A year ago, Dave Schappell, a former marketing executive at Amazon.com Inc. [AMZN], was searching for a motorcycle safety class so he could ride a scooter around town. Today, he's the founder and CEO of TeachStreet, a Seattle startup that helps students find local teachers through its Web site and is backed by some of Schappell's former colleagues, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself.

This week, TeachStreet announced a $2.2 million Series A round of funding led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Bezos Expeditions and several Seattle angels, including current Amazon execs Jeff Blackburn and Mike George; former Amazonians such as Jason Kilar (now CEO of Hulu LLC, the online video joint venture of News Corp and NBC Universal); and others, such as Erik Blachford (CEO of TerraPass Inc.) and John Musser (founder of ProgrammableWeb.com).

"The process of finding a motorcycle school was like it was in 1990," Schappell, 39, tells Tech Confidential. The information turned out to be in a form as low-tech as it gets--handwritten cards on bulletin boards inside motorcycle stores.

"It's one of those experiences that hasn't gotten any better over the last 15 years," Schappell says. "There was nobody out there aggregating local school content."

At Amazon, where he worked from 1998 to 2004 (beginning as a summer intern while he was enrolled at the MBA program at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania), Schappell became an expert in how to hook up buyers and sellers. As director of product development, he led a team that launched new stores and services, most significantly Marketplace, where used books are bought and sold and which became the model for how Amazon works with other merchants. He left the online bookseller in 2004, took some time off, worked for a non-profit (Unitus), then a startup (JibJab Media Inc.) and then got the idea for TeachStreet.

In funding the startup, he initially held off reaching out to Amazon, preferring to bootstrap it himself last summer. An angel round of $600,000 in the fall did not include Bezos, although other executives from his former employer did participate.

"I didn't want to go to 'Dad' first," Schappell jokes. "I'm sure Jeff gets asked for money 14 times a day. I wanted to prove that we could raise money, build the company and have a demo-able product before going to him."

Schappell waited until he was confident Seattle's early-stage VC firm Madrona would participate before pitching Bezos. Then after emailing his former boss, he recalls, "Within about 20 seconds I got pinged back by his investment folks" at Bezos Expeditions, Schappell says.

At TeachStreet, Schappell's goal is to "create a great experience for customers who are looking for classes and to keep satisfying the needs of teachers and small schools to make it easy for local teachers to find motivated students." The startup also helps instructors have a permanent presence on the Web and take advantage of online innovations, including blogging and calendaring. The service launched in the Seattle market this week, with a guide to 25,000 local teachers, classes, instructors and schools. The business model includes contextual advertisements and fees for advanced services to instructors, such as increased storage.

TeachStreet is doing data collection on a second city now. Says Schappell, "Our goal is to roll out additional cities every month or two."  -- Mary Kathleen Flynn

For more about Dave Schappell see his NoSnivelling.com blog