Vidyo Goes in ‘Circles’ to Improve Peer Group Learning, Saving Significant Costs and Time for Leaders, Participants

Challenge

Is there a way to improve peer-group learning in the business world at a 10th of the cost of current methods? Entrepreneur Dan Hoffman believes there is. Hoffman founded and sold a successful cloud communications company, M5, so he is proficient with the complexity of communications technology. Now he is using that technology to serve the learning and development sector to improve the way that peer groups collaborate, network, and leverage one another.

Hoffman, the founder and CEO of Circles, saw that people involved in peer coaching had to commute to be together — drive or fly — which was costly and time-consuming. He also wasn’t satisfied with traditional tools, like one-on- one meetings and corporate universities. So he wanted to create an effective, affordable tool to easily form peer- group learning and development circles in a customized virtual video environment.

Challenge

Is there a way to improve peer-group learning in the business world at a 10th of the cost of current methods? Entrepreneur Dan Hoffman believes there is. Hoffman founded and sold a successful cloud communications company, M5, so he is proficient with the complexity of communications technology. Now he is using that technology to serve the learning and development sector to improve the way that peer groups collaborate, network, and leverage one another.

Hoffman, the founder and CEO of Circles, saw that people involved in peer coaching had to commute to be together — drive or fly — which was costly and time-consuming. He also wasn’t satisfied with traditional tools, like one-on- one meetings and corporate universities. So he wanted to create an effective, affordable tool to easily form peer- group learning and development circles in a customized virtual video environment.

Solution

Hoffman and his team began working on Circles in 2015, and Hoffman says they considered “countless” video providers. Buying a solution allows for faster development and fewer resources, Hoffman noted, but it also means trusting your business to a third party that is responsive, solvent, and aligned with your direction. Opting not to build his own, Hoffman wanted a partner who took reliability very seriously.

While organizations can build or buy their own video technology systems, Hoffman’s team didn’t want to do that because it had built a VOIP system in a prior venture and was aware of the challenges. The team grew convinced that WebRTC was the best approach and selected a vendor, but found that initial vendor’s reliability and responsiveness inadequate. Hoffman’s team wanted a feature-rich set of APIs with great flexibility, but found many providers offered limited options and just wanted them to rebrand the same interface. They also wanted a provider with deep technical expertise and leadership in the codec because that foundation would be required to build and maintain a consistently reliable service.

The Circles team abstracted its technology from the underlying video engine and built a switch that could flip from one provider to another. Around this time, it so happened that one of Hoffman’s engineers took a full-time position with Vidyo, which had the desired flexible API, a cloud-based solution, deep technical knowledge, and proven reliability with its vidyo.io offering. Following his recommendation, Circles tested Vidyo and never flipped the switch back.

“In a matter of weeks, we had a working prototype, and then went live a couple of weeks later,” Hoffman said. “We had four developers work on the project. Vidyo was great — responsive and supportive.”