Jonathan Cornelissen

The Newsweek Profile

The educator who scaled a classroom to ten million

Jonathan Cornelissen runs a smaller schedule than he used to. After six years as the founding chief executive of DataCamp, the online platform he co-founded in 2013 to teach people how to work with data, he stepped back from the top job in 2019 and shifted his attention to early-stage investing. These days he puts money and advice into startups in education, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, and writes for other founders about the things he learned the hard way - hiring, equity, and what actually makes a company worth building.

What has not changed is the thread running through all of it. Cornelissen keeps returning to the same idea he started with: that hard, technical skills should be learnable by ordinary people, and that most learning tools make the process more painful than it needs to be. DataCamp was his answer to that, and by the time he handed off the CEO role it had grown into one of the largest data-education platforms in the world - more than 10 million registered learners, 200,000 paying subscribers, 2,500 enterprise customers, and over $50 million in annual recurring revenue.

A frustration that became a company

The origin is unglamorous, which is part of why he tells it plainly. During his PhD in financial econometrics at KU Leuven in Belgium, Cornelissen had to teach himself R, the statistical programming language. He found it slow going. Then, working as a teaching assistant covering R and introductory statistics, he watched non-technical students hit the same wall he had. He went looking for an online resource that could teach this material in a way that felt engaging and let people move at their own pace, whenever they wanted.

He could not find one. So he and his co-founders built it. That gap - the absence of an effective, engaging way to learn data science online - is the whole premise of DataCamp. The product decision that followed was to put the coding environment directly in the browser, mixing short video with hands-on exercises so learners write and run real code from the first minutes.

He believes that bet personally. In an era when a lot of technology is pitched as a way to remove human labor, Cornelissen built a company on the opposite wager: that teaching millions of people the very skills machines were supposed to make redundant would matter more, not less. The single introductory R course he authored has been completed by more than a million learners, which is a strange and specific kind of teaching reach - a lecture hall the size of a city.

How he actually works

Cornelissen describes himself as an introvert who overthinks, and he has built a working style around that rather than against it. Instead of polishing ideas in private, he tends to share half-formed ones out loud and let debate sharpen them. He leans on first-principles thinking - going back to the underlying assumptions and the data instead of following whatever is fashionable - which is the same instinct that got him through learning R in the first place. To keep learning while running a company left him little time for deep reading, he leaned on audiobooks to stay in a constant state of input.

Ask him about his biggest mistakes and he does not reach for a product misstep or a missed market. He points at hiring. His most expensive errors, he has said, were the wrong people - and that experience hardened into a rule he now repeats to other founders.

It is advice that sounds obvious and almost never gets followed, which is probably why he keeps saying it. For Cornelissen the team is not a means to the mission; it is most of the mission, and most of whether the work is any good to do day to day.

From Antwerp to New York

The path there was not a straight line through Silicon Valley. Cornelissen was born in Antwerp, Belgium, and studied Greek and mathematics in high school before moving into commercial engineering and then a doctorate in financial econometrics, both at KU Leuven. Along the way he co-founded an earlier venture, Sagio.be, and spent a stint lecturing at the Free University of Brussels. DataCamp eventually moved its center of gravity to New York, where he is now based, and where the company built out its enterprise business selling data training to large organizations.

That enterprise turn is a big part of how the numbers got large. Individual learners came for the courses; companies came because they had whole workforces that needed to become fluent in data, and few good ways to get them there. DataCamp's pitch - measurable data literacy, skill tracks, certifications - fit a moment when nearly every business was being told it had to become "data-driven" without being told how.

What he is building now

Since leaving the CEO seat, Cornelissen has turned into a backer of other people's beginnings. His angel portfolio spans the areas he cares about and knows - education, AI, and crypto - and includes companies such as Clever Girl Finance, Perch.fit and Two Front. He is candid about being drawn to crypto for reasons beyond returns, viewing blockchain as a possible counterweight to financial centralization and internet censorship.

He also writes. On his personal site and on Medium he publishes the kind of practical, unromantic material that early founders rarely get straight - mental models for angel investing, how startup equity and liquidation preferences actually work, notes for first-time CEOs. It reads less like thought leadership and more like a former operator leaving behind field notes.

Put together, the shape of his career is consistent even as the job titles change. He learned something difficult, found the tools for learning it lacking, and decided the fix was worth building. Then he did it at a scale most teachers never get near. Now he spends his time helping other people build their own version of that - which, for someone who says the team is what matters most, is a fitting second act.