Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Gary, thanks so much for joining us.
Gary Eimerman, Pluralsight
Hey Keith, appreciate you having us excited to chat with you and the team today.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you cuz we're gonna talk about Pluralsight, which is a company that like your tagline is great. It's the technology workforce development platform. So we need to unpack that. What is Pluralsight, and what does the company do?
Gary Eimerman, Pluralsight
Well, as you hit, it's all about workforce development. So we are focused just on technology. And I think that's a big thing. Because there are a lot of education companies out there, they're focused on everything. But if you go back, what was it about 10 years ago, Marc Andreessen said that Software is eating the world. I mean, very few statements have held so true as the last 10 years. And we've wanted to really specialize in being that development tool for technology. And it's trying to keep up with that requires a lot of things. But fundamentally, we've got some a couple of core products, we have skills, which is the educational upskilling and rescaling solution. And then we also have flow, which is our software delivery intelligence platform. So think about that as like the analytics in around the behaviors of your software delivery experience.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So who the typical customers for Pluralsight? Like, what, how does that all work?
Gary Eimerman, Pluralsight
Well, back to the software in the world. It's really everyone at this point in time, anyone who has any need for technology to be deployed in, their company. We have small businesses, mom and pop shops, we've got the largest companies in the world. So we've got everything from your individual learner who's looking to get into the technology space, to the seasoned veteran who's been working at Microsoft for four decades.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now, if this was an enterprise customer that we're talking about, like, how does it work for them?
Gary Eimerman, Pluralsight
Yeah, so they're really using it to help programa ties their upskilling and rescaling or gain insights to how their teams are actually developing, and delivering on software. So speaking to like, what is programming at tising? Your tech skills? It's really like first step is just understanding, what are you strategically trying to do as a company. And a lot of times you got CIO CTOs who are sitting there thinking like, okay, here are the things I need to go do with this technology. And like, they think about the budget, and they think about what I'm going to do for the customer. And what's really become aware, and especially the last couple years is like, I need to be thinking about the skills that I have on my teams, because it moves so quickly. Now, when I thought we have enough skills to go deliver on that. Two years ago, when we came up with this idea, well, technology has completely shifted, and I now need to rescale or upskill, folks into being able to go deliver on that. I think the cloud transformation has done a massive number of that. So now that these individuals are thinking about this strategically, great. What skills do I have in my company, I can tell you like right now, most companies are doing that via like, manager one on ones like in like Excel spreadsheets, or whatever Google Sheets, whatever it might be. And what we've really done is built a platform that allows you to actually see that, what are the skills, create an inventory, start to understand where are you strong? Where are you not? Where are people developing? Where are they growing, where they not align that to your strategic initiatives, and then create programs that will then help you drive that skill development from where you're currently at, to where you need to be to go deliver on whatever your strategic initiatives are.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Got it, okay. Now, pluralsite is, a very successful company. So talk about the current stage, like the size of company, number of employees, or whatever else you can share.
Gary Eimerman, Pluralsight
Yeah, so a couple of things here. I mean, you hit on stage. And I love that because there's been different stages throughout the years here at Pluralsight. And I think that one of the key things that we just kicked off here in January was Pluralsight, 4.0. It is a new stage for us. And it's a new opportunity. We recently went private. So we had been a public company and gone through that version of Pluralsight 3.0. And now as a private company, it's really unlock the doors for us to make some really big bets and look at that long term impact that we're going to have and really accelerate growth to go deliver on that. So right now today, we're over 2000 people across the entire world. I think we have employees in 21 country's or so. That's constantly updating. So I don't know the exact number but I think that's right. And I mean, back to the just the nature of the business. It's like we're over 50% remote. We've got our headquarters here, where I'm at today in Salt Lake City, but I live in Chicago, I'm full time remote. Our executive team, our teams are spread around the world. We have offices in Boston and Austin, and Dublin in India and recently in Australia as well. So we've got sort of like these pubs, and then team members that are whether they be hybrid or fully remote around the world.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now you're the general manager of skills. So talk about your like your team, like, what's your team working on right now.
Gary Eimerman, Pluralsight
So we've got some exciting things. I think one of the big things is we recently acquired a cloud guru. And it's really a merger of the two biggest powerhouses of technology skills. A cloud guru has focused just on Cloud transformation Pluralsight, on software development, security, the broad space for anything technology. And so one of the big exciting things is we're actually bringing the best of those platforms together, some of the hands on capabilities that ACG had and deploying that across more things, taking the skills inventory, and skill IQ, which I talked about earlier, and taking that back to the cloud space. And so bringing that together in a shared platform and really thinking about what could this look like from a user experience, where you can focus really, on just your role in what you're tackling today. But when you realize, oh, shoot, I need to learn that other technology topic that's adjacent, all of a sudden be able to reach out and grab and have access to that as well. So that's a big one that excited about. And then the other two, that I would I would call out our tech foundations, which is a offering for think of this as like, we call it conversational knowledge. You don't need to go be the practitioner. But nowadays, everyone in the business like all the companies out there are like looking at like, how do I make sure that you know what artificial intelligence is or what blockchain is or what 5g is, and not to go actually be a practitioner on it. But how to actually just like, oh, this is how this applies to our world. This is how I need what I need to know to be able to talk with our engineering teams, or our data science team, or whatever it might be, or to our customers. And so this is a conversational program, built from the ground up really focused on instead of like force feeding people, I think we've all taken the forced training, security awareness, or whatever. That's, that's no fun at all. And so we tried to create something that was really like, going to benefit everyone and not be a force fed, but value add to individuals who aren't practitioners. So that was one and the other is just the growth on the insights and analytics, we have some fun things coming down the pipeline, because, again, it's all there's so much data that's out there today. And that's great. And we create a lot of that ourselves. It's like, what do you do with that? How do you take this knowledge of great, I've got these skills. Now, how do I actually map that to my objective? So there's a lot of exciting stuff coming in those areas.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
You had mentioned a lot of the workforce a Pluralsight is remote. So what's the culture like working there? What's the day to day environment? Like?
Gary Eimerman, Pluralsight
Yeah, so definitely a remote-friendly is what we call it here. So our goal is about making sure that the people are the best talent in the right places in the right time. And we've been remote long before the world sort of went remote in 2020. With the pandemic. We've had remote teams for decades, at this point in time, I mean, really, not quite since the existence but pretty close. And so we built a culture that understands like leading through a remote environment, which is so critical, like you can't just say, Hey, I'm remote, and then like think you can just do the same thing that you're doing everyday, because then you have dynamics of presence bias and things like that, that start to creep in. So we've got a team that really understands how to work together remotely, and we're constantly learning and evolving is like the tools and everything grow. I think the other question you should ask is like, what's the culture? So there's the culture of being remote. But then there's also the culture of like the people. And I think this is one of the reasons why I've been here at Pluralsight, as long as I have is truly the people, we acknowledged that everyone's sort of unique, and brings their own flavor of life to the group, and it's relishing that uniqueness, that actually makes us a really fun team to be together. And so it's that idea of like, if you ask someone here, like, Hey, why are you like, what do you like so much about Pluralsight all of our employee surveys talk about like the people. And it's because we allow when we focus on everyone just bring their whole selves, like you're a member of a family, you're a member of a community, you're a member of whatever it might be. And it's like, bring all that to our team, and show up that way and learn about each other. And I think that's, it's really fun when you're just like in the halls catching up with people learning like you know about their family, you know about what they're doing. And like, that's a major focus of our discussions that happens over zoom with our belonging, check ins and things like that. So I'd say that the culture is one of community and people first here at Wellesley.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now there's a lot of growth happening at Pluralsight. So in terms of hiring is that across all different functional areas?
Gary Eimerman, Pluralsight
Absolutely, I'm trying to think if there's a role in the business that we're not actively hiring, I mean, as you are aware in this space right now, that is a hot market around the world. And they're just because of what we're actually even training and developing is one of software development. And everyone's saying, hey, I need more software developers, or I need more cloud engineers, or I need more security professionals, when we're literally training that. We're also in the same boat, we're trying to hire more security professionals, DevOps professionals, we're also developing them in ourselves internally, which is super exciting. Like, that's one of the things that I would say, is a benefit to coming to Pluralsight is like, we are fundamentally a learning company, like at the root of what we started at the root of how we act day in and day out. So like, Hey, we're short, DevOps engineers, great, let's build an academy with our own products with our instructor led training with our demand with our labs and everything, and bring that together, create an academy, and develop folks to bring them up to the skill level and actually hire them. And we do that internally from customer support into DevOps, or whatever it might be. And so, I think that that's another sort of value and cultural pieces that like focus on learning. But we're hiring product managers, we're hiring product designers, we're hiring data analysts, and business analysts and DevOps engineers and sales team members, like literally like, go to Pluralsight comm slash careers, and you'll see all about not only the environment here, but also all the opportunities that there are. And it's, that's the other thing is like, once you get in the door, if you are truly committed to learning, which is one of our values, is you've got the opportunity to continue to grow in the last year and a half at this point in time, over 48% of people have stepped into new roles been promoted into new roles stepped into new career opportunities, like almost half the company. So like you talked about, like learning and putting your money where your mouth is, like we are, it's about developing, folks. And if you want to grow the company, you've got an opportunity to do that here.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
That's a really impressive statistic in terms of the internal growth. I mean, that's definitely something that people are looking forward to grow within a company and hopefully hit the next milestone in their career. Now, as you highlighted, the market is active, there's lots of opportunities for people to explore. So why is now the ideal time to join Pluralsight?
Gary Eimerman, Pluralsight
Yeah, twofold. One is in this is not just about now it's just about Pluralsight is one of those rare companies where you can come develop your career, continue to grow and learn new things be challenged day in and day out, make a good living, and do it at a company where you're actually creating good in the world. Like there's a lot of companies out there where you can go make a living, and be selling something that is sometimes an addiction or like material, like things that are good in like entertaining and valuable, but not like true at its core. Good. What we're literally doing is creating knowledge, opportunities and career development opportunities for individuals around the world, whether that be at a fortune 100 company, or an individual who's in A or in a place where maybe there's less opportunities, they have access to Pluralsight and have the ability to create a career, the letters that we get via LinkedIn, and our NPS surveys and just cold on like Twitter and things like that, like, it's amazing to see the impact that you have on people's lives, we actually have stories where like people have said, it saved my life, it took me from a path of potentially ending my life to a path of having meaning and career. And it's like there aren't a lot of places where you get that mix. So I think that's, that's true. The wine now Pluralsight element. For me, it's because we're starting that new chapter. And we talked about this Pluralsight for Dotto, there is an opportunity now, we're not going to rest on our laurels, like you said, we've had success we've grown like from infancy to a public company. Now taking it private allows us to really focus on that long term growth, and really changing the game again, like we're not going to sit back and just say, Hey, we're happy of where we've got, let's just run it out. Let's keep making money. Now. It's like, how do we make the ability to learn quicker, easier and more fun? How do we enable you to actually be more successful in your role in your life to take that career hop from one side of the responsibility to another? How do we as a company help you actually go solve those big world problems with health care and the environment and whatnot? You're actually at Pluralsight. You're creating that tool that's going to enable all those things to happen in the future.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well, as Gary mentioned, Pluralsight is hiring across the board. So there's lots and lots of options. opportunities to explore. You can check out their openings on VentureFizz, go to venturefizz.com/pluralsight. And you'll see all their job listings there. Gary, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the great things happening at the company.
Gary Eimerman, Pluralsight
Well, Keith, thank you so much for having me and look forward to connecting more with your community.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
