Udacity Raises Funds From Andreessen Horowitz

http://allthingsd.com/20121025/education-start-up-udacity-raises-funds-from-andreessen-horowitz/

by dbh937 • 14 years ago

66 13 14 years ago

0003• 14 years ago

>It started out matching students and employers — and has placed about 20 people in new jobs, total. But what really seems to be working is sponsored courses, Thrun said.

>So, for instance, Google will offer an HTML5 game development course co-taught by two of its employees. HTML5 game development is a skill that’s useful in industry but not deeply academic, and something slow-moving universities are unlikely to offer for a while, Thrun noted.

I am really curious to see how this works out.

Does anyone know if udacity is modeling for a connected-learning experience? From the course requirements for the above course[1], it seems to be going this way:

>Basic knowledge of HTML, Javascript, and how the web works is necessary for this course. There is an optional unit on HTML and Javascript to help get you up-to-speed. If you have a basic understanding of how the web is structured at the level of CS253: Web Application Engineering, you should be fine.

[1]http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs255/CourseRev/1

francesca• 14 years ago

I think they stated the main point really well: “I don’t think this is about putting universities out of business. Educating millions of individuals, to me that’s a radical idea, but a positive radical idea.”

Most people taking these courses are not college-aged students. Universities continue to be valuable, but it's important to constantly renew your skill set and make this knowledge and resources accessible to as many people as possible.

I'm thrilled to see VC funding go into this. I've taken 1 Udacity and 1 Stanford course and both have been a great experience (although I prefer udacity). It might not help me get my next job, but the structure is excellent and definitely promotes more hands-on learning than I have seen in the classroom.

confluence2• 14 years ago

Udacity will win by disintermediating HR, which I think is a great development. I really hate HR, because frankly - they suck - hard.

An example?

I can't remember which company this story was from (I think it was Lotus Software).

Basically the HR team of a multi-billion dollar startup were given the anonymised resumes of the first 10-20 founding team members.

HR rejected them all. Not one founding team member was accepted even for a short interview.

Tells you something about HR doesn't it?

First class universities are really great at bringing together smart people, money and difficult problems all into one area.

For the vast majority of non-smart people however it frankly just isn't worth it. The vast majority of jobs held by people from third and second tier universities do not need a degree - they just need to be qualified to do a specific job.

Udacity will stand in between second/third tier students and second/third tier business and match them like eBay does with buyers and sellers. This is worth a lot of money.

2pasc• 14 years ago

I partially agree with you. I don't think Udacity disintermediates HR - it disintermediates 2nd and 3rd tier universities whose main value, beyond the degree, was to have a career services department that was sort of helping out students by putting together career fairs, etc... It also allows people in random parts of the world to get recognized and hired by top tier firms, providing them with opportunities that were not possible before at that scale.

Re: HR and founders- that's true in most successful startups. Their value is not what they can technically do. It is the fact that they did everything they could to make it happen. It is a totally different skill set than being an employee of a Company, where people look for people with repeatable, proven skills.

gms• 14 years ago

Founder-types don't tend to be 'good' employees at established companies. I think it's unlikely HR did anything wrong in the Lotus example.

confluence2• 14 years ago

Well then - maybe we should reevaluate what makes "good" employees.

trekkin• 14 years ago

Honestly, Udacity seems to be losing it. It has only had 14 courses for a while, while Coursera has 200 courses, and counting. And the universities represented at Coursera have better recognition/ranking that at Udacity.

Why would somebody invest in Udacity now?

msellout• 14 years ago

It's far too early to call Coursera the incumbent and Udacity the challenger. Plus, challengers sometimes win.

robrenaud• 14 years ago

Coursera is awesome, don't get me wrong. I am on my fourth Coursera class (if you count the pre-Coursera ML class, and Quantum Mech that I gave up on a couple weeks in), and I haven't had any real interest in anything Udacity has had to offer. Their offerings seem more basic and less academic; I am happy to get hands on experience at work.

But Coursera fundamentally has the same problem that Hulu has, they are just a platform for distributing content. Hulu is toally at the mercy of the media industry, likewise, Coursera is totally at the mercy of the universities. Now, it is possible that universities will be more giving to Coursera than the big media studios are to Hulu and this won't actually be a problem for Coursera. But it really might actually be a problem if Coursera starts biting into their bottom line.

Thrun, on the other hand, is happy to blow the whole higher ed system up if he can. He is way more outwardly ambitious[1]. This adversarial relationship with the universities might end up killing his strategy, as is consistent with your 200 vs 14 courses number. But it might not, Udacity might just carve up enough of the territory that they really own that they aren't held hostage by the university system they are trying to replace.

[1] When I watch Andrew Ng or Daphne Koller talk about Coursera I notice their unwillingness to say the word "disrupt". I wonder if they are actually equally ambitious as Thurn, just unwilling to admit it, for the sake of not biting the hand that is currently feeding them very well.

brandnewlow• 14 years ago

Thank you for pinpointing the fundamental difference between these two companies for someone who's not followed the space super carefully.

paulrademacher• 14 years ago

You could have compared to iTunes instead of Hulu, though. Using that analogy, one company is distributing the vast catalogs of well-established creators, while another is building a studio from the ground up.

salimmadjd• 14 years ago

I took Sebastian's AI class at Stanford and signed up for more classes at Coursera (NLP, image processing). However, I think both of them lacking in student engagement and need building up additional infrastructure to keep student motivated. Self-pace study or self study requires a lot of discipline and a little bit of push via game mechanics, daily emails etc. can go a long way.

I think their metrics should not be just based on total signup or total classes offered but how many students graduate with high level competency. It's the total graduates and their skillsets that have HR value at the end.

ExpiredLink• 14 years ago

What is Thrun's share on Udacity now?

Udacity Raises Funds From Andreessen Horowitz

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