He once taught engineers how to build firewalls. Now he teaches universities how to turn a real industry project into a grade.
Who he is now
Picture a university course where the final isn't a test. It's a deadline, a client, and a deliverable that somebody outside the school actually wanted. That is the thing Wes Sonnenreich has spent the last decade making routine. As Co-CEO and co-founder of Practera, he runs the platform that lets educators design, deploy, and measure real industry projects - internships, accelerators, consulting sprints, international placements - for tens of thousands of learners a year.
The trick isn't the idea. Plenty of people believe in learning by doing. The trick is scale. One mentor with one student is easy and doesn't move the needle. A few hundred students placed with employers, each getting timely feedback, assessed fairly, tracked through the messy arc of a real project - that's the part that used to be impossible. Practera makes it operational. About half of Australia's universities run on it, and it reaches into institutions like Boston University and employers like Deloitte and Westpac.
Lately his attention has shifted to the obvious next question: what happens to "learning by doing" when the doing involves AI? His answer is less anxious than most. He talks about people learning alongside machines, not against them - using AI to deepen the feedback a learner gets rather than to replace the human work at the center of it. In October 2025 he took that argument to the MIT AI Conference, in a fireside chat with Grammarly's CEO about how to build AI products people actually trust.
By the numbers
The throughline
Three obsessions, one instinct: take something chaotic and make it legible. Each chapter of his career rhymes with the last.
In the late '90s he wrote about how search engines actually worked and founded Pharmatrak, a web-metrics tool for pharmaceutical companies. The internet was new and unreadable. He made it measurable.
He co-authored books on Linux and OpenBSD firewalls and "Network Security Illustrated," then co-founded SageSecure, a risk consultancy. He even built a model - ROSI - to put a number on the value of being secure.
At Deloitte Australia he ran the innovation program. Then he co-founded Practera to do the hardest thing in education: make authentic, hands-on experience something you can deliver to thousands at once.
The long game
And another for tracking experiential learning in 2020. Twenty-one years apart, the same bet. Patience, it turns out, is a strategy.
Writes "A History of Search Engines" and co-authors the "Web Developer's Guide to Search Engines."
Files a patent for an internet-based distance learning system. Founds Pharmatrak.
Co-authors "Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls."
Co-authors "Network Security Illustrated" with Jason Albanese.
Publishes the ROSI papers; co-founds SageSecure LLC.
Co-founds Intersective - later Practera - with Beau Leese and Suzy Watson.
Raises a $3.75M Series A led by Main Sequence Ventures.
Files a patent for monitoring a learner through an experiential learning cycle.
Speaks at the MIT AI Conference alongside Grammarly's CEO.
Stop competing with the machines. Start learning alongside them.- The argument at the heart of his recent talks
The back catalog
Long before he taught machines to mentor students, he taught engineers to secure networks. The instinct to make hard things readable is older than the company.
A visual guide to securing networks, co-authored with Jason Albanese.
A hands-on manual for constructing secure firewalls from open-source tools.
An early deep-dive into how search engines work, with Tim Macinta.
The cross-wiring
That's the actual MIT degree - three fields fused into one. It reads like a clue. People who study one thing tend to build one kind of company. People who can't pick tend to build at the seams between fields, which is exactly where Practera lives: part software, part pedagogy, part employer marketplace.
He topped it off with executive leadership training at Harvard Business School, then spent the years in between collecting roles that don't obviously connect - GM of science and technology at a minerals company, innovation director at Deloitte, security consultant, startup founder. Look closer and the pattern holds. Every one of them is about turning an unfamiliar system into something a person can actually use. He also runs Practera as a Co-CEO, a deliberately shared model that's rare among founders who usually guard the title.
Off the record