The Tech Glow Up - Fabulous conversations with innovative minds.

Get a front row seat to the conversations about AI, AR smartglasses, and the future of enterprise technology from Augmented World Expo 2026.

Oscar Falmer has spent eight years helping developers build for wearables — at Meta and at other companies doing interesting work in the space. As developer advocate for things like smartglasses, his job is to lower the floor for anyone who wants to build for AI smartglasses, whether they write code for a living or picked up an AI coding agent on a weekend.

The Meta Display Glasses use the familiar Ray-Ban form factor with a monocular waveguide display on the right side. Pair them with the Meta Neural Band — an EMG wristband that reads electrical signals from your wrist to recognize gestures — and you have a device that lets you interact with content without lifting your phone or draining your battery through computer vision.

Key Moments:

• [00:01:27] Meta Display Glasses hardware: monocular waveguide display, 70 grams, Neural Band gesture control, and why battery efficiency matters for all-day wear.
• [00:05:21] Web apps for Meta Glasses: how the platform opened one month ago and why power users — not just developers — are the ones shipping fastest.
• [00:06:06] The constellation app: star maps using GPS coordinates and IMU sensors, location-based context without full spatial tracking.
• [00:11:46] Personal software is here: why AI coding agents and HTML/CSS/JavaScript make it possible to go from idea to running glasses app in 30 minutes.
• [00:15:50] The Go-Giver playbook: how Oscar's open-source AR glasses dataset went from a single spreadsheet to C-suite circulation and a job at Meta.

Oscar builds community the same way he builds tools: share what you know, keep it open, and trust that the right people will find it. His AR glasses dataset — started when he was between jobs, shared for free — was being passed around at the highest levels of enterprise XR before anyone knew his name.

Catch the full episode on YouTube — like and subscribe if you want more conversations like this.

#SmartGlasses #MetaGlasses #TechGlowUp #AWE2026 #XR

About Oscar Falmer

Oscar Falmer is a Wearables Developer Advocate at Meta, where he supports developers and companies building for Meta AI glasses. 

He's spent nearly a decade in XR, previously working in Developer Relations at both Snap and Apple, where he helped developers create AR experiences across mobile, social media, and wearable platforms.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Get a front row seat to the conversations about AI, AR smartglasses, and the future of enterprise technology from Augmented World Expo 2026.

Neil Trevett has spent his career connecting software to silicon. As president of the Khronos Group — the organization behind OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenXR, and glTF — and president of the Metaverse Standards Forum, he works on the open interoperability standards that let developers build once and deploy across many devices. His day job is at NVIDIA, developing GPU developer ecosystems. His life's work is making sure the industry doesn't have to rebuild the same foundation six times.

At AWE 2026, Neil announced the Open Metaverse Browser Initiative: a spatial engine sitting alongside the existing browser stack so that services from multiple companies can be composited into a single scene without exposing anyone's proprietary data. Not a replacement for the 2D web — one new dimension added on top of the one that already exists.

Key Moments:

• [00:02:27] glTF's evolution: from 3D asset format to Gaussian splat support and semantic scene information that captures meaning, not just appearance.
• [00:08:21] The OpenXR timing lesson: standards set too early die by committee, too late and fragmentation wins — and how Khronos hit the window.
• [00:13:25] The metaverse redefined: multiple people doing spatial computing on smart glasses, connected, in the real world.
• [00:19:23] Why enterprise spatial computing is stalled: proprietary data can't flow through a third-party intermediary, and nothing in the current web stack fixes that.
• [00:20:53] Open Metaverse Browser Initiative: composition in the browser — open, private, multi-service.

The M-word has had a rough few years, but the vision — people connected to the world around them through spatial compute on wearable devices — is more achievable now than it has ever been.

Watch the full episode → https://youtu.be/MwJD8ZoEUMs

Like and subscribe if you want more conversations like this.

#SpatialWeb #KhronosGroup #TechGlowUp #AWE2026 #XR

About Neil Trevett

Neil Trevett is Vice President of Developer Ecosystems at NVIDIA, where he is responsible for enabling and encouraging advanced applications to use GPU acceleration.  Neil is also serving as the elected President of the Khronos Group where he created and chaired the OpenGL ES working group that  defined the industry standard for 3D graphics on mobile devices. 

At Khronos he also chairs the OpenCL working group for portable, parallel heterogeneous computing, helped initiate the WebGL standard that is bringing interactive 3D graphics to the Web and is now working to help formulate standards for vision and neural network inferencing. Previously, as Vice President of 3Dlabs, Neil was at the forefront of the silicon revolution bringing interactive 3D to the PC, and he established the embedded graphics division of 3Dlabs to bring advanced visual processing to a wide-range of non-PC platforms. 

Neil was elected President for eight consecutive years of the Web3D Consortium dedicated to creating open standards for communicating real-time 3D on the Internet.  Neil graduated from Birmingham University in the UK with a First Class Joint Honors B.Sc. in electronic engineering and computer science and holds several patents in the area of graphics technology.

About the Metaverse Standards Forum

The Metaverse Standards Forum is a non-profit consortium dedicated to fostering metaverse interoperability. Open to all organizations of any size, including standards organizations, companies, and universities, the Forum is committed to promoting open standards, collaboration, and best practices to pave the way for an open, inclusive, and accessible metaverse. Metaverse Standards Forum members engage in building consensus on interoperability requirements, prototyping, plugfests, and open-source tool development. Learn more at metaverse-standards.org, and follow the Metaverse Standards Forum on Twitter @metaverse_forum.

About the Open Metaverse Browser Initiative

The Open Metaverse Browser Initiative (OMBI), created by the Metaverse Standards Forum in collaboration with RP1, brings standards organizations, technology companies, developers, and researchers together to build the spatial equivalent of the web browser: open, interoperable, and owned by no single company. RP1 is the lead architect and maintainer. Sneeze, the first open metaverse browser engine, is developed through OMBI and available on the Forum's GitHub repository under the Apache 2.0 license. Learn more at omb.wiki.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Get a front row seat to the conversations about AI, AR smartglasses, and the future of enterprise technology from Augmented World Expo 2026. 

For six or seven years, the XR industry has been selling upgrades to people who already believe. Better resolution, more compute, a sleeker strap — for the same early-adopter audience already wearing a headset. I kept waiting for someone to answer the obvious question: when does this technology reach anyone else?

Amir Khorram, Head of Enterprise at XREAL, is back on The Tech Glow Up — we recorded this one live at AWE in Long Beach — and he had the most concrete answer I have heard. XREAL Aura is a full AR device built in collaboration with Google (Android XR operating system) and Qualcomm (Snapdragon Reality Elite Platform). Lightweight, wearable, designed for multi-use deployment, and enterprise-ready: MDM integration, kiosk mode, custom app stores, and the data privacy track record of Android — a platform with hundreds of millions of devices deployed globally. Seventy percent of the XR industry already works on Android. Aura meets enterprise buyers where they already are.

Episode Key Moment Highlights:

• [00:00:00] Aura explained: what the device is, who built it, and why it clears healthcare and financial services data standards on day one.
• [00:00:28] Beyond the believers: why Aura is the first device Amir genuinely expects to pull new audiences into XR — lighter, multi-use, and comfortable enough to wear all day.
• [00:00:22] Global XR reach: developers in Germany, schools in Latin America, healthcare in Asia — the industry is bigger and more global than it gets credit for.
• [00:00:00] Enterprise readiness: the Android track record that means enterprise buyers don't have to make a new bet — just extend one they already made.
• [00:00:00] The industry's next glow up: Amir's case that the development community needs real investment — not just launches — to make XR sustainable.

I walked away with four people in mind to connect with Amir. If you work in health, education, spatial computing, or enterprise tech, this conversation is for you.

Watch the full episode on YouTube → https://youtu.be/Vvh_XWE_gig — like and subscribe to catch every episode of The Tech Glow Up. 

Join the Tech Glow Up newsletter on Substack → https://substack.com/@mxnathanc

Wardrobe provided by: Wildfang.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Smart glasses had a moment at Augmented World Expo 2026 — and I was there for all of it. Here's your preview of what's coming.

Sending this from a co-working spot in Japan, where I'm traveling for work and a little pleasure after AWE. I'll be honest: rather than wait to record a polished intro for every episode, I wanted to drop this quick update so you know what's heading your way before it starts hitting your feed. The content is too good to sit on.

At AWE 2026, Snap announced the new Specs AR AI-powered smart glasses, and if any year was the year of smart glasses in XR, this was it. I sat down with leaders from Specs, Meta Display, and the XREAL team — three of the biggest players shaping where this hardware is headed — and those conversations are some of my strongest to date. Smart glasses aren't a concept anymore. They're here, they're good, and the people building them are moving fast.

I also talked with Neil Trevett of the Khronos Group and the Metaverse Standards Forum about the open content standards that will determine whether spatial computing reaches everyone or stays niche. And with Sean Mann, CEO of RP1, about open metaverse browsers — the next evolution of what a URL can do. These are the infrastructure conversations that don't get enough attention, and they're fascinating.

On the enterprise side: honest conversations with leaders from Salesforce, Wieden+Kennedy, and Amazon about how organizations are actually applying XR right now — not in the future, right now.

And a first for the Tech Glow Up — my first ASL conversation, with Michael Alan Nesmith of Not Breaking Space, on accessible and universal design in XR. I hope you love it as much as I did.

Then there's the Spatial Creator Spotlight. Close to ten interviews from the Snap SPECS Developer Bootcamp — artists, designers, researchers, and tinkerers turning what's technically possible into things people actually want. Those drop first, followed by AWE episodes twice a week for most of the rest of the summer.

Subscribe so you don't miss any of it → https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPCFJLJF5522VdY5xCrYvPA

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Rural hospitals hold some of the most reliable receivables in finance — money owed by the US government — yet they can't borrow against them. Banks won't price the risk. So hospitals pledge buildings instead, starving themselves of capital. Joseph Riddle, Chief Commercial Officer at Capital Pulse, watched this problem up close before his company built the AI that cracks it: a model valuing any medical receivable with greater than 95% accuracy, flagging denials early, and giving lenders confidence to treat those receivables as real collateral.

Joseph is also an angel investor in eight startups. He was employee number 25 at SmartBrief before it sold to Future PLC, came up through Gartner, and has been through two successful exits in roughly three years. 

He now invests in healthcare and climate — the two sectors he sees as the most pressing challenges facing the United States. His philosophy: "The antidote to anxiety is action." When the problem looks impossible, you start moving.

Episode Key Moment Highlights:

• [00:08:47] Healthcare and climate focus: Joseph explains why he chose these two sectors and why education, despite its urgency, is harder to shift with technology alone.
• [00:15:12] Seed stage investing: At the earliest rounds investors bet on the founder first, idea second — Joseph walks through what conviction and preparation look like to an angel.
• [00:20:20] Marketing 101: Stop talking about your company and start talking about your client's problem — in B2B, your client usually understands their pain better than you do.
• [00:22:36] Capital Pulse's RCM solution: The AI model that lets banks treat government medical receivables as real collateral, giving rural hospitals predictable cash flow.
• [00:28:01] Mentorship without a formal ask: Joseph found people with "special juice" and built reasons to spend time with them — a model most founders never try.

His approach across investing and building: talk to customers, combine stories with data, stay focused on the client's problem.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube → https://youtu.be/ErrspDJTwaM

Like and subscribe so you never miss an episode of The Tech Glow Up.

About Joseph A. Riddle:

Joseph Riddle is an angel investor, writer, and B2B marketing executive who bridges the gap between financial strategy and spiritual well-being. After rising from a childhood of poverty to become a retired multi-millionaire by age 45, Joseph realized that traditional definitions of success were insufficient for navigating a chaotic world. 

He has since reinvented himself as an intentional investor in "Green Tech," funding startups like CarbonWave and Carbon GeoCapture that are turning climate pollution into sustainable solutions.

Joseph’s investing philosophy is grounded in the Buddhist concept of equanimity, which he uses to counter climate anxiety, doomscrolling and the rage economy. He advocates for making friends with your Future Self as a strategy for long-term decision-making, arguing that we must invest today to ensure a habitable world for the person we will become. 

A member of the Startup Investor Accelorator, Joseph splits his time between Bellingham, Washington, and Mexico City, where he practices the art of creating "islands of stability" through conscious resource allocation.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Most climate communication talks at people. It delivers facts, projections, timelines — and wonders why nothing changes. Facts land in the head, not the gut. Immersive media like XR, AR, VR changes that. When you're standing inside a story, it stops being abstract. You feel it. That's the conviction behind Agog, the Immersive Media Institute, and why co-founder Chip Giller believes XR is one of the most important tools the climate movement hasn't fully picked up yet.

Chip didn't arrive here in a straight line. He founded Grist.org in the late 1990s — one of the first digital-only nonprofit news organizations — chasing every new platform: desktop publishing, the web, podcasting before it had a name, video, social. 

Around 2014–2015, he put on an Oculus DK1. "This is f@cking amazing — this feeling of presence." During COVID he spent time in AltspaceVR and VRChat with people from India, Brazil, and beyond; and saw that XR shows not just what is, but what was and what could be. He co-founded Agog with Wendy Schmidt to build the field that could make that vision real.

Key Moments:

• [00:08:15] The climate communication gap: why facts don't move people — and why XR does
• [00:21:40] Grist to Agog: chasing platforms for 25 years and what the DK1 moment revealed
• [00:35:10] Field building: why Agog moved beyond grants to train creators and activate cultural institutions
• [00:48:55] "Postcards from Our Climate Resilient Future": AR at Portland bus stops bringing Metro's climate plans to life
• [01:02:30] Open call: $1 million for immersive climate storytelling and what judges are looking for

Agog has distributed $6.5 million in grants in its first two years. Now there's an open call for $1 million in new funding — not for the flashiest tech, but where immersive genuinely adds value. 

The 15-person team is growing, the peer-reviewed Immersive Impact Review is underway, and Chip's philosophy says it all: building toward "a future that doesn't suck."

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/igFUkSJ36IU

About Chip Giller

Chip Giller is the executive director and a co-founder of Agog. He has been a visionary in the climate space and media field for 30 years, leading creative storytelling teams and partnering with nonprofits, philanthropists, and other leaders to accelerate progress to a better, more just world. 

In 2024, Chip joined forces with Wendy Schmidt to launch Agog: The Immersive Media Institute, bringing their shared passion for innovation and social change to the forefront of the immersive media landscape. Agog helps people use emerging media like XR to imagine and build better futures.

In 1999, Chip founded one of the first digital news organizations and first nonprofit newsrooms, Grist, to engage the next generation on climate change and other environmental issues. Grist reaches millions and has been recognized in many ways for its impact, including as a recipient of the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. 

In 2017, Chip launched Grist’s solutions lab to identify, celebrate, and connect a diverse array of climate solutions leaders, collectively known as the Grist 50; and to tell unexpected stories in creative new formats about justice and progress. Among other honors, Chip has received a Heinz Award and been named a TIME “Hero of the Environment.” Follow Chip on Threads and LinkedIn.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

What does it take to stay committed to a vision when the technology is still developing? Russell Patton has been inside Snap working on camera glasses and AR smartglasses for over a decade. 

He's a Staff Product Manager on Snap Spectacles, and we recorded this episode at Snap's Spectacles Developer Bootcamp in Santa Monica, where 50 of the world's top lens creators gathered to advance the path toward wearable AR.

Russell's through-line isn't hype — it's conviction built on evidence. Snap started making camera glasses in 2016 — not because the product was perfect, but because each generation taught the team something new about comfort, efficiency, and treating privacy as a first-class design principle. 

When Evan Spiegel said around 2019 that consumer AR glasses were probably a decade away, skeptics balked. But that call came from a deep understanding of what the technology actually required.

• [00:01:39] Snap's AR vision: The challenge was never the idea — it was getting the technology to catch up, and what camera glasses since 2016 taught the team about the path forward.
• [00:04:01] Developers vs. consumers: Developers onboard themselves — but consumers need a working content ecosystem on day one and an experience that meets them where they are.
• [00:07:40] Spatial UX onboarding: Moving closer to content scales it, content stays anchored in 3D space — intuitive by nature, but people trained on flat screens need to rediscover that mode of thinking.
• [00:09:23] Specs 2024 in detail: Large field of view, electronic tint, 6DoF tracking, hand tracking, voice input, split computing architecture, and vapor chambers in each temple for thermal management.
• [00:17:27] Vision and conviction: "If the journey was easy, I think it's likely that the innovation would've already happened." On arriving at the right destination, even if it takes time.

AR glasses aren't a gadget — they're a new computing paradigm, a canvas for experiences that don't exist yet. 

The most common reason developers give for their excitement says it best: get the screen out of the way so we can be in the real world more.

Watch on YouTube and subscribe so you never miss an episode of The Tech Glow Up. https://youtu.be/dUkxBmpL2uw

Join the Tech Glow Up newsletter on Substack → https://substack.com/@mxnathanc

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Every health tech founder wants to change the system. But Warren Templeton, Managing Director at Health2047, will tell you that without financial sustainability, the mission dies on the vine. "No mission without margin" isn't a compromise — it's a precondition. In a sector where impact is measured in lives and dollars at the same time, Warren argues that founders who can't do the math on their own business model are the ones who don't make it.

Health2047 is a venture studio backed by the American Medical Association — and that structure matters. Warren and his team don't just write checks. They build business capability around pre-seed and seed founders, then deploy capital through whatever vehicle fits the situation, debt or equity. 

The name 2047 is deliberate: the 200-year anniversary of the AMA's founding. 

The portfolio spans chronic disease management, data liquidity, and physician productivity, with companies like Phenomix Health, Moneta, ScholarRx, and Zing Health. Warren also wants every Health2047 startup to openly document their data's biases and limitations — because training on non-representative data doesn't fix the problem, it compounds it.

Key Moments:

• [00:03:34] How Health2047 partners with founders — beyond the check
• [00:06:05] The "no mission without margin" thesis and what it really means
• [00:12:16] What healthcare transformation actually looks like (hint: it's not blowing things up)
• [00:24:58] The open data future Warren wants to see — and why it's already starting
• [00:26:37] The women's health investment gap and the Health of Women thesis

Warren's framework for founders is deceptively simple: price times quantity. Healthcare has finite patient populations, limited physician counts, and real unit economics. Knowing your P×Q math tells you what kind of investor you need and whether your business model can actually survive.

Subscribe to The Tech Glow Up for more conversations with the leaders driving healthcare forward.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube → https://youtu.be/NYYc_a2k63w

Join the Tech Glow Up newsletter on Substack → https://substack.com/@mxnathanc

About Warren Templeton:

Warren Templeton is a Managing Director at Health2047, the venture studio backed by the American Medical Association. In this role, Warren works with founders and entrepreneurs on product formation and refinement through to go-to-market execution. Warren brings strong analytical and deep technical skills, possessing significant capabilities in both enterprise and consumer-focused product development. Warren sits on the board of RecoverX, a Health2047 portfolio company. 

Previously, Warren co-founded a marketing content creation platform, Zigna, and served as COO. He worked at Fitbit on growth strategies via M&A. Warren began his career building trading technology for Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, and Morgan Stanley, where he last held the title of VP. Warren holds a BSc in Computer Science and Management from the University of St. Andrews and an MBA from Darden School of Business at University of Virginia.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

We train our bodies. We track our steps, our sleep, our resting heart rate. But when it comes to mental wellness — the skills that help people regulate, process, and recover — most people never learn them until something breaks. The tools exist. Cognitive behavioral therapy has 50 years of evidence behind it. And those tools work just as well before a crisis as after. Almost nobody knows that.

Leah Blain is a licensed clinical psychologist and Chief Clinical Officer at Chimney Trail Health. Her conviction is simple: get evidence-based mental wellness tools to people upstream — before a problem starts, not after it requires treatment. That means translating decades of validated CBT research into something accessible. Something that fits in a cargo pocket. 

Chimney Trail's flagship offering is a workbook that looks like a fun magazine — small quizzes, thought records, digestible content, designed specifically to fit in a military uniform pocket. Sometimes meeting people where they are is the whole innovation.

What we cover in this episode:

• [00:00] Nathan and Leah introduce Chimney Trail Health and the primary prevention model
• [04:36] How Chimney Trail builds ROI through outcomes, not just access — B2B and B2G engagement strategy
• [05:59] The pocket workbook: why a physical, cargo-pocket-sized magazine beat a digital app for military users
• [15:57] Mission as the decision yardstick: how Chimney Trail evaluates what to add and what to leave out
• [24:38] Chimney Trail's recent glow up — a lethal means security curriculum and a large-scale Air Force pilot

Leah also talks about the incentive problem in healthcare, why prevention is invisible when it works, and what it would look like to give mental wellness the same cultural weight as physical fitness. 

Her ask for the field: stop treating mental health as a marker of brokenness and start treating it as a performance edge everyone already has and can train.

Catch the full episode where you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube —https://youtu.be/vuNTy5lIR6I

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Join the Tech Glow Up newsletter on Substack → https://substack.com/@mxnathanc

About Leah Blain

Dr. Leah Blain is a licensed clinical psychologist, a Beck Institute-certified cognitive behavioral psychotherapist, and Chief Clinical Officer for Chimney Trail Health. She spent the last decade building and running cutting edge behavioral health clinics; most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, where she launched a specialized cognitive behavioral therapy program for veterans and military family members.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Meet the HealthTech Impact Award Winners. Five innovators with five real, personal inspirations that keep them focussed and building. 

Ellyn Ito co-founded InnerStill after her 15-year-old son became suicidal during the pandemic. Every avenue they tried fell short. That search led to MindVybe — a patented wearable neuromodulation device using vagus nerve stimulation and acupressure point regulation for stress, poor sleep, brain fog, agitation, and lack of focus. No side effects, no overuse risk. MindVybe has 5,000 users in clinical studies, three state innovation grants, and is on the FDA 510k pathway.

Claire Dixon is building LoOop for the millions living with PCOS — polycystic ovary syndrome — a painful, chronically underfunded condition. LoOop is an abdominal patch combining electronic stimulation with a full care platform: knowledge base, personal journaling, and an AI chat assistant. Claire's philosophy: "There are two ways to win and only one way to fail — if you lose and you learn, that's still a win." Life happens for you, not to you.

Dr. Chigozie Michael Nwalozie built Zarephath Health on one conviction: execution matters more than ideas. His team created non-invasive, urine-based diagnostic tests for HPV, STDs, and other markers — results in 10 minutes — scaling across 16 countries in Africa around three pillars: screening, accessible diagnosis, and treatment. His message is clear: HPV does not respect nationality, race, wealth, or title. This is a global problem.

Alex Koshykov asked why telehealth fell back to pre-pandemic levels after COVID. The answer: patients can't describe symptoms in clinical terms, and doctors can't diagnose without information. YODD is a multimodal remote diagnostic device giving doctors real-time data — lung and heart sounds, ears, throat, oxygen saturation, pulse, EKG, blood pressure — during a telehealth call. Built for rural patients who travel two to three hours to reach a hospital.

Tayaru Bayyana's father went through a stage four cancer journey. A problem solver by nature, she could not solve it. "That hit me really hard." SereniCare AI is a proactive decision platform for cancer patients and caregivers, built to turn existing data into timely guidance — designed so no one in that circle makes decisions in the dark. Validated through 50 to 70 interviews with clinicians and nurse practitioners.

Timestamps:
[00:00:00] Introduction — The HealthTech Impact Showdown
[00:05:00] Ellyn Ito — InnerStill / MindVybe
[00:20:00] Claire Dixon — Neuraura / LoOop
[00:35:00] Dr. Chigozie Michael Nwalozie — Zarephath Health
[00:50:00] Alex Koshykov — YODD
[01:05:00] Tayaru Bayyana — SereniCare AI

Five founders. Five moments where something happened and they chose to build. This episode is a celebration of that choice.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube →https://youtu.be/4FeCDubNO-8

Join the Tech Glow Up newsletter on Substack → https://substack.com/@mxnathanc

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success. 

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.