SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Launching today, Hone is a new ‘management-training-as-a-service’ platform led by CEO Tom Griffiths, co-founder and former Chief Product Officer of FanDuel, and co-founders Jeremy Hamel and Savina Perez, previously of CultureIQ. Hone is the antidote to outdated corporate management training such as expensive, time-consuming workshops and impersonal e-learning videos. The company’s platform is the first of its kind, powered by live online expert facilitators and artificial intelligence (AI).
“Millennials will make up 75 percent of the global workforce by 2025, and we see companies struggling to find the right way to train this next generation of leaders. Current approaches don’t fit today’s busy schedules or distributed workforce, and training often gets forgotten once people leave the classroom,” said Griffiths. “Hone combines best-of-breed executive coaches and psychologists with the power of technology and AI to finally make leadership training convenient and effective for the millions of employees who take it every year. We are positioned to modernize how the world’s best companies train their current and future leaders.”
Leadership training is close to Griffiths’ heart, as he grew FanDuel from five to 500 employees and a $1.3 billion valuation in a matter of years. Along the way he experienced the struggles that come with rapid growth, and found another industry to upend. While fantasy sports was ripe for disruption in 2009 when he co-founded FanDuel, a much larger opportunity exists in the wildly outdated corporate training and leadership development industry, sized at over $30 billion annually in the United States1.
The Hone Way
Research shows, on average, trainees forget 70 percent of what they are taught within 24 hours of the training experience2. Based on Griffiths’s background in product development and machine learning, Hone will use the latest advances in consumer technology and AI to reinforce human-led leadership training and have it actually “stick” long-term with trainees. By taking a remote-first approach, Hone also serves the 43 percent of workers in the US who spend at least some time each week working remotely. The platform’s flagship program is an 12-week Manager Bootcamp, which is experienced live online by groups of eight peers with an expert facilitator where they practice core management skills in short weekly sessions. Interactive messaging with chatbots and instructors supports learners in applying their training over time. New programs on additional leadership topics are coming soon.
Hone is currently piloting with a number of top companies and has a strong pipeline of organizations waiting to adopt their platform.
“We want to ensure we provide opportunities for first-time managers to grow and learn to lead. Hone has been an effective tool for that, and we especially love that it’s not location dependent as we have managers in both Paris and New York,” said Ciara Lakhani, vice president of People at Dashlane. “Our managers love connecting with their peers from other companies to compare and reflect upon their experiences.”
“Our people managers are the keys to unlocking the potential of our incredible community. We are committed to ensuring they have the tools, support and skills they need to thrive, and to ignite their teams, and we found that solution in Hone,” said Jo Dennis, Chief Human Resources Officer at Omada Health.
Partnered with Griffiths, Hamel and Perez bring deep experience in the HR technology space, having served as VP Product and VP Marketing respectively at CultureIQ, a culture analytics platform. The company is advised by top executive coaches and I/O psychologists to ensure its training is best-in-class.
For more information, please visit www.honehq.com, and follow Hone on Twitter @honehq, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
About Hone
Hone is a next-generation training platform for the next generation of leaders. Launched in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company provides bite-sized, live online training for managers, and uses the latest advances in consumer technology and AI to help learners effectively apply their training to become better, more impactful leaders. Visit www.honehq.com.
2 https://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/1400/brain-science-overcoming-the-forgetting-curve
