WorkRamp: Transforming Corporate Learning with Engaging Training Solutions (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: When we started the company, we actually started, our wedge was really helping salespeople get more efficient at their roles. And then over time, our customers were coming to us and saying, hey, can you help our support people? Can you help our customers? Can you also educate our partners? Now we've landed into a spot where we've essentially created an entire enterprise learning platform so that when a company has a learning need, they know, hey, I can go into WorkRamp and solve that specific learning need.

Speaker 2: San Francisco-based WorkRamp is an employee onboarding and training platform. Seeing that the market for corporate learning was underserved, CEO Ted Blosser began working on a software for employee training. It wasn't until they acquired Y Combinator-backed Prelude in 2016 that they created a GitHub-like platform that allows companies to create and share their own employee training content.

Speaker 1: At the core of WorkRamp is learning, and our vision is to empower every person to reach their full potential through learning. And so we see that all businesses are successful if their people are equipped and enabled to do their roles first. And so our goal is to help the companies like the Zooms of the world, the Everlanes of the world, to make sure that their employees know how to do their roles effectively, whether they're in person or remote or in the field. And so that once they know how to do their roles more effectively, they can provide more value to their organizations and also to their customers as well, too.

Speaker 2: Even before raising their Series A, WorkRamp made a name for themselves by attracting high-profile clients like Airbnb, Slack, Uber and Zoom. To date, the company has raised $27.2 million, most recently securing $17 million in the Series B in December 2020.

Speaker 1: The difficulties of bringing WorkRamp to market is that traditionally people have thought of learning technology and just learning in general as a tedious task to do. And so it has this almost negative connotation to it originally where it's like, oh, I need to go take my compliance training or I need to go take that mandatory training. Our goal at WorkRamp is to really focus on an amazing learner experience, amazing end user experience that people are excited to go learn and get better at their jobs. So, for example, let's say I'm someone in support and I need to take a mandatory training to learn more about the product and how to serve customers better. You want to make that learning more fun, engaging, bite-sized, interactive. And so as we've built out the product, we've overcome a lot of those objections. And so now people are way more excited to buy learning technology. A surprise to us as we've run the company is that I think a lot of people, when they build startups, they think the hardest thing is actually getting to what they call product market fit, is getting to a product that people want to buy. And I initially thought that was the hardest thing to do when building a company. And what's actually much harder is building a great group of people who are aligned and basically want to work on a very large vision together. So the company building aspect of the startup world was something I way underestimated in this whole journey. And so now looking back on a product market fit was almost the easy thing to do. Making sure you have a great company aligned on a singular vision has proven to be the much harder part of the equation. And so we spend most of our time making sure we have a great company culture and great people on that team to help drive our vision forward.