Virtual Reality, the Future of Retail, & Selling to Big Business - Tracey Wiedmeyer / Co-Founder of InContext Solutions

Tracey Wiedmeyer is the CTO and a Co-Founder of InContext Solutions, the leader in scalable virtual reality (VR) shopping and retail solutions. InContext Solutions lets manufacturers and retailers simulate real in-store shopping situations to ideate, evaluate and activate all types of merchandising, display, layout and other in-store shopping experiences within a VR store environment before implementing them in the real world. Just last month, they closed their Series E round of funding, bringing their total funding to $42.5M.  In This Episode You Will Learn: Why Tracey and his co-founders started InContext Solutions How he raised their seed capital from his family over Christmas How similarly do people behave in virtual reality vs the real world How InContext Solutions recreates stores How they landed their first customers How they try to lure tech talent away from quant trading What he’d like to see big companies improve on Why you have to focus on ROI and business cases when selling to large enterprises Whether we are in a simulation or not Where the future of virtual reality is heading in 5-10 years What the future of retail may look like How they landed a partnership with Intel How a partnership with a big company can benefit a startup Favorite Books: The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't by Jim Collins Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles That Fuel Success and Performance at Work by Shawn Achor The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil Best Sources to Learn More About Virtual Reality: Unreal VR NextVR Samsung VR Microsoft HoloLens Google VR