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That's actually a different firm called Apollo Group (which is mostly comprised of Phoenix and a small number of other things) – Apollo Global is a much larger private equity firm with a confusingly similar name

Also, this might answer the question of potential acquirers...

At Thinkful (thinkful.com) we're in beta with a python class that covers programming with python, and then web developing using flask. The syllabus overview for the class is here: https://www.thinkful.com/register/syllabus-python

First commenter's co-founder here: Sure, you definitely need to screen for culture fit. There are great people who would be bad fits here. That said, we want people who have succeed in most positions they've had in the past. If there are two people who have had 4 jobs in their career, you're way more likely to pick the better if you favor the one who outperformed in 3 of those 4 jobs rather than 1 of the 4. When you combine that with looking closely at their experience as it fits with the role, and their fit with the culture, then you have a complete screening process.

Thinkful (thinkful.com) - NYC, full-time.

We are a team of educators and students. Whether you’re building the product, designing a curriculum, or working directly with students, you’ll be asked to learn quickly and help others do the same. We hire for the curiosity, enthusiasm, and grit that characterize our students. We believe in both teaching and learning while at work, and we provide the freedom and support you need to learn any skill.

We offer everything you should expect from a well-funded startup: competitive salaries, health insurance, significant equity, and a few perks that reflect our culture: gym membership, Kindle, and monthly book credit. We share an office with other great startups in the Flatiron district of Manhattan.

Python/Django engineers

We’re building the tools to deliver curricula, expertise and live help so anyone can advance their career. As an engineer at Thinkful you’ll be working directly with both Darrell and Dan to architect, build and grow our technology and our team. You’re excited about learning new skills and applying them to help others learn. You must have a portfolio of interesting software engineering projects you can show us. The ideal candidate has a keen interest in education and learning, reflecting the aspirations of our students. Talent and curiosity matter more than raw skill: Experience is valued, but not as much as potential. This position is with us in New York City.

Contact Darrell (darrell at thinkful dot com) to apply. Send along your GitHub profile, or any work that makes you awesome.

UX/UI designer

We need to build a visual voice that reflects the values of Thinkful: Aspirational, curious, and open to experimentation. In this role, you’ll define the look and feel of the Thinkful brand and create the UX and UI of our educational product. You’re excited to design experiences that help our students learn faster and retain what they learn. You want to contribute ideas, and take others’ ideas to the state of finished products. If you don’t already know how to code your designs, you’re excited to learn (we’re happy to teach you). Your experience must demonstrate that you’re versatile, and your curiosity must convince us that you intend to become more so. This position is with us in New York City.

Contact Darrell (darrell at thinkful dot com) to apply. Send along any work that makes you awesome.

Couldn't agree more – when we started Thinkful (mentor-led training for front-end development), my co-founder and I mentored every student ourselves, and it was amazing how quickly it exposed every hole in our understanding of even basic concepts. Even though the team has grown and we now have 12 mentors, we still try to work with a few students because we enjoy it so much.

We've mentor about 75 students in front-end development at Thinkful (thinkful.com) – we're actually working with a team of about 12 mentors now. If you'd like to join, feel free to reach out (email is dan at thinkful). We've learned a ton about best practices for how to help beginners learn over the last 6 months of doing it.

Also OATV is a seed fund – they may have participated in a few series A's in the past, but probably don't deserve to be mentioned in this list. Should probably add a filter for investors that do 80%+ seed deals and just a few series A's.

Coaching is less likely to mask incompetence than reveal competence.

Right, and it's one thing if the problem is, "you're a douche," which frankly requires more than interview feedback to fix. But if the problem is, "you came across as timid," and the problem is strictly about speaking with more confidence, that's a highly fixable problem that you can improve with a reasonable amount of practice.

Free month of Thinkful to the team that's supposed to be keeping it up. Could have order something and had it delivered in the time it took to get back up...

With such comprehensive layoffs (4% of the company), I can't imagine they wiped out 80% of their bottom 5%.

Signs certainly point to yes.

Oh come on, we know it's Derek Jeter. Jeter IS kalamazoo.

Sometimes it's not about being unique or being the hardest-working in the world. A well-told human story can often inspire.

We've known for a while just how widespread this is. Surveys have shown 2/3 of undergrads cheat at some point in college. Students just don't feel they're doing something immoral when they cheat.

[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1286242...

"I’m convinced that medium/long-form writing’s future is unthreatened; but remain puzzled that nobody in new media has really figured out the elite-curation story and created a place that you go, and then subscribe to with real money, because that’s where you have a high chance of being entertained, influenced, and informed."

It seems like Svbtle may be going after exactly what you describe here, although it's unclear whether it will be free or paid at this point.

This is the big challenge when it comes to quantified self -- passive tracking can be creepy, but manual track has such high adoption costs. Seems like it would be hard for manual tracking to go extreme, bc few people care as much about quantifying everything as this community does. Any form of passive tracking has higher upside but also must be treated carefully so it seems trustworthy.

One of Musk's original goals was to do it 10x cheaper, and accd to his recent discussion with NPR, he's already at 1/8th of the cost(1). What an amazing accomplishment. 1. http://www.npr.org/2012/05/18/153015277/on-eve-of-launch-spa...

Realistically that's the growth curve experienced by even the most popular and addictive games (grow quickly to large # of users, slowly decline into mediocrity) -- the trick for Turf will be to figure out how to become more than just 1 game. There's no reason they can't launch new games within the game (just off the top of my head, think scavenger hunts or group battles), and get people engaging in all sorts of gameplay.

Haven't we seen enough of these?

I'm thinking punchd, Belly, LevelUp, Plink, not to mention offerings from Groupon, foursquare... They may be able to profitably acquire businesses now, but isn't it a coinflip as to who will win in the long-term?

Great implementation solving a big problem.

And the same Yuri Milner that owns significant stakes in Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Spotify, and Groupon...

how about a non-ads business? they add a ton of value by serving as the identity provider for the web, but all they're monetizing is pageviews... you would think they could/should capture some of the value they create at some point.

Berkeley's presence on both coursera and EdX is an interesting wrinkle -- they've got a quote in another article suggesting they can't control where their professors to decide to put their content: “Ultimately, our faculty will decide where they want to put courses up online, but we find that edX has values and methodologies very closely aligned with ours at Berkeley, so our institutional preference would be to use edX,” said Robert J. Birgeneau, the chancellor of Berkeley.

LPTHW is excellent, although if you are interested in doing something with videos and the structure of a course, Udacity does use python, and their courses are available whenever you want. You could do CS 101 with him there (even after finishing LPTHW).

Also, you are awesome.

This really makes me wish they would leave content up rather than following the cohort model -- there are a handful of classes I'd like to take, but their current model forces users to basically adhere to the university schedule (they have 4x more courses starting in september than any other month). Udacity made the switch after a couple months of trying the cohort model -- hope Coursera considers the same.

Majority of "top grossing" apps are free. The article seems to reflect the opinion of a small minority, who happen to make a lot of noise in a few circles.

Education is also a much weaker predictor of sales abilities than of biz dev potential. Sales seems like a more directly learnable skill. Sales also tends to leave highly-educated people with a negative taste (that's absent from biz dev), even though good salespeople can have as big an impact on the bottom line.

It's a good question, but I'm not sure it has to. They're almost breaking even right now with that cost, and their only consumer product is a crappy deals e-mail site. With better consumer offerings, they could be getting 2-3x the value off of that cost.