Unlike in nature, ideas in enterprise don't grow or perish by

the laws of natural selection -- survival of the fittest -- but

rather, which ideas are communicated and understood better at the

early stages. But not every good idea is best expressed on a

whiteboard. That's why Gabe Paez developed The Wild -- a digital

collaborative space designed to help teams workshop designs and ideas

in a VR environment.

Alan: My name's Alan Smithson,

the host of the XR for Business Podcast, where we interview industry

leaders in making technologies in virtual, augmented and mixed

reality. And today's guest is Gabe Paez. Gabe works at the

intersection of engineering, design, and business. He's the founder

and CEO of The Wild, and immersive collaboration platform for teams

to experience their work together, from anywhere in augmented and

virtual reality. The Wild enables spatial design teams to ideate,

review, share, and present in cross-platform XR from the same room or

across the world. Gabe has over a decade of experience leading

experiential product teams and has designed immersive software

products for a diverse roster of Fortune 100 companies including

Google, Samsung, Nike, AT&T, and Verizon. To learn more about The

Wild visit thewild.com.

Gabe, welcome to the show.

Gabe: Hi! It's good to be here.

Thank you.

Alan: Really amazing. Thank you

so much for taking the time. I know you're super busy. You just

launched The Wild out into the wild. Tell us about The Wild. How did

this idea come to be, and what is it?

Gabe: Well, to be honest, I feel

like I've spent my whole career trying to explain ambitious ideas to

people, and what I've realized in that process is that there are

pools for sharing that idea -- especially in the early stages of that

idea -- are so limited. And often the best, the most ambitious, the

most interesting ideas get shut out early on, solely for the reason

that they are misunderstood or not completely communicated to the

other person. So I really wanted to break down that barrier; find a

way for everyone on a team to experience an idea together, while it's

still in the ideas stage straight through to execution, and to find

an efficiency in that process. Not just solely for cost savings, but

ultimately, to find the best ideas and let those surface to the top

of the stack.

Alan: Let's break it down here.

So this is a collaboration tool or a platform where people from

around the world can go into a virtual space and experience design

together.

Gabe: So The Wild really puts

collaboration at the core of the offering, not as an add-on, but as

the foundation of what we're doing. We're creating a collaboration

hub for people that design spaces, environments to come together and

experience those spaces from anywhere in the world. Architects,

engineers, people that their profession is to take an idea and

transform that into a physical place in the physical world somewhere.

And so they have a unique challenge that the output of their process,

their design process really isn't realized until the very final

stage. So what The Wild does is sort of says we now have a capability

that we don't have to wait until the very end to really understand

that space and to experience it, not just as a simulation on your

own, but to experience it together as a team, just as you would in

the very final moments where you walk through that space physically

with your teammates and look at what you've created together. We're

using not just virtual reality, but the whole XR spectrum to allow

those team members to experience that idea as a concept in the very

early stages, either in total virtual space, in virtual reality or

augmented into a physical space. Whether you're building out a full

building on an empty lot, that you c