Advisor and angel investor. XR, AI, and wearables. Barcelona.
A headset on its own is a hard sell. I spent eight years selling them, so I say that with love.
XR gets useful when it pairs with AI and with glasses you can wear all day. The hardware is close. What is missing is a reason to put it on, and that reason has to be real:
The historical record. A guide that knows everything that happened on the spot where you are standing.
Getting around. Glasses that help someone with low vision cross the city on their own.
The factory floor. Hands-free guidance that holds up on a real shift, not just in a demo.
Then someone has to get it to the people who want it. Creator data and discovery: the unglamorous layer that decides whether any of this finds an audience.
XR plus AI plus wearables, fed by something real. I am looking for the edge cases.
Some of it is paid work with a defined scope. Some of it is equity, where I get paid when the company does. Where I help: getting into Europe, hardware and platform partnerships, and the jump from prototype to people actually paying.
And one specific thing: not building your company on platform money. I watched it fund a generation of XR studios, then fall by a factor of a thousand.
I also write small angel checks.
Optimal conditions. ByteDance and Google can generate a world you can walk through in real time. What it costs, what a headset needs, and why enterprises will pay for it before consumers do.
Who carries the camera. Odyssey-3 runs arms, humanoids, a car, and drones from one world model. It learned the world from people walking to a script. Most of the sidewalk is not.
Spatial data, in three parts. Frames of reference, what gets thrown away at the moment of capture, and why the money is scaling the place and not the person.
PICO XR, 2017 to 2025. Joined as one of the first international employees, opened the European office in Barcelona three months later, and spent a year running it alone before incorporating and hiring. The team was close to a dozen people when ByteDance acquired PICO in 2021 for $1.3 billion. Launched PICO as a consumer brand in Europe, hired 20+ people in nine months, shipped PICO 4 across 20+ markets, and sold six figures of units inside a year. Moved to enterprise in 2023 across EMEA and the US.
Virtually Live, VR social sports. Sony Computer Entertainment America, six years in strategy and consumer insight, including product evaluation work on PS4, PSVR, and PS Vita TV. Berkeley Haas. Before all of it, a contract archaeologist in the Potomac valley, which is still the job that best explains how I think about the past being worth rebuilding.
Building one of these edge cases? Book a call. Bring the product, not the deck.