UC Santa Cruz Alum Launches Virtual Class Catalog Amid Quarantine

BAY AREA, CA — A University of California, Santa Cruz graduate has co-founded a new site that seeks to help users get connected with live, virtual classes during the pandemic.

Users of Classalog, a San Francisco-based start-up, can search by category to find classes that are free or related to fitness, food, arts and crafts, professional development, language and more. The site displays a schedule of upcoming classes that includes information about pricing.

Sofia Menendez, who studied biology and sociology at UC Santa Cruz, hopes the free service will help people stay productive while giving a platform to instructors whose work has been sidelined during the pandemic. Many affected instructors are women or minorities working to build a business or launch a side project, she said.

Menendez feels her educational background in sociology motivated her to find work that helps others.

"Having the opportunity to help these people gain visibility is something that is really important to me," she said.

Classalog was initially envisioned by co-founder and former Google employee Deniz Binay as an online marketplace that made it easy for adults to get connected with activities in their communities.

Binay said he began to launch Classalog in San Francisco, at the beginning of the year, but "then COVID happened," he said.

Nobody wanted to take in-person classes.

"I was almost about to give up at that point," he said.

Binay joined forces with Menendez and the two transformed Classalog into a search engine for digital classes. Since then, users across the country and outside of the U.S. have used the site to find online classes. They've seen growth every week, he said.

He hopes Classalog can benefit people in smaller towns with fewer extra curricular opportunities and prevent people from feeling isolated while they're sheltering in place.

"The beauty of these online classes — you can connect people if they don't have the opportunity to connect in real life," Binay said.

"It does fight, a bit, the loneliness."

Visit Classalog here.