Jason Field’s course history contains an agreeable complication for anyone who likes a founder to arrive fully formed. He studied web development, user experience, product management and data analytics through BrainStation, the company he was already running. The chief executive had homework. Somewhere in that arrangement is a more useful account of entrepreneurship than the familiar story in which a person knows everything, starts a business and explains the rest to an audience.
Field wanted instruction himself. He wanted enough understanding to work with digital specialists and lead a team with some credibility. That desire became the starting point for BrainStation, established in 2012. It also gave him something valuable to carry into the business: a customer’s impatience with learning that never quite reaches the work.
There is a practical advantage to occupying both seats. A course has to survive the learner’s calendar as well as the company’s ambitions. Someone with a full working week needs a reason to surrender an evening. Field’s career has kept returning to that small, demanding transaction.
An evening, not a disappearing act
By November 2013, BrainStation was preparing a January program built around twelve weeks of part-time study. The advertised price was about $3,500. Small classes and projects were part of the offer. Duncan McCall, Apoorv Gupta, Field and Alex Karasyov were identified as co-founders of the venture. Its appeal depended on fitting education around a life already in progress.
Field’s argument was plain: students could keep their jobs and income while discovering whether coding interested them. That made exploration less punishing. A person could learn something useful without first announcing a complete reinvention to an employer, a landlord and everyone at dinner.
The price still required a serious commitment. Field acknowledged the difficulty of paying it at once, and the early program offered a payment arrangement through a financial institution. His attention to that detail matters. Education can sound wonderfully accessible in a presentation and feel rather different when the bill arrives.
The company’s teaching model also began in smaller pieces. Field later described testing short events and workshops before investing in a campus. He treated the educational approach as something to try with people, revise and try again. A roomful of learners could answer questions that a business plan could only phrase elegantly.
His term for the approach was agile learning. The point was to keep the content and methods responsive as technology changed. Building a school this way creates an unusual obligation: the organization teaching people to adapt must keep adapting its own lessons. A syllabus cannot simply be admired into relevance.
A school acquires a bigger address book
Field’s earlier work had been at Lululemon, including time in Australia and New Zealand. His original ambitions lay in retail strategy. He wanted digital mentorship to help pursue them. BrainStation offered a route into that knowledge, then became the work itself. He also recalled meeting a prospective student at Bonnaroo who subsequently introduced him to Konrad Group.
Konrad acquired BrainStation in 2014. Field stayed involved in building the brand, and the relationship gave the education business access to an established technology consultancy. His TEDxYouth@Toronto biography describes his work on expansion beyond Toronto, including Vancouver, New York and Costa Rica. The founder’s own learning problem was travelling rather well.
There was a useful fit between practical education and people building digital products for a living. Practitioners could bring the questions they encountered at work into a classroom. Learners could ask about the decisions behind the finished result. Field’s public account of the company consistently returns to that proximity.
The physical setting developed its own character. BrainStation’s earlier Toronto campus occupied the former Global Village Backpackers hostel at King and Spadina. Quantum Coffee and a shared working area sat at street level. A building once organized around temporary stays had become a place where people came to change what they could do next.
Inside the business, early staff described a month of cross-training that included customer service and campus operations. Educators came from industry, with hands-on projects central to the teaching. Field’s instruction to them was to approach students as they would a new hire. That comparison brought a useful standard into the room: could this person become more capable of doing the work?
Leave space on the whiteboard
Running a learning company brings an awkward possibility: the person with the title may still need to listen. Field has described strategy discussions in which younger or less experienced employees can supply useful ideas. The question is who understands the problem, rather than who has accumulated the longest introduction.
In his account of departmental meetings, roughly thirty percent of the time had structure and seventy percent remained flexible. Bigger annual leadership meetings were more organized. Sometimes a casual conversation became a short whiteboard session and a new strategy to test. The method left room for a promising thought to develop before an agenda could politely escort it out.
He also put limits around enthusiasm. An appealing idea needs to be considered alongside budgets, resources and other commitments. Senior colleagues carry information that the rest of the group may not have. Their contribution is to bring that context into the conversation. A whiteboard is generous; the operating budget tends to be more particular.
“More action. Less talking!”Jason Field, on strategy meetings
The syllabus keeps moving
By 2022, Field was discussing product leadership as a skill relevant to professionals across industries. The curriculum included roadmaps, Agile processes, stakeholder relationships and design thinking. It also covered developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The intended learner did not need a senior title to begin taking responsibility.
His explanation emphasized understanding whether a technology could create value for users and an organization. That is a useful discipline in a field fond of impressive vocabulary. A leader has to ask what a tool does, how it works and whether it helps solve the problem in front of the team. Curiosity needs a practical destination.
Field’s own course-taking provides a personal counterpart to that view. He has recommended structured learning as a way to establish foundations, followed by continued self-teaching. He has even encouraged prospective customers to find that foundation elsewhere if another organization suits them. The argument is about getting one’s bearings before wandering further.
For someone already working, the relevant comparison is the time required to reach useful understanding. Searching independently can be productive; it can also leave a beginner unsure which question to ask next. Field’s approach gives mentorship and feedback a central role. An instructor can help a learner distinguish a productive difficulty from a very long detour.
There was a software side to the classroom, too. In 2019, Field discussed Synapse, BrainStation’s learning platform, on the Framework podcast. It gave learners access to live lectures, lessons and interaction with industry professionals. The company was building a place for the learning to continue beyond a particular room.
That adds another dimension to his role as a customer of his own business. Teaching involves a sequence of encounters: the explanation, the attempt, the question and the chance to try again. A platform has to support those moments without becoming an extra subject the student must master. For Field, the education business therefore reaches into both the human relationship and the tools that help sustain it. Each needs to make the next step easier to take.
The present company emphasizes AI and digital skills training for professionals and enterprise teams, with studios in New York, London and Toronto. It reports more than 40,000 professionals certified. That figure describes certifications, a specific measure of the work. Behind it lies the recurring task of making a lesson useful to someone with an actual job.
Events remain part of Field’s attention. At the beginning of 2026, he reported that BrainStation had delivered more than 200 industry events during 2025, with fifty already scheduled to start the new year. The announced participants included people from Google, Meta, Shopify, Stripe and Wise. The invitation still depended on bringing working professionals together to exchange something they could use.
Always learning. Preferably on time.
Field has been candid about having to develop alongside his company. In 2020, he said he had been twenty-three when BrainStation started and described the challenge of maturing quickly enough to keep pace with its growth. It is an admission with more texture than a polished account of precocious certainty.
His shorter answers supply a few human particulars. A favorite city: London, where his public professional profile now places him. A film: The Godfather. A book recommendation: Guns, Germs, and Steel. A pet peeve: people who arrive late without explaining why. Even a business devoted to learning new things apparently has room for the old courtesy of turning up.
Asked for his formula for success, he supplied three letters: “ABL. Always be learning.” It could easily become a slogan. His course history gives it some substance. The CEO had put himself through the same kind of education he was asking other working adults to make time for.
That is where Field’s story remains interesting. Responsibility does not remove the need for instruction. A title does not settle every question. Someone still has to find a person who understands the subject, protect an evening and begin. He built a company around that process, then kept a place for himself inside it.