What is Expercoin?
Serving Fortune 500 clients with demonstrable success, Experfy is an on-demand AI consulting and training marketplace with 30,000 experts that first debuted on March 31, 2014. TechCrunch wrote in its headline: “Harvard-Backed Experfy Wants to Create a McKinsey in the Cloud for Big Data Talent”[1] and the one from Forbes, “Harvard-Backed Startup Experfy Launches to Match Top Data Talent with Thousands in Freelance Cash,”[2] both encapsulated the mission of the platform on the day of our launch. Roughly a year later, Datanami observed the platform’s dramatic growth with the headline, “Experfy: The Uber of Big Data Projects,”[3] while The Wall Street Journal announced that the Experfy had raised $1.5 million in seed funding in a round led by Peter Diamandis.[4] Recently, in May 2017, recognizing Experfy’s both consulting and training offerings, Gartner named Experfy a “Cool Vendor in Data Science and Machine Learning.”[5] Experfy’s clients include Macy’s, Deloitte, PwC, McKesson, Cigna, Tata, Gulf, Vistaprint, Keurig Green Mountain, The Food Group, UC Davis and Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, among others.
To foster an ecosystem that is open, decentralized and highly scalable, Experfy believes it must create a series of new products, services, and systems. However, building a decentralized system is a complex process, and the transition to it must be done in a responsible manner over time. We believe the Ecosystem will establish a new protocol that will allow individuals and organizations to create and launch new marketplaces for different areas of specialization.
Educators serious about preparing students to enter the workforce; employers scrambling to upskill their employees; and experts dissatisfied with 9-5 work regimes are all beginning to recognize the limitations of slow-moving centralized organizations. These organizations are operating on learning and employment models that were devised over a hundred years ago. The future of education and work is clear. Education will be skills-based—employers care little about degrees—while work will be increasingly distributed and performed by teams of specialized experts from around the globe.
Our vision is that anyone seeking to make an impact in a particular area of specialization should be able to leverage a mature technology stack and launch a decentralized platform to reinvent both education and work for that specialization. According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, half of all American colleges are bound for bankruptcy in the next few decades. By launching a large number of learning platforms and integrating them with relevant work experiences, we hope to bring about a meaningful change in an industry facing disruption.
[1] Harvard-Backed Experfy Wants To Create A McKinsey In The Cloud For Big Data Talent (TechCrunch)
[2] Free Issues of Forbes Harvard-Backed Startup Experfy Launches To Match Top Data Talent With Thousands In Freelance Cash (Forbes)
[3] Experfy: The Uber of Big Data Projects (Datanami)
[4] Experfy Secures Seed Round to Scale Data Scientist Marketplace (WSJ)
[5] Cool Vendors in Data Science and Machine Learning, 2017 (Gartner)
Republics
“In Skills We Trust”
It is our intention that each Republic will be highly specialized and is intended to consist of six pillars that become available as soon as the Republic is created:
Learning Marketplace: Listing of course offerings and interactive games promoting learning experiences within an area of expertise. All offerings are rated. AI-powered adaptive learning system to deliver courses, hands-on coding exercises and capstone projects.
Jobs Marketplace: Platform for employers to post and facilitate apprenticeships, internships, short-term contracts and full-time job requirements in the Republic’s area of specialization.
Mentorship Marketplace: Mentors for hire to help students and corporate employees on both technical and non-technical topics ranging from writing code to expert advice.
Assessment Platform: Assessments to identify skills gap for a job role or an area of expertise. Helps employers screen candidates during recruiting process. Assessments will also provide benchmarking against other users in the field, followed by micro-credentialing and certifications.
Corporate Academy: Team and group interface for companies to understand employee course engagement and completion rates. Companies can bulk purchase learning content or purchase subscriptions for their employees.
Financial Aid Marketplace: Peer-to-peer financial aid offered through a marketplace. A student may request tuition assistance and the lender pays directly to the course creator on the student’s behalf. Course creators may also serve as lenders in exchange for a premium on the course price.
The individual launching a new Republic will be able to choose which platform services launch first. Developers will be able to develop new apps and offer them in the Expercoin app store in order to expand the functionality of Republics.
What’s noteworthy is that Experfy has been using four of the six pillars with its customers and generating revenue in the process. These pillars represent cutting-edge products that have earned the trust of Fortune 500s. As these pillars are decentralized, we believe they are likely to make a real contribution to the Expercoin ecosystem with their rich feature-set.