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I loved the site. Now I will have to add it to the long list of companies that got bought and lost their essence, like cdbaby, reddit, or digg.
I started using whassapp in order to scape facebook. Now those bubble monsters are acquiring everything they can while money is free.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My personal opinion is that credentialing is going out of style anyway. Employers want to see what you can do, not where you learned. Put another way -- when's the last time you cared if someone was Microsoft Visual C++ .NET certified?
For startups, I agree: certificates mean nothing. In fact, they can be a detriment as the certificates cause an increase in pay that may not be affordable in a startups budget. Plus since startups tend to live on the bleeding edge, there tend to not be certificates for newer technologies like golang. For large enterprises, I believe it gives them the peace of mind that the new hire has at least basic skills in a tech…
As an outsider looking in, LinkedIn's purchase of Lynda.com looks like an odd duck in comparison to their previous acquisitions[1]. As far as I can tell, the Lynda.com brand name isn't that well known outside of tech circles. (Virtually all of their courses are Adobe, Microsoft Office, and web development, etc) I'm guessing those computer courses are relevant to less than 5% of LinkedIn's user base. It was very recen…
Linkedin will do well pushing computer courses because "getting into tech" looks attractive to the 90% of people stuck in lousy jobs. They're looking to cash in on a webified version of the "bootcamp" movement. They have a great audience - people make Linkedin profiles because they are job hunting. And anyone who takes an HTML class makes the list of profiles returned from a recruiter's search longer. And for the spa…
I wonder if Pluralsight is also on their target list?
As an outsider looking in, LinkedIn's purchase of Lynda.com looks like an odd duck in comparison to their previous acquisitions[1]. As far as I can tell, the Lynda.com brand name isn't that well known outside of tech circles. (Virtually all of their courses are Adobe, Microsoft Office, and web development, etc) I'm guessing those computer courses are relevant to less than 5% of LinkedIn's user base. It was very recen…
How can their technology possibly be worth $1.5B?
If we break out components of Lynda.com for purposes of valuation, we might have:
+ customer base
+ content library
+ executive team and their programming staff
+ technology platform
Yes, Lynda.com has an existing customer base and an obvious way is to look at the recurring revenue and make projections on it. However, I discount the customers because I'd guess that Lynda subscribers are the kind of tech savvy users that are very jaded about LinkedIn's shady business practices. It seems like the sentiment among these subscribers is to declare their separation from LinkedIn as a badge of honor. I just can't see that the executives from LinkedIn allocating the bulk of their $1.5 billion price for these customers.
As for "content library", their existing portfolio consists mostly of timely courses that will become obsolete within months. How valuable is the "2009 Adobe CS4 Essential Training" or "2011 Learn iOS 5" course? It's not like Sony buying the Beatles song catalog which can be milked year after year. Because most tech courses have limited shelf life, the copyrights on the existing content library does not explain the 1.5 billion. Yes, new courses will be created but Lynda's authors are basically independent contractors. They are not handcuffed into multi-year exclusive contracts.
To me, this leaves the "executive team, programming staff" and "technology platform" as the components with the most value to LinkedIn. If I do some more armchair speculation, I can think of one way to make the $1.5 really pay off:
Dramatically expand Lynda.com's offerings so that it's more relevant to the general public. The 2015 Lynda.com they bought was 95% software tutorials and 5% business, but the transformation that LinkedIn envisions would be a content portfolio of 95% business, paralegal, welding, and other topics relevant to the 95% of job seekers not doing software dev work. Imagine a future where young people who talk about lynda.com (if the brand name is not gone) to say "TIL lynda used to be mostly Adobe/MSOffice/HTML courses."
The current Lynda.com customer base & courses portfolio is much too niche for it to be the main reason for the 1.5B price tag. On the other hand, LinkedIn can leverage the well-oiled content production pipeline that Lynda has mastered to create other material that the non-tech population would pay for and that will potentially pay back multiples of that $1.5B. In other words, the future customers that Lynda doesn't have today will vastly outnumber the current customers and that future scenario is what LinkedIn bought into.
If you believe LinkedIn thought Lynda's content was more valuable than Lynda's delivery platform, I'd like to hear your reasoning.
What can be LinkedIn's take on this?
Strategic rationale:
- Believes that the acquisition of lynda.com will be an important step to fulfilling LinkedIn's vision of developing an "economic graph"
- Views lynda.com as essential for professionals to advance their skill sets
- Believes that acquisition of lynda.com will expand the addressable opportunity by 30B into corporate employee education and professional certifications market
- Believes that by leveraging LinkedIn's professional context, content distribution platform and channel focused base of customers, LinkedIn is well positioned to become leader in learning and development market
- Believes the mission and strategy of lynda.com is aligned with LinkedIn and will help integrate lynda.com into their business
- Sees lynda.com having large traction on university campuses which overlaps with LinkedIn's strength looks to capitalize on overlapping presence
Financial details:
- Primary focus will be maximizing long-term member and business value over short term financial results
- Views lynda.com revenue mix as 2/3 consumer driven subscriptions and 1/3 corporate enterprise
- 50% of customer base is higher education in government and other 50% is corporate enterprise
- Sees lynda.com business model made up of 70% gross margin, ~20% content / engineering and ~35% Sales and marketing with EBITDA margins of 5-10%
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My first reaction was also "oh no!". That being said, it could be interesting if Lynda course completions could be linked to a linkedin profile or something similar. Gives some power to self-learners.
I've used lynda.com for a while and about 6 months ago they started asking me to share that I had completed a course in my linkedin profile. There is no exam or anything just something that said I'd "completed" (watched) the course. They call them certificates of completion. I've never shared them because I don't think sitting through 4hrs of video means anything other than I have an interest to learn about that subj…
I understand that there is an aspect of labeling theory that goes on with this, however, as with all things, it shows that people are willing to pay $$ to learn.
Just offering a counter point. :)
This, to me, is terrible news. I am a big fan of Lynda.com. They've always had a great library (both for tech' stuff but are also one of few sites that offer non-tech video training (business courses, photography, etc) and their prices were always very reasonable. LinkedIn can only make the site worse as far as I am concerned, and I already avoid LinkedIn due to the fact that they've essentially become spammers who w…
Totally agree. I simply cannot see Lynda.com's current (amazing) setup blending well with LinkedIn. Lynda.com is going the way of the History Channel.
oh, sh*t, no! I loved the site. Now I will have to add it to the long list of companies that got bought and lost their essence, like cdbaby, reddit, or digg. I started using whassapp in order to scape facebook. Now those bubble monsters are acquiring everything they can while money is free.
Why not udemy/coursera/udacity? Lynda is great but seems a bit "old-style", but anyway I think this is the right move, a job site companied by training
Coursera seems to offer more of an academic lesson plan (learn linear algebra, algorithms, history of modern China) which doesn't seem very applicable to a specific tech job. These are more for people who want to learn for the joy of learning. (Same thing would be said about edX although I think it's owned by the schools (could be wrong))
I would say they didn't go after Udacity most likely because of the small, and also younger, user base where as Lynda.com seems to appeal to more of the people who want to transition out of a job into another job.
This is all pure speculation though as I've only done a few courses on udacity and coursera and actually never done any on Lynda.com but have known people who have.