#StartupsEverywhere profile: Sam Caucci, Founder & CEO, 1Huddle
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Developing technology that enables fun, inclusive workforce training
Sam Caucci is the founder and CEO of 1Huddle, a Newark-based software company creating mobile games for workforce development, corporate employee training, and upskilling. We sat down with him to discuss how he developed his business, the challenges of navigating complex privacy frameworks, and the need to rethink how technology will impact the future of work.
Can you start by telling us a little bit about your background and how it led you to 1Huddle?
Before starting 1Huddle, I spent most of my career in sports entertainment, running training facilities, fitness club operations, and global franchise sales for various sports brands. These experiences were critical to my journey because I was constantly responsible for workforce training and development. I noticed it was getting harder and harder to get new sales representative’s skilled-up coming right out of college. Universities do a good job at preparing people for jobs from a decade ago, but that isn't helpful for companies who need a new hire to perform on day one.
All of that experience bubbled up to this concept of 1Huddle; a faster way to onboard, up-skill, and develop workers. We operate using a SaaS—Software as a Service—enterprise platform that uses games as the medium to develop skills. Blackboard, Canvas, and other traditional e-learning platforms can often fail to map substantial, positive outcomes. We put together an advisory board of experts and coaches who know how skills develop. Our research showed that experiencing struggle is a critical ingredient in the learning process for trainees. But who the heck wants to take a test? So, we disguised testing as a trivia platform. You're not just getting skilled up; you’re getting more engaged with your workforce, which should result in better sales, service, outcomes, and retention.
Tell us about 1Huddle and the work you are doing.
We joined an accelerator called 500 Startups in Silicon Valley, and eventually we received some seed capital from Newark Venture Partners (NVP), a smaller venture capital fund. With this investment and other partnership opportunities, we decided to make the move to Newark. NVP’s thesis totally changed how I think about 1Huddle; it’s about bringing tech to work to revitalize the urban core. When I moved to Newark, we started interacting with the community. We gave our platform to the Workforce Development Centers in Newark, nonprofits fighting to end homelessness, and reentry programs trying to help formerly incarcerated men and women get reacclimated into day to day life.
We have committed our product to a full workforce, which means anybody who wakes up and has a job deserves access to job training to help them succeed. Unfortunately, in this country, our workforce training infrastructure is pretty bad. Today, we have over 100 brands from 12 different verticals, including the U.S. Air Force. We started in sports with customers like the Wizards, Washington Capitals, Monumental Sports, Ted Leonsis, MSG Sports, and the Golden State Warriors. Now, our customers range from the Tao Group to Loews Hotels.
How do you approach and think about working with content, provided by your customers and users?
We are always aware of the topic because we are sitting on a tremendous amount of proprietary content that companies basically just hand to us. Madison Square Garden gives us all of their intellectual property and policies to convert that material into games to deploy for their workforce. Content that's turned into a game format by our 1Huddle game design team is owned by 1Huddle and licensed back to Madison Square Garden. Any games they design on the platform are theirs.
In today's workforce, most companies buy their training content; they don't necessarily build it. With our product, we're democratizing who can create job training. The 35,000 learning and development workers in this country often do not have formal education in cognitive behavior learning design or instructional pedagogy. We're allowing companies to author content from the frontlines, which means that if you were at Compass Coffee, you can build a game as a manager, send it to the head of human resources, and then deploy it to the workplace. You could be a sales rep for Vineyard Vines, take three pictures of the new retail promotion, create a few questions, swipe right, and our AI will make up iterations of that game for your workers. We're changing who the expert is. And, fortunately, we haven't experienced many barriers related to our content development under existing law because typically the company is simply using their own materials on our platform.
What challenges have you faced navigating various international privacy frameworks?
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) presents challenges for us as an organization. I think there's a middle ground, but as a high-growth and early-stage startup trying to grow fast, you're at a major competitive disadvantage trying to innovate when companies are afraid of these complex frameworks. Often, security and compliance-related requirements are overly restrictive to innovation. To be honest with you, I would have to raise an entire second Series A to navigate many of these frameworks. For instance, companies like Blackboard or Salesforce have been at this for 20 years—how do you compete with a legacy product and their resources to navigate these laws? We did secure a deal with the U.S. Air Force. They provided a sandbox environment and made it easy to prove concepts before we start figuring out the tough technical compliance details. That's the challenge to build and compete as enterprise software, which is trying to impact the workforce. With American companies adopting GDPR policy and procedure, we have had to just say no to companies. I understand the reasoning, but it’s proved to be too big a barrier for our business.
What are some of the biggest policy challenges you face that you think need more attention from federal, state, and local lawmakers as they're trying to better support the startup ecosystem?
We have 160 million U.S. workers, 50% of them work in the service sector. The overwhelming majority of those jobs are low-wage work. The outdated mechanics of the FLSA and wage and hour rules are doing a few things. One, they're saying that you can't use your own device for work in certain states, even if you want to. We have come out with more features in the last two years to actually limit the usage of our product. Since our product gets such wide adoption, people want to play. We had to develop a feature that only allows you to play when you're clocked in at work because people were doing it off the clock. I do not think people should work without getting paid for it. However, if I’m a bartender and want to be the general manager, how do I access the education to do that?
Many of these rules were developed before the Internet was created, and it was not normal for people to be using their personal devices on the clock. It makes sense to enact policy while considering the fact that humans use their mobile or personal devices off the clock to improve their personal skills. Companies that want to invest in technological innovations, which are often sold by startups, can be scared to do it if burdensome regulations surround their use. In our case, if employees use our product off the clock, what type of liabilities have employers opened themselves up to? There are so many incredible software solutions that are employee benefit wrap-around services, but companies stay away because it's easier.
You cannot talk about the future of work and not talk about how innovation impacts it. You can't talk about infrastructure without talking about technology as part of the infrastructure for workers. I've been banging my head for years to figure out what type of tax credits the government should offer companies to encourage them to upgrade their technology infrastructure. We just don't do it. I'm better off buying a bunch of staplers to get a better deduction than investing in workforce training. My biggest fear as we come out of this pandemic is that many companies are going to delay making investments in technology infrastructure until next year. They're going to keep costs low and try to squeeze and stretch. We should be finding ways to motivate companies to invest in technology now and reduce the risk and barriers associated with innovation.
What is your long-term goal for 1Huddle?
Over the last year, it was remote work, remote work, remote work. We forget about the fact that the majority of our workforce today has to be in person. They're frequently doing low-wage, low-skill labor, and future work trends will directly impact this group, if not all groups. The millennial generation will have held an average of 20 jobs in our lifetime. We're going to be changing jobs, and those jobs are going to shift. 1Huddle is a game platform, so we advocate for the fact that nobody likes an unfair game.
We're not going to stop until we create a world where every worker in your organization—regardless of education, race, or experience—can compete. We have already had some pretty incredible stories about the night worker or the overnight security guard who, just by playing 1Huddle, was able to stand out and become a bartender. Since they could become a bartender, they were able to become an assistant manager. We think that education information is critical and that technology can help us through this pandemic and beyond. We should be leaning into technology now more than ever to move us forward and create a world where every worker can compete.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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