Name: Skillshare
Quick Pitch: Skillshare turns cities into classrooms and all of their residents into potential teachers.
Genius Idea: Creating an open, online marketplace for offline classes.
Skillshare co-founder Michael Karnjanaprakorn is very good at poker. So good, in fact, that he felt comfortable entering the World Series of Poker last year and that all of his friends wanted to know his poker secrets when he returned.
When he agreed to host a poker class for them, the idea for Skillshare clikcked. Karnjanaprakorn and his co-founder Malcolm Ong had been looking for a way to “Bring On The Learning Revolution!” after seeing a TED talk of that title by creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson. Almost everyone knows how to do at least one thing that others want to learn, like how to play poker. Why not make cities classrooms and their inhabitants teachers?
Skillshare, which launched in April, is a marketplace for offline classes. Anyone can sell tickets for a class. Karnjanaprakorn’s poker class was one of the first to go up on the site, but since then more than 100 people have hosted classes on everything from “Crocheted Wire Jewelry Made Easy” to “How to Invest Your First $10,000“.
“We thought people would want to take fun and quirky classes, but in reality they wanted to take skill-based classes where they would walk out learning something tangible, whether it was making jewelery or programming, making your first app, walking out with a legal document that you need to start a company … those are the classes that are selling o ut like crazy,”...
