Build a product for GPT-6 - Nick Hernandez (360Learning)
Nick Hernandez - CEO 360Learning
Segment: Corporate education
Business model: B2B
Location: Paris, France
360Learning is on a mission of championing upskilling from within through collaborative learning.
The full transcript of the podcast can be found below for those who prefer reading rather than listening. The podcast is hosted by Frank Albert Coates.
Episode summary
Nick describes his background and passion for education, sparked by his parents' love for learning. He explains the company's pivot from kids education to corporate training due to better market opportunities.
He highlights the unique aspect of 360Learning which is its focus on 'collaborative learning', contrasting with the 'top-down' approach of many competitors.
He shares his experience with fundraising, advising startups to run a structured process where all potential VC investors are approached within a very short period to create momentum and competition.
He discusses 360Learning's acquisition strategy, citing the recent purchase of skills mapping company, eLamp, as an example of synergistic expansion.
He dives into the emerging field of generative AI, explaining how it can automate and revolutionize learning interfaces and interactions.
He advises startup founders to think about the future of their products, planning for the advancements in AI technology.
Transcript of interview
FC: So, hello everyone. We are back with a new podcast episode from EdTech Founders. And today we have Nick from 360Learning with us. Hi, Nick. How are you?
NH: Hi, Frank. I'm doing great. How are you?
FC: Fantastic. It's good to have you on the show today. And we have lots to cover because you have probably a lot to tell us about your history in EdTech.
So let's just dive into it and tell us a bit more about how come you ended up in EdTech and start 360Learning.
NH: Yeah, for sure. Listen, I just love learning. Since I was born, I think my parents, both of them, they come from South America and they could immigrate to France because they were really good at their university.
And I think it was really, it was defining for the family history that they could immigrate to France. And I think they transmitted to me and my sister too, the love of learning. One way they did that is by having us believe it was a game. So I was as a kid really believing math.
Computers really were a game that was, it was only fun. And there was a lot of efforts from them. And now that I have kids myself, I can see that doing that is not easy. But they managed to do that. And so I love, I really loved math and literature and computer science. I was 12 years old in 1994. I remember coding on visual basic.
I was playing with that at home. We were connecting computers, programming on a server, client architecture. We're doing that at home. It was, all that was a lot of fun. And when we, I remember having two computers at home communicate with one another in different rooms. And that seemed like science fiction, right?
That was pre internet. So I had a lot of fun doing all that. I enjoyed studying high school, university, all that was really fun for me. And then it was time to find a job, make a living. I think naturally I wanted to stay in that field.
FC: Okay, great. So, I hear a lot of passion for education. And so I guess one question is, and I heard this from some of your previous interviews. So why didn't you explore more in this kids education space? And I think you've, you did a bit of it, but you didn't go into it fully.
NH: We started there.
We pivoted into corporate because honestly, it's where we found business. But at the beginning we were exploring a lot in K 12 and also culture. We did some apps for museums to generate quizzes around all the knowledge that was represented in a museum. It was hard to find a use case that we could go to market with and make money in K 12. We found a business with corporates, but I was almost launching another startup at the time on homeschooling. I was really that close of doing something different and supporting parents who had to homeschool their kids either because ideologically or because they wanted their kids home.
But there, I mean, the main use case for homeschooling are situations, special situations, right? Where the kids, it's not easy for them to go to school for one reason or another, but they have like constraints and that's actually a significant population. And I almost started that. We ended up like having customers, finding customers, for what would be later called 360Learning.
And that was the main driver after almost three years of iterations. We still didn't have revenue. We were running out of cash. We followed the business, the contracts. Right.
FC: And that sounds like a very similar story to what I hear from many founders, right. Especially in the K 12 space.
So let's go a bit deeper into 360Learning. So you've come a long way now, right? Could you say something about, you know, what do you think makes 360Learning succeed and, and sort of the secret sauce behind everything?
NH: It's been 10 years now, a bit more than 10 years. And it's, it's true that a lot of companies aiming at helping kids learn better, they struggle to find a business model, not just in Europe or in France, but in every country. Back to your question. So 360Learning, which by the way, I mean, I'm still super happy that we're operating in the learning space.
Even if it's corporate learning, we live in a time where people will have to learn for their whole life. And I guess AI right now is the example, along with probably decarbonation; we have to learn new technologies and we have to keep learning, all lifelong.
What makes 360Learning unique? It is very simple. It's that we believe that people learn from people. We believe in peer learning, collaboration. All these learning management systems, as we call them, that's the acronym LMS for learning management system. They are all very top down. And by top down, it means as a learner, your experience is that you're going to be alone in the tool and it will feel lonely.
You're reading a text, you're watching a video. For instance, you're being onboarded at a new company and you receive that invitation. Email, invite to a tool, the LMS, you connect to the tool and you know, most people they join a company because they want to join a team. They want to work with peers. They want to build connections. They want to meet their new team. That's what you're excited with when you are switching jobs. And, surprise, you're invited to that learning platform that is entirely top down and lonely. We thought that is not motivating and be it for the onboarding use case, or for training sales, or for training partners, or even for compliance training.
For all these use cases you have in corporate learning, we believe that learning from someone and not in a cold lonely environment was going to be pivotal for the efficiency of that learning and for the user engagement. So we built a platform that is entirely collaborative, meaning you clearly see who has created the course you're taking.
You can see who contributed from the team. For instance, your co worker took that course and made a contribution because your co workers saw the course was incomplete. But you see who made that contribution. You yourself can make another contribution. And on top of that, we build a lot of modules like crowdsourcing learning needs.
So being able to contribute to the learning strategy by documenting what you think you need to learn to positively impact the company business. And then we also build modules to leverage AI to find who is the expert inside the company who can create the course that will answer these learning needs.
And so on and so on. It's been now 10 years that we've built a whole suite of collaborative learning tools. And we are, so in that space, I mean, we have competitors and they have all of them followed the more top down approach. And we differentiate by having made everything learning collaborative for our customers.
And it doesn't work for, I mean, some company culture say, hey, no, we're very top down. We don't want contributions. We don't want questions here. It's more like the army. Well, actually I think the army has a quite interesting collaborative way of working, but that's maybe for another day. But, some companies say, no, here we're top down.
I actually found that most of the companies who say that they're actually more afraid of moving into the future than anything else, but some of them say, hey, no, we want it top down or we are worried with compliance only, and we don't want to create value for business. We're not after business impact. We're only after checking the compliance box. So these won't be our customers, but the others, typically the startups or also the large corporates that are focused on impact usually they want a collaborative platform.
FC: And that's interesting to see that you sort of resonate with some type of organizations, right?
But also, you're talking a bit about the market of competitors and other LMS platforms. So the market is, or has been quite traditional, many platforms that haven't moved a lot, right? So when you think about competition, how do you think about that? And, why would you consider or not some as competitors in the LMS market or more widely in the corporate learning space?
NH: We have competitors. They're quite known, like companies like Cornerstone or Docebo are typically people we meet in the market, we compete with for customers.
FC: Is the edge sort of the social learning of it or like how do you position the pitch if you know, you have those two in an RFP?
NH: Yeah, we cover most of the same use cases, all of us, and 360Learning is different in that it is collaborative from A to Z.
We don't say social learning because I think for most people, social learning means a newsfeed and some comments without a real use case. And I don't think Facebook for business has seen, at least not the news feed for business, has seen huge success because there is no use case. Like except maybe sharing holiday pictures, but it's not like tremendous value for a business.
So we don't say social learning because usually that's what people have in mind when you say social learning or some version of a Slack or a WhatsApp for business. But, I think what we do is way more ingrained in the workflows of learning and understanding what the workforce needs to learn, what each person needs to learn and engaging them in learning with and from each other. Finding the right expert inside the company who should be training others, all that. I think that's, I mean, that's what makes us different from the market. Yes, it's that dimension of collaboration.
FC: And then since you started the company, what's been your biggest challenge and how did you solve it?
NH: I think growing fast comes with a lot of challenges around hiring the right team and growing people, developing people for the next phase. I don't know if it's a challenge, but it's a lot of energy. I love doing that personally, but it is a lot of work. It is a lot of work, but it's also very exciting.
It's building a team around you that's going to help you perform as a group, as a team.
FC: And I guess as a follow up to that, okay, how do you do great hiring, right? What's your key to success in doing that right?
NH: That's a big question. I mean, there are a lot of ways to answer that.
Some people have their secret hiring questions. And we do too. And so we do all that. Like we do the homework, right? It's assessing people with some situation case. Like we put them in a real business situation and we see what they deliver and we look at what's being delivered because there is very often a gap between what you perceive or what people are able to talk about as being their skills and when they need to deliver sometimes you're surprised. Because I mean it's like between commenting a soccer game or playing a soccer game.
And you can be very good at commenting without being very good on the field. So we put people on the field and we assess their move. So that is what I would call the homework. It's what you're supposed to do.
I think a lot of companies and a lot of managers don't actually do it because it is more work. It is more work to do that versus just spending an hour talking with someone and believing that it's enough. But that is the table stakes, right, of hiring. I think what we've done, that's a bit different is related to a conviction of mine that there is an opportunity to hire people that are more introverts or I would say, that have less social skills, but that are more thoughtful.
Typically, the ones who will not be at ease if you're in a group brainstorming and everyone needs to be throwing ideas on the fly, answering very quickly. They will not perform very well in that environment. And because of that, they have been kind of penalized in their career because the corporate world is such that it confuses gravitas, or I don't know what it means, like charisma. And which are actually a way to kind of reproduce the codes. I wouldn't say domination, but almost, and the codes of some people, usually some white older people, who are using these codes and that impression that there's gravitas or what, to actually stay in positions of leadership and keep this leadership position for themselves. Whereas if you, and that is work, and that is an effort, a collective effort to create room for the people who are more thoughtful, more slow thinkers.
And when I say slow thinker, I really mean in a very positive way. Like in the book, Thinking Fast and Slow, it's the one who uses the system to really look at things in depth and not just reacting in the moment like some a bit more developed form of a ChatGPT who can just react to anything in the moment, but they don't do that.
Instead, they just, they know that if they're going to say something, they want that thing to be useful. And maybe it's not going to take days, but it can take maybe 20 seconds. The problem is in most conversations, you don't have 20 seconds. You have one second and some people just outperform really all the others if you give them this 20 seconds or it's also creating a safe space where they can start working and delivering their value.
I believe there are a lot of these people and the opportunities to build culture around, hey, let's value that more than some version of charisma or gravitas or all these words that I don't think have a real meaning.
FC: And that's a great transition to our next section. So, I wanted to deep dive a bit on some specific areas that you have experience in.
So around fundraising, acquisitions, and AI, as you mentioned. So let's start with the fundraising piece, which is what we hear from obviously a lot of early stage funders that they're struggling with, or they need to learn about. And you have raised from some of the largest funds, VC funds globally, like SoftBank.
And it would be great to understand a bit what have been your learnings from this process. And, you know, what would you have done differently if you were to restart all of that again?
NH: Well, here again, like there, there is one dimension is doing your homework. And that means running a proper process.
I see a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of companies going to market to raise money without any structure or process. So typically, first they're talking to VCs all the time, like they're constantly raising money. It's not the best way. The best way is to say, Hey, I'm going to raise money now and to run a proper process where you're going to talk to the whole market during a period, a very short period of two weeks. You're doing that because you want the market to be talking about you and you want to create competition. You want to create momentum. So you don't divulge, you don't give away your numbers. You don't say I'm fundraising when you're not talking to everyone in the same week.
When you do, then everybody gets to see your business, your numbers at the same time. And what's going to happen is these VCs, Because they are talking, when they talk together, they're going to say, Hey, have you seen company A? And the other is going to say, yeah, we're looking at it right now. And that's enough to create FOMO.
And that's what you need to do as a founder. And frankly I've been surprised that many founders are actually not doing it like that. And it's not serving them. It's not helping them. So that I would call again, like it's the basics. It's fundraising 101. But again, 90 percent of the founders I see in the market, they are not doing it like that.
What we've done differently, I'm not sure I've done anything differently. I've tried to go by the book. But to do really good on all dimensions of the playbook and one of them is being able to very clearly articulate your differentiation. And say, we're in a market where everybody is doing A, but we're doing B and it doesn't have to be better. It has to be different. And to Apple, I don't know if you remember, but Steve Jobs had that tagline think different. And it's not, it doesn't say think better, and I think he was on point. Think different, the word is big enough that you can find your own niche. You can find your market. And later on, once you've owned a niche, you're going to expand and you can own the whole market if that's what you want.
Because I think entrepreneurs are very often ambitious and that's why they want to own the whole market, but you're not credible when you're raising a series A or B saying, I will beat everyone. I will beat Microsoft. No, you should be saying that there are giants, there are people smarter than myself, there are people with more money, but I'm gonna go after a niche.
Where I'm going to do something very different than nobody else does, probably because it's too small for them. And that's why I'm going to do it because I'm going to be different and I'm going to own a very clear market. And even if it's small, it's probably large enough for your series B. And when you do that, you are credible.
It is credible and it means you understand go to market, you understand product differentiation. And that does a lot. That does a lot for the credibility of your plan. And I mean, if someone tells you; I'm going to compete in, I don't know, whatever, even a very crowded industry, like, I don't know, CRM. But tells you, yes, but I'm going to build a CRM with very specific features for a small niche where there are 200 companies. And I hope I can get 50 of them. And then I'm going to expand in a broader niche because once I have these 50, I know there are 50 others that are not in my initial niche, but that are similar companies for which it will mean a lot that I conquered the first 50.
And I'm going to go from there and you build such a roadmap, then I think then your credibility is really increased and your chances of raising are also very increased. It's how we did it. And it's the pitch I gave you around collaborative learning. It's they're all being top down and we're different. We're collaborative. But at the beginning, I was even narrowing that down to we are collaborative and we're serving sales training better because that was a long time ago. In the first half of the company existence, we had a more narrow use case in learning. And that's how you create even more efficient differentiation.
And VCs know that. They know that there's a book called Crossing the Chasm. It is the VC Bible. It's a book that has, I think 30 years, maybe 25 years old book. And all the VCs have read that book in the 90s. And that's their Bible. It's crossing the chasm is all about that. It's one niche at a time.
And if you want to cross the chasm from early adopters to large majority, late majority, you do it not by expanding and wanting to own the whole market, but you do it by keeping your focus on niche and seeing the market as a series of niches that you're going after one at a time. Entrepreneurs who read that book, speak that language, will connect with their buyer. In that case, the VC.
FC: I guess the question is, where did you get the advice from and sort of find the right process, as you said. Were there board members helping you, were there someone who sort of had done it before?
How did you know what was the right process actually?
NH: I had a mentor, my series A VC. Jean-David from the fund ISAI is probably the best series A fund in France. I had the chance that we raised money with him in 2013. At the time there were probably like two VCs in France for series A's. And Jean-David was doing two deals a year. We really had the chance that we connected. We spent one year talking. I mean, we understand each other. We think the same way and he really trained and pushed us in the right directions for me to learn all that. But it took a lot of wall hitting to learn all that. So a few examples of that. I tried to hire a banker to help us with fundraising at the series B, and the series D, well at the series B actually.
And he said, no, he put a veto. He said, no. And I said, why? Because that's going to be helpful. And he said, listen, you go do it yourself. You're gonna learn. It's gonna be a nice skill for your next round and your next run because I had done the seed round, I've done the series A and he told me the way you did the series A is probably not the best optimal way to do it.
So go back now, but you go and yes, maybe you're going to raise a smaller round, but you're going to learn. And that's going to help you for the series C. It's going to help you for the exit. That's going to help you for your life or learn how to close deals. So that was one thing he did, pushing me to do it myself.
And something else that he did was, he was saying, without a banker, there's not going to be a misunderstanding between you and the VC. And the banker, because they want to maximize the valuation, because they want to maximize the round size, they can introduce some kind of misunderstanding regarding the ambition of the company or who is the founder. He probably is going to show your strengths, but the challenges of the team of the funder, maybe of the business, he's going to hide that.
And then, you close a transaction and you have what is called an oh shit board after that, where people who just invested, now the banker is not there in the boardroom, and they realize what company and what founder they invested in because before that there was a layer of a banker in between them and the company and the founders.
And Jean-David said, I don't want that to happen. So there's not going to be a misunderstanding, which when it happens, can actually kill the company. So he was making sure that doesn't happen and that I was learning. I think that did a lot to help me learn all these things.
FC: So getting a mentor and a good one early on, that's the key to at least success there. And so you mentioned closing deals, so let's continue on that. So you just recently closed a deal with eLamp and previously you also acquired Looop. So what's your strategy when you think about acquisitions, if you can share, obviously and maybe you want to use like eLamp as well as an example of that?
NH: Yeah, I can share a bit of it. So eLamp is a skills company, right? First, maybe we need to explain what eLamp does and why is it a synergy? And then we can try to conceptualize what we're doing with M&A and how I think of M&A. eLamp is a skills company. So it helps, customers build a dictionary of skills that works for the jobs in that company.
And then they have that company log the data of who in their workforce has what skill. So you have two steps. What are the skills that describe the jobs we have? And we're going to use that dictionary of skills then, and then you need to position your people on that dictionary. From there you can have a skills gap and it is the skills gap between the job, the skills your people have and the skills they should have for the job they currently have, the position they're holding. That is the skills gap that's used for the up-skilling use case.
And then there's a skills gap for a re-skilling use case, which is basically the same. It's just the difference is you are gonna look at the gap between the skills a person has and the skills that are required for their next job, not their current job. So if you're looking at the current job, it's upskilling. If it's the next job, especially if it's a lateral move, like not going up the leadership ladder, but making a step on the side. Typically, you're a thermic car engineer and you need to become an electric car engineer. So that is a re-skilling use case.
And last, the third use case is employability, which I push a lot. I would love our customers to really look at it in depth. It is asking yourself, does my workforce have the skills needed if they want to find a job tomorrow in the job market. And you have to see that that is the value of your workforce. So it's the value you're having. You could see that, well, I don't want to let them go. So why would I do that? Actually, it's way better, but CHROs understand that. I think we're going to see a lot of focus on that question too, but it's more the future when re-skilling, up-skilling is really the present. It's what people are focusing on right now.
So, eLamp does that very well. And we believe with 360Learning that with AI and generative AI, the way they have started, and we're now going to help them finish that, automate all that process, is a revolution. Because that skill matrix, like it's a matrix because you have skills and then you have people. And so it's a big, it's a lot of numbers because you want to quantify. Because obviously what I didn't mention is on each skill it's not 0 or 1. Someone can be level 1, level 2, level 3, level 4 on a different scale. So, you have that matrix. You need to fill it with 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 numbers.
And the thing is, in every industry right now, the world keeps moving really fast. There's innovation. So there AI, generative AI appears. You need to include it in your skill ontology. So that dictionary of skills keeps changing on a monthly basis in all industries. We don't realize how fast the world is changing, but when you look at the speed at which these skills ontology for each company, they need to update them. It's on a monthly basis and that really tells you how fast our world is evolving. So that was the main challenge that these skills matrices were changing so fast that companies were struggling to keep them up to date and to really use them. So we were skeptical with that whole skills first approach.
With generative AI, the game has changed. And that's why we chose eLamp because they had all the right infrastructure, R&D team and they already started to implement generative AI. Serving or helping, supporting, I would say, the L&D team or HR team in keeping their skills model up to date with minimal work, thanks to AI.
One example of that for everyone to understand. One feature that helps you do that is monitoring the competition job descriptions. So you're in an industry and you're monitoring in the industry, the job descriptions that are going out. And the AI notices that there's a new skill looking at this text. There's a new skill that is trending this month in these job descriptions. And we're going to push a notification to the HR team and tell them, hey, there's that new skill. Do you want to integrate it in your dictionary of skills? And if they say yes, then they need to say what population should have that skill and it creates a skill gap. And by creating the skills gap, it means they are now monitoring that skills gap and they're going to be able to close it with the learning platform, with 360Learning.
We're going to start sending courses to train people and help them acquire that new skill that has emerged in the market. So that's how eLamp plus 360Learning automate the way for a company to monitor and increase the skills in their workforce. Which is really like, it's never been seen, that level of automation and also such a powerful tool to upskill and reskill the workforce and close the skills gap almost automatically end to end.
So that's why we're doing it with eLamp.
Now to your question, why did we choose eLamp? The synergies here are obvious, right? Learning is the medicine. The skills gap and understanding the skills gap is like the doctor. So we thought, what happened if we put the doctor and the pharmacy in the same place?
The synergies are huge because of course we're integrating these two systems seamlessly, so that for the customer it works really well. That's why we made that acquisition.
Now, how do you think of acquisitions in general? I'm in touch with founders in the space. We screen more than 200 companies. We do that all the time. More often than not, there's a reason not to do the deal. I was talking with the eLamp team for, many, for a lot of time, like probably 18 months. I don't remember exactly, but it was long. And I stay in touch with these founders. And we have conversations and I learn, they learn.
And if at some point it's the right moment, the right, I don't know, there are so many dimensions like the cultural fit between the teams, the valuation, understanding their roadmap, their vision for their product, where is it going, and when there's a fit. And all that takes time building that fit, it's not built overnight.
So it's kind of the opposite as the fundraising process I was describing earlier. Because when a strategic buys a company, meaning there's a company like 360Learning buying a smaller company, it's very rarely out of FOMO in a two week process. Some companies hire a banker, they run a two week process like that. I don't think it's the best way to sell your company. I think the best way is to build a relationship, build a partnership, and after one year or two, the synergies are so obvious that the deal closes itself. Yeah.
FC: You raised generative AI and AI as a topic, so we can't continue without diving into that.
So first, overall, also when you look at, you know, startups and acquisitions, how much do you think it is hype and how much is actually sort of benefiting the learner like today as we speak?
NH: Well, there's definitely some hype with generative AI, but the hype doesn't mean there's nothing real. I think the technology is very promising and there already are some use cases. We let authors create courses almost automatically with AI. They just need to guide, give some inputs. And a lot of the work is done in the authoring tool, the tool to create courses. A lot of the work is done with the help of these generative AI models. We launched in beta like three, four months ago. We passed the 10, 000 courses created a month with Generative AI. So that is real. And it is at scale.
Now, I also believe that the technology is only at the beginning. It's only starting. And it's going to improve and improve at a very high pace. Maybe after this weekend even, since the pace is going to be a bit slower. But still, it's going to be fast. So, I think what we have right now is a lot of hype and some use cases, and in the future we'll have a lot of use cases and I guess still a lot of hype.
FC: And if you had to sort of summarize your learnings until now and give advice to like other startups in the EdTech field, like what would you say they should do when it comes to sort of integrating, using, leveraging AI?
NH: You know, it's a question I ask myself all the time. And so I decided to share; I created a Substack to share on that topic, and I'm going to share a post tomorrow on the UI and the UX.
And I think it's a very valid question. What is the impact of generative AI, which is more an infrastructure layer than a UX layer, but what's the impact of a change in that infrastructure layer on the UI and the UX? And a lot of people in product and product design would tell you,, software does way better than a chat already.
So it's not going to go back to being a chat because software is way better than a chat. When you send an email, you're not in a chat and say, hey, Gmail, can you create a new email for me? Because typing that on the keyboard would be a huge friction versus just clicking on a compose button in your Gmail interface.
That's the way I give it to my product management team, that's the way to think of building user interactions. I tell them; reading the screen is zero point of friction. Scrolling is one point. Clicking is 10 points, but pressing a keyboard key is 100 points and wearing a metaverse, Oculus kind of helmet is probably like 10, 000 points of friction and making a payment is even more.
But, if we stay on the usual things like keyboard click and I mean of course these points, it's not precise, it's like an image. It's like to give you an idea of the orders of magnitude of friction between reading, scrolling, clicking and keyboard. So the chat is really a huge friction because you're using your keyboard. And it is a big friction versus an interface like Gmail where I'm clicking to compose and I just stop typing. And now the AI is auto completing my email, saving me a lot of keyboard touches.
So that's one very popular view is; how are you going to embed generative AI in your software to make it smarter, faster, and keep reducing the frictions. And in the case of Gmail, reducing the number of key presses you need to make before your email is ready to send. So that is right. That is the initial thought.
It was mine too. But now I'm starting, I'm starting to think, I'm starting to think, well, you know, we're thinking like that because we're in software and we've been in software for more than a decade in my case, and some people two or three decades. And so we've built kind of a mental box for ourselves where that's how we think of interfaces, but how many people are capable of doing that?
I know people, not necessarily old people. I mean, they're lost. And if I think of myself, an app that I use like Spotify. I use Spotify, but I'm lost with the playlist. At the time I was creating playlists, I've stopped. I don't know. It's too complex for me. I keep losing them. I wouldn't even be able to tell you exactly why, but I can tell you it's what happened.
I didn't invest probably the five minutes that need to be invested to understand Spotify playlists. And I use that app on a daily basis and it's been probably five to 10 years. I don't even remember. It's been long. I didn't make the investment. Interacting with software is actually something pretty complex, pretty unnatural, and the number of people who are successful at it. I don't think we can say like 10 percent of the population is successful and 90 percent not successful, because even the ones that are successful, they're not making the investment with old software, as we can see with my example with Spotify.
And here we're talking about a consumer app that doesn't do a lot, but when you're thinking of B2B apps, B2B software, SaaS, or K12 software, that's going to do a lot more than Spotify. The complexity is high. And the TAM, the total addressable market, is limited by the ability of people to learn software interactions and software interfaces.
And there is a friction and that friction, we have to face it, we have to think outside of that box we built. That friction is high. What doesn't have a high friction is natural language because people use it and they use it when they talk to other people. And to my point around collaborative learning, the human being is built to interact with other humans and we have language.
And it's thousands of years of evolution that took us here. So it's a skill everybody has. And that's, so that's another viewpoint to say, hey, no, actually generative AI and that ability to express and understand natural language, might completely change the game as for software interfaces. I don't think there's going to be a chat, but maybe it's an opportunity to completely reinvent user interfaces. And I don't have the answer, but so when you ask me like, what should people building startups do right now? I think they should think of how generative AI is useful to reinvent user experience and interactions with the end user in a very simplified way. And when I think of that, I will give you an example, but I wouldn't be surprised that tomorrow, for instance I enter my car and my car is suddenly a self driving car.
And unlike a Tesla, it doesn't have that huge screen because that huge screen is the past. It's software. It's the past. Instead, maybe it just has, it just displays one address and maybe I can interact with just some facial expressions. Like, raising my eyebrow, and that means no, because it's close to what I would do.
And by the way, generative AI applies to language, but also to images, and maybe it can understand my sentiment. Maybe the way I'm going to look at it, it's going to know that it's not the right address. And I have nothing to do and it's completely seamless. So I believe that software is going to be changed at not just at the infra level, but that AI opens an opportunity to reinvent the user interface and user interactions. That's what I would do if I was raising a star, if I was starting a startup right now.
FC: And I completely agree with you. I think in discussing with early stage founders they're very much occupied with sort of all technology, you know, it's going to change everything for my tool service, whatever.
But they are actually not thinking about the user experience first. So I totally agree with you there.
FC: So, let's move on to sort of the future vision and outlook. If we look ahead in the next couple of months, or maybe years, so what's keeping you up at night?
NH: It's pretty much what we just said, like, what's the future of software? And I think it's going to change right now. So I think the question is, what does the future of software look like? And the future of learning specifically.
These are the two questions I'm asking myself, but I don't have definitive answers. I start with the use case. The use case I know; it's onboarding people in a company and I think that's not going to change. It's helping salespeople sell better. Maybe the way to sell is going to change. So the way to train sales is going to change, but you're still going to need to train people to sell better.
So I don't think these fundamental use cases of corporate learning, I don't think they're going to go. But maybe the interface, maybe everything's going to change about them. It's the question. I don't have the answer.
FC: And then you already shared a lot of advice for founders in startups.
Is there anything sort of that you haven't mentioned yet that you would say, okay, this is one thing I would really tell all the founders that they, you know, should think about when they run their startup.
NH: Yeah, I think something that's challenging with AI right now, and it's an advice I would give them too, is to build a product that's not completely going to work right now, but you're building a product for GPT-5 You're building a product for GPT-6 You're not building a product for GPT-4 And I see a lot of people thinking like if the technology was static.
And they think of some limitations that the LLM systems have right now, when instead, I think you should build for what they're going to be two years from now. In my experience, I've invested in some startups, it takes two years to find product market fit. But two years from now, technology is going to be nothing like what it is today.
If you don't want to lose product market fit during the course of these two years, you really need to build something. And I would be really excited if someone shows me an interface that doesn't look like anything I've seen and tells me about the use case it's addressing and tells me that it doesn't really work right now, but it's going to work really well for GPT-6 And already better for GPT-5 I would say, wow, that's brilliant.
FC: Yeah. We'll encourage all the founders to do that and get ready for GPT 6, which probably, well, we'll see, will come faster than we think or not. Things change so fast these days.
And the last question. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with our audience?
NH: I think we're good. We're living through fantastic times. It's time to build, take risks, imagine the future. There are some risks and we can be worried about the future, but we also have a lot of opportunities to build it. So, let's focus on building.
