Jeremy Robb - Robbclan

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom pod. We have Jeremy, Rob with us today. Jeremy's building Robplan, Rob with two Bs. They're an MCP-enabled agentic platform, uh, and yeah, they provide AI courses, um, yeah, AI platform to build learning paths and courses for your employees and their AI agents. So Jeremy, I think you were on the Spark Tank a couple weeks ago or something like that, so, but It was fun to hearing your pitch. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're building there.

You bet. So I've been in the learning space for a long time. When I worked for eBay, I started developing courses there, and then I got a chance to teach at the University of Utah for a while. And then we moved to San Diego, and I worked for UCSD Medical Center teaching courses there for onboarding. And then I got an opportunity to work at ServiceNow as a trainer and then manage training. I helped develop courses with, with the team there, which was great. Managed my, my, my team for the Americas and all of our partners, and then moved on, built a new whole new training program at Abnormal AI. From the ground up. They had nothing, not even slides when I got there. And then moved on to NetBrain. And then I started a consulting business. And I was focused primarily on fighting burnout, particularly for autistic adults, because I'm autistic and I went through my first autistic burnout and it was brutal. And I wanted to help build resilience and focus on that. Well, current administration came into power and DEI funding kind of dried up. And so as I started thinking about what the next phase was going to be, this little application called Open Claw came out. And that got exciting. Now all of a sudden AI could do stuff other than just sit and chat with you. And then I started thinking about how this would work within the organization, particularly with training and development. And one of the biggest bottlenecks that I found in my experience of building training and working with stakeholders is getting everybody in a room, getting stuff built out because everyone else doesn't have the time to sit for an hour and, and, you know, work with training. You know, they're, they're worried about— engineering's worried about putting out code, and marketing has got, you know, big marketing pushes they're going to be doing. Customer success, they've got a lot of customers to manage and support. They've got a huge queue they've got to work through. No one really wants to sit down and talk to the training team and help them develop better training. What I wanted was to utilize AI assistants. I'm not calling them agents because agents are kind of reactive. AI assistants because they're proactive. Utilizing them to reach out to your stakeholders, have their AI agents look at the training, evaluate it based on their individual context that they've got. If they're doing the projects, they know what what, you know, everything should look like. Have them look at the training, evaluate it, propose the edits, have the owners submit those as their edits, and then have the, the trainer come back and evaluate that, make, you know, accept the changes, and then publish it. The, the whole process can take a matter of 2 minutes per person to go through and evaluate, whereas, so during that, the that hour-long period you'd normally have to align, take notes, and go back and build, you're actually building the training. It's built, it's ready to go, and then you can publish. That was my, my goal. And so we built Wayfinder, and Wayfinder uses MCP to do that.

Right. Hey, let's cover your time at ServiceNow first. What did you learn from your time there? What period of ServiceNow was this one? Was it this Frank Slootman era, and was it like the explosive era of it in which was growing crazy fast? Tell us a bit more.

Yes, uh, blanket yes. When I started, I started in 2013 in December with Frank Slootman, and I was there for the initial transition from Frank to, um, John. And that was a short tenure because John then transitioned off to— oh, who's the CEO now? He used to be over at SAP. I'm spacing his name. It's been a while since I've been there. But I've been through all those. And when I started, there were like 3,000 employees, and I was number 3,336. And when I left, there were over 20,000 employees, ServiceNow was finally a household name. I got to meet the founder, Fred Luddy, really, you know, meet him. I didn't get to know him really well, but I got to meet him, which was pretty neat. What was really exciting, though, about being part of the training team there at ServiceNow is that we were the happiest team at ServiceNow, and ServiceNow is a pretty great company to work for. I mean, it's just absolutely fantastic. People love working there. We were the happiest team. Everyone wanted to be on our team because we had great managers that were all about enabling people, having them feel empowered to do what they need to do, and they were part of the conversation, and they would always understand why. And so we had a huge amount of trust, and everyone was dedicated to helping everyone else on the team be successful. Even if you were struggling, everyone would rally around you to help you be successful. I had several trainers as we were moving along that would struggle at the very beginning to— with the training load or certifications or, or just communicating with their customers because they were used to a different type of training. And the team would gather together and help that person excel, and they all ended up being fantastic. We had an average CSAT of 9.6 out of 10, which in training, like, see, if you get an 8, you're happy. We were 9.6 on average. And then our NPS was close to 60, which is unheard of. Most people are aiming for like 50 to get that there. So it was a great time, had a great team, lots of great people to work for, and I hated leaving. But it was just an opportunity, great opportunity.

And before that, you were at eBay. Tell me about your time there. eBay that recently had an unsolicited acquisition by the GameStop CEO.

Yeah, that was a surprise. I was at eBay when Meg Whitman was there and just as John was starting during that transition. And Meg was phenomenal. I mean, she was a great leader. She was very open. She was very much customer-centric. When I was there, I started in the chat team, just chatting with sellers and buyers and helping them understand what was going on. I had a great opportunity, actually, and this is, I don't think I've ever told anybody this, but I helped the seller of the hearse that carried Martin Luther King get his listing posted. That was, I mean, just that piece of history was amazing. And then when I became a team lead, I started developing training for the team, for the Power Seller team, for the stores team. Just standardizing what we were teaching our folks so that we could hire more people faster and have them be more successful. And at that point, I just really wanted to learn how to teach. I had this secret burning urge to be a history professor until I found out how much they made. But I wanted to be a really good teacher, so I got a master's degree in education. And that was phenomenal because everything that I was learning applied directly to my job. I got to work with eBay University and it really put me on that path of training and training for business outcomes, like making a difference in your training, not just training to know something, but training to move the needle.

And tell me, a bit more, like when you knew that you had something special at ServiceNow in the training space, and how did that translate to Wayfinding and what you're building now?

Oh, uh, so, um, sorry, phone call. Um, what, what, what I really loved about ServiceNow the way we taught people and the way we treated people, whether they were customers, partners, individuals, we really focused on helping them be the best at what they could be and really help them develop in their careers. And because we had that mindset of we want everyone to be better, That really drove the team. And that's, that's what is really driving me with Wayfinder is how can I help learning and development teams be better, not replace them, but be better. Because as we're learning with AI, AI is absolutely fantastic. It does a great job at doing a lot of tasks, but it doesn't replace jobs. You've got to have someone that's responsible. You've got to have someone that has domain expertise. All that's really important to be, you know, valued and to have the impact that AI really brings. And so Wayfinder is really built around that. It's built around enabling your learning and development team to develop the training faster, have it be higher quality, have it do better because you're getting feedback from your partners and, you know, your, your, your stakeholders and, and everything. And they're all part of the conversation without taking everyone else away from their own jobs. Interesting. And how do you design trainings with AI Specifically, like, yes, how it was done historically. Oh yeah, so historically with training, it's actually interesting because you can use the same methodology. It's just lots of pieces are, are changed up. With, with typical training, you go through the ADDIE method, and that is, you know, you start with your analysis, which is what I always loved. You'd sit down, and this is like 80% of the time creating training. You sit down, you learn what someone needs to know, you know, if there's a deficit, what is that deficit? How— what, what are the processes that they're following? And then you determine, is there, um, do you need to have a new process? Do you need to have, you know, better workflows? Do you need to maybe have better tools? Or do people just need to know how to do their job better? And that's where you go into the whole training bit. So it's kind of like being a business analyst. Then as you, you've got your outline, your outline really breaks down into, you've got your job, and then within that job you've got tasks, and within that task you've got subtasks in order to complete the task, and then within the subtasks you've got your knowledge, your skills, your attitudes, your behaviors, your, your perspectives, however you want to put that, that make up, you know, how you complete the subtasks. That's all the stuff you've got to know, and that's what you're teaching. So what's really cool is that builds your, your design, which is, you know, your, your job is kind of like the chapter, the task is going to be your section, and then your subtask is your paragraph, and the SKA, um, the, the skills, knowledge, and whatnot, that's all going to be covered in your your paragraphs. So it makes it really easy to break down what training is going to look like if you're going to be doing it in a book. Um, and then you, you know, after you do the design, you do the development, you write it up, you get your screenshots, you throw it all in there, and then you'd implement it. You throw it out there, usually through an alpha, to make sure you've got a generally good idea. This is where you get your stakeholders together and and have them kind of test it out. You stop and you discuss it. Then after the alpha, you run a beta. And the beta means that you're more or less baked, and this is when you're going to be training your trainers to do the job. In self-paced training, this is where you would have, you know, a select few people go in and try it out, kind of like pilot the training and make sure that it meets their needs. And you take the notes back and then you make some tweaks and then you do your implementation. You let it run. Finally, you evaluate through every stage, like what works, what doesn't, and that's the E part of ADDIE. With AI, there are lots of pieces that are kind of compressed there. So one is analysis. AI makes analysis really, really easy. You can sit down, you can start pulling out workflows and how people are doing them. And what steps they're doing, because AI is really good about pulling that out. Once you've got the analysis done, you've got that breakdown all set up, the design is really, really easy because it knows what all the skills, knowledge, everything. It can start populating content. The content, and this is the development piece, and this is the piece where you've really got to have people in the mix, because AI, even with, you know, Claude Design and, you know, Codex 5.5, your frontier models, the content isn't, you know, 100% polished when it comes out. So you've got to have someone go in and either tweak the model or tweak the text themselves and have them push it back. And that's where people come in. And that's what makes higher quality training, and that's where you're going to get it. Implementation becomes really easy because now your alphas are basically send it out to your— the AI agents or AI assistants that your stakeholders have. Have them evaluate it, have them look at it, see if it looks good. They can give you your feedback right away. Then you'd go back for your beta, and then you can have folks go through and take it. With MCP UI, which is built into Wayfinder, they can take it directly from their AI assistant. So they don't have to leave where they're working, they can do it right where they're working and take the training, evaluate it, send it back and send back with notes. So your beta is pretty clean and pretty easy to do. And then deployment, implementation to everybody, same thing. It makes it really easy to access the training, pull it in through, through your AI assistant, run through the training, and you're done. And you can even get to the point where the AI can pull sections of the training that you need in real time and give you the training as you need it. So now you're getting an à la carte type experience that's enabled through AI assistants.

So I can see the value of that for sure. Earlier you mentioned— first time I hear this— but autistic burnout, like, how does that happen? And how can you design a training or an employee satisfaction survey or motivation score so that this doesn't happen?

That is a really good question. And it's a really complex answer. Um, so AI, um, AI, um, autistic burnout is when someone who is autistic who has been masking— and, and right now I would say most autistic professionals are either undiagnosed or they're late diagnosed because they've been masking up to this point. Um, when you're masking, it takes a lot of energy to kind of hide your, your autistic tendencies and appear as normal as possible. And the more work you have on top of that, it really, really compresses your cognitive load. And if you don't know what cognitive load is, you kind of think of it as like RAM. There's a really good— I love this analogy because I learned it when I was doing my master's— but there was a study that was done by, I can't remember if it was MIT or Harvard, but they had students go through and memorize a like 7-digit number and then kind of walk around the corner and then repeat it. And this kind of showed what they could keep in their active memory. And then they found that if they had them go around the corner and someone offered them a piece of chocolate cake, they could only remember 3 numbers. Of the 7 because the, you know, their, their cerebellum, their animalistic part of the brain kind of took over and started screaming chocolate cake. It affected their cognitive load so they could only take in so much. We can only process so much as we go about our days. And usually about 30% is like your day-to-day load. And then you've got on top of that, stress from work, and then on top of that, if you're doing training, you've got training, you know, you're learning new stuff. With autistic individuals, they have an additional load that's their masking load, and it's very draining. And a lot of times they don't know that they're getting overburdened until all of a sudden they just shut down and they just can't do anything. And it feels like you're being lazy. It feels like you're not able to You're just not functioning because you don't want to function, but it's just because your brain can't handle it anymore. This happens usually when someone is doing— in my case, I was doing the job of like 3 people. They had just laid off 3 people from work and I had to take over their jobs. And I already had my own job on top of that. And it was, it was very, very stressful. Very draining. I was using a lot of my free time. I didn't have time to kind of stop and decompress. So with, with the training that you would develop around that, it's, it's going to focus on what is your cognitive load. How much time do you spend focusing on your day-to-day tasks? How much time do you spend focusing on, you know, what, what the ride home was like, or, you know, what you ate for dinner, or like the night before and whether or not you've got heartburn or anything like that. And then how much time do you spend, particularly for autistic adults, because they do a lot of ruminating, which is, you know, going back and reviewing conversations and reviewing experiences and whatnot. How much time do you do that during your day? Because that takes up a lot of your cognitive load. And then how much time do you spend trying to understand what's going on and take in what's going on while not, you know, stimming or not, you know, looking like you're not interested and looking off to the side while you're trying to process what's being said. And that in and of itself is a very stressful and very cognitive load thing. And then how much time do you spend decompressing? Stepping back, letting things go. One of the, one of the benefits I had prior to my burnout is that with most jobs, I could get up and I could go for a walk and just get out of the building, get out of the office and just walk around the campus, walk around the neighborhood, relax, let my brain kind of process things in the backend and that made it easier to cope. When you're, you know, working flat out, you don't have that, but you've got to recognize that that's the case. So that's a lot of the training that you're going to have is going to focus on that. Like how much are you processing? What are you processing on? And where, where are you, where are you spending most of your time? And do you have any downtime? Love that.

What's next for you, Jeremy, this year? What do you want to accomplish?

Oh, next is full launch of the Wayfinder app, which, you know, knock on wood, is going to happen within the next couple weeks, and just start taking off like crazy. By the end of the year, I want to start really making a difference in at least 2, 300 organizations and helping them realize their AI goals, whether it's, you know, we're not quite ready for AI, but we want to try it. We're ready for an AI agent and we're willing to let you do that. Or, you know, we're fully prepared to move into the agentic age. We're going to be using AI assistants. We need a platform that what's going to enable that. I want to help folks get to that point and feel the, feel the benefits of where AI can really take them and how much load that can take off of them.

Well, thanks for being on, Jeremy. Where can people find out more about you?

They can definitely find out more. I'm at LinkedIn. JRob is my handle. I'm on YouTube. Uh, you can find me at, um, Leadership and Learning is my podcast, uh, also on Spotify. And check out my website at robclan.com.

That was Jeremy and Charles Cormier for another Founder Wisdom podcast.