Very Impressive Progress
When Airbnb launched in 2008, it ignited a new peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing boom. Four years later, Lyft debuted the P2P ride sharing model, which immediately took off and was soon after copied by Uber — at that time still a premium limousine service. In only a few years, the “copy-catting” of Lyft’s P2P ride sharing model around the World resulted in a list of new unicorns, including Didi, Grab, Gojek, and Ola.
The drivers of this fast-paced revolution included a) ease of use from your mobile device, b) automatic in-app payment, and c) high visibility on the service providers due to the rating and review system. On the supply side, these new P2P sharing services also provided new income for things people already owned or did. Not surprisingly, the market leaders took the entire industry upside down, and saw value creation in the tens of billions of dollars within years.
Peer-to-Peer Sharing Leaders

Source: Company announcements and current trade valuations
Enter the Education space, and we are now witnessing the first woman-led education unicorn, which also has a P2P model. This week, Beijing-based VIPKid announced it raised $200 million at a $1.5 billion valuation (as reported by Bloomberg) from Sequoia and Tencent. Based off of Lyft’s peer-to-peer model, VIPKid helps Chinese kids learn English, Math and other subjects by connecting them with top-quality teachers from North America. In many ways, teachers are similar to Lyft drivers because they are on-demand and get rated after each session.

Source: VIPKid
The 4-year old startup is led by Cindy Mi who is a Very Impressive Person. She was a high school drop-out in Harbin, where she read science fiction in her math classes and never took the “Gao Kao” — the “life or death” exam for most Chinese students. In the short four years since launching, VIPKid has rocketed to be a leader in after-school learning in China.
At just 34 years of age, Cindy has managed to grow the platform to over 20,000 teachers and 200,000 paying students; this is up from 1K teachers and 10K paying students in April 2016 when she presented at our ASU GSV Summit.
With the new funding, VIPKid is also launching a new service called Lingo Bus. It is a mirror image service, offering Mandarin classes taught by Chinese tutors to kids in the U.S. and elsewhere. With that addition, and with further geographic expansion in the future, Cindy expects to hit 1 million paying students by 2019.

Source: VIPKid
* The 2019 Teacher estimate is a GSV estimate
Monetization is also picking up quickly, with June’s gross revenue reported at $60 million, or a $720 million annual gross revenue run rate. The company said it expects to generate $750 million in gross revenue for 2017. VIPKid’s effective take rate is about 50%, and it pays teachers slightly over $20 per hour net.
VIPKid recently partnered with the Jack Ma Foundation and it aims to expand its online English education program in rural China from five to 100 schools this year.
We believe VIPKid is one of the most important growth companies in the World, and one that is very high on our priority list.
As published in this week’s A 2 Apple: http://www.a2apple.com/eclipse-fix/
