Skillshare Announces Multiple Growth Milestones
NEW YORK, November 6, 2017 (Newswire.com) - Online learning community Skillshare (www.skillshare.com) this week announced several major milestones highlighting the company’s growth during 2017. In addition to surpassing three million members, Skillshare also recently exceeded 5,000 teachers using its platform and 50 full-time employees -- all of which together have resulted in the company nearly doubling revenue year over year.
To accommodate its rapid growth, Skillshare -- which offers a catalog of over 17,000 classes in design, business, technology and more -- has been actively building out its executive team by making a number of recent hires and changes. Facilitating the day-to-day operation of the expanded team, COO Matt Cooper will move to the position of CEO; while Skillshare founder and CEO Michael Karnjanaprakorn will assume the role of Executive Chairman. This move enables Cooper (a long-time startup executive, formerly of Upwork and Visually) to further bring his considerable C-level management experience to the daily operations of the company, while Karnjanaprakorn will focus on external relations, fundraising and the company’s long-term strategic vision. Karnjanaprakorn, who also penned a recent blog post on the change, commented: “I’ve worked closely with Matt over the last 12 months and couldn’t be more excited about his assuming the role of CEO. Matt has extensive experience scaling platforms and he’s the perfect person to build on our strong momentum as we look to another year of 100%+ revenue growth in 2018.”
In addition to the new division of responsibilities at the top of the organization, several recent hires were made to fill out the remainder of Skillshare’s executive team:
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Sabrina Kieffer joined Skillshare as VP of Operations from global video-streaming company Vimeo, where she acted as SVP of Operations. A key member of Vimeo’s leadership team and trusted advisor to the CEO, Sabrina joined Vimeo in 2012 and was instrumental in scaling the company from 50 to 200 employees and accelerating revenue growth by more than 50 percent.
- Ken Liu joined Skillshare as VP of Engineering from VTS, the industry-leading platform for commercial real estate leasing and asset management. Liu grew the engineering arm of VTS -- which has raised $110 million to date -- taking it from a small, early-stage team to a mature engineering department with over a dozen squads working together on a large product.
The recently expanded team will work out of the company’s new headquarters in New York City’s Flatiron District. The new location nearly doubles Skillshare’s office space to approximately 12,000 square feet and will allow the company to grow headcount to 90 in 2018.
“We’re very bullish about our prospects,” said CEO Matt Cooper. “We have an incredibly strong foundation and now that we have our full executive team in place, we can further accelerate our growth as we help even more people around the world build their skills and unlock opportunities in the new economy.”
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Benjamin Webb, Nicholas Baines, or Benedict Bunyard at Deliberate PR
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Source: Skillshare