Alex Poe
The editorial project, “Techstars Diary” is the place where I will share my insights and findings for anyone interested in this very dynamic and accelerated adventure.
I’m out of space to write too long of an intro so let’s cut right to the heart of this thing.
In 2015 I joined the Alternative University (UA) right after I came back from my Master’s in the Netherlands. UA was a university founded by students that was on a mission to revolutionize the learning system in Romania. It had self directed education at its core, students were encouraged to design their own learning journeys and experiment with various learning methods.
The birth of the Chambr team
The teachers were not academics, but real life professionals who worked in the field. We would meet once every month to decide democratically the future of the university. For a bit over a decade, UA’s mission managed to gather around 1000 students and my co-founder, Gabriela, was among them.
Every year, the students organized a summer camp, centered around the 6 university values: Freedom, Learning, Playing, Kindness, Collaborating & Daring. Each day was designed to embody one of the values and in 2017 I organized the Playing Day while in 2018 Gabi organized the Learning Day for what would become the last camp.
The experience of being a designer really made one embody that value to the fullest. Somewhere in between those 2 camps we asked ourselves:
‘What would happen if we put Playing and Learning together?’. And that’s how our first startup, Playlearn was born.
Playlearn was one of the early pioneers of the local game based learning scene. We gamified corporate learning, making processes like Onboarding, Learning & Development, Culture or Community Building more effective by creating learning boardgames that were customized for each client.
We had the opportunity of working with some really big companies like: UiPath, KPMG, T Mobile, Orange, BCR or Zitec. It was an incredible experience.
Each project brought us an opportunity to experiment with a different blend of game mechanics and learning methods. It felt like a dream, working out of passion and driven by our mission to upgrade learning to the 21st century. We loved immersing ourselves in each of those worlds and amassed a significant boardgame collection in the process.
We also learned a lot about working together and the value of understanding each other’s needs and ways of communicating.
It was definitely not a pretty ride all the time, but brick by brick, we built a solid foundation that we could then use in other undertakings.
For instance, a small real estate investing side hustle naturally emerged. There we noticed the advantage we had as a team to adapt fast and take on completely new challenges with the experience of having collaborated and bonded already. It was way more easy and that gave us confidence that we could face anything moving forward.
And then in February of 2020 it all came crashing down. In just 2 days we lost all our contracts because our board games were played at the office and everything went remote. We froze, not believing that our business had been eradicated in the blink of an eye.
The birth and rebirth of Chambr
After 2 failed business attempts, in October of that year we started building what would eventually become Chambr.
We’ve gone through over 200 iterations and experiments, both with our product as well as with our value prop and business model.
As a result, Chambr is an AI B2B SaaS that helps sales teams close more deals through game-based simulations.
We’ve started applying to Techstars ever since launching our 3rd prototype in 2022. Since then, we acquired 24 paying customers and a Microsoft partnership that enabled us to integrate our platform with Teams and published on the Azure marketplace.
Most importantly, Aurelian joined our team as a full-stack CTO with 12+ years of experience. (It’s a pleasure working with you, bro!)
We also began our relocation to the US and incorporated as Chambr Inc during the winter of ’22. The initial expedition across the pond was focused on building relationships and getting accustomed ourselves with the mindset here.
But I will tell you more about our American adventure and our road to Techstars success in a new diary entry that you will be able to read next week.
Till then you can follow me, Gabriela and Chambr on our Linkedin accounts.
And if there is anything you would like to know about being accepted at Techstars, feel free to ask us.
