The following interview is a conversation we had with Prem Kumar, CEO of Humanly.io, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Prem Kumar, CEO of Humanly.io: $5.5 Million Raised to Build the Conversational Hiring Category

Tom Griffiths
Hey,Brett, great to be on. Thanks for having me. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building today, I’d love to talk about what you’ve already built. So I’m sure everyone listening will of course, have heard of your previous company, FanDuel, but let’s talk about it. So walk us through the early days of FanDuel and what it was like starting the company and some of those challenges you faced along the way.

Tom Griffiths
Yeah, absolutely. So we got started back in 2007. I dropped out of grad school because I really wanted to start companies and have a big impact on the world that way. And were building a different idea. It was a news prediction market called Hubdub that would allow people to make play money predictions on news stories, so celebrity gossip or politics going into an election year in eight. So it’s kind of an interesting free game that we’d built. And we’d raised a bit of capital out there in Scotland and that was running out and our revenue wasn’t really materializing. So we recognized that we needed to pivot and do so pretty substantially to save the business. And so what we saw in the data was that people love to predict on sports and that if were to monetize predictions around sports, that would be within a fantasy sports framework if it was going to be legal in the US. 

Tom Griffiths
Which is 80% of our traffic at the time. And so we started experimenting with different daily fantasy sports prediction games, which is a bit of a mouthful and wasn’t really a category at the time. There were a few bedroom projects, but were the first venture funded company to really develop the game format and market it. And so were able to create a category. And I think Fanjewel, after the Pivot, made more money in its first month than our other company in the first two years. So we’re like, okay, this is the direction we want to go, and that’s how it was born.

Brett
And just so we can understand the scale of the company at that time or at the peak, how big did FanDuel get? 

Tom Griffiths
Yeah, so, I mean, it’s continued to grow and is at its peak at the moment in its latest incarnation of really, a sports book and gaming platform that also includes fantasy sports. But where we started was just in terms of team size. Five of us founders around a kitchen table in Scotland, knocking around ideas for what we could do to entertain the fan base that we built. And throughout my tenure of exactly ten years, I left on my anniversary to start Hone. We grew to a peak of 550. So from five to 550 in about six years can’t give exact revenue numbers, but certainly north of 100 million over that period of time, and much more at this point, given how the industry has exploded post the Supreme Court decision to allow for sports betting at state level. 

Brett
And I think every founder dreams or has aspirations to create a new category and be a company that’s a market leader like that. But I think there are some downsides that come from it and some challenges that come from it, of course. So can you talk us through some of those challenges that you faced in the early days as you were creating that category?

Tom Griffiths
Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the lessons that we took from Hubdub was, don’t be too different. You can create a new category, but be one step removed from something people know. We were trying to create this, like, Play money prediction market that was also a new site and it took me three minutes to explain to anyone what it was. Whereas with Fandule, yes, it was new and a new category of daily fantasy sports with DFS. But it was only one step removed from traditional fantasy sports that your target market knew about. And you could say, yeah, we’re like season long fantasy, except it happens in a day or a week. And that was a clear enough bridge for people to understand what the heck were in the early days. So that was one lesson. I think another lesson is, of course, it just takes a lot of time and money to create a category. 

 
Tom Griffiths
And a lot of people think of FanDuel and DraftKings as overnight success stories, whether that’s 2014, 2015, but it’s the overnight success story that took eight years to build, right? Because we’re trying to refine the products, trying to figure out what are their successful marketing channels, how do we message and explain what we are? So it takes time, takes capital. And then, I think, in our case, as an industry, when we reached escape velocity around that time, 2015, we did attract some media scrutiny and some regulatory scrutiny because of what were doing with money related to sports. And we’d had multiple legal opinions of the legality of the game. So it was less of a concern. There more of a clarifying exercise to pass legislation and regulation at the state level to shore up the legality of the game, which, again, when you’re pushing boundaries and creating new products and new industries. 

Tom Griffiths
That is often a cycle that companies go through. Thinking of places like Airbnb or Uber who’ve had their own regulatory battles because of the innovative approach they bring to. 

Brett
The space, makes a lot of sense. And you were raising, let’s see, when did you raise the first round for FanDuel? Was it 2009?

Tom Griffiths
Yes, it would have been 2008 pre pivot. And then the first round we raised as FanDuel, I believe was 2011.

Brett
Wow. So you guys were raising in the very different times from now and you were able to raise I would describe it as Fu money. According to CrunchBase, it was over 400 million. How have you seen the venture markets change from how they were back then to how they are today and the current fundraising environment?

Tom Griffiths
Yeah, well, I mean, it’s been an interesting path and almost, I wouldn’t say going full circle, it was certainly more modest in terms of valuations and the various fundraisers at each stage back then. But of course, we’ve been through a few years of boom times with crazy valuations, crazy revenue multiples, and the Series C looks like the Series A used to, and Series A looks like the Series B used to. So things have definitely kind of migrated earlier. But this year, of course, we’re going through a pretty significant reset in terms of valuation, in terms of the availability of capital or the pace of capital deployment. And so I wouldn’t say it’s gone all the way back 14 years, but certainly back to kind of 2019 levels in terms of people’s expectations and scrutiny of the business. Right. Like, I think in the boom times, a lot of diligence can be taking shortcuts. 

 
Tom Griffiths
Whereas now we just did a fundraise for Hone over the summer and they really dig into the business and understand all aspects and metrics and people and opportunity versus the same time last year when a lot of diligence was getting skipped. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And two questions we’d like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a founder and as a leader, is there a specific CEO and team that you’ve really studied and learned the most from? 

 
Tom Griffiths
I mean, I respect a lot of entrepreneurs. Anyone that’s kind of been in the grind, even if it becomes a household name later, there’s often a much harder story than people realize to get there. One of the companies and entrepreneurs that come to mind when I think like that is Brian Cheskey at Airbnb. They had quite a lot of grind in the early days to spin up their marketplace and even sold cereal to make rent or whatever it was. There’s good founding law around that. But I really just look up to Airbnb as an iconic company because of what it has enabled for people, both hosts who can make an income and guests who can travel around the world and stay in unique places. It’s an amazing business, and I think they’ve created an incredible culture brand and have a tendency to stand up for doing things the right way and are not afraid to admit their mistakes and correct them.

Tom Griffiths
So I just think it’s a really well run business with a huge positive impact on the world.

Brett
Nice. I love that. Yeah, I love their origin story. It’s almost too perfect. Like? What was the serial Captain McCain’s and Obama owes? And they sold like, 50K worth to fund Airbnb in the early days. Something along those lines, right? 

Tom Griffiths
Totally. Exactly. Although, inside secret, I’m not saying Airbnb did this, but many founding stories kind of get remembered with rose tinted glasses and a little bit exaggerated. So always take a pinch of salt with those founding stories.

Brett
Yeah, for sure. I feel like they’re crafted by strategic communications team over many brainstorming sessions to figure out the exact pieces. I’m sure the pieces are always accurate and truthful, but how they’re pieced together may vary a little bit.

Tom Griffiths
Exactly. Although, of course, not for FanDuel or. 

 
Brett
Home, of course, all the other companies. And what about books? What book has had the greatest impact on you as a founder? And this can be a business book, of course, or it can be a personal book. 

Tom Griffiths
Yeah. Given the nature of what we do at home with leadership and management. I read a lot of leadership books. I think what really got me on the personal development track was Seven Habits of High Effective People. It’s a massive classic. So many folks will know it, but just understanding some of the interpersonal principles there really kind of opened my mind to how you can grow in those dimensions as well as more technical dimensions, which were a big feature of my education and college years. So really, that was a watershed moment for me. I would say more recently, really enjoy Extreme ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin and Ampered up by Frank Sleepman. Really just how to be thoughtful but aggressive and move at pace in business. But in the extreme ownership case, really taking responsibility for everything in your life and everything in the business and looking at what you can do to reach new heights rather than blaming other people or taking shortcuts. 

 
Tom Griffiths
So there’s just a lot of common wisdom, I would say, to a lot of the literature. But those three stand out as having their unique take. 

Brett
Yeah, I just finished Frank Slutman’s book, and I loved it. That guy’s a machine. He’s like a real operator and a real executor. The takeaway I had from that book was his chapter or the section about the need and the importance of having an enemy. And I think he really hammered that message. And I think that’s just a very good message to have out there because I think a lot of companies really need that and they need to understand that there is an enemy there that does exist. 

Tom Griffiths
Yeah, totally. And daily fantasy. Sports is a great example of that. I think were rivals, shall we say, found you all in DraftKings and ultimately have a lot of respect for the DraftKings team as entrepreneurs and business people. But when were in hand to hand combat in those kind of earlier years, then it was a real rivalry that drove the team. So he’s exactly right.

Brett
If you saw the founders from that company now, would you guys handshake hug or avoid each other? 

Tom Griffiths
Well, it’s funny because we actually got to know each other quite well when the two companies weren’t meant to be merging, which was kind of an unthinkable act back at the time. This was 2016, after we’d been through this challenging regulatory cycle that really kind of put the brakes on the growth in the industry. And so our boards thought that it would be sensible, and there’s a lot of rationale to it that these two arch rivals should actually combine into one company, which you could imagine went down like a lead balloon with the teams. But I actually spent a lot of time with the Draft Kings leadership team because we needed to figure out how are we going to put these two companies together, which pieces were going to keep from each one. And were pretty much ready to go until one fateful day when the FTC reviewed the deal from antitrust perspective and decided to shut it down because it felt like it was competitive. 

Tom Griffiths
Our argument, of course, was that Sports and Fantasy Sports is much bigger than Found you on DraftKings, but they narrowly defined the market as DFS, and between the two of us, we had a significant market share. So that was a disappointing decision and changed the course of the company’s history and my life, frankly. But, yeah, that’s how I got to know the DraftKings guys.

Brett
There has to be some form of validation for an entrepreneur to know they made it though, right? If the FTC is striking down your deals, then you’re at least on the radar and you’re having an impact on society. 

 
Tom Griffiths
You’re doing something. Yeah, exactly. 

 
Brett
Nice. Amazing. Well, I think that’s plenty of time to talk about what you’ve previously built. Now let’s talk about what you’re building today, because I know it’s super exciting. So tell us about Hone. What’s the origin story? And give us just a little bit of more information on what you guys really do. Absolutely. 

 
Tom Griffiths
So, we’re in the education space. We have a novel platform that does live online education for corporations. So we teach zoom based classes of 60 to 90 minutes that are super high impact, super interactive, with a small group of learners and an executive coach teaching things like how to give feedback, how to delegate well, how to run a one one meeting, as well as diversity, equity, inclusion principles, and personal productivity. So it’s in some ways best practices that have been around for a while. The contribution that we’re making is that we’ve really upleveled the user experience of what it means to go through training. I learned at FanDuel when I was working with the LND teams to find this kind of soft skills or people skills training for our employees, that things hadn’t really moved on since the 1980s, where even today manager training. Can look like. 

Tom Griffiths
Fly everybody into HQ or some hotel ballroom, sit in a conference room for a couple of days with a flip chart, maybe get a printed handout at the end of the day. And then you go back to your workplace, expected to be a great manager based on just a couple of days training. And no disrespect to the content and the experiences that have come before, but in terms of the return on investment, like the level of inconvenience and actually the lack of follow up and reinforcement, it’s not a great user experience or learner experience or ROI for the business, yet it’s 100 billion dollar industry. And so I couldn’t get this opportunity out of my mind when I was at Fan dual thinking, okay, we can really go solve a much order of magnitude better learning experience for people in these mission critical kind of life changing leadership, management and inclusion skills. 

Tom Griffiths
So that’s what we did. And it’s just been a really fun problem to solve where not only is it software like Fanja was, but we’ve got real live humans kind of showing up to classes and crying and laughing and arguing and discussing and it really does have a big impact on people. So combining the live kind of human element of interactive teaching and learning with the digital element of being able to scale that and measure its impact for companies has been a really great experience and it’s having a big impact that we’re very proud of. 

Brett
And was there a Pivot at all in the midst of COVID Or was the plan always to do live learning via Zoom like this? 

 
Tom Griffiths
Well, we got started in 2018 and I predicted there would be a pandemic in 2020, so we started with the remote approach. I’m kidding. Yeah, we’ve always been remote first and so we’ve been remote first as a company and we’ve been remote first as a learning experience. But it was just an incredible opportunity for us to meet the moment with a two year head start and anybody else when COVID did come around and everybody shifted to remote and hybrid work. I think there’s been just a real inflection point in work in the industry where people are now comfortable working remotely and collaborating on Zoom, which unlocks this big opportunity of being the go to platform for training in that world. Whereas previously you might have trading companies occasionally do live online sessions. We’re all about that and our software is purpose built for that, as is our content. 

Tom Griffiths
And so it was just a great tailwind for us to grow coming out of 2000 and 22,021. 

Brett
And how do you think about market categories? Is live learning your market category or is that a subcategory of corporate training? What are your views there when it comes to categories? 

Tom Griffiths
Yeah, we’re definitely in the corporate training category, which I would say is adjacent to some really exciting categories, like one to one coaching that BetterUp does. Our category historically has been a bit old school and stuffy, if I dare say it, in terms of the corporate training names that come up time and time again. And it just feels like an incredible opportunity to be able to disrupt that with a more kind of consumer grade experience and analytics for the organization. So, yeah, I put us in the corporate training live training space, but again, we’re competing with the Courtyard Marriott flipchart experience, but doing it in a completely modern way that fits remote and hybrid work. 

 
Brett
And in your previous company, you were CPO, I believe. Right. You’re a chief product officer. 

Tom Griffiths
Correct. 

 
Brett
What’s been the biggest difference for you as you’ve shifted to the CEO role? 

 
Tom Griffiths
Couple of things. I had the benefit of learning shoulder to shoulder with our CEO, Nigel Echoes Fanjel, who is a phenomenal role model and mentor and so was able to take a lot of lessons from him in starting this company. I think the big thing, a couple of big things that I noticed, one is that there’s so many more degrees of freedom as a CEO, as a CPO. Yes, you’re setting product vision and defining what you build in the product, but there’s still the CEO who’s defining the direction and the corporate strategy and which buyer personas are going after, or you’re collaborating with marketing and that as CEO, obviously the buck stops with you and you’ve got to make all those decisions. Of course you delegate certain things down, but for the difficult ones, you’ve got to make the call and actually there’s no right answer. 

 
Tom Griffiths
You just need to base those decisions on the vision of the kind of company you want to create, on the values that you have as a leader and as a company on the data and the information that you have to hand, and then go with it. And then not only go with it yourself if you’re only half sure, but actually convince everybody else that this is the direction you’ve got to go, knowing it could be wrong, but there’s also ten other options that you could have chosen that could be wrong, and this is the right way. So that felt like sailing out into the open ocean, right? You could go any degree on the compass. So that was a big mindset shift. I think the other learning is just the degree to which you need to be the face of the company and to be able to do that, having an ability to tell stories or inspire people or fundraise or recruit top executives. 

 
Tom Griffiths
A lot of the skills to do all of those things are the same. But it starts with having a high internal conviction over what you’re doing. So I would say to anyone that’s founding a company as a founder, CEOs, just like, don’t settle for something that you’re kind of half interested in and think could be a good business opportunity, because there’s really a high bar for conviction, which then leads to all of the other practices of being able to tell a compelling story and bring people in. And especially in this market where fundraising is very difficult compared with even twelve months ago, you really need to have that level of belief and conviction and then the ability to tell great stories externally as well as internally as I.

Brett
Had previously, makes a lot of sense. And if we’re looking at adoption and traction so far, are there any numbers or metrics that you can share just so we can better understand what that looks like? 

 
Tom Griffiths
Yeah, I mean, as we raised our round of funding over the summer, we’ve grown ten X over the prior twelve months because of this tailwind of companies getting comfortable with the idea of remote and hybrid work and shifting to us because we’re really the best positioned solution. So just a high relative growth rate that’s been really exciting. We just crossed 100 employees last week thanks to continued growth and investment with our Series B, and it’s just exciting to be mature in the company to get that next ten X growth over the coming years and upwards from there.

Brett
And what are you doing to break through the noise and stand out? Because I see in Tech Crunch every couple of weeks there’s a new corporate training platform that’s raising some funding. What have you done to really rise above that noise and capture their attention?

Tom Griffiths
I think it’s a few things. I think that the combination of live teaching and an enterprise grade platform that helps companies deploy and measure it is actually unique. And I think perhaps if you’re coming to the space, maybe as a generalist investor or an observer, a lot of the solutions can look similar. Whereas when we speak to customers, they see us as very different and the distinction is clear. And so we use those customer testimonials, those customer viewpoints, customer references to show that this really is different. This is like the modern version of the classroom training as opposed to a video library or a one one coaching platform and that helps us to cut through. So really, just like leveraging customer stories and continually reinforcing how we’re fundamentally different. 

 
Brett
And in terms of fun, on a level of one to ten, how does live learning compare to what you’re doing at FanDuel in the consumer focused markets and fantasy sports? 

 
Tom Griffiths
Well, I mean, all those free Super Bowl tickets and NBA Finals tickets just got really boring over time. All the travel to the different cities now I mean found your was a tremendously fun company to build. I think it’s a great word for it. I would say for Hone, it’s a higher purpose. For me it’s much more fulfilling. We have a lot of fun along the way, but it definitely feels like this is what I want to spend my life working on and reimagining how learning happens in terms of people skills and at work. And so it’s kind of a different dimension or different level for me here at home.

Brett
And what would you say excites you the most every day and what do you wake up for every day with this company?

Tom Griffiths
Yeah, I think it’s important for anyone building anything to stay close to the impact you’re having on the customer. It’s easy to look at metrics or think about plans or hiring or personnel issues that you have to deal with every day. But whenever I take one of our classes it’s just so transformational that it reminds me of this impact that we’re having. We’re running hundreds of classes every week right now, which is super exciting. And the feedback we get we actually pump into a slack channel. So if you ever need a feel good five minutes, you can hop into the feedback channel and you see people saying, wow, this is really because we take the feedback a month later after the class and they say, wow, this has really changed my dynamic with my team. I feel like they’re stepping up more because I’m listening better and delegating better.

Tom Griffiths
But also it’s helped with my communication with my spouse because being a great communicator or maybe conflict resolution is a useful skill as well at home. So I love seeing the kind of the whole person impact that we’re having.

Brett
Amazing. And if we zoom out into the future, let’s say five years, what’s the five year vision for home? What’s it going to look like?

Tom Griffiths
Yeah, I mean the dream would be that we become the go to platform for all live corporate learning. So anything that used to be taught in a classroom, whether that’s management skills as we do today, dei skills as we do today, or in future, potentially more specialized skills like sales leadership or excellence, marketing, product management and so on, we want to expand the content on the platform to deliver that value more broadly to companies. I think they like that idea because they want a simpler kind of aggregated experience. It’s just that no one’s done that for live training yet and so I would love us to be the number one in the category and the thing that everybody thinks of when they think live training amazing.

Brett
Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as you build, where’s the best place for them to go. 

Tom Griffiths
They can follow me on LinkedIn,Tom Griffiths and Hone, or they can follow me on Twitter at tom. Grifiths. Awesome. 

Brett
Well, thanks so much for taking the time to chat and share your vision. This is all super exciting and we look forward to seeing you execute on this vision. 

Tom Griffiths
Thanks,Brett. Really enjoyed it. Appreciate having you our channel.