Udemy

The Open Angel Forum was an amazing event and anybody who has a chance to should apply. You may already know this, but 100+ companies applied and over 50 investors applied (yes, investors applied!). Only 5 companies and 20 investors were accepted. Even Jeff Clavier (one of the smartest, classiest super-angels in the Valley) said to me “this was like the Who’s Who of Angel Investing.” He was impressed. Enough said.

Jason Calacanis and Tyler Crowley put on a fantastic event and corralled the best angels in the Valley to come. The list included Chris Sacca, Kevin Rose, Mike Maples, Jeff Clavier, Andrea Zurek, 3 representatives from Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Dave Morin, Matt Mullenweg, Narendra Rocherolle, Joshua Shachter, Cyan Banister, Mark Suster and Manu Kumar (Google those names for bios; I’m sorry if I forgot someone!). It was absurdly nerve-racking (though I tried not to show it) to go in front of that crowd.

Udemy was lucky enough to be invited to the Open Angel Forum, and we are extremely thankful to Tyler, Jason for the opportunity. Also, thank you to WSGR and Binc for sponsoring. Chris Sacca of lowercase Capital and Kevin Rose of Digg fame were the local hosts. Sacca and Tyler especially went out of their way to make sure everyone felt at home. Sacca spent more than 10 min with each company after the event to make sure we got feedback about our pitch/company.

The hosts kept the event fairly light-hearted, considering what was at stake for the presenters. As previous OAF attendees mentioned, almost everyone drank a beer before presenting and there were constant jokes about how every company had “adult” applications.
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Shhh… Udemy isn’t launched yet. We’ve had no PR and have intentionally kept Udemy to a closed community of high quality educators, investors and friends. We’ll be unveiling Udemy more publicly soon (read: PR and Marketing efforts), but for now, we’ve got some great new updates.

Udemy now has over 600 academic courses. By taking advantage of free open source content, we have filled our library with high-quality lectures from Stanford, Yale, MIT and IAS. We’ll continue to add more educational videos and presentations to the site so you can use Udemy as a great tool for learning.

We’ll also continue to work hard to enable you to build your own course and we’ve got some fantastic teachers and partners lined up for launch!

We recently added Facebook Connect and other social sharing features to help promote Udemy courses. Facebook connect will make it easier for students and educators to access Udemy. The sharing features, including Twitter, Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon and MySpace, will help students and educators promote the courses they find. Our hope is that you’ll soon see a plethora of Tweets and wall posts about cool stuff people have found on Udemy.

Note: this blog post is for Elance’s A New Way to Work competition, as seen on Vator.tv.

There just isn’t any doubt about it. Things are changing, and Udemy, a startup I’m co-founding, is as good example as any to embody that change. Folks like me don’t just quit their job, take out a loan and start a company anymore. Instead, we spend every free hour – every waking moment – working towards our dream. Success doesn’t just come with the 9-5 anymore (although some can definitely make it work). As Gary Vaynerchuck of winelibrary.tv once said to a packed room at the Web 2.0 conference, if you want to pursue your passion, there are no excuses. You work 9-5 to support your family and yourself? No problem – “7 to 2 in the morning is plenty of time to do damage.” And here’s a little tidbit from the co-founders at Udemy: if you make a decent wage on your day job, pay someone else to work 9-5 on your dream.

I’m writing this from United Airlines flight 255 – service from Chicago to San Francisco. I do this every week. Red-eye on Sunday night to Chicago, then to Roanoke, VA. Thursday night is the way back – every week, 15 hours on a plane; 8 hours at an airport. My full-time job as a consultant keeps me busy; it’s not 9-5, more like 8a-10p. Some people would go crazy having this job alone. But instead, I was stupid enough to sign up for another one (I write part-time for TechCrunch’s mobile site, MobileCrunch), and to decide to start my own company on the side.

Let me be clear about one thing – we don’t let our full-time jobs slack. I actually enjoy being a consultant and desperately crave the approval of my bosses. Instead, I look at 10p – 1a as work time. So is all day Saturday and Sunday. This won’t last forever – but for now, I’m on a mission to penetrate Silicon Valley. I want to be a small part of what’s going on over there; it’s just too amazing not to want to be in on it.

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Hi all,

Welcome to Udemy, the best place to share knowledge online. We’ve got some amazing tech coming your way in the next few weeks/months, and can’t wait to see what you think. Ultimately, our goal is to enable you to create and share knowledge with anyone. You should be able to go on our site and create courses (or webinars) that relate to anything. And we mean anything. Yes, if you want, Udemy will allow you to teach the cha cha, English as a foreign language, how to become a chess master or how to successfully run an ice cream stand in Helsinki during the winter.

Of course, if you don’t have anything to share, no problem. You can get lost in a world of knowledge on Udemy.com!

Well, that’s the plan at least. Obviously, we’re in private alpha right now so there aren’t a whole lot of people crawling the pages of Udemy. But… we’ll be launching private beta in a few days! Can’t wait to see what you think.

Best,
Gagan Biyani