The AR Show: Kyle Jackson (Talespin) on Using AI and AR/VR to Enable the Future of Education and Employment

4:17PM Oct 25, 2022

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Kyle Jackson

Keywords:

started

company

built

learning

problem

skill

process

technology

platform

digital

systems

move

learner

film

early

big

day

content

workflow

virtual

Welcome to the AR show where I dive deep into augmented reality with a focus on the technology, the use cases and the people behind them. I'm your host Jason McDowall. Today's conversation is with Kyle Jackson. Kyle was the co founder and CEO of Talespin, a company making immersive learning a reality for the future of work. Kyle is a serial entrepreneur who has worked at the intersection of technology and storytelling for over 20 years. After studying interactive multimedia design, and then earning a BFA from the school of cinema television at USC, Kyle has persistently been solving the hard problems around creating and distributing Digital Media at scale. About 10 years ago, I was digging into the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, and the coming age of AR and VR and thought something was missing.

And so I started to kind of really question how the structures we had in place for education and employment, were going to keep up with the pace of change that was was seemed fairly obvious when you're sitting in those rooms. And there just wasn't a lot of discussion going on about that back then, you know, this is now this again, this isn't like 2013 2014. So you know, Oculus is getting acquired, and there's there's a lot of stuff going on. But there wasn't a lot of people talking about how all of these technologies and trends coming together needed to be offset with a little bit of a reworking of some of our foundational systems, both in education and employment.

Kyle believes mixed reality in combination with AI can enable us to have higher emotional intelligence and enhanced capabilities to communicate, learn and lead. In this conversation we get into Kyle's entrepreneurial journey and some of the lessons he's learned along the way, we dig into the origins of Talespin and how he transformed the company for being focused on servicing one off projects into a product company that raised a $20 million Series C round earlier this year. We also discussed the concept of proof of skill, and the future of skill development for work. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website var show.com. And please support the podcast@patreon.com slash the AR show. Let's dive in.

Kyle, you grew up in one of the areas that I loved as a child I grew up in South Dakota, but my grandparents lived in Colorado. And so I used to go there all the time. And as I got a bit older, I really loved going skiing in the Rockies and I had some amazing skiing days at Breckenridge, driving up the mountain, just as the snow was falling at the end of a snowstorm and capturing some amazing snow. What was your experience growing up in that part of part of Colorado and and being out there on the snow?

I mean, it's an amazing place to grow up. And ever since I moved away it you know, it's always had this drop back to those roots, because not just the skiing, but it's one of the things that's so amazing about that part of the country is everybody that lives they're so active in just different aspects of nature and community. And each season is different. And so it was this constant progress. It was this constant, like you always look forward to the season that was coming up, you always had a short window to kind of like live life to the fullest for whatever it was that you were going to do during that season. There's a lot of community involvement in it. And then, of course, you moved on to the next one. So with skiing, I mean, that's where I really leaned into it hard. Gosh, probably sophomore year, I think has been a bit of a metaphor for how I've handled the entrepreneurs journey, which is what I get into something I go all in. And so my senior year in high school actually put all the trail maps up on my wall in my bedroom, and I decided I'm gonna ski every single black in Summit County, in one season, black or above. And it was really hard to do.

How many trails is that? How many mountains is are there in Summit County.

It's changed now but there's let's see. So you've got you've got all of Vail Resorts. So that's Vail Beaver Creek, you've got Breckenridge you've got Keystone you got Loveland get a base and you get Winter Park, you've got Mary Jane, you've got Copper Mountain. So you've got a probably a dozen mountains in Sonoma County, at least. And it's expanded since then. But there's, there's you know, there's a couple 100 trails, and there's several of them that are only open, you know, one one day a year because of snowfall.

So the snow has to be just right has to be thick enough, big enough. And that's the day you have to go.

Yeah, the big back bowl shoots you have to you know, they're open one day a year. And so I've wake up, I check the snow report and it sees today, the day I'm gonna get that trail and I managed to do it all in one season, at least at least the trails that were there back then I probably have got to go back and revisit it

now. Doesn't matter what was happening in your life high school history exam today doesn't matter. The ball is open. I'm going

I had engineered it. So that was acceptable. Yeah. By the time I got to my senior year, I actually was is another funny story. I had gone to my superintendent in my district, and I said, I want to do more, basically. And so I wrote a proposal where they would start paying for me to go to college classes while I was still in high school, my junior year, they would pay you to go to college classes. No, they paid for the classes. My high school school district would pay for the classes. And they did it they worked it out with see you and so I actually had that last two years of high school I had, I was out of class by early early morning, because I was actually mostly doing the college classes, which were afternoon and evenings, so, so that meant I could ski. I snuck in lots of days of skiing, and still managed to go to college and check the box on all of it. That's,

that's pretty incredible. And that was back in the day when remote learning wasn't such a big thing. Right? Yeah. Physically driving into see you. Yep. Yep. Which, which cu school did you go to?

Both CU Denver and CU Boulder? Yeah, I did both? I did. I did at the time, there wasn't really an intensive media program at CU Boulder. Yeah, it was actually at CU Denver. And so I was really interested in, you know, 3d and video and a lot of the digital technologies that were emerging then. And so that was all at CU Denver,

and what was it about that area that attracted you so much, especially at such a young age? How did you know that that was your passion?

I started in design. So I was an artist. So I was always really into, you know, sketching and charcoals paint, then I got into graphic design, really young, like 1213 and started having a passion for for graphic design. And then that just kept kept going. So from design, it went to early web, you know, Macromedia and Dreamweaver, and in early web development, and then into some light programming, some C, C++, and then from that into 3d animation, and from that, and the video, and just, you know, like the rabbit hole was deep, and just couldn't get enough, I didn't know, I didn't even know where it's gonna go. Because I wasn't exposed. You know, growing up in Colorado, I wasn't really exposed to a lot of the professions that would have used those skills. But I just just loved it. So I just kept, kept soaking it up as much as I could.

Where that leads you this just following the passionate self following what your interests kind of were taking without this kind of end goal in mind, or did that path lead you

back then I was sure I was going to be an animator for Pixar. That's what I wanted to do. And so I started really spending a lot of time learning, you know, rendering 3d modeling 3d animation, again, mostly on my own a little bit at CU. And then that led me to start looking at film schools. And she started to explore what were the best programs in the country and ended up at USC. And as soon as I got there, I got into more of the live action directing, producing track and, and it just started taking me more and more towards towards live action. And that was happening kind of at the same time that that Final Cut was emerging. And a lot of other digital video trends were starting to emerge. And I had gotten really fortunate that I actually landed a job at Apple when I when I landed in LA. And I was I was in the early kind of Final Cut Pro evangelists and user feedback team. And so I got like a front row seat on version 1.0, as we took it to market and really started to learn a lot about the kind of huge transition that was ahead for the industry from from kind of analog and physical production to, you know, to digital production, digital distribution. And so as I was in film school, I was also, like, in this front row seat with Apple, it was it was amazing. It was such a fortunate break, but then it just dominoed from there.

And what was that next step in the domino? How did that lead to like your first entrepreneurial sort of experience?

I see this. So this was 2001. It was really small community of like tech innovators in Los Angeles at the time, there was obviously a huge community of traditional innovators as okay related to film production and the crazy crazy things that people invented to accomplish those goals, but like into, like the new digital workflows, digital distribution standards, you know, file formats, cameras, all that stuff, it was a pretty small group. And so being at Apple, I got networked into that group very, very quickly. And the dominoes that started to fall were were as Apple got out into some major productions, they didn't have a lot of like expert expert users, that were helping to triage those early days of film productions. And so I got sent out into the field and started working on you know, I worked on like, the very first Panasonic HD film worked on the, you know, same same at Sony. And this was, this is a time when, like, the timecode didn't even work and Final Cut properly yet at that point. So it was like we had some really big product problems still. But it was it was a really, really amazing experience to get thrown into the deep end of the pool like that. And so I got pretty well networked into this small group of innovators and technologists. And to this day, I mean, it's still some of my closest friends and a lot of them have moved, you know, through those early days of inventing digital camera systems or helping to figure out what the file formats and workflows would be building NLS and and digital audio workstations and 3d other 3d softwares into VR AR virtual production, online video distribution. I mean, I mean that community is very small pool of people that have made a really big impact on a lot of industries. Now,

you found that was the same core group that were constantly writing the front edge The wave of innovation as a kind of move through this very different various different media

has, as well, there's been there's been common players, I would say, yeah, yeah. And the, for me that that landed, you know, after film school, I actually got a chance to direct a film for Sony. And so right out of film school, I was, I was making this film, and I was a digital native. Because of that background, I've just been swimming in that pool now for a few years. And so So I actually understood the digital side of the business a lot better than I understood the analog side of the business. But the business was still pretty analog at the time. So we had to deliver film prints we had to deliver into the traditional distribution systems. The first company came out of out of that, which was, we didn't know how to do that. We didn't know what we didn't know about analog distribution, and did delivery. And we made a film that had a lot of visual effects and a lot of a lot of digital transitions and digital optical effects and things like that. And to rebuild a reproduce that was going to be prohibitively expensive for the size of the film that we had we had made. And so we backed ourselves into this really tough spot, which is that we couldn't pay a vendor in the world out in the film industry at the time, there was no vendor that would take our budget and do what we needed to do. And so we sat down and wrote a piece of software, and figured out how to do it ourselves. And that started the first company.

Clearly, you found additional people had suffered the same problem knew that same sort of solution. Yeah, what was the specific problems that about how to distribute digital across the traditional distribution mechanisms

that came that came second, that was that was the second company, the first company was really, at the time, it was a process called Digital Intermediate. And it was it was the process of bringing analog 35 millimeter Phil into the computer through through scan it scan a 35 millimeter film, you reassemble the film into whatever the cut was that you had done in the in Final Cut, or Premiere or AVID, now you'd have it at a much higher resolution, and you would be able to do all the visual effects and all the optical transitions and things like that. And then you'd actually re record it back to film through, you know, through a photochemical process. And so that process at the time was, you know, was was very common to be a million plus dollars a film. And we had, like, $150,000, at the time to do it. And there was just nobody would even do it, I think the clothing the lowest, what we got was like, three 350, something like that. And we decided, okay, well, we have to figure out how to deliver this film to Sony. So we don't have a choice. So let's, let's get to work. And so we we actually found this was through through some of my connections in that small pool at Apple, I found a group in San Diego, they had built a node based, you know, color transform room basically be software. And it was it was using the GPU. And it was one of the very, very first pieces of software to do really complex transformations, image transformations using the GPU, so the CPU. And so we built off the back of that and turned it into a digital intermediate color correction software, and use that to, you know, basically put the film back together and get it to a place where you could shoot it out to film and deliver it to the studio. That like to your point that was just from that point on, there was a lot of independent films that were looking to do, you know, kind of exceptional things because the digital tools were becoming available to them. And it required them going through a similar process. And so there was a big market. And so we ended up, you know, after we delivered the film, we immediately had a bunch of others at our doorstep to repeat it. And so that turned into a services company and and off off, it went for the next, you know, eight years.

Wow. And so, as you noted, this started a services company had a lot of demand, and what is it that you learned, you kind of go back and reflect as an entrepreneur in kind of over the course of your career, having built several companies now, what did you learn from that early experience about being an entrepreneur?

I mean, that was such a different experience. Because we we literally made a company out of nothing. I mean, we we only raised like 15, or $30,000, to build that company. And we built it to at one point before I moved on, and we have about 7080 employees and so wasn't venture backed. I didn't know anything about raising capital at that point in time. I just understood a problem and understood how to fix it, and just got to work. And it's interesting to see the evolution of like how venture capitals come in and changed the way people approach building companies. And now where we are today, and there's a lot of emphasis back on profitability over growth. That's the current environment. And so I think that early experience was just really good because it's, it's, you know, no matter what you're doing, I mean, being scrappy, and trying to figure out how to work through really tough problems. multi dimensional problems is is really the name of the game, at least from my own most like entrepreneurial experience. So that one was a masterclass and working with very little and trying to You know, work within an ecosystem that was very structured, can there's bonding companies, there's finance companies, there's the studios. So, you know, like working now in enterprise software years later, there's, there's lots of stakeholders, you know that you have to make sure that you're keeping aligned. And so I think that was those are probably the two most lasting, you know, lessons from that company.

And how did that experience lead to your next entrepreneurial experience?

Because we were sitting in that then that pool of digital innovators in the media entertainment space? Yeah, there was a lot of problems that started to surface, you know, so first was, you know, kind of like, how do we use digital tools to make movies and to finish movies and visual effects? And that, obviously, there was there's several big companies built out of that both on the software and on the services side, and then it started to navigate or migrate into, well, how do we distribute things digitally? How do we catalog things digitally? How do we rest, restore our old libraries and get them prepared for this new wave of distribution. And so there was a lot of a lot of opportunity. And so the next company that really became a focus was was in digital distribution. So as on the early management team of company called go digital, and still around today and doing extremely well buying up digital rights today. That might this was a friend from USC, you know, that we sat in class together, and we were really close to each other, as we were building, the early days of I was building a services company, and he was starting to build a digital rights company. And we just started to see an emerging problem around lack of standards for distribution, lack of standards for workflow, and what was happening at the time, as there was, you know, hundreds of competing portals like Netflix that had emerged globally. And if you're a movie studio, you didn't know which one is going to win yet. And so at that time, there was a desire to deliver don't a lot of them. You know, I think at one point, we had something like 700 delivery profiles and in the software we've built. And that if you think of that, before that you're going from one master, like, you know, you made a film print, and you made one high quality tape master and that from that you can make all your DVD distribution, you could distribute to the cable networks, it was it was really simple in terms of distribution, at this time, and like this was about 2007, probably 2006 2008, or in that period, the distribution landscape got really complicated. And it was super challenging for studios to figure out how to navigate that. So what we did is we built a software that was that used business logic to define all of the distribution workflows. And so in our software, you would go in, and you would say, I want to release this movie on that platform with this pricing schema, for this date, and so on, so forth. And then in the back end, we would figure out, what's the codec? What's the workflow? What's the metadata, what's all the things that have to go along with it from a rights management and packaging perspective to make it work on that platform. And over time, you saw standards form and things normalized a little bit. So it didn't, it wasn't near as complicated a problem. But for a number of years there, it was a really messy problem to try to deliver pie in content. And so that was the second that was the second company.

So for a few years, there, you were a really successful as a fund manager focused on TV and film investments, how did that come to be, and how is it you end up evaluating the potential for that type of content and investment,

it came out of just the way we were positioned in the ecosystem. So during that period of time, again, this was about that 2008, probably 2008 2010 period, DVD Business was booming, there was a lot of of established kind of ways to estimate the value of a project, because of how well that industry was doing. And there was a huge amount of independent films that are being created as a result. And so what happened is, you know, every independent filmmaker is is over ambitious with what they want to make, and you almost always run out of money, almost every single one and so we were do is because I had a post production company and because I understood the distribution landscape, I could basically look at any project and go okay, well, we can provide the last you know, million dollars or $200,000 or whatever it was, is mostly finishing money so so yeah, not not financing eventually did finance some bigger projects, but most of them were, you know, smaller loan amounts, where we would come in as a lender investor, we provide that we'd help them finish it, we'd help them navigate the distribution landscape and we and we deliver it into those contracts and recoup our money. So it's a really, it was what I was like, you can see all three sides the problem, it was kind of like a really obvious investment opportunity from from the seat I was sitting in it was It wasn't something that was commonly done at the time. But since then, you know, kind of that type of financing that type of mezzanine or or finishing funds financing has become very, very common. And so there's pretty big business in that today. But back at the time there was there was you know, is much more traditional industry prior to that kind of huge uptick in in independent production that happened as as a as a kind of like a domino of digital, you know, digital production techniques a lot more people working Were also able to get access to, you know, make movies and tell the stories they wanted to make.

Did you end up having to raise outside financing to help fund those investments? Or was that all from internal sources?

It really depended on the investment. But yeah, that was probably my first foray into to raising, you know, third party investment. The time, the loans and the deals that we were doing were small enough that it was mostly individual investors. There also wasn't near as prolific a kind of venture investment scene in LA. So there was kind of content investors, at least my experience back then there wasn't much of a venture scene in Los Angeles. And then there's private equity, you know, which were, which we're doing, like the large studio, Slate deals and stuff. So we kind of fit there was like no man's land in the middle for this type of investment. And so we didn't really well, we didn't really well, we, you know, we were returning, you know, 30 40% returns on on our deals, annualized. Which at that, you know, that that's like venture kind of returns. And it was very predictable, because we could see oh, we could see the whole the whole chain.

Yeah, that 30 to 40% IRR is really impressive. Very impressive. How is it then that you kind of went from that experience and being very in the kind of, as you noted, seeing all three sides of the triangle of this particular puzzle, to starting Talespin? What was the opportunity you were seeing in the market at that time? That led to Talespin?

Yeah, yeah, there's a bit of a gap there. But it's so about 2010. So about the same times we were doing the funding and, you know, had the services company up and running and digital distribution was, was really starting to click into place, virtual production started to become a, again, this small group of technologists that were sitting in Los Angeles would get pulled in, and it's like, Hey, we're going to start using camera tracking systems to merge a virtual environment in a physical environment in real time on set. So we can produce these movies as if we were in the virtual world. And that started the Avatar was some major breakthroughs in technology. And then after that, some of the studios started to pay attention. And, and so got really actively involved in that scene started actually building studio infrastructure around the world, once I kind of got exposed to it, you know, in my, in my, in my mind, it was made up that all linear produced content or video based content was going to go away, it was just a matter of time, because this was such a superior process in terms of how you made the content, you have to have, have a virtual world which you could, you know, explore, shoot reshoot, render differently, move the camera virtually, and you know, get a different shot, all that kind of stuff was like, so groundbreaking over the traditional process, I was just convinced that this was this was a foregone conclusion, can you

go a little bit deeper into how it's truly different, and why you thought so strongly the 1000 be the way of the future,

it starts, it starts with a very simple problem, really, which is, everything about traditional film production is is like, throw away. And so you build these incredible sets, you know, you mobilize hundreds of people onto a location, and then you shoot, and then you go away. And then so you don't have what you need. And you have to go back. And there's reshoots. And there's this and there's, it's just really complicated process. And it's almost impossible. It's such a moving circus, when you're in it, that it's nearly impossible to do it perfect. There's always that problem was present. So the idea that, that the virtual world is there that the elaborate set is there, you can step back into it on the stage, it's not that big a deal to kind of get access that you don't have to mobilize 300 people back to the distance, you know, a far off location, you know, and the cost that company move, and that all of those logistics, like the fact that you could just go back to a stage, boot back up the virtual world, pick up more shots. That was like, number one, just like oh, my gosh, this changes everything. And then once you started to go a step deeper than you're, then you started to realize, Well wait a second, if we're capturing this with where we are today. So let's fast forward a little bit today, we're volumetrically capturing things. And we're capturing things in a way where I can actually change my camera movement in post, I didn't really like my you know, I didn't get a close up on that shot. Well, let me just go, let me just go reframe it virtually, and with the virtual camera in post production, and get get the shot that I missed. And so it's just, it completely throws a lot of the processes into a different order. And once you start to look at that, that revised process, you go, wow, this is so much more efficient. Well, one, the amount of creative flexibility that I have, as a director as a storyteller, his image is amazing. And to the amount of money that can save in making these really, really complex pieces, literally brings it was to me, it was like it was like going from analog filmmaking to digital filmmaking like that was such a huge step and who had access it with what you could do with different budgets that this was a similar kind of thing is like okay, well, now, I can make a Marvel movie for $30 million. Sure, no problem. You know, like, that was a $300 million movie. That was my mindset was like Now we're entering the space where the flexibility we're going to have and the stories we can tell within within these budgets is going to completely be different.

So you saw this evolution, this next evolution in capturing in ultimately creating the sort of stories or experiences, videos, or whatever the intention of the content is? And what steps did you take them to go in and take advantage of the of this future version of the world that you saw,

started building studio infrastructure to support it. So you know, there was a number of different camera investments that were going on, there were volumetric cameras back in 2012, that we were helping to develop out, doing some of the r&d around, we are building studio infrastructure to support this new kind of workflow. And so that that included a much heavier digital backbone behind stages than previously, you know, stages, historically, are really big volumes, like, really big, empty spaces that, you know, have a lot of AC, a lot of power, and a lot of flexibility in what you can put in there. And that's about it. And once he started to move into this new space, there was actually I mean, these were basically data centers, gigantic data centers, they had lots of good, lots of compute camera tracking, you know, you had a lot of digital workflows that needed to happen in parallel. And so it just, it completely changed kind of the composition of what those spaces should look like. And so we built a bunch of them. We built, we built several in Los Angeles, we built one in Korea, one in China. And so that was really from like, 2012, to pretty much right about the time we started Talespin was was building a lot of infrastructure. And of course, none of it happened nearly as quickly as we thought, which was another really good lesson.

Was it you yourself and your team weren't able to move as quickly or the industry itself wasn't as quick to appreciate the value of this new this new way up

the ladder? Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, that what that definitely taught me was, you know, any technology, regardless of how efficient it is, and how much it improves, the process is part of an ecosystem of behaviors, economics, standards, unions, job codes, I mean, all of it. And, and the film industry is definitely very, very efficient in the systems that it's set up, because because people do, you know, impossibly complex things with very little ramp time. And so what the reason I will do that is because a lot of that infrastructure and common language is in place. And so when you're, you're gripping electric department walks on the set, you don't even question what their skills are most of the time, because they come through a process, which, you know, is validated, you know, and therefore, there's, there's some, there's obviously, some nuances, but it's, but it's much more, it's much more standardized, and you find like, the enterprise working world, you know, looking back on it, it was, it's pretty silly to think that change would happen that fast. But now he's made it, you know, this production technology is being used a lot. And with the pandemic, that was another big area that got shot shot forward. So, you know, 10 years too early.

As an entrepreneur, if you're giving advice to a young entrepreneur today, how would you advise they they take into account this level of complexity and status quo, in the workflow in the style and the standards and the unions and all the rest? When they're thinking about creating a new startup that might touched it in some way?

Yeah, I always struggle with that kind of old adage, you know, simple product, because maybe just the way my brain works are the types of problems I like to work on, I enjoy the complexity, and trying to unravel some of it. But that I think, that is good advice. You know, I mean, even at a complex environment, pick a really, really simple problem to start. And even with Talespin, we, you know, we've kind of had to apply that lesson, you know, over the seven years that we've been building this thing now. Because early on, you know, it was it was, it was definitely a very boil the ocean kind of concept that we were telling investors as we went out. And then as we started to double and triple and, you know, click into things, you find that there's actually some very, relatively simpler problems to solve first. And yet, and then we backed into that. And once we did it, it's all starts to work. And then you and then you, you know, you get to your end state a lot quicker,

that the outset of Talespin, what was this vision that you'd had what was the the boil the ocean sort of approach that you were taking? At the very beginning,

the thing that got Talespin kind of kicked into motion was as I was working through virtual production, as I was working through, you know, these emerging kind of technology spaces there was there was a lot of, of interesting tech coming together. So computer vision technology was was, you know, was a huge piece of, of virtual, you know, tracking systems and being able to keep cameras in sync and things like that with the physical space and the virtual space. There was quite a bit going on machine learning around trying to make these these processes more efficient. And so I just started diving into all these different areas, when it was really because of the fascination with virtual production. And as I dove into them, Uh, you know, I'm curious enough that I would just find a basement in San Francisco that was holding an AI conference. And it was not a big conference at that point, you know, 30 people sitting in the basement in San Francisco, talking about early machine learning or AI. And it was that exposure that led to kind of a different understanding of where not just the entertainment space was going. But generally, the larger world of work was going. And so I started to kind of really question how the structures we had in place for education and employment, were going to keep up with the pace of change that was was seemed fairly obvious when you're sitting in those rooms. And there just wasn't a lot of discussion going on about that back then, you know, this is now this again, this isn't like 2013 2014. So you know, Oculus is getting acquired, and there's, there's a lot of stuff going on. But there wasn't a lot of people talking about how all of these technologies and trends coming together needed to be offset with a little bit of a reworking of some of our foundational systems, both in education and employment. And so I just got really, my day job was working in these highly technical and bleeding edge entertainment environments. And my fascination and anxiety at night was going are we're not set up for what's coming. And so I got really passionate about trying to find what think tanks were working on on this problem. Was there anybody visioning these futures? And what were we doing to kind of accelerate these new foundations? There was a little bit of conversation going on. I think one of the first things that I picked up on was Michael Bloomberg actually funded a thing called the shift commission. And it was it was, it was very much like, let's imagine for potential futures based on how this plays out. And then from there, of course, it started, there started to be other ones. And then by, I'd say, probably by 2018 2019, you had this whole idea of like, what's the future of work? And it was really the embodiment of how do we as humans fit inside of productivity? Now that there's all these other technologies that are doing some of the things that we used to do? And how does that shift, you know, how we should look at our careers and our personal development and the opportunity landscape for us and all that stuff. And so the startup Talespin was just sitting right in the middle of all this soup. And so we started the company in 2015, late 2015. And it was really started, because a lot of the technology innovators that, that myself and Steven, my co founder knew, just needed help. It was it was, again, one of these digital spaces that was like the Wild West, brands and, and businesses wanted to do all sorts of crazy stuff with this new VR, you know, AR landscape. And there wasn't a lot of people that could cut through the noise and just say, Okay, well, how do we how do we put some, how do we put it project on rails and deliver it? How do we communicate the value of what is possible with these technologies, and help be a guide? And so the first couple years that we started tail spin, you know, that's what really what we were doing, we were more of a solutions delivery company, and in the background, was this this idea of like, what's, what's the breakthrough? What is that piece of, of infrastructure technology, and workflow that we need to solve to get to that new foundation for a workforce or for education. And so that was really kind of that, you know, complimentary, you know, conversations that were going on, we chose not to take any money early on, because when I looked at the technology, I was like, Man, this is just having come from that virtual production thing. This is, this feels like 10 years away, and everybody's raising tons of cash, and they're just gonna, they're gonna, it's gonna really hurt when they get the timing wrong. And so we we self funded through projects, and, and going back to the first company felt very much like those early days, you know, it was like, just go sell the work. And then and then use your spare dollars to reinvest in some of the ideas that you that you think are more important than just the work. And so that's what we did. We did that for almost three years.

What was some of the early projects that you were working on that kind of helped you stir up or understand how to coalesce all of these things into one concise set of value product offering that you can often deliver to the market?

I think they they probably fit into two categories. There was a lot of it was just workflow, honestly, there was a lot of stuff, there was a lot of venture backed companies that got handed a lot of money. And this, this is just reflecting a lesson that we were just talking about the difference between the venture community in like 2008 in Los Angeles and the venture community and 2014 in Los Angeles, big difference. Like the venture world woke up to that there was some real meaningful tech innovation and some real meaningful content innovation that was going on. And there was really big companies coming out of Los Angeles by that point in time. And so, so there was a lot of money flowing into the scene. And that meant that there was a lot of problems that needed to be solved. And then of course, there's a limited pool of skilled people who can go in and solve those workflow problems and in this area in this domain, so so we had, we had, you know, probably, I'd say, a million million five a year of revenue that we were doing back then there was just related to workflow and helping to solve somebody's problem. And it was, it was for big venture backed companies that we all know now, some of which are not around some which have been sold. But they had a lot of money, and they needed people to help them solve those things. And so we got, we got hired to do that a lot. And then in parallel, we started pitching, I had had, you know, from prior work had a few close contacts in the enterprise space that we said, well, you can go and actually just sit down over a beer, and talk about what's going on in their world, what's happening in their employee base, what's happening as it relates to education and how they're using technology to shift jobs and responsibilities and things like that. And that eventually led to a bunch of pilots. And so one of those one of those early ones was with with wills with Farmers Insurance, because they're la based company. So we could we could get together frequently and kind of talk about this stuff. And, and so we we built a simulation, where we were basically using VR to help individuals are new hires enter residential home and solve problems, you know, the kinds of problems that they run into help homes that flood or catch fire, have theft, or vandalism, like these types of problems. And instead of having to, to learn on the job, they started to learn that you know, and upskill people much more quickly, you know, using VR back in 2015 2016.

So they're really Vanguard so really saw the potential for this technology and its application to learning.

Yeah, we did some stuff in 2016 2017. With them, which still to this day, pretty much is what's been responsible for most of our big partnerships, because when I, when I say partnership, I mean, like, you know, the hardware providers, you know, the game engines, all these, they saw work that we did then and they went, something's different here. So we've been able to establish some longer standing partnerships with them because of that early work. And we're honestly some of it, it's like, I look back at it, and I go, man, we're just gonna, you know, 10 years from now we're going to catch back up to where we were, you know, in 2016, we just will have sorted out all the complications to do at scale and with more predictability.

Yeah. Sometimes doing things at scale is the hardest problem often, yep. Yeah. All that kind of forward thinking that you and Farmers Insurance did together? What is it exactly that unit making for them? What were the sort of training experiences that they were trying to enable through VR?

So first started in hard skills. So it was very, very common place that a lot of large companies go initially is how do we take a hard to reach training environment and a hard set of tasks to repeat at scale, and bring them into a virtual training environment. So this particular case, it was training a new claims representative how to enter a residential home, the residential home was randomized in our simulation. So every time they entered it, it was different, and assess the problem. And in this case, it was either find the leak, find the fire, find the damage. And then you had to through your investigation skills and the tools that you had in virtual reality. We kind of gamified it. So you had you had a tagging gun, and you had a wristwatch that had a certain interface, all that stuff that became popular years later, we had some early versions of it in that experience. And through the tagging and assessment and investigation, you did, we got a score? And we could say, yeah, actually, you're really good at investigation skills, or you thought through the process in the right linear fashion for how, you know, at the time farmers wanted those assessments to go. And so we put, you know, 1000s of people through that, and the over, I guess, would have probably been 20, late 2016 2017, early 2018. One of the things that was really eye opening about that was, you know, they didn't they don't hire 1000s of new claims adjusters each year. But there's a lot of support people around claims adjusters that never got actual exposure to the process before. And now that you had this virtual version of the process that was super engaging, you know, farmers decided to give those people exposure. So it was salespeople, it was customer service, and call center people it was management, it was you know, it was a whole bunch of other people besides the actual job. But what it did is it helped everybody to better understand the process was going on. And it also, we always, we always said it was a pebble in a pond. You know, insurance companies weren't traditionally known as breakthrough innovators back then. And but this thing dropping in the middle of farmers at that time, was really impactful, because it was part of a digital, a broader digital transformation and a broader cultural shift. And it was just such a experiential way to kind of get on board with that, that I think it really helped to push a lot of other things for

him. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, that the team had such foresight at that time. And they stuck through it and really made sure they got all of the learnings for themselves out of it not just that they delivered learning to the employees but they really under Just how can impact not just the direct person doing the work, but the entire community servicing that person around them.

We built one other project that was even more wild west than that, which was, we built an organizational or an org visualizer. So one of the biggest problems that the companies that have 20,000 50,000 100,000 employees, they can't communicate, or they have a hard time communicating the strategic roadmap and how it applies to all the different divisions, departments and layers inside of that organization. So as you're moving through a digital transition, or a digital transformation, that problem gets even more challenging, because you also have this kind of foundational shift that's going on underneath the company at the same time. And so we actually built a VR experience. And that you, you, you walked on to a basically a Glass platform in space. And you explored this five year strategic roadmap, and how it connected to every part of the business and where they were within their own skills and ability as it related to that strategic priority. It's fascinating, it's still to this day, one of the one of the coolest applications, I think of VR that I've seen, and it just it was just again, very far ahead of its time. But farmers did that one too. And it was it was it was put in, you know, half a dozen kind of innovation centers in which management came in, and they use that visual tool to spur conversations around where their gaps were as an organization.

That's pretty brilliant. Yeah,

it was awesome.

I love that one. Having built a services company for the first several years there have Talespin, how is it that you structured the team, or the time that you're devoting to make that shift to being a product company, and what was exactly the product is that you were you were creating.

So we didn't really start that journey until about 2018. And so we basically had built a an efficient and high quality project studio. And so we were able to spin up teams and develop really beautiful prototypes, you know, on pretty limited budgets. And by late 2017, we had been working with a partner out of the Netherlands company called Sticky studios, back of the time, back in the day, they were a basically a triple a mobile game, mobile games company. And they had been building, you know, titles like Batman and Hobbit and Interstellar for the movie studios. So really high quality team based out of Netherlands, and we sat, you know, we had some good working relationships. And we said, you know, we started talking about the bigger vision and bigger problem and, and there was a lot of alignment around that. And so we actually agreed to merge. And that started us that started to really put a lot more foundation under the company as as a platform, because what they had been challenged to do for, for at that point, probably close to 10 years, was build really complex games, and really short timelines on top of unity, that with a really high quality. And so they had built a lot of core systems that became the foundation of the platform. And then from there, we Okay, now we've got enough, now we've got something here that can become kind of repeatable and scalable. So we're not just building, you know, kind of bespoke projects in whatever scrappy way that that we can. On top of unity, now we've got more of a common platform. And so that was stage one. And then I started to try and go and tell that story to the investment community. And I got a lot of pushback, because there's a very common belief, at least at that time, I hope this changes over time. But at that time, there was a very common belief that a project studio could not become a product company, that just as a as a transition that's really, really hard to make. And it is it is definitely hard to

make. I feel the same thing in the investment community that there is this disbelief that a project based company can make the shift to a product based company. And it feels that some of that belief is originates in that they mindsets different, the product is different. What done means is different. What it means to scale is different. There's all these elements about, well, maybe the day to day is not that different, the output ends up being very different, as traditionally is difficult for companies to make that shift. Yeah. So as you kind of think through what your own experience your own mindset was, how did you counter this narrative? Or what was it you were hearing from them about why it wasn't gonna work for you?

There's one other layer, which is that that opinion, when you put it in the context of Los Angeles was even stronger. Because la had been, you know, there was project based companies in say, New York or San Francisco or Chicago or other other strong markets that were more agency focused, they had to have had it to some degree shifted to private companies successfully. But LA is was a project city, you know, I mean, if you look at the media, entertainment industry, these are these are projects, and so overcoming that was another layer, you know, honestly, the only way to overcome it was just keep proving them wrong. You know, just keep showing that there's more repeatability, more scalability, more common deal structures, when you know office See with investors, I think one of the things that especially in an emerging space like this, the more you can get your your contracting process to look like a product company, the farther ahead you are. And so we so we really focused heavily, heavily on on how we were contract contracting with customers first. Because that obviously set the customer expectation gave us the leeway to, to kind of say yes and no to certain things. And that's not part of the product, that is part of the product. Yeah, and I think that's the biggest, that's the biggest thing you have to steer, when you're going from projects to product is what you can't do. Because then in a project, you know, especially when the tools are as mature and as as flexible as they are today. Everything's possible. And so, you know, it's all about saying no, and that's, that's the hard part. Because, you know, especially in an emerging space, the customers start to get that gene of this the art of the possible, and they start inventing an themselves and you want that, because that's where your advocacy comes from, that's where your that's where your actual buyer persona inside of a deal comes from. But that works directly against, you know, productizing, or building a platform oftentimes, until until you really find a a common center. And that took some time. Yeah, one of the things that we did early on that was a project and total experiment became became kind of that Common Core for us, which was, which was this whole conversational simulation aspect. You know, that was that was a, that was a demo, because we kept hearing from customers that we saw two, two signals. One was workflows inside of organizations, were changing a lot at the hands of technology. And all of that change basically resulted in people needing to have better communication, collaboration and conversation skills. Because if there was a task that I used to send somebody out onto a site to do, and they then came back, and they they directly told me what was going on that that that worked, you know, and that's worked for decades. But when that task now got done by a sensor, or by a, some, some other remote process, or worker, that's a gig worker, like that communication flow got broken. And so therefore, it became an internal communication flow that had to get more efficient. And so if people had trouble with that, it was a really problematic area for business. And so, so we were hearing that directly from the businesses. And at the same time, when you're watching these, these white papers come out about the trending future skills on stuff. Every single list had soft skills going up, and up and up, and up and up. And so we went, Okay, well, there's a common, scalable theme. So let's build a prototype. And so we built we built a prototype that became pretty famous with with Barry getting fired, which, which went viral a bit, because it was it was what we decided our our KPIs were, for that prototype was was believability, like emotional realism. And so we wanted to pick a scenario in which everybody could relate whether you had been fired or had a fear of being fired or had to fire somebody, it was a very common emotional center point. And once we started showing people that it just people just went, Ah, okay, well, I hadn't thought about using this technology for this. But man, it solves so many other problems for us. And so that became our anchor in terms of shifting to a platform company that we build out from there.

And so many elements of that platform were how to do that at scale. How can we make this as efficient as possible and satisfy not just the one company with a one demoed need, but all companies in the variety of needs around that specific type of use case? Going back

to the vision, the vision was, how do you build? So if you think of what Cornerstone ondemand did with kind of web one Oh, right, they took basically took compliance training into an online forum using digital early elearning content. And they did that at scale. And that became hugely successful, right? Because that was a huge need for companies to systematize the way that they they dealt with compliance initially. And then, and then as more and more content got on those platforms that went out of compliance, and it went into more personal development, corporate development types of of needs, which then got into a second generation of enterprise learning platform, which was the LX P, learning experience platform. That was all about okay, well, now, no one's focused on the individual learner. In all of this digitalization. We've only focused on the corporates needs, no one's focused on the learners needs. So what companies like degreed and edcast and a few others did, is they really focused on how can we repackage the content so it's focused on the learners own progression. Because ultimately, six what success looks like is just helping that learner to have a prolonged stay at my company or at you know, whatever company and on that journey always been able to progress and feel fulfilled in their their journey. And that was just there was just no good way to navigate that. And so that was kind of I would call it your like your web two version, which was this learning experience platform. And so the Talespin vision was like okay, well, what is It looked like in the world that we're going to live in, where things are changing so fast, that the skills we need have a shelf life of like six months, you know, 12 months. So it's this kind of constant curiosity, you know, I always need to be actively engaged in my learning experience. So that was one aspect of, of what we thought might be critical to solve for. Another was, okay, if things are changing that fast, I need to be able to publish content in a cadence that is as fast or faster than previous mediums, which at the time of xr entering the space, like nothing happened fast a prototype was six months. So I was like, no, no, we need to be able to create and publish content in days. Because we're not we're not we're competing with PowerPoint or video, because that's the that's the fallback. Because these companies are in kind of critical, critical failure states, you know, like, things are changing so fast in their business, they have to try to upskill people. So it's question of what are they going to use? It was obvious pretty quickly that VR and AR could provide a substantially higher outcome. But then you have this issue of, well, if it takes me six months to achieve that outcome, and my half life of my skill, or my need is 12 months. Now, this whole thing doesn't make any sense. And so that was the soup that kind of set the table for for, you know, to your point, like, the real problem that tells me has been working on for a long time is is scalability is how do you get to an ecosystem, they can accomplish those, you know, they can accomplish successful learning outcomes at that velocity at scale, with a very high frequency?

And what is it that you've created now to solve that?

So there's, I think there's basically three three major components to to solving that problem. So there's first a content enablement engine. So we started with a no code platform that is called copilot designer. And what it does is allows non technical people to create immersive learning content very quickly. So the same type of content that we were creating back when we did that berry demo, would take five months, 10 to 12 people, and we cost a couple $100,000 To make that content. Now, a non developer can create that same content, same length, same type of engagement style, probably in seven days, with one or two people. And that's just like relentless optimization of workflow, and basically taking tasks that Unity does elegantly, but only a developer will know how to do and turning them into things that happen in background. So you just do a lot of background processing, of, you know, basically, and simplification of tasks on the front end, because getting your users very, very different. You know, we targeted at learning designers are just business people, people who are in the business unit and understand the problem that have the choice to either go create a PowerPoint deck, make a video, or potentially do you know, use something like this, to then solve their problem. So that was the first the first component of this tool was was content enablement. The second one was content distribution. Because the other problem we have in this space is our engines that we that we they don't get, we've always been fixed off, we've always been focused on real real time, real time engines. And that type of content is usually compiled into an executable, and executables are really hard to distribute in the enterprise space. That you know, they typically go through it process that procurement process and in a lot of clearing houses, to let that be distributed inside the enterprise world. And we went well, that's not going to work because we need to distribute things like, let's say 20 times a week, 50 times a week, like we're going to backlog it so fast. If we go that route, that it will just break. So we got to build, we got to build some player technology. And this was very similar to kind of the complications I was seeing in early digital VOD days, we had 100 file formats, you know, 16 different players, you know, play your applications that could some could play subtitles, some couldn't. Some could play multiple, multiple audio streams, some couldn't. Some could play this codec, some could buy that codec, it was a mess. And until that got solved, there was no digital video distribution ecosystem. It just didn't work. And so we said, Okay, well, let's let's focus on solving that. So we built a player for distribution that interprets our the content, and doesn't require it to be compiled. So now we've basically made a file format that can be can be played from the server and interpreted by the player. And then the last piece was, was probably the one that were a lot of that's plumbing, like it had to happen. And of course, there's a lot of cool innovation and a lot of a lot of really important things that we're I think we're solving there. But the thing that I think we're most passionate about, if you were to ask anybody a Talespin is is this idea of, of how we can get to a proof of skill, proof of skill, proof of skill. So the third leg on this the stool is is the analytics the dashboard and skill measurement. Because we're learning platform, right if I if you can't, if you can't measure it, then You know that you got a big hole? And so if you think about that historically and like the web one web two worlds, you know, if you're watching the video, you can measure did the learner watch all the way through? Did they answer my questions at the end of the the elearning questions at the end of the lesson, you know, did they attend the webinar? There's, there's some, there's some metrics, but they're generally not near as deep as what we can make possible with this new medium. Right. So here, I can put a learner into A into that Farmers Insurance example. I can watch how they move through the space, I can see what what do they do tasks, I can see what they investigate what they don't investigate. And I can build a scoring system that interprets that back to a proof of skill, meaning, pick, pick the skill, you know, in this case, maybe a basic investigation skill, did they achieve it or not. And it's it's software, it's it's, you know, at the end of day, it's not it's not a facilitator that's that's doing that, that's that's running a session, that then has to be the analysis of that learners. Job well done, not well done, is coming from that facilitator. And those facilitators are always different. And so the consistency of measurement in any other way you would try to accomplish this makes it nearly impossible to have a crew a true proof of skill, you have too much bias in the process. So the idea here is that if we can build a scalable content creation engine, a scalable distribution methodology, and a system for consistent scale measurement, then you get to this this new kind of paradigm for learning. And I think the the big change we're trying to affect is if you get to a proof of skill, the resume process changes the employment process changes, like, like a lot of things change in terms of how we work with each other and, and how quickly we can assemble teams and all that kind of stuff. And, and it comes a little bit back to like, how entertainment does it if you really think about it, like there's this, there's like almost as inherent proof of skill, based on crew positions based on the way that teams assemble a baseball complex the processes that they ought to engage in, like there's an inherent trust and proof of skill. That happens, you don't go through a six week interviewing process to join a crew on a production most time like it's like a spin up fast. You're in pre production for four weeks. That's it? Yeah. So it's really trying to get to that new foundation, that was the kind of aha moment back in 2018. And now here, we are coming up on five years later of just trying to get the plumbing in place.

At this point, that plumbing is pretty securely in place. One of the elements you did hinted out, maybe we can dig into just a little bit deeper here is that as you've been working on conversational AI, on this notion that how do we take what has been a six month process and condense it down into two weeks for just a couple of people, as long as you have the skills to define what it is you want that learner to learn? And the sort of maybe the dialogue with the script so that the variations in that sort of learning experience, then you can create something really compelling? Yeah. And part of the way that you enable that is through the workflow stuff, but also through the capabilities of the system itself in terms of virtual humans, and conversational AI. Yep. Can you talk a little bit about how that's come together? And what's unique about what you guys are doing there?

It's also been a journey. So our instinct was first to go all the way to okay, how do we, how do we train the conversational AI to basically generate all the responses that we would want the system to give in any given business context. And so we thought, you know, kind of like where GPT three, and some of these other engines have now gotten more recently, we thought back in like, 2017, that was going to be the way to do it. And we actually learned that there's a lot of problems with that. And there's still a lot of problems with that we have a very specific view on when that will actually work. For learning outcomes, it works, it can work, it will work a lot sooner for a lot of other things. But what you find with learners in that type of a system is is you know, especially when it's novel and new technology, they they want to break it, they want to wander off. And when you're when you're trying to achieve a learning outcome, that's, that works against your learning outcome. And so we've actually put a very flexible system out for one of the customers back in in 2017 2018. And that's exactly what learners did. They just explore no one accomplished any of the learning outcomes. Because it was all over the place. And so now, from that experience, we said, okay, you know, we need to give the impression of Free Free Roam or free roaming conversation, but in a structure that kind of puts people back into design learning outcomes. And so that became much closer to like a branch narrative type of approach. And that works well. And we so we ended up introduced some randomization and some other types of things into the system that allow it to feel more flexible than that. And then, you know, for the virtual humans, we said, Okay, well, our end user is not an animator. They can't they are not going to understand what an IK rig is, or understand anything about bringing a virtual human for this type of use case. So all that has to be invisible to them. And then we said, well, what are they going to understand when they're filling out these scenarios there, they can probably express in plain line Which what the what the intent, right? So, at this point in the conversation, I intend the virtual human to be angry, you know, because this is a de escalation scenario, or, or I intend the virtual human to be out of time, like, you know, they want to move on. So these are like plain language descriptors that actually translate to animations, you know, like nonverbal communication animations. And so we put the entire animation system is based on that. So as you're, as you're working through your scenario design, and you're clicking into saying, hey, you know, I need the virtual human to, to react this way, you're not thinking about animating their hands, or arms, or feet, or body posture, you're thinking about what's the emotion, or what's the interaction that I need them to have at this point. And you just drag and drop those things down. And it's, and it's literally a, we built an animation system that allows you to stack those things on top of each other, and they all influence one another. So I can take the same animation, and I can drag angry onto it, and eventually, he was going to do it differently. And so that became, again, just like workflow innovation, really, because it's something that this particular user can understand. And I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of room for that to become even more powerful. I mean, there's companies like deep motion and, and some of the others that are doing really amazing stuff with with machine learning based animation. And I think what we'll see is we'll be able to take a lot of that innovation, and work it into our kind of approach to write a lot more flexibility in the system than it has today. But the approach is probably still the right approach

for a while. That sounds incredibly powerful. Yeah,

we hope. So.

You're scripting this learning experiences learning outcome, and you just simply say, you know, gets impatient, it's outraged, in response to, you know, a couple of different potential choices that you expect the user might make any map, it's one of those, it just sounds very cool.

Well, and the other thing that I think a lot of people don't immediately connect the dots on with, with what the way you approach that we've taken, and this is partly because of how we've positioned the company, as well, as, you know, starting with kind of communication, training, or collaboration, training, is a really good use of the system. But if you think of the system itself, like I can use the same nose animation system, the same approach, to create an instructor to create a guide, somebody who guides me through a physical process, somebody who instructs me as if they're just teach, there's giving me information, you know, there's one way information share. So there's a lot of other ways you can use the system. And so we said, as we believe that as we move forward in this kind of, you know, let's call it third wave, fourth wave of, of learning technologies and learning platforms, kind of human centered design is going to be the most important thing. And so what's the most human thing that we could put at the center of, of our design? And we said, Well, I think it's going to be this this communication flow, versus overly focusing on, you know, how to simulate certain complex tasks that's lower in the stack of reusability. And so he said, you know, if you're going to look at a tip of an iceberg, for what is it, you know, kind of a third wave of learning platforms? Where do you start? And so that's, that's really where now we're at is we've got we've sought, we've kind of crossed off the, you can build the conversational soft skills and other human skills simulations at scale, like we have, we have literally hundreds of scenarios that have been built by, you know, other users in, you know, not too many months. And so, from just 18 months ago, Talespin had taken all of our time until the end to build six, you know, so like that curve now is something that like, you can kind of work from there on your assumptions. And now we're moving into Okay, well, now how do we use those that those those building blocks to broaden out the number of use cases to get out to to basically being, you know, kind of a spatial learning platform that you know, that hopefully, one of us in the ecosystem creates?

There's a couple of ways I want to take take us from here, one of them, I want to talk about this threat around the investor and how you've kind of brought them along the investor community generally, but the ones specifically move back to you. But even before we get there, this notion that this is the third great wave of learning systems, digital learning systems, how do you measure the impact? You talked about this proof of skill, this notion that kind of had this idea that VR is better? But what sort of data do you have you collected on the improvement you're able to deliver with the your sort of platform? A lot?

A lot? I mean, I think one of the things that's been shocking but not shocking over this journey, I mean, obviously from our conversation, I'm a very curious person so I'm probably not the target demographic for a lot of these lessons. Like I can't get enough like I'm learning something all the time. When enterprises rollout learning programs, that's not necessarily all the the audience that they're always hitting, you know, it or maybe the topic also, but there's, there's a substantial lack of engagement in just upskilling rescaling or training Me in the enterprise world, I don't remember where it's just like, but but but somebody, a very senior learning person at one of our clients told us that if they got 25% uptake on any program that they rolled out 25% play play through, like consumption. That was a huge success. I'm like, Wait, you're talking about 75% of your licenses, or 75% of the people you targeted? Never watch it? Yeah, like, Well, that seems like a big problem. And so we see opposite numbers, right, like we see in some of his probably is as a result of like, novel technology and interest in, you know, people that are curious around the technology. But we see, you know, huge engagement, you know, we see, we see, you know, 75 plus percent engagement in terms of the target user profile, when we roll out these programs. And so, I think that's number one, if you're going to make big changes, you have to get people to become active participants in their own learning journey are their own development. So the technology is helping today, the thing that will help, I think, you know, to continue, that trend is obviously weaving in a lot more the engagement design that we see in gaming that we see in entertainment we see and other content types, into this one. So you get the sense of exploration, the sense of adventure, that is almost again, almost innate to the technology, but it certainly feels much, it's much, it's definitely much more present than if I'm watching a video. So we internally say, let's move from passive learning to active learning, that's the difference, right? Like passive learning is, is all those video based platforms Leanback watch somebody preach at you maybe do a little bit of engagement and, and maybe there's some templates or some some tutorials that you can engage in, that start to get more interactive. But let's go from that to active active learning, which is a sense of exploration adventure. And, and again, eventually resulting in this kind of whole idea of proof of skill, almost as an exhaust, like a data exhaust of the whole process. But what we see on the ROI side, that our customers are using is definitely, that we see a lot more sophistication in the last, I'd say two years, tracking the skill measurement in simulation to a business outcome 369 months down the line. So they're connecting their systems, you know, their their process systems and learning systems. And there's no, there's always been this holy grail of, I want to be able to prove to my CFO or to the financially accountable party and my company, I want to prove that the thing I did here for learning affected the business outcome there. And those things have always been so disconnected that they can't. And so we're starting to see some really interesting analysis that's getting done when they look into the skills data. And then they apply that to something that's usually measured later, and then a different system. But now they actually have some data points that are that are more direct. And as soon as we unlock that at a bigger scale, then it's like, all bets are off. Because that's, that's the holy grail for work. If you're a CFO, where do you wanna make investments, you wanna make investments, places where you can track the progress, and see that, you know, and these are really complex areas, a lot of times where, you know, we're trying to train or upskill people, and so it's a lot of times it's throwing money into a black hole, like, you know, I hope this works. And if it can get can get out of that mode, then every company out there is, is all experiencing a kind of a, an elevated need for new skills. And so, you know, how do you navigate that world, when you have this kind of black hole nature to where you invest in our world, doesn't seem like a very good time to be financially accountable for

those things, for sure. And it's amazing, you know, that 20 Some of these this one particular executives, one pretty good experience was 25%, of 25%, of the intended audience actually opens the video and watches it, that's a win, that doesn't include those that actually have paid attention to it gotten anything out of it able to apply it. And yeah. And so there's so much headroom for improvement, just even beyond the basic engagement, because of the style of interaction that you have, because there is interaction with those learning content, there's an opportunity for for much deeper learning and application all the way to the job.

Yep. Well, then we hear we hear on the individual side as well, you know, because I think one of the things that is very important as we navigate this, you know, the corporations have big problems out of them, you know, just in terms of how much is changing at once. That's, that's that that is what it is. So to individuals, right, like, the systems in which we kind of built our career decisions, our personal decisions based upon are changing as well. And so, you know, as individuals, I think our features are not as predictable as they once were. And that's scary, and a very, very personal journey that companies play an active role in, in trying to help facilitate, you know, how do I get better visibility and things like that. So I think we're entering a period where if you give an active solution, an active like a solution that allows me to actively participate in that in that In a way that I actually enjoy, and helps to give me some clarity around these, these kind of like, there's uncertain times, you're going to see that go from 25% to like, it's just people can't get enough

people actively seeking out their own learning and pulling themselves forward. So we've seen,

I mean, that's, I mean, the underlying context of the great resignation, and all these things are people are reevaluating, people are trying to serve and how to make themselves successful, given the new environment. And they're doing it in

huge numbers. Yeah. Let's jump back to this thread around the investors. Let's see it noted early on, there was a lot of disbelief around whether a project based company could make the shift to a product based company, especially in LA given the three a project centric town, especially with the entertainment industry, how is it ultimately you convince them who was in or what were you maybe when you got that first investment? And then what were some of the milestones you had to demonstrate in order to get this most recent investment?

It's really good question. And and I would like to say that this was designed from the get go, but I don't I don't, you know, I mean, there was definitely some learnings from early early businesses that I'm sure influenced it, but it definitely wasn't designed. But now looking back, it really makes a lot of sense as to how it all played out. So our first round was, was customer funded. So very strategic, we went out to people who were making really big impacts on in those early days. And we said, we need a few million dollars to get to the next stage where we can become a platform, or we can start to become a platform. So we raised about $5 million, that way back in 2018. And then we and we deployed the money right there, right, we had merged with the gaming city of the Netherlands, we had a foundation to build upon and we said, okay, platform platform platform, let's start to work towards making this look more and more like a platform. And, you know, about, we're sort of about 18 months later, we got to the point and we said, Okay, we've now proven that we can become a little more platform like littlest project, like, we've also gotten customers that have renewed and renewed and renewed keep working with us. So we have some predictability of revenue and things like that. So we said, let's, let's try to go more venture. And we actually ended up with Cornerstone ondemand being the lead, they have a corporate venture arm. And so it was kind of somewhere in between strategic and venture, it was it was CVC corporate venture capital, they led the round, and get really lucky on timing, you know, this is one of those things as an entrepreneur that I've learned over and over again, as you just you can't underestimate how often you need something to come through that doesn't come through. And if you didn't have like six backups, like you'd be dead. And this was the case, you know, we closed that round on Christmas Eve 2019. You know, and had a strategic plan for for rolling out with Cornerstone over 2020 and then a pandemic it and the whole thing shifted, but you know, we were we were sitting with enough capital to navigate the shift. And so we talked to customers and and we really, at that point really, really doubled down on on the platform side, because we heard people pretty early on in the pandemic, we heard people starting to speak about XR as if it was a more foundational technology, oh, this is just gonna be part of the way things happen from here forward. And so it went from like three conversations with every customer trying to convince them that was even a thing that they should consider to them saying back to me in the first conversation, the second conversation, oh, well, this is all playing in your favor. And it's like, okay, well, you're making that decision, you're making that interpretation of the reality, not me, that's great. So this is now it's time to double down on a platform. So we further further double down, we shifted direction a bit, the cornerstone investment was largely based on the idea of building out a content library. Because we believed that, at that point in the market, a content library to be the strongest way to go to market for scaling up adoption. But as we were hearing all those things early in the pandemic, we said, you know, this is actually probably the moment time where people are going to start to be ready for a platform out the other side. And so that's when we started to take our internal tooling. So what we had been using to kind of improve our processes internally and scale up scale our margins of predictability internally. And we said, let's, let's turn it into an external platform. And once we once we'd gotten close enough to doing that, then we were able to raise the next round, which was again about 18 months later. And that was that was true. That was truly traditional venture at that point.

And that was earlier this year. Right. So it was early 2022. And that was a $20 million round started with

started actually closing it last summer. So oftentimes what you know, doesn't go reported in those those types of announcements is you know, it's a process and so are securing the lead and getting the first funding locked and doing our first closing was middle of last summer. And then and then we got back to work. And then we managed to at the end of the year, basically we kind of put our heads back up. We said okay, we should finish closing off the rest of the financing that we had intended. And so we closed it and then announced at the top of the year.

Amazing. And so this was a purely venture plus maybe Some follow on from from earlier investors.

Yeah, we had some follow on, we also had some new customers. So central join the round was led by by seek, which is a growth equity fund out of Australia had participation from from a couple other strategics as well. So, so go one was in there, they're a very quickly growing enterprise learning platform, that's very much content focused. So they're, they're kind of the Spotify of learning is really the model they've taken on. So it was a mixture of a purely financial and a little bit of, again, strategic corporate venture.

And when you were making the pitch in this most recent round, what was the vision that you articulated for them, these three main stools, yeah, to achieve what objective.

So oftentimes, in our our opening slide on our deck is we say we are a skills mobility company. And what that means is taking this idea of proof of skill. So we're putting the technology into the background, because at the end of day, like how we get to this point where we can engage in learning content, get accelerated outcomes, because of because of the way the contents, you know, way, way, the way we're engaging with the content. And at the same time, get this, this kind of proof of skill, changes kind of the foundations of what a learning platform is and does. And so we always lead with that. And then by the time you get to the sixth or seventh slide, you realize, oh, wait, they're using XR to do this, because there's still a lot of friction in and understandably so in terms of like, when this will scale, how it will scale? How will overcome some of the barriers that have been, you know, challenging for the last, you know, seven years, 10 years. But yeah, we went out and said, We are a skills mobility company, which means that we can prove that learners have a skill and we can provide them a path for where they go next.

Nice. You talk about XR is not even tailslide, six ish, whatever it is, in the decks not first and foremost, it's really about the value ultimately, the problem you're solving for him. Yeah, when when AR glasses eventually do become a thing, like we've talked a fair amount about VR, and that was really the early foundation. It's such a great technology delivery mechanism for a lot of the training. But when air glasses eventually become a thing, do you think the majority of these soft skill trainings will be done still in VR, or chef mode AR or they kind of how do those two fit together in your mind as it relates to these learning outcomes?

I'm pretty excited about this idea of like a single device, you know, dual mode device. So the idea that, you know, obviously, we see we see what magic leaps doing with the segmented demeanor, and and being able to give a VR like experience in an AR device. And then we see what, you know, meta is doing with Cambria, and using kind of the pass through mode that we see on the quest now and taking it a step further. So both of those kind of end in the same place, you know, which is I've got this device that allows me to, to be fully immersed when I want to be and place things in my world when that makes sense. And so from a platform perspective, there's use cases for both and, and so I'll give an example where it will make a lot of sense to use passthrough for for soft skills or putting virtual humans into the flow of work as like a guide or an instructor is it let's say, I'm doing customer simulations, and I'm in the hospitality industry, I could do that fully virtual, or I could do that standing at my at my front desk, and I can put some virtual customers there. And I could practice or I could do it in context to the situation where I'm going to encounter those customers, without necessarily having to build and model that 3d environment and all those stuff. So provides a lot of flexibility. It takes again, one additional friction out of the content creation process, that can provide a lot of value. So I think we'll see vary depending on the use case, one of the things that's been held up a lot in the early days of VR is the idea that I'm getting access to an environment that's really hard to get my learner's to. So that that's the utility of why VR because it cost me too much to transport the learners to the real environment. That's not gonna change so that those are great VR use cases. But if I've got a learner, that's it's really easy access to the environment. Well, maybe the con, maybe the customer is hard to simulate, you know. So it's this question of what's the hardest part to get to get your learner's in front of, and then that I think that to me, starts to dictate when AR VR makes more sense.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. As you reflect back through all of these experiences, how do you describe your own evolution as a leader?

Trial by Fire? No lie lot of a lot of hard learnings. I mean, I kind of crash course into being an entrepreneur through the lens of being an artist and a content creator. And so I didn't, I didn't go to business school. So I didn't understand the aspects of finance and accounting and all those things that I do now. didn't understand anything about raising capital and all those things. And so all of those things were, I think, relatively easy learnings. Honestly. The thing that is is definitely the hardest is the people management is definitely team management team dynamics, and now global, you know, global workforce dynamics. So I feel like, like, what we're trying to solve is somewhat really, really personal in that way too. Because I've, it's been a, it's something, something that, you know, I see the outcome I want, I know the impact that can make, it's just getting people to actually work together to get there. That's the really, really hard part. And so when I hear that pain point back for businesses, I'm like, Man, this is this is this is this is the thing, this is the thing we have to solve. So, you know, as a leader, you know, there's a lot of, of good courses and precedent there that I think has good foundations, but it's also recognizing that we're like, really living in a very unique time. And a lot of those things are changing justice fast. And the reason I know that is is these, like titans of leadership are coming to us to help build content in this new space. And they're speaking about how different things are, like, either, either, because the workforce has new expectations, new value systems, you know, working remotely first, you know, or global first, it's a, it's an interesting additional field of innovation that I think we're gonna see over the next couple of years is, is what is what does leadership look like, you know, in this new world of work? How do we keep our teams connected? How do we keep people motivated? How do we people keep up to keep people attached to a mission or a cause, or, or their work, when there's just so many things that are working towards us being disconnected? And so I don't know, I just feels like it's an ever evolving experience as an entrepreneur, you know, whatever problem you feel like you've got under under control, right behind as another one, which, which is part of what makes it so enjoyable. It's challenging, certainly challenging, but also, you know, is never a dull moment.

That's what keeps it fun. That's probably a few and lightning round questions. Okay. What commonly held belief about AR VR spatial computing? Do you disagree with?

I think everybody gets timelines wrong. Over and over and over again, it's like, almost like embarrassing how many times we can get the timeline wrong, I get why everybody's so optimistic and, and why we need to push things, or push that narrative. But again, going back to like, when you look at the broad range of things that this technology is, is touching, I'd say from the point at which it's actually more consumer ready, you know, you still have a period of probably at least five, if not 10 years from that point, before we really start to see kind of the ubiquitous nature that I think oftentimes is talked about in the VR AR community. And so I would like to say that within the next couple of years, we'll be at the starting line for that change. But I don't think we're I don't I don't know if so they know that we're even at the starting line yet. For the type of change and the types of impacts that everybody likes to say is around the corner.

Certainly from an augmented reality perspective ahead more administrivia perspective, or not even to starting on yet? Yeah, yeah. Besides the one you're building, what tool or service do you wish existed in the AR market,

I really want the whole AR skiing with your friends, application to be more mature. Like there's been some early stuff where like, you know, I can I can put in AR like how fast I'm going and things like that. But I want like the full version, where it's like, I know that Jason's on this trail next to me, and I'm gonna meet him, I'm gonna put a waypoint down the mountain so that he knows to meet me for lunch or drink down there. And we can compete. And we can all have that, like, I can't wait for that. That's gonna be fun.

It's amazing. Do you wear augmented reality glasses today when you're skiing?

No, I I've tried the goggles that are out there. And And honestly, the value is not there. I'd rather just keep the phone in my pocket recording the same day. It doesn't really help me any. You know, it's kind of like the showing data for data's sake. Versus versus utility.

Not quite there yet. Yeah. Is it a sensor thing? Like it's just you don't you don't have the right sensors? Is it an interaction thing, you're not able to interact with it in a useful way to give you useful data back? What do you think the gap is?

Well, so let me caveat by having tried it since the pandemic, so they may have come a little bit of ways in the last couple of years. But back then, it was that it was a very single person type of utility. So it was good, just showing my speed, maybe what direction I was headed. And then any other like time of day, or, or very basic statistics, what song I was playing, you know, stuff like that, like just stuff is coming off your phone, where the utility that I want is more of like the where are my friends on the slope that somebody jumped to another trail? So that's like Spatial Mapping or better, better understanding environment, understanding, social, right, so social features aren't there were there as well as being able to like leverage waypoints and spatial anchors and things like that to kind of like, hey, I'll meet you at the top of such and such and 20 minutes and see that we're actually going to arrive at the same time because we can take all those inputs, you know, because oftentimes, when you're skiing, you're like, you know, To the best of intentions, and then get the double lift. And it's like 30 minutes between the time you get there and your buddy gets there, because he just, you know, yeah. So So again, it's like that utility stuff that you can see coming from spatial anchors and some of the other layers that are coming.

Yeah. Yeah. The collaboration element. Other collaborations. Yes, key. What book have you read recently that you found to be deeply insightful or profound?

One is written, I actually read it a few years ago, but it keeps resonating is a book called Hustle and Flow. And it's the idea of, of hustle culture, and how like, we started to hold up the, the, this, this notion of like, just work harder to just work harder, just work harder, and have that conflict with the type of work that is most valuable for us as humans to give back into productivity now. So it's this idea that, like, it's really, we're really good at abstraction, creativity, you know, connection, connecting disparate ideas and things like that. And, and that isn't something that typically people do. When they're hustling, you need some space to make those connections you need, you need some, some, like kind of free roam, like let the brain make these bizarre connections that it makes magically and, and understand it all. So it's just this idea that, like, our working culture, and our actual utility in society, are at odds is really interesting. Yeah. So but it's been, it's been a couple of years since I read it, but it just like it just now. Now, coming out of the pandemic, and hearing with all the problems, I just, it just kind of keeps coming up. I highly, highly recommend it.

Um, definitely check that one out. If you could sit down, have coffee with your 25 year old self, what advice would you share with 25 year old Kyle,

spend another five years just getting experienced don't don't rush to have to build something, you know, like you save yourself a lot of pain by putting yourself around some other good leaders. And what I did that I kind of regret is jumping right to the await, I know how to build. The opportunity was there I just you know, at the time, it kind of seemed to make sense for for the opportunities I had in front of myself. But I think I'd be even further had I had, you know, five years around just a really great manager, a really great mentor, instead of really chopping through the thick of it, you know, as a as an early entrepreneur.

Yeah. It's so difficult mindset shift for a 20 something year old to think that they can get to the destination faster. If they start a little bit slower. Yeah, as long as that slower start is in the right environment in the right context with the right sort of perspective on what it is you're trying to learn.

It's, it's really about finding that if you can find the right environment, and or others with the right perspective, you'll go a lot faster. If it's really hard to even identify what that is at the time.

Yeah, yeah. Any closing thoughts you'd like to share?

That I think LA is going to be a force of nature for innovation and technology in this next wave? I think what we're seeing is, is that the mindset that has been prolific here, and the way we saw problems in this city, for as long as the city has been a burgeoning city, like, is really starting to bode well for the environment that we're moving into. Yeah, that kind of like really challenging project based culture to come together, solve really complex things really fast, and then disperse, and do it again, and do that at a really high velocity, that's going to serve very well. Also, that, that, that everything's becoming through the storytelling lens anymore, like the only way I can get people on board with the change that's happening, whether it's a digital transformation, or, or a change in corporate values or direction or whatever, like, it's all for the storytelling lens. So that that, you know, you see that skill trend up on every single list of of skills in demand. And obviously, this is, it's been a great place for that skill. So So I think that we're gonna see a lot of groundbreaking companies come out of LA over the next, you know, next wave.

Yeah, I agree. As an LA native now myself, I can do a degree. Yeah.

What What brought you here,

I moved here originally because of the military. So I did ROTC in college. And the Air Force was kind enough to foot almost all of my my tuition bill, which I'm very grateful for. And the the commitment that I made was to serve for a handful of years in the Air Force. And so they sent me here to Los Angeles. And in LA, there is an Air Force Base, which is now a Space Force Base, which dealt primarily with satellite and ground systems. And it was the hub for a lot of the aerospace sector that is such a big part of the LA tech scene traditionally has been aerospace yet SpaceX was started here and many, many space related startups, aerospace startups are here, massive government, aerospace sector companies are either have a major you're headquartered here, we're headquartered here is of a major, still full of operations here. And so that was my my introduction to Los Angeles was through this perspective of aerospace and I experienced that LA venture scene. I started my first company here back in 2003 trying to raise money from LA, basically, and it was challenging. Anyway, where can people go to learn more about you and your efforts there a Talespin.

Always the website so Talespins, ta le SPI N and on Twitter at KJ planet is my handle.

Awesome. Kyle, thanks so much for this conversation. Thanks, Jason. Before you go, I want to tell you about the next episode. In it. I speak with Eric Marcion Tbone, the co founder and CEO of micro OLED and Mark prints the general manager for the end goal product line. Micro OLED micro OLED is a company that develops high performance OLED microdisplays for near to eye applications. power efficiency and brightness are two areas where they excel and the company is bringing that display technology to life through the end goal eyewear product line, Eric and Mark get into the core of the technology, the product strategy and where they go from here. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. Please consider contributing to this podcast@patreon.com slash var show and thanks for listening