Why We Built Vero: Owning the Content Layer of Workforce Learning
· 8 min read · Steve Gilman & Houtan Fanisalek, Co-Founders, OneRange
A note from the co-founders on why OneRange built Vero, the strategic case for owning the content layer, and where we believe the market is underserved
When we started OneRange, our bet was simple: companies should invest in their people the way they invest in their products — continuously, measurably, and with real ROI. Our marketplace gave employees access to the best external courses, bootcamps, and coaches in the world, and it gave employers a single budget to manage all of it. That product is still doing what it was built to do, and customers love it.
But somewhere along the way, sitting in customer calls, two things became impossible to ignore.
First, the most valuable knowledge inside a company almost never lives in a public course catalog. It lives in a senior engineer's head, in a sales playbook nobody updated since the last reorg, in a Notion page three managers deep. The catalog can teach you Python or negotiation in the abstract — it can't teach you how your company actually does discovery calls, ships a release, or onboards a new analyst.
Second, every CFO we talked to was asking the same uncomfortable question: "What did we actually get for the training spend?" Completion rates aren't an answer. Hours logged aren't an answer. Even traditional LMS reporting wasn't an answer. The market had built an enormous distribution layer for learning and almost no proof layer.
Vero is our response to both. And the strategic reason we built it ourselves, instead of pointing customers at another tool, comes down to one phrase we kept coming back to: own the content.
Why "own the content" is the right play
In every market we've worked in, the platforms that win long-term are the ones that move closer to the work itself. Stripe didn't stay a checkout button — it moved into invoicing, billing, capital, and tax. Figma didn't stay a design viewer — it moved into the canvas where the work actually happens. Distribution gets commoditized. The layer where the work is created, captured, and improved is where the durable value sits.
Workforce learning is no different. The marketplace layer — "here are the courses you can buy" — is valuable, but it's increasingly a thin wrapper around content somebody else made. The content layer — "here is what your people actually learned, what they can now do, and what they should learn next" — is the layer that compounds.
By building Vero, we move from being the place you buy training to being the place your training lives. That changes the data we see, the problems we can solve, and the moat we can build around our customers.
Where the market is underserved today
We don't say this lightly: workforce learning is one of the largest categories in enterprise software, and yet most of the products in it feel a decade behind everything else our customers use. A few specific gaps kept showing up in every conversation we had.
- Content is slow and expensive to make. A single custom course from a traditional vendor can run $15,000 to $40,000 and take 6–12 weeks. By the time it ships, the product, the policy, or the playbook has already moved
- Completion is mistaken for learning. The industry has trained itself to celebrate a 90% completion rate on a video nobody actually watched. Whether the learner can now do the thing is a separate question — and almost nobody answers it
- Tribal knowledge stays trapped. The people who know the most are the busiest, and the system gives them no easy way to convert what they know into something the rest of the company can learn from
- Reporting is built for compliance, not performance. Most LMS dashboards tell you who's overdue, not who got better. Leaders don't want a hall monitor — they want a coach
This is the gap Vero was built to close.
What Vero actually does differently
Vero is an AI-native training platform. You point it at the material that already exists in your company — a doc, a deck, a recorded call, a policy, a playbook — and it generates a fully interactive course: a conversational tutor that explains, examples, and checks for understanding, plus the right mix of scenarios, role-plays, hands-on labs, and graded assessments for the topic. Cost per course collapses from tens of thousands of dollars to under a hundred. Build time collapses from months to minutes.
But the real shift isn't speed or cost. It's the signal. Because every learner interacts with Vero in a conversation, we capture a level of detail that a video player simply cannot: which concepts confused which people, where the gaps are by team, who's progressing and who's stuck, and — crucially — who can actually demonstrate the skill at the end. That data flows back into the next course, the next assignment, and the next coaching conversation. The system gets smarter the more your company uses it.
Content that adapts in real time to the person in front of it
There's a reason completion rates on traditional e-learning are so brutal. The content is static. It was authored once, for a hypothetical "average" learner who doesn't exist, and then served identically to a brand-new hire and a ten-year veteran. If you already know the material, it's condescending. If you're behind, it's overwhelming. Either way, you tab away. We've all done it.
Vero was built to make that impossible. Every course dynamically generates and reshapes its content around the person taking it. If a learner already demonstrates command of a concept, Vero compresses it, skips the basics, and moves them into harder scenarios. If they're struggling, it slows down, reaches for a different example, offers an analogy from their role, and checks understanding before moving on. Two people taking the same course on the same day will have two genuinely different conversations — and both will land at the level of mastery the company defined for that skill.
This is the part static courses fundamentally cannot do, and it's the part AI makes obvious in hindsight. The goal of training was never to deliver content. It was to get every person to a specific bar. Static content can only deliver; AI can actually teach. That's how you keep a senior engineer engaged in the same compliance course as a new grad, and how you keep both of them from quietly tuning out.
The ROI we believe Vero delivers
We're early, but the pattern is already clear from the customers running Vero in production. Three numbers we care about most:
- 3x–5x higher completion rates than traditional video-based e-learning. Conversational courses sit in the 60–80% range; static video typically lands at 10–20%
- Roughly 95–99% reduction in content creation cost per course, and a comparable collapse in time-to-deploy. Teams that used to ship two courses a quarter are shipping two a week
- Annual savings in the $300k–$700k range for a typical mid-market customer, before you factor in the productivity uplift from people who actually learned the thing
And underneath all of that is the part we're most excited about: for the first time, a company can see — at the individual, team, and skill level — what its workforce can actually do, and where to invest next. That's the proof layer the market has been asking for.
Why this matters to you
If you're a customer: Vero turns the knowledge already inside your company into training that actually changes behavior, and it does it at a price point that makes "train everyone, on everything that matters" finally realistic. We'd love to show you what your own playbooks look like as a Vero course.
If you're an investor: Vero is the move from a distribution business into a content and data business. The marketplace told us what employees wanted to learn. Vero tells us what they actually learned. That signal is proprietary, it compounds, and it's the foundation for everything we want to build next — from internal mobility to workforce planning to skill-based hiring.
If you support OneRange in any other way — as an advisor, a partner, a friend of the company — thank you. The reason we get to build something this ambitious is the people who keep telling us the hard truths and pushing us to go further than we'd planned to. Vero is the clearest expression yet of what we think this company can become.
We're just getting started.
— Steve Gilman & Houtan Fanisalek, Co-Founders, OneRange
Tags: Founders, Strategy, AI Training, Vision