Cornerstone OnDemand was founded more than 25 years ago and was acquired by Clearlake Capital Group (Private Equity) for $5.2 billion in 2021.
Last week, they completed their first Lightning Strike at #CSODConnect2024 in Chicago in front of hundreds of customers, analysts, investors and employees.
During his keynote, Himanshu Palsule (CEO), explained that:
"As the velocity of change in how we work accelerates, organizations grapple with an inability to keep pace.
People can’t deliver what organizations need, when and where they need it.
Creating a giant workforce readiness gap"
He revealed that a stunning 63% of enterprise leadership don’t believe their workforce is adaptable to change.
The consequences of which are an equally breathtaking $8.5 Trillion lost in unrealized revenue.
Think about that for a moment.
The annual revenue of the largest American corporations (Fortune 500) is $18.2 trillion.
Worldwide its more than $80 Trillion.
So... more than 10% of revenue goes up in smoke because of this problem.
That is exactly the kind of problem we at Play Bigger like to invest in — Giant and impossible to solve.
Karthik Suri (CPO/CTO), during his keynote, explained that Cornerstone had made it their mission to stand with their customers by putting people, and their potential, at the center of everything.
He announced a new holistic Workforce Agility platform called Cornerstone Galaxy.
Empowering every enterprise to close this Workforce Readiness Gap.
And as we all know, people are at the heart of any organization’s ability to change and adapt to whatever the world throws its way.
Especially in this new post-COVID, work from home world…
Congratulations to Himanshu, Karthik and the entire executive team for having the vision and conviction to solve this massive problem.
Congratulations also to the internal category designers at Cornerstone Bernd Leger, Heather Moses and Sudeep Eldo Cherian for undertaking this ambitions transformational journey.
None of this would have happened without your relentless efforts to stop competing in existing categories and create a new, more expansive category.
Also congratulations to all the employees of Cornerstone who had the courage to mobilize and transform their entire company from an established e-learning category into an exciting and new Workforce Agility space.
We are proud to have been part of this amazing journey and props to one of our new Partners - Michael Bruno- for leading this category design.
Onwards!
A final footnote.
Private Equity backed companies haven’t traditionally been a place for category led transformations. But based on their answers to our initial Category Assessment, the folks at Clearlake Capital Group clearly understood that there was a giant problem to be solved.
Our hunch is that $5 billion seems very small in the context of the consequences of the problem…
#private equity
