Skillshare

Life and Times of Skillshare - Vol. 1

Wow. It’s been a crazy busy week for the Skillshare team. We released a major update for the website, created a new product video (above), got a lot of press, & made some key hire(s)!

PRODUCT

Class Listings & Idle Class: Our team has been cracking this Rubik’s Cube feature for the past month. On most sites, after an event ends, the event kind of disappears into the ether. On Skillshare, all of our classes never disappear (they now act like listings), so people can browse your class forever. Now, after a class ends, it moves to an “idle” state until you make it “live” again.

Teach Again: As a teacher, we made it extremely easy for you to teach a class again. Simply, click on the “teach again” button and enter a new date/time/location/price and you’ll be good to go!

Sharing, Sending & Commenting: It’s no secret that we heart Facebook, so we’ve integrated the Like, Send & Comment features throughout Skillshare. Now, you’ll be able to share your classes with your friendos, co-workers, and la familia. We’ve also integrated Facebook Comments so that you can chat with students and teachers. And lastly, we also added a Twitter/Tweet button for those that have massive followers. (As a team, we made a conscious decision to focus on key features for our community (which I’ll share below) and not reinvent the wheel with features like commenting, etc.)

On Deck: Next, we’ll be working on integrating reviews for classes. And adding a new feature that will allow you to build your own personal curriculum & learning network. More details coming soon!

ANNOUNCEMENTS & PRESS

Funding: This week, Techcrunch announced our latest investment round from Founder Collective, SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, and a roster of other great angel investors (link). We’re very excited to have such a great group supporting our mission to disrupt education and democratize learning.

Press: Over the past month, we were lucky to receive some great coverage from The Next Web (link), Daily Candy (link), Huffington Post (link), Forbes (link), Paper Magazine (link), Collaborative Consumption (link), MTV (link), Tasting Table (link), Swiss Miss (link), Beta Beat (link), and 100+ points on Hacker News (link).

NEW HIRES

Danya Cheskis-Gold joins our team as the Skillshare Community Manager. Previously, Danya spent 4 years as a Recruitment Director for Teach For America. It was almost too perfect for her to join our team : )

Peter Boyce II joins as our Founder Apprentice for the summer. Peter is currently a student at Harvard and previously worked at Bad Boy Records. We hope he doesn’t bring the curse here. Kidding!

We’re always looking for awesome “seals” to join our team here in New York. If you want to make the world a better place through education, join our team.

This post was written by Michael Karnjanaprakorn, CEO/Co-founder of Skillshare.