If you want to master something, teach it." That’s the old adage, and at Circuit Stream, the thinking is teaching XR helps you develop better solutions, too. Founder and CEO Lou Pushelberg created Circuit Stream courses to give companies the power to educate and empower themselves, and just make the whole XR ecosystem stronger.

Alan: You're listening to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is Lou Pushelberg, founder and CEO of Circuit Stream. Circuit Stream's story began in 2015 with Lou traveling around North America, connecting with developers, designers, and creators, pushing the boundaries of immersive experiences. Rather than try to build the next big application like everyone else, Lou saw a bigger need for education and training that could help propel the industry forward. From this journey, Circuit Stream's 10-week online course emerged. Their education platform has reached over 25,000 students. They're a Unity authorized training partner and their team of 20 people is giving professionals the skills they need to build value-driven XR experiences. They have three business divisions: education, software development, and their platform. To learn more about the great work that Lew and his team is doing, you can visit circuitstream.com.

Lou, welcome to the show, my friend.

Lou: Alan, thanks so much for

hosting me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Alan: It's my absolute honor.

I've been watching the work you guys are doing. You're basically one

of the only educational institutions that are teaching people the

practical hands-on skills on how to create XR. How did this come

about?

Lou: Well, I was working for another VR startup early in 2015. They were based out of Seattle. This was kind of the DK2 era -- so early in VR's history -- and personally was inspired by a lot of the early pioneers, who were building some of the flagship VR content and titles that were coming out on the first wave of consumer hardware -- so the Vive and the original Rift -- and was basically looking for an opportunity and a need, where I could create value for the ecosystem and help accelerate the adoption of VR and ultimately of XR technology, and found that kind of service and value that I could provide to the ecosystem in education.

Alan: So how did you begin?

Where do you start with building a course for technology that's

emerging? Like, "Unity 101: here's how to make a model."

Like, how did that-- where do you even begin?

Lou: [chuckles] Yeah, that's a good question. So we began with a kind of a core philosophy that was, the only way to learn anything really in it -- and especially this technology -- was to get hands-on and just start building things. There wasn't a playbook for VR and AR, there wasn't a series of best practices at the time. They were kind of just beginning to emerge. So we really wanted to focus a lot of what we were doing around getting people into Unity and some of the other major engines, and just helping them start blazing their own trails by just building stuff and sharing it with people. That's kind of been our MO and what we try to facilitate with all of the professionals, companies that we work with. So in kind of architecting the course in the beginning, we would go straight to the source. So you mentioned travelling across North America. I had basically booked a trip through what were the four biggest hubs down the West Coast. So starting in Vancouver and then heading south through into Seattle, San Francisco, and LA and in each XR hub, I would interview developers, sometimes from startups who were kind of pushing XR forward, and other times from some of the major players -- like the Valves, Oculus, Unity, Google -- developers who were in VR building