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With an initial focus on web-based and mobile training platforms for education publishers, including industry mainstays Kaplan and Pearson, co-founders Vishal Shah and Ethan Linkner started Vlinks Media in San Francisco and moved to Chicago in 2011. In 2013 VLinks entered the corporate training market with its new cloud-based product, LearnCore.
“There are a lot of new learning technologies, with a lot of fancy buzzwords. But the thing a lot of new companies struggle with is initial adoption,” said Shah. “We've been able to create a product, in a fairly crowded market actually, and it's really starting to grow. Instead of a very pie-in-the-sky kind of idea and concept, we chose to make things that people are looking for already.”
The team realized that their learning platform could be advantageous for companies as well -and they tested it out with positive feedback.
“So LearnCore was born based on the demand we got from the market from companies wanting a better learning experience for their teams,” Shah said. “Something that's much more engaging and interactive, similar to what we were doing for these (education) companies.”
LearnCore is designed to enable enterprise clients to create and deploy training in their departments and teams, with an emphasis on skills that drive a business. “We focus on turning the everyday employee into a top performer,” said Shah. “We’ve brought several learning methodologies that we've learned across the way” into LearnCore.
“It’s not only training that's assigned and administered by HR,” Shah said. “It''s really focused on high-stakes training—the learning that actually makes a business go forward, rather than things they just have to do.”
By focusing on high-stakes training, the VLinks team is able to increase the speed for proficiency of new hires via product training, communication and sales training.
“Since going live last year we have worked with several different companies in the region, Fortune 500 companies, and even medium-sized businesses," Shah said. "It's pretty exciting to see that impact.”
Also in 2013, Pearson Education selected VLinks Media to take part in its Catalyst for Education program. Shah said that they built an application for Pearson’s nursing certification test.
Building on the momentum from last year’s entry into the corporate training market, VLinks Media received the top award as the “Start-Up Learning Provider of the Year” at the 2014 Learning Awards held in the United Kingdom.
VLinks Media was the only non-European firm nominated, said Shah. And although no one from the Chicago startup could attend the event in London on Feb. 6, Shah said it is “great gratification, and great momentum for our team.”
"Something like that is a full team reward," he said. "It's not just on the sales side, or on the development side. They evaluate the company as a whole.”
According to Shah, LPI looked at VLink’s product and company track record during the evaluation process. “They were really digging into our business as a whole,” he added, “our differentiators, and whether or not those differentiators are proven based on the business traction that we've got.”
When asked about VLink’s goals for 2014, Shah said “LearnCore is a relatively new product, and we've gotten some great feedback and some great case studies. What we have been doing and are starting to get better at is aligning it with the ROI side, increasing revenue. The big goal is to make sure that the clients we have onboard are extremely happy, to take their feedback and make the platform better, and really start to hit the gas pedal by the end of this year.”
