Our Origin Story
Our Purpose
elevator9 was founded with a purpose: to elevate the impact of learning through science, technology, and innovation. We challenged ourselves to reexamine our assumptions and seek the most effective methods for driving excellence. We believe in the transformative potential of learning and development and know that we can positively impact the outcomes of businesses, nonprofits, foundations, and social enterprises by elevating learning so people can gain the new skills and behaviors they need to be their highest and best selves. By reimagining how we enable people to learn, we sought to build a business that would scale, be profitable, and do good in the world by democratizing access to impactful learning experiences.
As learning practitioners, we recognized a problem: Traditional live training events often fail to produce lasting performance improvements that impact organizational goals. Even the most well-designed learning events, with clear learning outcomes and highly engaged participants, often fail to drive their intended impact because people quickly forget much of what they initially learned. Even worse, without reactivating the learning over time, most people fail to develop the intended skills and behaviors. Even when the training does succeed, there is little data available to measure the results.
At elevator9, we solve both components of this problem. We make learning stick and measure the results, so organizations can ensure they get a return on their investment in learning.
How did we get here?
Our journey began when cofounder David Grad was leading on-air social impact campaign production for MTV. During this time, he discovered his passion for creating the conditions that enable teams and the individuals on them to succeed. This realization led him to pursue a master's degree in strategic communication, focusing on leadership communication and how to help leaders elevate their people and relationship skills to increase their influence and drive more successful results. He decided to shift his career focus to learning and development.
As he transitioned into the role of a learning practitioner, he began to coach leaders, design and facilitate leadership training, and teach leadership to graduate students. He noticed a significant difference between the short-term impact of live organizational training events and the lasting improvements seen when learning took place over a period of time, like his students and coaching clients experienced. Those who had opportunities to reactivate their learning over time achieved significantly greater performance improvements. He also recognized that working professionals have limited time. Their organizations need them to be focused on performance in their roles; not spending long periods of time in live training.
A deep dive into the science…
Driven by these insights, he delved into learning science, acquiring knowledge from workshops and books written by people like cognitive and learning sciences expert Dr. Clark Quinn.
It became clear to him that there are science-based best principles of learning, and that by more effectively leveraging the science of learning, we could significantly increase the likelihood that learning from facilitated training would stick, elevating the impact and return on investment in those training programs. But how could we achieve this without significantly increasing the time commitment for participants?
The goal became to integrate learning science with technology to create brief yet powerfully effective learning interventions after an initial learning event, thus ensuring that live trainings have a measurably lasting impact. Together with now board advisor Aaron Windfield, David secured initial funding from a corporate pilot partner, developed a prototype, and delivered elevator9’s first engagement.
The Pilot Phase
Following the first pilot, the results were undeniably powerful, and the success led to more engagements with the company and six additional paying pilot partners, helping us refine our platform and methodology. David later reached out to Dr. Clark Quinn to see what he thought of what they had designed. Dr. Quinn ended up joining the team as a board advisor and has been a valuable contributor ever since, helping to embed the best principles of learning science into our platform.
Despite the challenges posed by Covid-19, which slowed our early momentum, we persevered. Aaron turned his focus to a new startup in the music sector where his true passion lay. This opened the opportunity for David to welcome a new cofounder, Dr. Page Chen. Together, they began to accelerate our development of the business.
Our Path Forward
While Page and David’s story started many many years ago as childhood friends, time and distance led them on very different journeys only to reconnect at just the right time to bring elevator9 to the next level (pun intended). Page brings a wealth of experience to elevator9. As a versatile leader with 20+ years of experience designing learning solutions that drive growth and development in distributed and global organizations. She is recognized for a proactive approach to identifying customer training needs and enabling their success in achieving and exceeding their goals. Page has always been passionate about researching the intersection of strategy and technology to allow for the design of impactful learning experiences that scale, which is why when her path crossed once again with David she was excited at the prospect of expanding on elevator9’s original pilot to help develop the platform we have today.
As COO and head of product innovation, she complements David’s contributions with her leadership experience, operational skills, and deep expertise in helping organizations develop their own strategic learning solutions. Together, they expand elevator9’s impact, ensuring organizations achieve their most important goals by leveraging our platform and services to provide effective live learning events that align to their goals and have the means to measure their greater return on that investment.
Where did the name come from?
At elevator9, we believe in the power of learning. When people are given the opportunity to learn, there is unlimited potential for what they can achieve. Learning something new can be transformative, making a person feel like they’re on “Cloud Nine”. That’s why we call ourselves elevator9. We help elevate people to their highest and best selves so they can experience the transformational power of learning and use it to achieve their biggest goals, overcome their most challenging obstacles, and help their organizations succeed.