Author: Elise Smith, Co-founder & CEO

Celebrating a year of learning and growth

Posted on by Elise Smith, Co-founder & CEO

In April 2021, we launched our flagship learning journey, Pivotal Experiences. We were just 7 people who shared a mission for making society more equitable. And since raising our Series A last fall, we’ve seen some incredible growth. 

In what has felt like a blink of an eye, we’ve gone from 2 to 10 enterprise clients, 0 to over 5,000 learners, and 7 to over 40 diverse and brilliant people who make up our team.

We’re incredibly proud and excited about the progress we’ve made and the opportunities to drive a truly equitable and inclusive future of work with our clients, learners, and partners. 

Pioneering a new future for DEIJ training

By now, we’ve all seen articles and studies that say diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) trainings don’t work. We wanted to build a something different.

We reached out to experts in behavior change, social psychology, learning design, and DEIJ to inform our course content and product development. That’s how me and my Co-founder Heather Shen came up with our immersive learning solution, Praxis Labs: an end-to-end listening, learning, and actioning platform that builds the empathy and confidence in every employee so they can identify and address incidents of bias when they happen. 

Our clients are doing just that. As Indigo Avisov, senior diversity and inclusion business partner at Uber, shares, “The Praxis Labs learning platform gives learners a research-backed experience that allows them to be successful in not only recalling and integrating their learning, but doing so in a way that impacts their day to day activities and in the work they do.” 

More than 80% of learners across leading brands like Google, Uber, and Ebay feel more confident in identifying and taking action against bias. Another 84% see how Pivotal Experiences has deepened their empathy and understanding of historically underrepresented groups (HUGs). 

Driving outcomes through behavior change

This growth is made possible by our theory of behavior change. Through radical self-awareness and perspective-taking, learners gain a deep understanding of the systemic nature of workplace power and privilege, and the interpersonal dynamics that sustain inequity. 

“Now we’re able to leverage technology to understand the perspective of a marginalized person experiencing bias in the workplace,” explains Abraham Gin, senior manager of DEI at ServiceNow, on WorkLife with Adam Grant. “Praxis Labs’ immersive learning didn’t just elicit emotions and just keep it there, it gave me opportunities to take action.” Within our immerse environments learners practice making decisions that directly impact workplace equity and inclusion.

When learners understand that they can effect change, it empowers them to make a difference both in and outside the platform. Beyond equipping learners with the resources, skills, and support they need to take action, we hope to recognize and validate the experiences of people who systemically encounter workplace bias every day.

“Praxis Labs’ immersive learning didn’t just elicit emotions and just keep it there, it gave me opportunities to take action.“

Abraham Gin, Senior Manager of DEI at ServiceNow, on WorkLife with Adam Grant

Scaling our product and team 

In October 2021, we announced our Series A, led by Norwest Venture Partners and Emerson Collective. Since then, we’ve been scaling our platform, expanding our learning library, and growing our team. Here are some key developments:

  • Employee lifecycle curriculums: our courses take learners through scenarios where they practice responding to incidents of bias during core employee lifecycle milestones like interviewing and hiring, performance evaluation, project delegation, and more. Since our launch, we’ve added six more learning modules spanning neurodiversity, pay equity, and gender-affirming pronoun usage. We are continuing to add to our library with “just-in-time” training, additional people manager and soft skills training, and more opportunities to practice inclusive leadership. 
  • Driving Business ROI: our Pivotal Insights dashboard aggregates learner data to provide administrators with actionable insights and targeted interventions to improve workplace diversity and inclusion. Beyond our learner and client dashboards, we’re partnering with our clients to prove the business value of investing in our learning journeys as it pertains to employee engagement, inclusion, and long term retention.
  • Hiring: we have open positions throughout our company. Join us on our mission to build more equitable and inclusive workplaces. 
JOIN OUR TEAM

 

Meet our new executives

Praxis Labs exists to build more equitable and inclusive organizations, and that starts with building our own. We’ve added two new members to our leadership team who bring the functional and leadership expertise to take our company to even greater heights. 

Sabrina Ronningen joins us as Head of Client Impact where she is building out Praxis Labs’ Client Impact Function and Operations. Sabrina is a tenured client impact leader, bringing a depth of experience in Talent Management, Professional Consulting, and Client Delivery in SaaS organizations to our team. Sabrina serves on the client advisory board at Involve.Ai and joins us from the employee engagement space, where she spent the last five years leading and scaling Glint’s Client Success team, which was acquired by LinkedIn/Microsoft in 2018. She takes a data-driven approach to Client Success and believes that client intelligence is the future of the function. In addition to her career in SaaS, Sabrina is a proud mother, an advocate for fairness and justice, and an active leadership coach and mentor in the CSM community. Sabrina believes that leading with authenticity, transparency, and equitability is the path to a more diverse and inclusive world.

Theresa Vu joins us as Chief Technology Officer. In this role, she leads the engineering teams in their mission to build impactful DEIJ learning solutions that can scale at the enterprise level. As an executive, Theresa specializes in leading teams and platforms through eras of hyper-growth and loves to be at the intersection of technology, art, and social justice. Formerly, she worked at AppNexus where she built the now largest independent ad tech platform in the world and grew her initial team of one into an engineering org of 500. When she is not focusing on technology, Tvu is part of the hip hop group Magnetic North & Taiyo Na, whose album “Home:Word” hit #3 on the Japanese hip hop charts. 

We’re expanding our leadership team with open roles in Sales and Finance. 

Expressing gratitude

Given the current climate and deep divisions in society, we believe that building empathy and understanding of others’ perspectives, as well as a knowledge of how to intervene in the moment, is vital to increasing equity, inclusion, and belonging in the workplace. Our clients are proof that we can all make our workplaces — and ultimately, society — more equitable and inclusive.

We’re so grateful for our clients, our learners, our team, and our investors who inspire and energize us on our mission. 

It’s for you that we keep building. 

In the Field

Posted on by Elise Smith, Co-founder & CEO

Black History Month reminds us of the importance of making true on our mission to help create a more equitable society. For this reason, we are so excited to share a new video series “In The Field” where we have asked experts and practitioners in the DEI, VR, and academic research spaces to share their recent learnings.

Watch the series now

These leaders have informed our perspective at Praxis Labs and we’re grateful to share their genius with our community.

Introducing Pivotal Experiences

Posted on by Elise Smith, Co-founder & CEO

At Praxis Labs, our mission is to help make society more equitable. We’re targeting workforces because that’s where we are confident we’ll reach the most people and have the greatest impact at scale.

We believe that if we can help each and every employee become a conscious and inclusive leader, that will have a catalytic effect. Our vision is that these learners will not only transform their workplaces, but that their impact will permeate to the places you and I frequent every day.

How We Work.

Praxis Labs moves the needle for individuals and organizations by helping employees develop into conscious and inclusive leaders. Our learning platform: 

  • Leverages Virtual Reality to build empathy for the experiences of others: Through VR, we create immersive learning experiences with our flagship curriculum, Pivotal Experiences, that give employees the opportunity to experience someone else’s perspective, allowing them to take on different intersectional identities across race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, body size, religion, age and power in the organization. They either experience incidents of bias or discrimination firsthand, or from the perspective of someone complicit in an incident.
  • Provides opportunities for reflection and practice identifying barriers to equity: After each immersive experience, learners reflect on the incidents of bias they experienced on our platform and are taught the language context and definitions to identify these barriers in their own workplace.
  • Encourages employees to take action and make commitments to increase inclusion and equity in their own lives: Each experience on our platform leverages the virtual world to provide space for learners to practice intervening in the moment – either by self-advocating or by advocating on behalf of others. They can then apply this to real life, making commitments to practice research-backed behaviors and interventions in their actual workplace.

Through this process, we’re able to provide tangible, actionable insights – both to the learners and to the organizations they work for.

What Sets Us Apart. 

We’ve all seen articles and studies that say D&I trainings don’t work. So why do we think our learning experiences will be any different? Traditionally, the effectiveness of D&I training has been based on “how valuable” individuals thought it was on a scale of one to five. As a field, we weren’t applying the rigor of learning science to D&I education and we were failing to measure attitudes, mindsets, and behaviors, which made it nearly impossible to show that trainings were making a difference. 

At Praxis Labs, we’re changing the way companies measure D&I at both the learner and organization level with a laser focus on impact and efficacy. Through this approach, we’re able to measure a learners’ growth in empathy, their ability to identify barriers to equity, as well as the actions they take during and after the learning experience. We collect learners’ reflections on their workplace’s culture of equity and inclusion and aggregate that data to our clients, identifying hot spots before they become real problem areas. Together, we’re increasing empathy, reducing bias and creating sustained behavior change. 

Why we do it. 

For me – and for many folks like me from underrepresented backgrounds – D&I work is personal. My parents’ stories of overcoming systemic barriers to access high-quality education instilled in me at an early age the understanding that access and opportunity weren’t distributed equitably. It’s why I’ve been drawn to using technology as part of the solution – specifically focused on technology’s potential to help scale access and opportunity. My co-founder Heather’s family has similarly inspired her – as a daughter of immigrants, she grew up celebrating and working across cultural differences. 

The Praxis Labs team shares our mission and lives our values every day. We’re a diverse group by design, and we bring our lived experiences to bear to create lifelike simulations that will help lead to the outcomes we care so deeply about.

Join Us.

We’re grateful for our investors – SoftBank’s SB Opportunity Fund, Norwest Venture Partners, Ulu Ventures, Emerson Collective, Precursor Ventures and Firework VC – a diverse set of backers who invested in two women of color, believed in our vision and care deeply about the impact we will have together. 

We’re inspired by our clients – Google, Target, Amazon, eBay, and Uber – who have been with us since the beginning as we’ve tested and iterated on the learning experience and are continuing with us on this exciting journey with the goal of advancing equity, inclusion and belonging in their organizations. 

We’re humbled by our learners – Our clients’ employees – who have been brave, vulnerable, and open-minded. They’ve been willing to try new things to better themselves and their work cultures.

And we’re excited to meet you! We invite you to join us in making workplaces – and ultimately society – more equitable.