About Watershed

Mike Rustici founded Rustici Software and became the world’s leading expert in a technical standard called SCORM and learning systems interoperability. Mike and his business partner Tim Martin set out to build a company focused on attracting and retaining great people. And they succeeded in creating an incredible culture filled with talented, motivated, and friendly people.

Rustici Software found a niche helping people with SCORM and quickly became the authority in learning systems interoperability while also becoming familiar with hundreds of learning systems.

Technology marched on, but learning systems remained stagnant.

While the world's technical landscape evolved with mobile, social, and cloud technology, corporate learning technology remained dormant and struggled to grow past dated e-learning courses delivered via monolithic LMSs.

During this period, Rustici Software's primary standard was SCORM—which was created in 2000. The L&D industry would be confined to this model for the next decade.

Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL), a research lab within the U.S. Department of Defense, awarded Rustici Software a research grant to develop a next-generation protocol for learning system interoperability.

Rustici Software launched “Project Tin Can,” an industry-wide initiative to gather requirements that attracted hundreds of participants. After being analyzed, requirements were combined to create the Tin Can API—a modern framework for exchanging learning data.

Along the way, members of Rustici Software reimagined what a modern learning ecosystem should look like.

Rustici Software released the Tin Can API (now called the Experience API or xAPI) and invented the Learning Record Store (LRS).

At the time, most organizations relied on LMSs for training. But learning happens everywhere, not just in an LMS. And thanks to xAPI and the LRS, we could start tracking everything from mobile and social to informal and real-world learning events in one place. Users could now embrace learning wherever it happened, while instructional designers were free to use the delivery mechanism that best enhanced every learning experience.

That’s when an R&D group at Rustici Software began to envision a new LRS-centric learning ecosystem—and Watershed was born.

More than 200 companies applied to pilot Watershed—including Google, AT&T, and YUM! Brands. Excitement built around the innovation and disruption that was suddenly available in the learning space.

Cutting-edge innovators were eager to experiment with new ideas and technologies, such as:

• training delivery without an LMS
• automatically linking training with performance data
• portable learning records (Personal Data Locker or experience graph)
• capturing and analyzing social, informal, mobile, game-based, and simulation-based learning events
• awarding badges and accomplishments for learning
• consolidating data from many disparate learning systems

R&D turns into reality and Tin Can API is renamed xAPI.

xAPI's continued adoption removed constraints, enabled new tools, and inspired a wave of market innovation—as these tools produced data that's easily consumable in an xAPI format.

Mike Rustici also spun off Watershed into its own company with a $4M Series A funding round and sold Rustici Software to Learning Technologies Group plc (LTG).

Thanks to Watershed's learning analytics platform, learning professionals could now track, capture, and analyze data.

We’ve grown to be the leading provider in LRS and learning analytics products. And our clients continue to use Watershed’s insights to not only increase operational efficiency and reduce unnecessary spend, but also improve the overall experience of their learners.

We still believe that learning analytics, modern learning ecosystems, and measuring business impact is the right focus for Watershed. After all, developing people makes the world a better place. That's why we remain dedicated to positively impacting the effectiveness of all learning professionals.