One of the most exciting adventures we’ve had so far this year was donating an HTC VIVE VR headset to every private and public secondary school in our home state of North Dakota. To our knowledge, North Dakota is the first state in the country to have a deployment like this. The web-based aspect of our career exploration platform, CareerViewXR, was already in use at these schools thanks to a North Dakota Career and Technical Education initiative in the fall of 2023. This NDCTE initiative was made possible by the approval of an appropriation by the North Dakota State Legislature during their 2023 session. With the addition of the donated VR headsets, North Dakota students can now be fully immersed in CareerViewXR field trips as well as other educational VR content their schools may invest in.

My business hero would have to be my wife (and our majority owner), Katie. Funny story about that… we met our sophomore year of college in a freshman speech class. We’d both been avoiding it because we were terrified of public speaking. A couple months after she founded the business, she asked me if I would be the CEO, which meant that I got to do all the fun flashy, showmanship stuff, (which I’ve actually come to love) and she would get to be more behind the scenes. The reason I say she is my business hero is because she convinced me we should take a chance on this venture 8 years ago… investing most of our savings into some image capture equipment, a website, and an idea. I was perfectly happy with my job in higher education. But her gut instinct on big decisions is never wrong and I’m glad she identified this path we could head down together. She still hates being in the spotlight, but I can just about guarantee that anything I am out there shouting from the mountaintops has been thoroughly vetted and assessed by her gut instinct. Her foresight into seeing an opportunity in the XR industry is the reason that I now rather enjoy speaking in public (and the reason I get to work my dream job).

Oh, we’ve made all sorts of mistakes… and I guarantee we’ll make a lot more. If I had to choose one, the biggest mistake we made was spending too much time trying to make our business work in the residential real estate industry before making a major pivot. We didn’t listen to our gut and spent way too much time trying to get people to purchase our “great idea,” instead of trying to thoroughly understand the problems they needed solved. We learned the hard way that while people may say they love your idea, if you aren’t focused on solving their problem, then they will not buy it. From that lesson, we’ve learned to be a lot more nimble and to not overdevelop things, rather listen to our customers, understand their pain points, and create solutions that make a difference.

This is a tough one, but I would have to say “Crucial Conversations” is the most inspirational book I’ve read. I mention this title because it has really helped me adapt how I enter tough conversations both professionally and personally with confidence and tact, ensuring that when addressing tough issues, it is possible to be kind with people, but remain hard on solving a problem. I find myself referencing it repeatedly as we continue to drive into new territory as our business grows and develops.

I think the biggest challenge will be defining what my role becomes in the organisation. As we have continued to grow, the responsibilities on my plate have been in a constant state of flux, and it’s challenging at times to determine what needs stay, what needs to go, and what I need to make room for. Luckily, we have an incredibly talented team who is eager to take on new roles and responsibilities, so while I expect this will continue to be a challenge, I know I have a group of professionals beside me who are ready and willing to grow and adapt, ensuring our organisation stays positioned for continued growth.

This year we’re digging into how using different artificial intelligence solutions could help increase our efficiency as a team. After mapping out our processes, we noted several areas that would benefit from automation with AI technology, notably translating our work into various languages. If we were to develop the specialised AI necessary for our post-production needs and a VR application, we would see an impressive productivity gain of about 394,600 hours per year at our current team size. That’s a lot of time freed up to make even more immersive content for our subscribers here in the US and beyond. We wouldn’t have been able to even dream of such a shift without the recent innovations in the AI industry.