Q&A with Gavin Cooney, CEO of Learnosity

Reading time: approx 13  minutes

As part of Learnovate’s Meet the Patrons series, we speak to Gavin Cooney, the co-founder and CEO of Learnosity, a leading provider of AI-powered assessment and learning products for learning institutions. 

Gavin founded Learnosity with business partner Mark Lynch in 2007. The company now employs 240 people serving more than 750 customers and 40 million learners around the world. 

As CEO, Gavin is responsible for driving business growth. While the nature of his role has changed over the years, rapid developments in AI have led him in recent times to become more active in the recruitment of AI specialists to help maximise the benefits of cutting-edge technologies for Learnosity, its clients, and learners.

Gavin graduated from University College Dublin with a BA in Commerce in 1998 before going on to study for an MBA in Management Information Systems and eCommerce at Smurfit Business School. From there, he spent a year with Meteor Mobile in Dublin as a team lead in web application development, building the mobile operator’s customer care intranet and dealer extranet systems. 

In 2002 he moved to Australia where he chanced upon a role with the New South Wales Board of Studies, developing content management system websites and online testing applications. The switch proved to be serendipitous as it helped him identify the need for efficient, easy-to-use digital learning products, leading to the formation of Learnosity. 

Gavin is based in Malta and recently celebrated the birth of his second child. 

What are the biggest lessons you learned in your career?

Don’t waste time looking for investors. The default approach when you have a start-up is to try to raise as much money as possible. That’s nonsense. I wish I’d never spent a minute listening to investors. I always say that venture capitalists venture nothing because they only invest when you’re already up and running and no longer need the money. That’s not conventional wisdom but it’s my belief; if you focus on making the business sustainable and cash-flow positive, you can keep the whole thing for yourself.

Another thing: your most important relationship is with your business partners. Choose that person carefully. I wouldn’t be where I am today without my business partner, Mark Lynch. Your business partner can be your best friend, but you need to be able to have robust conversations. We’ve had a lot of those over the years. Someone once described our relationship as being like Bono and The Edge. I don’t mind the microphone, so that would make me Bono, but The Edge is the man behind the sound. Ultimately, they’re nothing without each other. 

Lastly, whatever your idea is, it’s going to be wrong and you’re going to have to change it five or six times before it works. Pivoting is an iterative process. It’s one of those things: when you get the model right, it feels different. When you know you’ve got it right, you know. 

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

In my younger days, when I moved to Australia, I got a two-day contract working with the New South Wales Board of Education, the government body in charge of school curriculum. I finished what they wanted me to do in a couple of hours. I called the recruitment agency that placed me there and said, ‘I’m finished ahead of schedule – what do I do now?’ And the agent said, ‘Don’t leave. Find something else to do.’ That was 22 years ago. It’s the best advice I’ve ever received because I ended up staying in the NSW Board of Education for five years and I’ve been in the learning industry ever since, almost 18 years as a partner in my own business. 

How would you define your work style and how has this changed over your career?

There’s no point building a team unless you’re willing to collaborate and go forward together. I try to lead but not in a dictatorial way. I’m 46 years old and I’ve been doing this since my late twenties. You learn a lot along the way, but the thing I’ve always been consistent about is seeking advice. Talking to other people is how I solve problems and that facilitates collaboration. I’ve encountered people who maybe didn’t have the humility to seek advice, or saw asking for help as a weakness, and that’s been a net negative for them. I actively look for people to mentor me in different areas because there’s no pride in working things out for yourself. 

In terms of my own role, I’m helped by the fact that every year for the past 17 years has been different. There’s always a new challenge, which gives me a new lease of life. The last two years I’ve been focused on AI and its impact on the industry and the company. Challenges energise you and I think the team feeds off that energy as well. 

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Ultimately, everything has worked out well for me, so I’d probably tell myself to enjoy the journey. I spend about six months a year travelling. I’m on around 90 flights a year. I might be in the US for months at a time, so I make that as fun as possible. If I’m in a certain city, I’ll contact a friend in that city and we’ll go for a meal or to a concert. The work becomes an adventure in that way. I wish my younger self could have understood that a bit more.

If you had not chosen your current career what would you love to do?

I’m not sure I wanted something else for myself in the sense that, when I was 12, I wanted to own a business. When I was coming to the end of my undergraduate degree the big accounting firms would come around to pitch my classmates and I wouldn’t go because I had so little interest in working for an organisation that wasn’t my own. I’ve always been my own boss.

How has AI impacted your organisation/industry?

AI is both the biggest opportunity and biggest disruptor in the market at the moment. It’s completely changed our conversations with clients. Meanwhile, our whole company is working on augmenting what we were doing before with new AI technologies to add value for our customers. The result is that we’ve launched two products in recent times. 

The first, Author Aide, lets authors write exam questions with the help of AI. Before, they might draft questions themselves from scratch. Now, the tool writes the first draft of the question, allowing authors to edit it. Presenting a first draft to an author is like loosening the pickle jar. You’re saving them time and energy. So you might upload a 100-page chapter on the history of the West of Ireland to Author Aide and it’ll respond by creating 1000 questions from that chapter. That’s orders of magnitude more questions than you can create yourself. Then you can go through and edit them. This enables customers to create more and better content for cheaper. 

Our second AI product, Feedback Aide, helps with essay scoring. Right now, a teacher has to read the essay, check it against a grading rubric, then decide on a score. With Feedback Aide, the AI processes essays in real-time, assesses content against the rubric, then automatically produces feedback. Another feature is that the AI flags areas where there’s problematic content, such as content that demonstrates intent to self-harm, or signs of abuse. We’ve done a study in which we’ve put 800 essays through a model and compared the human scores with the AI score. They’re almost totally aligned. 

What are the opportunities and/or risks from AI to your business or sector and/or the learning technology industry?

With AI, whether something is an opportunity or a risk to your business depends largely on the stability of the business and your individual perspective. The key thing is to build stuff that clients can’t and make hay there. If we sat on our hands, we would lose market share very quickly, but AI presents a huge opportunity for us to move into new markets. We’re aggressively pursuing this and that’s why we’ve recruited so intensely in recent times. 

When we created our AI team, we wanted it to be like a start-up within the start-up. We wanted to dedicate resources to it rather than squeezing in AI functionality alongside everything we’re already building. Because the tech is developing so fast, we felt that having people in the office – so they could have those watercooler moments – would facilitate the right level of innovation and collaboration. Luckily, Ireland has a phenomenal talent pool and I’m really proud of the result. 

What are the biggest skills challenges to your business or sector?

The challenge is not so much about skill as being comfortable with the cultural shift that’s taking place with AI. In education, there’s going to be a skills gap. In the same way as there’s a digital divide between us and our parents’ generation, there’s another between us and young people now growing up using AI. You have to learn to use this stuff because this is going to change everything. When calculators came out, people were worried about this new technology changing how we learn maths. The concerns are the same when you’re talking about using AI in your work. For example, my developers can use AI to write and debug code. I don’t care about that. The code is better when they use AI. Likewise, young people should be able to use AI in exams because that’s what they’re going to use in real life. It’s the same for accountants, and so on. 

The skills gap can also be a challenge in terms of hiring. We tried to hire people recently in the US and found it unviable given the additional costs in terms of healthcare provision and the shortage of skills. We switched focus to Ireland and have been very impressed by the Irish market. We were thrilled by the calibre of talent out there and we’ve managed to build a team of 15 AI specialists in a short space of time — with more still to come. The talent is here so ultimately third-level institutions are taking the right approach, even if going forward there probably will have to be further developments on how we teach people. 

What book would you recommend on learning, technology, business or understanding people?

Seven Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy by Hamilton Helmer is a book I go back to again and again. Helmer is a strategic business advisor and his book outlines seven competitive forces that drive the rise of dominant companies like, for example, Google and Standard Oil. 

Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win by Sachin Khajuria. It’s a great book and gives real insight into the world of private equity. 

I read anything by Michael Lewis, his stuff is fascinating, but I often return to The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and an experienced entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. It’s full of practical advice on running a start-up. He gives insight into the challenges that business leaders face and how he came to devise solutions for awkward situations that have arisen over the years. 

The problem with reading business books all the time is that I never switch off. That’s why I’ll take skiing over a sun holiday any day. When you’re by the pool, you have a book, you’re making notes and thinking about how to apply the lessons to your business. When I’m skiing, I’m thinking about staying upright and alive. It demands that you stay present and live in the moment. That’s how I switch off.

What are your favourite tools and resources in work?

I use a lot of AI tools. For example, when I’m writing something longer form, I’ll use programmes like Claude and ChatGPT to develop a first draft and refine the content. Google’s collaboration tools are also really useful, especially when you work remotely like I do. That’s changing a lot as I discover more AI tools with capabilities that are closer to my needs. I’m attracted to software that’s intuitive and feels like magic to use. Obviously, we try to emulate that with everything we’re doing at Learnosity. 

Any interesting podcasts or other media that you consume that you would recommend on learning, technology or business?

I live in Malta so there’s no commute to work anymore. That means I listen to fewer podcasts, but one I really enjoyed is called Acquired. Each episode focuses on the story of some of the biggest tech IPOs and acquisitions in history. There are episodes on IKEA, Duolingo, Meta, and more. It’s really interesting. 

I also enjoyed one from BBC Sounds, the Rise and Fall of Oasis. It’s about the testy relationship between Noel and Liam and how it both made and ultimately destroyed the band. One of my favourite quotes is by Noel Gallagher and I think about it often: ‘If you’re in a rock band, and you’re not trying to be bigger than the Beatles, it’s just a hobby.’ 

Why is membership of Learnovate important to your company? What does Learnovate do well?

Education is how we save the world. To cure disease, you teach kids to be better doctors. It’s the answer to every social problem: poverty, crime, addiction, and so on. Our team buys into that. They want to do good in the world, not help a bank get richer. There’s a vocational element to what Learnovate does also. The recent announcement that the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC) is being defunded puts into perspective how important organisations like Learnovate are to the continued health of the learning and development sector. Being a patron member of Learnovate gives us access to Dublin, a hub of innovation with an approach to education that helps develop skilled individuals who are capable of pushing the industry forward. Learnovate is one of the organisations driving us broadly in the right direction as an industry and country.

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