The AR Show: Evan Rose (Rose Digital) on Adding Value and the Challenges of Leading a Fast Growing Company

1:13AM Oct 31, 2023

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Evan Rose

Keywords:

ar

work

create

clients

vr

people

systems

metaverse

spatial

technology

interact

users

engage

space

thinking

started

devices

years

business

scale

Welcome to the AR show where we 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 Evan Rose. Evan is the founder and president of Rose Digital, a company specializing in using augmented reality to help brands engage and delight their customers. Beyond that rose digital serves as an innovation partner for its clients. On the side, Evan is the founder of AR post, one of the leading new sources for AR and VR. He's also the co founder and board president of The Steve Fund, which is the nation's first organization focused on supporting the mental health and emotional well being of college students of color. Prior to Rose digital, Evan worked in finance at hedge funds and investment banks before pursuing his desire to create and learning how to code. Evan showed his entrepreneurial drive early in life and then went on to attend Harvard to study anthropology.

In this conversation, Evan describes his desire and early efforts to create an add value to the world.

There was almost like an eye opening, seminal moment for me, I can do this the first time I you know, build something. And I said to myself, this is pretty good, I can actually do this. And then the second moment that I feel like was a big eye opening moment was, when I realized that anything that came into my head, I had the technical capacity to execute that that came years later, in after I had mastered, you know, most of these tools. But those two moments I think, to me to this day, are probably some of the most important non familial moments of my life.

He goes on to describe how rose digital that started examples of how they're operating at the cutting edge of AR VR and machine learning. Being the was to clients jobs like vision, whether clients or users even know what they want potential implications and impacts of the apple vision pro device advice for startup founders born from the experience of working with major brands, and challenges of being one of the fastest growing companies as recognized by Inc Magazine for the last four years.

As reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, the AR show.com. And please support the podcast@patreon.com slash the AR show. Let's dive in.

Evan, how has entrepreneurship touched your early childhood?

It's a great question. It's definitely been a part of my life since I was a child, which is potentially weird to say. But I think early on in my life, I realized that I wanted to create things and connect with people in ways that delivered value to them. And ultimately, what happened for me is it kind of happened organically, I was as many children were in the 90s into Pokemon cards, and various Pokemon cards, I developed a little binder, I had them all organized, I had them ordered by rarity. And what was happening out of that, as I started to show the spider to others who were interested, I realized that there was a potentially an option to be a pokey stop, which is basically somebody who can be the go between and trade cards, or essentially be a market maker for Pokemon cards, which at the time was pretty interesting, because you're really your world revolved around what was available locally. So if you go to your local big topic, I don't even know if that exists anymore. But it was like a big toy store in my childhood, you could get a certain set of cards. And they were essentially limited to whatever was purchased or randomized in the pack. But you oftentimes didn't have access to cards that you might if you have, you know, we had the ability to have a wider access to these cards like we do today through Amazon or anything of that nature. And so I started purchasing out these cards, creating the ability for people at my local school to trade between each other. So I would operate, you know, as the middleman and say, you know, here's sort of a interstitial set of cards, you can trade with me that would potentially give you the value that you need to get the holographic charge card from James over there. And then I did so directly as well. So I saw sold and bought cards myself. And it kind of turned into a whole thing. And then they shut down Pokemon Trading School, which was pretty interesting. Beyond that, I mean, I think I learned quite rapidly as soon as I got into the world of work that I really feel like there's a lot of better ways to do things and is standard. And I started working as soon as was possible, you know, think I was 14 years old, got my work permit, worked at a hospital and wound up in the filing room, which was great job for a 14 year old, just organizing, filing different things. And what I learned is that they just had boxes of documents stuffed into a drawer and into a closet and into every crevice that was available. This is kind of the early days. These were not even digitized files yet. So I went through the process basically of creating a proposal to digitize all these documents instead of filing them all around what was essentially a house stuffed to the brim with papers. So instead of filing and managing the files, what I wound up doing was digitizing all of these documents on 97 on the radio day in and day out, didn't have really any AC but I found it really interesting to begin to put things into into order and try to do something a little bit better than what's asked of me. And so that kind of trend continue You'd up through, you know, my time in high school, spent a lot of my time that I was not doing school working in high school as well, you know, identifying different areas of interest for myself, that's kind of where the seed of my interest in finance began, at that time, worked at a hedge fund work that JP Morgan during my my third trimester while I was in high school, and similarly found that there were even at these big companies, things that weren't done in what I would consider to be the most optimized way. And it's something that I've seen throughout my career. And throughout my my company that I'm running now is that even organizations that you would expect to be operating at the highest level, they have really smart people, they have all this technology, the actual process of how things get done, sometimes doesn't meet what one might expect. And so optimizing processes, optimizing how systems work, and using technology to do so kind of was built in to the way that I have thought for as long as I can remember,

that's really amazing. I want to go back to this notion that you said that the Pokemon market maker that you had become Pokemon trading card market maker that you'd become was ultimately recognized by the school and shut down what was going on there, what was happening, the dynamic between the title of students that their school recognize it and ultimately had to shut it down.

I think there were a few dynamics at play. The first is, I don't know that at that time, the wheels of commerce were free to spin in the local middle school in the way that a lot of a lot of middle schoolers might have freedom to do now. I mean, you've got middle schoolers who are creating, you know, Tik Tok fame in their doing Snapchat, and they have all these avenues to express themselves and create businesses and connect with others at that time, really, it was frowned upon, I think, by the school. And the second piece of it is I think the values of the cards started to go up, because there was a market and people saw that there was ways to make money, there definitely were people who tried to capitalize on that. And so there was certainly some some challenges there as the the values went up, and it kind of became a factor in day to day life,

where the values go up. And not that you you were bringing home some money that your parents were starting to raise their eyebrows. They did.

They were they were pleased with it. To my knowledge, I think that my brother thought it was hilarious. He was three years older than me, and he thought it was absurd that I had taken on this position. But I think mostly it was probably people that either weren't in the game or weren't in the in the system in terms of like, having the ability to get access to cards or folks who, you know, felt like they made a bad trade. And, you know, they they wanted to basically shaft somebody else out of the cards that they had traded tied there, I didn't really have a lot of control over that I was really trying to be a more of a neutral middleman, as it were, those pieces of the puzzle, I think are always like any any market, there's going to be, you know, some friction between folks. And you know, what I was trying to do is reduce the friction, but in turn the school I think I found that to be something that perhaps is not the purview of middle schoolers, maybe we'll leave that to JP Morgan and his crew.

So you also had opportunities, you noted to spend time working with healthcare records and proposing how to digitize a better organized and, and even some other organizations, you know, to JPMorgan Chase and hedge fund still all in your high school experience. And after all of that, you decided to study anthropology in college? What was the what was the draw for it to anthropology?

So two things. The first is, I think it's a pretty big deal to select your concentration, I was very if there was a way to study business, I probably would have studied business there is not at Harvard, they don't allow you to study business as an undergrad, the closest thing is economics. And I wasn't tremendously interested in economics. And so what I thought to myself is why don't I diversify my experience? Why don't I you know, find a different lens through which to view the world as I'm getting all of this really exciting information through my internship because I interned all the way through. So as you as you mentioned earlier, I interned when I was in high school, then even in college, I interned at Goldman for several years, and then moved to IHG and finance as well. So I was getting that financial business learning from those experiences. And you know, to do so at school as well seemed like a potentially foolhardy decision to not you know, have the opportunity to learn from a different angle and to choose a different lens. And so, where my areas of interest within anthropology kind of fall fell into was how groups of people define their their boundaries and how they interact with each other once those boundaries are defined. And I think that is something that is fundamental to the human condition and fundamental to the way that we engage, but it also amplifies even when we start talking about digital scale, and sort of web scale, and how people create communities and how people, you know, define the boundaries of those communities and the membership in those communities and how those communities might interact and what ripple effects might occur when there are interactions and that doesn't even take into account the full folks that are doing so for their own means, right. So you've got groups that create communities for the sole purpose of misleading and creating misinformation as well. So there's all these different like facets to the way that human beings interact. And it's interesting on the micro level of like, looking in speaking to a specific person and learning more about them, but also gets more interesting at the macro level as well.

super fascinating. And I look forward to hearing how you kind of sprinkled these insights into the following entrepreneurial career they end up having, but immediately after college, you stuck with the theme, I guess, of working in these financial institutions and these hedge funds. And that's where you kind of started your, your post collegiate career before making a change. But what was it about working at a hedge fund that you ultimately determined wasn't right for you?

Yeah, I mean, I came out at a really unique time in history. So I graduated in 2009. And it was the middle of the great crash. So Wall Street was in shambles. For the most part, many of my peers wanted to without opportunities or had jobs rescinded. You know, I had also had jobs rescinded as well. So I found this opportunity was very happy for it. But what I have learned quite rapidly is this job was in programmatic trading. And so programmatic trading essentially works by very rapidly moving money around and taking arbitrage opportunities. And so finding opportunities to make really small amounts of money, and then doing it at such a high scale that you make a lot of money. And, to me, while it's interesting, from a technical perspective, right, there's a lot of code that goes into that, there's a lot of thinking, there's a lot of market strategy, and all sorts of different elements of sort of how that business comes together, I didn't really feel like I personally was able to create anything, and I didn't really feel like I personally was able to engage with other people such that I could deliver them value, right, like I was operating outside of the, the realm of like, here's something that I've created, or something that mean a group of people have created that will deliver value to other human. And that's really where I like to say, it's definitely, you know, something that I learned about myself, like, while there's a lot of opportunities for, you know, lucrative career opportunity out there, I think what my area of interest typically tends to be is in what can I create, and of what I create? How can that deliver value to people. So that was really where I kind of thought to myself, I really need to begin thinking about something different. And during that time, I didn't know how to code. And it was an era where the mobile, you know, hype was at its peak. So mobile apps are getting launched all sorts of really interesting new technologies were coming online, creating new ways for people to connect and engage with each other. And, you know, I was kind of on the sidelines, thinking to myself, like, how can I think about this new medium that we're delivering, you know, all this great information and media on? And how can I create something that might be able to deliver value and so without the ability to code, and I started working with different contractors thinking about different things that I could create. And I always felt like, very often when you have a creative vision, but you don't have the ability to bring it to life yourself, you can feel like you're, you know, trying to perform surgery with like, ski gloves on. And it's very, very challenging, because you have this this thing that you want to bring to the world, and you really can't get it out there in the way that you really feel like it needs to get out there. And so I wound up at that point, just kind of thinking to myself, let's just figure this out, right? There's other people who code Why Why not me. And so I started reverse engineering, different systems, that I had access to different code bases, figuring out kind of the basic building blocks of how they work, the various different systems for login systems for building transactions, ability to deliver content. And basically through reverse engineering the systems I learned how they worked. And once I understood how the system kind of was put together, I started learning the syntax. And I started learning all the different details of how the languages worked as well, I started out with PHP quickly, you know, learn the the obvious next two, which are not really programming languages, but HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for interactivity, and then expanded out from there one to you know, picking up Java, Python, other languages that would help me to perform specific functions. And so that was kind of how I approached it. It was almost like an eye opening, seminal moment for me if I can do this, the first time I, you know, built something. And I said to myself, this is pretty good, I can actually do this. And then the second moment that I feel like was a big eye opening moment was, when I realized that anything that came into my head, I had the technical capacity to execute that came years later, you know, after I had mastered, you know, most of these tools, but those two moments, I think, to me to this day, are probably some of the most important non familial moments of my life.

There's moments realization that you can create, and you can really create anything that that you can imagine at that point, you develop that skill set. How did that kind of this pursuit of additional creative ability manifest as kind of comes to finding that next piece of work after your hedge fund experience?

Yeah, I mean, really where I sat at that point is trying to figure out, alright, do I want to create a startup that has a product? Or do I want to, you know, work with the people that have visions and help them to bring them to life, because that's really, you know, what my skill set was was about at that point. It's like bringing visions to life and whether I wanted to take the direct approach or whether I wanted to work with others. And what I settled on is that I wanted to build impactful experiences that would reach millions of people. And the best way to potentially do that is to work with organizations that have customers or users in those numbers and to further Hone and refine my craft in doing so. And very rapidly. I learned that within that space, there's an interesting and different set of problems around legacy systems and tech debt and how those things can impact the development of new platforms, as well as the you know, things that I mentioned earlier around being in large organizations, even though they are large organizations, and they may appear well oiled from the outside very often, what we found is simple stuff, like, you know, user research was skipped, or there was, you know, proprietary ways of building technology internally that precluded them from using modern technology that would enable them to deliver a better user experience. And so that is where I wound up specializing wound up pretty quickly working, you know, either through other agencies or directly myself with fairly large organizations, building platforms. This is in like the pre react era. So it's just pre react pspa era. So a lot of different tools were used, it was a bit of a wild west situation before SBAS came to be. But that's kind of where I landed is let me reach as many people and impact as many people as I can, by partnering with organizations that could benefit from, you know, my creative and technological expertise. And then it kind of spiraled from there from me building things directly to me managing teams building things to ultimately me managing people who manage teams, building things. And through all that, though, I still, very rarely do I now code for clients directly. But I still code because it's my hobby. It's like my probably my biggest hobby is outside of work, even though it's not really outside of work.

That's really cool. In that sort of progression, as you went from doing yourself to managing others doing into managing the managers of the teams doing the work. You also came to a presume, some sort of perspective on how that market works, how that the set of agencies doing this type of work on behalf of clients, behalf of the major customers and brands and visionaries, works, what what did you kind of notice about that market? What was missing or different from what others were doing and what you thought needed to be done?

This a great question. So what I found is largely agencies will repackage older and or packaged up technology, and then they'll sell it for like 10 million bucks. It works. It's a great business model, in a world where that business model is tolerated. But when it comes to like actually innovating and actually building new things for clients, and actually thinking about what's next, right? How do you implement and think about the technologies that are going to be coming down the pipe 510 years in the future? And how do you prepare yourself for them? Most agencies at that time weren't really doing that. And so that was the biggest gap that I saw in the market is thinking about things at a level of somebody who's actually in the tech knows what's next. They know what what's interesting this year, they know what's probably going to be interesting in the next 235 years out. And bringing that insight to bear for clients was was really what I wanted to be doing. I didn't want to be building 10 year old tech and stamping my name on it saying this is great. Because while it may appear to be innovative, it doesn't at its heart have any innovation within it. And so because of that gap, I was able to work with clients who were looking to kind of be on the bleeding edge and explore what's next. And you know, at that time, it was everybody was thinking about React and SBAS. And so I worked in that space. And then I built out hybrid mobile applications before, you know, the big hybrid mobile application frameworks came to be started rolling some of my own frameworks and then ultimately landed in the React Native universe as well. So there's certainly areas of innovation that 10 years ago, were very exciting that I was able to work with clients and you know, some of their seminal steps in those spaces.

What was different, I guess, maybe about or between the clients that were interested in eager and actually being at the cutting edge of the technology, versus those that seem to have been satisfied with a repackage 10 year old technology to meet their needs.

So I think the biggest delta is there are clients that are willing to disrupt themselves. And there are clients who are happy with incremental gains, right, the clients that are happy with incremental gains. Great, most businesses are like this, they want 5% 3% You know, we want to increase our adds to cart we want to increase our engagement time on our site. And when you're dealing with 10s or hundreds of millions of people, these numbers mean a lot. Right? But then there's the folks that understand that something new will come along and disrupt what you're doing and if you're not the one to disrupt yourself, then you find yourself But the you know, looking at the wrong end of it. And those are the clients that I've always found are the most exciting to work with, because they're willing to ask fundamental questions of why are we doing this this way? How should we be doing it? And how will we be doing it and five years in when they start thinking that way, it kind of opens up doors to think about the future of their industry in the future of their product set, and how users might be best served. Instead of thinking we've invested 1520 however many 10s of millions of bucks into platform x, we got to stick with platform X, they're also willing to at the edges of that think about, alright, well, what's you know, platform alpha, what, what's the next thing? How can we invest in that? And how can we build that out? And how can we determine whether it delivers the value that we hope to our users? So I like to stay in the universe of working with companies and clients that think in that manner? Versus the it's good enough? You know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it type of folks.

Yeah. So early days, it's all about the evolution of his early web frameworks and mobile apps and hybrid mobile apps and that sort of thing. But over the last several years, there's been a lot of projects as it relates to more immersive technologies, AR VR. Mr. I presume in the mix there as well. Is that the case?

Definitely, definitely those are, those are technologies that we've been working in for many years now. And even you know, prior to some of the sort of more sort of more modern implementations of them, thinking about how can spatial activations be done for different brands, not just for marketing, but also in terms of learning and development and training and warehouse floors and things of that nature. So those areas, certainly are really in vogue now, especially in the last couple of years with the rise of the metaverse, which I don't really love that term. But we can talk about that a little bit later. These are things that as the technology has evolved, the opportunities to utilize them have also evolved and grown exponentially, just simply by virtue of the ability to use your mobile phone and have really rich experiences, which I think is a very, you know, big stepping stone towards the world that we all see, you know, in the in the AR VR space of ubiquitous use of AR once the form factor reduces down to, you know, glasses, or in the far future contact lenses.

Can you describe maybe a few of the favorite recent projects that touch on some of these technologies?

Yeah, definitely. So we recently did an activation with the Premier League and our friends over at the game. And the goal was essentially to help the Premier League to bring people out of their homes and into the wild to explore the summer series, which is this big tournament that the Premier League is having in the US. And for folks who don't deal in in soccer or football, depending on which side of the pond you're on. That is essentially the NFL of you know, the soccer universe, right? These are, these are all of the biggest teams with all of the biggest names and bringing them to the US is a huge deal. And so to bring people together and get them out, we actually hid a bunch of digital trophies in various different key metros, so New York, DC, et cetera. And as users engaged with this experience, they were encouraged to get out, find these trophies collect them, each of which corresponded with a team. And at the conclusion of it, those who collected them were able to get merged, get tickets to games, really fun stuff, basically, in a in a sweepstakes context. And one of the things about AR that I love the most is, its ability to kind of connect people with the spaces around them, and ultimately with the people around them. And so that was really the goal of the campaign is to bring people out of their homes and into the world where the real stuff happens, and get them engaging and exploring. So lots of really fun stuff there. We also dabble quite a bit in the sort of machine learning artificial intelligence space, specifically on the machine learning side because it's really more the business stuff and less the generative stuff, except for recently doing quite a bit of the the generative universe of stuff. But what we were tasked with doing is there's two projects that I must speak about. One is a video game organization that essentially tasked us with creating realistic digital avatars of people based on a single photo, which is pretty challenging to do, right, there's all these different variables that go into how somebody looks, all these different variables that might affect the capture quality, you know, the lighting that would be on them, their positioning, how they position their face. And so we actually want to building a system that appeared to be video but actually want to capturing a photo got the user to the right position where we would get optimal lighting, optimal face positioning, capture that we then ran multiple custom models on that image to pull out skin tone, hair segmentation, face segmentation, and then we turn that face from that one image into 3d mesh. And then we generated a head for it and body for it as well. All of which was matched back to the skin tone hair mapped as well. some really interesting stuff around how to normalize different lighting conditions was done and ultimately what it created It was the ability to generate 3d avatars from images that could work in production and at scale was really, really interesting from a technical perspective type of project. And on the enterprise side, we worked with one of the largest banks in the world, to essentially build a system that would enable their wholesale clients, which is essentially their biggest client. So like your John Dears, or your Walmart's that have hundreds of accounts with hundreds of millions of dollars flowing in and out on any week given week to take those and analyze all of those flows, and understand little bit more about how cash should be moved through between accounts to optimize cash flow, and reduce risk, which sounds less sexy, but at the scales that we were working on, is incredibly sexy, because it deals in, you know, very easily 10s of millions of dollars in savings or optimizations. And that's just on a given day. So these are all examples of the type of work that we do in the industries that we did them in all considered to be, you know, really exciting, you know, cutting edge type work. So those are just a few examples, we do quite a bit of these types of activation, both on the AI ml side, and on the AR side, as well. So happy to delve into any areas you thought might be of interest.

That's fascinating. So based on what you just described, I think I had a little bit of a different picture in my mind about the sort of agency work this notion, my notion of agency and the sort of projects that I have seen agencies produce on behalf of clients, but what you're describing is you're almost not simply delivering experiences that allow these customers of yours to more uniquely or interestingly, or effectively engaged with their with their customers. But also, in some cases, you're acting as an r&d shop to really help them push the edge of what's possible around some important aspect of their, of their offering.

Precisely, yeah, that's always how we've thought of ourselves as a technical partner that will push the boundaries for our clients and help them to think about how the future of their product or service might be delivered and the technological systems required to do it. So we almost in some cases, operate as a consulting firm to start with, with these clients where we're working through strategy, design considerations user experience research, before we even move into the technological implementations. But we certainly aren't what most people would think of as, like an basic normal digital agency, where we're building marketing sites, or social media ads, or things of that nature. That's not really our bread and butter, we stay very often on the more technically complex side of things.

That's so fascinating. You kind of think back through the set of experiences you've had, as you've engaged, you know, post hedge fund in the early days of working with other agencies, building your own projects, or managing others building projects, and now, through roads, digital, and all the sorts of really innovative work you get to do there. How does this perspective, this breadth of perspective that you had gained studying anthropology come into play.

So it actually factors in quite a bit. Most of the first few conversations that we have with clients are very exploratory understanding the person understanding the organization, understanding the niche, or space that they live in, because some of these organizations are massive, and they don't play in a niche they play with the entire world. Those conversations very much are like the conversations that were observations I should say, that a anthropologists might undertake, as they're trying to learn about culture. And very often we are learning about a culture, right, because it's not just the tech in the system, that's also the culture of the organization that we have to take into account, especially when we're building things that are disruptive, either internally or externally. So very often, the approach that I will take is to ask probing questions, and then sit back and listen and observe, trying to understand and then weave that in with the data that we request. So I'm kind of a little toe into the sociological universe of things as well, because we're always very data driven here. But it certainly plays a huge role in how I think about the initial discovery and exploration conversations that we have with clients to identify what the right path forward is what the right future is,

in this, this kind of study this understanding this appreciation you've gained around culture, and how groups of people organize themselves interact with each other. Have you drawn any conclusions around whether or not users actually now or your customers actually know what they want? Or need? Is there a huge difference between that and what they say they want or need?

That's a terrific question. I think it's a really loaded one as well. Because a lot of times, things that people say and things that people do are very different. But like just looking at the data, right? If you look at the data of how people use websites, and apps and things of that nature, the product of a lot of effort on the UX and UI teams played is is very often a refined version that gets most of the people into the funnel. But then there's always these outliers that will do really wacky stuff, like click on things that clearly are not clickable, or I'm trying to break things and all sorts of things. So I don't know that people as a whole know exactly what they want, but I do think that within have data and with enough engagement, both, you know, anecdotal type and engagement. So if you're doing user research and speaking with people, or you're asking them to work through different use flows and see how they move through the flow with enough data, you can start to understand at least at the scale of the problem that you're trying to solve, which might be get users to register or get users to purchase. So that's like sort of one layer to it, when you start to zoom out. And you think even more on the macro level of user behavior and consumer behavior at large thing and becomes even more unpredictable. So there's certainly areas of tech, especially in the realm of new tech, that are untrodden, right, where there is no data because those systems haven't been invented yet. And in those contexts, it again becomes even more interesting because you think to yourself, should experts be proposing how things might be? Or do we want a more democratized approach? Do we want to pull on norms from other systems? You know, I think there's some really interesting stuff that that Apple is doing by introducing the double tap feature, basically a nod to the future that they see with the vision Pro, and getting some real interesting data and engagement around will people actually take these types of interactions, and make them a part of their common interactions that they'll do on a day to day basis. So I'm really excited to see the data that comes from that and the data that comes from other similar implementations across the board and other peripherals and headsets. And start to think about how our vision by AR I mean, the broad, you know, AR VR community vision of how things should be, and whether it aligns with the way that real human beings are actually going to use these products and get value from them.

So my interpretation of some of what you just said there is that it is the innovators, opportunity or obligation to propose to hypothesize and to make available new types of interactions or new types of technologies. And then listen, carefully study carefully what the reaction is to those things.

I mean, I think I would agree with you, you know, somebody's got to put something out there, especially if it's completely new. And there's really not a ton of analogues for it. And the behavior that we're expecting of people is net new behavior, somebody's going to put something out there and test it and tweak it, and somebody else is going to come up with something that's a bit different. And eventually, with keen observation and data will arrive at new approaches and new norms and new guidelines for how people will interact in a spatial context.

On that line of kind of how people will interact and the work that Apple has been doing with the doubletap, can you dig into this notion that double tap, what's the experiment that you see them running. So

interacting with the watch, through that functionality is something that, to me seems and feels very futuristic, obviously, it's still bound within the face of the watch. So it's not really a spatial experience. But by decoupling it from the touch approach, it creates this space between the interface and the tool that you're using to interact with, in this case, your hands. And I think by creating that space, in the users mind, is going to prepare them for other environments, where their interaction is not controlled by their fingers. And we've been so conditioned, right? through mobile phones and our computers to expect the mouse essentially, right, the mouse is a proxy, your finger is a proxy for the mouse on your phone, and your finger is the mouse on your computer. And that's been, you know, 2020 years plus of conditioning. And that takes a lot right to decondition a whole society from thinking my finger is what controls this to I, as a whole, my voice. My movements are what controls this. So there's some some really interesting data that they're going to begin to collect as to whether people will even do that, right? Or do they still just want to touch the face of their watch, which would be interesting to learn. But I think, you know, as far as sleek interfaces go, or sleek, spatial interfaces, this is only the beginning. I know, at some point, they were exploring different ways to use the watch, potentially, to capture the movements of the muscles in the hands to create keyboards and things of that nature. Those are all, you know, obviously, still very futuristic, and not anything that's been announced yet. But that idea in that concept of extending the interface from just the face of the device into the whole world, and how you interact physically with the world, is I think, the most exciting thing. And really, what it means to me is that we're starting to remove the glass and we're starting to remove the device from between us and data and interacting and spatial encounters and activations. And that's really what's most exciting to me about AR VR at large is thinking about how it could be potentially used to connect us rather than to divide us.

Do you think the apple vision pro takes us down that path of connecting us rather than dividing us?

I think it's a very early step. Obviously, the form factor is still such that it's going to mostly be used in people's homes and offices, right? It's not that people are not going to I would not expect people to be outside where vision pros anytime soon until they're more like you know, glasses or things of that nature. So to that end, and it will be a step in that direction in the sense that there's all of the multiplayer type interactions that you can build inside of it. By bringing other people into your space, you know, either as the floating rectangles that they shared in their, their release, or potentially as volumetric avatars, or alpha video projections that can stand in your space and interact with things in front of you. And, and that's where you start to really begin to connect with others, right? Because if you can stand in front of your table, and then there's, you know, three other Jedi style projections, and you're all interacting with the same information that even though you're not physically connected with those people, I think you are connected in a much realer way than you would be by being on a zoom.

Do you get to work on any projects for Apple vision Pro? Can you talk about any of those right now.

So we're early days in terms of the ideation and development of AVP based activations, but we are exploring some that are very similar to what I just mentioned, involving bringing multiple people together into sort of a shared setting, having presentations be done allowing interactions, not just between the presenter and the viewers, but also between viewers as well, to create experiences that feel a lot more like being with others in a space in real life. And then you scale that to you know, the world. So you can have unique things that really only could happen in AR. So there's some really interesting stuff happening there. With regard to the AVP. The biggest challenge, I think, right now is device access. So getting access to devices, and ultimately, figuring out the best ways to test these things before it actually all goes live is has been on our mind quite a bit.

You don't have a pile of them sitting around do you guys get to play with in tests with real users yet?

No, not just yet. Well, we're online. We're online, like, like many of the rest of the the nerds out there.

Fair enough. Every time I hear AVP, I live in Southern California and AVP is the volleyball pro association for professional volleyballs.

Alien VS Predator.

Now there it is. Yeah. I'm still tuning my brain to hear EVP is Apple vision Pro. Two, as you kind of imagine this devices, it's an in between device more so than the VR devices that have come before it's kind of sits in between like the Magic Leap or the HoloLens on the one hand is this fully immersive sensor outfitted device regularly wearing your head versus the the Oculus series of devices or HTC, or some of these others that have come around. And it really emphasizes larger and more vivid visual experience with better interaction with the real world better video passer of the real world. So it is an evolution of the set of devices that we've seen before that sits very squarely in between or attempts to sit in between this idea of what VR can be at its best. And what video passthrough sorts of AR experiences can be if you had a guest today, what sort of impact that Apple's push into the space will have? How would you describe that? What do you think that device will have the biggest impact on the market.

So I think there's going to be a few different folks that there's going to be the tech forward hobbyist type folks like myself that are just going to buy one just because it's the future and we need it. It's just guys got to happen. But most importantly, I think the implications for work are quite exciting, and how it can enable freedom from you know, the sitting at my desk with a laptop type of paradigm and the types of interactions that could be created, especially in a world where remote. So my company is entirely remote. Right? The interactions that we can have are limited, right? You can do creative things in figma. And you can do creative things in zoom and all these other tools that are fostering collaboration. But if there was a way to share various physical things, or digital representations of physical things in front of us, I think that's a huge game changer, especially given we do a lot of 3d, right, we're visualizing assets, we're, you know, trying to figure out how those assets will move in real space. And doing so collaboratively could be huge. I think work is probably the biggest, the biggest potential use for it. And it also aligns well with the cost of the device, right. A lot of employees if they can get a, you know, x increase in productivity, might be interested in, you know, expanding that capital to have these devices available for their team, especially among the companies that are primarily remote.

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I'm super excited to see how this plays out. And I, it feels right to me that the it'll be the home enthusiast and the progressive workplaces that still value and an advocate more remote work, I think we'll have an opportunity to really benefit from something like this. So I'm super excited to see how how it flows. When I look back at this collective set of experiences that you've already had a chance to delivery talks about the English Premier League and how they I'm an English Premier League fan myself and it was super excited to have them come to the US and do their there's so many tournaments and bring some of the brand we even had Wrexham which isn't part of the English Premier League, but they're one of the most well known English sports or soccer teams football teams. Here in the US, due to their owners, and the amazing Docu series is built around them anyway, it's fine to have that for me here in the US. And you had created this amazing activation experience for the fans of those teams and of that league. And you noted the machine learning project on avatars and working with a major bank and helping them more effectively engage, engage with their large customers, and you've done tons of these projects now, and you're constantly at the cutting edge. And you're exploring how how these technologies affect the the companies that for whom, you know, you're doing the work, but also for their end customers. And I wonder, as you reflect back on these, whether there are some kind of key lessons that you draw, and you bring forward to the next project, about how to engage with clients like that, or how to engage with the end users of these sorts of advanced interfaces and technologies, or how to engage with the technologies themselves, that you encapsulate and kind of describe for yourself that maybe sharing to this audience will help them plan their next product, or make that next startup idea. work a little bit more smoothly?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think to your the first part of your question, engaging with the brands in the companies is always really exciting. And I think the biggest thing is trust, right? At the end of the day, a lot of this stuff is big and scary, right? The investments can be quite expensive, and you're not certain that they're going to pan out. So it's incredibly important to have a partnership. And I think a lot of agencies talk about that in a lot of agencies do that really well, I think really where we spend a lot of our time isn't thinking about, you know, how can we be the you know, the was to these agencies is jobs, right? As if they come at things from the creative or the business side of things? And how do we be that tech partner that will bring it all to life for them, that is really at the heart of how we think about bringing the future to life for these brands. And what we have done, and what we will continue to do is make sure that people that are well versed in the tech are front and center during that engagement process of understanding, you know, what is it that you're you're trying to accomplish? How might it come to life? What are the different creative opportunities, because those are always the most exciting conversations. But if they're had with a salesperson, they feel hollow. And so that's really, really key is putting tech at the heart of it and understanding that our clients trust us to determine and ultimately build and ultimately scale this tech in what could and ideally will be really important moments in their career in the life of their, their company. If all goes well, on the user side of things, I think there's a few pieces, right? Especially when it comes to AR VR and sort of the spatial universe. I think there are expectations with a lot of folks that if you just build it, they will come and to to a degree they might write to the degree that you get her in media and you get all sorts of press and buzz around it, you might, but producing AR experiences without thinking about them in the context that they'll live and how you'll onboard people into them. It's like creating a new app and not having a marketing plan for it. And then being surprised when there's like 10 users, there isn't that's just I don't know why people think about AR in that way and decouple it from their marketing approaches. But that's a really important piece. The second piece of that, and I think it's embedded within that is it that hurdle for engaging with AR is a little bit higher, right? You're not the web has been built around creating ease of getting you from what you want to I now have it in a digital format, whether it be information or goods and all of the technology and the systems that have been built over the last 1015 20 years, have been designed to grease those skids and get you from A to B as fast as possible. And AR is really just starting out. So there's still a few steps where any AR experience that you do, especially if it's through, you know mobile context, you're going to need to either download an app, which takes time or you're going to need to accept permissions. And there may be two or three permissions. So you've got this, you know, five to 10 second period, where there are going to be people who drop off. So in order to have these experiences be truly meaningful and have them really get the conversion that you need. It's most the most important thing is to determine how you can position them to the users, and how you can position the value that you're gonna provide or the entertainment you're going to provide or the excitement that you're going to provide. Or, you know, just straight up like it's a sweepstakes, you need to get something out of this. So come come check this out, figuring out how to do that. and presenting it upfront is really, really important versus like, hey, click four times and explore my thing. People don't like to do that. They'll drop off what they do, if there's a narrative or a story. And I think people resonate when you've created a story that engages them with something exciting, that delivers them some value or entertainment and then ultimately, in the course of the experience gives them moments of delight where they you know, kind of feel like a kid again and explore this new technology that that has the power to bring us all back to you know those moments of wonder that you have in your childhood when you see something you didn't think was possible.

Wonder excitement story, these elements this this notion of are really what help you engage with users and allow them and encourage them to interact with the content and work their way through whatever friction they perceive. That's right. It's my, yeah, it feels so human, these notion of connecting everything that we can to a story, but also incredibly challenging and incredibly demanding.

Certainly it is. And it's, it's important, though, I mean, I think that's as humans, we, we engage so deeply with these narratives. And in the absence of one, you're unmoored. And if you're on more than you won't invest the time. So to your point, certainly, if you can expend the time in the effort to create a compelling story, both visually and like narrative context wise, then you can certainly expect a lot better conversions and a lot better engagement. And really, at the end of the day, just people that are happy and get a lot of value out of the experience, whether that be entertainment or you know, business value.

As you've now it's been what 10 years, Hong Kong has rows digital existed as an independent entity, 10 years wild, wild 10 years. So in that time, what for you has been most challenging about building up the agency and the pedigree that you've achieved to date?

Oh, man, so many things. I always, I always like to tell people that it feels like a step function in business does. Because you're at one level, and you develop the systems in the process, and you master it and you feel like alright, I'm good. Now I can, you know, ski. And then immediately after that, it feels like you get a new opportunity. And it takes you to the next level where you'll be at a different scale, and scaling the systems, the process, all of that stuff is always incredibly difficult at all the junctures that we've come to, we've had to do it quite a few times, we've been, you know, on the Inc 5000 list. Now, four times in a row Financial Times, fastest growing companies four times in a row. And by virtue of that growth, we've had to redesign the plumbing of the company multiple times in the last 10 years. And that's, that's, I think, a hard thing, right, because designing one company that's successful is challenging, but scaling it revenue wise, people wise, systems wise, process wise, is also incredibly challenging. I think at the heart of it, we've got a pretty good value proposition, we've, you know, born it out in the market, and people find value in it, we deliver great work for folks. But ensuring that the inside of the company can survive that growth is, I think, a really important piece, I was like to say, it's like, when you get that that next portion of the step function. So often, like, putting nachos on a golf cart can feel like when you're operating in a, you know, a speed and a scale that you've never operated up before, and you're like, my tires are not gonna hold out, I don't think I'm gonna make it through this one. And then you find a way to make it happen. And, you know, the biggest learning that I have had is finding the right people, right, finding the right people that are great, creative, dedicated, and understand that with a growing company, there's going to be changes to the way they do things. And I think internally, we almost have to treat ourselves like a startup. Because in many ways we are as you're growing at that at that pace. And understand that you're redesigning, you're constantly evolving internally, or you stagnate versus a more, you know, cookie cutter, you know, punch clock type company,

it is definitely an art to find, attract, and keep as such right minded folks, right, who have the appreciation for being able to deliver in a way that helps the company as they exist as it exists today. And delivering everything that's necessary around the people side and the system side and everything else to be successful, but then also be able to grow into that next evolution of the company itself. I was just just thinking that through, especially because you focus on r&d, some of these elements are truly at the very cutting edge. And you're innovating here in this areas of machine learning and how to map a single 2d image into an avatar that makes sense and production of video or movies or other sorts of things. That's really the cutting edge, and the sort of person that maybe thrives in doing that sort of more research oriented side of the problems that may not be the same one that thrives in a organization that's rapidly growing and changing all the time. And so finding the right sort of folks that can help smooth and manage and accept and thrive through so much growth and change is challenging, it's specialists to find those sorts of folks. So congratulations.

Thank you. Yeah, it's it's, we found our band here, we've got the band together, who it's taken some time to find the right pieces and make sure that everything is in place to let them do the best work that they can possibly do. But certainly very excited about what we have coming up for the coming year.

So looking ahead, coming here coming five years. What does the company look like a few years out?

It's a great question. And I think there's a couple of different ways that I think about that in the past. I've always thought about it in terms of like the scale of the company. But I think really where my head's at right now is in the impact that we're able to have. And I'd like for the organization to be able to collaborate with some of the largest consumer facing brands in the world on defining how they present themselves in spatial contexts, right, that's one side of it. So that's our immersive tech side of it, if we can be a part of that thinking and of the implementation of that thinking, then we will have had an outsized impact relative to the scale of the organization on the world. On the other side of it, the tech partnership side of the business, wherein we build, you know, the systems that make everything go. So like the web, mobile API builds, machine learning happens on that side of the business as well, I see us continuing to focus on really designing and building impactful human centered digital experiences. So you know, thinking about things, from the perspective, you know, anthropologically of how people might interact with it, and how they might derive value from it. And what we'd like to continue doing on that side is helping people in large organizations out of large organizations, intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, creators, to bring things to life through technology, you know, leveraging our creative and our technological expertise, my hope is that we can bring impactful tech to life with our partners, regardless of whether it happens at a fortune 500, or somebody who's got a creative idea that they want to bring to life.

Impact is key. One of the things that I find really amazing about your work, at least sits very close to home about your your past six years or so is that you've also somehow found time to run AR post, which is one of the leading new sources around AR and VR. It kind of makes sense, as I think through it, that there's a lot of complementary interests with the work that you're doing at the agency as well as digital. But what was the original motivation to start AR post?

Great question, I always find that when I'm excited about a space that I can't stop reading about it, and I go out, and I research and I read and I talk to people, and at the time that I started their posts, there really weren't a ton of outlets focusing just on AR or VR. And the information that was being presented was, you know, still sparse, as the spaces were still, you know, of course, developing and moving into the, into the sort of spotlight as it were. So what I wanted to do is create what I haven't would want as an aggregation of all the interesting stuff happening in the space, which is what I develop anyway, when I'm interested in this space, I'll literally Kevin, I notes scratchpad of all the different things that I you know, I'm interested in the things that I'm reading about the space, I'll have like a bunch of pocket links, etc. And that's really how it kind of came to be is thinking about, what would I want to read as a person who's interested in AR and immersive technology? And what information would I want from a news outlet? And then it kind of spiraled out from there gathered the right writers, and editors and people that can pull all this information together. But it all started from kind of looking inward and thinking about, I'm doing this anyway, right? I'm gathering all this information anyway, how can I evolve what we're offering to be something that would be valuable for others as well, um, since you know, I'm getting value out of just doing this in an apple notes myself.

So it is the service that you that you are trading for yourself and that you wanted to see in the world, as you had noted that one of the terms that was adopted by the industry was the notion of the metaverse one that doesn't sit well with you. Why why not?

I think there's too much in it. It's it's got it's got too many too many tentacles. People think Metaverse, they also think web three, they also think blockchain and they also think spatial. They also think VR, it just is it amalgamates too many things that are very different. And that could be better considered individually. There's a lot of value at the intersection of them. But I just don't feel that the term and especially how much it's been used over the last 18 months, lends itself to people thinking about the value of each of the individual parts without throwing out the whole thing because they think the blockchain is a fraud or they think web three is not a value to them. So I think that's the biggest My biggest concern with it. Each of those technologies individually are transformative and have the potential to change the world. When you bundle them all up together. I think you get the worst of all the parts. And people always latch on to the one that they hate the most. And they say, Well screw the metaverse, because VR is like strapping an iPhone to your face. And then so okay, but it's not just VR, it's all of these other things. And you have to like go through each of them one by one. So I would like a less charged and a less like sort of omnibus style term to talk about these technologies that individually are so valuable and transformative in their own contexts.

Yeah, I have very, very similar opinions about the word encompasses everything so much that it means nothing. And just as you describe, people dismiss it because they can pick one thing out of the mass that they disagree with. And therefore chuck the whole thing out nuances is helpful in this case. Definitely. From this perspective, though, that you've kind of gained through the work you're doing at Rose digital as well as all the things that you read and see an AR post. Do you besides is the term of Metaverse or other things that you're really frustrated with as we can come to the end of 2023, or things that you're really excited about here within the industry.

Definitely, I think there's a few things on the tech side that I'm pretty excited about. One of them is the potential for spatial computing and, you know, immersive technology to create control interfaces for things that historically have had either analog or no control interfaces. So IoT, everybody was talking about it probably five to seven years ago. And it's in everybody's homes at this point. But I feel like it's a buzzword, people aren't really talking a ton about it. But in my house, there's probably three dozen, maybe four dozen different devices, each of which, you know, is integral to the functioning of the home. But each has its own separate control interface to it, whether it be remote control, or wall console, or any number of different things that LightSwitch there's really interesting ways that I think of the future potentially being brought to life control interfaces, essentially, is what I was saying. And there's really interesting ways that I think spatial interfaces could bring them to life and centralize them in a way that makes them more valuable and more engaging. And that's just inside of the context of the home. Right, if you walk through the world, there's also a ton of devices that you interact with on a day to day basis, that have no interface visible to you. And those devices, potentially, through spatial interactions, and through AI and through the, you know, coding of how those API's are exposed, can potentially be interactive, too, in the future. So there's some really cool stuff there. I think the second piece of it is as another, you know, meshing of a couple of things in the under the metaverse heading, but utilizing blockchain to create seamless transactions that can be enabled or enhanced by, you know, spatial interfaces. So if you're in a movie theater, and you enjoy the movie, and the system has captured your enjoyment in the form of laughs, or smiles, or things of that nature, you know, potentially you could have transactions occur, benefiting the creators directly as a result of that. So there's some really different ways that that I think could potentially come to life. And then I think the third is more probably far future. There's a book that I love. It's called Damon by Daniel Suarez. And it essentially posits a world whereby people have spatial overlays that are governed by this AI, essentially, it's a starts out is like a pretty simple routine that eventually evolves. And it essentially creates an incentive system that's presented to people through the spatial interfaces to engage in a new societal construct, which is benefiting, you know, green tech and is focused around building communities and diversifying skill sets based on you know, what's valuable in a given local area versus, you know, on a macro scale. And I think there's some really interesting ideas behind that of how you might incentivize or create serendipitous connections between people using spatial interfaces. That is not really possible right now. Yeah,

that's a great one. I really enjoyed that book by Daniel Suarez, that's a great one. Let's shift into this set of lightning round questions and jump right into this continuation of the same theme, which is of all of the beliefs held around this idea of AR VR and spatial computing. Besides the terminology around Metaverse, what do you disagree with?

So I think the biggest thing, at least for folks that are not involved in the, you know, immersive tech space, is that AR and VR will separate us. I don't think that's the case at all, I think, you know, when you do look at like, a virtual reality headset right now, or you are around somebody who's wearing a virtual reality headset, most certainly they feel disconnected, right from the from the rest of the folks that are in that physical space. But I think in its best implementation, AR and VR have the ability to remove the screens that we kind of interact with information through and present information in ways that are more natural, and hopefully, by virtue of that reduce the volume of information that we have to consume on a daily basis, right, the way that mobile phones or in the content being shipped to us through mobile phones currently interacts with us is essentially like a firehose, right. You're getting blasted with emails and content and 90% of it is stuff that you don't care about, nor do you want to see, you know, ultimately, but that's how that's how showbiz works basically, is you've got ads that gotta be that have to be sold in order for these businesses to survive. But if you take that away, and you just put the information that might be directly of interest to somebody either spatially in their physical location, or information that they've self selected into, because you can't just blast a wall of text at somebody if they've got a you know, a headset on. It's just not not what the interface is designed for. I think there's really opportunity to bring us back together because when you take the Firehose and you turn it down a little bit, enables you to create connections and to engage with other people. And if you take everybody sitting around the table on their phones out of the picture, how might we interact? You know, back, back before all this, people just chatted and they connected, and maybe spatial, is potentially a way to return closer to that paradigm than currently what we what we have.

Yeah, I like that. You kind of maybe are touching on this as part of this, that what you just described here, but what tool or service that you haven't built yet, that doesn't exist yet. Do you wish existed around AR VR and spatial computing?

That's a great question. I think there's still tremendous challenges in generating content, in immersive context, right now, that's hard, right? You need 3d animators, you need designers. Yes, there are tools that can generate 3d from images or video, they're not really very good yet, and they take a pretty long time to go about doing it. So the ease of creating, if there were ways to generate that based on text or voice that really works quickly and easily, I think that would be a huge game changer, for us to be able to describe an environment and have that environment populate in front of you would be really cool. I know some people already working on this out there. And I'm hoping that it will reach prime time in real time, as much as possible. But that would be the biggest game changer. So if you take the need to, like meticulously craft, literally everything in a 3d scene out of it, then creation of immersive content becomes easier. And then you're going to start to see a lot more content, a lot more engagement, etc, you know, the ease of content creation on Instagram, or Tiktok, it's gonna be really hard to get there with spatial but if we can get there, then I suspect that there's going to be some really, really interesting creative opportunities that are unlocked as a result of it.

Yeah, the whole generative AI movement in rapidly advancing capabilities around this will be fascinating to see how that ends up getting applied to spatial and where this can go. I'm super excited about that. You touched on this one of the books from Daniel Suarez called Daymond. But is there is that the one or is there another book, podcasts video, something that you've consumed recently, you found to be deeply insightful or profound. So

another one that I really like. So I alternate, I read a sci fi book than I do a biography than I do a business book and I cycle through and I would say, 50% of the time I get stuck in sci fi, and I read like 10 sci fi books in a row. Because that's my, my guilty pleasure. I just I love it. But um, another book that I read recently, or I should say reread recently, that I always find to be really interesting is avocado court by William hurtling? I don't know if you've heard of that one. But I have read it. That's awesome. I love it. Yeah, it's a really interesting look at AI. And it's particularly exciting right now, because of how, how that AI was text based, and really essentially the same as our large language models and how it developed and impacted all these different areas of society and ultimately took over. So very, very interesting book especially interesting. Now, in light of current developments in the AI space, not saying that our current iteration of AI has any potential or risk of becoming general intelligence. But it is interesting to think about the dynamics at play when a system is designed for one thing and potentially scales in ways that are

unpredictable. Yeah. I really enjoyed that book as well. It really is very timely right now with a large language models that kind of imagines how, if you had a system that could help you draft an email, you know, in you drew that to a conclusion of where that could evolve and go, what happens? It's a fun read, if you could sit down and have coffee with your 25 year old self, what advice would you share with 25 year old Devin?

If I could sit down and have coffee with my 25 year old self? There are a few things, I think I would tell myself, the first thing is to buy a ton of Bitcoin, that would be my first thing that I would tell myself, it's 25. The next thing that I would tell myself is that it's about the people, and not just the technology, I sometimes get into, you know, thinking about the technology and geeking out about that, and to the exclusion of everything else, I get like, oh, go down wormholes and 4am and I'm coding and writing something wild. But um, it's about the people internally, the people that you have around you and in the organization that you create are incredibly important, like the right people will create the right process, and they'll create the right systems. But with the wrong people, you really won't be able to do much. And then it's also about the people externally, the people that you work with and the companies that you choose to work with. It's about the people that you create the technology for, most importantly, never forgetting those folks who are actually using these things and who on a day to day basis are interacting with the things that you're creating. And I think the third thing would be to periodically zoom out and think macro. It's really easy when you're creating a company to be zoomed in on the micro right the day to day the operational the tactical and not to think about the macro. In reality, thinking about like the macroeconomic pieces of it, I only really feel like macro economic actors and activity, I've become aware of how it might impact my business over the last like three to five years. And I think when you're small, you're operating at a scale where you really don't see how those things are going to impact you. And then when you start to move up the chain a little bit work with large organizations and work at scale across multiple different clients, it the the macro impacts of things can be quite big, I mean, we've had two major, huge world shifts, right COVID, and then the, you know, economic meltdown of the first half of this year, that were macro, and that are things that, you know, you can can see and can predict and can prepare for, thankfully, you know, for the latter, we did, but there's certainly some value in even early on thinking about how that, that Macron how that macro applies not just to the business side, but also to the user side of things as well. And the creation of technology for millions of people, you have to be thinking macro have to be thinking scale. So those would be the three things that I think I would uh, I would tell myself and also get some sleep, I didn't sleep very much for the first five years of this company was up to like three o'clock, I would say 80% of the time, four o'clock 5% of the time, and it's feels like when you're doing it, you get used to it. But yeah, there's a lot of effort that goes into getting something from nothing to having that flywheel turning in a way that that generates valuable for the business and for the clients

on this notion of getting more sleep and in doing everything you need to do to get the company off the ground. In retrospect, could you have done things a little bit differently, more efficiently and allowed yourself more sleep, or just that was necessary evil of getting the company off the ground?

I think in my case, it would have been challenging because it's a technician owned business. And a lot of businesses start this way, right where you're, you know, I'm a software engineer, and my software engineering is what I sell. And in order to scale what I sell, I have to spend more hours on it. And then you realize that you can bring people in, and then there's risks that come with that. And now you've got to develop process and system to ensure that you're able to deliver the quality that you personally did at scale with multiple people. So I think for this type of business, it's pretty challenging to scale it unless you develop systems really early, which I think is probably a good call out, you know, ultimately, the development of systems to govern the business and to ensure quality of output. And, you know, not uniformity up because we're in a creative space. But to ensure that everything meets the bar or exceeds the bar, developing the systems to do that developing the systems for marketing, developing the systems for governing, you know, the internal operations of the business, are all things that you know, if I could have done them quite a bit earlier, I would have liked to do them earlier. So that's probably now my fourth thing that I would tell my 25 year old self is to develop the systems and then keep redeveloping the systems so that they work, because the sooner you get that in place, the sooner you can free yourself from the grind.

Yeah, yeah. hard earned advice for your 25 year old self. Any closing thoughts you'd like to share?

No, I'm just excited to you know, have been invited on here. I think we're just one of the most exciting times I think and that I have been aware of in technology, right? We've got multiple huge developments that will change humanity and change the way that we interact and change the way that we consume and generate information with AI and spatial computing and all of the you know, the associated developments. And so it's just a pleasure to be able to talk about these things. And I've spent so much time in my in my waking hours, even my sleeping hours thinking about dreaming about and talk about how they might impact society. So just a thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, it's been my absolutely my pleasure. Where can people go to learn more about you and the efforts there at Rose digital?

Yeah, definitely. So you can check out built by rose.co. To learn a little bit more about the organization what it is that we do. And then on the AR post side, it's ar posts.co as well. I'm partial to Dotco domain names for some reason.

Awesome, Evan, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Jason. Have a great rest of your day.

Before you go, I'm going to tell you about the next episode. In it I speak with Kirin Sinha. Kirin is the co founder and CEO of Illumix, a leading augmented reality technology and media company focused on developing immersive experiences for the mobile phone. In this conversation, Kirin describes the influence of her time in the Disney Accelerator, and the current focus of the company after their earlier success with Five Nights at Freddy's AR Special Edition. She shares some insights into the company's $18 million series A investment earlier this year, as well as your experience as an entrepreneur and more. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. And please consider contributing to this podcast at patreon.com/thearshow. Thanks for listening