We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Victoria Chasi. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Victoria below.
Victoria, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?
While working on partnerships at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Africa Bureau Headquarters in New York, I realized that African entrepreneurial endeavors were underrated as public-private solutions to some of the biggest developmental challenges. I was inspired by the $1 billion fund we were raising to support these entrepreneurs. Following my background working with entrepreneurs on grassroots issues while a student at the University of Cape Town and at Cornell University, I was curious about these kinds of partnerships for the common good. Knowing myself to have been asked to stop learning Shona, my mother-tongue to learn English, I wanted to create a software as a service (SaaS) platform that taught African languages exclusively and I wanted that to happen in an immersive environment because although I studied other languages like French and Mandarin; it had been cost-prohibitive to actually go there to improve my level of French. Similarly I wanted the platform to preserve African history and heritage using crowdsourcing methods.
After ending my time at UNDP in June 2024, I founded ARCHV (pronounced “Archive”) in July 2024 and received the incorporation documents in August 2024. To test the market, I created a market research survey to see what people would want and have 167 respondents in the last 6 months. I set up a website; signed up for networking events and have since held monthly events to gather community. I have attended 5 networking conferences, including one where the former Director of NBC’s Immersive Experiences has offered to facilitate building the product with me.
I have also presented the idea to my colleagues at UNDP, who seem open to partnership.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Zimbabwean born; South African raised and a national of both countries, I went to the best university in Africa (depending on how you value the rankings) – the University of Cape Town. I studied 2 undergraduate degrees – a Bachelor of Social Science in International Relations and Business French and a Bachelor of Laws. These degrees took 7 years; throughout the last year of my law degree and into the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked as a monitor of the South African Parliament/ National Legislature before coming to Cornell University for a Master of Public Administration in International Development. Public administration and policy felt like the heart of and intersection of my initial undergraduate degree and law degree. I wanted a more data-driven perspective on how to address public issues and found that the universities at home did not have as much of a quantitative perspective in the public policy degrees, which is why I looked to the US. ARCHV, is a future looking organization that sees the value of developing extended reality technology for the benefit of language and cultural preservation specifically given the demographic urgency and opportunity presented by the African case. ARCHV aims to train AI on African languages, to create an exploratory extended reality (XR) learning environment for learning African languages, and to create a supplementary revision app for AI-driven language exploration conversations to consolidate XR experiences.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I had to unlearn the story that a non-business major I could not start a business. For some reason, it had never occurred to me that given how I’ve been trained in systems thinking and finding needs and gaps in existing problems; I am equipped to be able to address these issues. I had to unlearn that even though I didn’t come from a tech background; I could self-teach myself enough UX design to come up with a prototype of my product on Figma, and I had good research, partnerships and networking skills to find the right people to talk to who could guide me along the way as I learn. I had to unlearn the expectation that you can only “start” once you have all your ducks in a row.
Have you ever had to pivot?
I pivoted from planning to remain in an international development career as an employee in a large bureaucracy for my whole life and was happy with the thought until I found a problem I could not let go that necessarily could not be solved in a large bureaucracy, but in partnership with them.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.archv.org
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thearchv/
- Other: Pitch Deck:https://www.canva.com/design/DAGep_xtp6g/_COtYE0KkX6_HGnSb1AtUg/view?utm_content=DAGep_xtp6g&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=uniquelinks&utlId=h095dfa0c8a
