Our History & Origins

EARLY BEGINNINGS… PLANTING THE SEEDS OF MENTORSHIP

In 2015 our co-founders met; Marcus Shingles was a business executive and recognized thought-leader in innovation and emerging technologies (CEO XPRIZE, Partner Deloitte Consulting). Marco Vargas was a sophomore in a public high school in south-central Los Angeles. Marcus “adopted” Marco’s high school to help design and implement the “Exponential Entrepreneur” program, which introduced new entrepreneurial training and a course on emerging innovation and technologies (AI, robotics, 3d printing, bio-tech, Blockchain, Virtual Reality, etc.). Marco and his student peers leveraged this training and education to upskill into relevance for the “future of work”.  Marcus continued to be a mentor for Marco even after he graduated from high school, and Marco, even before graduating from high school, had launch several successful businesses to help his community.  Marco would eventually go on after high school to Dartmouth college on a full-ride scholarship.

In March of 2020, as the covid global pandemic abruptly shut down the public school system in Los Angeles (and around the world), Marcus and Marco decided to re-launch the “Exponential” program from 2015 in a desperate attempt to supplement the public education system which was deteriorating as a result of rapidly transitioning to new home-based learning models. The revised program, renamed “Exponential Destiny”, was initially a mentorship initiative that essentially centered around a daily zoom call in which high school students and recent graduates from public school systems in lower-income communities were invited and encouraged to attend in order to learn new skills and obtain the knowledge to assist them in being relevant for the new emerging digital jobs economy. The program quickly obtained an ambitious group of students and recent graduates, not just in Los Angeles but throughout the U.S. Many of the initial participants were part of the original “Exponential Entrepreneur” program from 2015 in Los Angeles (per above). This initial cohort of the Exponential Destiny program, young men and women who recently graduated from a south-central Los Angeles public high school, would eventually go on to become the senior leadership team of the non-profit organization, “Exponential Destiny”.

In late 2020, as an executive at Bain consulting as well as through his own private practice, Exponential Destiny’s co-founder Marcus, started to offer consulting and advisory services to large global businesses who were interested in exploring the emerging capabilities of virtual reality and spatial web (aka, “Metaverse”).  As a form of mentorship, rather than just talk about and describe these emerging technologies, Marcus invited the young team of the Exponential Destiny mentorship program to “shadow” him on these client conversations and related projects (considering all meetings were video-calls due to covid). Thus, the Exponential Destiny community (“Mentees”) were able to listen and learn as Marcus advised his clients through full life-cycle pilots for how best to leverage the metaverse and related innovations to improve their business operations. Marcus quickly observed the minimal learning curve of the “digitally native” mentees, and was impressed with their aptitude for quickly learning the virtual reality software platforms and hardware.

A video summary of commercial projects using the Metaverse/VR in their businesses in which the Exponential Destiny team supported

UPSKILLING OF “METAVERSE ENTREPRENUERS”

As a result of shadowing Marcus on consulting client projects, by early 2021 the Exponential Destiny team was becoming highly proficient in virtual reality and the emerging “Metaverse” (prior to the hype of Facebook changing their name to “Meta”).  Both left-brain and right-brain learners were exceling as designers in these environments, and therefore Marcus started to provide the Exponential Destiny mentees paid positions on projects with his commercial clients.  Together, in first half of 2021 the team eventually completed over 25 client “metaverse” projects in virtual reality with businesses across several sectors; financial services, consumer products, retail, real-estate, energy, aerospace/defense, and industrial manufacturing. (see video above).  The Exponential Destiny “mentees” went from training to delivering paid projects in this high-demand field.

JOB PLACEMENT & ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES

Meet Juan Felix. In this short video Juan shares his journey and how after he was mentored by Exponential Destiny in Metaverse design at age 19 he went from working in retail at Target Stores to leading the new VR department for a billion-dollar corporation. (This video of Juan is an excerpt from a keynote presentation that Exponential Destiny delivered at the United Nations ITU summit in Geneva, Switzerland.

Through these early commercial client projects that leveraged virtual reality and metaverse capabilities, several of the Exponential Destiny mentees were being upskilled sufficiently to find immediate job-placement in the field. For example, Juan Felix, an early mentee of Exponential Destiny, quit his job at Target Stores (19 years old at the time, stocking shelves) as a result of being hired to help launch the new virtual reality training department of a global consumer products organization, which he shadowed during one of these early commercial client projects.

The Exponential Destiny team was amazed and encouraged that after a few months of training, mentees (from low-income communities) were being upskilled into income-generating positions in the emerging digital economy around the Metaverse.

This was when we all realized there was significant potential to help upskill our peers into similar digital jobs, careers, and economic opportunities.

A REALIZATION & CHANGE IN FOCUS

As the Exponential Destiny team was perfecting their skillsets working with businesses as Metaverse designers and creators, there was an efficacy report that surfaced in late 2020 by PwC that compared training and education in VR versus Classroom and on-line approaches (above).   Upon reviewing this full report, we realized at Exponential Destiny that the true use-case for VR was potentially in Education, and we were interested in seeing if we could obtain similar exponential improvements when applying VR – combined with what we call “immersive and experiential” methods of learning – in low-income and underserved public school systems.

(please see a summary of “Potential and Promise: The Early Efficacy Data for Education & Learning in VR” in the “Our Projects & Approach” section)

OUR FIRST PUBLIC SCHOOL PROOF-OF-CONCEPT

In Q1 of 2021 Exponential Destiny teamed up with an amazing educational non-profit, the National Centers for Families Learning  (NCFL).  We teamed up to conduct our first 6-month proof-of-concept and Virtual Reality pilot with the 6th largest school district in the U.S., Broward County, Florida. Verizon corporation donated the funding to support the project. Working with students, teachers, and senior administrators from Broward County, NCFL and Exponential Destiny conducted a structured and methodical series of experiments over a 6-month design-sprint focused on exploring use-cases for “leap-frogging” education and learning leveraging the emerging capabilities of VR.

(please see a summary of the full project in the “Our Projects & Approach” section)

Above is a full recording of the end-of-project recap summit, where all of the methods and results and shared by students, teachers, administrators, and Exponential Destiny & NCFL

REIMAGINING EDUCATION… FINDING OUR PURPOSE

After a successful proof-of-concept with the Broward County school district, there was significant discoveries and lessons learned – what worked as well as what didn’t work – in terms of how a public school system with limited budget and resources may leverage this emerging capability to reinvent, and even reimagine, its education and learning effectiveness. The enthusiasm and optimism over the potential – as expressed by the teachers, educators, school administrators, and students – was extraordinary. It was at this time that the Exponential Destiny team realized that this capability – edu-tainment based methods for immersive and experiential learning using VR – has the real potential to drive significant innovation and “leap-frog” level improvements for the education sector, particularly in under-served communities.

Around this time the co-Founders and core leadership team at Exponential Destiny did a company planned retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and it is there that we all determined to switch focus away from working with commercial businesses in VR and instead follow our passion; we created a non-profit that focused on working with educational organizations, with a specific focus on under-served public schools and after-school programs where we could also continue our peer-to-peer mentorship mission to digitally upskill individuals in marginalized communities.

In early 2022 Exponential Destiny was asked to deliver the opening keynote focused on the “Metaverse for SDGs” at the United Nations “Digital Transformation” ITU summit in Geneva, Switzerland, in which they announced the “Metaverse for SDG’s Global Prize & VR Competition” with the support of the United Nations ITU agency.

During this keynote, the team was able to share experiences from students, teachers, and the leadership team’s own perspective in how VR has been used for SDG #4-Quality Education, and several others.

(please see a summary of the “Metaverse for SDGs Global Prize & VR Competition” in the “Our Projects & Approach” section) or view details at www.SDGmetaversePrize.org

UNITED NATIONS ITU’s GLOBAL YOUTH SUMMIT in KIGALI, RWANDA

In early June the Exponential Destiny team had the opportunity to attend and speak at the 4-day United Nations ITU’s Agency’s “Generations Connect – Global Youth Summit” in Kigali, Rwanda.

At this summit, we provided demos for the more than 5,000 youth leaders attending from over 70 countries.

We also had the unique opportunity to visit a school for young girls who were recent Afghanistan refugees (see CBS 60 Minutes Episode on the SOLA school), where we donated VR headsets and demoed educational experiences for the teachers and students. We put the girls into VR experiences that they chose… “attending a symphony”, “take a roller coaster ride”, “sky diving”, “Visit Rome”… the laughter that day at the school was unforgettable

This is when we officially launched the www.SDGmetaversePrize.com  official global competition web-site.  More than 1,200 registrants from more than 70 countries joined us in the competition and community.

MORE RESEACH, PROOF-OF-CONCEPTS, & PILOTS

Similar to the initial Broward County Florida proof-of-concept, the focus throughout 2022 for Exponential Destiny has been to continue experimentation and research of the adoption of “immersive & experiential” methods of learning VR through pilots with additional schools in the U.S..  In 2022 we worked with a public high school in Chicago, Illinois (see video above), two high schools in south-central Los Angeles, as well as a summer STEM youth camp in south-central Los Angeles.  Please see a summary of “OUR RESEARCH PROJECTS & CASE-STUDIES” in the Education Section of “Our Projects & Approach” section for details of each.

In addition, we started to explore extending the method in schools and communities outside the U.S., working with a team of Exponential Destiny mentors in Africa.

In 2022 our team also held bi-weekly information sessions for the “Metaverse for SDGs Global Prize & VR Competition”, where we provided VR design and development training and educational sessions for the community of 1,200 who were participating in the competition.

MOVING FORWARD

2023 will be an exciting year.  We will be announcing the 17 finalists for the “SDG Metaverse Prize & VR Competition” and awarding up to $200,000 in prize money.

There are several ITU events at the UN in NYC and Geneva where Exponential Destiny has been invited to showcase the finalist teams and winners of the competition.

The United Nations ITU published their GENERATIONS CONNECT podcast, which featured the Exponential Destiny team.

In 2023 we are also continuing to work with several existing and new communities and schools, and we are also planning on a collaboration with a well-known and globally recognized museum to help them use immersive and experiential learning methods in VR to scale their art and culture preservation goals across more communities that may not have access to their physical museum campuses.