The Tech Glow Up - Fabulous conversations with innovative minds.

The spatial computing world is buzzing, but not everything is growing: while virtual reality (VR) hype might be flattening for consumers, augmented reality (AR) in the enterprise is exploding. 

The key to this growth? Moving beyond bulky headsets and figuring out how to make AR glasses lightweight and wearable for long periods of time. Global Head of Enterprise at XREAL, Amir Khorram, has had a front row seat to the entire XR journey and shares why lightweight AR is finally delivering massive value for industries like healthcare, aerospace, and education.

Amir's philosophy on innovation is deeply rooted in experience: the most successful technologies don't go it alone. He details how XREAL, a company that initially focused on building a global consumer brand, found its unexpected enterprise success by observing how doctors and teachers were already using their glasses. 

This insight led to a focus on partnership ecosystems—identifying XREAL's core strength (hardware) and supporting developers and distribution partners (like Manage XR, Arbor XR, Pixo VR) who excel at content and deployment.

Episode Highlights

• Enterprise Adoption Signal: Organizations in finance, hospitals, and music schools started deploying AR hardware on their own, proving the technology's real-world value outside of consumer gaming.
• The Form Factor Challenge: Legacy VR deployments validated immersive tech for saving money and improving training, but the clunky form factor made long-term, widespread use challenging.
• Immersive Health Applications: Lightweight AR glasses are making a difference across healthcare, from mental health breaks and distraction therapy for dialysis patients to physical rehabilitation and remote consultations with medical professionals.
• Strategic Planning in Enterprise XR: XREAL's 2026 plan balances short-term tactical goals (3-6 months for distribution) with longer-term developer and innovation support (6-12 months for Project Aura).
• Entrepreneurial Advice: Founders should seek knowledge and actively leverage tools, technology (including AI), and partnerships to move faster, drawing on a lifetime of experience from a family of successful entrepreneurs.

Amir’s ultimate mission for XREAL’s enterprise business is to establish a core foundation by actively amplifying the impressive, real-world stories of their developer and partner community. 

He argues that seeing AR technology proven as a genuine solution for industries—where it saves money and boosts efficiency—is the most effective way to inspire widespread investment and accelerate the market.

Hear the full conversation and see the future of enterprise AR on YouTube now. https://youtu.be/ygvu8KQLuHU

About Amir: 

Over a 20 year career Amir Khorram continues to build and lead winning teams in cutting edge industries. From 5G to XR, Amir’s business units drive record setting results around the globe. 

Amir now leads global enterprise at XREAL, where his team is tasked with delivering world class hardware and services to everyone from SMB’s to Fortune 500 organizations.

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.

14 years ago, before the AI boom, marketers were stuck in "batch and blast" and data-overwhelmed. I talk with Colin Nederkoorn, CEO and co-founder of Customer IO, about his company’s journey from convincing people to use behavioral data for deterministic paths to becoming critical infrastructure for the new era of AI-driven, real-time customer communication that has fueled the company to over $100 million in ARR.

Colin shares a profound philosophy for early-stage founders: not every company needs to "blitz scale." His methodical approach was about building the machine for compound growth, raising "a little bit of money" only to buy time to reach the next milestone, rather than a big venture round that forces speed. 

This patience allowed Customer IO to build a powerful platform that could "complete the loop" by measuring if a user's behavior changed inside their product.

Episode Highlights

• Behavioral Data: The critical shift from list-based "batch and blast" to using real-time behavioral data to influence user actions and complete the feedback loop.
• Compound Growth: The mathematical insight that a steady 20% month-over-month growth, consistently applied, creates an outsize business over the long run because of the power of compounding.
• AI's Role: Customer IO's six-month "Glow Up" is a commitment to use AI to remove all the "drudgery" for marketers in setting up complex, sophisticated campaigns.
• Leadership Fuel: A blunt piece of feedback from an investor—that Colin "wasn't a good enough CEO"—became the motivation to hire a coach and accelerate the company’s trajectory.
• Incumbent Advantage: Colin’s spicy hot take is that traditional SaaS businesses positioned as "critical infrastructure" will figure out AI and thrive, avoiding massive displacement.

Colin’s story is a masterclass in strategic product-led innovation: learning from customers, making a crucial pivot, and maintaining a level-headed, long-term approach to business growth. 

His focus on unlocking the power of a robust, data-rich platform for the new age of LLMs is a clear roadmap for any founder in the B2B space.

Watch the full episode on YouTube and make sure to like and subscribe to The Tech Glow Up.

About Colin Nederkoorn

Colin Nederkoorn is the founder and CEO of Customer.io. Since starting the company in 2012, he has focused on creating products that help brands connect meaningfully with their users. 

Drawing from his passion for entrepreneurship and experience in product leadership, including his time as Head of Product at ChallengePost, he leads the executive team, drives innovation, and manages the company’s growth. 

Based in Portland, Oregon, when he's not building Customer.io, he enjoys sailing, coaching youth soccer, and cooking.

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 teams ship “good” products that quietly fail because they never tested them with the people they were supposedly built for. This Techquity Awards special is a four-part episode on how to fix that. I’m joined by Janna Guinen, Executive Director of the HLTH Foundation, plus three Techquity Award winners—Reza Sanai of PicassoMD; Colby Takeda of Pear Suite; and David and Robert Bosnack of Attune Media Labs—who use Techquity as a practical blueprint for building products that actually work in the real world.

Techquity, as Janna defines it, is innovating with everybody in mind—from how you validate the problem to who can realistically use your product on the other side. The HLTH Techquity Awards are case-study based, not feel-good trophies. 
Applicants document how they involved the communities they serve, which population they’re designing for, and which metrics prove they’re closing gaps for both patients and the teams who care for them. 

This year’s winners show three different ways to put Techquity into practice: PicassoMD’s curbside specialist consults at the point of primary care, Pear Suite’s tech and billing rails for community health workers and local organizations, and Attune Media Labs’ AI emotional intelligence companion for burned-out clinicians.

Episode Highlights:

• Techquity Awards use a rigorous case-study process that forces teams to show their problem validation, design choices, and metrics—not just outcomes slides.
• PicassoMD tested its curbside consult platform head-to-head in an affluent urban clinic and a rural clinic with many uninsured patients, proving the model can work in very different settings.
• Pear Suite onboarded more than 600 community health workers and doulas across 80+ organizations serving Medi-Cal members, closing 80% of identified social needs gaps.​
• Attune Media Labs deployed an AI-based emotional intelligence companion with over 1,000 clinicians in rural Cameroon, where about 65% reported burnout, and designed against benchmarks for retention and engagement.

Janna makes the case that Techquity should be the default lens for digital health because inclusive design improves ROI, stickiness, and long-term system sustainability.

And we close with Janna’s announcement that the Techquity Awards are moving from ViVE to the main HLTH event, with applications opening in early spring so these case studies get a bigger stage.

Watch the full HLTH Techquity Awards Special on YouTube to learn how Techquity turns “health equity” from a buzzword into a build process. 

Then like and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

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.

Medical students get one, maybe two chances a year to practice diagnosing real patients. One to two shots before they're the ones making the call. Oli Siska, co-founder and CEO of Kaleidoscope XR, builds VR and AI tools that blow that limitation wide open. 

Caregiver VR puts up to 20 students in a virtual classroom where they role-play dementia care scenarios—and the person playing the resident actually experiences simulated auditory and visual hallucinations. OSCI AI Pro lets medical students practice patient conversations 24/7 on any device with an AI avatar that talks back.

Episode Highlights:

• Caregiver VR triggers real symptoms of dementia—auditory and visual hallucinations—so trainees feel what residents experience, building empathy you cannot get from a lecture or textbook.
• OSCI AI Pro replaces expensive standardized patient exams that require doctors behind one-way mirrors and hired actors, giving medical students unlimited practice on any device, anytime, anywhere.
• VR training produces seven times more information retention than traditional instruction, while standardizing content so every trainee gets the same quality regardless of location.
• New legislation regulating healthcare aides in February 2026 opens a massive opportunity for frontline workers in long-term care to get certified through accessible, on-demand training tools.
• Subject matter experts drive every build at Kaleidoscope XR—the number one mistake any company can make is thinking they know what the customer needs without asking first.

Oli's next move is expanding OSCI AI Pro beyond doctors and nurses into long-term care, where healthcare aides deal with dementia responsive behaviors every day without enough training. 60% of the mission is better patient care. The other 40% is worker satisfaction—the more control frontline workers have over their day, the better it is for everyone.

Watch the full episode on YouTube - https://youtu.be/UXNH9l9_BG4

Like and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

About Oli Siska

Oli Siska works with a talented team on technology development that enhances human dignity—particularly in healthcare and aging.

As CEO of Kaleidoscope XR, I lead a team that creates immersive training solutions solving real problems: medical students who can't access enough clinical practice, caregivers who need to truly understand what dementia feels like, frontline workers who deserve better preparation before high-stakes patient interactions.

Our work spans VR empathy training, AI-powered clinical simulations, and custom solutions designed for social good. We specialize in making complex technology accessible and ensuring it serves humans—not the other way around.

I believe technology should make the world more compassionate, more equitable, and more accessible. That's what drives everything I do.

Beyond tech, I'm an artist—poetry, music, visual art—because creativity and innovation are inseparable.

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.

Holly Taylor was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer after selling her last company. Her rare form usually gets caught at stage one—99% survivable. Stage three? Different story. 

That personal experience drives everything she does at Lucem Health, where she's general manager of strategic partnerships focused on early disease detection using AI to find patterns in patient data before symptoms even start.

Cervical cancer went from deadly to 99% survivable once pap smears became normal preventative care. Same approach could work for pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, type one diabetes—if we catch them early. But Holly's not just throwing AI at the problem. 

Episode Highlights:

• Clinical research background spanning 15 years taught Holly to measure what matters and use data to make ruthless decisions without emotional attachment to ideas that aren't working.
• Cervical cancer survival jumped to 99% once pap smears became standard preventative care, proving early detection transforms outcomes for diseases like pancreatic cancer and type one diabetes.
• Healthcare represents 20% of GDP and employs more people than any other industry, which means disruption requires purpose and partnership with overwhelmed physicians and health systems.
• Keet Health scaled from 11 engineers fresh out of UT to 6 million patients and 30-40% of physical therapists nationwide by protecting innovation culture even as the company grew fast.
• Type one diabetes screening using BERT transformer models aims to prevent 60% of kids from ending up in life-threatening diabetic ketoacidosis before diagnosis.

Holly cuts through complexity with data-driven decisions and refuses to waste time on solutions that don't work. At Lucem she's focused on contracting that 17-year medical adoption timeline by building programs that educate patients and physicians while respecting the reality of stretched-thin healthcare teams. 

Her magic wand wish? Fix healthcare reimbursement chaos so systems can focus on patient outcomes instead of survival mode.

Watch the full episode on YouTube https://youtu.be/oQpYlp35zmk

About Holly Taylor

Holly Taylor is a healthcare entrepreneur and executive with more than 30 years of experience at the intersection of patient care, healthcare delivery, and technology innovation.

She has founded and led multiple startups to successful commercialization in population health, clinical research, and digital health. Her ventures have delivered innovative solutions reaching millions of patients and tens of thousands of providers. Her career is guided by the belief that meaningful innovation uses technology to improve both clinical outcomes and the human experience.

Holly currently serves as General Manager of Strategic Partnerships at Lucem Health, where she stewards the commercial success of the company’s early disease detection programs.

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.

Sabrina Runbeck spent a decade in cardiothoracic surgery. She operated on hearts. Now she operates on healthtech companies—fixing what's broken before founders even see it themselves. 

As co-founder of PulsePoint Path and the Health Tech Impact Awards, plus Chief Strategy Officer at Health Board Advisors, Sabrina teaches founders something critical: your pitch deck means nothing if you can't clearly explain who you help and what problem you solve in under two minutes.

Many founders get this backwards. They pitch everywhere—conferences, investor calls, demo days. Lots of top-of-funnel activity, lots of conversations. Then nothing happens because they never learned how to follow through. They're building companies like side projects. 

Episode Highlights:

• Healthtech founders waste precious time telling 10-minute background stories instead of getting straight to traction, core problem solved, and what makes them different from every other startup at the conference.
• Health Tech Impact Awards runs like a founder bootcamp—free application, two-minute video pitch, public voting, then final six compete in a game show format that teaches you to speak investor language.
• Women make up 70-80% of the clinical healthcare workforce but less than 15% on the venture side and barely 20-30% in executive leadership—Sabrina's TED Talk breaks down the 3% problem.
• Sabrina assesses founders across five levels: body communication, psychological profile, natural skillset, behavior patterns, and spiritual purpose—if your deepest values don't align with company mission, you'll burn out.
• Clinician advisors with 10+ years experience can join Health Board Advisors to vet startups, guide product development, and help bridge early-stage companies to venture partners who understand clinical workflow reality.

Applications for Health Tech Impact Awards close March 1st. Six categories: diagnostic, digital health, medical device, biotech, mental health, women's health. Winners get featured on The Tech Glow Up. 

Watch the full episode to hear why Sabrina thinks we need more clinicians making investment decisions early, not waiting for big hospital systems and VCs to catch up.

Get Seen by the Right Investors, Not Just Any Investors
Third-party validation is the trust shortcut most founders overlook. Apply now for the HealthTech Impact Awards—six categories, one chance to be seen by capital-ready backers.

Nominations close March 1, 2026
 HealthTechImpactAward.com

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.

Nic Fonta leads XR at Autodesk, where architects, engineers, and designers collaborate in virtual reality to catch design problems before construction begins. The math is stark: $280 billion spent globally every year on rework and material waste on construction sites because of poor communication and misalignment. Workshop XR (autodesk.com/workshopxr) , Autodesk's immersive collaborative platform, lets teams put on VR headsets and walk through their designs at full scale before a single brick is laid.

His background is surprising for someone leading a design collaboration tool: Nic is a software engineer who started in flight simulator technology working on a $35 million MIG-29 cockpit simulator. After hesitating between architecture and engineering in university, engineering won—but he ended up serving architects anyway. His entire career has been in real-time rendering and simulation: flight simulators, gaming at Electronic Arts, and now helping the AEC industry see what they're building before they build it.

The magic happens when an architect puts on a VR headset and realizes they missed a design flaw for months—something twisted in the geometry that appeared broken in VR but was invisible in their 2D design tool. That moment changed everything for Nic. He knew XR could transform how people work.

Today, Workshop XR helps teams find problems earlier, reduce material waste, increase engagement during design reviews, and identify safety hazards before workers hit the site. The next frontier: integrating AI agents into the immersive space so they learn from spatial relationships and how humans understand and feel design decisions.

Episode Highlights:

• A $35 million MIG-29 flight simulator cockpit sparked a career in real-time simulation that led to serving architects instead—because Nic chose engineering over architecture in university but ended up designing tools for both.
• Workshop XR reduces $280 billion in annual global construction rework by helping teams find design problems earlier when they're cheaper and faster to fix.
• One architect walked into VR, spotted a twisted geometry in the main entrance, and realized months later in his 2D tool that he'd missed the same flaw the entire time—that moment proved XR transforms how people see.
• Safety reviews emerged as a second use case when construction teams used the same immersive experience to identify hazards before workers reached the site, reducing accidents and rework.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube.

About Nic Fonta

Nic Fonta is a Montreal-based technology and product executive with over 25 years of experience driving innovation at the intersection of real-time rendering, simulation, gaming, and XR. Since joining Autodesk in 2014 for his deep real-time expertise, Nic has played a pivotal role in shaping the company’s XR strategy. 

He led the development and go-to-market of Revit Live, managed the 3ds Max product line, and now serves as General Manager for XR, spearheading Autodesk’s XR vision and execution. Following the acquisition of The Wild, Nic is leading the charge to democratize XR in the AEC and Manufacturing industries 

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.

David Nussbaum started Proto Hologram in his living room in 2018 to answer a simple question: what if instead of using holograms to bring back dead musicians, you used them to connect the living? The result is a seven-foot-tall holographic display that lets people beam into rooms across the world—live, prerecorded, or as interactive AI avatars that speak more than 300 languages and dialects.

His background is broadcasting. As a kid, David sat in his dad's Volkswagen listening to talk radio, fascinated by communicating with someone who wasn’t physically there. 

That turned into an obsession with connection across distance—first as a radio broadcaster, then as one of the first 1000 podcasters on Apple, where he eventually met his wife. Proto is the next evolution of that obsession: instead of talking into a phone, you broadcast yourself as a hologram.

Episode Highlights:

• Broadcasting obsession started in a Volkswagen listening to talk radio, led to a Howard Stern fixation at 14, turned into 25–30 years in radio and one of the first 1000 podcasts on Apple—where David met his wife.
• William Shatner beams into Sydney for a keynote and calls Proto a time machine because it saved him two weeks of travel—he gave his speech and was home having breakfast with his wife in LA the same morning.
• Christie’s beams multi-million-dollar sculptures and paintings globally instead of physically shipping them, protecting priceless works while giving collectors intimate previews before auction.
• Healthcare is the next frontier: oncologists beam into rural clinics, HIPAA compliance is live, and David’s goal is to replace flat Zoom calls and virtual doctor visits with the presence of holographic physicians for cancer patients receiving sensitive news.

David Nussbaum has spent his life obsessed with connection across distance. Proto is the latest evolution of that mission. His favorite part: he still sells through experience—visitors create their own AI avatar in the office and walk out with a piece of the technology.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube to hear why David believes AI isn’t something to fear, but something to embrace—and how using it well can create connection instead of replacement.

About David Nussbaum

An award-winning An award-winning writer and producer, Nussbaum founded Proto after 20 years in the entertainment industry, having spent time in sports radio, television, podcasting and live events. 

David was named to TIME’s Healthcare100 List for 2025 and has spoken at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, USC, the Infinity Festival, CES, Christie's Art + Tech Conference, and at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art.  

With the slogan, “If you can’t BE there, BEAM there!” David walks the walk, beaming from company headquarters in Los Angeles to meetings on multiple continents every week to save on business travel time and expense & carbon impact.

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 of the time spatail computing isn't rocket science, but for this conversation, it is. Alex Goldberg leads augmented reality at Blue Origin. He helps rocket scientists and manufacturing engineers work faster, collaborate better, and solve problems that require precision at the edge of what's possible. 

His tools include AR glasses for remote assistance, digital twins built from reality capture, and spatial data that tells the story of how a component travels through a manufacturing lifecycle from fabrication to launch.

Alex's work is about giving engineers infographics on steroids; helpful tips in their field of view when they need them. It's about capturing the physical environment as digital twins so teams can see what actually got built versus what was designed. And it's about giving people the freedom to discover uses for the technology that even he didn't expect.

Episode Highlights:

• A VR arcade job at 19 led to game testing at Rocket Science Games, years later at Blue Origin actual rocket scientists call Alex a wizard when they see what AR does for manufacturing.
• AR for manufacturing works best as contextual infographics right now; helpful tips in engineers' field of view—because rapid iteration cycles outpace documentation updates.
• Remote assist delivers a massive win; factory floor workers put on AR glasses, call offsite experts, get unblocked in real time, and can create annotations for asynchronous training without an expert present.
• People who have access to actual spatial data stop thinking of information as living on a server and start thinking of it as living in that physical location—they've built a new mental model for data organization.
• The best moments in innovation happen six months after launch when someone in the team discovers a novel application that solves a problem Alex wasn't even aware existed.

Alex Goldberg builds for the moment when an engineer looks at spatial data overlaid on reality and understands something they couldn't have grasped from a flat screen. His focus is on getting out of the way and listening to how teams actually work.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube to hear why mixed reality is fading and why see-through AR glasses are the inevitable future within three to five years.

About Alex Goldberg:

Alex’s work bridges storytelling and cutting-edge technology and empowers teams across the education, retail, and manufacturing sectors to maximize the full potential of spatial computing.

Alex brings a unique blend of creativity and technical expertise to the world of interactive technology. Leveraging a broad background in mobile game and app production, Alex has produced many top-ranking enterprise and consumer applications for iOS and Android platforms. 

Since 2015, Alex has stood at the forefront of spatial computing: designing innovative augmented reality experiences that focus on training for complex tasks and procedures. 

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.

Cortney Harding thinks the Spatial Race has already started, but most companies are lookiing 10 years ahead. As founder of Friends with Holograms and author of The Spatial Race, she works with Fortune 100 companies to build strategies in spatial computing and artificial intelligence before they get disrupted. 

Cortney's real focus is solving the actual business problem first. She built an Amazon training where warehouse workers promoted to management roles could practice difficult conversations with AI-powered virtual humans at scale. 

It worked because it started with a real problem: managers felt unprepared, team members felt disconnected, and in-person training couldn't scale. Most companies skip that step and start with "we need to do AI." That's why 95% of corporate AI pilots fail.

Episode Highlights:

• Amazon's management training challenge became a VR solution powered by AI, where employees built customized virtual humans to practice conversations at scale, resulting in a 92% improvement in outcomes across Irish warehouses.
• Companies fail at AI pilots because they reverse-engineer from the technology instead of starting with the business problem, and she's built her practice on helping teams think problem-first rather than technology-first.
• Enterprise adoption lags behind the hype because VR headsets are now simple to deploy—the real blocker is bad content.
• In 10 years, people will experience the world through head-mounted devices powered by AI, and companies that start building for that future now will survive the disruption while incumbents get left behind.

Cortney approaches immersive tech like a strategist, not a technologist. She teaches at Caltech, Barnard, and New Mexico State. She writes for Forbes. She's speaking on stages worldwide. Her core message: the spatial race is happening right now, and preparation beats disruption.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube https://youtu.be/w_bG57HBP6U.

About Cortney Harding

Cortney Harding is an in-demand expert in helping businesses harness the power of artificial intelligence, spatial computing, and virtual reality. She has created AI-powered conversational avatars for companies like Amazon, the NIH, and Verizon, and virtual reality training scenarios around topics like child abuse, workplace exclusion, mental health, Black maternal mortality, and racial bias for companies like Lowe’s, Walmart, PWC, Target, and more. She leads workshops for Fortune 100 companies and universities on how to use AI and VR in education and training. 

Her work has been honored on numerous occasions. As an executive producer on JFK Memento, she was nominated for an Emmy and the piece won the audience award for best XR at SXSW and Best in the World at the QLD XR Festival. Her work has also been honored as the Best VR/AR of 2019 at Mobile World Congress, a SXSW Innovation Award Finalist, and a Top HR Product by HR Executive. 

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.