Nick Hernandez is the CEO and Founder of 360Learning, a leading advisor and investor in the SaaS technology industry, and the author of Collaborative Learning: How to Upskill from Within and Turn L&D into Your Competitive Advantage.
Nick founded 360Learning in 2013 and has since grown the company into a leader in the EdTech sector. In late 2021, Nick and his team secured $200m in funding from Sumeru, SoftBank, and Silverlake for 360Learning to continue their mission of championing upskilling from within through collaborative learning. He is based in Paris, France.
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Nick Hernandez is the CEO and Founder of 360Learning, a leading advisor and investor in the SaaS technology industry, and the author of Collaborative Learning: How to Upskill from Within and Turn L&D into Your Competitive Advantage.
Nick founded 360Learning in 2013 and has since grown the company into a leader in the EdTech sector. In late 2021, Nick and his team secured $200m in funding from Sumeru, SoftBank, and Silverlake for 360Learning to continue their mission of championing upskilling from within through collaborative learning. He is based in Paris, France.
Recommended Resources:
Welcome to Season Eight of Edtech Insiders where we speak to educators, founders, investors, thought leaders and the industry experts who are shaping the global education technology industry. Every week we bring you the week in edtech. important updates from the edtech field, including news about core technologies and issues we know will influence the sector like artificial intelligence, extended reality, education, politics, and more. We also conduct in depth interviews with a wide variety of edtech thought leaders and bring you insights and conversations from ed tech conferences all around the world. Remember to subscribe, follow and tell your ed tech friends about the podcast and to check out the Edtech Insiders substack newsletter. Thanks for being part of the Edtech Insiders community enjoy the show. Nick Hernandez is the CEO and founder of 360Learning, a leading advisor and investor in the SAS technology industry and the author of collaborative learning how to upskill from within and turn l&d into your competitive advantage. Nick founded 360Learning in 2013, and has since grown the company into a leader in the EdTech sector. In late 2021. Nick and his team secured $200 million in funding from Sumeru, Softbank, and Silverlake for 360Learning to continue their mission of championing upskilling from within, through collaborative learning. He is based in Paris, France, Nick Hernandez, Welcome to EdTech. Insiders.
Nick Hernandez:Hi. Glad to be here.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, great to have you here. So you are the CEO and founder of 360Learning a really interesting company. Before we get into what 360learning does. Tell us a little bit about your personal background. How did you get into education technology? And how did you get interested in this sort of workforce learning world?
Nick Hernandez:Well, both my parents are immigrants, and they moved to France, because at the time in the 80s, friends would be chasing students that were great in university, and offer them to move to France and pay everything like plane tickets, food and shelter, even pocket money. And so my parents were coming from modest backgrounds. But they had the opportunity to move to France then and then met each other at the university residence for South American students. Six months later, my mother was pregnant, and I spend my first year of my life in that university residence. So we can say sort of that my love my history with education studied, even before I was born. And all jokes aside, I mean, it did make a tremendous difference for my parents in their life, in their trajectory that they were good, good students. And so I think it was somehow part of the family culture of just studying and enjoying that, and loving it. And I did love. I thought it was a game month where a game, like finishing all the training that was available in the book, especially in maths, felt, I believe it was a game. So that made me good. Not that I was a genius. I was not I worked a lot. But it didn't feel like work. It felt like a game. I thought it was fun. And then later, I ended up with people that were really talented and that they were not working at all. And they were even better. And I realized it was not my case, I had been working a lot, studying a lot to get these results. So I guess that's how it started. I just loved studying. And then I also did, I did engineering, computer science. That's in the 2005. And I did two curriculums, two Bachelors in two masters in parallel. One was engineering, computer science. And the other was philosophy that I studied at a distance learning university and around 2008, nine, I would be receiving the courses by postal mail, and in the philosophy courses, and I had to write my essays and send them back by postal mail. Like weeks, weeks later, I would receive notes from the professor 2019 We're all on Facebook, LinkedIn already. I mean, that was not the beginning of the internet. It was more advanced. I thought, well, you can do better than that. I work just to beat in a bank had that experience but compliance courses. And that felt really off. And then with these two experiences, I thought there's an opportunity here i I started threesixty learning interesting to note that 2011 12, when we started in France, there was no startup ecosystem at all. And that was really felt like the startup culture was very underground. And I have good memories of that moment, there was no playbook. It was not about scaling, creating startups, at least not in France, it was in the US. But it was not the case in France, there was no lean startup where I can be in utter Steve Blank literature, or that didn't exist at all, it was not accessible for us. But it didn't exist, it was not documented. And I think it was a bit different than today. And I enjoyed that very much. We started a bit early, I think there was a trend around elearning and Innovation in Learning and, like do it yourself kind of internet tools in we were in that way. But that started a bit later. So I think in terms of time to market, it's interesting to note that our time to market was probably not good. We're probably like, three, four years too early. And in many cases, being too early is a good reason to fail, as well, of course, as being too late. But when you really look actually most startups, successful companies, the founders were too early. And that's why often you see this view telling you what Yeah, it took us 2345 years before things to golf, and it's our case took us five years, without any revenue, any customer, I think it's because then yes, you can be successful, because your three, four or five years too early, you can build your tech, right, have the time to think about it have the time to meet with potential customer to improve your take. And then when there's that turning point, and market is ready, you have been getting ready for four or five years. Yeah, you're ready, you're ready. And that's what happened to us. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:that's fascinating. So, you know, I'm hearing that you felt like you're personally had a lot of sort of intrinsic motivation in school, you felt like math, in particular was a game and not work. And then when you had some experiences as an adult learner, with compliance courses, you know, you were like, This doesn't feel like the same kind of learning, this doesn't feel very engaging or interesting. And that was, you know, one of the insights that led to what you've been doing with 360Learning over the last, as you say, 10 plus years. And you know, I'm sure some of our listeners, we are mostly in the US aren't familiar with what 360Learning actually does. So give us the overview of what it does. And I think it'll match your history of why it was a little early, but then it found itself right in the right place around, you know, 2018, when the world started getting really more comfortable with online education. Tell us about 360Learning's, mission and what you do?
Nick Hernandez:Sure. So 360Learning is an LMS, or learning management system. It's very simple. an LMS is the backbone software for companies to organize their corporate learning internally for their employees. Typically, we deal with 10 use cases such as compliance, yes, but also sales training, leadership training, partner training, and so on. There are like 1012, use cases, software training and deploying new software, people need to understand it. Leadership when we talk about leadership, you know, the use cases, companies promote people into being first time manager all the time. Usually, if you're not training, first time managers, things will not go well. It's hard to be leading a team. And you need to learn a few things, especially when you're doing it for the first time. So leadership training is about that sales training, obviously, is about increasing bookings, by having reps know the product they're selling, how it's innovating, how it's better than the market all that. So that's what we're doing. Now, that existed already when we started, but the space was pretty much focused on compliance. So elearning started in the 2000s. But the main use case who that was addressed was compliance. The rest the other use cases I'm mentioning here, were not didn't exist, there was no good market for that. There was no playbook for a company to be organizing in a more systematic way sales training on a platform or a tool. There was some strain but it was just not organized online. What our take when we started was we put a name on it but the name came later. Like we found the concept of collaborative learning In 2018, but it's what we did, from the get go with an authoring tool to create courses that could be used by anyone. And that's how we were different. Because the other learning management system platforms, when you wanted to create a course, you actually had to go to an instructional designer, often people who had studied elearning, for at least one year, if not two years, often at university, they had graduated, and you would request them to make a proposal migratory birds whole process. Yeah, it would take six months, at least sometimes two years, between the moment you decide you're going to launch a new learning course, and moment, it's live. And it would often cost more like six figures, 100, to 200 cake, to put that course, into production and ship it to learners, we said, that's not how we're going to do it, we're going to create an authoring tool that anyone can understand and use immediately. And ship of course, in house a day, or even in 30 minutes, of course, the course will not look the same. And on this authoring tool, like before we arrived, and before we change the market here, the authoring tools, where, you know, you would create very often these kind of cartoons avatars, like all, you would look like cartoons from the 80s. And the reason for that it's an intuition. Because an intuition is correct. It is that because it is hard to engage learners, who are going to invest a lot in the design and the animations and make this fancy, or some people might think it's fancy, at least it is sophisticated cartoons that, hey, we're gonna learn these today. And so here is a question, but it's not well, designer, right, right. So it might look a bit cheap. And as user, and especially as the internet culture was mattering, as people would look at that, and like, I'm not a 12 year old. It's not the right way to engage people to offer them that kind of design. And so we said, No, let's look at Instagram. And yes, you're going to create a course. But it's going to be simple. And very often, it's not even Instagram, it's more like notion, or it's just, you want people to learn something, give them the bullet points, and straight away bullet points, and then multiple choice question to the contest themselves. But if it's only white background, and just text is fine. But what people really love is collaborating with their peers, being able to ask a question, even more they love being able to answer a question from their peers, because then now they're creating value. And if you reward them for the value they're creating, they just love that. And later, we created that concept of collaborative learning. And it's not just about the questions, it's a whole user story about declaring what you think you need to learn to increase your performance. It's about analyzing automatically all these answers to determine all the learning needs for the company. Yes, it's about finding the experts who can create these courses when the courses don't exist when their internal knowledge. So but helping these experts create these courses, reviewing that doing peer reviews, or having the l&d team reviewing the courses before until they're really great. And before they are sent to everyone and offered to everyone. So it's the whole process of as a group, learning together, sharing knowledge, creating value for the company by sharing knowledge. And so we call that collaborative learning. And, I mean, some companies love it, some companies saying we're not collaborating or top down company, some industries, you know, banking, typically, we hear that a lot. No, we're still focused on compliance. We're a bank, we are top down. That's who we are to that fine. These are not our customers. Some of the companies are more about sharing knowledge, typically, because this skills specific skills are the value of the company and they really need subject matter experts to create courses and share them internally that is strategic to the business and these are our customers. So that's what makes us different collaborative learning, we're in that space NMS, there are many companies. But growing on that niche of making learning collaborative allowed us to scale go to market being focused. And that niche was actually not a small niche, but might be the majority of the market, right. And that's probably what we are finding. These days.
Alexander Sarlin:There's so many interesting, sort of through lens in what you're saying about that moment in time. Because, you know, we talk sometimes about, you know, Internet 1.0, and internet 2.0. And internet 1.0 was sort of, as you say, top down sort of broadcast model more sort of based on news organizations, it was very much, you know, authoritative, and internet. 2.0 was the age of social media and user generated content, where it Facebook and Instagram and MySpace, and Friendster and LinkedIn and all of these tools that allowed people to communicate and build their own content and created authoring tools. You could call Facebook, a big authoring tool, right? It allows you to make posts and post pictures and do all these things. Yeah. So in 2018, you know, we're really into Internet two world. But as you say, corporate training has not found that happening yet. They're still melted, probably a lot of people are doing video based top down with the kind of, you know, lame cartoons and engagement techniques that people have done for decades. So it's a really fascinating and really meaningful, I think, insight and right on time to think about how can you access the expertise within a company, have people teach each other collaborate on the learning, you know, use that adult learning principle of unlocking people's experience and knowledge. And rather than just teaching to them, allowing them to teach each other it's that's like a core adult learning principle. And it's really core to your approach clearly. And as you say, you know, it's one of these things were made at the time, it might have felt like a niche idea. But now we're in a world where if you want information, you go to Reddit, or YouTube or, you know, I mean, this is just how people learn, or you know, Skillshare, all these different places where people can author and teach each other. So it's really interesting to hear your talk about that moment, and how it influenced what you're doing. So give us an example of what this looks like in a company. I'm sure you've seen so many over the last, you know, six years, give us just one example of what it looks like when a company really embraces this kind of, you know, peer driven, collaborative learning? And how does it sort of change the learning outcomes and address skill gaps within an organization?
Nick Hernandez:Yeah, sure. So you know, it really depends on the use case, if you're doing sales training is very clear. You will have product teams, marketing teams, creating courses, to train cells. And the beauty is when sales start improving the course. So they're making improvements, suggestions to the course. And that will often trigger really interesting conversations between product marketing, and sales. And why these questions appear, why these improvements, suggestions to the course, are being made. And it's often because there is feedback market feedback and says people are saying, Hey, you're suggesting that we pitch it that way. But we do it we're facing an objection. So we're suggesting you pitch or someone said, Hey, I'm pitching it in a different way. And it's working well, so I'm suggesting, and sometimes you have that rep that says, I actually wrote down the script I'm using and so now I'm adding that to the course. And the other reps can use that. And that creates a lot of value, obviously, and short feedback cycles, feedback loops. Now, there's another example I like, you know, something, as I'm sure you've noticed that in the car manufacturing industry, something happened in the past three years. It's one by one, all the CEOs of these car companies made the big announcement that hey, by 2026 2820 30, will become an electric car car. Yep. This year, Ciara hears that. And the car shows like, hey, we have 15,000 engineers, and they know how to build regular thermic car. They don't know how to build an electric car. And it's different. There are some similarities, but it's not exactly the same. And all the engineers know how to build an electric car. They're working on the district car and the other house. They're working with apple on that Apple Car secret project. But they don't want to work for us. Anyway, there are not enough of these engineers on the market for all the car companies for shifting to electric cars until how you're going to do that. You might have some people in the company who know but most of them don't. And that's a good use case. That's a good use case where you really need these few people who have knowledge because I don't know they've been following the technology's evolutions, but you do to know who they are. So you first need to identify them. You don't know all the skills in detail that are needed to build an electric car. So you need to build that skills map and document it, and then create the courses and then transition everyone and look at the skills ask them. What do you know about building an electric car motor?
Alexander Sarlin:Or? Well,
Nick Hernandez:I don't know myself, but all these different skills, which one do you have which one you don't, so you understand the skills gap. And then you look at them internally created courses by these experts, and you send them to these people, and you're doing rescaling at the scale of 5000 10,000, sometimes 20,000 engineers, and that is another use case where it really needs to be collaborative, because you're not going to remove 20,000 engineers and rehire 23rd, there is no choice, you need to rescale them and go through that innovation disruption phase with your people internally, you don't have a choice, collaborative learning in that case is not an option. And I love these stories, and they're successful, I love them, it's beautiful to see a large organization goes through such a big change, and doing it internally driving it internal.
Alexander Sarlin:What strikes me about your two examples here, which I think are both terrific, you know, they're both about sort of changing the attitude of people so that instead of feeling like they're individually learning something new and sort of absorbing it from a video or from a top down training, it's very collective. So your sales example, it's like, you know, salespeople can be competitive with each other. But in this example, it is not competitive at all, it's all about learning from the market sharing best practices, as you say, you know, changing the course, so that everybody does better. And I just love that it's this collective mind set. And then the second example, even more so read the idea of a big company facing a huge systemic change, right, like a technological change, like electric cars coming. It's such a better and healthier attitude to say, how can we as a whole company, work together to lead this change internally, as you say, versus you know, what you often see when changes come down, which is the CEO, as you say, you know, gets rid of a whole department or shaves it off, or does massive layoffs, or does all these things and it just feels like everybody's sort of on their own. Instead, it's the company and all these 1000s of employees sort of working together towards a common goal, which is, you know, restructuring the company around a new technology, like electric cars, that they're really exciting uses of elearning. And, you know, speaking of technological changes, one that we are definitely working with right now. And speaking of sort of skills, is AI we can't get through any episode here without talking about AI. But you are have been thinking very deeply about AI and how it's really offers a lot of change to everybody in almost every industry right now. And you recently acquired a lamp and AI powered skills platform, which is all about creating skills ontologies with AI, tell us about your experience with AI, how you're thinking about it for 360 learning and about this acquisition? Yes,
Nick Hernandez:sure. So, as we said, we're 60 learning a learning system better over the crucial years, I started to think learning, it is the medicine. It's like the pharmacy where the drugstore. But the doctor is knowing the skills, where are the skills gap, what we're saying? Who has which skills regarding building an electric car, and what skills are lacking, right? And so we're doing we're like the cure, that we're not the doctor. And so we're thinking would be great if we could do both. So you wouldn't have the doctor and the drug, you could get two of these at the same place. And the market was asking, I mean, I was meaning we see our choices all the time. And like, Nick, we'd love you to help us with understanding the skills of our workforce, we want to model all the skills of our business. And then we're going to create matrix where we have the skills and the people and we know exactly which person has which skills and will maintain that over the years and, and so we can start building learning plans based on that. But my understanding was that dream is legit. But that project never works. Once yet Euro once told me, she told me in 2015 I did that with a consulting company. I spent 12 million she said $12 million, building the skills ontology building the skills matrix. It was supposed to take two years it took three years. I involve 1200 managers in workshops, moving discount, and by the time we're done, it's out there Eat. So we cannot go live, and we never did. And she said, I'm never going to do it again. And different versions of that story are frequent, you hear you are hearing that. So I was thinking actually, I understand people want that, but it just doesn't work. It's like something that doesn't exist. You know, it's like a unicorn. Love to see one, but they don't exist. And last year, when irlams, when GPT was up, and like that demo of Nanolab? Well, first thing I thought was, well, that might be the answer, that might be the way to keep the skills ontology up to date. And so we went shopping, and I thought, we need to find a technology that helps us do that. And so we found one, it's the lamp, we bought the company, we announced it, three, four months ago, now, we're integrating integrated it. And we're doing that. I mean, to give you an example of why MLMs are really helpful here, and what the change, they're bringing, I really love one feature, I mean, there are a whole list of features that are helping with the incremental maintenance of the skills ontology. One is watching the job descriptions, the job posts of your competitors are of the whole industry and asking the LLM to tell you, what are the new skills that are appearing that are being looked for in your industry? And then you just asked the VP talent or the skills manager person, do you want to add that skill that is trending now in your industry? Do you want to add it to your ontology? And if they do, what happens is it will instantly create a skills gap? Because you say, Okay, I want to add that skills. And we ask you, okay, which job title you have internally should have should master that skill. And once you do that, it instantly creates a skills gap. And so we'll start training people on that skill. The good example is with AI. So right now, people using that feature, actually see that things like prompt engineer, prompt engineering is a skill that's being in demand. And so if they added their prompt management, prompt engineering, in their skills, ontology, well, the next day, there are people we start receiving training, engineering, good prompts. And that's just automatic, more like the user story. If we just take a step back from just that feature, the user story of the two use cases upskilling, and rescaling, they're very similar user stories. First, you need to build the skills ontology for your company, which means you have jobs and job titles. And for each job title, will you want to list the skills, it's not just the skills, it's for each skill, you have levels with a description. So you need to build all that. And you need to say, hey, for the senior salesperson should be level four on active listening. So you document all that, then you need to know the skills your people have, right. And you have four options basically for that, first, you ask people to tell you what skills they have. And the level, you can start there, then you can ask the manager or you can ask AI to tell you from people LinkedIn profile or resume or wherever data you have some companies, we don't do that at that point. But some companies offer passive listening on the browser. And so if you go to Wikipedia and you start reading something, we'll see that you've progressed on a scale, right? We don't do that, I think it might be the future, obviously, raise some questions on data and how far you want to go. But that's for another day. And so now, we've done that, for each person of the company, you know, their skills, and you know, the skills of the job they the position they have, and now you have a skills gap between the skills they really have and the skills they're supposed to. And from that gap, you can build the training plan and start sending them courses. And if you don't have discourses, you can know especially with collaborative learning, you can go find the right expert internally and ask that expert to create the course to fill the skills gap that is upscaling rescaling is the same use case but instead of comparing the skills of the person with the skills of their job, current job, you're looking at the next job. So you're looking at the gap between their current skills and the skills needed. Did for their next job? There is a third use case very similar that I love that not a lot of companies implement that I wish more companies would. We are capable, we succeed only we have the capability. I call it employability. And it's the same use case, but you're comparing people's skills, not with the skills needed for their job, not with the next job, but with the job market. Right. So what's the gap? Where are the skills they need to acquire, to be able to find a job easily? Not internally in the company, but in the job market? And to chose No, it's better to have an employable? I mean, it could be counterintuitive. For some people, especially in the business, they're like, Why do I want to make it easier for my people to live? They might ask searchers, no, it's, you're not in a good spot, when your people cannot find a job outside is probably not a good sign, right. And you want to maintain your workforce liquid in the job market, all that is unlocked. Because with Jenny I, you can maintain the skills ontology up to date with a minimal effort involving AI and human together working together, which was not possible before. And building the ontology. Maintaining the ontology is really what changed, was generated there. Yeah,
Alexander Sarlin:I think it's such an interesting insight. Obviously, what LLM 's and ai do at heart is take enormous amounts of data and make sort of sense of them in various ways that can create new things, it can organize them. And from your perspective, and from 360 learning, really thinking about this particularly wicked problem, which I have experienced in my career as well, where companies really are desperate to understand their current employees skill set, and the skills needed for various jobs. And it's just so much information, so much data, you know, your job descriptions, you have to interview people, like you said, 1200 managers, there's so many steps that it takes to really understand what skills are associated with each job, that that it takes forever. And as you say, by the time it's done, it's outdated. It's a very fragile system, it doesn't account for what you call trending skills, which I think is an amazing term, right trending skills, things that are changing and hot in any particular job market, but may not yet be reflected inside a company or inside a training set. So this idea of applying the power of AI to creating and maintaining and revising these skills, ontologies is incredibly exciting. And as you say, it makes a lot of sense to me that the idea of being a doctor who Diagnosis The skills gap for a particular company, and then be able to prescribe training to either the whole company or individuals or individual departments, you know, on any level is really sort of the dream, I think of corporate training and has been for a long time. And it's never been possible. So it is really quite exciting use of AI, I want to dig into something you said, because it's just so intriguing, which is, you know, there are a few different ways to know what the skills are within a job and to know if somebody's training. And you mentioned the sort of passive listening one. And I know, I know, this is, as you said, it's potentially a controversial tricky topic, because it sort of potentially feels like surveillance, and it can feel a little strange to talk about, but you mentioned that you think it might be the future. And I agree with that. I think there's something very exciting data issues aside, which are huge, about the idea of using actual behavior as the input rather than self reports or manager reports, or you know, whether you clicked through a number of slides and in training, that's really exciting. And it's sort of that's another sea change to what training might look like. So I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about why you think passive listening may be the future of this sort of skills world.
Nick Hernandez:Well, as you said, it looks like a natural evolution. And it looks like a very convenient, powerful solution. Now, of course, again, you said it, it raises questions regarding who owns the data, do you really want to? Is it personal data? Can it be company data, right? Should the company be watching everything you're doing online, and even if it's for improving your skills profile? You know, in learning people talk a lot about adaptive learning, and learning in the flow of words, just in time training, all these concepts well, that are very popular. They're very popular because of course, it'd be great if we could just learn if the technology could learn from what people are doing in their real job. And then, again, with business data, see what they need to learn to perform better. and send them that knowledge, their form of a micro, tiny course or even tiny advice can be just one sentence. Yeah, just when they need, it's a one example just to illustrate that. One thing we do is a version of the Salesforce integration. When there's a sales, who goes in Salesforce, and they have a new opportunity in an industry, in the car industry to stay on that, for instance, they create that opportunity in the automotive industry. And then we look at that. And we can send them a course or a piece of training, what's happening in the car industry. And we made that push. So typically, that kind of thing, did it manually in, we put it in the Salesforce integration. And what's great is probably with m&ms, and passive listening, is the combination of both, you can probably scale automate and scale that and be constantly watching what people are doing and trying to guess what value you can create for them, but pushing by pushing them the information they need, but they didn't know they needed.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, one thing that strikes me as a potentially interesting metaphor for this is with teacher training teachers, they're often student teachers for a while, or they do they teach in teach in various contexts, but usually, they teach. And one of the things that's core to their training is that they'll have observations and there'll be not everyday observations, you know, once in a while a teacher trainer or principal will come in and observe the teacher at work in a normal day, you know, just doing their exact job, and then give them feedback and suggest, you know, additional trainings and professional development and all that kind of thing. And it strikes me as you know, the concept of constantly surveilling you're constantly listening to somebody, or watching somebody as they do their job and saying, you know, hey, you could do this better, or here's a, here's some advice, or here's some additional resources is exciting. But yeah, it can be a little frightening, it just feels like a lot, I think, for somebody to feel like everything they're doing is being monitored. But the idea of observation periods of, hey, you know, one day a month, it's a day where we are going to monitor everything you do online, you just do your normal work, do your normal thing. But as you do, it will identify skills gaps, while identify things that you're doing that are useful to the job XYZ, that's just strikes me as a possible interesting sort of a medium term place that people might go where, you know, people are aware, they're being observed, it's not every day, you know, it's not gonna follow them when they go online shopping, or when they, you know, when they do things like in the early Internet era, that was what was happening in the corporate world is they'd be monitoring every website, you went to really carefully. And really, and I don't know if we want to go back to that. But the idea of being able to observe people doing their jobs, and give and provide training is so powerful that I agree with you, there's, we have to find a way to make that work, because it just changes the entire paradigm of what training is. And of course, if you could opt into it if you say you know what I want the training module or the training, but to be on right now, because I'm about to do something that I'm not sure I know how to do. And I'm I'm learning it, turn on the training bot, that could also be a really great way to make it work at this sort of opt in. It's such an exciting space to think about, because it just is a totally new way of thinking about identifying skills, gaps and training. It's really, really exciting. Let me ask you a little bit about your experience in you mentioned that when you started in Paris, there was no French ecosystem for startups, and there was no lean startup. And it just you're sort of out on your own and you enjoyed it. But you're sort of really carving a path, I'd love to zip forward to, you know, 2024, tell us a little bit about what it's like now in the European ecosystem, what it's like in Paris, and how things have changed in that decade. Yeah,
Nick Hernandez:happy to do that. Just to come back on the point of the book, listening in the passive listening thing. I think there is the exact like the not the opposite. But the other way of doing it, is by building simulations that replicate your work environments. So using AI to generate a training simulation that really looks like if we're taking the example of sales. Now, it's not a salesperson who's selling really, but it really looks like it because they're in front of an avatar that behaves like a human. And the simulation really looks like reality, and it can train and practice in. So anyway, that would be a new kind of a new version, a better version of serious games. And we had that whole trend of service games, but the problem was, they were really basic and not realistic and for that reason, maybe a bit boring on cringing, especially they don't compare well, with the real video games we have, where hundreds of millions are invested the Assassin's Creed, etcetera, and FIFA and all of that, but now is generated as you can imagine, being in simulations that really look the same, you know, we're talking about the impact of January also in the game on the gaming industry. The gaming industry is huge, you know, people, I used to say that we some sometimes we don't realize how big it is, but it's bigger than the music industry in Hollywood combined.
Alexander Sarlin:Wow, I did not realize it's a major gaming
Nick Hernandez:industry is the number one entertainment industry by far. And so they are looking at general DVI, also, and very seriously, and so you have games now with that grimdark going to look like the real life way more, not just the design, but the way characters you're going to meet behave, is going to feel completely different. And so I believe that's another version that it's not, it's less cringe than the passive listening thing, because it's another way of, of Ghana of achieving the same result. And that might be also what the future looks like. Now, back to your question. Now, your Paris is now a place where there are startups, there is an ecosystem, it is still small. I mean, it is great, it is growing. And I really love, you know, I love France, I love that country, for so many reasons. That could be for another day. But I really love it. But I mean, there is no startup culture, I think the combined value of French startups is probably 5% of Google valuation or Apple valuation. So it still seems like it's still like 100 companies that have some scale, and most of the other less than one or 100 people, but the ecosystem is there. And now that there are processes to create startups, and there is a kind of repeatable way we're seeing that is growing, it's still in the work still in the process. In AI, we have a lot of AI engineers in France. So I think a lot of AI technologies are being built and will be built in France, I believe the French eco system to like business culture. And so they can build technologies. I'm not sure there is the culture of building moats, and building sustainable businesses on top of technologies. I think the world knows that it's a great opportunity to be building in France, and selling and marketing from the US. And I wish that changes. And soon we are in France, not just building but also monetizing and building sustainable giants in technologies from France. I don't know that culture for that is still there and mature in terms.
Alexander Sarlin:That's interesting to hear. Yeah. There's so much to talk about here. i The simulations idea is fantastic. And you know, I can imagine a Salesforce training where you're on something that looks and feels exactly like real Salesforce, and you're on a call. And the call is with a AI voice, you know, an AI avatar character. And as you say, that would be a way to get closer and closer to real world training and real world skills assessment without needing to do quite as much surveillance. But I think all of those ideas have legs. I mean, there's so much room for improvement in the training world. And it feels like some of these ideas originally, you know, the collaborative learning idea. And now all these AI focused ideas are just hugely impactful in making that a really vibrant, you know, space to be in. We're coming on the end of our time. And we always close our interviews with two questions in about two minutes. You know, what is the most exciting trend that you see in the Ed Tech landscape right now that you think is rising that's coming towards us that you think our listeners should keep an eye on?
Nick Hernandez:I would say what I'm most excited with, of course, is the potential of generative AI to change the way we work. And somehow, I believe the future looks like a lot of things are automated, a lot of things happen, and they're easy to be built. And the question for us is what do we want to build? I think that question, how do we decide collectively what we want to build is going to be more and more important. And so some people say it's going to be more and more about the Soft skills, because it's going to be about working, deciding together what we want to build our goals, and less the technical skills of building it because AI is going to automate it. Some other people are saying the opposite. They're saying it's going to be about being technical because everything, AI does everything. That's the soft skills as the gold management, all this, these things are automated, but doing something different doing something new, technically. And so I guess these are the big questions for this. What do we need to learn the contents? What does the skills we need to learn in a future where automation and artificial intelligence are executing a lot for us instead of us? Yeah. And
Alexander Sarlin:somebody with a philosophy and a computer science, you know, parallel education, I think you have a really interesting take on that. Because the liberal arts soft skills, you know, open up one way of thinking about the future and then being able to go really deeply technical, as you say, you know, I've heard people say, the floor is lifted with generative AI, but so is the ceiling. You know, when you have these incredible AI, coding co pilots, they assist everybody. And if you're already somebody who's doing really innovative tech work, it can take you to a level that sort of nobody's ever seen before, which is really exciting. Yeah, really interesting insight there. And then finally, what is a resource you would recommend for somebody who wants to dive deeper into any of the topics we discussed today? That could be skills ontologies corporate LMS is corporate training AI, what would you recommend for people to look into?
Nick Hernandez:But listen, I love to podcasts that are not niche. They're not like giving away secrets. But for people who don't know them. I love listening to Lex Fridman podcast, and I love to listen. The second one's name is Logan Bartlett and I think it's called each change name three times. I think it's the Logan Bartlett show. It was called cartoon avatars before and three cartoon avatars and four people in SAS, I find it really helpful. A lot of actionable advices. That there that I mean, I find them actionable and useful for myself. So I like these two resources. Yeah, they're not specifically on LMSs. But I find them helpful.
Alexander Sarlin:That's great. As always, we'll put links to those in the show notes for this episode. That's the Lex Fridman podcast and Logan Bartlett podcast that Logan Bartlett show or what will link directly to it. Nick Hernandez of 360 learning doing truly fascinating work in the workforce training upskilling, rescaling and employability space. Thank you so much for being here with us on Edtech Insiders.
Nick Hernandez:Well, thank you for doing this.
Alexander Sarlin:Thanks for listening to this episode of Edtech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the Edtech community. For those who want even more Edtech Insider subscribe to the free Edtech Insiders newsletter on substack.