Martijn Theuwissen and the price of an open classroom

Ten percent is an awkward number to give away. It is large enough to notice, small enough to argue about, and almost guaranteed to make a young company’s spreadsheet less cheerful. DataCamp had a student subscription that people were buying. At the end of 2016, its founders decided that teachers and their students should get the platform for free.

Martijn Theuwissen later helped explain that decision in writing. The academic plan had become a tenth of revenue. Dropping it meant choosing access before a dependable stream of payments. The company was still young; the choice followed long internal debates. There is something refreshingly concrete about this version of an educational mission. Someone had to remove a price.

That question of access runs through Theuwissen’s career. He co-founded DataCamp in Leuven, served as its CEO in 2019, and is now its co-founder and chief operating officer. He has worked across the product, content, marketing and sales sides of the business. The classroom keeps changing shape around him. The question of who can enter it has endured.

A summer project with an impatient student

DataCamp began in 2013 with Theuwissen, Jonathan Cornelissen and Dieter De Mesmaeker. Cornelissen had struggled to learn R, the programming language used for statistical work. Interactive websites existed for learning web development. He wanted an equivalent for data science. The three began working on it that summer in Leuven. A frustrating learning experience had supplied a business problem.

Theuwissen brought a master’s degree in Business Engineering from KU Leuven. He also served as a student representative and as vice-president for education at Ekonomika. Before helping build an online classroom, he had already taken an interest in how a university’s students were taught. The connection is modest, but it is more revealing than another entry on a founder’s résumé.

The original product offered a clear bargain: try something, see what happens, try again. A browser could put the exercise next to the explanation. For a beginner staring at a programming language, that matters. The distance between understanding a sentence and making a computer obey it can feel embarrassingly long. An immediate response gives the learner somewhere to begin.

The lesson has to find its students

By May 2015, Theuwissen was writing about a familiar learner’s dilemma: R or Python? His answer depended on the analytical task. This was practical guidance from a co-founder whose company then mainly offered R tutorials. The tool had to fit the work. Even at that stage, the classroom’s boundaries were wider than one language.

His advice to other training founders has been equally practical. “Focus on traction.” Building a course, he argued, could consume more than a hundred hours; a single social post would hardly guarantee students. Distribution brings learners, and learners bring feedback. A lesson can be beautifully prepared and still spend its life waiting to be discovered.

This makes marketing part of an education business’s daily work. Teachers need to reach students; course makers need to hear where those students get stuck. Theuwissen connects the two rather than treating the course launch as a finish line. It is a useful corrective to the pleasing fantasy that publishing something is the same as getting it used.

There is a second, less solemn clue to his way of thinking. In 2017 he published a piece titled “What World War 2 Can Teach You About Product Management,” introducing it with his interest in history and his work leading product at DataCamp. A product meeting apparently need not get all its metaphors from a software dashboard.

A classroom with the till switched off

The free-access decision gave that interest in education a financial consequence. Theuwissen described growing up with inexpensive education in Belgium and seeing a different system in the United States. The contrast sharpened his appreciation of access independent of someone’s background. A student’s available money became something the company could choose to work around.

The results extended well beyond the initial argument over revenue. In its September 2023 account, DataCamp reported that Classrooms had reached more than 900,000 students, across over 37,000 classrooms and 13,000 schools in more than 180 countries. Those figures describe that reported period, rather than a live counter. A free classroom, multiplied, can become a substantial part of a company’s educational footprint.

The same ambition appears in DataCamp’s partnership with the Mark Cuban Foundation’s AI Bootcamps. Theuwissen has spoken about giving both teachers and students the tools and curriculum to participate in the AI transformation. The foundation describes project-based learning and unlimited classroom seats. In practical terms, access includes room for the next student who wants to join.

A subscription company still needs subscriptions. The interesting thing here is the coexistence of commercial customers and a free route through the classroom door. A teacher should not have to turn every interested pupil into a purchasing decision. For a business devoted to teaching, that is a policy with a readily understandable human effect.

Several desks, then the chief executive’s chair

When Theuwissen formally became CEO on November 18, 2019, he had already spent seven months as interim chief executive. His announcement listed teams he had built and led in marketing, sales, product and content. He described plans to expand into data engineering, assessments and learner analytics. The accumulated experience was spread across several departments.

That year also put the instructor community into the company’s governance work. As interim CEO, he announced an instructor advisory board whose inaugural members included Allen Downey, Katharine Jarmul and Noah Gift. In his November statement, he committed to continuing work on recommendations from an independent third-party review. Managing a learning platform also meant listening to the people teaching on it.

Today, DataCamp identifies Cornelissen as CEO and Theuwissen as COO. Theuwissen’s current work includes helping enterprise clients with data and digital transformation. Titles mark chapters, but they do not quite capture this career’s breadth. Content, product and the customer’s organization all sit close together when the business sells the ability to do something new.

Theuwissen is based in Hasselt, Belgium. The company’s reach is international: DataCamp currently reports 21 million learners and a presence in more than 180 countries. Theuwissen’s working subject has grown from a browser exercise into the question of how people throughout an organization acquire useful skills.

The data department has more neighbours

In 2020, Theuwissen argued that data knowledge confined to a small group created communication problems elsewhere in a company. Marketing, commercial and product teams could gain new capabilities as colleagues learned SQL and visualization. His emphasis fell on continuous, measurable learning. A single training day would struggle to keep pace with the work.

This view gives data fluency a social dimension. A specialist can produce an analysis, but other people still have to understand it, challenge it and decide what to do next. Teaching more colleagues changes the conversation around the result. It gives them better questions to ask, as well as more ways to find answers themselves.

By January 2024, the conversation had expanded to AI literacy. Theuwissen described DataCamp colleagues using AI to investigate email performance and the content that resonated with learners. The people doing that work did not necessarily have technical backgrounds. His interest lay in what ordinary teams could actually accomplish with the new tools.

The example is comfortably unglamorous. Open rates and click-through rates rarely get invited to a technology premiere. Yet this is where workplace learning earns its time: in an existing task, with familiar material, producing something a colleague can use. Theuwissen’s account keeps the discussion close to that everyday scale.

A tutor that can change the pace

In November 2025, Theuwissen announced DataCamp’s acquisition of Optima and the arrival of its founder, Yusuf Saber, as chief AI officer. He described an AI learning experience that could adapt exercises and explanations to a learner’s skills, role and goals. A marketing learner could work with campaign data; someone in finance could encounter portfolio examples.

The proposal addresses a familiar classroom difficulty. People arrive with different knowledge, and an explanation that helps one can delay another. An adaptive course promises to spend more time where a learner struggles and less where the material is already familiar. That promise has to be fulfilled in the lesson itself, where patience and clarity count.

Theuwissen’s January 2026 predictions returned to careers. He argued that people at different career stages would need to prioritize learning AI skills, including those midway through working life. In a separate review episode, he and Cornelissen revisited their earlier predictions. Looking back at a forecast is a useful habit in a field that constantly offers new ones.

At RADAR 11x in October 2026, Theuwissen placed AI in a longer sequence of programming changes, from assembly through higher-level languages. “AI is just the next abstraction layer.” His argument was that people who understood underlying concepts had been better equipped to move between those layers. Easier interfaces still leave something worth understanding beneath them.

“AI is just the next abstraction layer.”

Martijn Theuwissen · RADAR 11x, October 2026

The classroom meets the World Cup

For a less formal demonstration of his interest in learning behaviour, consider his World Cup post. Theuwissen shared an analysis comparing DataCamp learning during matches with the same time windows in preceding weeks. Learning dropped about 30% across the countries examined. Morocco’s engagement fell 73% during its matches. Football had found an effective way to interrupt homework.

Belgium was the exception: engagement rose. The explanation involved University of Antwerp students working through a course assignment. Theuwissen credited Pieter Moors for the analysis and treated the exception with a smile. National enthusiasm is one explanation for a chart. A deadline is another, and it can be remarkably persuasive.

It is a small episode, but it suits this story. The learner is a person with a working day, a match to watch, a task to complete and something still to understand. Theuwissen’s career has moved through several company roles and successive technologies. His classroom remains full of people whose attention has to be earned. Sometimes, even the World Cup must wait.