The founders finished CREATE at Miami Dade College

CREATE stands for the Center for Research and Transformative Entrepreneurship. When the Knight Foundation, which helped fund it, described the program in 2015, it ran for sixteen weeks: weekly group sessions, one-to-one meetings with the director, and a closing day where each founder had five minutes to present the business and the story behind it. The director at the time called that day "a celebration", not a pitch competition.

The Idea Center later posted a photograph of that first 2017 cohort, and Pasillas answered as "an alumna of the 2017's generation". Jonalex Herrera has credited Gustavo Grande with leading the program they went through.

In June 2017 Herrera was presenting New Discovery Media's model to his cohort, pointing at the slide projected behind him. The company was still a Miami production house then, making music videos and branded content and starting to shoot in 360°, as VoyageMIA described it that September.

Pasillas later described that year from the stage at TEDx Ciudad Juárez: a professional crisis, and an accelerator that opened the door to rethinking everything and building a new prototype. The same thread runs into what came next, when she took New Discovery Media to the Startup Nation Conference at Miami Dade College in February 2018.

What came out of the sixteen weeks was Mersyv, the prototype the company built inside the programme. It is the thing that gave the founders something to pitch rather than a portfolio to show, and it went on the road twice: to the Female Founders Startup Challenge at unbound Miami that November, and to the Startup Nation Conference the following February.

And the programme did more than produce the prototype — it opened both of those doors. The Idea Center is what put the company inside Miami's startup circuit, and the Startup Nation Conference was The Idea Center's own event, which is how a production house from Juárez by way of New York ended up on an AR and VR panel next to founders flown in from Tel Aviv.