Carlson, who lives in Denver, cofounded Guild in 2015 to help companies offer education benefits that employees would actually use. Many big employers will pay for their workers to go to school , but hardly any workers take advantage of the opportunity. So she cut deals with universities that often spend more than $3,000 in marketing to attract each new student and eliminated barriers to entry like out-of-pocket costs for workers.
In a tight labor market, Guild’s model made sense as companies competed to attract and retain talent. But Carlson knew that employers’ needs would drastically change if they faced layoffs and furloughs. So she entered talks with Entangled’s Paul Freedman, an early investor in Guild, to create a platform that would enable laid off workers to access jobs, as well as connect them with additional education necessary to move to different areas of the workforce.
“Rather than pivot, we just built a wholly different product with Entangled,” explains Carlson. “We were both building the components on our own, but Guild was approaching it from a ‘what do you do if the person needs educational training’ perspective and Entangled was approaching it from a ‘what you do if they need a job’ perspective.”
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