In this episode of the Full Throttle Leaders Podcast, host Michael Falato interviews Robin Daniels, co‑founder of Sensei (stylized Sensai). Daniels explains that Sensei is an AI‑driven platform that combines goal‑setting performance management with daily learning, all built natively on the Microsoft ecosystem (Teams, Copilot, SharePoint, Excel, etc.). He argues that traditional HR tech has overpromised and underdelivered, offering fragmented tools that require users to leave their primary work apps. Sensei’s value proposition is to surface personalized learning and performance guidance “in the moment” where employees are already working, thereby increasing engagement, purpose, and productivity. The conversation covers the company’s target market—mid‑market to large enterprises—with examples such as a confidential pharmaceutical firm, the sports‑streaming service DAZN, banks, nursing‑care facilities, and a rocketry company. Daniels shares his motivation for joining an underdog startup, the challenges of differentiating in a crowded HR‑tech space, and lessons learned about marketing: the need for a bold, differentiated story and a clear, large “delta” that justifies the switching cost for customers. He also highlights the sales mantra “no delta, no deal,” emphasizing that customers must see a substantial performance jump to adopt a new platform. The episode ends with contact information for further conversations.
Chapters
Hello everybody, Michael Fulato again from GTM Full Throttle. We have a great guest today, Robin Daniels, who I've known for almost a year now from Sensei. What is Sensei? What are we talking about? It's not Sensei, it's Sensei.
It's a great question. We are basically a platform that's focused on optimizing human performance with the aid of AI. So basically the way I think about this is we are really about how do we make sure that people are deeply engaged in the work that they do, that they're learning the right things every day and getting the right skills that they need to be successful and ultimately setting themselves clear goals for what they need to achieve. So I— we're kind of this magical combination of a goal-setting performance management platform, which is important for executives, for teams, and for individuals. We're this special thing that helps teams feel a sense of purpose and belonging together because they work really well together when they use our platform. And then we're also a learning platform so people can learn the right skills they need to be successful every single day. And our secret sauce is we do this 100% in the Microsoft ecosystem. So if you're a company that's thinking about how do I level up my team and employees and you use Microsoft, there's no better platform to do so than ours.
So does that mean that if you have Google, don't work with you guys, or you can still, it's just not as tight of a unit?
I would love to work with you, but we don't. We only work in the Microsoft. We're 100% built on Microsoft, and we only work at the Microsoft, which is a huge benefit, which means you can roll us, you can deploy our platform virtually instantly. The CIO loves us. The CFO loves us. It's not, you know, It's very easy to manage and deploy and just kind of like have it up and running instantly in Teams, in Copilot, in SharePoint, you name it. That's just—
What do you think the biggest fail— what do you think the biggest solution or problem that people keep on doing over and over that you guys solve for?
Well, I think the big problem is that For the longest time, people have— companies have wanted to like invest in their people, and then they always go buy a gazillion platforms. And I honestly think the HR space, HR technology companies have overpromised and underdelivered. They say, hey, if you just buy our platform, you're going to have more growth, more happiness, and blah, blah, blah. And you know what? If you look at any data, any data from Gallup or McKinsey or HBR, it says that people's happiness and productivity is kind of stagnating or going the opposite direction. Our thesis is very simple. You have to give people the opportunity to engage and grow where they are already working every day. So if you're in Word every day or Excel or in Teams or in SharePoint or PowerPoint, whatever it is, our platform shows up right where the user is. Like, I've worked in many companies. I've worked at Salesforce and LinkedIn and WeWork and, you know, a bunch of different companies, and I had access to a lot of great tools, but it was always this extra thing I had to go do. And you know what? I'm so busy. I'm like, I'm not gonna do that. Get out of what I'm doing, log into this other platform, sit there for half an hour. We believe that it has to be in the moment when you need it the most, like learning and growing in the moment of need. So if you're sitting in an Excel file and you're like, it's very complex and you're like struggling what to do, maybe we can help you by giving you a prompt of what to do. Like, here's a course you should be taking. Here's a 5-minute thing to learn so you can actually optimize what you're doing in the moment when you need it the most.
You're— I'm working on something like Excel. I don't know what I'm doing. Instead of going out and going, what could— how can I do this in Excel? It's almost integrated and woven into the whole—
Yeah. So, yeah, so, so like the, the learning courses that we provide or through our partners would then get surfaced right there in Copilot because, you know, you can have a Copilot pane open up while you're in Excel, for example, and it can just teach you what, what to do, right? I'm struggling with some formulas. Show me how to do that and then share this out, maybe the rest of my team. Like, so you can kind of also start building that cohesiveness between your team. So it's really kind of this unifying platform. I would classify it as an HR platform. You know, we compete with the Workdays and Oracles and SAPs of the world, right? But we're much more user-friendly.
Yeah.
We're really focused on like not just like an HR platform that's focused on compliance and making sure people get paid. But I see giving people the actual tools and skills they need to perform better every day, all in the service of performance. We're kind of obsessed with how can we get people to perform the best every day, both because it gives them more sense of joy and satisfaction and purpose, but also for the companies they work for will perform better. It's very simple.
I come from the HR tech space. And there's a lot of tools out there. It's very crowded, but they never do what they're supposed to do, or it's a little bit oversold. So I know exactly what you're talking about. Um, what, what kind of grabbed your attention to even, even make a switch to, to a company that's, that's what, more of a startup compared to some of the companies you've been at, or what?
Yeah, I mean, we, uh, we are about 200-ish people, um, and we're growing fairly steadily. Um, We have about just over 2 million users around the world, about a couple of thousand customers. We usually focus on— our sweet spot is really mid-market, but we have some very large enterprises who use us as well. Our largest customer is about 110,000 employees. So, so quite large. What attracted me, I always like being the underdog. I love going into all the companies that like the silver lining in my career, whether you look at Salesforce when I joined in the early days or Box or, you know, even like WeWork or or some of these other companies. I love being the underdog because it allows you to like take some creative risks and some go-to-market risks. I think it's hard when you're working for the top player in a space. All you're doing honestly is defending your position all day long and becomes a little bit like about risk aversion more than about courage. And I've always loved that. So this company, like I knew that everyone hates the HR space and the HR kind of tech that's out there, not everyone, but a lot of people do. It's 'cause it's been overpromised, like you just said. And I just thought, can we do something differently? have a different platform? Can we tell a different story? Can we get people to fall in love with us in a different way that actually finally lives up to the promise that we've been told for so long? I mean, I think the first generation of HR tech was really about just making sure people's basic needs got taken care of— pay and compliance and vacation. And then the second generation came out about 20 years ago when we started changing HR to like people and culture. Remember that, Michael? I was like, oh. But really what that meant was like Let's give people ping pong tables and kombucha on tap. And, you know, we, if we just like very social, it was doors on top of file cabinets.
Remember the dot-com?
Exactly. Exactly. And they thought, well, if we could just like overwhelm people with cool snacks and perks, then, then, then, you know, that will be enough. But if you look at any data, any data, literally that says, this is not what people are looking for. This is not what gives people purpose. That's an added bonus. If I have great snacks and free lunch at work, what people want is Am I growing? Am I learning? Am I connecting with my team members? Am I having fun while doing all this? That's what gives you daily purpose.
What would you say your average— I don't want to get too personal— your average revenue per client is the ICP? Like, what's— obviously you said something about mid-sized companies and large companies, but, you know, what is the sweet spot for your company?
Yeah, it was just, I mean, I'll give you some examples. I was just speaking to a customer yesterday. They have been a customer of ours for many years. They're in the pharmaceutical space, 2,500 employees, and they're based in the Northeast. So you can kind of take a guess of who that is, but I can't mention their name because they're quite privacy and confidentiality aware.
Yeah.
But they're looking to expand into like really using us for much more around like leadership planning, succession planning. They're thinking about, you know, performance reviews and all this kind of stuff.
So that's one example.
Another example is a company called DAZN. I don't know if you know them. They're the, they're kind of the Netflix of sports streaming. So they have over 300 million monthly subscribers.
Whoa.
And they have about, I think, 3,000 employees, maybe 3,500 employees now. DAZN, D-A-Z-N, DAZN. Like, so they, but they, it's the largest provider in the world of sports streaming. So if you wanna watch the World Cup, if you wanna watch hockey, they're not as big in the US for some reason, but everywhere else they're huge. They're huge. So they started with us many, many years ago and they've just kind of kept expanding. So as their company has grown, they started when they were 500 employees and now there's just over 3,000 employees and they're doing phenomenally well. So a lot of these kind of like mid-market companies that are growing into the enterprise, you know, we want to be a catalyst for their growth, of course. But then we also have a lot of like banks. We have like Somebody who's providing, uh, like, uh, nursing care facilities, you know, that, um, is another one. We have somebody who's doing rocketry as well, like sending rockets into space. I can't mention again who they are for confidentiality reasons, but like, got some really cool customers, you know.
What would you say something that you did, probably, uh, you business-wise, that you're like, in the last 12 months, like, I I know I learned from it, but I wish I didn't learn from the mistake of it.
Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I think we should have gotten better, honestly, at, um, differentiating ourselves earlier. I still think that when I think about some of the marketing that we put out in the last— in my first year or 2 there, it was a little too bland. It was a little too non-differentiated. And I think in a very crowded space You gotta stand out somehow. And you can't just be 5, 10, 20% different. You gotta be remarkably different, I think. And I think now really pushing the team to have a lot more courage in how we tell the story of who we are, because I do think we have something really special, but it requires courage to tell that story because it's easy to look at what this competitor is doing in this and then say, hey, we can just tweak it a little bit.
Yeah.
But that's not really gonna I mean, if we're gonna get somebody to change from Workday or Oracle, SAP, they— we gotta really make them fall in love with who we are.
Yeah. Everybody looks at who cares so what, why you tell me this? If you can't answer that when you're writing this stuff, big deal. And a lot of people are sending out marketing information, what we're doing, what we, we, I, I, I. It's so— you really gotta make it like You gotta give before you take. This is like, like this whole podcast roundtable, the way we met is don't— you're going too fast.
Yeah. I learned early on in my career at Salesforce, I, there was a really great sales leader. He had the saying, no delta, no deal. And I just loved it. And he was always like, let's say on a scale of 1 to 10. So if a customer's at a 3 and you promise to get them to a 4, they're gonna go, this is not worth the hassle. I'm not, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna take the time to like switch out a platform, retrain my employees, get the CFO involved, the IT. No way. But if you can promise to go from a 3 to an 8, then maybe the delta is big enough that the pain is worth it. 'Cause there's always a switching cost, right?
Yeah.
When you go from something to something else. And, and it's the same in marketing, the storytelling. So trying to be much more clear around the delta is much bigger than you think it is, is, is basically what I'm trying to focus on.
Or, and give first. It's not just about the job, it's also about what are you gonna do first and what value do you provide. So what's the best way to get a hold of you as we close this out?
Yeah, just, you can go to sensai.com. Fairly simple. You can go to LinkedIn, find me there. I'm very easy to find, Robin Daniels. And I'm happy to have a conversation with anyone. So please hit me up.
It's Robin G. Daniels is your, I think, your name on LinkedIn, it looks like, right?
Yeah, yeah, just, just Robin Daniels, I think you find me. Yeah.
Okay, cool. Well, thanks for making time, Robin. It's good seeing you again.
