LearnShark, the platform to help new employees onboard and become productive quickly and painlessly, has graduated from Acceleprise. LearnShark CEO Dhruva Rajendra reports that Acceleprise-facilitated demo days in D.C., San Francisco, Boston and New York are going well.
"It's different than showing up by yourself," Rajendra explains. "We haven't spent as much time in San Francisco and Boston as we have in D.C. and New York. New York has a great startup community. I know a lot of people there. Boston is known for doing enterprise technology."
LearnShark is built to work on top of internal social networks that companies are already using, like Yammer, Jive and Salesforce. New employees create individual "Learn Paths" within LearnShark, allowing users to learn the systems in use at a new job. When users have questions along the path, they can reach out to the appropriate people who actually use the systems they are learning, rather than HR representatives or trainers who may not know the answers.
"People are moving jobs more quickly than ever. There is a demand to onboard [employees] quickly and efficiently," Rajendra says. The faster and more efficiently new employees can be brought up to speed, the faster they can become productive. "LearnShark is intervention based," Rajendra says, "and it's designed to help with high turnover."
Rajendra is mulling his options now that LearnShark's tenure at Acceleprise is finished. "We're going to be in D.C. or Virginia," he says, "possibly at 1776 once a week, although we haven't approached them yet. We can stay at Acceleprise and pay rent. Because they're so focused on enterprise technology, it's a lot more likely that someone would walk in that we would want to talk to."
No matter which physical office he chooses, Rajendra himself is staying put. "Forty percent of Americans are expected to be contractors by 2020," Rajendra says; those contractors move around even more than employees, necessitating even more onboarding. "The number one place for that is D.C. In that environment, it makes sense for LearnShark to be here."