Author Archives: Aaron Skonnard

About Aaron Skonnard

As the President/CEO of Pluralsight, I work every day to deliver more value to our growing number of subscribers by publishing relevant, high-quality courses each and every week along with new product features to improve our modern online learning experience.

Calling Microsoft MVPs – Share Your Expertise with the World

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It’s that time of the year again. Time for another fabulous MVP Summit! As a Microsoft MVP, you are most likely the perfect fit to become a Pluralsight author and share your expertise with the world. You owe it to yourself to learn more about the opportunity.

MVP Summit 2013

We’re also pleased to announce that we are now providing Microsoft MVP’s and Regional Directors with a free Annual Plus subscription ($499 value). Simply email your request to mvp-promo@pluralsight.com and provide a link to your online MVP/RD profile page. Once validated, we’ll send you an activation code and registration instructions.

We have aggressive growth plans for 2013 and we want you to be part of it. Please help us spread the word and feel free to email authoring@pluralsight.com to learn more.

The Pluralsight Opportunity

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Since our recent Series A funding announcement, we have received numerous emails a day from candidates interested in authoring courses for our professional training library. The questions are usually the same so I decided it was time to write this article on the Pluralsight opportunity and how to get started for those interested.

Our goal for 2013 is simple:

Amass the largest, highest quality, body of knowledge for professional software developers on the planet.

We are accomplishing this by partnering with today’s leading software development experts to produce “courses” for our fast-growing training library. This year we have an aggressive goal to publish over 600 new courses, which will bring our library to over 1,000 courses by year-end. This creates a tremendous opportunity for future authors.

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The hardest part of this, however, is finding the right experts because, by definition, they are in short supply and scattered all over the world. Nevertheless, we work tirelessly to find them each and every day. If you believe you’re one, please keep reading.
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The Story Behind Our $27.5M Series A Funding

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Wow, it’s been an exciting month for our company! I’m Aaron Skonnard, the CEO and cofounder of Pluralsight. Today feels like a perfect day to share some of my own thoughts about the recent news and what it ultimately means to our customers.

Last Thursday, TechCrunch broke the story about our $27.5M Series A funding led by Insight Venture Partners. Shortly thereafter, articles about the investment round appeared in AllThingsD, VentureBeat, and several other sites.

As the Screen Shot 2013-01-08 at 9.00.25 AMone who led the investment process for Pluralsight, I want to share some of the thinking that led to this outcome. I hope this post will provide more context for our customers and explain how the investment will impact the future of our business.

When we first considered the idea of taking an outside investment, we weren’t sure it was the right thing to do. Pluralsight was founded back in 2004 and we’ve been profitable for over 8 years now. We pivoted to the online model in 2008, and since then, we’ve seen dramatic growth in overall revenue and our customer base.
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The kind of feedback that makes you smile

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Recent message from a customer:

Want to take the opportunity though to compliment Pluralsight and all the terrific instructors for an amazingly high quality experience and the best value I have seen in the 30 years I’ve been involved in this industry both as a developer and as an instructor and developer of training material. Bravo to all of you.

I don’t think I’ve every recommended anything in this business to as many people as I have Pluralsight.

Thanks for sharing. You just made our day! ;)

Pluralsight + SharePoint = Awesomesauce

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Pluralsight has been investing heavily in building a complete online SharePoint training curriculum for a while now. We’ve been proud to work with expert instructors like Sahil Malik, Rob Windsor, Janis Hall, and Dan Wahlin so far! But we’ve struggled to keep up with the massive size of the SharePoint platform, the version changes, and the different user roles who all desperately need training online today!

Well, a few months ago that changed pretty dramatically for us.

We formed a content partnership with Critical Path Training, one of the industry leaders in serious, professional SharePoint classroom training. You can read more about our partnership here, but basically, Critical Path Training is publishing their entire SharePoint classroom training curriculum online at Pluralsight. Critical Path Training boasts a thorough and deep curriculum that targets information users, administrators, developers, and web designers. Check out the entire Critical Path Training catalog.

Since we announced the partnership, we have jointly published 39 new SharePoint courses and we have many more planned for the months ahead! That gives us a grand total of 53 SharePoint courses in our online training library today!

Critical Path Training’s cofounder, Andrew Connell, recently published six new courses on SharePoint 2013 designed to quickly ramp-up serious developers.

We believe these are the ONLY online courses available today on SharePoint 2013.

We want to celebrate this achievement and give everyone a chance to experience the quality of our SharePoint content. Hence, we’ve decided to unlock all six of our new 2013 courses – they’re FREE for the next 48 hours starting today Nov 13 (through Thursday, Nov 15, 5pm ET)!  - Free offer has now expired. Get a 10-day free trial on our website.

Watch the following SharePoint 2013 courses today!

This series is a MUST for SharePoint developers. Kudos to Andrew Connell.

Today we’re confident that Pluralsight has the most comprehensive and high-quality online training library for SharePoint thanks to our partnership with Critical Path Training. We believe this will dramatically improve educational opportunities for SharePoint professionals around the globe.

We’re also happy to give them a free trial to the entire library and can give their organization a free company pilot to check our license management and report features.

This week we’re at The SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada exhibiting and working side-by-side with our partner, Critical Path Training, to engage with the SharePoint community here. If you happen to be here at #SPC12, please stop by and say hello! We’d love to meet you, give you some free stuff, and enter you to win one of two (2) Windows 8 Surface tablets!

Happy SharePoint learning!

Pluralsight for MSDN Subscribers Worldwide

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Back in June, we announced a special training benefit for MSDN designed to provide MSDN subscribers with access to 20 of our most popular courses.

Previously only available in the US, today we’re expanding this benefit to MSDN subscribers worldwide through December 11, 2012. Now you can access this benefit across the globe, regardless of location! See the notes below on who is eligible.

Based on your feedback, we’ve also worked with Microsoft to enhance this custom 12 month training subscription with several new Visual Studio 2012 courses.

The Pluralsight Starter Subscription for MSDN now contains 25 popular courses. The five new courses we added include:  Continue reading →

Special FREE Offer: Best Practices for Software Startups

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To celebrate our recent success as a fast-growing startup, we thought it would only be appropriate to share our new Best Practices for Software Startups course with the community. Starting today, and for the next week, you can get a free activation code that will give you 30-days to watch the course and absorb these gems of wisdom.

Request an activation code now!

The course was authored by Stephen Forte, the Chief Strategy Officer of the venture backed company, Telerik, a leading vendor of developer and team productivity tools. Stephen has been involved in several startups during his career.

He was co-founder of Triton Works, which was acquired by UBM (London: UBM.L) in 2010 and was the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Corzen, Inc., which was acquired by Wanted Technologies (TXV: WAN) in 2007. Prior to Corzen, Stephen served as the CTO of Zagat Survey in New York City (acquired by Google in 2011) and also was co-founder of New York-based software consulting firm The Aurora Development Group. Stephen earned an MBA from City University in New York.

More recently, Stephen launched a new mobiled-focused startup accelerator – known as AcceleratorHK – in Hong Kong where he currently lives.

In this course, Stephen shares many of these lessons he’s learned during his career as a software entrepreneur. He teaches how to get started with “the idea”, build the team, develop “the customer”, and establish a process for “technical excellence”. Then he provides in-depth discussions on funding the startup and exit strategies. If you’re an aspiring software entrepreneur, you owe it to yourself to watch this course!

Request an activation code now!

Free course offer ends Monday October 15th at 11:59PM MDT.

Pluralsight reaches 1,000 hrs of video, 150k users!

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It wasn’t long ago when we first released the Pluralsight online training library with only 10 courses and a couple of early adopter users. So you can only imagine how excited we were back in June when we surpassed 100k user accounts.

But what’s even more exciting is watching our growth rate continue to increase.

Today, just three months later, we’ve reached 150k users and over 1,000 hours of video in our library!

We’ve seen record growth across the entire business and all of our key metrics. Thanks to a strategic content partnership, we were able to publish 50 new courses in the month of September – that’s a huge month content-wise. We’re also expecting 50+ new courses before end of year. That puts us on track to more than double the size of our entire training library since Jan 1st.

We’re seeing growth rates of over 100% in total user accounts, active users, and ultimately revenue. We’re also pleased to see our social communities flourishing with over 100k followers on Twitter and ~40k likes on our Facebook page.

The good news for customers: this success will fuel our future library expansion. We are aggressively investing in new topic areas that developers care about, where the need for online training is apparent. And we will do so without sacrificing quality one bit.

The quality of our authors and their content is – and always will be – the most important characteristic of the Pluralsight brand.

Our company’s mission is to drive more and more value into each dollar we earn. We appreciate the trust you place in our product each month and do not take it for granted. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.

Sweden Pluralsight Study Group

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A few months ago we announced the first Pluralsight Study Group formed in New York City. We’ve watched them with keen interest, week by week, as the group has progressed working through several Pluralsight courses together. Each week they watch a course module, have some discussion, and occasionally write code together. The feedback so far has been wonderful, from the organizers and members alike.

Not long after the New York group was formed, one of our strong community advocates in Sweden, Iris Classon, asked about forming another Pluralsight study group in Gothenburg. We readily agreed and the Sweden Pluralsight Study Group was born!

Watch this video recording of Iris presenting during their first meeting a few weeks back to get a feel for what the group is all about.

The group’s site states the following:

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Watch Pluralsight on Your XBox 360!

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We recently released a new HTML 5 player for watching Pluralsight courses. Although still in alpha testing, the new HTML 5 player has already unlocked the doors to new platforms and viewing scenarios. For example, we’ve heard reports of the HTML 5 player working great on Ubuntu, Blackberry Playbook, and even the XBox 360 with the IE10 beta!

One of our lead developers on the HTML 5 project, Jim Cooper, decided to do some testing of his own and enlisted the help of his teenage son to get Pluralsight fired up on their XBox 360! The video you see below is the result of that home experiment. Enjoy!