Flying taxi startup Blade is helping Silicon Valley CEOs bypass traffic

Blade, backed by Lerer Hippeau and Airbus, has begun chauffering the Bay Area’s elite.

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Sebastian Thrun initiates aggressive plan to transform Udacity

“I’m a fighter. I believe in our people, I believe in our mission, and I believe that it should exist and must exist.” Sebastian Thrun is talking animatedly about Udacity, the $1 billion online education startup that he co-founded nearly eight years ago. His tone is buoyant and hopeful. He’s encouraged, he says over an occasionally […]

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Edtech unicorn Udacity lays off 125 people in global strategy shift

Learning platform Udacity is to axe a big chunk of its workforce — which looks to be between a fifth and a quarter — as part of a global reorganization effort, according to VentureBeat. It reports the company is cutting 125 staff from now through early 2019. We’ve also heard from a source that around 100 Udacity […]

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Apoll01 wants to remake education by decentralizing the diploma

Dan Genduso spent nearly a decade working in consulting before landing on the Disrupt Berlin stage to launch his first startup, Apoll01 — a small company with a big idea about how to solve America’s expanding education crisis.  First at Accenture and then at Slalom Consulting in San Francisco, Genduso focused on building out customer […]

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Vishal Makhijani steps down as chief executive of Udacity

Vishal Makhijani, the long time chief executive of online education company Udacity, is stepping down as its chief executive officer, TechCrunch has learned. Makhijani first joined the company in 2013 as chief operating officer under Sebastian Thrun, the company’s founder and chief executive at the time. In 2016, Thrun, the original architect of Alphabet’s self-driving […]

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MasterClass is mastering scale as a media business

MasterClass’ $80M Series D announced last week marks a triumph in validating the potential venture-scale of content businesses in an era when many are founded with equal parts tech and media DNA. The platform for online video courses on topics from film directing to tennis taught by iconic figures in each field (like Martin Scorsese […]

View More MasterClass is mastering scale as a media business

MasterClass is mastering scale as a media business

MasterClass’ $80M Series D announced last week marks a triumph in validating the potential venture-scale of content businesses in an era when many are founded with equal parts tech and media DNA. The platform for online video courses on topics from film directing to tennis taught by iconic figures in each field (like Martin Scorsese […]

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Udacity and Google launch free career courses for interview prep, resume writing and more

Udacity today announced a new partnership with Google that will make a number of career courses freely available to recent graduates and mid-career professionals. The free career courses, which mark a first for Udacity, will focus on helping employees improve their chances of getting a job, no matter whether that’s a first job or we […]

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Lyft partners with Udacity to hire self-driving car engineers

Lyft is teaming up with Udacity to find talent for its Level 5 autonomous-driving engineering team. The partnership entails a challenge designed to identify the best candidates in Udacity’s self-driving car engineer nanodegree program. Called the Lyft Perception Challenge, the idea is to test problem-solving skills around perception for autonomous vehicles. The competition, which runs […]

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Udacity tackles cybersecurity with its latest nanodegree

Responding to the talent shortage and increasing demand facing the cybersecurity industry, Udacity said that it is now developing a new nanodegree focused on security. Launched at the security industry’s RSA Conference, details about the new program (including potential partners) are still sketchy (there’s little available on the information page on the Udacity’s website about the program). […]

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Udacity introduces real robots and virtual worlds to help students build skills

Udacity is hosting its annual Intersect conference this week, and the online learning platform is introducing some new programs and features for students at the event. Those include two new ways for students to practice and hone their practical skills – in both real and virtual worlds. For robotics education, Udacity is teaming up with […]

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