elevator9 News: The Measurement Layer That Proves Live Training Actually Works

By Gregg Kell, Editor, Spotlight on Startups

Every company that pays for a leadership workshop, a sales bootcamp, or an all hands training day makes a bet. The bet is that the people in the room will remember what they heard. They will change how they work because of it. They will produce a result the business can point to. David Grad is Cofounder and CEO of elevator9. For the past several years, he’s built his company around one simple idea. That most companies lose this bet before the training day is even over.

“Live training doesn’t fail. It fades.” – David Grad – CEO elevator9

That single distinction is the foundation of elevator9’s blue ocean niche. It’s post event learning reinforcement and ROI measurement for live corporate training programs. elevator9 does not build workshops. It does not host a course catalog. It does not compete with the facilitators who run a company’s leadership offsite.

Instead, the platform picks up the moment a live session ends. It uses short mobile reinforcement exercises and real time analytics. This keeps what was taught alive in memory. It also shows, in measurable terms, whether it changed how people work.

A News Producer Who Became a Learning Scientist’s Business Partner

Grad’s path to elevator9 did not start in a classroom. He spent the earlier part of his career leading on air social impact campaign production for MTV, work that put him in the middle of large scale efforts to change how audiences thought and behaved. That experience left him with a specific fascination: what actually creates the conditions for people and teams to succeed.

He pursued a master’s degree in strategic communication focused on leadership communication, then shifted his career into learning and development, coaching leaders and designing and facilitating leadership training. He now serves as a Senior Lecturer at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies, where he teaches Values Based Leadership Skills for an Interconnected World and co teaches a course on the psychology of persuasion.

elevator9 took shape when Grad, working with early collaborator and now board advisor Aaron Windfield, secured initial funding from a corporate pilot partner and built the platform’s first prototype. The Covid 19 pandemic slowed that early momentum considerably, disrupting the live events and in person trainings the concept depended on. Rather than abandon the idea, Grad brought on a childhood friend turned learning and development veteran, Dr. Page Chen, as Cofounder and Chief Operating Officer.

Chen brings more than two decades of experience designing learning solutions for distributed and global organizations, and she has led the buildout of elevator9’s product and data strategy since joining. Learning scientist Dr. Clark Quinn later joined the company as a board advisor, embedding cognitive science principles directly into the platform’s instructional logic.

What Happens After the Workshop Ends

The elevator9 platform is built around what Grad calls a system rather than an event. Once a live session wraps and participants return to their normal workflow, they receive a series of three to five minute learning reactivations delivered by smartphone. Each one uses retrieval, practice, and reflection prompts spaced out over subsequent days and weeks, a structure designed specifically to counteract how quickly the brain sheds new information without reinforcement.

“Once a live session wraps and learners are back in the flow of work, they receive a series of three to five minute learning reactivations via smartphone,” Grad said. “Each response to a prompt is a data point we collect showing who engaged, what stuck, how they are engaging with the learning, and how it connects back to on the job performance. It turns a one time event with a fuzzy payoff into something measurable, something a CFO can see the return on.” – David Grad

An Ongoing System

That last point is where elevator9 diverges most sharply from the rest of the learning and development market. Chen has described the underlying framework internally as a loop, moving training from a single point in time into an ongoing system that spans before, during, and after the live event.

The platform also applies generative AI to analyze the qualitative responses participants submit during reactivation, turning open ended reflection into structured signal about whether a skill is actually taking hold, not just whether a module was completed.

A Market Built Around Delivery, Not What Happens After

The broader learning technology market is dense with tools built to create or host training content. Enterprise learning management systems such as Cornerstone and Docebo manage course catalogs, compliance tracking, and content delivery at scale. A separate category of microlearning and reinforcement tools, including Axonify and Qstream, has emerged specifically to fight knowledge decay through daily bite sized lessons and spaced repetition. However, that category is built almost entirely around frontline, deskless workforces repeating operational or safety knowledge. It’s not focused on reinforcing and measuring the return on a specific live leadership or skills training event a company just paid for.

elevator9 sits in the space those categories leave open. It is not a content library, and it is not a daily habit tool for retail or warehouse teams. It is the layer a company adds after an instructor led program, whether that program was run internally or bought from an outside training provider, to make sure the investment survives contact with the calendar.

Why has that gap persisted? Grad’s answer points to how the training industry gets paid.

“The entire industry gets paid for the training moment,” he said. “The workshop, the program, the keynote. Delivery is the product, so delivery is what gets measured: attendance, completion, a satisfaction survey on the way out. What happens after the room empties has always been treated as the learner’s problem. But the after is where behavior change happens or doesn’t. That’s the space we built elevator9 to own.” – David Grad

Why the Timing Finally Works

The urgency behind elevator9’s pitch is tied directly to what is happening in the broader labor market. As AI absorbs more routine execution work, Grad argues that a company’s real competitive edge increasingly comes down to the things only people do well: judgment, communication, trust, and leading other people through change.

Corporate training budgets reflect that shift. Estimates of the global corporate learning and development market put annual spend in the neighborhood of $400 billion, and separate 2026 market research puts the figure as high as $380 billion and climbing as AI driven upskilling accelerates.

The problem elevator9 is built to solve is not new. Psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus documented the pattern behind what is now called the forgetting curve more than a century ago, and modern research keeps confirming it: without reinforcement, learners forget the majority of what they hear in a training session within days, and up to 90 percent within a month.

Reinforcement industry researchers have separately documented that spaced retrieval practice, delivered over time rather than crammed into a single session, is one of the most reliable tools available for pushing back against that decay, a finding echoed across corporate learning and development research.

Measuring whether that reinforcement actually changes results has its own long history. The Kirkpatrick Model, first introduced in 1959 and still the most widely used training evaluation framework in the industry, breaks evaluation into four levels: reaction, learning, behavior, and results, with the final level tied directly to measurable business outcomes. Most organizations, as practitioner research on the model documents, never get past the first two levels because they lack a data source connecting a training event to what happens on the job weeks later. elevator9’s spaced reactivation data is built to supply exactly that missing layer.

“There’s also an honest technology answer. Keeping learning alive in the flow of work, and actually measuring whether it’s changing how people operate, means engaging every learner individually over weeks and making sense of what they tell you. Until recently that wasn’t possible at scale. Now it is. So the problem became more urgent and the solution became buildable at the same moment. That’s why now.” – David Grad

What 2026 Looks Like for elevator9

Grad’s near term goals are focused on proving the category, not just the product.

“Our focus for the rest of this year is proving that measuring what happens after training is a category, not a feature. We want L&D leaders, executives, and training providers to treat the weeks after a program as something they actively manage and measure, not something they hope works out.” – David Grad

He outlined three concrete priorities. The first is publishing retention and behavior change data across client cohorts, building an evidence base rather than relying on anecdote. The second is partnering directly with training providers and university executive education programs, which Grad says face the same structural gap elevator9 was built to close: senior leaders want the learning experience without a heavy testing and attendance burden, while program operators need a credible way to demonstrate impact to the organizations paying for the seats. The third is continuing to help client organizations translate training spend into something defensible in front of company leadership.

“If we do those three things well, the conversation in this industry starts to shift from did people like the training to did the training change how people work. That’s the shift we’re building for.” – David Grad

Why This Matters Beyond elevator9

Grad’s story is a useful case study for any founder sitting on a crowded market. elevator9 did not try to out build the learning management systems or out content the training providers already established in the space. It picked the one part of the training lifecycle nobody was getting paid to own, the weeks after the workshop ends, and built a business, and a category argument, around it.

That kind of specificity is exactly what Spotlight on Startups exists to document. The publication profiles founders whose businesses occupy a genuinely defensible niche, using journalist authored reporting rather than press release language to make that positioning legible to readers, and increasingly, to the AI systems more buyers now rely on to research a vendor before ever picking up the phone.

Spotlight on Startups explains its approach and eligibility in its frequently asked questions about getting featured, and lays out the free, guided process in its guide to getting featured on the platform. The publication has also written directly about why category ownership, not generic keyword chasing, is becoming the deciding factor in how AI answer engines choose which companies to recommend, a shift explored in its piece on why authority is becoming the new SEO.

The same instinct that led Grad to study why founders build the businesses they build shows up across other Spotlight on Startups reporting, including its examination of what actually drives entrepreneurs to start companies in the first place. For founders weighing how to tell their own story credibly, the publication has also compiled resources on choosing the right platforms for startup storytelling and PR, on the tools founders are using to run lean operations in 2026, and on how founders are approaching lean executive hiring as they scale without adding permanent headcount too early.

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