Learn to Win
Stanford University
Microlearning software for results-driven trainers
The Team
Andrew Powell
• Cofounder, CCEO at Learn to Win
• MBA, Stanford
Sasha Seymore
• Cofounder, COO at Learn to Win
• JD/MBA, Stanford
Sam Lisbonne
• Advisor at Learn to Win
• Former Principal Materials Scientist at Itron
• MS in Engineering, Stanford
• BS in Mechanical Engineering, Stanford
Phil Stiefel
• JD/MBA, Stanford
Problem Sponsor
Lt Col Niewiarowski
Original Problem Statement
Combat Air Force (CAF) instructors need improved and expedited training procedures in order to reduce phase duration and information loss of trained student personnel.
Beneficiary Discovery Interviews
107
The Innovation
Hacking for Defense students leveraged their experiences with learning science and college sports to train U.S. Air Force pilots more efficiently, but their innovation has since expanded to a variety of organizations, from Chickfila to the Los Angeles Rams.
H4D alumni and H4X Labs participants from team Learn to Win developed a platform to improve training quality and efficiency for a variety of organizations, including Fortune 200 companies, NFL teams, the US military, and more. Three years after completing the course, Learn to Win has raised $14 million and is the first H4D team to receive SBIR Phase III funding.
The Learn to Win team was formed in the Spring 2019 term of Stanford’s Hacking for Defense course. The original H4D team included MBA student Andrew Powell, JD/MBA student Sasha Seymore, JD/MBA student Phil Stiefel, and Engineering student Sam Lisbonne. Andrew’s background in learning science and education, coupled with Sasha’s experience as a college athlete and his time in the Navy Reserves, proved to be the perfect primer for catalyzing the development of Learn to Win.
Reflecting on his time as a college athlete, Sasha recalled the stacks of photocopies containing hand-drawn plays that he used to receive each season. After learning about this, Andrew remembers thinking “there are so many better ways to learn this than memorizing a three-ring binder.” These issues were not exclusive to collegiate athletes, however, as Sasha noted that his onboarding into the Navy Reserves also consisted of a three-ring binder full of instructions that he was told to memorize. After sharing their experiences, Sasha and Andrew realized that there was a systemic lack of consistent, quality training across a variety of industries. This realization gave Sasha and Andrew the momentum they needed to begin the process of developing Learn to Win.
In the summer of 2018, Andrew and Sasha prototyped what would later become the Learn to Win training program through their work with student athletes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When Andrew and Sasha learned that one of the problems for the upcoming semester of H4D at Stanford sought to improve training procedures for pilots, they identified parallels between their work with student athletes, which challenged them to explore how their platform could be adapted and applied to matters of national security within the Department of Defense.
The team was originally tasked with improving and expediting training procedures for Combat Air Force instructors. After 107 interviews, however, the team discovered that the true problem was more deeply rooted in the wide-spread lack of modern learning tools, which prevented students and pilots in the United States Air Force from accessing consistent, on-demand content.
The ability to visit various Air Force bases was paramount to the team’s discovery during the course. In particular, the team’s visit to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma gave them the opportunity to explore the limitations of Computer Based Training (CBT) on a first-hand basis. Following their visit, the team concluded that the obsolete method by which CBTs are graded likely resulted in functional loss for both pilots and instructors. In particular, the current method of grading CBTs at the time of the team’s discovery made it nearly impossible for instructors to identify significant knowledge gaps amongst their pilots. This led to their key thesis: “greater accessibility will lead to greater usage, which will lead to greater learning.”
By the end of the course, they had developed an Minimum Viable Product with three key elements:
An interactive mobile learning experience,
A user-friendly, templatized authoring platform for building the content, and
An analytics suite that more efficiently identifies performance and knowledge gaps.
After the course, Learn to Win participated in BMNT’s H4X Labs. H4X Labs helped them focus on partnering with dual-use, Deep Tech companies to match their solution to a database of active government requirements, and access non-dilutive funding to bring their solution into the commercial market.
In collaboration with university, industry and defense organizations supplemented with H4XLabs weekly coaching sessions, Learn to Win fast-tracked their understanding of funding programs, like SBIR, and helped them get their materials in prime shape for a strong application.
The result was a funding turnaround so fast any VC firm would be surprised; one month from proposal, they received $750,000. Making Learn to Win the very first H4D alumnus to transition to SBIR Phase III.
Presentation
Learn to Win’s
Hacking for Defense Experience
Andrew credits the H4D course with giving the team a head start in navigating the defense innovation space. He learned that selling a contract and getting an upsell is not as simple as solving a user problem and demonstrating value, but has so many factors, like having the user problem, identifying the person with money, having a contracting vehicle, having the right color of money, and the timelines. By leveraging the expertise of mentors from the H4D ecosystem who had done it before, the team was able to navigate the complex process.
The course’s focus on user problems and emphasis on “getting out the building” and talking to people was also transformative for their understanding of the DOD landscape. The course methodology was so influential to the team that they still conduct customer interviews now when looking into breaking into a new industry in order to quickly get a broad understanding of a market.
Andrew recommends H4D to anyone who is interested in working on consequential problems, especially those interested in entrepreneurship and/or national security and defense.
“In Hacking for Defense, there is an amazing set of opportunities where you can work on amazing and important problems. Applying your talent toward those things in the long run is a lot more fulfilling than just pursuing the highest-paying job or the easiest path. Intellectually stimulating experience that might expose you to some opportunities to make an impact that you might not otherwise come across,” said Andrew.