FanDuel cofounder starts Hone service for training managers

Tom Griffiths cofounded FanDuel and helped turn it into a billion-dollar company in fantasy sports. Now he has a new startup called Hone that offers management training as a service.

Griffiths was the former chief product officer at FanDuel, which he started in 2009. Now his new company says it is the antidote to outdated corporate management training and expensive, time-consuming workshops and impersonal e-learning videos. Hone is powered by live online expert facilitators and the power of artificial intelligence (AI).

“Millennials will make up 75 percent of the global workforce by 2025, and we see companies struggling to find the right way to train this next generation of leaders. Current approaches don’t fit today’s busy schedules or distributed workforce, and training often gets forgotten once people leave the classroom,” said Griffiths, in a statement. “Hone combines best-of-breed executive coaches and psychologists with the power of technology and AI to finally make leadership training convenient and effective for the millions of employees who take it every year. We are positioned to modernize how the world’s best companies train their current and future leaders.”

Leadership training is close to Griffiths’ heart, as he grew FanDuel from five to 500 employees and a $1.3 billion valuation in a matter of years. Along the way he experienced the struggles that come with rapid growth, and found another industry to upend. While fantasy sports was ripe for disruption in 2009 when he co-founded FanDuel, Griffiths believes a much larger opportunity exists in the wildly outdated corporate training and leadership development industry, sized at over $30 billion annually in the United States.

Research shows, on average, trainees forget 70 percent of what they are taught within 24 hours of the training experience. Based on Griffiths’s background in product development and machine learning, Hone will use the latest advances in consumer technology and AI to reinforce human-led leadership training and have it actually “stick” long-term with trainees.

By taking a remote-first approach, Hone also serves the 43 percent of workers in the US who spend at least some time each week working remotely. The platform’s flagship program is an 8-week Manager Bootcamp, which is experienced live online by groups of eight peers with an expert facilitator where they practice core management skills in short weekly sessions. Interactive messaging with chatbots and instructors supports learners in applying their training over time. New programs on additional leadership topics are coming soon.

Hone is currently piloting with a number of top companies and has a strong pipeline of organizations waiting to adopt their platform.

“Our people managers are the keys to unlocking the potential of our incredible community. We are committed to ensuring they have the tools, support and skills they need to thrive, and to ignite their teams, and we found that solution in Hone,” said Jo Dennis, chief human resources officer at Omada Health, in a statement.

Hone’s cofounders include Jeremy Hamel and Savina Perez, previously of CultureIQ. They started the company in San Francisco earlier this year.