[confluence]

Udacity will win by disintermediating HR, which I think is a great development. I really hate HR, because frankly - they suck - hard.

An example?

I can't remember which company this story was from (I think it was Lotus Software).

Basically the HR team of a multi-billion dollar startup were given the anonymised resumes of the first 10-20 founding team members.

HR rejected them all. Not one founding team member was accepted even for a short interview.

Tells you something about HR doesn't it?

First class universities are really great at bringing together smart people, money and difficult problems all into one area.

For the vast majority of non-smart people however it frankly just isn't worth it. The vast majority of jobs held by people from third and second tier universities do not need a degree - they just need to be qualified to do a specific job.

Udacity will stand in between second/third tier students and second/third tier business and match them like eBay does with buyers and sellers. This is worth a lot of money.

[2pasc]

I partially agree with you. I don't think Udacity disintermediates HR - it disintermediates 2nd and 3rd tier universities whose main value, beyond the degree, was to have a career services department that was sort of helping out students by putting together career fairs, etc... It also allows people in random parts of the world to get recognized and hired by top tier firms, providing them with opportunities that were not possible before at that scale.

Re: HR and founders- that's true in most successful startups. Their value is not what they can technically do. It is the fact that they did everything they could to make it happen. It is a totally different skill set than being an employee of a Company, where people look for people with repeatable, proven skills.

[gms]

Founder-types don't tend to be 'good' employees at established companies. I think it's unlikely HR did anything wrong in the Lotus example.

[confluence]

Well then - maybe we should reevaluate what makes "good" employees.