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Udacity Raises $105M Series D, Bringing Valuation to $1B

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Re: Udacity Raises $105M Series D, Bringing Valuation to $1B

#11

Post by ghaff »

dthal wrote: post #9
ghaff wrote: post #3

Mind. Boggles. "Nanodegrees"? "now recognized by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, including Google and Salesforce"? What does that even mean? And this is a company that has essentially "pivoted" to being a sort of vocational training in the CS space. There may be a business model there but it doesn't seem like anything particularly unique or deserving of out-sized evaluations.

I wouldn't be so down on vocational training for software...It is a field that has an unusually high requirement for ongoing learning. And when you have to learn some new tech, usually you have to do it now, and in-place, not next September, in the nearest college town. Given the high ongoing learning requirements that software has, I think there is a pretty clear need for training that's delivered where you are and…

Oh. To be clear. I think on-going training is great especially given the pace of change. And things like automated evaluation of code is something that actually works pretty well in MOOCs in my experience. (Unlike peer grading.) However, the argument for platforms like Udacity hasn't in general been that they're a great advancement for vocational training but that they disrupt higher ed generally. And that's probably a different valuation metric.

Re: Udacity Raises $105M Series D, Bringing Valuation to $1B

#12

Post by shadesof »

ghaff wrote: post #3

Mind. Boggles. "Nanodegrees"? "now recognized by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, including Google and Salesforce"? What does that even mean? And this is a company that has essentially "pivoted" to being a sort of vocational training in the CS space. There may be a business model there but it doesn't seem like anything particularly unique or deserving of out-sized evaluations.

Udacity has also partnered with Georgia Tech and AT&T to offer the OMSCS program. If this program continues to scale effectively on Udacity's platform, I imagine that more large-scale partnership opportunities will emerge. I would think that at least some of this funding is earmarked for smoothing out the platform's integration points and addressing insufficiencies revealed by this relatively new context.

Re: Udacity Raises $105M Series D, Bringing Valuation to $1B

#13

Post by ghaff »

rtpg wrote: post #10
ghaff wrote: post #3

Mind. Boggles. "Nanodegrees"? "now recognized by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, including Google and Salesforce"? What does that even mean? And this is a company that has essentially "pivoted" to being a sort of vocational training in the CS space. There may be a business model there but it doesn't seem like anything particularly unique or deserving of out-sized evaluations.

really? Companies pay _sooooo_ much money for employee training. a billion for this makes a hell of a lot more sense than billion dollar valuations for companies in races to the bottom.

If these kind of valuations were based on company training budgets, I'd be happily convinced. I haven't heard that argument being made but maybe it's the basis.

Re: Udacity Raises $105M Series D, Bringing Valuation to $1B

#15

Post by cortesoft »

dthal wrote: post #9
ghaff wrote: post #3

Mind. Boggles. "Nanodegrees"? "now recognized by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, including Google and Salesforce"? What does that even mean? And this is a company that has essentially "pivoted" to being a sort of vocational training in the CS space. There may be a business model there but it doesn't seem like anything particularly unique or deserving of out-sized evaluations.

I wouldn't be so down on vocational training for software...It is a field that has an unusually high requirement for ongoing learning. And when you have to learn some new tech, usually you have to do it now, and in-place, not next September, in the nearest college town. Given the high ongoing learning requirements that software has, I think there is a pretty clear need for training that's delivered where you are and…

I feel that the ongoing learning requirements that software has lead to developers becoming VERY good at learning new software.... which means they don't need training, because they can self-teach. At least that has been my experience.

Re: Udacity Raises $105M Series D, Bringing Valuation to $1B

#16

Post by dthal »

A lot of people are going to dump on this billion dollar valuation, but we don't have the terms. Presumably there is liquidation preference. According to Crunchbase [1], the total capital raised is about $160 million after this money, so the investors don't need this company to be worth $1 billion to come out fine. Sam Altman made the point a few days ago that a lot of these late-stage private financings are kind of debt-like [2, about paragraph 8-9 and footnote #2], with the result that the valuations aren't really meaningful.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/udacity#/entity

[2] http://blog.samaltman.com/the-tech-bust-of-2015

Re: Udacity Raises $105M Series D, Bringing Valuation to $1B

#19

Post by Everhusk »

Awesome, Udacity is awesome! Any time my friends ask me how I learned coding I always refer them to Udacity. The quality is just as good as University courses, and you don't have to wait months to finish because you can go on a 2x speed binge watch and crush it in days/weeks.
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