Our Accidental Start-Up

Okay, so probably not the type of title that investors want to hear, but it is, nevertheless, a true one. I accidentally positioned myself to learn about CVR and then accidentally found myself at the receiving end of the following from my cousin Milla, the accountant in the family: “Okay, Coz, When you know the name of your company, let me know and I’l get your LLC paperwork sorted.” I already had the name: Educational CVR, but panicked just a tad and said, “Let me think about it.” My cousin, a go-getter since she flew through the halls at Christmas in footie pjs looking for Santa, took it in stride and replied, “Just let me know.”

Okay, Coz, When you know the name of your company, let me know and I’l get your LLC paperwork sorted.

“Just let me know.” Spoken expectantly, knowing it would happen and not seeing why it shouldn’t. So many memories of our times together flickered through my mind and less than five minutes later, as I was waiting for my appointment, I texted her the name. 48 hours later, confirmation from the Secretary of the State of Texas arrived and I had an LLC. (Thank you Milla!)

With the leap made, I had only one thing to do: alert my partners in crime and start digging in and doing to get this company up and going. So on to it with my partner from the start, the creative with a camera, the man behind the beginnings, Marcos Luna.

Marcos and I met in a graduate film course — I was crashing into the department and getting a glimpse from the inside of a medium that had fascinated me my entire professional life. On our final day, after I presented on the potential of CVR as a curricular tool in high school literature classes, Marcos came up to me and said, when you do it — the it being create the CVR curricular film — call me, I’ll be your cinematographer. We left that class talking about my idea and his interest and I asked him if he was serious. Marcos said yes, we parted with an exchange of phone numbers, and the rest is the inciting incident for our company’s origin story. Only two years later, at his wedding, did I learn that he didn’t really think I’d call and that when I did, it took him a minute or five to remember who I was.

Only two years later, at his wedding, did I learn that he didn’t really think I’d call and that when I did, it took him a minute or five to remember who I was.

Flash forward to June 2020. The world has gone through a global covid crisis and America is going through another cultural revolution, at least according to Victor David Hanson; and I agree with him which is why I believe it is so necessary for my company to thrive - to produce the already phenomenal script on Dickinson we have written and to get it in the hands of students and their teachers everywhere.

In order to that, I must spend the next eleven weeks finishing the dissertation that will earn me the letters after my name, letters that signify to academia that I know what I’m doing in a way that my 20+ years of teaching experience does not.

At the end of all the study is the beginning of the next phase of immersive learning experiences - those curated by a carefully crafted team of individuals who all believe in the power of art, in the the wonder of travel, and in the immersive power of cinematic virtual reality.

Bailenson termed VR the empathy machine - I’d like to riff on his phrasing: VR is the modern empathy machine, transporting viewers via digital technologies to other worlds, allowing them to inhabit other personas; literature, however, is the original empathy machine - it transports readers via their own imaginations, to other worlds, allowing them to become, while they are immersed in that story, another person in other circumstances.

Join us as we create experiences that hope to use the modern empathy machine to tempt students into the original empathy machine, Literature.