Am I Leaving Film to Build an Education Platform? — and What I Learned About Both

By Jeffrey Reno, Founder · Untd We Stnd July 13, 2026 ·

I spent years behind a camera before I ever thought about building a learning platform.

Film teaches you one thing faster than anything else: attention is sacred. You get a few seconds to earn it, and if you waste those seconds, you've lost the person permanently. There are no second chances in a frame. The audience doesn't care how hard you worked. They care about what they feel.

I never expected that lesson to become the foundation of Praxis.

The moment everything shifted

A few years ago I was filming a corporate wellness event. The kind where a company brings in a speaker, puts their employees in a hotel ballroom for half a day, and checks the "we care about your health" box on their HR calendar.

The speaker was good. Polished, energetic, hitting all the right notes about nutrition and stress management and sleep. The audience was nodding along. Polite applause at the end.

On the way out, I overheard two people talking in the corridor.

"That was actually interesting."

"Yeah. I had no idea what half of it meant though."

"Me neither. I should probably Google it."

They never Googled it. I'd bet my camera on that. Because that's not how information works. You hear something in a hotel ballroom, you feel briefly inspired, and then your afternoon happens to you and it's gone.

I kept thinking about that conversation. Not because it was unusual — because it was completely ordinary. That's what most health education looks like. A one-time event. A podcast episode that plays in the background while you cook dinner. A book you read half of on a flight.

None of it sticks. Not because the information is bad. Because the format is wrong.

What film taught me about learning

Here's what I know from ten years of making things people watch: you can have the best information in the world, and if you can't hold someone's attention long enough to deliver it, it doesn't matter.

But I also know the inverse is true. You can hold someone's attention perfectly — beautiful cinematography, perfect sound design, an emotional score — and if there's nothing underneath it, you've made something forgettable. Entertainment that evaporates the moment the credits roll.

The best films do neither of those things separately. They earn your attention and they leave something behind that you carry with you.

That's what education is supposed to do. That's almost never what it actually does.

When we started talking about building Praxis, that was the brief I kept coming back to. Not "how do we make the best course platform." How do we make something that actually stays with people after they close the laptop.

Why the instructors were the answer

I've worked with a lot of people on camera. Actors, executives, presenters, keynote speakers. And I've worked with a handful of genuine practitioners — people who have spent decades in the room with patients, clients, athletes — who know something so deeply that when they explain it, you can feel the difference.

Jeremy Mullins is one of those people. So is Brenton. So is Dr. Tebos.

When I first sat down with Jeremy to film a test lesson, I wasn't thinking about curriculum design or learning outcomes. I was watching his eyes. Because that's where the truth is on camera — in the eyes. You can fake confidence. You can fake warmth. You can't fake knowing something in your bones.

Jeremy knows nutrition in his bones. Two decades, thousands of clients, tens of thousands of pounds lost, the kind of repetition that burns a thing into you until it becomes reflex. When he explains something on camera, there's no effort in it. It's just true, and you can see that it's true.

That's not something you can script. You can't hire that. You find it or you don't.

We found it in our circle of people, and we built a platform around them.

What Praxis is actually trying to do

Most learning platforms are libraries. They acquire content the way streaming services acquire shows — volume, variety, something for everyone. The bet is that if you have enough, people will find something they like.

We're doing something different. We're building a curriculum around specific practitioners who have spent their careers in specific disciplines, and making that knowledge accessible in a format that respects the intelligence of the person learning.

That means no fluff. No padding. No fifteen-minute lessons that should be five minutes. Every lesson we've built has been cut to its essential length and no shorter. Film discipline applied to education.

It also means no celebrities. I have enormous respect for what MasterClass has built. But there's a difference between learning about cooking from a famous chef and learning about nutrition from the dietitian your doctor calls when they're stumped. One is inspiring. One changes how you actually eat.

We're building the latter.

The part nobody told me about running this kind of company

I film during the day and run the business at night. Sometimes simultaneously.

Nobody tells you that building something real means wearing every hat in the building, often before you've had coffee. I'm the director of photography, the operations lead, the editor, the person who figures out why the checkout page broke at 11PM, and occasionally the person who drives to pick up equipment that didn't arrive on time.

What keeps it from being overwhelming — and I want to be honest about this, because I think founders who pretend it's all easy are doing a disservice to everyone who's about to start something — is that the mission is specific enough to function as a compass.

We're not trying to build the biggest education platform. We're trying to build the most credible one. Those are different goals and they make different decisions easy.

When I'm in the edit and I'm wondering whether to cut something, I ask whether it makes the instructor more credible or less. That's the only question. Everything else is noise.

Why I'm writing this

We're at the beginning of something. Praxis will be live soon, the courses are real, and people are watching them and finishing them and telling us it's the clearest explanation of something they've been confused about for years.

That's the thing that makes all of it worth it. Not the metrics — though I care about those too — but the messages. The person who tells Sam that they finally understand why their back hurts after trying three physios who couldn't explain it. The person who tells Brenton they've been training for two years and this is the first time progressive overload actually made sense to them.

That's the whole point. That's what the others can’t necessarily claim. 

I'm going to write here regularly — about what we're building, what we're learning, the things that are working and the things that aren't. Not polished founder content. Actual observations from someone who is in this every day, camera in hand, trying to figure out how to make something that lasts.

If you haven't tried a free lesson yet, start there. No account required. Just watch one thing and see if it changes how you think about something you care about.

That's all I am asking. 

Jeffrey Reno is the founder of Untd We Stnd and co-founder behind Praxis. He has a background in documentary and commercial film and is from Lexington, Ky.