Leland Hedges

Thesis

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 is paired with AI, and with glasses and other wearables you can keep on 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 tour guide that knows everything that ever happened on the spot where you are standing.

Live events. A match, a concert or a conference, seen from the pitch, the stage or the other side of the world.

Play. Six friends, ninety minutes, a story that goes where they take it, in a room or online.

Then someone has to connect all of it to the people who want it. Creator data, discovery, recommendation: 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.

How I work

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, usually where I am already advising.

Current work

• Superspatial Advisor
  Spatial AI and agentic AR characters anchored to real-world locations, starting with cultural tourism.
• Gnosika Advisor and investor
  An AI film studio building Gauset, the persistent 3D set layer for vertical drama. Build a location once, then keep shooting inside it across episodes and seasons.
• Biel Glasses Advisor
  A CE-marked Class 1 medical device that helps people with low vision move independently.
• Digital Eyewear Labs Advisor
  Industrial smart glasses that put AI in front of frontline workers.
• Feeds Investor
  AI content discovery and aggregation across the platforms people already use.
• Favikon Investor
  Creator analytics and ranking, and the creator dataset behind it.

Writing

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.

Before this

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.

Talk to me

Building one of these edge cases? Book a call. Bring the product, not the deck.

Book a call