Alex Young and the art of having another go

In New York, Alex Young finally ran out of things to do. A blizzard had kept him inside the apartment building where he was staying. He could not get to the gym. His usual stream of work and side projects had been interrupted. For someone who likes a full calendar, the weather had committed an act of insubordination.

Young remembers it as a weekend in early 2017. With the day unexpectedly cleared, he began thinking five years ahead, then ten, then twenty. The futures he wanted kept returning to the same place: running a business that could help people learn on a global scale. He had already built businesses around another demanding career. Now he was considering giving the idea his full attention.

The appealing part was the challenge. He enjoyed the work he was doing; leaving would mean surrendering something he valued. Yet his side projects had become the thing he looked forward to when he returned home. The question had grown larger than how to fit another task into an evening. He needed to decide which work would get the years ahead.

Virti, founded in 2018, became that decision made tangible. Today Young is its founder and former CEO, a creator of learning businesses who keeps returning to a fairly ordinary human predicament. You can understand something perfectly well in advance and still struggle when it is your turn to do it. His answer has been to make another attempt easier to arrange.

The snowstorm is a pleasing beginning for someone so interested in productivity. A day that refused to be productive gave him room to choose a direction. Even an enthusiast for efficiency occasionally benefits from a city cancelling his plans. He describes that pause as a chance to reflect, and the distinction matters: the business followed years of experiments, then a moment to decide what they meant.

A bedroom, a browser, a business

Long before that weekend, there was a teenager who liked video games and wanted to know how computers worked. Young taught himself to code at fourteen. His father had a property business, and making websites offered a practical reason to learn. Later he built computers too. He learned by trying things, breaking things and returning to them, rather than by taking a formal coding course.

That is a useful apprenticeship for entrepreneurship. A website either does what you intended or presents you with an extremely specific objection. It is difficult to negotiate with a broken link. Young's interest in technology survived into his university years in Bristol, where it also offered a way to earn money without taking on the kind of outside work that would swallow his study time.

He built an events, conference and education business while still a student. The venture became Medvent, running events in Bristol and London. He later built an online education company, Meddicle, around preparation for exams and interviews. He has said he scaled that second venture to seven figures in revenue while continuing his day job. These were working businesses, with customers and practical demands, before Virti existed.

The names preserve a little of the early enthusiasm. Young has admitted finding Meddicle amusing at the time. A founder must eventually explain the product, the market and the finances; occasionally he must also explain what seemed funny when he bought the domain. The humour feels consistent with a public persona that makes room for being a nerd without treating it as a solemn distinction.

His mother was a teacher, and education was central to the household in which he grew up. But Young's account of learning is less about effortless brilliance than about finding a workable method. He has called himself a “massive learning nerd”. The business books, the coding experiments and the early ventures all gave that enthusiasm somewhere to go.

The trouble with a beautiful notebook

Young's writing contains a confession that will disappoint anyone selling elaborate revision stationery. In his first year at university, he copied lecture slides, wrote down what was said and reread the results. He failed an exam. The pages were filling up, but the method was failing its owner. In his second year, he changed the way he studied.

His account of the replacement is practical. Prepare for the material. Turn it into questions. Test what you can retrieve. Return to the questions over time. He still used the underlying teaching material; he stopped treating the production of notes as the central achievement. In his telling, the change helped him improve his results while spending less time studying.

There is a personal preference underneath the technique. Young wants to know whether the time is earning its keep. He has joked about being “probably quite lazy”, an unexpectedly good line from someone with so many projects. The joke explains something about his approach: he would like a useful outcome without performing every customary ceremony on the way there.

It also helps explain the businesses. An events company makes access to teaching easier. An online learning company lets preparation travel beyond a room. Virti carries the problem into situations that require a response, a decision or a conversation. Across those changes, Young keeps asking how to make the learner do something with what they know.

Give the conversation a rehearsal

Virti offers simulations, interactive video and AI roleplay for workplace learning. The situations now include sales conversations, customer service and leadership. A person can rehearse a difficult exchange, receive feedback and repeat it. The product has been available through desktop and mobile devices as well as virtual reality equipment, giving the idea more routes into someone's working day.

Young describes skills such as empathy, communication and leadership as power skills. That wording puts some weight behind abilities often filed under the rather apologetic heading of soft skills. In a sales call or a difficult review, listening closely and explaining clearly can determine what happens next. They deserve a place in preparation, alongside the technical knowledge of the job.

There is a familiar unevenness in how people acquire them. One newcomer gets a generous mentor and regular feedback. Another is largely left to work it out. Young has repeatedly argued for making experiential learning accessible and for collecting information that helps learners understand where to improve. The promise is specific: more chances to practise, with a clearer account of what happened during the attempt.

The financial and public milestones came quickly. Virti secured a $2 million seed round in 2019 and a $10 million Series A in 2021. TIME included the company in its Best Inventions of 2020. Those markers record outside interest in the business; they also help explain how a founder's experiments grew into a company with the resources to develop a wider training platform.

Virti's current company history marks the launch of Virtual Humans in 2022 and reports more than 500 organisations reached across over 30 countries in 2026. Young's original ambition to make learning travel is visible in that geographic spread. The company has moved into several workplace settings, keeping rehearsal at the centre while changing the kind of conversation being rehearsed.

*Virti’s reported reach. Funding is company capital, not Young’s personal wealth.

A game jam belongs on the calendar

A learning company has to decide how it will learn together. Young's writing about company culture is unusually concrete on this point. Virti introduced quarterly Game Jams, giving colleagues a chance to work in groups on a passion project outside their usual work. The project could be technical or otherwise. The purpose was to try something new and get to know the people doing it with you.

For a team spread across countries and time zones, this made sociability something to organise deliberately. Young also described asynchronous video updates, informal video coffees and different teams bringing their own character to company meetings. These are modest arrangements, but they address a real feature of remote work: familiarity seldom arrives simply because everybody has been added to the same channel.

He wrote about a Virti Operating System, VOS2, that connected an individual's priorities to a team's quarterly focus and the wider mission. He argued for explaining growth plans to employees, making company knowledge easy to find and helping new hires understand how values apply in practice. An expanding company, in his account, owes people enough information to decide whether its next phase suits them.

That is an interesting concern for someone who chose to change his own career. Young allows for the possibility that an employee might prefer the smaller organisation they originally joined. Growing quickly creates new jobs, expectations and relationships. His advice gives those changes a human scale, rather than assuming everyone must find a bigger company automatically more appealing.

“I think the most important metric people should track is self-development.”Alex Young

The founder takes his own homework

Young's public teaching gives him another place to test his ideas. He hosts The Human Performance Podcast, writes the Sunday Shockwave newsletter and publishes videos about learning, productivity and building businesses. His website advertises a newsletter audience of more than 20,000 readers. The subjects have also expanded to AI tools, coding and the practical work of making software.

For his 2022 TEDxUniversityofBristol talk, he described setting himself a challenge: become better at speaking to a camera and explaining complicated topics simply. He started a public YouTube channel and committed to a weekly video about learning. Someone selling the value of deliberate practice had found a reasonably unforgiving way to demonstrate it. A camera is patient, but playback can be terribly honest.

The small details are revealing. He has written that he prepared for the TED talk using stories from his experience rather than trying to perfect every word, while also looking after a puppy. He says he reads around a hundred books a year. His interests include video games and running; he has completed the New York and Tokyo marathons. There is plenty of repetition in that collection, and also plenty of play.

His conversations bring in people who have pursued demanding projects of their own. Astronaut Scott Parazynski has been a guest on his podcast. Young has spoken admiringly about the founders of Calm, Michael Acton Smith and Alex Tew, and their persistence in building a business. He treats these stories as material for learning, with the guest's experience doing more of the work than the host's credentials.

The public work continues. His speaker programme listed a February 2026 World of Learning session on improving sales and leadership with AI roleplay and coaching. His recent writing explores tools for coding, research, automation and video production. The teenager making websites has kept a hand in the workshop, even as the workshop has acquired considerably more machinery.

There is a smaller invitation on his personal site, too: if you are in Bristol, or he is visiting your city, he offers to buy a coffee when the logistics work. It is a charmingly practical footnote to an interest in global learning. A conversation still needs a time and a place. For all the systems, simulations and schedules, Young keeps leaving room for another person to turn up.