April 13, 2026

LH128 Crossing the Divide with Lars Hyland

1 hour 10 minutes

What does it take to change how an industry works — and what happens when it doesn't change fast enough? Lars Hyland has been asking that question for thirty years, from the early days of interactive multimedia through nearly a decade leading EMEA for Totara Learning, and now at Enlytning, an AI-powered platform helping small businesses close the gap between policy and practice. In this conversation, John and Lars go back to the beginning — to the Epic days, when the e-learning model that now dominates the industry was taking shape around them — and trace a career-long argument about the one thing L&D keeps getting wrong.

They cover the founding of Retenda in 2010 — a learning reinforcement platform built on spaced repetition, a decade before the category existed — and why good timing isn't enough if the market isn't ready. They get into the Totara years, open source as a power relationship, and the honest tension in spending nearly a decade championing infrastructure you know is being misused. And they dig into AI: not the conference version, but the harder question of whether the industry is using it to fix a broken model or just to run the broken model faster. Lars's phrase for the latter — faster garbage in, garbage out — is both a provocation and a diagnosis.

Lars has a view on what he thinks good actually looks like. The question is whether the industry is willing to build it.

TIMESTAMPS

02:12 - Intro

05:05 - The formative years of elearning

17:59 - Why did he found Retenda?

21:35 - The Totara years

25:53 - What happens to open source tech when it goes commercial?

30:21 - Enlytning

40:26 - Compliance & HR

52:17 - Does the SaaS model still have a future?

57:51 - A way to cut down duplication in course catalogues?

01:08:51 - End