Startup WorkRamp's Marketplace Helps Train Employees Like At Airbnb And Uber

Developers post their projects to GitHub, allowing their peers to learn from their code in exchange for exposure and recognition from the community. Now a company called WorkRamp is looking to do the same thing with employee training.

The San Francisco startup's new marketplace is called The WorkRoom, and it hosts expertise from initial partners including unicorns Airbnb and Uber as well as high-flying startups Eero and Mixpanel. Those companies host their preferred workflows for a specific training use case, such as data science or product management. Users can then build their own training program off of the flow and track employee progress and completion.

CEO Ted Blosser says the company was meeting with another San Francisco startup, Omada Health, when its executive for human resources wished out loud that there were a way to get a employee training program up and running without building it from scratch. WorkRamp was working on software for employee training, but it didn't shift its focus to building a marketplace more like GitHub until it acquired a stealth Y Combinator-backed startup working on an enterprise commerce marketplace called Prelude in October 2016. Its cofounder Percia Safar had worked with Blosser previously at Box.

Together, the combined WorkRamp is now betting that companies will want to share their more successful training processes with the world in exchange for better exposure, and that a lot more businesses will want to use their work as templates. "The only way to do this at scale is to democratize the knowledge by companies sharing with each other," says Blosser.

It's free to use The WorkRoom, with WorkRamp only charging businesses that want to add premium features to how their employees use the content. The plan is to expand training into a range of job types, but at first the marketplace will prioritize data analysis, sales and customer service processes.

Employees are already using the product at PayPal, Square and Twilio, as well as Forbes Cloud 100 company Zoom. At PayPal, staff are using The WorkRoom to train engineers. At African startup Off Grid Electric, it's helping train sales and customer service reps selling solar panels. And at Tom Ford, the software helps train retail associates to stay up to date on new pieces for sale.

WorkRamp eventually wants to connect the actual experts at the companies providing the content directly to adopters, so that a data expert at Airbnb could make visitation hours available and meet directly with her fans through the product.

"High growth companies need this," says Safar. "Engineering roles can sit open for a hundred days. Then you're feeling pressure on the recruiting side to retrain people."

WorkRamp has influential early backers including Y Combinator, Slack's investment fund, Susa Ventures and a group of angel investors including Semil Shah and Elad Gil. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, an investor through his fund Initialized, says he and Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman could've spent more time focusing on community if they'd had the WorkRoom community to use for training when they built their site.

"If we could have gotten an inside look into how the greatest companies did it, we could have scaled our mission that much faster," Ohanian says. "Even today, posts abound that are good for generating Hacker News upvotes, but don't actually give you the tools or the depth to actually apply the best practices of the best companies."

But for The WorkRoom to succeed, it will have to clear several significant hurdles. First, the company will have to build momentum of word-of-mouth at key customers so that sales trainers or HR reps spread the word about the marketplace. At the same time, it has to manage expectations on the supply side so that businesses like Airbnb and Uber continue to devote employee time to what's essentially an unpaid pursuit of thought leadership in sharing their work. Should WorkRamp get the balance wrong, or bring on content providers whose quality dilutes the cachet of those already signed on, it would risk that buy-in and find it hard to bounce back after squandering its initial goodwill.

WorkRamp's marketplace already beats the alternative of after-hours workshops and office hours, says Blosser, but he acknowledges the company will have to curate its marketplace carefully. "People find value in being viewed as leaders in their market," he says. "And posting to LinkedIn isn't cutting it."