Adam Miller joined Knight Transportation in September 2002. Adam Miller is certainly not an average bicycle CEO, just like he wasn’t a run-of-the-mill college student, or a typical 12-year-old. Cornerstone built out its recruiting product, advanced its analytics engine and reporting, and continued to add features in other areas. One company in particular I liked was called Learn.com. In Adam Miller’s case, his ability to scale was impressive. Adam coaching his children’s AYSO and tournament soccer teams. Adam Miller is the founder & CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand. Workday, founded by many of the smartest people from PeopleSoft, knew how to build everything Cornerstone had done. What most vendors find out is that Learning Management software is incredibly complex. The Crusade For Employee Experience: How Did We Get Here? ), When Adam Miller and Cornerstone entered the market (around 1999), there were vendors like Saba, Docent, Click2Learn, Pathlore, Learn.com, and others already in place. Adam is an avid social entrepreneur. As companies rushed to put training online, they realized they needed a platform to put it into. Adam Miller is the President & CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand (NASDAQ: CSOD). Adam was very savvy about these trends and one of his big gambles was to move from “e-learning” to what I call “talent-driven learning,” essentially adding a module for talent management. Meet the most interesting man in the world. Organizational Learning . He started Cornerstone in 1999 in his one-bedroom apartment to help people realize their potential. He co-authored Business Capital for Women and was a contributor to Talent Management. Adam Miller Tech founder, social entrepreneur and philanthropist Los Angeles, California, United States 500+ connections Adam Miller, Founder and CEO, Cornerstone OnDemand. But it was his two-year trip around the world in his twenties that best prepared him to run a global business. While not all companies want this solution, it’s far cheaper and much more reasonable for companies in Europe and highly fragmented businesses. Adam has decided to change roles and co-lead the board. Investors pay high multiples for a fast-growing company, expecting that over time they will “dominate” a market and profits will come later. Organizational Learning . Adam understood all these changes, and he was able to pivot and adapt in amazing ways. I studied Saba during my time at Arista, and we believed the product was elegantly designed but over-engineered. He’s a role model for entrepreneurs throughout the industry. Not only are there a myriad of business rules to automate, but you have to manage content, develop assessments, manage user pathways, and deal with e-commerce, customer training workflows, and … well it goes on and on. Kristen understood this well and then hired Frank Riccardi (another executive I worked with at DigitalThink) and they built out the Client Success Framework and focused on all the gritty issues of “how do you help companies implement talent management.” And this helped the company grow again. I often believe that there are more lines of code in the LMS than most of the rest of the HR suite. L&D leaders are perplexed by all the options, so many would like a safe, market leader to help. (Read about Adam’s sales and marketing transformation here.). He is the past-president and a current director of IKAR in Los Angeles. By using our website, you are consenting to our use of cookies, as described in our privacy policy.You can change your cookie settings at any time. It turned out that the Customer Success Framework, while a great strategy to make customers happy, was diluting the profits of recurring revenue. No, not the Dos Equis guy; Adam Miller, the founder, president and CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand. Adam’s work is not quite over. For a guy running a multi-hundred million dollar company with thousands of employees, I was pretty impressed. Adam Miller understood all this. He has quietly led this enormous market, created careers for thousands of people, and he is always willing to listen. As Chairman of Team Rubicon from 2013-2020, he helped the team grow the nonprofit from 500 to 120,000 volunteers and create America’s leading veterans service organization, which leverages the skills of military veterans to provide humanitarian aid globally. His focus is on the development and implementation of strategic plans that lead to increasing efficiencies by streamlining operations, preparing complex financial models and negotiating asset-based financing for the business. Excellence In Employee Experience: What Works? Well as the LMS and talent market got crowded (and slowed down), Cornerstone’s investors started to tell Adam that they just wouldn’t value the company as a growth company anymore, and he had to start making money. Talent Management As Chairman of the Cornerstone OnDemand Foundation, he helped deliver over $150M of social impact and launched WorkforceReady, NonprofitReady and DisasterReady, which provide online training and resources to help people who help people. The new versions of Saba started to become easier to use, more reliable, more intelligent, and customers decided to renew. Under his leadership, Cornerstone has grown to become one of the largest cloud computing companies in … But the potential was there, and lots of us saw it coming. While that model isn’t bad, it doesn’t add a lot of value. From my perspective, I am left with three thoughts about what’s next. Cornerstone OnDemand Inc., the Santa Monica-based talent management software developer, said founder and Chief Executive Adam Miller will step down and transition to co-chairman, effective June 15. It turned out Saba’s complex architecture for training administration, compliance processing, e-commerce (in Saba courses were called “products”), and reporting was badly needed. Now, as the biggest company in learning technology, he had the financial strength, engineering team, and market reach to really lead the market. The answer was simple: we had a major recession in 2000 and 2001, followed by the 9/11 disaster. Many of Cornerstone’s competitors (Saba, Plateau, and others) had product-centric leaders, but they tended to fall down in sales, marketing, or hiring the right team. July 15, 2019. Feb. 24, 2020 8:51 PM ET Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc. … Saba and the vendors had been selling licensed software products, so Cornerstone differentiated itself by naming itself CornerstoneOndemand – promoting the fact that CSOD was “built for the internet.” (A position which Workday has used for years.). I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Adam Miller yet – I’m sure there’s another chapter to come. Prior to founding Cornerstone, Mr. Miller served time as an investment banker and consultant. I was always amazed at analyst meetings how the Cornerstone team seemed more integrated, aligned, and committed than almost any other vendor I met. Under his leadership, Cornerstone has grown to over $500 million in revenue and is one of the largest cloud computing companies in the world. I was working at a startup at the time (Arista Knowledge Systems, long gone) and we were building an online learning platform of our own. While most companies weren’t very good at building content, there was a lot of money thrown at the space. It was very rich in functionality, highly configurable, and very complex. Cornerstone OnDemand CEO Adam Miller explains the company’s strategies. CSOD was an end-to-end internally developed system, and while it wasn’t as functionally deep as Saba or Plateau, it was easy to use and easy to sell. Right before the Saba deal, I spent a day with their team and they have a vision for something quite new and creative (leveraging the acquisition of Clustree). The publication’s annual honor recognizes individuals for exceptional leadership within their organizations and … Many things have happened in the ensuing years, including the disruptive growth in the LXP market (which has stymied Cornerstone a bit). I told him this was a real threat but he thought it was an easy product to build, so they just “launched” an LXP for free. Saba, which had been merged with Halogen (leader in mid-market talent software in Canada), Lumesse (recruitment and learning content in Europe), and dozens of other companies, had become a profitable, PE-backed company and had re-engineered Saba Cloud so companies were starting to like it. Leading for two decades as CEO, Adam grew the company to over 3,000 employees in more than 25 countries delivering over one billion courses as the world’s premier people development company. Adam Miller will become co-chair of the Cornerstone Board of Directors. Early on the company partnered with ADP, which let Cornerstone grow fast. He'll be replaced by Phil Saunders, the … And wanna-be’s were always jumping in. View Adam Miller’s profile on LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional community. In the case of online learning, Adam faced a lot of difficult barriers. He established the company in 1999 and it has seen tremendous growth in the thirteen years he’s been at the helm. Yes, there are a lot of product issues to address, but now Cornerstone could act like Oracle or SAP – do big things and lead the market in a new direction. As Saba grew the company acquired the #1 provider of virtual classroom technology (Centra) and continued to build out content management, reporting, and analytics. Succeeding as an entrepreneur is a bit like schitzophrenia: you wake up one day worried about deals, the next day worried about competitors, and the next day worried about the product. Adam Miller is the Chief Financial Officer of Barron Lighting Group. Miller’s skill at developing solutions for the talent management industry has been widely recognized through numerous awards and honorable mentions. The company hired Vincent Belliveau to run Europe (one of the best sales and marketing execs I’ve come across), they went public in 2011, and the company started to pull into the lead. I’d mention that there’s a big market for something new, he would carefully listen, and then a few months later he’d show me a prototype and a marketing plan. Adam Miller will become co-chair of the Cornerstone Board of Directors. Join to Connect ADAM MILLER HOMES LLC. Cornerstone OnDemand founder and CEO Adam Miller is stepping down from the role after 20 years, the company announced Monday. Join The Crusade. First, I’m bullish on Cornerstone. Biography. Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc. (CSOD) CEO Adam Miller on Q4 2019 Results - Earnings Call Transcript. He was appointed CFO of the Knight-Swift parent company and President of Swift Transportation in November of 2020. The leader in the early days was Saba, a fast-growing software company located in Redwood City. While the market became even more competitive, what I think Adam did exceptionally well was to position CSOD as the “specialist leader” in integrated talent management. They see the future and they act on opportunity. He has also coached over 20 of his children’s AYSO and tournament soccer teams. Most start as product leaders (Elon Musk, Steve Jobs), and then at some point bring in other leaders. Cornerstone OnDemand helps businesses manage their workforce with the power of the cloud, and it's catapulted the stock some 200% since it went public. The company went public, continued to grow, and expanded its footprint around the world. The board has appointed Phil Saunders, the former CEO of Saba Software, to serve as Cornerstone’s new CEO effective June 15, 2020. Over the last few years, Adam has been dogged with the LXP market, which more or less caught him by surprise. It’s important to realize that the online learning market is massive. But the most interesting company of all was an east-coast company (different breed from Santa Monica) called Plateau. I wrote the original Cornerstone research paper on this topic, and I felt like we were sticking our necks out. We can save a lot of money around here.” That was a new part of our conversation, and once again I saw how agile his mind could be. Each had a slightly different product set (Saba was for big enterprises; Docent was for channel and sales training; Click2Learn was for content developers; Learn.com was for smaller companies), forcing Cornerstone to “pick its space.”, Cornerstone (originally called CyberU) was conceived as a content company, so Adam, Steven, and his team focused on the content experience first, then later built out enterprise features. Third, Cornerstone’s content strategy has yet to play out. Miller is CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand , which helps companies realize the potential of the modern workforce through cloud-based learning and talent management. http://www.cornerstoneondemand.com - Technology Council of Southern California Honors CEO of the Year. But along comes Saba and Adam once again pivoted to the future. This was the birth of the LMS or Learning Management System. E-Learning was a very big deal. Adam Miller is the Founder & CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand (NASDAQ: CSOD). In one of my meetings with Adam he laughed and told me “we don’t even consolidate our hotel rooms or airplane and travel expenses. Phil and Adam have another chapter ahead. But they decided to put learning off for a while. He was driving the product strategy, making sure the company closed big deals, and hiring a strong management team. Later they acquired Evolv (to advance their analytics) and built out a new technology stack to scale. (Here is our 2003 website.). The Next Act: The Whirlwind of Talent Management. Adam Miller, Founder and CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand, is Appointed to Mindbody Board of Directors San Luis Obispo, CA – February 8, 2017 – MINDBODY, Inc. (NASDAQ:MB), the leading provider of cloud-based business management software for the wellness services industry, today announced the appointment of Adam Miller to its Board of Directors. He started Cornerstone in 1999 in his one-bedroom apartment to help people realize their professional potential. Companies had “training management systems” to schedule classrooms, but they didn’t have systems for online content. Insights and key takeaways from Adam Miller Perspective is … He started Cornerstone in 1999 in his one-bedroom apartment to help people realize their professional potential. You have to remain calm, think clearly through a lot of uncertainty, and be very good at ruthlessly deciding what “not” to do. I led product management and marketing there for about a year, and was later laid off. Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSOD) Q1 2019 Earnings Conference Call May 07, 2019 05:00 PM ET Company Participants Jason Gold - Investor Relations Adam Miller - … Meanwhile, down in Los Angeles, an entrepreneur named Adam Miller was working with his friends Steven Seymour and Perry Wallack to also enter the space. Executive Vice President, NBCUniversal. So once again Adam started a new strategy: a new focus on recurring revenue growth at ever increasing profit. Insights and key takeaways from Adam Miller Perspective is … They built out a customer success and consulting team. Biography. When Workday entered the market, Cornerstone became their best friend. Connect the best people to your great company.css-w1bzkn{color:#2F3944;}, Keep your people competitive and compliant, Fast track skill building with personalized learning, Expertly curated content to close skills gaps, Build and manage a high-performance organization, Coach and continuously develop your people, Better manage your people data and processes, Ensure company-wide regulatory compliance, Give your people the skills they want and the business needs, Reinvent your business or risk becoming irrelevant, Connect with the best to elevate your people, Top ratings from the world’s best analysts, The world’s leading companies trust Cornerstone, "Cornerstone helps unleash the potential of our employees"  - Katie Lamkin, CHRO, Connect with the best to elevate your game, Bringing our community together to shape HR, The impact of technology on the future of work, Best source for tips, guides, and industry best practices, Investing in the next generation of cloud startups. Adam is a frequent speaker and writer on entrepreneurship, philanthropy, technology and talent management. SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (June 21, 2019) – Centauri Health Solutions Co-Founder and CEO Adam Miller has been selected as the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2019 Award winner in the Healthcare category for the Mountain Desert Region, encompassing Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. Adam Miller is the founder & CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand. Cornerstone OnDemand founder Adam Miller is moving out of the CEO’s office to make way for Phil Saunders, who led Saba Software through its acquisition by Cornerstone in February. Miller is one of six winners of this year's Best Practice Awards . With a solid and deep bench of managerial talent, this leaves Cornerstone in a position to exploit its leadership position and do what leaders do: Lead. This is what successful entrepreneurs do. Not only was Saba well established, but companies like Plateau, Click2Learn (which had merged with Docent and Pathlore to become SumTotal), PeopleSoft (who tried to build an LMS – Heidi Spirgi who worked on this is now leading marketing at CSOD), and Oracle (who now owns Learn.com and has a built many LMS products of their own) were all well along. Let’s buy Saba. Talent Management So Adam and his team focused in this area. So several years ago the company shut down its services business and hired consultants to “clean up the operation” to become more efficient. Adam Miller, Founder and CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand, is Appointed to Mindbody Board of Directors San Luis Obispo, CA – February 8, 2017 – MINDBODY, Inc. (NASDAQ:MB), the leading provider of cloud-based business management software for the wellness services industry, today announced the appointment of Adam Miller to its Board of Directors. I actually worked as a contract product manager during my first few years as an analyst (helping build Saba Analytics) and got to know the product. As the talent management market grew, Adam drove the company toward feature expansion. He was not only the CEO of the company, he deeply understands the product (Adam was the “chief product officer”) and he understands product-market fit. Adam has won in the following categories: Software Development. Companies stopped travel and extraneous spending, so online learning was the best way to save money (sound eerily familiar?). Its Now A Time For Corporate Citizenship. Miller joins ranks of trailblazing entrepreneurs in Healthcare. The Evolving Role Of IBM In The HR Marketplace. Cornerstone OnDemand helps businesses manage their workforce with the power of the cloud, and it's catapulted the stock some 200% since it went public. Biography. Adam Miller understood all this. Companies desperately need a back-office ERP system to manage training, and neither Workday, Oracle, or ADP really have an enterprise solution that competes with Cornerstone. Saba had also built a performance management product, but it was over-engineered and the Cornerstone “learning and talent” platform started to take the lead. While the idea of Cornerstone acquiring Saba may sound odd to some, I immediately saw what Adam was doing. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Cisco made a feeble stab at it; Google built some prototypes; IBM built an LMS (IBM used Saba internally but also developed their own), and vendors like Kenexa (now absorbed by IBM), and most other HR software companies were building something. Can Cornerstone put Workday and others on the defensive? Internet bandwidth was spotty, video was difficult and expensive, and most of the content was built with Flash, which required complex programming. Updated June 5, 2020. Adam Miller, 49, is the new CEO of Joseph-Beth Booksellers, which has three bookstores —in Lexington and Crestview Hills, Kentucky and … Adam knew this partnership would eventually end, but he was savvy enough to understand that growth was the goal, and once Cornerstone got a customer it was hard for them to switch. Biography. So platform vendors like Saba and Cornerstone have to constantly keep up. Adam Miller was working with his friends Steven Seymour and Perry Wallack, the company acquired the #1 provider of virtual classroom technology (Centra), Adam’s sales and marketing transformation here, including the disruptive growth in the LXP market, Elevating Equity and Diversity: The Challenge Of The Decade, The Massive Market Impact of Microsoft Viva, Workday Throws Down The Gauntlet On Employee Engagement: Acquisition of Peakon. After two decades building Cornerstone OnDemand into one of the largest cloud-based learning and talent management software vendors in the world with a market capitalization of more than $2 billion, CEO and founder Adam Miller is finally ready to walk away. Most CEO/Entrepreneurs flame out at some point. He was named an CEO of the Year in 2009 by the Technology Council and was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young in 2011. He founded Cornerstone in 1999 in his one-bedroom apartment to help people realize their potential, and he has grown it to be one of the largest cloud computing companies in … As CEO, Miller will oversee the principal operations and business activities administered at Voqal ensuring they are consistent with Voqal’s strategy and mission. This market, which is big and fragmented (it’s one of the biggest “red oceans” I’ve ever seen), is very confusing to buyers. Online learning and talent software looks great during the demo, but it doesn’t always get used. Adam Miller Chief Administration Officer, Comcast Corporation. Yes, the LMS market is old – but the market is real, it’s big, and it’s not going away. One of the most pivotal changes in Cornerstone’s life was the birth and growth of Workday. He was not only the CEO of the company, he deeply understands the product (Adam was the “chief product officer”) and he understands product-market fit. Injustice and Demonstrations: Will The Pandemic Help Or Hurt? Meet the most interesting man in the world. But there was something else going on too. His drive, charisma, intelligence, and leadership has paid off. SCOTTSDALE, AZ (Sept. 13, 2018) – Centauri Health Solutions CEO Adam Miller has been named one of 2018’s Most Admired Leaders by the Phoenix Business Journal. Cornerstone went from one of the leading LMS companies to the first-ever LMS company to sell integrated performance management. Adam Miller is the Founder & Co-Chair of Cornerstone OnDemand (NASDAQ: CSOD). Which leads us to where we are. Adam Miller is the Founder, CEO and President of Cornerstone OnDemand. Behind all this effort, Adam was calling the shots. In 2017, Adam was ranked #5 in The SaaS Report’s list of Top CEOs, ranked #8 in Comparably’s list of Best CEOs, awarded the Best Practices Institute CEO Award, and received HR Tech World’s Unleash Award for his contributions to the industry. But perhaps the most important next step (which led to the Saba deal) was Adam’s realization that “profit” was now the goal. His vision to become the world’s biggest and bestest company in learning could actually be realized. But the job for Cornerstone is not over. Plateau was founded by Paul Sparta, a serious entrepreneur who built a product that could “out-Saba Saba.” And he did just that. As the chart below shows, every time a new technology enters our consumer life, someone starts figuring out how to use it for learning. The Netscape Browser was launched in 1994, and within four years (1998) a cottage industry of online learning had begun. Plateau was a cleaner, more elegant system than Saba and he nailed the market for pharmaceutical and financial regulatory training. You have to be able to synthesize all three of these problems in your head at the same time – Adam was able to pull this off. Cornerstone OnDemand Inc., the Santa Monica-based talent management software developer, said founder and Chief Executive Adam Miller will step down and transition to co-chairman, effective June 15. The publication’s annual honor recognizes individuals for exceptional leadership … We were partially right and partially wrong. Adam Miller - CFO and President of Swift Transportation - Knight-Swift Transportation | LinkedIn. He led the merger of FAAN and FAI to create FARE (Food Allergy Research & Education), the world’s largest voluntary health organization serving the food allergic community, and he helped build the UCLA Food Allergy Program.