Samer Saab is the founder and CEO of Explorance with over 22 years of experience within the technology industry. Prior to founding Explorance, Samer developed a large perspective on business through quite a lot of roles in diverse organizations including Bombardier, Nortel, Sycamore Networks, and Nakisa. He also participates in a big selection of philanthropic activities that deal with his two passions: entrepreneurship and learning.
Explorance is a world provider of feedback analytics and insights solutions designed to assist organizations improve worker and student experiences. The corporate offers a set of software tools—including Blue, MLY, Metrics That Matter, and Forms—that collect and analyze qualitative feedback to deliver data-driven recommendations. These tools are used across various industries, from higher education to corporate environments, enabling leaders to make informed decisions and take meaningful motion.
Explorance leverages purpose-built AI to interpret sentiment, streamline workflows, and customize reporting, ultimately supporting improved engagement, learning effectiveness, and organizational growth. The platform is recognized for its ability to show feedback into actionable insights and is trusted by institutions and enterprises world wide.
Are you able to walk us through the moment you made the decision to launch the corporate, and what problem you initially set out to unravel?
I got here to Canada at age 20—on an immigration visa, in 1990. After arriving, I studied Electrical Engineering at McGill University and later accomplished a part-time MBA to sharpen my business and leadership skills. I spent the subsequent decade working across several technology firms, including Bombardier, Nortel, Sycamore Networks, Tellium, and Nakisa—gaining experience in a variety of roles and seeing firsthand how organizations operate from the within.
I founded Explorance in 2003, driven by a straightforward but powerful realization: when people feel useful and valued, they perform at their best, and so they’re at their happiest. I wanted to construct an organization that helped organizations truly listen, because I knew firsthand what it felt like to not be heard.
Explorance was born from that conviction. I wanted feedback to be treated as a first-class citizen, not an afterthought. To me, feedback isn’t just data, it’s deeply personal. It’s not a mirror reflecting the past; it’s a compass guiding us toward our greatest future.
The moment I made a decision to launch the corporate wasn’t driven by a market opportunity or financial motivation. It got here from a shift inside. I had a secure job, a promising profession—but I felt I used to be living another person’s version of success. Sooner or later, I stood in front of the mirror and asked myself if I used to be being true to the life I wanted to steer and the impact I hoped to make.
That moment was like walking on water, where fear dissolved, and clarity took its place. I knew then I had to construct something meaningful. I envisioned organizations that were more human, more connected. The issue I set out to unravel was easy, yet profound: How can we empower people and organizations to grow through honest, caring, actionable feedback?
That vision is what continues to drive Explorance to at the present time.
Explorance was bootstrapped from the start. What were a number of the early challenges you faced, and the way did you overcome them without external funding?
Explorance was built from the bottom up, bootstrapped not only within the early days, but for the primary 18 years of our journey. After I began the corporate in 2003, I had no external funding, no safety net. I invested my entire life savings on the time, $55,000, into the vision. That cash went quickly, and what followed was a relentless, make-it-work reality.
The primary five years were brutal. We operated in pure survival mode. Our average salary in yr one was $18,000, and for the primary 18 months, we didn’t take a single time off. We were five people doing the work of eighteen, each working 17 hours a day, each day.
Without outside funding, every decision was existential. Could we make payroll? Should we pay this invoice now or defer it every week? I remember getting an email from my mother on the time reminding me to “pay the rent on time, and the Visa bill too.” That type of stress doesn’t show up in pitch decks, nevertheless it’s very real when every thing is on the road.
The largest challenge was managing energy and focus. Bootstrapping is a masterclass in discipline. We needed to learn to say “no” to distractions and “yes” only to the work that aligned with our values and purpose. We committed early on to serving academia, where we felt we could make a real impact, and we selected to construct deep, trust-based relationships as a substitute of chasing unsustainable growth.
In that environment, I also needed to evolve as a pacesetter. Bootstrapped leadership is just not about charisma or vision statements, it’s about shared sacrifice, radical consistency, and deep trust. Without the levers of high salaries or perks, I needed to encourage through belief, purpose, and integrity. I had to point out up, not only in ideas, but in grit.
Bootstrapping forced us to turn into value-driven before we could afford to be revenue-driven. It forged a resilient culture that prioritized people, purpose, and long-term considering. Those early years shaped not only our business model, but our soul.
What values or principles guided your approach when constructing Explorance—and the way have they evolved, if in any respect, over time?
At the guts of Explorance there has at all times been a belief in people, specifically, in the facility of people that feel trusted, valued, and empowered to be their best selves. Within the early years, especially in the course of the intense survival phase of bootstrapping, my leadership approach was anchored in grit, trust, and shared sacrifice. I believed that if we created an environment where everyone gave 120%, not out of obligation but out of belief within the mission, we could do extraordinary things.
That belief matured into what I called a culture of reciprocity: a relationship where the employer and worker are in full harmony, each giving their best, trusting one another deeply, and growing together. It wasn’t about perks or flexibility for the sake of convenience; it was about responsibility, ownership, and mutual commitment. We treated one another as adults—capable, self-driven, and deeply accountable.
As Explorance grew, our culture evolved. We transitioned from reciprocity to a broader philosophy: a culture of purpose, growth, and impact. This shift was not a departure, but a natural progression. Today, we define success not only by performance, but by how much purpose and meaning people derive from their work. We attempt to be an organization where leaders lead by influence and example, not title, where feedback is a catalyst for transformation, and where belonging isn’t an HR initiative, but a lived every day experience.
This cultural foundation led to Explorance being named the #1 company to work for in Canada in 2021, a milestone that reinforced our commitment to constructing not only an awesome product or business, but an awesome place to grow and thrive.
We now describe our cultural ethos as:
“Growing up. Growing out. Growing together.”
We’re a village of autonomous, high-performing, and caring Explorers who come together to make a long-lasting difference in how organizations listen, operate, and excel.
Over time, we’ve embedded these values into every thing, from how we recruit, to how we lead, to how we serve our customers. Our culture is not any longer just internal glue; it’s a part of the product, a part of the brand, and a part of the impact we hope to have on the world.
How did your experience working at firms like Nortel, Bombardier, and Sycamore Networks influence your considering as a founder?
My experiences at Nortel, Bombardier, and Sycamore Networks gave me a front-row seat to each the brilliance and the blind spots of enormous organizations. I used to be surrounded by smart people, ambitious goals, and cutting-edge technology—but I also witnessed the human cost of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and leadership by authority as a substitute of influence.
In those environments, I saw employees treated like cogs in a machine relatively than capable, thoughtful adults. Initiative was often discouraged, and trust was in brief supply. Leadership often meant command and control—not inspiration, not collaboration. Those years were pivotal not because I desired to recreate what I saw, but because I knew I had to construct the other of it.
After I founded Explorance, I made a promise: to construct an organization where trust was the muse, and where people didn’t have to go away their humanity on the door to achieve success. That philosophy became the premise for what I call a culture of reciprocity—a workplace where each the corporate and its people give 120%, anchored in mutual respect, transparency, and a shared sense of purpose.
It’s a straightforward but powerful idea: people don’t need to be managed—they need to be believed in. They don’t need to be incentivized—they need to be inspired. The organizations I got here from taught me that you could have all the correct strategy and systems in place, but when people don’t feel trusted, empowered, and heard, none of it matters.
At Explorance, we flipped the script. We defined greatness not by title or tenure, but by the courage to look inward, live with purpose, and pursue excellence together
That mindset is woven into every thing we do—our product philosophy, our culture, and the impact we seek to create on this planet.
So in some ways, those corporate chapters gave me clarity. They showed me the gaps I needed to fill—not only in business, but in how people experience work. And that clarity became the blueprint for constructing something radically more human.
Explorance uses AI and advanced analytics to show feedback into motion. What role does AI play in your product offerings today, and where do you see it heading in the longer term?
Our work with AI began well before the 2023 hype cycle. In 2017, we began constructing MLY, a specialized, high-accuracy machine learning platform focused on one thing: helping organizations deeply understand the voice of their people, without asking them to say greater than they have already got.
After six years of development behind the scenes, MLY launched as a differentiated feedback intelligence engine. It analyzes open-ended comments with extraordinary precision—capturing not only sentiment, but context, causality, and intention. It preserves the query context by which comments were made, identifies what persons are expressing, why they feel that way, and the way it pertains to key drivers like engagement, inclusion, or performance. It turns unstructured feedback into insight you possibly can act on, quickly, confidently, and at scale.
What makes MLY so powerful is that it shifts the role of feedback entirely. Open-ended comments aren’t any longer treated as messy add-ons; they turn into the richest source of “what,” “why,” and “how” in any feedback ecosystem. And since this is commonly data organizations have already got, MLY reduces the necessity to launch yet one more survey, it listens first and asks questions second.
This shift is strategic. With MLY, we would like to reorient how organizations approach feedback:
- Start with the impact you must make
- Follow through with the insights it is advisable to get there
- End with the query, provided that you have to
Today, half of our product organization is fully dedicated to the continuing evolution of MLY, because we consider it’s the longer term of feedback. AI for us isn’t about automation for its own sake, it’s about making a more intelligent, less intrusive, more human method to listen. One which empowers organizations to act with purpose, agility, and empathy.
Your AI-powered MLY platform processes massive volumes of qualitative data. What were the largest technical hurdles in developing something so scalable and reliable?
At Explorance, scale doesn’t just mean more data, it means deeper trust, broader coverage, and safer conversations.
Constructing MLY to the usual we envisioned wasn’t only a technical endeavor, it was an ethical and strategic one. On the core of any trustworthy AI platform is the standard, diversity, and responsibility of the info that powers it. That was our first major challenge: sourcing a big enough volume of relevant qualitative data to coach our proprietary models, while doing so ethically, with full customer consent, and across a big selection of use cases.
Our models needed to reflect the complete breadth of human experiences across each student education journeys and worker learning and HR contexts. Which means understanding hundreds of subtle expressions, across cultures, institutions, and industries—while respecting privacy and maintaining consent. It took years of careful data curation, working along with our customers who trusted us to treat their data with care and purpose.
The second challenge was architectural: how will we construct models which might be powerful enough to surface deep intelligence, while still maintaining high precision and recall standards, in addition to comprehensive coverage? Our customers don’t just want sentiment, they need meaning. They expect feedback to be actionable, inclusive, and representative of each voice, especially people who might otherwise go unheard. That demand for scale, diversity, and insight, concurrently, requires ongoing innovation and relentless testing.
A 3rd layer emerged as our platform matured: supporting psychological and physical safety throughout the feedback evaluation and reporting process. Listening shouldn’t feel threatening, it should feel secure. Organizations are actually expecting tools like MLY to strengthen a culture of trust and care, ensuring that feedback is rarely weaponized but as a substitute used as a catalyst for constructive change. That’s a posh balance of AI sophistication, UX design, and ethical principles.
And eventually, we’re consistently adapting to the rapid evolution of AI technology, the emergence of latest regulatory frameworks, and procurement processes which might be only starting to catch up. For us, this isn’t a one-time achievement, it’s a commitment to evolve MLY at lightspeed, staying differentiated, responsible, and above all, useful to the people and organizations who depend on it.
Briefly: scalability wasn’t nearly speed and volume. It was about constructing AI that’s as thoughtful because it is powerful—and that continues to be our north star.
How do you ensure responsible, ethical AI development at Explorance, especially given your emphasis on values and human-centric design?
At Explorance, we transcend ethical AI, we construct for Responsible AI. Where ethics sets the intention, responsibility shapes the execution. It’s how we translate our values into the design, governance, and on a regular basis application of our technologies.
First, we start with a transparent and unwavering principle: data belongs solely to our customers. We never use customer data to coach or improve our models without explicit, written consent. Our training datasets are entirely opt-in, curated ethically and transparently. We now have strict internal policies around data retention, data usage, and data ownership. Trust isn’t only a promise, it’s a protocol.
Second, accuracy is non-negotiable. MLY doesn’t hallucinate or speculate. We’ve built it to deliver decision-grade intelligence with high precision, even when which means being conservative in coverage on the outset. Our customers make critical decisions based on MLY’s insights, and so they deserve the arrogance that what they’re acting on is reliable, grounded, and real.
Third, we’re deeply committed to inclusivity and bias mitigation. MLY is trained on a various and representative dataset covering the complete spectrum of student, worker, and human experiences. Every voice matters, especially those which might be often missed. That commitment is embedded in how we construct, evaluate, and evolve our models.
But the last word test of Responsible AI is its impact. For us, which means helping organizations do greater than analyze feedback—we help them create safer spaces for open dialogue, courageous conversations, and meaningful advancement. Responsible AI, in our world, is a tool for improving humanity, by making feedback not only a metric, but a moment of trust, connection, and progress.
And eventually, we recognize that Responsible AI is a living promise. As technologies evolve, as regulation matures, and as latest societal expectations emerge, we remain agile, accountable, and transparent. Because at Explorance, Responsible AI isn’t a feature, it’s our foundation.
As someone deeply captivated with learning, how does your personal philosophy on education influence your organization’s products—especially in higher education?
For me, learning isn’t only a process, it’s a purpose. I consider that learning is essentially the most human of superpowers. It’s how we grow, how we adapt, how we connect. And when paired with listening, it becomes transformational, not only for people, but for institutions, organizations, and full cultures.
That philosophy is on the core of Explorance. We don’t construct products to guage performance, we construct them to enable progress. In higher education especially, our mission is to assist institutions not only teach but listen. To not only assess the scholar experience, but to know it. MLY, Blue, MTM and our entire platform ecosystem are designed to assist educators and leaders ask deeper questions, surface more honest answers, and use feedback as a catalyst for real change.
One in every of the guiding reflections I often share is:
“Did we listen? Did we learn? Did we construct the type of culture we’d want our kids to work and thrive in?”
That query shapes every thing, from our technology roadmap to how we measure success. Within the education sector, we partner with institutions not only to lift response rates or improve learning outcomes, but to create safer spaces for dialogue, more inclusive classrooms, and a culture where every student feels seen, heard, and valued.
Ultimately, I consider that feedback is how we teach institutions to learn. And in doing so, we give them the tools to evolve, not only to satisfy expectations, but to encourage transformation. Because the longer term of education isn’t nearly delivering content, it’s about cultivating listening cultures that empower every lifelong learner to turn into more fully themselves.
You’ve described your team as a “mighty army of Explorers.” What do you search for within the people you hire, and the way do you foster such deep alignment along with your mission?
We don’t hire employees; we invite Explorers on a journey. And that journey is built on trust, purpose, and the idea that growth is at all times a shared endeavor.
At Explorance, we don’t just hire for talent, we hire for spirit. Skills matter, in fact. But what we truly search for is people who find themselves able to walk the hard road with heart, who can thrive in ambiguity, and who’re fueled by purpose greater than perks.
I’ve said before: “I even have worked for a thousand years, and I’ll work for a thousand more.” That’s not about burnout, it’s about belonging to something you suspect in, something that offers you energy relatively than simply extracting it. That’s the spirit of an Explorer: someone who gives 120% not because they’re told to, but because they own the mission as if it were theirs.
What do I search for?
- Individuals who take initiative without waiting for permission
- People who find themselves emotionally intelligent and don’t leave their humanity on the door
- Individuals who embrace responsibility over entitlement
- And above all, individuals who care deeply about growth of self, of others, of the organization
But hiring is barely the start. Alignment comes from how we lead, listen, and live together. That’s why we built a culture of reciprocity, where trust isn’t earned over time, it’s given from day one. Where leaders lead by influence and example, not title. Where we hold one another to high standards because we consider in one another, not because we fear failure.
This alignment isn’t accidental. It’s intentional. It’s embedded in every feedback loop, every onboarding conversation, every tough moment when we elect values over convenience. And over time, that alignment becomes a force multiplier. People don’t just work here, they belong here.
That’s why I call us a “mighty army of Explorers.” Because this isn’t just an organization, it’s a shared quest. And those that walk with us don’t just grow, they assist grow something that outlasts all of us.
You’ve been a builder, mentor, philanthropist, and lifelong learner. What’s next for you—and for Explorance—as you look toward the longer term of labor and education?
What’s next isn’t a finish line, it’s a continuation of a promise. For me personally, the subsequent chapter is about deepening the impact I could make by staying true to the values that brought me here: listening with intention, leading with care, and growing through service. I’ve at all times believed that work isn’t something separate from who we’re, it’s a method to express who we’re becoming.
At Explorance, we’re entering what I see as our most meaningful stage yet. Through our Horizon 2027 plan, we’re focused not only on revenue growth, but on becoming a platform for inspiration and transformation, a catalyst for a way the world listens, learns, and leads.
Our mission is to redefine feedback as a human right, not only a company tool. We’re evolving our technologies like MLY, Blue, and MTM to make feedback more accurate, more actionable, and more empowering. But much more importantly, we’re helping organizations construct cultures of trust and psychological safety, so people don’t just give feedback, they thrive due to it.
As the longer term of labor and education unfolds, I consider the winners won’t be those that automate essentially the most, but those that humanize the most effective. The organizations that lead will likely be those that know how one can listen, how one can act, and how one can create space for people to grow into their fullest selves.
On a private level, I believe often about legacy. Not within the sense of being remembered for accomplishments, but for the impact I’ve had on people’s journeys. I need to know that I helped create safer workplaces, more empathetic classrooms, and a generation of leaders who lead with heart.
As I wrote in Whispers of the Future:
“When I am going, I hope people will say I made them feel seen. That, I asked questions that mattered. That I helped them turn into more of who they already were.”
That’s the work that also lies ahead. And I’m all in, for a thousand more years, if that’s what it takes.
