Skillshare announced a $3.1 million round led by Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures today. The motto of the startup is pretty straight forward: “learn anything from anyone”. Launched in fall 2010 it is a community marketplace for offline lessons. It is basically the exact opposite to platforms like Udemy, Learnable or eduFire and when I came across the platform the first time, I especially liked the following part in the video that explains the concept of Skillshare.
No webcams, no downloads. Just real classes.
Skillshare wants to take on the education problem in the communities, on a grassroots level if you like. Or, as the founders Michael Karnjanaprakorn & Malcolm Ong wrote on the Skillshare blog today:
We created Skillshare to turn every community into a huge campus, every address into a classroom, and every neighbor into a teacher and student.
An online platform for local lessons and tutoring is of course not a brand new idea and I recently wrote a post at Disrupt Education on “Learning Unplugged – Find it on the Internet but Learn it in Real Life“. There is School of Everything, doMore, Coursehorse and of course TeachStreet. But as Dave Schappell points out in his blog post on the Skillshare funding today
… we see it as validation of the opportunity we’re all pursuing, and we anticipate many other entrants fast on our heels …
I think, we also need to mention Meetup here as back in June 2008 local community meetups around learning something were even featured in the video made by Lee LeFever of CommonCraft.
The idea described in the video is pretty much the same yet the platform seems to be just too broad and overwhelming for many people to find relevant local classes as a Meetup can be about anything. What Skillshare brings to the table is the focus on the learning vertical and the possibility to earn money by sharing your skills.
Besides the $3.1 million that will enable key hires and growth Skillshare attracted some high profile personas in the tech space like who offer classes via the platform. The biggest boost might come from Fred Wilson who announced today that he will teach MBA Mondays at the Union Square Ventures event space. Those classes will also be streamed live and recorded. The attendee fee will be donated to charity.
Website: Skillshare.com
Twitter: @Skillshare
