Lefteris Ntouanoglou and the education of a company

Lefteris Ntouanoglou was close to moving to America. The business was pulling him west; the product kept him in Thessaloniki. Around 2013-2014, he recalls, he had reached the point of preparing to relocate with his family. Then he reconsidered. Someone needed to stay with the software and the people building it. He stayed.

That decision offers a useful way into Schoox, the workplace learning company he co-founded. Its story runs between a Greek development base and an American market, between an engineer’s attention to the system and an executive’s obligation to make a business from it. The distance between those jobs can be considerable, even when they occupy the same chair.

An engineer with another set of questions

Ntouanoglou was born in Stuttgart to Greek parents and moved to Greece to study engineering. As a boy, he had learned BASIC on an Amstrad CPC 464. The machine used tapes, an arrangement that gave early computer enthusiasts an education in patience alongside programming. His eventual choice of electrical and computer engineering left room for several interests under one academic roof.

At Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, that technical education developed into doctoral work in diffractive optics and computer-generated holography. His research involved algorithms for calculating holographic patterns. In 1998, he received an innovation award from Germany’s Association of Holographic Techniques for an anti-counterfeiting system combining a coded holographic label with a web application.

It is an unexpectedly physical beginning for a career now associated with online learning. A holographic label concerns the identity of an object. A learning platform concerns what a person knows and can do. Both require engineering beneath an interface that someone else must be able to understand. The subjects differ; the demand for a workable system survives the change.

Before Schoox, he worked at OTS SA, a software business serving the public sector, taking on management responsibilities as well as technical work. He also earned an MBA. His career was accumulating two kinds of vocabulary: the language of making something function and the language of keeping an organization functioning around it.

America required introductions

Schoox dates its founding to 2012. The company’s early proposition was a learning system designed around the learner, with mobile access built into the thinking. Ntouanoglou brought product and technology experience to the venture. Turning that experience into an American business also required help from people who understood the market.

He has been explicit about that debt. The International Accelerator helped Schoox establish US connections and raise its first round of capital. In his account, understanding America mattered even more than those introductions alone. “It all started with them,” he said. A founder can arrive with working software and still have much of the commercial education ahead of him.

That acknowledgment gives the story some welcome company. Founders are often described as if they travel alone, carrying conviction in a cabin bag. Schoox’s path involved a network. A connection could create a conversation; a conversation could explain a customer’s expectations. The useful lesson lay in learning how the market worked, then making decisions with that knowledge.

Ntouanoglou’s LinkedIn profile includes a recommendation from Angelos Angelou, who describes helping bring Schoox to Austin. The same profile offers a quieter clue to the founder’s thinking: his MBA gave him a chance to test management methods he had previously used instinctively. Books and practice were allowed to argue with one another.

A sandwich chain tests the theory

In June 2016, Schoox announced a deployment that made the scale of its customer problem unusually clear. The University of Subway had rolled out to 540,000 users in 110 countries over 30 days. The announcement put the chain’s footprint at more than 44,000 locations. Those are figures from that rollout, a snapshot of what the teams were handling then.

A franchise network makes organizational complexity tangible. There are locations, local operators and responsibilities that must fit together. Training needs to arrive in the right place without requiring every employee to understand the machinery behind it. A sandwich may be assembled in front of you; the training infrastructure has rather more places to hide a complication.

Ntouanoglou emphasized the implementation work and the decision to design for organizations of that complexity. The launch required coordination across Subway’s technology, training and operations teams and Schoox’s support team. The achievement belonged to a working relationship as well as a piece of software.

By 2023, his public conversations still returned to that terrain. At Learning Technologies, he discussed Schoox’s work with multi-unit, multi-store and franchise organizations, alongside plans for developing skills functionality. The customer structure remained part of the product conversation. The next question was how to connect a person’s place in that structure with the skills they needed.

Growth brings its own homework

On June 29, 2021, Schoox announced a strategic growth investment from Vista Equity Partners’ Endeavor Fund. The stated plans included expanding the product suite, adding resources for learning teams and investing in Schoox’s workforce and customer support. A bigger business would need more capacity around the technology.

Ntouanoglou also described an obligation to preserve the company’s culture as it grew. His argument connected care for employees with care for customers. That is a promise whose practical consequences live in hiring, support and product decisions. Investment supplies resources; the daily work still decides how those resources reach a customer.

Growth can also leave its marks on a screen. At Schoox, designer Paul Hershey worked on an interface made unwieldy by years of feature additions and contractual changes. The response involved a design center, a shared design system and customer research. The work proceeded through improvements to the existing product, feature by feature.

This is a less glamorous chapter than a funding announcement, and an illuminating one. Every addition can be reasonable on its own. Together, additions can make a product harder to use. The work included expanding a three-person design team to nineteen and establishing disciplines including user research and UX writing. A company built to help people learn had its own interface to reconsider.

For a founder who had chosen to remain near development, that work brings the original decision into focus. Staying close to a product means living with its accumulated choices, including the ones that eventually need revisiting. The customer encounters the whole application at once. The builder remembers each feature separately. Making those perspectives meet takes a willingness to examine something familiar through the eyes of a person trying to finish a task.

The learner gets a better view

In May 2024, Ntouanoglou introduced a revised Schoox experience following a multiyear research and development effort. At that point, he described a community of more than 3,000 customers and 20 million learners. The changes addressed how learners encountered their training, followed their progress and found opportunities to develop.

The announced features included clearer separation between assigned and self-enrolled learning, recommendations related to interests, and dashboards showing skills and career progress. AI-enabled skills mapping, including an integration with Visier Skills Intelligence, connected jobs and content with skills. For the person opening the application, those connections were intended to make the next useful step easier to find.

“Learning becomes strategic the moment you can show how building a skill moves a business metric.”

Lefteris Ntouanoglou

Recognition followed in another register. In 2025, he was named a finalist for EY’s Entrepreneur Of The Year Gulf South award. The distinction was a finalist selection, a public milestone in a career whose earlier chapters had involved engineering, research and learning how to sell software abroad.

What happened after the course?

By 2026, Ntouanoglou was pressing a specific argument: training should be designed with the business result in view. Revenue, retention, productivity and customer satisfaction could give learning teams a starting point. From there, they could identify the relevant skills and decide what development should help people accomplish.

His January HRTech Cube conversation framed AI as a way to connect learning, skills and performance information. The ambition moves beyond a record that someone attended or completed something. It asks whether the development effort can be related to an operational change, and whether the next decision can be better informed.

In June, he discussed the problem with analyst John Leh on The Talented Learning Show. One example concerned a low skills-assessment score: the learning application should respond with appropriate training. Information becomes useful when it changes what happens next. A record passed between systems can leave the employee waiting for someone to notice it.

He also questioned the industry’s preoccupation with elaborate skills classifications. For a restaurant server, communication becomes a more practical topic when tied to order accuracy or customer interactions. His point was to put a job and its context around the skill. A beautifully organized taxonomy can still leave someone wondering what to do on the next shift.

His later Growth Perspectives conversation continued the discussion of learning, career development and outcomes, while returning to mentors and the values of philotimo and meraki. Technical ambition and the human relationships around a business remained in the same conversation. Years after deciding to stay near the product, Ntouanoglou was still asking how its pieces should connect.

There is an appropriate demand in his current project. A company devoted to learning has to keep examining its own answers. The course ends. The employee returns to work. What happens there is the question that keeps the engineer occupied.