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Elevator Pitch: School of Everything scores £350K funding

The team behind School of Everything is on a high after scoring their first round of investment in the form of £350,000 seed funding from Esther Dyson, Rocco Pellegrinelli and JP Rangaswami alongside Channel 4 Education and the Young Foundation.

That means expanding their small, Bethnal Green team from six upwards - not bad for a project that started as a voluntary experiment in social philanthropy in October 2007.

Co-founder Paul Miller explains how it works.

School of Everything co-founders: Andy Gibson, Mary Harrington, Paul Miller, Peter Brownell and Dougald Hine

• Explain your business to my Mum.
"If you want to learn something, we put you in touch with teachers near you. If you can teach something, we'll find you students and help you organise your work. It's free to join, and you can teach and learn whatever you want (as long as it's legal)."

• How do you make money?
"Our business model will be to provide tools to help people book classes and take payment online, and take a small commission on those payments."

• What's your background?
"We're a bunch of campaigners who've started a company to change the world. It's somewhere between starting a dot-com, a band and a revolution."

"About 1000 now. We're aiming for 100,000 by the end of the year."

• What's your biggest challenge?
"Hitting critical mass so we have enough teachers for learners to want to come to the site and vice versa. It's all about our users - without them we're nothing."

• Name your closest competitors.
"There's a start-up in the US called Teachstreet with a similar idea. But it only works if you live in Seattle."

Nope. The scene is really vibrant but the businesses that will succeed this time round will have an impact on the real world and real value. I think investors realise that. There are far fewer dot-coms being set up for the sake of setting up dot-coms, so it's not suddenly going to go pop.

"The Point - it's basically a way of getting groups of people to do things together. You can sign up to pledge your support or money and a campaign gets 'activated' if it reaches its target. Check out the project to raise enough money to put a giant banana in geostationary orbit above Texas, but also imagine how revolutionary it could be for making a real difference locally."

• What's the weirdest business experience you've had so far?
"Ah, where to start. There's the tank that our chief technical officer bought on eBay to drive to an arms fair; gatecrashing a party at 10 Downing Street where we met one of our investors; our lawyer is a stand up comedian in the evenings - the list goes on..."

"Less a company, and more a social movement of people who want to change the way that education is organised."

• Are you the next big thing?
"We think so. Learning is one of the biggest and oldest industries in the world and ripe for disruption. And everyone's got something to learn."


Are there enough time-generous people in the world to make this work? Would you offer your skills? And can this last?

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