Twenty students in somebody else’s house: there are more elegant ways to begin a technology company. Doug Donovan encountered this arrangement while working in residential energy-auditor training. A field visit offered practical experience, but assembling a class inside a willing homeowner’s property was an awkward way to supply it. The household became a classroom; the classroom could scarcely accommodate the ambition.
The inconvenience contained a business question. How could people rehearse work that ordinarily required access to an actual building and actual equipment? Donovan saw the difficulty extending well beyond energy audits. Electricians, plumbers and maintenance technicians also needed opportunities to make decisions before a customer depended on those decisions. He launched Interplay Learning in 2016 with simulation at the center of that effort.
Today, the Austin-based co-founder and CEO works on a problem whose scale has changed while its basic shape remains familiar: there are people who want practical careers, and too few convenient places to practise. His company puts versions of that practice on screens. The destination remains decidedly physical. Someone still has to keep the equipment running.
A mountain was an expensive way to learn about hobbies
Donovan’s route to this work took a considerable detour uphill. His background included finance and a venture-backed software business before he developed a small Colorado ski area. He had studied at the University of Virginia and earned an MBA at Berkeley Haas. Those are respectable preparations for running a company. A mountain supplies its own supplementary examination.
At Echo Mountain Park, a 2006 account finds him trying to get a snowmaking system working in the dark. A newly installed pump was delivering little more than a trickle. Opening the resort depended on a construction effort with a public deadline and plenty of room for uncooperative machinery. The glamorous business of skiing had acquired a plumbing problem.
Construction manager Grady Ham was central to getting the place open. Donovan credited him with making that possible, an admission that gives this episode its human weight. A finance background could help organise a venture; another person’s practical experience could decide whether it actually operated. It is a useful scene to hold beside Donovan’s later work educating technicians.
Running the ski area also diminished his opportunity to ski. He later described realising that pursuing his favourite pastime as a business had consumed the pastime itself. He wanted to protect skiing by returning it to the weekend. Entrepreneurship literature often recommends following one’s passion. Donovan’s experience suggests checking who will be responsible for the pumps first.
“Just show up.”
Doug Donovan’s stated motto
The classroom gets a reset button
Interplay carries that concern with practical capability into software. Its training spans trades including HVAC, electrical work, plumbing, solar and facilities maintenance. The simulations ask learners to work through equipment and troubleshooting scenarios, bringing a task into view rather than leaving it entirely in a description. A learner can return to an exercise and try again.
There is an appealing modesty in the application. A game-like environment can concern itself with an air-conditioning system. A simulated task can be useful precisely because the corresponding real task is ordinary, necessary and unforgiving of confusion. The glamour belongs to the technology; the value has to survive a working day.
Donovan has been making the case publicly for years. In September 2017, the University of Texas invited him to discuss his entrepreneurial path and virtual reality for business. The event described simulations already used in career training by more than 60,000 students and professionals. That early snapshot helps explain his persistence: the audience for practical digital learning existed well before the latest enthusiasm for AI.
He also resists letting a headset become the entire story. His 2025 Manufacturers Network conversation emphasised that much of this training happens on conventional screens. Widespread access matters. A learning method that reaches a technician on an available device has an immediate advantage over a magnificent demonstration that requires equipment the technician does not have.
An adviser who should make you think
That same test applies to artificial intelligence. Interplay introduced SAM in 2023 as an AI-powered training adviser. The tool draws on the company’s learning material and offers assistance within SkillMill. Its stated design includes challenging learners to think further, alongside helping them understand the material. An answer can be convenient; understanding why it works takes more effort.
SAM’s role gives Donovan’s interest in personalisation a concrete form. A trainee can ask a question at the point of confusion. The company also describes the adviser as a place to ask questions that someone might otherwise keep to themselves. Anyone who has nodded through an explanation and regretted it later can appreciate the attraction.
The educational ambition is individual attention at a scale a single instructor cannot supply alone. It remains an ambition that must be judged by what learners can subsequently do. A fluent conversation about equipment is a beginning. The practical test comes when someone must identify a problem, choose a procedure and carry it through.
A bigger company, with heavier equipment
In September 2024, Interplay secured growth investment from Goldman Sachs Alternatives and acquired Industrial Training International. Richard Waitumbi, a Goldman Sachs managing director, joined the board. The transaction took the company further into industrial training, adding expertise in cranes, rigging and load handling. The metaphorical weight of workforce development now had some literal company.
ITI had been founded in 1986 and brought instructor-led training as well as online learning and a virtual-reality crane simulator. Combining those approaches fits the practical logic of Donovan’s project. Different tasks require different kinds of preparation, and industrial experience is an asset that software alone cannot conjure.
At the announcement, Interplay reported more than 250,000 people trained since 2016 and relationships with nearly 2,000 businesses and educational organisations. These were company-wide figures, rather than a personal scorecard for its CEO. They describe the network through which his idea travels: employers, educators and instructors putting a tool to work for their own learners.
The company’s June 2026 announcement put cumulative reach above 500,000 people trained. The figures mark separate reporting dates and a business that had expanded through acquisition. Treating them as a controlled comparison of learning outcomes would ask the numbers to perform a job they were never trained to do.
AI still needs someone to maintain the cooling
The data-center boom gives Donovan’s work a particularly tangible setting. In June 2026, Interplay launched a maintenance training catalog for the people supporting those facilities. It covers electrical, mechanical, cooling and related operational responsibilities, combining simulations with instruction and assessments. The software economy continues to require a remarkable amount of working hardware.
“In the data center environment, every second matters,” Donovan said at the launch. The urgency makes preparation consequential. Cooling equipment and electrical distribution systems belong to the machinery behind the digital spectacle. Learning their behaviour in advance offers a way to approach that machinery with more preparation than a diagram alone can provide.
In September, Interplay announced America’s Mission Critical Workforce, with Cengage, the New American Industrial Alliance and YouthBuild among its founding members. The initiative aims to expand training capacity and connect employers with prospective workers earlier. Its remit extends from construction into operating and maintaining facilities once they are built.
This is a coordination problem as much as a content problem. Employers need people; education organisations need capacity; prospective workers need a route they can enter. Donovan’s response now includes convening partners alongside building software. The original crowded house has become a national question about how many people a training system can accommodate.
The useful question: can you do the work?
On October 15, 2026, Donovan introduced Skill Verification in a post under his own name. He described simulation-based assessments that evaluate a task step by step, offering more detail than whether a learner completed a course. The distinction is practical: attendance and performance answer different questions for an instructor deciding what to teach next.
The intended uses include targeting retraining, informing placement and helping instructors allocate limited lab time. Donovan also set a boundary: the assessments work alongside managerial judgment and do not replace required certification or a final hands-on check. That qualification is essential to understanding his model. Physical work retains a physical examination.
For Donovan, the opportunity lies in arranging digital and physical learning more carefully. Let people build knowledge and rehearse decisions before consuming scarce instructor and equipment time. Then make the hands-on portion precise. The aim is to use an instructor’s expertise where it matters most, while giving each learner more room to prepare.
Keep the conversation moving
Donovan’s public interests extend beyond product launches. He hosts Better Careers, Better Lives, a podcast about education, workforce development and routes into work. Its opening conversation featured Maryville University president Mark Lombardi discussing change in higher education. The choice of guest placed the venture’s questions in a larger conversation about who education serves.
His March 2023 Venture Pill appearance also offered a reading list: Conscious Business, Predictably Irrational, Tribe of Mentors and The Four Hour Work Week. Taken together, the titles make an eclectic companion shelf for an entrepreneur interested in organisations, decisions and how people spend their working lives. They are recommendations, rather than a complete explanation of his worldview.
For that, his own short phrases are more useful. He has described “Yes, and” as a principle borrowed from improvisation, and “Just show up” as a commitment to persistence. He credits early supporters including the Central Texas Angel Network and Rick Timmins. The picture is of someone who values forward motion and other people’s contribution to it.
There is room in that picture for humour, particularly the humour supplied by a career that includes a ski mountain and simulated heat pumps. Donovan’s work has changed settings repeatedly. Its present concern is straightforward enough to survive the journey: give people a chance to learn a useful job, practise its decisions, and demonstrate that they are ready for the responsibility.