Mr. Karnjanaprakorn (Photo: About.Me)

The Principal of New York

Before Mayor Bloomberg signed up for Codecademy, before General Assembly signed its first lease in the Flatiron—even before Peter Thiel started paying kids to skip school—Skillshare founder and CEO Mike Karnjanaprakorn was trying convince New York investors to finance his peer-to-peer learning startup. He billed the company as the Etsy of education, since it set up a market for anyone to teach—and learn—practical skills through an affordable hands-on class, starting at $25 a night. (The hybrid online classes that Skillshare launched this August, with Livestream office hours, start at just $20 a night.)

But in 2010, two years before The New York Times dubbed 2012, “The Year of the MOOC” (massive open online course), venture capitalists weren’t biting. As with hardware and clean tech, investors begged off education—burned by one too many startups shut out by the gatekeepers of traditional K through 12 and higher ed. “Some of my favorite notes that we got from investors were, ‘We don’t think education is a big market,’ ‘We think education is a shrinking market’ and ‘We don’t think people enjoy learning at all after they graduate,’” he said. “‘You have to get a master’s in education before you can teach,’ was another.”

Economic realities like persistent unemployment, mounting student debt and an army of jobless graduates without the skills to fill open positions quickly proved otherwise. The time was right for Skillshare’s modernized approach. Through its online platform, the company promotes the classes, procures students, processes credit cards and books rooms for in-person offerings—often in a tech company’s lounge or lecture hall—all in exchange for a percentage of the sales.

In the early days, Mr. Karnjanaprakorn, whose previous employer Hot Potato was acquired by Facebook, and his co-founder Malcolm Ong, a product manager at game-maker OMGPOP, gravitated toward the kind of programming and entrepreneurship classes they wanted to take, like Mr. Karnjanaprakorn’s popular course, “Launch Your Startup Idea for Less Than $1,000.” As the Silicon Alley refrain goes, meeting tech people is easy: just take a Skillshare class and drop by General Assembly.

Skillshare’s emphasis on nonacademic classes with real-world application paved the way for other local players like CourseHorse, Lore and Codecademy. Signing up felt less like an indulgence than a practical necessity. “There’s a real-world application” to Skillshare classes, he said, “something that you could use immediately.” Headlines about an instructor quitting his day job with the $100,000 a year he made teaching Ruby on Rails to aspiring programmers helped attract instructors as well.

In 2012, the company expanded to other U.S. cities like San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles, and kicked off its large-scale online-only classes with an offering from Union Square Ventures co-founder Fred Wilson—a Skillshare investor—that reached 2,500 students all over the world. Mr. Karnjanaprakorn said that it would take him two years to teach that many students if he taught every week here in New York City.

Mr. Karnjanaprakorn compared making a case for accessible education outside of a university to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. “If the first phase is awareness and huge institutional change,” he told The Observer, “The second step is making something that will fix it or being a company that tries to solve it. I can feel that happening. It’s less about why should people learn. Nobody asks that question now anymore.”

Next: Rick Webb, Tumblr: The Undercover Ad Man

Back to the beginning

(Photo: Crunchbase)

Thrive Capital, the New York-based venture capital firm helmed by 26-year-old Josh Kushner*, announced today that it has successfully raised a $150 million fund for early and later stage startups. The news comes almost a year to the day after Thrive announced a $40 million raise from investors like Princeton University. The fresh $150 million comes from a slew of some of the same investors, including Princeton, Wellcome Trust and Hall Capital Partners.

Thrive has backed many of New York's recent notable startup exits. The firm was an investor in Instagram, purchased by Facebook for $1 billion; Hot Potato, also purchased by Facebook for around $10 million; and GroupMe, purchased by Skype for more than $50 million.

The current Thrive portfolio reads like a who's who in New York tech: the company is also an investor in Pinterest competitor The Fancy, flash sales site Fab and e-commerce glasses hub Warby Parker.

“Many see the way the Internet has already transformed our daily lives and conclude that most of the change that was going to happen already has.” Mr. Kushner told The New York Times. “I am of the belief that it is only the beginning.”

*Disclosure: Thrive Capital is invested in several start-up companies. Josh Kushner, a Thrive principal, is also part-owner of Observer Media Group, which owns Betabeat. Betabeat has no affiliation with Thrive Capital and the views expressed in Betabeat do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Thrive Capital or its principals.

"I mean, Google is freakin' massive, and they've almost had no effect on the community," Hacker Union head and 10gen engineer Brandon Diamond told us by Gchat. "They're trying to get out there, but they seem to be awful insular. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook is the same way... it will probably help more than it hurts. Fb obviously isn't banking on the 'tremendous number of hackers living in NYC.' Instead, I think they believe they'll be able to woo many new hackers with the added bonus of being in a cool city. It's a boon."

As to whether the new office will lure back some of the talent Facebook poached in the form of Drop.io, Hot Potato, Daytum and Mail Rank, but survey says no. "I don't suspect? Highly doubt it, actually," says a source, regarding the Hot Potatoes.
CC FAIL. "Note to all: Don't CC the current CEO on an email that speaks to replacing the current CEO. #idiot," tweeted Zelkova Ventures' Jay Levy before Thanksgiving. Crappy way to find out you've been terminated, we suppose, but it turns out the CEO was in the clear. Apparently a rogue board member was musing a little too freely on email and indiscreetly copied the founder on an email about firing him. "The rest of the board had 110% confidence in him and asked that board member to remove himself from the board," said a source familiar with the matter. "Him being the CEO... CEO staying and is going to continue to grow the company into a force in the industry."

WHITHER THE PARTY? Last week, Betabeat interviewed MessageParty founder and Y Combinator graduate Amanda Peyton for a story about East versus West. We casually dropped by the site and noticed it was a bit of a deadzone; Ms. Peyton herself hadn't posted in three months, the Twitter account hasn't tweeted since August, and the last newsletter went out in June. Yikes, we thought, remembering MessageParty's April pivot. Has the startup bitten the dust? "We are actively considering a few options for the future of the product, though it won't stay in its current state for much longer," Ms. Peyton said in an email.

SEAN PARKER, MAN ABOUT TOWN. Lolol:

He said, 'Google my name and Lindsay Lohan. You'll see that a year ago there's an article written that says she had me kicked out of Bungalow 8.' He said, 'I don't think she had me kicked out... I want to know who [did].' "Lerner, who knows Lohan socially, agreed to look into the matter. It turns out it wasn't the Mean Girl but her ex, DJ Samantha Ronson. Satisfied, [Sean] Parker restored Lerner's profile in just six hours.

STAYING TRUE TO STEREOTYPES. Tumblr's John Maloney has purchased a new bicycle, which according to engineer Matt Hackett "is attracting quite a crowd. Bikes are flames to moths here in Tumblr HQ." The hipster startup has a room full of the the things.

ALL YOUR PARTIES ARE BELONG TO US. Send Betabeat your holiday party tips.

Good lord, we look like a bad Wooly Willy

We had no idea. Really. These dudes tell us nothing. Nobody wants this to be an Arrington-SV Angel style relationship more than us, but they're not buying it.

As we reported earlier today, Thrive Capital just had a big, 17X exit with GroupMe that is a feather in the cap of the young fund.

Now Fortune is reporting that Thrive Capital has raised a new, $40 million fund, a step up from their first $10 million fund. Aside from GroupMe, Thrive also had an exit when Hot Potato sold to Facebook. OnSwipe, a Thrive company, recently raised $5 million.

Small VCs, like start-ups, would be wise to close their financing now, before macro-economic uncertainties get any worse.

Disclosure.

flickr.com/skillshare

Continuing education start-up Skillshare, founded by former Hot Potato head of product Mike Karnjanaprakorn and veteran CTO Malcolm Ong, has been growing slowly since it first started offering classes in New York City in the spring after raising $550,000 from Founder Collective, SV Angel, Collaborative Fund and angel investors including Meetup's Scott Heiferman and TechStars's David Tisch. "When we first launched, we got a lot of feedback like 'why is this closed, why isn't this open everywhere?' But for us it was like we really abide by the lean start-up philosophy," Mr. Karnjanaprakorn told Betabeat last week.

He and Mr. Ong decided to limit Skillshare, which lets users offer small, paid classes in anything from computer programming to making chocolate, viewing New York as a sandbox for the company to work out any bugs and, you know, see if anyone would want to use it.

Turns out they did. "We have teachers that make a lot of money on the platform, thousands of dollars," he said, citing one teacher who does a class in Ruby on Rails. 

Most of the classes on offer are still early-adopter and start-up-oriented--"How to Talk to Investors," "Creating a Product-Focused Start-Up Culture," and so on, but the range has broadened a bit, Mr. Karnjanaprakorn.

"We're starting to see businesses on the site. There's a jewelry store in Brooklyn teaching a class on how to make bracelets. Ella Lounge in the East Village taught a bartending course... we're starting to branch out of the tech cool kids community to average people and businesses teaching real tangible skills. We didn't want to be stuck with just a product for tech people," he said.

Skillshare has a voting system to determine which city to move into next, but the co-founders decided to pull the trigger and start offering classes in San Francisco. "We'r growing every single month and doing very well so it felt like we should run another experiment in another city and see how that works," he said. "We don't really know that many people there... but I think it'll be even bigger in San Francisco."

Philadelphia will probably be Skillshare's next stop; the city only needs 38 votes to get "unlocked," at which point Skillshare will make sure there have been at least 50 "Pilot Classes," unscheduled listings to gauge student interest. Once that tips, they'll go about recruiting power users to serve as volunteer ambassadors for the new city. "We'll assign a Special Ops team who'll hit the ground to find teachers, venues, and ensure that you guys kick off with a wicked party," the site explains.

The company is still running, lean start-up style, off its January seed round. But Skillshare is hiring for a few positions in the Soho office it shares with fellow design-y, hip start-up Svpply.