Lessons from Joel Hellermark

Joel Hellermark, the visionary founder of the AI-powered learning platform Sana, has been a prominent voice in the discourse on artificial intelligence, education, and the future of work. Since founding Sana at the age of 19, Hellermark has offered a wealth of insights into his philosophies on augmenting human intelligence, building a mission-driven company, and the transformative potential of AI.

On the Future of Learning and AI

On the ultimate goal of AI in education: "Our ambition is to transform every single learning product into a superhuman teaching system a system which finds your unique path through any course a system which pinpoints your knowledge gaps and implements strategies to address them. a system which accurately models your learning style." [1]
On the historical stagnation of learning: "Since Gutenberg invented the printing press little has changed in how we share and consume knowledge. We still to a very large degree rely on a one-sizefitsall. model a model where we present the very same content in the very same way to all students." [1]
On the confluence of technologies: "We now live in a very special time a rare time in history a time where the confluence of fields is enabling personalization to a whole new extent. and at a whole new scale. these fields are online education allowing us to collect immense data sets. and neural networks allowing us to learn directly from that data at the intersection. we have the next great education revolution the next Renaissance." [1]
On the power of personalized learning: "If we empowered every single student globally to learn a 100 times. more." [1]
On the inefficiency of traditional methods: "If we think about it just like an insanely powerful calculator, you'd want everyone to just learn to use the calculator. Why should you sit there and do a bunch of calculations? That's quite inefficient.” [2]
On dynamic content generation: "We're so used to creating content and then someone consumes the exact thing that you created– that goes all the way back to the printing press. It hasn't changed that much since. What we can do now is dynamically generate content, so now the system will know what you know, it will know your level, it will know your context, it will know your role, it will know what..." [2]
On the end game for personalized AI: "If you have this knowledge assistant that you know you use across your entire life, it will know you based on what you've written, the role you have, historical searches, courses you've taken. I think that's really the end game here.” [2]
On the evolution from search to chat: "We followed that up with introducing chat so not only could you search for all of your company's knowledge but you could ask questions to it and query. it." [3]
On the importance of meetings as a knowledge source: "And then we found that there was one source of knowledge that was really important which was meetings. so we introduced the meeting assistant that could join you take notes make that searchable. and add that to the knowledge. base." [3]
On the shift from assistance to agency: "So what we think we need to do is move from this paradigm of assistance where it's basically one flow you're telling the assistant can you solve. this this uh task in one go... towards assistance where you basically tell it hey lay out a plan set up the each of the sequential actions you need to do retrieve any relevant knowledge you need to do analyze the response. and then if it looks good you can show it to the user. but otherwise run another run and it can keep correcting its mistakes." [3]

On Building Sana and Entrepreneurship

On the founding principle of Sana: "Sana was very much founded around that idea: that we could enhance human learning with machine learning, and the business idea has evolved since." [4]
On the ambition for Sana's technology: "Our ambition at Sana Labs is that there shouldn't be a learning product in the world that's not in some way using our technology." [5]
On the importance of a company's mission: "We want to find people that have fire in their eyes, who get very excited whenever you give them that impossible task. Every six months we reorganize the entire company around our top missions, what we're looking to achieve. There's not a single person at Sana that's not working on the most important thing." [6]
On being a "pragmatic dreamer": "We talk at Sana about pragmatic dreamers. What really inspired me was you're really trying to build something generational. And I was just struck by how you went deep on the product, but also deep on effectively everything else while being extremely ambitious in the long term." [6]
On the role of a founder: "I've basically been a recruiter. and uh and I think that's that's how I've survived it's just building that team of of exceptional. folks." [7]
On the long-term vision for Sana: "It was designed to be my life's work, something that I could spend decades on." [8]
On creating a "Bell Labs" environment: "I wanted to build a place like Bell Labs, where we would gather the best scientists, designers, engineers, and marketers, and we would find intersections across all of these disciplines and build a generation of new tools that could empower people to learn more effectively." [8]
On the company's organizational structure: "At Sana, we don't have a single specialist in-house. Our designers write code. Our customer success managers build dashboards from scratch. We want Sana to be a place where you can truly do your life's work and explore all of your passions and interests." [8]
On the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration: "We wanted to maximise the likelihood of those discussions happening, like the engineer running into the designer." [8]
On recruiting top talent: "Recruitment can take years to get right. Whenever we find someone who we think is a good fit, we can spend two years convincing them to join. You need to fight really hard for the best talent." [8]
On the future of learning platforms in business: “We believe that every company beyond 50 employees will have a learning platform in the future. And we're the category leader in that space, changing the way the world learns.” [4]
On the potential market size: “We think that the company that defines the category leader for learning could be one of the most important and largest companies on the planet.” [4]
On the problem Sana solves for businesses: "Arguably, learning is the most important part of an organisation, and we need tools that are fit for their demands." [4]
On the analogy for Sana's role: "Hellermark compares the current state of online learning within businesses to the internet before Google: there are lots of scattered resources, but no-one to organise and personalise the world's learning in a way that's searchable and recommendable. “That's what we aim to do,” he says." [4]
On the acquisition by Workday: “Our focus has always been on creating intuitive AI tools that improve how people learn and work. I'm excited to bring these tools to 75 million Workday users and partner with Workday's iconic team to launch a new era of superintelligence for work.” [9][10]

On His Personal Philosophy and Influences

On his early passion for programming: "I was very for forunate. to grow up during a time where where with an internet connection. you could effectively learn anything... and at the age 13. I was I was able to just take them on on on my computer at at home. and I really got obsessed with with programming." [7]
On his fascination with learning: "...from the beginning machine learning but but equally human learning and I got obsessed. with what is this process that enables humans to acquire new new knowledge." [7]
On his ambition: "I've always been very ambitious. I started programming when I was 13, the ideas I started tinkering with were not ideas that were going to have an incremental impact. I was always drawn to ideas that could potentially fundamentally change the world." [5]
On his heroes: "Not necessarily Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos but people like Leonardo Di Vinci, Michelangelo and Edwin Land whose genius lay at the intersection of combining insights from different fields... They weren't just mathematicians, or philosophers, or artists, but their genius lay in combining different insights from different industries. So I idolise polymaths a lot, whose genius lies in taking insights from maths and combining that with the arts, and I think that's what we try to do with Sana as well." [5]
On the importance of "meta problems": "a guy called Bucky Fuller you've heard a bit about today was was out for a walk with another really clever guy called Albert Einstein. and so they're out for this walk and they start talking about you know what are the most important problems. and they concluded that the most important problems are the meta. problems the problems that if you solve them you solve everything else. and they thought the biggest meta. problem was access to knowledge." [3]
On the impact of changing access to knowledge: "if we looked back in human history you know every time we've changed access to knowledge. everything else changed for the better. and that was really the foundational purpose of Sana." [3]
On the potential of augmenting human intelligence: "if we could augment human capability and make humans far more capable we could solve all of the world's. problems." [11]
On the nature of human intelligence: "There doesn't seem to be anything unique about human intelligence. There's nothing that can't be solved with a sufficient amount of computing.” [8]
On the limitations of rule-based systems: "It would take us billions of lifetimes to define that set of rules. — What you want to develop now are models that can learn those rules and represent them in high-dimensional ways." [8]
On his early entrepreneurial ventures: "I founded my first AI company when I was 16." [7]

On the Broader Impact of AI

On AI as a "distribution game": “AI today is a distribution game.” [9]
On the future UI being AI: “The new UI of the future is AI.” [10]
On the productivity gains from AI: "already with just the very early examples of AI we're seeing productivity gains from 30 to 50%." [11]
On the potential of AI to solve major challenges: "If you look back in history, every time we've changed access to knowledge, everything has changed for the better. Sana is the first system that really has indexed all knowledge that sits within a company and makes that universally accessible for every employee." [6]
On the problem of scattered institutional knowledge: "The first is that institutional knowledge today is scattered across dozens of systems. It's stuck in presentations, docs, PDFs, and Slack threads. The second problem is that knowledge is trapped in people's heads. These two problems are slowing teams down and wasting precious time." [8]
On being a "wrapper" for large language models: "I'm very excited to be a wrapper. A lot of our customers, they'll just care about speed and accuracy. Whether it's Claude or GPT-4 or Mistral. The legacy models are becoming incredibly capable. They have an IQ of 155. But we really aren't using much of the models' capabilities. And they're only as good as their context." [6]
On embedding reasoning into models: "What we're working on now is embedding reasoning into this model." [6]
On the importance of context for AI: "They have an IQ of 155. But we really aren't using much of the models' capabilities. And they're only as good as their context." [6]
On the adoption rate of enterprise AI: “It's an adoption rate that is faster than any other enterprise software in history. Then we need the capital to be there.” [2]
On the universal need for AI assistants: “In principle, every CEO across the globe is right now looking at how to connect their company knowledge to foundational models and build assistants to their employees.” [2]
On the vision of a universal assistant: "Joel's vision includes creating a universal assistant that augments human intelligence for a wide range of applications." [12]
On the bias in machine learning: "I think the biggest problem with bias in machine learning is when the system does not reflect the users." [5]
On the complexity of human learning for AI: "There are so many intricacies to how we learn that deducing them from neuroscience is going to take several lifetimes." [5]
On the power of neural networks: "because the power of neural networks lies in their ability to learn directly from raw. data meaning that in difference from the personal. computer it allows computers to capture much more complex relationships. and learn by. themselves." [1]
On the future of work with AI: "Sana labs is logging into Workday for your entire workday – getting access to all content and information across all data sets in the enterprise. That's a super powerful value proposition that is going to transform the way people think about engaging with and through Workday.” [10]

Learn more:

Lessons from Joel Hellermark

On the Future of Learning and AI

On Building Sana and Entrepreneurship

On His Personal Philosophy and Influences

On the Broader Impact of AI

Written by Antoine Buteau

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