Company: Flockjay is on a mission to empower upward mobility through education and access. The company's platform provides training and support for on-demand tech jobs that allows students from all backgrounds and locations to have access to high-paying opportunities.
HQ Location & Year Founded: San Francisco, 2018
Founder: Shaan Hathiramani, Founder and CEO, spent nearly ten years in the investment management industry prior to starting Flockjay. He also served as CXO of VC-backed meal delivery platform, Thistle. Shaan holds a degree in applied mathematics from Harvard College.
Funds Raised and VC Investors: $14 million from Cleo Capital, Coatue Management, Dreamers VC, F7 Ventures, Human Capital Development, Impact America Fund, Index Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Neville Point Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Serena Ventures, SV Angel, Y Combinator, and angels.
Where did the idea for Flockjay originate?
Flockjay originated from a lifelong passion project. I grew up in an environment where I was really fortunate to see the two kingdoms of what it looks like to have access to knowledge and networks and not have access to knowledge and networks. I was really lucky to go to a great high school in the Bronx and that transformed my appreciation for being able to access upper mobility through education. And then I was subsequently inspired while starting my career in 2008 during the depths of the last recession. Having access to education wasn't enough in the traditional sense and there's a whole long tail of skills that weren't being addressed and even the most respected institutions in the world were not preparing folks for starting careers.
So Flockjay came about from this idea that we all need to learn skills that aren't necessarily taught in the classroom and we need avenues to do that in a way that also can expand our network. I taught financial literacy on the side for about ten years while pursuing a career in finance. That led me to co-founding nonprofits in New York and then working for one in Chicago. And that led me to asking the larger question of what are those skills like financial literacy that aren't taught in the classroom. That led me to tech and to software sales, which is one of the most interesting, accessible, potentially transformational and life changing skills that you couldn't find a class on in most colleges or high schools today.
The second evolution of Flockjay came about from the insight that the larger problem wasn't necessarily getting folks in the door, but it was actually supporting them on the job. Especially in a world where markets were changing so much faster than the training that was accessible within their companies. Where the way we worked was changing faster than the way that companies were set up to deal with in terms of hybrid and remote and see, the products are more technical, the ways that we were working were changing. So Flockjay's latest iteration is about how do you resolve the education debt within companies and build a more modern solution for upskilling and reskilling folks within the workplace.
What is the key problem that Flockjay intends to solve?
We have trained thousands of sales reps, and in doing that, we realized that they were exposed to not just education from Flockjay, but really a community where they could access tribal knowledge, mentorship, and coaching. And we realized that when they got onto their jobs, most of them were just handed a Salesforce account login and a dialer and some level of onboarding training. But especially in today's world where they were onboarding in their studio apartments, there wasn't a lot of support, and more importantly, there weren't a lot of ways to efficiently capture and learn from the best practices of their team. A lot of that was shared anecdotes on Zoom and Slack messages that were being lost.
So we decided to take on the very large and very slow moving space of content and learning management within go-to-market teams. So a verticalized approach to content and learning management that was very particular to the fast moving technical environment of sales teams today, starting with software sales, but broadly applicable to any sales team that's looking to sell a large portfolio of products to a large list of personas and a large list of verticals.We're able to not just enable sales teams to build training faster and organize content better, leveraging some of the technology that has now come into the fourfold of generative AI, but also connect people to each other and share lessons directly from the field. We turn those lessons into training and build a better way for people to learn from each other and not just from someone three or four layers removed from the job.
How are you most differentiated as a service?
The biggest way to think about how we differentiate versus a traditional content and learning management system is that a lot of those systems rely on content being created three or four layers removed from where people are actually doing the job. Someone is building training courses, someone is building content, and they're pushing it down to you. But people don't learn from just content. They learn from each other and they learn from conversations with customers. So our biggest differentiation is that we take the bottom-up insights from the field, give folks a way to share those lessons at the manager level, the rep level, and it allows folks who are actually in the training seat to turn those into better training, better content. So we create feedback loops from the field where before there was just a one directional repository of content.
What are the company’s key accomplishments to date?
It’s been pretty exciting to see the uptake of our solution with sales teams that can have hundreds or thousands of salespeople signing up. We're replacing existing learning and content management systems, and we're able to do that across different verticals. So whether it's companies in cybersecurity, travel and hospitality, data analytics That's been a huge set of accomplishments for us to be able to sign large enterprise customers across verticals in the last 18 months.
We're excited about the quality of companies that we're partnering with and the exponentially larger impact potential of what we're able to do on our mission in being able to connect people to knowledge within their teams and within their companies. What I'm most proud of is we're not just building software to help people be more efficient at their jobs. We're actually building software to help people develop their careers in a more sustainable way, especially given sales is such a competitive and such a high turnover role. Our hope is we can help companies retain better talent for longer and develop them into future leaders.
What lies ahead in the plans for Flockjay?
I think the ground is shaking with all the technology and advancements in generative AI, and I think how we learn on the job is going to dramatically change. I think the traditional paradigm of clicking boxes, dropping down into menus, clicking filter buttons to try to get the knowledge we need is going to change and I think it's going to be a hugely positive event for guidance, coaching, and mentorship. This will be done In ways that are faster and easier than they ever have been before. And so we're laser focused on thoughtful ways to marry all of the intelligence that already exists in companies today in the form of their content and their training. People will access information freely and quickly so that they can be the best versions of themselves.
Ron’s Take
Upskilling and reskilling the workforce is a need that will only grow as technology and society advances. Other companies previously featured in this blog, including Aprende Institute, BloomTech and VeroSkills, are among those that help adult learners pursue more advanced vocational and technical training. Flockjay addresses the vast opportunity for career success in sales, where income and upward mobility potential are nearly limitless. As a speaker once said in a talk that I attended, “in any company, there are those who sell and those who support those who sell.” Even the greatest advances in AI are unlikely to diminish the value of a highly skilled salesperson. Organizations that empower their salesforce through tools platforms such as Flockjay will be well positioned to stay ahead of the pack.