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Friday, 05 November 2010 16:05

Skyara Wants to Help You Do Something New This Weekend

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One of the pleasures of going on vacation is doing things you don’t usually do at home, like learning to scuba dive or taking a cooking class in the local cuisine.

Now Skyara, a startup

incubated in the first class of I/O Ventures in San Francisco, wants to make such adventures more of an every weekend experience than once a year.

The concept is simple: people who have an experience to sell set a price and list it for free on the site. The bored or restless search for something fun. When the two connect, the company takes twelve percent of the transaction, while guaranteeing satisfaction.

The site officially launches Friday, with an initial focus on San Francisco. Listings include typical tourist fare such as a San Francisco Architecture Tour (which comes highly recommended), but co-founder Jonathan Wu wants more listings like the ones from an Army Ranger, who for $50 will train you in marksmanship or for $20 crush you into shape with army fitness training.

He hopes to get people who have “experiences” to offer, but who aren’t ready to quit their jobs to create listings.

Wu says he’s currently most excited about barista training from a local café.

“I’m going to book that one to learn how to make a cappuccino and machiato,” Wu said. “I’ve never had chance to work at a café and you watch them do it and wonder how long it took to learn to make the leaf with the steamed milk.”

Wu and longtime friend Dennis Liu decided to start the company after working in NYC in consulting jobs, thinking of companies to start. They decided to focus on a startup about adventures and travelling, something they both like. The notion has worked in the past — Groupon founder Andrew Mason, who has built a billion business on getting people to buy coupons, says one of the best things about his company is that it gets people to try new things and go out more.

After being accepted to I/O ventures, they convinced their third partner, Steven Ou, in the final months of his senior year at college to give up his post-college job at UBS before he even started.

While the site doesn’t have many listings yet — the classic chicken-and-the-egg problem for any marketplace, Wu hopes that the site’s “Request” feature will help, giving people the chance to request experiences they want but are not listed.

For instance, I/O Venture partner Paul Bragiel wants to ride along with a San Francisco cab driver on a Saturday night, one of many requests already posted, alongside some surprising ones like “flip burgers at a fast-food joint.”

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.

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Authors: Ryan Singel

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