GREY Customized Upskilling Platform

1 out of every 3 university students that graduate with a professional degree are not ready to execute what they've learned in actual work spaces. In Latin America, our market specifically, 56% of employees do no have the abilities to work in teams, lack problem solving skills, and are not autonomous in the execution of their work. The GREY platform activates innovative growth through data-driven customized upskilling, integrating personal and global skills mapping to intelligently connect professionals to the professional development marketplace. Our AI completely personalizes growth for every USER, and provides companies with the metrics necessary to manage in-house training and corporate continuous education. 

The problem that GREY tackles is specifically a problem in how we train and educate our professionals in Latin America. 

According to the study called the Disparity of Skills in Latin America, 45% of employers acknowledge that new hires don't have the skills necessary to to execute tasks inside of the company. Not only that, but in a recent study done on the Future of Professional Development in Latin America determined that  56% of employees do no have the abilities to work in teams, lack problem solving skills. 

The future of work is in LATAM, but a Future of Education needs to be establish that recognizes the needs of professionals at the individual level, personalizing growth for hard and soft skills development and preparing them for future of work spaces that require skills that lead to workplace automation and transformation through adaptability, creativity, autonomy, and problem solving skills. GREY focuses on the extremity of that personalization and provides a tool for the user that automates their growth plan. 

I want to speak about a specific user persona narrative that you could encounter from any LATAM professional either fresh out of university or seasoned in the professional field. The other day I spoke to a professional accountant here, who has all of the capacity to continue to receive certification upon certification (Colombia has one of the biggest continuous education markets in LATAM). She was having trouble finding a job even though she had multiple certifications in accounting. The problem of the Future of Work implementation aspects in LatAm is the lack of focus on how we are preparing our professionals in Universities and Continuous Education Academies. The professional is not seeing the ROI of their education tangibly in the professional labor market. It's not lack of jobs, but lack of skills that causes these problems. We need to provide a tool that allows professionals to understand themselves and how they can grow, either in soft skills, or even transversally between new technical skills that could make them more attractive in a future of work setting where automation is replacing traditional labor expectations. 

GREY has a gammified onboarding where we profile the professional and his soft skills abilities as well as deficiencies. This isn't the innovation, seeing as JP Morgan uses a similar onboarding for new employees. The innovation is in our AI and how we use the data to connect the professional to a recommendation engine that powers a personalized growth profile. The data received from our onboarding can give the power to the professional to easily enter new technical abilities, and at the same time grow to new soft skills proficiencies. The second half of our tech relies on a scraped websites that allows to to tap into a marketplace of already existing contents and courses (in the future mentors and learning practices). We classify the data with soft skills as well as technical, and this allows us to create an advanced marketplace that we can connect the user to based on his profile- allowing him to easily navigate the vast contents that will allow him to grow and specifically catering to his specific profile. 

Our vision is: Innovate Growth. Evolve People. With our tech, we want to give power to the people to navigate a vastly growing landscape of contents generally seen in edutainment startups all around the world. AI needs to be used in learning, and not for the institutional necessities that we see in traditional LMSs, but to change education towards a future of complete personalization. This "new dimension of performance" is one that disrupts the current way professional education works: generally universities or continuous education is a series of standardized curriculums that thousands of people experience on the path towards career development. What grey does is break those curriculums into thousands of pieces and reorganizes them for each and every individual professional, creating a unique path towards growth that not only allows for professional growth, but a diverse professional profile. Not only are you now just an accountant, but now you can be an accountant with a product design aspect and higher critical thinking capacity due to the philosophy courses you took. That future of work landscape is very real, and GREY responds to this by creating a future of education that can pave the way towards this disruption. 

Activity: 

Iterate a Platform Design that facilitates personalized growth profiling for companies as well as individual professionals. This activity is based on numerous studies from the Latin American region based on professional development, the future of work implementation, and the scarcity of skills. The metrics that most impact the activity of GREY are: 45% of employers say their new hires don't have the abilities to perform in work environments, 56% of employees are inefficient, dependent, and don't have the abilities to work in teams, and 37% of current companies are looking to change or start to integrate growth experiences for their companies in house. 

Outputs: 

Personalized growth plans for Professionals where they can understand and manage their growth in soft skills as well as to new technical skills as well as a company dashboard to visualize and access growth metrics of employees. 

Short Term Outcomes: 

Automation growth and professional development processes that allow professionals to intelligently access contents to help better their soft and technical skills.

Midterm Outcomes

Skills growth and transversal skills profiles of employees, facilitation of growth for professionals in a Future of Work setting, Employee Recommendation metrics for companies 

Long Term Outcomes 

Robust Professional Profiles, Personalised Skills Growth and Maintenance Knowledge exploration and management of transversal multidisciplines, Decentralisation of University Style Standardized Curriculums

1. Latam Professionals that want to continuously grow professionally to add value to their work, skills, and profiles. Currently Served 60 analog last year, currently serving 0 (we launch this week) 

2. In a year, 10,000 professionals served with impact in the Colombian Market for Companies as well as individuals 

3. 50,000,000 Served as a source for a future of education platform, integrating with professional environments as well as university professional training. 

Our current short term OKRs are:

1. Integrate Local University continuous education programs and their contents as well as mentors into our platform

2. Understand accessibility for a future B2C channel where professionals can grow without company onboarding

3. Apply practices for mentor intervention based on professional profiles and their specific needs

4. Pilot with local universities to understand personalization at the university level for future professionals

Our 5 year goals are: 

1. Implement with local latam governments to give access to personalized growth in the public education sphere 

2. Licensing to universities in LatAm to attack the problem of professional development at it's source

3. Provide a robust and diverse marketplace of existing contents and mentors from other suppliers of edutainment and professional educational content 

Barriers: 
Financial- Need Seed money for one year of runway to iterate product and understand product market fit in Latam, specifically for 3-10 new developers on the team and 

Technical: 
Latin America has debts in technical ability, but also economic labor with a willingness to learn. Our internal organizational vision is to manage a global team, where International developers work hand in hand with Latin American Developers innovating and ideating together. 

Legal: 
LLC in the united states with a process intellectual property patent. Also, Latin American lawyers don't have similar processes to lawyers in the states that would work for equity. Need to have legal consultation for everything from equity agreements, investor agreements, to IP/noncompetes.

Market: 
Working strategically in LatAm is key, we're creating connections to smart investors and key players in the professional development market, but a pipeline to these people would streamline sales as well as strategic market insertion of our product. 

Financial: We are currently launching this week, and with this tangible have had many potential investors in a relationship building funnel. We hope to close small convertible note investments by the end of next week.

Technical: 
We have a team of 7 that have already begun an onboarding done by our CTO that integrates skills necessary for our product. They also integrate skills like autonomy, problem solving, and cooperation. The benefit of being people involved in the education field is we've been a strong learning infrastructure for onboarding new employees, the rest is motivation and personal mentoring. 

Legal:
We are barely getting by with friends and advisors that give us hints and help us with legal advice on the cheap.

Market:
These relationships have already grown, we just need to increment them exponentially. They've assisted us in understanding the market more as well as our strategic insertion in the next 3 months after launch. 

We've implemented and validated an analog model of our solution last year to understand product design and test product impact with corporate clients as well as individual employees. Development began sin Dec. 2019 and we are now launching MVP this week of February. We've begun relationship building with investors since July of last year, and are now developing relationships with continuous education content providers in local universities like La Sabana, La Javeriana, and El Piloto- all of which create contents for corporate and professional clients. With our launch being this week, we also have creating relationships with other tech companies as early adopters to start a pilot program in March 2020 with them and learn more about our product. 

Full time staff- 5

Part - Time staff: 2

Advisors: 3

Anthony Regalado: Founder
United States expat 13 years of experience in Education as an educator- started with children with autism where the goal was to grow individuals through potentializing their personal abilities- this required personalized growth plans and strategic intervention. Later, moved to Colombia and taught in prestigious private schools where, after receiving his Master's in Practical Philosophy in Education with his thesis in Disruption in Education, began a private tutoring company for professionals that profiled their abilities in order to generate completely personalized growth experiences through mentors. Currently works with GREY full time as CEO

Kelly Henao: CoFounder
Colombia with 11 years of experience internationalizing South American universities through a European program called Columbus. Created strong ties to universities and assisted in their innovation to respond to current struggles that universities have in internationalization and connecting with a professional world. Is currently in her PhD process for Internationalization and Professional Development  in Education. Currently works with Grey part time as COO.

Charlie Cliff: CoFounder
United States Expact with 10 years of experience in Tech development. Began career in the United States military as a coder, then grew to work in Startups in the Texas area, where he assisted in successful exits. Moved to Colombia in 2017 where he became the CTO of a fintech and assisted in managing technological teams, iterating product design, and began to mentor Anthony. Eventually left the fintech after implementing a successful strategic development strategy, and now works with GREY full time as cofounder and CTO.

B2B Saas Model 

Will serve early adopters in Pilot after this week's launch. The early adopter profile we are looking for is companies looking to or already creating growth plans for their professionals in house, usually tech companies that are growing the the Bogotano Ecosytem. 

B2B Price Model: 

3USD per User 

B2C Saas Model (FREE): 
Access in platform free for individual professionals that want to understand their personalized growth through technical and soft skills.

We will sell products to private industries and companies that need to manage growth profiles and upskilling in their company with a dashboard feature to give transparency to their employees processes. 

Our revenue model will be a B2B Saas monthly per user model to start with. We are anticipating a pivot towards other business models in the future as we understand upselling and cross-selling opportunities. 

To scale, we will look for financial assistance in the form of Venture investments from angels and VC funds

A lesson quickly learned by us and our team is that connections and networking is key to success. the TPrize's ability to connect to mentors and experts in the field of innovation and education would be the greatest benefit of all. Ideating on strategy and hearing the narratives of those who have already been involved in this field would be a great help to growth, strategy and gaining market traction. This includes a personal goal of mine as the founder, which is that these relationships will build a path towards truly disruptive change in all levels of education and for all professionals in the world who feel alienated by the challenges brought forth by Future of Work tendencies in Latin America. 

We would first like to partner with already existing content providers for professional development. Linkedin for instance, provides amazing content through Lynda, it's online elearning platform for professionals. Others would include coursera and udemy, current giants in content creation. Considering that we would need contents in spanish- links to private universities all around South America would also benefit this creation of content marketplace. The goal would be to start mapping, scraping, and classifying contents in a GREY marketplace for users to actively navigate with our AI.