About LYCEUM
The premise is simple:
craft can be taught.
The most difficult disciplines — the ones that produce great designers, great engineers, great filmmakers and writers — are not mysteries reserved for the talented. They are skills, practised and refined through deliberate study and honest feedback.
The story
Why we built LYCEUM
LYCEUM was founded in 2023 by two people who had spent a combined twenty years inside online education — and who had grown frustrated with the same failure mode: courses designed for conversion, not for learning. Courses that were easy to start, easy to abandon, and easy to feel good about without actually changing your capabilities.
The name is a reference to the Lyceum of Athens — the school where Aristotle taught not by lecture but by peripatetic conversation, by walking and thinking and arguing with his students. The learning was not passive. The learning was hard.
We believe the internet has made it possible to bring that kind of instruction to anyone, anywhere — but only if you take the instruction as seriously as Aristotle took his students. That means finding instructors who are genuinely extraordinary at what they teach. It means building curriculum with a real outcome in mind. And it means designing the experience for people who want to be genuinely changed by it, not just entertained.
What we believe
Our values
Mastery over completion
Most online learning is optimised for the feeling of progress rather than its substance. LYCEUM is designed for the opposite: courses that are hard to finish because they demand real engagement, and that leave you genuinely more capable when you do.
Practitioners, not theorists
We believe the most valuable instruction comes from people who are still deep in the work — who learned from failures in the last five years, not the last fifty. Every LYCEUM instructor was selected because of what they built, wrote, shot, or shipped.
Learning is social
Even in an asynchronous medium, craft is learned in community. LYCEUM Pro includes access to a cohort structure where learners taking the same course can share work, get feedback, and hold each other to the standard the course demands.
Credentials that mean something
A LYCEUM certificate is not automatically meaningful. We intend to make it meaningful by ensuring that the process of earning it — completing the curriculum, submitting the capstone — is genuinely difficult and genuinely educational.
The team
Who's building LYCEUM
Andrés Villanueva
Co-founder & CEO
Former Head of Education at Khan Academy. Andrés has spent twelve years thinking about what works in online learning and what doesn't — and building LYCEUM around the 'what works' column.
Yuki Tanaka
Co-founder & CPO
Former product director at Coursera during their highest-growth period. Yuki designed the course experience architecture and the instructor selection framework that defines LYCEUM's quality bar.
Chioma Eze
Head of Curriculum
Former senior editor at MIT Press and academic director at General Assembly. Chioma works directly with instructors to shape the structure and pedagogy of every course.
Want to teach on LYCEUM?
We work with a small number of instructors per year — people who are genuinely extraordinary at what they do and who have a clear perspective on why the discipline matters.
Learn more