They're pretty good at marketing... that's about it. The lowest quality start-ups in this training/education space (at least from my experience) are not coincidentally some of the most funded.<p><a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/general-assembly" rel="nofollow">http://www.crunchbase.com/company/general-assembly</a>
<a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/skillshare" rel="nofollow">http://www.crunchbase.com/company/skillshare</a><p>Once the focus becomes the return for investors instead of the quality of instruction/training, it's a bad alignment of incentives. It seems in these cases there was a rush to expand before they'd really figured out the long lasting recipe of what actually works beyond marketing gimmicks. They're the "cool" version of DeVry and University of Phoenix, dumping more $$ into marketing than into their product.<p>Contrast this with codeschool.com that has raised $0 to date and is a much better way to learn. Or with some of the better in-person learn to code, design, etc programs, none of the good ones have raised any money. From my experience with all of these, and there seems to be a significantly negative correlation between taking large amounts of VC money and quality. FWIW.<p>Obviously GA would have the advantage of a theoretical community, but at least in SF... that doesn't exist for them anyway.