Google Utilizes Yale Startup, GoCrossOffice, for Next Generation Team Building Game

If you and a group of your friends locked yourselves in a room until you came up with an executable business idea, what would it be? For the members of the Yale Entrepreneurial Society in the Spring of 2007, the answer was a territorial conquest game that became known as “GoCrossCampus” (GXC).

GXC is a lot like Risk, as students form teams in an attempt to conquer all the territory on their virtual campus through strategic defense and offense. Because teams can only defend and attack once each day, the game fosters interim collaboration in the form of face to face strategizing, spying on other team’s, and chat room discussions among team members—in which people can plan their next step and try to sniff out moles hiding in their midst on the chat room. In addition, the more players you have on your team, the better your chances become of winning. GXC hosts tournaments both nationwide and intramural tournaments. Nationwide tournaments are open to anyone with a college e-mail address. As of this writing, tens of thousands of college students are competing in GXC tournaments. The way GXC games are won fosters social bonding, and thus helps to bridge the gap between online gaming and real social networking.

Four of the five founders of GXC, Brad Hargreaves, Sean Mehra, Jeffrey Reitman, and Matthew O. Brimer were President and Vice Presidents, respectively, of the Yale Entrepreneurial Society; and developed the GXC concept that emerged from the group’s landmark meeting. They recruited Isaac Silverman from Columbia, and landed their first round of funding from Easton Capital in the Fall of 2007. They assembled a team of ambitious Yale undergraduates to promote GXC, and by the summer of 2008, they had a fully functioning internship program with over 20 people.

The success of GXC and its ability to unify students through competition indicated the game’s potential utility in the business world. With that realization, “GoCrossOffice” (GXO) was born. The foundation of GXO is analogous to GXC; a company’s building, offices, or geographies are divided into territories that teams then try to conquer with competent strategy, communication, and leadership.

Companies often spend vast sums of money in team building retreats and events, many of which have unpredictable and often minimal success. GXO offers a comparatively low cost solution that fosters team building and friendly competition with minimal interrupt to the daily workload because each team only makes one move per day, on average.

Google and Vivendi decided to experiment with GXO, and they commissioned the GXC founders to build customized games to bond employees across four floors of a New York City office and across different countries, respectively. GXO worked with great success, and the case studies can be seen on their website.

The founding team has no plans to stop at GXC and GXO. Their next and potentially biggest gaming network set to launch in a couple of weeks will be found at www.pickteams.com.

Inc. Magazine, the premier magazine covering the entrepreneurial world, recently named the GoCrossCampus business, officially named “GXStudios”, one of the “10 Coolest College Startups ”. With funding of over $1.5 million already in place from two VC firms including Easton Capital, proven success, and plans to give online social networking more of a purpose through gaming, my bet is on GXC to attract followers and shake up the Internet industry.