In 2000, Tom Graunke described an online classroom with about thirty students and two instructors. One instructor delivered the lesson. The other answered questions. It is a small staffing detail, easily lost among the grand promises that accompanied the early commercial internet. Yet it gets rather close to the problem Graunke would keep trying to solve: somebody can send you a lesson without ever noticing whether you understand it.
KnowledgeNet, the company he led, taught subjects including Microsoft software and Cisco networking. Students could send questions while the class continued. The arrangement made room for the person who needed another explanation without requiring everyone else to wait. A raised hand had acquired an electronic equivalent; the teacher still had work to do.
Graunke’s career has followed that hand through several generations of training technology. He founded Mastering Computers, co-founded KnowledgeNet and later co-founded StormWind with Corey Frank. The companies changed. His interest in making instruction feel less remote kept returning. Along the way, the classroom acquired studio lights, investors and an unexpectedly plausible connection to custom golf clubs.
Three companies, one recurring question
Graunke studied at Arizona State University and identifies himself as coming from an entrepreneurial family. His early business career included leading Mastering Computers, a computer-training enterprise. KnowledgeNet followed, placing him inside the developing business of teaching people over the internet. For someone selling technical instruction, a new piece of software created both a subject to teach and another possible way to deliver the lesson.
By 2003, he was discussing blended learning: online instruction combined with video, audio and other methods. The attraction was flexibility. Teaching could use several formats rather than asking one medium to do everything. That is a more durable idea than any particular piece of classroom equipment. A student may want to hear an explanation, see a demonstration and then ask about the bit that went wrong.
The continuity matters because StormWind’s later argument about engagement came from someone who had already helped build online training businesses. Graunke had a stake in the earlier experiment. Starting again meant taking another pass at a familiar problem, with a different set of tools.
A detour onto the fairway
Before StormWind’s training studio came a different StormWind business. In 2006, StormWind Ventures bought a majority interest in Hot Stix Golf, Hot Stix Mobile and Hot Stix Technologies. Graunke operated the investment company with Tim and Eric Crown, the founders of Insight Enterprises. He became chairman of all three Hot Stix companies.
The businesses dealt in custom golf fitting, technology and mobile fitting centers. Founder Mark Timms remained responsible for research and development at Hot Stix Technologies. The announcement described six million dollars of invested capital, with expansion plans covering research, mobile operations and fitting software. Graunke had entered a business where the equipment itself was the object of close attention.
His public biography describes an interest in golf and skiing, along with a competitive disposition. In this instance, golf also supplies a useful piece of business history. Tim Crown would invest in the training company’s 2012 round. The connection had an earlier chapter, several years before that funding announcement.
The studio earns its keep
Graunke and Frank founded StormWind in 2009. Their complaint was that corporate online learning too often sacrificed the exchange between instructor and student. They proposed live, interactive video with more deliberate production. When Graunke attacked the old experience in 2012, his verdict was brief: “It’s boring and painful to take.”
There is something disarmingly direct about a training executive admitting that training can be a chore. The commercial challenge is what follows the complaint. A learner still has to understand the material. The production needs to earn the time spent watching it, while a teacher has to remain available for the question that the production did not anticipate.
StormWind offered technical classes as well as custom training for organizations. A 2012 announcement reported more than 500,000 HD class views since the program’s beta launch. Views described reach, rather than proving what every viewer learned. They nevertheless showed that the format had found an audience beyond an internal demonstration.
A Navy recruiter-training project gave the approach a specific assignment. Working with Team ABL, StormWind developed video and simulation material to augment classroom instruction. Graunke compared the result to movie trailers and immersive games. Here the intended role of entertainment was practical: help someone enter a situation, follow it and remember what to do.
The money behind the lesson
Investors backed the effort. In January 2012, StormWind announced a four-million-dollar preferred round led by GSV Capital, with Tim Crown also participating and joining the board. The stated plans included developing technology, widening the course offer and hiring. Michael Moe’s GSV provided a connection to investors already interested in the education business.
Two years later, a five-million-dollar Series C from GSV supported another expansion plan. StormWind identified sales, instructors and creative teams among the intended additions. Those three groups explain the operating shape of the business quite neatly: somebody must win the customer, somebody must teach, and somebody must make the broadcast work.
Company funding, not personal wealth
Graunke received an ASU+GSV Venture Award in 2013. The following year’s company announcement also identified him as a two-time Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year winner. Recognition and financing gave the venture public milestones. The everyday work remained more specific: prepare a class that somebody would choose to keep watching.
What a movie can teach a teacher
Graunke took that question into his writing and public appearances. In advice published at MarketingProfs in 2013, he urged trainers to use video thoughtfully, choose approachable experts and make space for interaction. He also argued for shorter segments. The underlying editorial task was to decide what the learner actually needed and remove material that distracted from it.
That is a useful distinction for a founder so associated with production. Elaborate delivery can add clutter as readily as it can add clarity. His advice put selection alongside presentation. An instructor preparing a demonstration has to decide what belongs in the frame, just as a writer decides what belongs in a paragraph.
“Why can’t learning be much more like a movie, and less like a book?”
Tom Graunke, on the format of learning
At a 2014 ASU+GSV discussion about engagement, Graunke appeared with executives from Apollo Lightspeed, Shmoop and Curious.com. The conversation ranged across emotion, narrative, curiosity and identification with characters. It placed his corporate-training work in a wider discussion about how people become interested enough to follow an explanation.
He also pointed to falling production costs. The implication was inviting: techniques associated with expensive entertainment were becoming more accessible to educators. A teacher did not have to adopt every cinematic trick to benefit. Even the decision to show an action clearly, rather than describe it at length, could change the experience.
His discussion of cloud technology made the same concern more technical. Graunke described browser-based training as constrained by local computing resources, and cloud services as a way to deliver richer experiences. Green screens and HD imagery figured in his explanation, but so did the ability to interact with a live class. The infrastructure was useful because of what it allowed a student and teacher to do together.
He also questioned whether conventional learning platforms were the only sensible place to put training. In an interview about learning technology, he pointed toward social platforms that employees already visited. The argument brought distribution into the picture: producing a compelling lesson was one decision; choosing a place where someone would encounter it was another. For a training founder, that widened the product brief considerably. The lesson, the conversation and the route into the classroom all needed attention.
The classroom behind the camera
There was software work underneath the broadcast. In a case study, development partner Foxbox described taking over a stalled StormWind platform project and improving the classroom experience, navigation and administration. It reported 2,300 users enrolled within months of launch. Graunke’s testimonial praised the team’s ability to turn ambiguous problems into working software.
That is a less glamorous part of the story, and a necessary one. A student needs to find the course before its production can impress them. An employer needs to manage access. Live instruction also creates schedules and account details. The experience includes these ordinary transactions as surely as it includes the person on camera.
StormWind’s current offering includes live and recorded training, technical practice ranges and AI learning tools. The subjects have expanded with the technologies people use at work. The delivery has acquired more ways to help learners study and find answers. Those developments carry the company into another round of the question that runs through Graunke’s career.
The company now advertises flashcards, generated practice tests, study notes and keyword searches across course material. Its Storm AI Tutor is presented as an assistant inside the course that can answer questions and simplify concepts. These are concrete additions to the study process, with a different job from the camera or the live teacher. They give the learner more points at which to stop, review and ask. Seen beside Graunke’s earlier work, the interesting continuity is the effort to make help available at the moment somebody needs it.
Go back to the KnowledgeNet classroom and its second instructor. There was a person assigned to the interruption, the uncertainty, the request to try that explanation again. New equipment gives a training business more choices about how to respond. The raised hand still deserves an answer.