShare
http://www.skillshare.com/
Elevator Pitch:
Skillshare is a marketplace of classes to learn anything (e.g. cooking, fashion, programming) from teachers in your community.
We are a community of learners: teachers and students fueled by common interests and driven by a passion to share real-world skills.
We want to allow people to create their own learning paths.
Founders (in 2011):
Mike Karnjanaprakorn
Malcolm Ong
Key ideas:
“The people who use Skillshare are those who are passionate and curious about learning and simply don’t want to stop adding to their skillsets or banks of knowledge. Skillshare only features classes that are creative, not normally accessible (either because they don’t exist in the traditional education world or they’re just normally wildly expensive, i.e., cooking classes), and relevant to today’s needs.”
Skillshare takes a 15 percent cut of the revenue teachers take in for their classes in exchange for the company’s hand in matchmaking students with teachers, and it just recently introduced a “schools” product to allow brands to market their own specialists as teachers for specific industry-related expertise.
“We don’t really see ourselves as a platform. We see ourselves as a community–an alternate route to learning.”
Vision from Union Squares Ventures and Spark Capital: "transform every community into a campus, every address into a classroom, and every neighbor into a teacher and student".
“If you could reinvent education for the twenty-first century what would that look like?”
Worth Reading/Watching:
Why we are builiding SkillShare (2011)