Travis Feldler and TechRow are changing the way grade school students in New York learn. The company, teaching students through virtual reality, is a part of Techstars, a capital market company created to provide mentorship and funding for tech companies.
Recently, Feldler spoke to rolling out about the company and its vision to improve education.
Where did the idea for TechRow come from?
TechRow originates out of New York City. We started in Harlem with a school by the name of New Design Middle School. New Design Middle School is literally steps away from the Hudson River on the West side of Northern Manhattan.
Principal [Marcellus] Stovall, barely a week into his leadership role, asked us to come in and talk to him about the ways we were using immersive technology and immersive media in the community. He shared his vision for how he wanted to introduce that into his school
and we immediately went to work. What we discovered in the market was there was just an enormous amount of under-distributed VR experiences and also cinematic media content. They also lived on platforms that were not necessarily relevant to the classroom.
So what we did was we reached out to these different studios and media networks and said, “Look, we’ve been using your content in some of our schools in Harlem, and we think there is an entire market to distribute your experiences into the K12 space. You should really consider working with us. We’re about to launch our own platform. One that would give school districts the ability to discover content more easily, control and curate it to their unique content needs.”
We were just piling up. We got an early investment from AT&T, so we were distributing the media assets under AT&T, Cartoon Network, The New York Times, CNN. It was going really well.
What started from one school in New York City soon became several. Then, we started expanding across the country just being the platform that creators, media networks and studios could look to distribute amazing content.
Where did the inspiration for TechRow come from?
There are these great platforms in the market that’s distributing content. Let’s say in the VR space, you have Oculus, HTC Vive. Then on the cinematic media side, you’ve got YouTube and Netflix. We said to ourselves, “How can we be that platform in the K12 space that’s not going to only look at educational content, we want the best content.”
Educational content is boring as hell. We felt there was so much inventory in the market that was produced for the media and entertainment space that had educational value, but they just weren’t considering those markets to distribute.
We were inspired by successful pilots. One, kids showed greater engagement, for content that was produced for the median entertainment space. Better talent, bigger budgets, more exciting, more engaging and we redistributed them into categories the K12 market can understand.
We’re not only providing opportunities to expand monetization and distribution for creators, but we’re also putting it on a platform that makes it easy to discover, control and curate the content to the unique needs of our audiences.
