In this episode, Avanish and Don discuss the evolution from marketplace to AI-powered learning platform, the dual-sided ecosystem strategy that creates value for LMS partners and content publishers, and how OpenSesame is positioning itself at the center of workforce reinvention by helping organizations navigate AI transformation with comprehensive change management and curated learning pathways.
With a career spanning the US Navy, executive leadership positions at PetSmart and Banfield Pet Hospital, and pioneering online training, Don brings unique insights into building and scaling businesses across industries. Throughout the conversation, Avanish and Don discuss OpenSesame's evolution from an online learning marketplace to an AI-powered platform that serves enterprises, learning management systems, and content publishers. They explore the "Intel Inside" ecosystem strategy, the Simon AI tool that democratizes course creation and enables instant translation into 70 languages, and how organizations can successfully navigate workforce reinvention in the AI era while meeting customers where they are.
In this episode, Avanish and Don discuss:
About Don Spear:
Don Spear is CEO of OpenSesame. Before his current role, he founded BlueVolt.com, held executive leadership positions at Banfield Pet Hospital and PetSmart, and served as a submarine officer aboard the USS Tunny (SSN 682).
About OpenSesame
OpenSesame, the leading provider of online business training, is the choice for L&D professionals wanting to drive learning initiatives forward with innovation, agility, and care. We offer the world's most comprehensive digital learning catalog, with regularly updated content from expert publishers in a variety of formats and languages. By providing comprehensive learning resources and innovative tools like Simon, OpenSesame empowers L&D professionals to exceed their goals and champion learning across their entire organization.
Host Avanish Sahai
Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits and educational boards. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow. From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase. Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early to mid-stage startups in Silicon Valley.
About Tidemark
Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale. Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years. Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.
Links
Transcript
Avanish Sahai (0:2.246)
All right, everybody, welcome to another fantastic edition of the Platform Journey. Delighted today to have Don Spear. Don is the CEO of OpenSesame. And Don, welcome to the Platform Journey.
Don Spear (0:17.166)
Great, thanks for having me. I'm excited to speak with you today.
Avanish Sahai (0:21.370)
So Don, you had a pretty storied career and you've done a number of very interesting different things. Why don't we start with that first, your personal journey, and then we'll talk a bit about OpenSesame.
Don Spear (0:31.982)
Great. Well, I think about myself being in the fourth phase of my career. I first started out after college in the US submarine force. It was in the 80s. And so I spent my time in a submarine on the Western Pacific, basically chasing and tracking Russians. It was an exciting time and a great training ground for me and all the other people I served with.
I then went to business school and after business school, a classmate and I had written a business plan for what was then a pretty crazy idea, large format pet supply stores.
It was an interesting opportunity to come help build something and apply some of the things we learned at school. And we got that business started. You'd know it today as PetSmart. It's a national chain of large format pet supply stores. I think that's where I really found my groove in building companies and organizations. And the company went public in 93 and it continues to operate today as one of the leaders in that category.
In 95, the then CEO of PetSmart, who I worked for Sam Parker, asked me to move to Portland to help lead Banfield Pet Hospital, which are veterinary hospitals inside of PetSmart. So related to the pet theme, the veterinarians were excellent practitioners, but they had never built organizations or scaled businesses to multi-locations, which we had done in the previous eight years at PetSmart.
It was a great opportunity to lead an organization to do that. And then we sold that business to the Mars family, which has a big business in pet food. And then I was too young to retire. The internet was just dawning. And so I decided I'd reinvent myself again. And I started looking into how to build online training, primarily because in the early days, and it's still true today, the primary benefit of the Internet is to remove time and geography. Of course, for people being trained or going to school, they need to be in a certain location at a certain time to take the lesson. And here we were able to build a business which is primarily focused at first on blue collar workers, electricians, plumbers, to help them complete their continuing education. And while we're building that business, we saw an even bigger opportunity to provide a very broad set of off-the-shelf content. And the company that we operate today is called OpenSesame. It's one of the leaders in delivery of online training.
We have the broadest, freshest, deepest catalog around 50,000 courses from some 200 or so publishers. We aggregate that, curate it specifically for our customers' needs, and then deliver that to our customers' existing learning management systems. So one can think about it a little bit like Netflix. They've collected up all the different movies, and they deliver those through whatever device or platform you'd like to use, or iTunes or any of the other marketplaces that have been created to deliver a wide variety of content in one simple, easy process.
Avanish Sahai (4:9.158)
That's awesome. Again, I should disclose, I've been an advisor to OpenSesame. I've been working with Don and team for a couple years now, because I think it's a fascinating space and place. And I think the vision you folks have laid out for how the future of learning is going to happen and frankly how the convergence of this platform strategy you just talked about, kind of the evolution of the marketplace to more of a platform. And then also how obviously AI is going to play into it is going to be pretty critical. So talk a bit about you, you’ve hit some pretty significant milestones, number of customers, revenue, et cetera. Talk a bit about this journey to becoming, to come into this point. And frankly, also, I think you and Josh, the president of OpenSesame, you've really embraced AI and kind of how it can truly change the experience. So talk a bit about what that's looking like and then we'll get into a bit of how you see the future of this space.
Don Spear (5:14.286)
Yes, you know, I'd say similar to but probably 1000 to 100,000 X the dawning of the Internet 25 years ago. And by dawning, I mean the commercialization and the rapid adoption. I mean, just like the Internet, AI has been started and created over a couple decades. So it's just now that we're seeing so many different opportunities to use it in our daily lives, embedded into the products that we build. And so we were, and always have been, excited about technology and how we can use it to improve the lives and livelihoods of our customers.
So for us, the AI journey, I'd say from a commercial standpoint, really started almost exactly three years ago when ChatGPT first came out. I remember downloading it. I remember where I was. We were onboarding our VP of partnerships, Rebecca. And I remember getting it in the hotel room and starting to play with it. And it was super exciting. And then, of course, it took another year before OpenAI made an enterprise version available, which we then instantly adopted for everybody in our company. We didn't know exactly how they were going to use it. But our underlying philosophy was get the tool, provide it to everyone, tell them to start learning and playing with it. And to some extent, they would figure out on their own where they could apply it. We also did three times a week, Show and Tells where we had people kind of already prearranged to show everyone else in the company. We're a fully remote company since COVID. What they had learned and how they used it. And so that really was kind of our first, I would say, introduction to how we might use AI, both in our own work, but also to understand what worked, what didn't. And of course, that was two years ago, and everything has been significantly improved and advances daily.
From a product standpoint, we had been using machine learning for a number of years to help us determine what are the best courses for a prospect. So you can imagine when a prospect comes, 5,000 employee manufacturing company in the Midwest. And they say, hey, we need training. And in many cases, they say, what should we use? They look to us to be the curators. And frankly, that is our primary value today. And it always has been. It's not just having the catalog, but actually being able to point to the best courses for them given their needs. And so because we have millions of completed courses, we know which ones people like, which ones they don't like. When we go through a curation process with the prospect, this machine learning algorithm essentially produces the first draft. And then we can show them, OK, well, you're going to need safety training. And here are the specific ones based on where you are that make sense for you. So we're really saving them the time, but also providing that guidance, which is super valuable for them.
And then as we continue to learn more about the needs of our customers, one of the things that we found, and even for some of our publishers, the tools that were available to create content really hadn't been advancing at the pace required to make what we think about as beautiful cinematic courses. And so we started building Simon, which is our course creation tool. And we used that first to create 600 Ted at Work courses. Ted wanted us to take their top videos and turn them in the courses. And our multinational companies, they always want specific courses, but they want them in all these different languages because they want to serve them the same course around the world. So part of our creation of Simon also included building in AI tools that allowed us to on the fly once the course is built initially most likely in English, it then translates the course in 70 different languages, both the voiceover as well as the subtext.
And so these are areas where we, I would say, balance the desire to always listen to customers, find out what their needs are. Many L&D departments have these same needs. They don't have big teams. And when they do develop content, they need to put together a subject matter expert and instructional designer, someone who can build the course. And our goal with Simon is to simplify that process so that really the subject matter expert on their own using Simon can create courses and make them of high quality, make them instantly usable. Of course, the L&D department wants to continue to have some oversight and some QA on them, which makes total sense, but we're essentially democratizing the ability to create the content into the hands of the people that know the job or know the tasks that need to be trained. And so that's another way that we have continued to add value to our customers that of course also feeds back into our OpenSesame marketplace platform because it increases the number and the quality of content we're able to offer.
Avanish Sahai (11:1.158)
Yeah, and I'm not easily impressed. I've been in this business too long. But I have to say, when I first saw the demo of Simon, I was kind of blown away. I think the quality that it allows the creator to deliver, and then frankly, it expands your market opportunity, right? You take it from, like you said, typically it's English first, but now for multinational organizations, you have a bunch of those kinds of customers, right? You can take the exact same, you know, predefined, pre-vetted, pre-curated content and take it global, right? And deliver it in the local languages and so on. So I think it is a game changer. And again, great, we're able to think about AI both for kind of internal use, but really how to make the customer experience a lot more significant. So you've recently also, I think again, thinking more strategically, you started talking about OpenSesame being at the center of something called workforce reinvention. And that I think is again, a very thoughtful way of approaching this. Talk a bit about what does that mean and what role do you see a platform like OpenSesame playing in that.
Don Spear (12:23.278)
Yes, so with the dawning of the commercialization of AI, like any other technology introduction, whether it was back in the 80s when people started getting desktops and laptops, then of course the internet, there's always a lag between the early adopters who are really anxious to come find the technology, play with it and use it, and the people that either aren't that interested yet or don't have the time to do that. And for larger, any size organization, there's a complete spectrum of people of those different categories. So our belief is that AI is a technology, it's advancing rapidly, but the true full benefit, just like other technologies, won't be realized by organizations until they run through the change management required to make their people aware of it, given the tools to try it, give them specific use cases. And so for us at OpenSesame, when we think about what we have been doing, by providing training programs to different companies over the years and by programs, I mean, helping them provide the content that they use to improve their safety program or improve or even stand up a leadership development program.
We see this as a big opportunity because all companies will need to either transform their workplaces and their people and their processes or they'll be left behind. Just as we've seen with other, again, other technological changes. People didn't adopt the internet. Those companies aren't around anymore. People that didn't adopt computing, those companies aren't around anymore. So AI workforce reinvention for us is putting together and providing for our prospects and customers a set of courses and a high level roadmap that helps the senior leader people, but also the senior HR people in companies to be part of that transformation process. So it's not just the technology and the choosing of it and adapting of it. Those are certainly important things that for the most part, you know, human resource people are not involved in, but they are involved in and should be involved in the creation of the roadmap to help the individuals and the teams transform. And of course, it's not as if this has been done thousands of times and we have the complete formula. We're just at the beginning of that process. We have our own experience over the past few years, and we have experience of other customers that have already started this. But our goal is to continue to enhance our offering and capability so that companies that are customers of ours can more rapidly adopt and reinvent their workforces.
Avanish Sahai (15:44.079)
And again I think you're thinking very strategically about this right this is not a where another systems or tool or technology provider I think you're really putting yourself in the shoes of your customers and prospects and I think being a frankly a partner in that journey and kind of in their transformation like you said some of them unfortunately may not be able to make that journey it happens but the ones that are going to are going to have to rethink how they do learning, development, training, growth, et cetera. So talking about partners, obviously I've been closely involved with some of your teams thinking around building the ecosystem. OpenSesame plays a really interesting role where you work with learning management systems, you work with HR systems, you work with a lot of the incumbent systems. But you truly are, like you said, combination marketplace and platform that helps curate bring content provide guidance etc talk about how that has worked out and again I think you and team have been very forward-thinking by realizing that this is this is kind of how the future is gonna have to work or I have to operate what what is that ecosystem strategy look like for OpenSesame
Don Spear (17:15.800)
Yes, the ecosystems as you described really on each side of our marketplace embraces different players. On the delivery side, it is the learning management systems. There are around 900 cataloged LMSs in the world. And there are some very large ones that focus specifically on large enterprise companies, some that are focused on SMB and middle market. But those are the platforms that are the primary interface and delivery. And our goal in working with them is that in most cases, I'd say all but a handful, they don't really focus any time on preparing or providing the content that their customers would consume. And so they're basically trying to improve their products so that the interfaces, the delivery, the reports, the tracking, is enhanced. And so what we found is that working with them, and we have somewhere in the order of 200 LMS slash HRIS system partners, that they are and have been hungry for providing a complete solution to their customers so that when, especially a new customer adopts one of these learning management system platforms, it comes with, as my sales leader says, food in the refrigerator.
And we've been successful at demonstrating that because of our clear focus on breadth, depth, and quality of content, that we, in many cases, if not most, are the chosen and preferred provider for that LMS to go to market. To some extent, I call it my Intel inside strategy. When you think about how, although we've missed some more recent waves of technology. But when you think about what they did for the PC and having the best processors. And so that's an important aspect. And we get a significant amount of our business from that category. The other part of the platform and ecosystem are the publishers. So in some cases, we have very small publishers that have excellent content, but they don't have the sales teams to go out and call on large enterprise customers. And enterprise customers don't have time to interview the three top safety providers, the three top leadership providers, the three top compliance providers. They want the best, which is where we're able to aggregate and curate for them. So we basically have given the smaller publishers significant access to much larger organizations than they would have had otherwise.
So our technology is what's allowing them to really enter into parts of a market that they wouldn't see. And likewise, the large publishers, well known like Harvard Business Publishing, which we carry their manager mentor platform, they focus pretty much on a thousand companies with their direct sales force. They don't really have or they desire to build a go-to-market motion for mid-size to SMB, which are huge markets. So for them, being included in our marketplace allows them to get to the SMB and the middle market customers that we serve. So again, the platform play is really not just to put together something that works for us, but how do we continue to enhance it so that our customer has a better product and experience and the other partners and publishers also reach audiences and sales that they wouldn't have otherwise.
Avanish Sahai (21:15.462)
Which is a great synthesis of a platform strategy, right? Which is you're providing the technology, you're providing the aggregation in the marketplace, you're providing the curation, and frankly, you're providing distribution. And I think that's a quintessential successful platform strategy. I love, absolutely love hearing that. So Don, I think one of the things that I've been really impressed by your mindset. I said you've said in some of the board meetings I have had the privilege of attending is always getting 1% better every day. You talked a bit about your journey from being in the Navy to being an entrepreneur in the pet space to being then taking, running veterinary hospitals and then now again being in the learning space, but this mindset, this philosophy of getting 1% better every day. Talk a bit about what's behind that, because I think there's a really important lesson in kind of how you scale companies, how do you build teams, how do you build a vision. So I'd love to connect those dots to your philosophy.
Don Spear (22:37.516)
I think it really started growing up. My mother was a public school teacher for many years, and she was always one of the most encouraging, if not the most encouraging and insightful people in my life. And she had this saying, good, better, best, never let it rest until your good is better and your better is best. And now perhaps that resonated with me given my personality from an early age.
As I reflect on not only my own experience in different areas of my life and journey, but also in other companies and people, I came to observe that even people that looked like they had a great breakthrough, when you looked at how they got to that breakthrough point, it was a consistent dedication and discipline about trying and improving continuously. I think that although in most cases, when we read the media, the news, and we see these fantastic new and different things, if you go back and trace what really got them there, it was this dedication to having an idea, having a vision, and continually improving it. And not every day you may not get better. You may get 3% better one day and 2% worse, but it's the learning that, dedication of the learning and the progress that allows you to build something big or great. And that's part of what my experience has been, and I have to say that's part of what my nature is.
Avanish Sahai (24:38.936)
I love that. I think part of the goal of this podcast or these podcasts is really to bring lessons learned, right? And there's deep, sometimes deep technical stuff. Sometimes there's lessons learned of what not to do. But a lot of it is, frankly, it's experiences of learnings that we've all had and part of that journey is sharing those insights or words of wisdom. So I think that's a brilliant summary of that. Don, again, you've had some pretty amazing examples of stories. You've seen OpenSesame scale pretty dramatically. There are a lot of people, your peers, CEOs, CXOs, investors, and companies of different scale. We're all thinking about this single product, you know, you started as a marketplace and you built your other products. Now you're kind of frankly defining a new category. What are some lessons that you can share? You would share, you know, I always try to envision sitting next to someone on the airplane. And you know, they're kind of in a similar situation and scratching their heads about how to take it to the next level. What are some lessons you might share that would help your peers think about their journeys?
Don Spear (26:21.006)
Yes, I think the one that comes to mind right away is that in order to convince someone to buy something from you, you really have to be able to meet them where they are. And even though you or others can create in their mind perhaps a solution that is excellent and will solve the problem as you see it in a very novel and fantastic way, if that requires too much change or too much understanding or too much budget from the prospects you're talking to, you won't get through. And so part of it is meet the customer where they are, understand deeply before you try to convince them of what you think it should be, what their needs are, and then be very open to allowing your product, especially at the beginning, looking for product market fit, to flex in areas that are not going to keep you from getting to your final vision, but provides them an easier path to adoption today. So that's a tricky thing to do. But if you want to get some early traction, which then provides you with early feedback and allows you to iterate on that, then meeting customers where they are is an important aspect of building products or businesses.
And I think the other thing that I've learned both from our own company and watching others. I remember reading Bill Gates' book, The Road Ahead, many years ago about how they were trying to build Outlook, which I'm not sure anyone uses anymore. I haven't used it for a couple of decades, but they couldn't, the team wasn't getting enough traction. They weren't getting enough progress. And I would say that's probably true of all new things. You think it should be simple to do whatever you're doing, but it's difficult. And so one of the things they changed is they said, OK, from now on, the entire development team, they have to use Outlook to build Outlook. And so forcing them to use it or requiring them changed the improvement. And so in our business, we do the same thing. Whatever we're building, we consume it first. If we eat our own dog food, as they would say at the Mars factory, and literally they do. So that is another aspect, I think, of companies that are important to learn about. And that is, how do you make sure your people love it? Because if they don't love it, it's probably not very good, and they probably can't sell it very well. So that's the other aspect I would say I learned often.
Avanish Sahai (29:41.306)
Look, those are huge, right? And again, the two points you made, having been in Silicon Valley for as long as I have, it is so easy to lose sight of that, right? Which is you get enamored by your technology, by your model, by your vision, and if someone doesn't quite get it at first glance, you think they're dumb. And again, I've heard that more than once and met them where they are. And I think frankly, this, the time we're in this AI transformation, this is what people are struggling with. They're like, you know what, this is a much bigger change to my processes, to my people, certainly to my technology, then I'm ready to commit to. And yes, it may sound fantastic, but I can't just flip a switch and make it all happen overnight. So trying to find that happy medium and being customer centric about it, I think is your, you absolutely nailed it. Don, what a pleasure. I really, really appreciate the insights. Thank you for joining us on this, the platform journey.
Don Spear (30:59.679)
Thank you for having me. It's great to see you as always and to learn from you as we continue in our journey at OpenSesame.
Avanish Sahai (31:9.488)
Thank you. With that, one more leg of the platform journey. Thank you so much.