Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Huw, thanks so much for joining us.
Huw Newton-Hill, Attensi
Absolutely great to be here.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
I'm excited to talk to you because we're going to talk about Attensi, which I'm a person who learns by doing if you give me a manual, I'm going to struggle to figure it out. So Attensi is disrupting training and how we know it. So talk about the company and what you guys do?
Huw Newton-Hill, Attensi
That's a great question. And I'm, I'm exactly the same. I mean, traditionally, when I went through all of my training programs I'd be given this list of stuff to do and to be honest, most of the time just disregarded and do the stuff I needed to do, and I just get on with the job. So I'm completely on board with that. The way it tends you've come about is really quite an exciting story. So our founder in the Nordics, he used to lead the biggest gaming company. So developing triple A games, think World of Warcraft think FIFA, you know, really high-end games using the likes of Unity and Unreal Engine. But before that he was at McKinsey, which is a consulting company. And really where attendees sit is bringing those two worldviews in a sense together to disrupt the way we do training. So we take a very consultative approach, working hand in hand with our clients to understand, really what makes their business tick, what are the capabilities and the skills they need to build? And what are the behaviors that set people up for success within the organization. So that's a really exciting piece of work that we do around problem solving. And then we bring in the gaming technology. And we use that to drive engagement to give people that learning journey. And really importantly, if you think of that flow of learning of challenge and failure, and then achievement, you're building people's confidence in mastery, while they're having fun at the same time. So that's really where these two will use to come together to create something that's really powerful for large organizations.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So the technology that you guys create is fascinating. It's a perfect example, going back to what I said at the beginning, how I learned it's learned by doing so talk about some customer examples and the different use cases.
Huw Newton-Hill, Attensi
Absolutely. And we have a huge diversity of use cases, really, this can be used for anything, you know, think about mental health and clinical treatments. Think about product knowledge, and building skills around that think about interpersonal dynamics, but a couple of examples to sort of bring this to life. One is from the insurance industry. We were working with Hiscox insurance, and we built the first underwriting simulator and underwriting we won't go into the technicalities of that. But it's a highly complex role. You're dealing with lots of information, how do you take on risks. And one of the things that we know about underwriting as the only way to learn how to be a good underwriter is to make mistakes to go through experience. So together with Hiscox, we created the world's first underwriting simulation, which allows people to practice these decisions in a safe environment. So if I decide to underwrite this piece of business, what happens, and if I decide to engage with the broker in that way, what happens? So you're getting the safe environment of what is traditional quite a risk-averse culture, and you're getting people to train in that part. Now thinking about a completely different use case, we work with Circle K, across the US and Canada and Europe. And there we have a number of different solutions, but one is really targeted towards their store managers. So they were looking globally at what defined the best practice in store management. And as I was speaking about our consultative approach, we then went through a process to help them identify what are the key skill gaps? And what are the key behaviors that allow store managers to outperform. And we then built a simulation where you play as a store manager, you come into a new store, you're introduced to your team. And as you're going through those introductions, you're earning points, because you need to establish yourself, establish yourself in the correct way. And then certain things happen in your store, maybe sales go down, maybe there's a promotion, you have an unhappy customer, all the while you're managing your store, you're walking around the store, having to make decisions having to make interactions, how do you deliver feedback? Do you do that as a group? Do you do that in the moment, all the while building points and badges and achievements, and that's really where the gamification comes in to drive repetition.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So it's an exciting time at Attensi the company is venture-backed and growing very aggressively. So talk about the company as a whole in terms of you know, where's it headquartered, and you've recently expanded to the US. So talk about those details, too.
Huw Newton-Hill, Attensi
Yeah, absolutely. So we are headquartered in Oslo, Norway, which is a fantastic place if you've never been, most of our team get to go and have already been and they absolutely love it. So we have a big, big team there. We have a big team in London, and we're about 200 globally, but everyone's eyes and really, I say everyone's eyes across the businesses on Boston. We have 15 people here in Boston now and we literally have cheerleaders across the globe, supporting us in our growth journey here. And so this is where the focus is. And that's why it's such an exciting time for us as a business.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So in terms of that US expansion, you know, growing the Boston office, like what functional areas are you going to be hiring for?
Huw Newton-Hill, Attensi
Great question. We're hiring across the board really, and, and we really do believe in that saying across scale apps that you know, get the right person on on the rocket ship, it doesn't really matter what seat they fill. But specifically, we are looking at growing our commercial team. That's obviously a huge focus for us as we expand out into a new market. Then we're also looking at growing our what we call the customer simulation team. And not many companies have a customer simulation team. So what does that include? That's our project managers who work hand in hand with our clients to ensure that we're delivering the best results. It's our simulation designers who often come from Creative backgrounds, whether it's writing or gameplay, or copy or design. And those people who really bring the creative down dynamism to what we do, as I spoke about, we have a core consulting capability, but then we need to bring that to life in a game. And that's really where we rely on the designers, some of my best friends at Attensi are in that design crew. And I've just been blown away about what they've been able to create. So those are the two focus areas for us now. But as we grow throughout the year, and looking into next year, we will be hiring across the board.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
So what's it like working at Attensi like, what's the culture? Like?
Huw Netwon-Hill, Attensi
It's a great question. And I mean, how long can you spend on culture, we are a Norwegian company, as we said at the beginning, and that really flows through into our culture, we are a people powered business, that's one of our values, we are super fast. That's another one of our values. And we are game changers. And I can tell you that most people within the organization could give you those three values. If you if you ask them today, that Norwegian culture, what it means, to me is really servant leadership. And I've seen this since I've joined the tendency that the people, the typical people at the top of the management team, are really here to enable the rest of the organization. If you are someone who's curious, who wants to learn who wants to grow, this is a fantastic environment because you are supported. You're given those stretch opportunities to really grow yourself professionally. And personally. So I would say that I think one of the other things, hopefully, you'll pick up if you do any investigation around Attensi that we like to have a lot of fun. We definitely have a have a play hard work hard mentality. At the end of the day, we are in the gaming industry. So fun is a core part of how we learn and how we got together.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Now there are a lot of opportunities out there for people to explore. It's a competitive job market, which is a good thing. It's good for people have options. So why is now the ideal time to join Attensi.
Huw Newton-Hill, Attensi
It really is a fantastic time, as I said, we're around 15 people in Boston, we have the whole of attendee looking to the Boston office to support and grow. As I've mentioned, culture is key. You know, we do offer people, we're growing super fast, and we want to get the right people on the bus to grow with us. You know, we don't hire someone for one or two or three years, I myself, I've been at Attensi for five years now. And the number of opportunities that I've got to grow and develop is really not what I would have expected starting out. So I'd say it's those growth opportunities. It's the culture, it's working with a fantastic product. And at the end of the day, we are helping people to be better in their jobs, which allows them additional opportunities, whether that's for promotion, or for moving into new roles. And that element of doing good is so core to what we do and something that you will feel if you do on us.
Keith Cline, VentureFizz
Well if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Attensi you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their listings there, go to venturefizz.com/attensi and that's Attensi, and you'll see all their listings. Huw thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the great things happening at the company.
Huw Newton-Hill, Attensi
Brilliant, awesome to be here.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
