Unlocking employee engagement and retention - Mindaugas Petrutis (Coho)

EdTech Founders

In this episode: Frank is talking with Mindaugas Petrutis, the CEO of Coho, which is enabling companies to curate peer groups at scale. This came as a spin-off from On Deck, the global startup community for founders. For Mindaugas, his journey in community building began nearly a decade ago, creating spaces for meaningful interactions and learning while working at InVision and On Deck. Through his work in assembling nearly 400 peer-groups, he unearthed a key insight: true professional growth stems from a blend of challenge and support found in diverse, thoughtfully curated peer groups.

Now he's scaling this concept and the MVP or v1 will be out later this year. The goal is to democratise access to this rich learning model, ensuring professionals across all fields can tap into the power of peer interaction. This approach counters the prevalent issues of loneliness, disengagement, and retention in the modern workplace.

We talk about:

The transformative potential of collective learning experiences, the integration of AI for group facilitation, the significance of customer feedback and prioritizing customer interactions for validation, the opportunity & complexity of implementing peer learning in large companies….and lots more.

Outtakes:

• A lot of companies have thought about implementing like the true concept of peer learning, but they either started and failed or got scared of the complexity.
• And what fascinates me is; how do people build relationships and learn from each other when you bring a group of people together in various settings.
• If this is successful, it falls way beyond the kind of basic learning tools because you start tackling, truly tackling employee engagement and retention with something like this. And that unlocks very different budgets and speed as to which you can move within an organization.
• You know that these folks are talking about, in real time, the things that they need, that they care about. And so being able to integrate with, say, learning management systems, you then can start building nearly a true recommendation system for the employee needs.

The ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠EdTech Garage⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is a community for early-stage European EdTech startups where founders can scale up faster through the founder community, matchmaking and specialized resources. In this podcast series we interview startup founders & players supporting early-stage EdTech startups from across Europe. We get straight to the point in 20+ minutes and publish new episodes roughly every month. You can find the transcript from each podcast on the site below.

• Join the community on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠edtechgarage.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
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Host: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Frank Albert Coates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ehsansation