Skillshare – Company Overview

Skillshare, Inc. is a U.S based online service that provides informative internet content. Skillshare is home to a massive online community where users can learn and share knowledge and skills about entrepreneurship, fashion, music, technology, animation, and branding. 

Skillshare exists simply as a provider of an online global learning community intended to offer the skills and expertise for those who are willing to learn them. It supports a broad community that offers classes on any type of skill, from baking cupcakes to raising startup capital to varying fields in design, business, and technology, enabling members to harness their creative power and learn skills in an enhanced way.

History

Skillshare’s site was brought online in April of 2011 by Michael Karnjanaprakorn and Malcolm Ong in New York City. Micheal had been working at Hot Potato where he led the product team. Hot potato is a social media product bought by Facebook. Skillshare raised $3.1 million by August 2011, in Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. Two years later, in late 2013, Skillshare hare had had been able to raise $4.65 million in funding, and $6 million by February 2014. They entered an agreement with financing co-led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. This brought their total funding up to $10 million.

In April 2012, Skillshare held a one-day discussion on the current educational system and how to reform it. The talk was called  the Penny Conference and it had some interesting speakers such as Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Codecademy’s cofounder Zach Sims, and Pencils of Promise founder Adam Braun.

Then in August 2012, Skillshare launched 15 self paced, online courses. Thi allowed students to collaborate to complete a project. In November of the next year, Skillshare hosted over 250 courses, and it launched its School of Design.Skillshare then went on to join forces with Levi’s to launch the School of MakeOurMark in October 2013. The school would focus on individual creativity with courses in photography, tattooing, and various forms of illustration.

Skillshare got membership model for $9.95 a month in March 2014. They also announced an open platform, where anyone could be a course instructor, later that year. They also included a free membership option to watch a limited amount of class content each month.

 Skillshare raised $12 million in Series B funding in May 2016. This number kept rising because as of July, 2018, their Series C funding had hit $28 million.

Skillshare, had over 7,000 premium classes and more than 2,000 free classes available by March 2019. Its also added a new feature; “Groups” this allowed members to connect with other creators, share work, and take skills to the next level through engaging discussions and prompts. With this, Skillshare users could connect more easily and  ask questions, give and receive feedback, or simply discuss the interests.

Skillshare; How it works and courses it offers

Skillshare is a unique site and so, it works somewhat differently from other online learning programs and massive open online courses. This is most likely because it’s more than just a training platform where you watch lecture video footage for countless hours. Skillshare’s unique learning program aims to engage students through providing interactive sessions and project-based classes.

Skillshare’s system makes it so that Students enrolled in any of the classes learn by actually performing, not just by watching a long video of someone performing a lecture(akin to other learning sites). This creates an atmosphere of learning through hands-on projects, which are then posted to the class’ project gallery. Skillshare also gives way for collaboration by encouraging students to communicate with each other, complete assignments given via video by the teacher, as well as receive or provide feedback back and forth between other students on the class’ discussion board.

Skillshare gives users the opportunity to consume a wide variety of content, courses, and presentations pertaining to a plethora of subjects. It also allows professionals and learned individuals who want to share their skills as instructors to teach by simply creating and publishing a class. Being an online learning platform,

Skillshare’s design and framework allows students to learn new skills through the aid of networking and support. It allows them to give feedback to their online classes as well as receive pointers and advice from fellow students and instructors.  It has a select list of features and tools that are designed to promote and nurture creativity. Skillshare’s learning community offers a wide range of features beneficial to both students and instructors. Here are some of them.

  • Free classes
  • Group classes
  • High-quality learning materials and courses
  • Complete catalog of premium classes
  • Referrals
  • Building channels
  • Networking
  • Feedback functionality
  • The shared learning experience
  • Class creation and publishing tools
  • Learning through support
  • Offline viewing for premium students

The platform has over 16,000 classes across a plethora of disciplines for teams. With these, you can build your organization with productivity and innovation. Skillshare gives SMBs the chance to enroll entire teams and departments. With concise usage reporting, you are able to monitor the progress of each individual team member.

The platform has a number of courses including advertising, business, design, fashion and style, film and video, food and drink, music, photography, gaming, technology, and writing and publishing often taught by the most renunced industry leaders. All online courses are self-paced, so you can move at your own speed.

There are some platform instructors that should be noted, they include Seth Godin (entrepreneurship), Jessica Hische (lettering), Young Guru (audio mixing and recording), Yuko Shimizu (inking and drawing techniques), Marc Ecko (entrepreneurship and brand creation), Gary Vaynerchuk (social media strategy),Guy Kawasaki (entrepreneurship) and Paula Scher (graphic design). Skillshare launched Skillshare Originals in June 2018. Skillshare Originals is a collection of courses produced by Skillshare’s in-house team

Skillshare’s group mode comes with an Admin Mode, which allows users to swap out seats in classes as their roster changes. Lastly, Skillshare’s online learning platform allows your team to learn on-the-go with offline access via their mobile application, whilst the company gets discount pricing based on the number of personnel you have enrolled in a class.

Headquarters and Revenue

The company has its headquarters in New York. Skillshare has a revenue of $15M, and 185 employees. Skillshare has raised a total of $50M in funding. The main competitors of Skillshare are Udemy, Udacity and Lynda. Skillshare has 2.6M fans on Facebook and 79.1K followers on Twitter, as of February 2020,.

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