Hone: HR’s Secret Weapon

Across every sector and every geography, the teams that attract and retain the strongest talent are the ones that ultimately win.

Reading the headlines you’ll see no shortage of well-capitalized startups seemingly poised for growth. Yet in boom times and bust, one common thread has always connected the very best companies: talent. Across every sector and every geography, the teams that attract and retain the strongest talent are the ones that ultimately win.

Given the importance of recruiting, it has been rewarding to see so many startups tackle talent acquisition. Yet retention, equally as important, has typically been under-served by the startup market, which is suffering from a historically tight labor market and a Covid-inspired “Great Resignation” leading millions of workers to leave their jobs. In fact, 55 percent of Americans expect to look for a new job in the coming year.

Enter Hone, the company providing live, cohort-based management and leadership training that teams love.

 

During the pandemic, consumers and professionals have come to rely on high-quality digital experiences, such as Peloton for fitness, Zoom for video-based meetings and Outschool and Coursera for education. Hone epitomizes the next evolution in employee education tools that leverage the kinds of digital experiences we’ve come to expect in the post-Covid era. In short, they’re building the next generation employee engagement, training, and retention tools–the kind of technology today’s employers and employees need–to usher in the future of work.

There’s an old adage that people don’t quit jobs; they quit bosses, and the data proves it out. 94% of employees say they would remain with one company longer if their employers were more invested in their training and education. And managers, too, feel more engaged when they have room to grow. Managers who have room to learn and grow are 3.5x more likely to be happy and engaged and 3.3x more likely to want to stay at their organization for 2 years. 

Through live, cohort-based training, Hone delivers the tools managers need to increase employee retention. By focusing on the highest-impact competencies for leadership and management and by practicing skills live in cohort-based learning teams, Hone has helped over 11,000 managers across 100+ organizations turn lessons into skills and drive lasting behavioral change. Their 300+ monthly courses include management themes, such as giving feedback that lands and building high-trust relationships, as well as issues relating to DEI, such as managing bias in the workplace, addressing microaggressions on the team and embracing diversity with inclusion.

Most importantly: Hone works. Unlike most e-learning lessons that average 10% completion rates, Hone’s training completion rates are 84%, with 90% of learners demonstrating a lasting behavior change. This shouldn’t be surprising given the caliber of the coaches — on average they score an impressive 4.8/5.0.  HR buyers are happy, too: 89% of pilot programs lead to expansions.

 

As with any startup, the strength lies in the team, beginning with a strong bench of leaders at the helm. Co-founder and CEO Tom Griffiths was formerly co-founder and Chief Product Officer at gaming unicorn FanDuel. In his capacity at FanDuel, he successfully helped the company pivot from a news surveying app to a multibillion-dollar sports gaming platform earning $150M+ in revenue. Meanwhile, co-founder and Chief Customer Officer Savina Perez is an HR and DEI guru, having led growth at several venture-backed startups and previously served in executive roles at Culture IQ and Curalate. The two united over their passion for training, culture and people and are the perfect duo to help companies upskill and retain their most precious resources: their employees. They have successfully built out a stellar team of 30 members, 50% of whom are female, and 43% of whom are non-white.

We couldn’t be more excited to join Tom, Savina and the rest of the Hone team on their journey to revolutionize employee performance and retention through live, cohort-based leadership and management training. If you think your team could use a boost in employee engagement and retention (and what team can’t?), check out their incredible offerings at Honehq.com.

Hone

Hone is a Live Learning Platform for organizations to teach transformational leadership, management, and people skills at scale. The company empowers HR and Learning & Development teams to tackle people development in a modern way, with easy deployment of small-group, live cohort learning at scale, and data and tools to measure its impact. Through a blend of live online cohort-based programs, world-class instructors, and a powerful behavior change platform, Hone cultivates soft skills with hard data, leading to lasting behavior change in 90% of learners who go through our programs. Hone has trained thousands of learners in 58+ countries, and serves a rapidly expanding list of clients including GoFundMe, ServiceNow, Rover, Grove Collaborative and more.

Sarah Lamont

Sarah Lamont is a Senior Associate at F-Prime, where she focuses on early-stage investments in fintech. Prior to joining F-Prime, she was a senior consultant at Oliver Wyman in the Private Capital & Financial Services practices, working with some of the world’s largest banks, private equity firms, and other financial institutions across the US and Europe.

In addition to her role at F-Prime, Sarah also co-leads the Boston chapter of the Emerging Venture Capitalists Association (EVCA) and is a Data Advocate for Fintech Sandbox, a non-profit serving fintech entrepreneurs by aggregating data and infrastructure for free during a startup’s development phase.

Sarah is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she majored in Mechanical Engineering and learned how to fly a Cessna.

Tierney Caputo

Tierney Caputo joined F-Prime in September 2021. She is the Executive Assistant to David Jegen. Prior to F-Prime, she worked as an Executive Assistant and Event Planner. Tierney received her BA in Communications and Public Relations from Virginia Tech.

Burro

Burro is a robotics company building an autonomous platform designed to free growers and their workforce from tedious tasks, while building the modular base for greater autonomy. Founded in 2017, the company offers the only fully autonomous, plug-and-play collaborative farming robot on the market.

Guros

Guros is an embedded insurance company in Mexico that’s transforming the entire insurance experience, from purchasing to managing vehicle and mobile insurance. They’re on a mission to democratize insurance in Latin America; both for end-customers and neobanks/fintechs who want to embed insurance into their platform, but need to do so in a much simpler, faster, and reliable way.

Warmly

Warmly is the first AI-fueled pipeline acceleration platform that harnesses the power of existing sales enablement and intent tools to automatically identify high propensity website visitors and alert them to sales for real-time engagement. It’s the first such solution purpose built to meet the business and budget needs of SMBs.

These Startups Are Helping Employers Prepare for the Post-COVID Workplace

In our post-pandemic lives, we will likely never return to the full level of in-person engagements we relied on before COVID broke out.

Summer is upon us, almost half of America’s adult population is fully vaccinated, and, increasingly, employers are beginning to plan to welcome employees back to the office. Employers are facing a complex new reality in which only some employees return to the office some of the time. As employers prepare for the post-COVID workplace, startups are creating tools to help them establish new work routines that accommodate distributed workforces and leverage our newfound reliance on video.

In a story for VentureBeat, John Lin outlines the post-COVID workplace trends he finds particularly exciting.

Originally published in VentureBeat. Read the full story here.

Healthcare is the next wave of data liberation

At F-Prime, we have been closely involved in the liberation of financial, to the benefit of service providers and consumers alike. In this story for TechCrunch, Carl Byers and David Jegen reflect on how while the winners in healthcare data transformation will look different than they did in the realm of fintech, even as the industry heads toward a similar end state.

Originally published in TechCrunch. Read the full story here.

1upHealth

1upHealth provides data interoperability between healthcare systems at a very low cost, fractions of a cent per API call, utilizing the latest FHIR® standards, and patient-authorized access, to ensure the best insights at the lowest costs across healthcare providers for low-income, diverse, and vulnerable populations.