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The official CEO.com podcast featuring unfiltered conversations with the leaders shaping our world.
Clint Betts: Brendan, thank you so much for coming on the show. You are the co-founder and CEO of LearnUpon. It’s a cloud-based learning management system that helps organizations deliver, manage, and measure learning for employees, customers, and partners.
How did you get here? What were you doing prior to this? What motivated you to co-found this company, and how did you become CEO? Let’s start there. That’s a small question, right?
Brendan Noud: Yeah. Thanks, Clint, for having me on the show. Great to chat with you today.
My co-founder, Des, and I started LearnUpon in 2012, but we had both been working in the space previously with one of the existing LMS providers. I was there for eight years, Des was there for 12, so we had a lot of experience. Des was on the technical side and I was on the sales side.
When you’re at the front end of sales, you can really see market demand developing. We could see there was a pent-up demand for a cloud SaaS solution that was easy to use and quick to set up.
Our previous employer had an on-premise solution, and we just felt cloud was the future. So we decided to leave and start around the kitchen table as a two-person startup.
Now, 13 years later, it’s been a fun journey.
When we started, we focused on professional training companies as our core ICP to sell into. We got good traction there, particularly because we had a portal feature in LearnUpon that was very powerful for that market. It allowed customers to create branded portals in about 60 seconds, license content, and sell courses.
From there we evolved into the corporate space. Today we focus on multi-audience training:
internal employee training, customer training, partner training, reseller training.
It’s been going well.
At the core, it really came from wanting to address frustrations we saw in the market.
Clint Betts: And how did you think about funding the company?
You’re from Ireland—Dublin? Or do you live in Dublin?
Brendan Noud: Kildare, actually, which is about an hour south of Dublin.
Clint Betts: Okay.
And you founded it there. Give us a sense for what the tech scene is like there and what the funding environment is like there.
Actually, I know a little bit about this, and I know Ireland has a really strong tech community. It’s pretty impressive. I don’t think people fully realize that.
Give us a sense for it.
Brendan Noud: Yeah, Ireland has a really strong tech ecosystem.
A lot of the major U.S. multinationals have their EMEA headquarters here:
Meta, Google, Zendesk, New Relic, and many others.
Off the back of that, a lot of people leave those companies and start startups themselves. There are also strong accelerator programs.
Des and I went through the NDRC accelerator program right at the start. There were about 14 companies in the cohort. They’d take in a new batch every six months.
The funding itself wasn’t huge—about €15,000, maybe around $20,000—but honestly the real value was the network.
When you’re starting a business for the first time, having great mentors and other founders around you is hugely valuable. We got great advice early on, especially around focusing on a specific ICP.
And there’s something motivating about being surrounded by other founders who are living on beans and toast and working around the clock trying to build traction.
I think it’s much easier to go through that in an accelerator than trying to do it completely alone.
We also have Enterprise Ireland here, which is a government body that supports indigenous scaling companies. They helped support us from a funding perspective in the early days through match funding alongside friends-and-family investment.
In 2013 we raised a little over half a million dollars to get started.
After that, we were largely bootstrapped. We funded the business by getting more customers on the platform.
Then in 2020 we raised our Series A, which was the first time we took institutional money into the business.
Clint Betts: At what point did you realize you really had something? Obviously as an entrepreneur, it probably feels like you never fully arrive.
But when did you think, “Okay, we’ve got a business here. This is actually going to work”?
Brendan Noud: Probably when we got to around 20 or 30 customers and it started feeling repeatable.
We had leads consistently coming in every week. We had a very high close rate, and the feedback from those early customers was really positive—even though internally we knew the platform still wasn’t where we ultimately wanted it to be.
So we thought, “Okay, there’s definitely something here.”
Then in 2014 we landed our first enterprise customer, a quick-service restaurant chain in the U.S.
For us, that felt like a real business. They had procurement teams, legal teams—all of that.
And we won that deal against much larger incumbents.
That was a huge moment where we thought, “Okay, this is real. We can compete here.”
Clint Betts: And how is AI changing all of this now? I’m sure you’re thinking about that constantly.
Brendan Noud: Absolutely. It’s really exciting.
In the learning and development space specifically, there are huge opportunities around content development and automation.
We’re focused heavily on automating administrative tasks around delivering learning at scale.
We’re also building personalized learning journeys driven by AI:
based on learner interests, skills gaps, career paths, and so on.
Our goal is really to put time back into the hands of administrators and instructors so they can focus on more strategic work and actually measure learning impact.
We also see a major opportunity around insights and analytics.
For example:
When someone completes training, what business impact does that create?
Does it reduce support tickets?
Improve retention?
Increase product adoption?
We want to surface those insights back to customers so they can act on them.
Things are moving very fast though, and we think it’s really important to take a responsible approach.
We’re very conscious of making sure there’s still a human in the loop because our customers are cautious too. They don’t want AI just running off and making every decision autonomously.
But for repetitive admin-heavy tasks, it’s an incredible opportunity.
Clint Betts: AI is such a fascinating challenge for every industry and every business.
I know you’re more focused on the corporate and business side, but do you think at all about how AI changes education itself?
Brendan Noud: Yeah, absolutely.
It’s interesting even from the school and university perspective.
I’m probably aging myself here, but when I was in school, the big debate was whether students could use calculators in class. At first they were banned because people thought students wouldn’t actually learn anything.
Then eventually calculators became accepted as tools—as long as students understood the underlying theory.
I think AI is very similar.
There’s obviously concern now around students using AI to do homework or assignments. Are they really learning?
I think it’s about balance.
Skills like creativity, critical thinking, and communication are probably going to become even more important.
And then people will use AI tools alongside those skills because realistically, that’s where information retrieval is going.
Clint Betts: Yeah, absolutely.
Give us a sense for what a typical day looks like for you as CEO.
Brendan Noud: My day starts early.
I’ve got two small kids—a six-year-old and a four-year-old—so they usually get me up pretty early.
I tend to check Slack and email first thing in the morning just to see what happened overnight, then help get the kids out to school.
After that I head into the office.
We operate hybrid—three days a week in office.
Most days are filled with meetings, but one thing I’ve really been trying to focus on lately is blocking off time for strategic thinking. Otherwise the day just becomes nonstop back-to-back meetings and you never get any real thinking done.
The afternoons get busier for me because most of our customers are in the U.S.
We have teams in Philadelphia and Salt Lake City, so from early afternoon onward I’m usually tied into meetings with U.S. teams and customers.
I usually get home around 7 p.m., spend time with the kids before bed, and then often do another couple hours of work later in the evening.
And I try to fit exercise in where I can.
We’re actually doing a company step challenge this month, so I’m trying not to let the team down too badly.
Clint Betts: What do you read, and what recommendations would you have for us?
Brendan Noud: On the business side, I love books around scaling businesses, leadership, and culture.
Scaling Up is one I’ve gone back to multiple times.
Good to Great is another big one for me.
Outside business, I’m a huge sports fan, so I read a lot of sports autobiographies when I want to switch off from work.
Right now I’m reading an autobiography by Irish tennis player Conor Niland, which I’m really enjoying.
Clint Betts: That’s awesome.
How have you thought about culture as you’ve scaled?
Brendan Noud: Culture has been something Des and I have been very intentional about from the very beginning.
I think we’ve done a really good job building a strong culture at LearnUpon. We have great retention. One of our earliest hires just celebrated 12 years with the company, and several team members have now been with us over a decade.
We created a culture code years ago inspired partly by HubSpot. Des and I were both big fans of what they built culturally.
I remember hearing Dharmesh Shah speak about HubSpot’s culture code years ago and thinking we should do something similar.
So our culture code is embedded throughout the company.
Our core pillars are:
Act like an owner.
Deliver quality.
Lead with curiosity.
Put the customer at the center of everything.
We reinforce those constantly and highlight examples of them in action across the business.
We also talk a lot about everyone being guardians of the culture. It’s not just the responsibility of leadership. Everybody owns it.
And culture evolves.
The culture at 20 people is very different from the culture at 300 people.
So you have to continually work on it.
Clint Betts: You mentioned Philadelphia and Salt Lake City.
What was it like becoming an international company and building globally?
Brendan Noud: We opened Philadelphia in 2016.
Before that, we were servicing the U.S. entirely from Ireland, which meant people were working night shifts here to support U.S. customers.
That wasn’t sustainable long term.
So we knew we needed a U.S. base, and Philadelphia worked out really well for us.
We’ve built a great team there. There’s actually a surprising amount of cultural alignment between Ireland and Philly—sports, food, personality.
Then about three years ago we opened Salt Lake City.
We relocated a few Dublin employees there initially to help hire and embed the culture from the start, and that’s worked really well too.
I think communication becomes incredibly important as you scale internationally.
You have to make sure you don’t accidentally create disconnected subcultures across offices.
So there’s a lot of travel back and forth between offices to keep everyone connected.
Clint Betts: How are you feeling about the broader macroeconomic environment?
Tariffs, global uncertainty—all of that.
How are you thinking about it?
Brendan Noud: Thankfully we’re not directly impacted by tariffs, but some of our customers are, particularly in the U.S., so indirectly it can affect us.
There was definitely a lot of uncertainty around March and April, but things seem more settled now.
From our perspective, business is strong. We’re excited to continue growing in the U.S. and creating jobs in both Philadelphia and Salt Lake.
Overall, companies are still investing in strong solutions that help them grow and operate better.
That said, you never know what the next shock around the corner will be.
We’ve gone through the pandemic and plenty of other disruptions over the years.
For us, it always comes back to adaptability and resilience.
When things are going really well, we try not to get too far ahead of ourselves.
And when things aren’t going to plan, we don’t panic—we adjust and keep moving.
Clint Betts: Was there a moment of failure or difficulty that became a huge learning experience for you?
Brendan Noud: Plenty.
One thing that comes to mind from the early days is that because we were largely bootstrapped, there were definitely moments where customers would request custom development work in exchange for what felt like a huge deal at the time.
Sometimes we said yes.
In hindsight, we probably regretted some of those decisions because you end up creating technical debt and pulling your roadmap away from serving the broader customer base.
Eventually we learned to be much more disciplined and selective about what we build.
More recently, as we’ve scaled, I’ve also learned how important intentional hiring is.
Every hire impacts the business.
As CEO, I try not to get too removed from understanding who we’re hiring and what responsibilities people actually own inside the organization.
Clint Betts: What’s the next five years look like? What’s the roadmap?
Brendan Noud: We’re really excited about where the platform is today.
We now have over 25 million learners on the platform and handle more than a billion requests every month.
Our biggest focus now is personalized learning at scale.
That’s been something people in learning and development have talked about forever as this kind of “holy grail,” but historically it was very difficult to truly achieve.
Now, with AI, we can get much closer to delivering the right learning to the right person at exactly the right time.
We’re also launching a new skills product later this year, which we’re really excited about.
Organizations need much better visibility into the skills they have internally and where gaps exist.
As the world changes quickly, businesses need to reskill and upskill employees constantly.
Another major area for us is customer education.
We see a huge opportunity in helping companies educate customers on products and services throughout the customer lifecycle.
We integrate deeply with systems like HubSpot and Salesforce so our customers can actually connect learning outcomes to business outcomes.
Those are the big focus areas for us right now.
Clint Betts: Finally, we end every interview with the same question.
At CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes.
When you hear that, who gave you a chance that helped get you where you are today?
Brendan Noud: I’d probably say my first manager.
I joined KPMG Consulting right out of college as a graduate consultant.
I was very raw and inexperienced.
At that stage in your career, you often expect to spend your days photocopying or reading manuals.
But my manager, Michael Atwire, immediately brought me out on-site into real client meetings.
This was during the height of the Y2K era back in 1999.
He exposed me to boardroom meetings, strategy work, and client engagement right from day one.
That experience shaped the rest of my career.
I learned a tremendous amount from him, and I’m very grateful he took a chance on me so early.
Clint Betts: Brendan, thank you so much for coming on the show.
What an incredible company you’ve built. Let’s stay in touch and have you back on again sometime. It really means a lot to have you here.
Brendan Noud: Thanks, Clint. I appreciate the time. Great to be on the show today.