From the moment we open our eyes it fuels our existence. We are on a mission to remind everyone to never lose your sense of curiosity or wonder. Long live learning!

Peer-to-peer education startup Skillshare, which just launched in April, raised a $550,000 angel round, according to an SEC filing. Investors in the New York City startup include Founder Collective, SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, David Tisch, and Scott Heiferman.

Skillshare is a community where people can offer classes to other members. People sign up online, and meet in person for real classes for everything from how to bake cupcakes to how to get startup funding. People can charge for the classes. “Our business model is similar to Eventbrite,” says co-founder Michael Karnjanaprakorn. “We take 15% off each ticket purchase. We made revenue on the first day that we launched.” Karnjanaprakorn used to be head of product at Hot Potato (since acquired by Facebook), and co-founder Malcolm Ong was the product manager at OMGPOP.

Prior to Skillshare, Karnjanaprakorn led the product team at check-in service provider Hot Potato, which was acquired by Facebook to build its Places tool. This week, in an email conversation, he set the record straight on his college years (turns out the guy holds two degrees, the dropout story is just a myth), shared some insight into the long-term plan for Skillshare and why traditional education will never be able to keep up with technology.

MC: How does learning from members of your community equalize education?

MK: Our team believes that the world needs a learning revolution. The pinnacle of education should be learning, not going to college. While it’s great to learn multi-variable calculus or the economics of china during school, what about the other 99% of skills that will never see the light of day? By the time a college starts teaching “Location Based iOS development”, it will become so outdated and irrelevant. Traditional education will never catch up to the skills needed in the market today.

While learning traditionally happens within the four walls of a classroom, why couldn’t learning exist outside of school? We all know that NYU is a great university, but what about New York City? Everyone that lives here has something valuable, interesting, and unique to share with others. We just need a platform to unlock this knowledge, and thus, Skillshare was born.

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 clicked. 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?

Other sites like Learnable and Udemy allow anyone to become a teacher online, but Skillshare seems to have hit on the recipe that makes companies like Meetup.com, Eventbrite and Airbnb tick: online organization for offline interactions.

Amber Rae, creative catalyst and starter of meaningful things talks about the art of being unreasonable and how to astray from the mainstream and traditional cultural expectations.

"I was turned on to Karnjanaprakorn’s mission after a friend-of-a-friend’s recent TEDX talk on being a “creative catalyst” (don’t ask). She mentioned that the man behind Skillshare had, in fact, dropped out of college, making it all the more remarkable that his life’s mission is education," Meghan Casserly said.

I also knew that I wasn’t ready to be an entrepreneur so I gained startup experience by working at Behance and Hot Potato. On the side, I launched a ton of small ideas including The Feast Conference, By/Association, World Series of Good, TBD, and Lovely Day. By executing all these smaller ideas, the filter for what I wanted to work on got higher and higher.

The idea for Skillshare didn’t happen overnight. It took 5+ years of climbing the ladder of ideas and immersing myself in a lot of different experiences. There is no rush in understanding yourself and your passions. Keep in mind that most entrepreneurs get stuck in this stage because they never execute anything. The more you execute, the more your learn about yourself and your passions. Your goal at this stage is to find a problem you are truly passionate about solving.

...If you follow the lean startup methodology, you’ll know that most startups don’t fail because of the technology, they fail because they are solving a problem that no one cares about. Our goal at this stage was to see if anyone on this planet wanted Skillshare to exist. We passed that initial test, kept hitting our next milestones, closed a seed round led by Founder Collective, and launched a full beta site in early April.

On Tuesday, the company is announcing that it has raised $3.1 million in a Series A round of venture financing, led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, to extend its offerings. Previously the company raised a $550,000 round of seed funding from Founder Collective and SV Angel, among others.

The company, which got off the ground in early April, has been heavily focused on expanding its community of teachers and students. The service now has 600 teachers signed up to offer classes. Recently the service introduced a review-based system so people can leave comments on teachers and classes. In addition, the site now has social features that let people “follow” teachers and subjects they like to stay abreast of when new seminars are added.

Skillshare is a community to learn anything from anyone.

Nowadays anyone can be an artist on Etsy or a host on travel sites such as Crashpadder. The next step is to connect people who need a skill or task done -- from pruning a tree to designing a wedding invitation -- with those able to help. Online marketplaces such as Skillpages make it possible to match the "haves" with the "wants".

Tomorrow night, I’m teaching a Skillshare class called The Art of the Pitch with Mashable’s Sarah Kessler. Sign up if you want to learn the tips/tricks of pitching to the media.

by Courtney Boyd Myers on 2011/11/14

In the two months leading up to the event, Raise Cache teamed up with local education startup Skillshare to host an Education Series with classes such as ”How to Communicate with Investors” with David Tisch of Techstars to “Making Something People Love” with Alexis Ohanian of Reddit, Hipmunk, and Breadpig. Raise Cache has blown past its goal of raising $10K with every teacher donating 100% of class proceeds to hackNY through Raise Cache. Today, that number has passed $20,000 in total donations.

What do these companies have in common?

1. They are mostly coded in nyc
2. They have 10K+ people use or visit their site monthly
3. They display “Made in NYC” as prominently as its copyright -- and it links to this page (http://nytm.org/made). [Optionally, (a) spell out “New York City” and/or (b) precede with an adverb/verb (see #10 below for some examples)]

Entrepreneurial educator and founder of Skillshare, a online community where anyone can offer courses and anyone can pay to take them, leading to the democratization of teaching.

Kick off the new year right! Enter for a chance to learn from the great minds at TED for all of 2012. Worth $995! Learn more about TED.

You get…

- Virtual seats at both TED and TED Global conferences.
- Year-round online community access.
- TED Books yearlong subscription & a new Kindle Fire.

WINNING. Skillshare is giving away a year’s TED Live membership ($995)! “You get… Virtual seats at both TED and TED Global conferences. Year-round online community access. TED Books yearlong subscription & a new Kindle Fire,” says Skillshare. “This is the warmup for all the stuff coming out over the next couple of months,” said CEO Mike Karnjanaprakorn, a 2012 TED fellow.

When you bring together a variety of voices and hands-on instruction, something truly spectacular happens.

We made classes horizontal rows instead of cards. We think this visual layout is easier to scan. Your eyes are guided in one direction instead of trying to scan two directions on a grid.

Categories are placed on the left and sorting on the top to show a difference between filters and sorting order.

Chris and Eric on my team might be better people to ask this specific question since they implemented the new design. It was inspiring to see Chris put some slick finishing touches on the UI (a little nice slide animation and an Easter egg in the background when certain sorts are clicked).