The problem I watched from the inside
Our founder spent eleven years at a major enterprise technology company, including a role as Chief of Staff to the General Manager of Learning — helping run the formal learning and training organization across an enterprise with tens of thousands of employees worldwide.
The process we ran was expensive, politically complicated, and increasingly disconnected from how employees actually learned. Every year, we’d go through an arduous negotiation cycle with leaders across the organization to agree on a curriculum — what topics, what formats, what roles, what budget allocation. Once we reached agreement, we’d commission content production: online courses, classroom sessions, certification programs. Each piece of content cost hundreds to thousands of dollars per finished minute to produce.
We consistently ran into three problems that no amount of process improvement could fix:
Content that no one used
Courses were produced at considerable cost and effort — then sat unused. The negotiated curriculum didn’t always reflect what employees actually needed to learn right now. Completion rates were a poor substitute for evidence that learning had actually happened.
Demand that couldn’t be met
Popular sessions would become oversubscribed. Employees who needed the knowledge most couldn’t access it because classroom seats were finite, scheduling was fixed, and there was no scalable way to serve the full demand for content that resonated.
New domains, no budget
Because the curriculum was locked at the start of the year, emerging topics — new technologies, new competitive dynamics, new internal priorities — had no path to becoming content. The formal system was structurally unable to respond in real time.
The whiteboard in the hallway
The insight that changed my thinking wasn’t a research paper. It was something our founder noticed walking through the buildings on campus.
The knowledge existed. It was running around in people’s heads and in those hallway conversations. The limitation wasn’t expertise — it was proximity. If you weren’t in that building, on that floor, at that moment, you missed the conversation.
What if we could capture that conversation — informally, at minimal cost — and make it searchable for anyone in the company?
What we built — and what happened
We built a peer video platform on a shoestring budget — less than 5% of what the formal training program cost — to test the thesis. The platform let employees record short videos sharing what they knew. We gave it a name internally and began a deliberate effort to build awareness and drive contribution.
We introduced two roles that made the model work at scale:
Content Producers
Producers weren’t subject matter experts — they were facilitators. They would reach out to employees with valuable knowledge, set up a simple recorded call using the company’s existing meeting tools (Teams, Zoom, or similar), handle the logistics of the session, introduce the speaker, and follow up to collect supporting materials — slide decks, reference documents, process guides. The result was lightly produced, highly specific video content created at near-zero marginal cost.
Content Account Managers
Employees and teams across the company had accumulated valuable knowledge in local repositories — SharePoint sites, team drives, email threads — that almost no one could find. Account managers worked to identify that existing content and convince its owners to migrate it to the central platform, where it could be indexed, searched, and discovered by anyone in the company.
The flywheel starts spinning
Adoption was flat for months. We used every grassroots tactic available — posters in elevators across campus, internal contests, manager endorsements, all-hands mentions. We called it gorilla marketing because we had no marketing budget.
Then the content library reached a critical mass. Employees started finding things they needed. They watched. They rated. They commented. They sent messages to the people who had created the content. Those creators — seeing their views climb, their inbox fill with questions from colleagues across the company they had never met — posted their next video. And the next.
The flywheel was spinning. Adoption followed a hockey stick: flat, flat, flat — then steep and sustained.
Employees didn’t contribute because they were required to. They contributed because it worked for them.
When an employee posts a video and starts receiving messages from colleagues across the company who found it useful — people they’ve never met, in offices they’ve never visited — something changes. They see themselves differently. They become visible within their organization as an expert, a resource, a contributor worth knowing. That visibility motivates the next video, which generates more reach, which generates more recognition. The culture of sharing becomes self-sustaining — not because it is mandated, but because it is genuinely rewarding.
The key enabler is contact. On a public platform, a viewer who finds a video helpful has no easy path to the creator. Inside an enterprise platform, the creator’s full contact details — email, phone, instant message handle, org chart position — are displayed alongside every video. The barrier to following up drops to near zero. Connections happen. Real learning follows.
Why I built Relay-Learning
What we built inside that company worked — at genuine scale, with genuine results, at a fraction of the cost of the formal training programs it complemented. But it was built for one organization, on that organization’s infrastructure, customized for that organization’s culture and tools.
Relay-Learning exists to take those learnings and make them available to any organization. The problem — valuable knowledge trapped in people’s heads and hallway conversations, invisible to the broader organization — is universal. So is the opportunity.
And that opportunity has never been more urgent. Artificial intelligence is accelerating change across every industry. Organizations need their people to learn faster, share knowledge more broadly, and develop capabilities continuously — not on an annual curriculum cycle. The formal training model cannot move at the speed that business now demands. Relay-Learning can.
What Relay-Learning actually is
Relay-Learning is a solution accelerator — a combination of platform technology and proven services methodology that gives organizations everything they need to build a self-sustaining internal knowledge network.
We are not a SaaS platform that you deploy and hope employees use. We are a services organization with a platform at its core — and we know, from experience, that the platform without deliberate adoption work is just storage. The methodology is the product. The technology enables it.
Implementation & Integration
We deploy Relay-Learning on your existing cloud infrastructure — Azure, AWS, or GCP — integrating with your identity provider, collaboration tools, and analytics platforms. The scope varies by environment; we assess and design accordingly.
Adoption Services
Without adoption, the platform is useless. We know how to drive it. Our 90-day adoption playbook — built from real experience at scale — includes the producer program, content broker strategy, internal marketing, and executive alignment that turn a deployed platform into an active knowledge flywheel.
Ongoing Management
We stay involved after go-live as a support partner, managed service provider, or strategic advisor — as much or as little as you need. Platform updates, governance design, content quality management, and adoption monitoring are all available as ongoing services.
Content Production
For organizations that want a head start, we provide lightly produced video content services — the same producer-facilitated model that proved effective at scale. This is optional: organizations that prefer fully employee-generated content from day one can do that too.
Aligned with your success.
Because Relay-Learning is a custom engagement built on your infrastructure, cost depends on your existing environment, the scope of integrations, and the size of your organization. We discuss this in discovery — not on a price sheet. Here is how the investment is structured.
What to expect on the timeline
Enterprise buyers ask us this question early. Here is an honest answer.
Platform live
From signed agreement to a deployed, integrated, technically live platform on your infrastructure. Employees can begin accessing and contributing content from day one of launch.
Active knowledge flywheel
Getting to a self-sustaining, actively used knowledge base — where organic contribution is growing without constant intervention — typically takes an additional six to twelve months after go-live. This is the adoption journey, and it is what our services engagement is designed to support and accelerate. A deployed platform that no one uses is not a success. An adopted platform that grows continuously is.