In the summer of 2014, Nicolas Hernandez took time off and discovered a problem with the company he was building. Some customers were unhappy. Explaining why proved unexpectedly difficult. The relevant conversations were scattered through individual inboxes. People had fragments of the story; assembling them required another round of asking around. A business devoted to helping people learn had developed a rather awkward relationship with its own knowledge.
His response became part of 360Learning’s operating philosophy: make business information accessible, so people can make decisions without a pilgrimage through the organization. Email had turned context into private property. Sharing it would redistribute something more consequential than messages. It would redistribute the ability to act.
There is a career in that small episode. Hernandez, who also goes by Nick, co-founded 360Learning and led it as CEO before becoming chairman. He is now building Jupi, a company concerned with how groups make decisions. Across both ventures, he keeps returning to a wonderfully inconvenient question for anyone seated at the head of a table: how much does the person at the head actually know?
The philosophy arrived by post
Long before he was rearranging workplace authority, education had rearranged his family’s prospects. His parents came to France from South America as students. They met in a university residence, and Hernandez says he spent his first year of life there. In his telling, study belonged to the family’s everyday culture. It offered opportunity, and it could also be enjoyable.
He remembers working through mathematics exercises as though they were a game. That recollection contains a useful correction to the effortless-prodigy story. He says he worked a great deal; he simply liked the work. The distinction matters to someone who would eventually sell companies a different experience of learning. Effort becomes easier to sustain when curiosity supplies some of the fuel.
He attended École polytechnique and studied philosophy alongside engineering and computer science. The philosophy was a correspondence course: lessons arrived through the post, essays went back the same way, and feedback followed weeks later. A student could already communicate online while waiting for his education to complete a round trip through the mail. The inconvenience was educational in its own right.
Hernandez also tried banking. He left after about a year. An impressive academic route had delivered him to a professional destination that failed to hold his interest. His eventual business would come from a combination of experiences: affection for study, irritation with how it was delivered, and dissatisfaction with workplace training. There was plenty to question before there was anything to sell.
“I just loved studying.”
Nicolas Hernandez, Edtech Insiders interview
The customer who gave the idea a job
Guillaume Alary, a friend from school, became a collaborator. Their early project, Myrtilla, dealt with visualizing data. It proved difficult to turn the technology into a business. Sébastien Mignot joined the effort, and the team explored knowledge tests, trying schools, teachers and museums as potential customers. The eventual corporate learning company was still several changes of direction away.
The useful turn came with Orange. An early contract in January 2013, worth €5,000, paid for a way to create social training. The founders put money into search advertising and began finding more leads. Later that year came a €1.2 million funding round. After the speculative applications, a customer had given the technology a practical assignment.
The amounts belong in different columns. Investment finances a search; a paying customer tells you something about the result. For Hernandez and his colleagues, the small contract made a claim that the larger sums could never make on their own: somebody had a use for what they were building. An unglamorous purchase order can be an unusually eloquent document.
Different currencies, different purposes. A customer contract and two funding rounds - shown as milestones, not comparable revenues.
A quiet room with 800 rules
As 360Learning grew, Hernandez helped develop a management framework called Convexity. By 2017, he described more than 800 documented working practices in Trello. People could propose a practice, have it reviewed by their team, and seek feedback from other teams before it entered the wider system. Decentralization, it turned out, could generate quite a reading list.
The details were revealing. Workrooms were intended for concentration; colleagues were expected to avoid interrupting one another. Leadership itself was treated as something people could learn through practices such as listening and giving useful feedback. Even the wording of feedback received attention. Dismissive phrases were poor substitutes for an argument someone could act on.
He has also described a working culture intended to make room for people who do not dominate conversations. Written exchanges give an idea somewhere to be considered beyond the instant in which somebody says it aloud. That is a concrete reason to care about the mechanics of communication: a colleague’s contribution should have a chance to travel even when the colleague prefers a quiet room.
These choices make his view of freedom more interesting. Autonomy requires a usable arrangement: information that can be found, responsibilities that can be understood, and feedback that helps the next attempt. A workplace can remove a layer of permission and still leave people stranded. The documentation was supposed to give them somewhere to stand.
Hernandez’s account has a demanding side, too. He has acknowledged that a highly transparent workplace will not suit everyone. The expectation is that people own a defined area and answer for the outcome. Low authority comes paired with high accountability. A person gets room to decide and a clear reason to care whether the decision works.
The colleague becomes the teacher
The software pursued a related idea. Within a company, useful expertise often belongs to people employed to do a particular job. A training department can help turn that expertise into something colleagues can use. The practitioner supplies the substance; the platform gives it a form that can travel.
In a 2015 interview, Hernandez offered the example of hairdressers filming a technical procedure, allowing an expert to assess the work remotely. It is a better illustration than a grand declaration about the future of education. Someone performs a task. Someone else can see it, question it and help improve it. The learning has an identifiable purpose and another human being attached.
That emphasis also explains his impatience with treating the move from classrooms to screens as the whole achievement. In his writing about blended learning, he argued that a lecture and an instructor-prepared digital module can preserve the same one-way relationship. Changing the delivery mechanism leaves the underlying arrangement open to question. The participant may have gained a pause button while retaining very little influence over the conversation.
The practical challenge is to let learners contribute needs, questions and experience, and let people with relevant expertise respond. An organization then has a chance to capture what it learns as it works. The appeal is easy to understand: a colleague’s answer can outlive the conversation in which it first appeared.
A conversation with a memory.
A bigger table, then a different chair
In October 2021, 360Learning announced a $200 million funding round involving Sumeru, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Silver Lake Waterman. The plans included international expansion, acquisitions and further technology development. By then, the modest early contract sat a long way back in the company’s history, though its lesson remained useful: growth depended on finding a practical place in somebody else’s working day.
Investor XAnge described the American market as central to the next stage. Its account pointed to customers across industries, including Toyota, Lego and Michelin. For a company selling learning, that range creates an ongoing problem of translation. A method has to survive different products, working environments and professional habits. The argument must become useful outside the room where the founders first made it.
Hernandez’s role eventually changed as well. Benjamin Marchal succeeded him as CEO, while Hernandez moved to chairman. The company’s March 2026 responsibility charter names Marchal as CEO and still places Convexity at the center of its working culture. A founder’s preferred operating system now has to function through another leader. There is a practical test of distributed responsibility in that succession.
“Being a leader doesn’t mean making all the decisions.”
Nicolas Hernandez, on management
The next decision
Artificial intelligence had already entered his work before Jupi. In a 2023 interview, Hernandez discussed 360Learning’s AI certification for learning professionals and tools called Robyn. He described a specific difficulty: teams were using generative AI but finding the resulting material generic. The presence of a new tool had created another need to learn how to use it well.
Jupi moves the focus toward choices. Its website describes keeping a shared record of decisions and bringing the relevant context back into Slack conversations and meetings. Hernandez is its founder and CEO. The connection to his earlier work is straightforward: once a group can share what it knows, it still has to choose what to do.
Even the visual identity has something to say about that ambition. The designers at How&How drew on Rodin and Magritte; the logo’s premise was a Thinker getting up. A philosophical figure finally leaving the contemplation department is a fitting mascot for a founder who has spent so much time joining ideas to working practices.
The new company faces its own product questions, and the previous success supplies no automatic answers. What Hernandez brings is a recurring concern: people can know useful things, work beside other capable people, and still struggle to think together. He keeps building ways for that knowledge to move. At some point, the person at the head of the table has to let somebody else use it.