We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Pete Mastin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Pete, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry? Any stories or anecdotes that illustrate why this matters?
Training in the corporate space has been dominated by 3 trends.
1) 80% of the global workforce is desk-less, frontline workers – and yet most corporate training is not Mobile friendly.
2) 90% of all training fails to incorporate the knowledge of the subject matter experts that exist in the company today.
3) Long for content is still the typical way that training is deployed – yet peoples attention span and desire for this style content is VERY low.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I started out my business life as a technical person. I programmed computers. As often happens, as I had success at that task, I would get thrust into leadership roles. Unfortunately for me (and the people I was asked to lead) I was not really very good at leadership. In fact I was ill prepared. What really turned it around for me, (and it took years), was volunteering as a baseball coach for my kids. I spent about 14 years coaching both my boys in baseball. From 6 years to 15 or so. This had a profound impact on my ability to lead in the corporate world. It turns out that people are not that different that 12 year old. Who knew :).
I founded Learnie with the singular desire (along with my co-founders) of creating a product and a company that would profoundly change the nature of the workforce. We wanted to build a product that acknowledged that 85% of ‘training’ in the workplace is peer training – someone comes over and helps you with something. That is NOT how corporations think of triaining today – and that is reflected in the performance of many companies. We are very proud of what we have created at Learnie.
Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?
We did an initial (friend and family) round of funding for Learnie using regulation CF (or Crowdfunding). There are multiple ways to do this – we happened to use Wefunder.com. We raised over $270K which was enough for us to build our MVP into a full fledged product. The process of convincing friends and family to invest was actually pretty easy and I would do it over again. We used SAFE notes to document peoples investments.
Any advice for managing a team?
1) Radical Honesty. Your team deserves to know the facts.
2) Baseball bat.
3) Humor.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mylearnie.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mylearnie/
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/mylearnie
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/learnie
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/mylearnie
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MyLearnie
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@mylearnie