Why MasterClass Isn’t Really About Mastery

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Top Highlights

• What exactly does a university sell?

• You might say they sell training and skills to help students earn a job.  You might say they sell a space for young adults to explore their intellectual and occupational interests in a low-risk environment.  You might say they simply sell a stamp of approval; a guarantee that students won’t fall into the cracks of society.  Or maybe they just sell a year-long summer camp to have fun, meet lifelong friends and let loose.

• The truth is that universities sell all of these things, bundled together. And that’s a big reason they’ve been able to raise prices to astronomical levels over the past several decades — it’s really hard to disrupt all of those things at once.

• Credibility, Not Education

• Even though MasterClass has instructors such as Aaron Franklin, Hans Zimmer, deadmau5, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, MasterClass isn’t selling a plate of barbeque, a film score, an EDM track, or a physics degree.

• Rather, Masterclass is selling credibility.

• The credibility of being someone at the top of your field takes a lot of work.

• Masterclass is selling the LeBron James poster we put on our bedroom wall, not the skills coach we hire to train us three times a week.

• (I actually think this is what massive online open courses (MOOCs) got wrong. They have notoriously low completion rates (around 5%), which is generally cited as the reason they didn’t upend the education system. But I think their mistake wasn’t in that people weren’t finishing the courses. Instead, it was the thesis that online, low-touch courses were for skill-building instead of inspiration or entertainment.

• Key Takeaways

• Borrowing social capital is easier than creating it.

• MasterClass took people who were already famous and gave their fans even more access to them (without much burden on the celebrities). It’s tricky to create a world-class talent. The MasterClass model skipped the line of building a large audience and lots of credibility and instead, they purchased under-monetized social capital and made delightful educational content out of it.