Most of the time spatail computing isn't rocket science, but for this conversation, it is. Alex Goldberg leads augmented reality at Blue Origin. He helps rocket scientists and manufacturing engineers work faster, collaborate better, and solve problems that require precision at the edge of what's possible.

His tools include AR glasses for remote assistance, digital twins built from reality capture, and spatial data that tells the story of how a component travels through a manufacturing lifecycle from fabrication to launch.

Alex's work is about giving engineers infographics on steroids; helpful tips in their field of view when they need them. It's about capturing the physical environment as digital twins so teams can see what actually got built versus what was designed. And it's about giving people the freedom to discover uses for the technology that even he didn't expect.

Episode Highlights:

• A VR arcade job at 19 led to game testing at Rocket Science Games, years later at Blue Origin actual rocket scientists call Alex a wizard when they see what AR does for manufacturing.
• AR for manufacturing works best as contextual infographics right now; helpful tips in engineers' field of view—because rapid iteration cycles outpace documentation updates.
• Remote assist delivers a massive win; factory floor workers put on AR glasses, call offsite experts, get unblocked in real time, and can create annotations for asynchronous training without an expert present.
• People who have access to actual spatial data stop thinking of information as living on a server and start thinking of it as living in that physical location—they've built a new mental model for data organization.
• The best moments in innovation happen six months after launch when someone in the team discovers a novel application that solves a problem Alex wasn't even aware existed.

Alex Goldberg builds for the moment when an engineer looks at spatial data overlaid on reality and understands something they couldn't have grasped from a flat screen. His focus is on getting out of the way and listening to how teams actually work.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube to hear why mixed reality is fading and why see-through AR glasses are the inevitable future within three to five years.

About Alex Goldberg:

Alex’s work bridges storytelling and cutting-edge technology and empowers teams across the education, retail, and manufacturing sectors to maximize the full potential of spatial computing.

Alex brings a unique blend of creativity and technical expertise to the world of interactive technology. Leveraging a broad background in mobile game and app production, Alex has produced many top-ranking enterprise and consumer applications for iOS and Android platforms.

Since 2015, Alex has stood at the forefront of spatial computing: designing innovative augmented reality experiences that focus on training for complex tasks and procedures.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Cortney Harding thinks the Spatial Race has already started, but most companies are lookiing 10 years ahead. As founder of Friends with Holograms and author of The Spatial Race, she works with Fortune 100 companies to build strategies in spatial computing and artificial intelligence before they get disrupted.

Cortney's real focus is solving the actual business problem first. She built an Amazon training where warehouse workers promoted to management roles could practice difficult conversations with AI-powered virtual humans at scale.

It worked because it started with a real problem: managers felt unprepared, team members felt disconnected, and in-person training couldn't scale. Most companies skip that step and start with "we need to do AI." That's why 95% of corporate AI pilots fail.

Episode Highlights:

• Amazon's management training challenge became a VR solution powered by AI, where employees built customized virtual humans to practice conversations at scale, resulting in a 92% improvement in outcomes across Irish warehouses.
• Companies fail at AI pilots because they reverse-engineer from the technology instead of starting with the business problem, and she's built her practice on helping teams think problem-first rather than technology-first.
• Enterprise adoption lags behind the hype because VR headsets are now simple to deploy—the real blocker is bad content.
• In 10 years, people will experience the world through head-mounted devices powered by AI, and companies that start building for that future now will survive the disruption while incumbents get left behind.

Cortney approaches immersive tech like a strategist, not a technologist. She teaches at Caltech, Barnard, and New Mexico State. She writes for Forbes. She's speaking on stages worldwide. Her core message: the spatial race is happening right now, and preparation beats disruption.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube https://youtu.be/w_bG57HBP6U.

About Cortney Harding

Cortney Harding is an in-demand expert in helping businesses harness the power of artificial intelligence, spatial computing, and virtual reality. She has created AI-powered conversational avatars for companies like Amazon, the NIH, and Verizon, and virtual reality training scenarios around topics like child abuse, workplace exclusion, mental health, Black maternal mortality, and racial bias for companies like Lowe’s, Walmart, PWC, Target, and more. She leads workshops for Fortune 100 companies and universities on how to use AI and VR in education and training.

Her work has been honored on numerous occasions. As an executive producer on JFK Memento, she was nominated for an Emmy and the piece won the audience award for best XR at SXSW and Best in the World at the QLD XR Festival. Her work has also been honored as the Best VR/AR of 2019 at Mobile World Congress, a SXSW Innovation Award Finalist, and a Top HR Product by HR Executive.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

There's a philosophical difference between making a film and creating an experience. Paul Raphaël discovered that difference when he put the Oculus Rift on for the first time in 2013. He realized immediately that everything he'd been taught about cinema—framing, pacing, narrative structure—had to get rethought from the ground up. Twelve years later, he's still figuring out what immersive storytelling actually is.

At Felix and Paul Studios, they've designed cameras that didn't exist, built experiences where 160+ people free roam through a virtual ISS together, and just launched Interstellar Arc at Area 15 in Las Vegas—a full hour inside a purpose-built spaceport. But the technical accomplishments aren't what's interesting about Paul. What's interesting is his obsession: story serves feeling, not the other way around. Everything else gets sacrificed to that principle.

Episode Highlights:

• He spent years exploring immersion through projection mapping and 3D installations before VR showed up, and that foundation changed how he approached building for the medium.
• When he cracked how to shoot 360 stereoscopic 3D, he realized VR wasn't just a new platform—it was a fundamentally different medium that required rethinking everything about how to tell stories.
• Interstellar Arc abandons the three-act structure entirely, instead placing you in one hour of real-time experience waking up 260 years in the future approaching a new world.
• Paul protects creative freedom over financial opportunities, which means his team takes bigger risks and stays obsessed with exploring the medium instead of chasing quick wins.
• Tech companies keep building headsets not because they're stubborn, but because they understand immersive is inevitable—and it's going to take decades to build it right.

Paul approaches immersive storytelling like a medium that demands invention, not adaptation. His 12-year journey reveals why most VR experiences fall short: they're films pretending to be immersive, not experiences built from the ground up for the space around you.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube to hear how Paul navigates the tension between artistic obsession and survival, and why he believes VR filmmakers have to completely unlearn cinema.

About Paul Raphaël

Paul Raphaël is an Emmy® Award-winning filmmaker and creative technologist renowned for his pioneering work in immersive storytelling. Blending artistic vision with cutting-edge innovation, he continually redefines the boundaries of narrative experience to evoke a profound sense of presence and emotional connection.

As co-founder and Head of Innovation at Felix & Paul Studios, Paul spearheaded the development of proprietary camera systems that enabled Strangers with Patrick Watson.

In 2025, Felix & Paul Studios unveiled Interstellar Arc at AREA15 in Las Vegas—its most ambitious project to date.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Caitlin Lacey was supposed to teach Shakespeare to high school sophomores. Instead, she started at Facebook in 2010 answering ad review tickets; a move that turned into a decade shaping how billions of people connect online.

Now as Director of Global Product Marketing at Cisco, Webex, she oversees the WebEx collaboration suite and the hardware business that powers conference rooms, airports, and enterprise spaces around the world.

Her career has been defined by one principle: get out of the group chat and into the real world. Whether she was dogfooding early Facebook features or launching immersive collaboration tools at Cisco, Caitlin approaches technology through the lens of human connection and storytelling. S

Episode Highlights:

• Curiosity took her from answering ad review tickets to leading global product strategy, shaped by dogfooding products with her own family and learning how humans actually want to connect.
• Cisco Spatial Meetings lets design teams and city planners collaborate in real time within Apple Vision Pro, manipulating 3D models together and laying the foundation for when immersive collaboration becomes standard.
• Getting global alignment across teams in different time zones is the hardest part of her job, and she'd use a magic wand to get everyone in one room for 30 minutes to align on the market story.
• A CMO threw her on stage to demo a product two months after she started at Cisco, and that bet on her potential changed her trajectory and shaped how she now looks for sparks in her team.
• AI isn't going anywhere, but the humanity behind it is taking center stage, which means English degrees are about to become more valuable than they were five years ago.

The best stories start from a place of curiosity. Caitlin learned this at Facebook, proved it at Meta with emerging tech, and now applies it every day at Cisco as she defines the future of workplace collaboration.

Her path shows that the most valuable skill in tech isn't technical knowledge—it's the ability to understand what people need and tell them why it matters.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube to hear how Caitlin built her career by asking the right questions and believing in her team's potential.

About Caitlin Lacey

Caitlin is a product marketing leader with 15+ years of experience shaping go-to-market strategy across emerging technology, hardware, and collaboration software.

She leads marketing for Cisco’s Employee Experience portfolio, spanning devices and software that power hybrid work.

Known for building high-performing teams and crafting narratives that drive adoption, she brings a sharp focus on business impact and human connection.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Innovation is just a creative response to a challenge. For Amy Hedrick, CEO of Cleanbox Technology, that challenge was the "ick factor" of sharing virtual reality headsets. She saw the future of learning, but she also saw that nobody would adopt it if it meant putting on a sweaty device used by a stranger.

Amy Hedrick is the founder and CEO of CleanBox Technology. Her journey started at Mobile World Congress in 2015 when she put on an Oculus Rift. With a background working with the Smithsonian Institution and its 158 million objects, she immediately saw how immersive tech could transform education and history. But she also identified the massive barrier to entry: hygiene. She founded CleanBox to solve it using rapid UVC LED disinfection. Today, the company holds over 50 global patents and operates in 15 different verticals.

Highlights include:

• Comprehensive XR Hardware Management Guide launched with 10 industry partners. It solves the unsexy but critical backend infrastructure problems for enterprise adoption.
• Helped publish two new hygiene standards with ASTM for the industry. Standards enable trust and scale.
• Founder resilience: you need a mix of "ignorance is bliss" and "knowledge is power." If you knew how hard it was going to be, you might not start. That ignorance protects the vision when you hit a brick wall.
• Using AI clones: "Amy AI" on the website answers technical and strategy questions so she can focus on 2026 planning.
• Innovation isn't a straight line. She pivoted from a think-tank background to running a hardware company with global supply chain complexities because that's where the opportunity led.

Amy's approach to selling hardware is simple: never sell the mayonnaise, sell the sandwich. Nobody wants to buy a jar of mayo to sit in the fridge; they want the result. Similarly, nobody wakes up wanting to buy a UV disinfection box.

They want risk-free XR programs for their enterprise. CleanBox is building the infrastructure that lets VR scale.

Watch The Tech Glow Up on YouTube - https://youtu.be/PGS8PyGiZmk

About Amy Hedrick

Amy Hedrick is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Cleanbox Technology, a pioneering sustainable disinfection company built to solve real-world problems through innovative solutions.

Amy’s leadership has expanded Cleanbox Technology’s reach around the world, establishing the brand as a leader in its field.

Hedrick is a thought leader in the applications of immersive technology as industry disruptors, bringing innovation and new market opportunities and the development of a comprehensive Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for hardware management, setting new benchmarks for excellence in XR enterprise and healthcare adoption.

Ms. Hedrick has been in both the immersive tech and UV product development spaces for close to a decade, supporting innovation in UVC applications, speaking frequently on UVC for surface decontamination.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Death by a thousand clicks. That is the problem facing clinicians who spend hours navigating scattered tools for documentation, billing, guidelines, and decision-making. One doctor-turned-founder accidentally built 50 apps trying to solve it before realizing he was an entrepreneur.

PJ Park is co-founder, chairman, and chief product AI officer at Avo MD. He came to the United States from Korea about ten years ago and joined a residency program barely able to speak English. On his first day, a senior asked him to call a dying patient's family. He missed everything.

That experience drove him to start building software on his own to make his "imperfect doctor" perfect. He built app after app during residency until he had created 50 different tools. His friends finally told him he should start a company. He had to Google what that even meant.

Avo MD is an AI clinical copilot platform for clinicians. Unlike scattered point solutions that each solve one narrow problem, Avo MD builds shared components that work like Lego blocks across workflows. The platform handles admission, discharge, rounding, and charting by combining patient data, hospital guidelines, and evidence-based protocols. AI makes recommendations, then doctors discuss and decide. The goal is a meaningful doctor-AI relationship rather than just more clicks.

Highlights from PJ Park at Avo MD:

• Built 50 apps during residency before friends told him to start a company. He had to Google what a startup was. His only goal was making his imperfect doctor perfect.
• Partners with content and IP companies like MCG for evidence-based guidelines. Turnaround time is 10 days versus six months to a year for larger companies. AI consumes proprietary guidelines to make better outcomes.
• His new iron triangle for healthcare: patients get better, doctors go home early, hospitals make more money.

His insight about the industry is that AI scribes are the first AI solution clinicians actually love because they were not built by administrators forcing compliance. But scribes only cover patient encounters. Most clinical care involves connecting dots between guidelines, protocols, documentation, and billing without any recording to transcribe. That is where Avo MD focuses.

Healthcare gets better when AI takes care of the technical checklists and lets humans do the thinking.

Live from HLTH 2025 - Watch on YouTube.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Wearables track thousands of data points daily, but most becomes noise instead of signal. Clinical notes document critical patient information, yet we cannot extract meaning at scale. Two founders solving how we turn data into trusted care.

Oren Nissim is the co-founder and CEO of Brook Health. He has type two diabetes himself, which drove him to build remote care for people with chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, CHF, and COPD.

The company works as part of the health system, extending primary care into the home. His mission is simple: people living with multiple chronic conditions at home need agency. The tools are cheap and covered by insurance. Brook collects thousands of data points daily from every patient. AI compares against baselines and identifies anomalies.

But here is what matters: a care team analyzes AI-flagged anomalies first, then brings medical decision recommendations to providers instead of raw data summaries.

Tim O'Connell, MD is a practicing radiologist and CEO of emtelligent, a nine-year-old medical language AI company. The company does large-scale data extraction from clinical notes and AI-assisted chart review.

He started the company in 2016 during the deep learning boom, years before the 2022 LLM explosion. His differentiator is that emtelligent does not use large language models as its core. The company builds custom language models optimized for cost, speed, and accuracy at massive scale.

His vision for healthcare is better data extraction from unstructured notes so we can use the critical information clinicians spend so much time documenting.

Highlights from Oren Nissim at Brook Health:

• His glow up is about use cases, not widgets. The industry is being forced to prove ROI rather than just adding more time and cost.
• The company uses AI to flag anomalies, then care teams validate and present medical decisions to providers. This creates guardrails so providers can trust what they see.
• His spicy take: watch Medicare Advantage closely over the next few months as some players walk away and others walk in.

Highlights from Tim O'Connell at emtelligent:

• His six-month glow up is moving pilots to implementations. After years of experimentation, 2025 is the year of execution.
• When extracting data, the software shows exactly where terms came from in source documents. This builds trust and allows human reviewers to verify accuracy.
• His industry glow up is better healthcare analytics. We need to extract meaning from the documentation clinicians spend so much time creating.

Healthcare gets better when we turn overwhelming data into trusted insights that providers can act on.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

From testing hundreds of cancer drugs in 10 days to unlocking healthcare stories through audio—conversations with two innovators solving how we personalize treatment and tell those stories live from HLTH 2025.

Jim Foote is the founder of First Ascent Biomedical. He built the company after losing his 17-year-old son to cancer. First Ascent takes a biopsy, enriches cancer cells rapidly, and then tests hundreds of FDA-approved drugs to determine which work against your specific biology.

The results were published in Nature Medicine. The stakes are high: one in three cancer patients will die in 2025. Cancer is the number one killer of men under 50, number two for women, and number one for children by disease type. Foote believes we have the tools and technology, but doctors need better decision-making infrastructure to use them effectively.

Dan Kendall is the founder of Mission Based Media. He has been in health innovation since before digital health was called digital health. He has been listening to podcasts since 2005. In 2016, he could not find a healthcare podcast that worked, so he built one.

He now runs Health Podcast Network and Health Unmuted, which he describes as "WebMD for your ears." His insight is that audio unlocks content from its glass jail cell. People consume podcasts in cars, kitchens, and on dog walks. These are places where meaningful connection happens without competing for attention with thousands of other things.

Highlights from Jim Foote at First Ascent Biomedical:

• Combined with genomics, doctors receive a ranked drug list in 10 days with 85% correlation between lab results and body response. Nature Medicine showed 83% patient benefit rate versus standard care.
• Pictures of cancer patients line the lab walls because "every biopsy is somebody's loved one."
• His vision is to scale locally so biopsies are taken, analyzed, and treated in the same community. This closes the financial toxicity gap affecting 95% of pediatric cancer families.

Highlights from Dan Kendall at Mission Based Media:

• Built the first digital health podcast in 2016 when none existed. He has been a podcast listener since 2005 with his first 80-gigabyte iPod.
• His philosophy is that audio unleashes mechanical waves that physically stimulate thought, creating connection when people are ready rather than competing for attention.
• His mission is to amplify voices through audio-forward storytelling that meets audiences where they are rather than demanding they come to you.

Healthcare innovation personalizes treatment and meets people exactly where they are.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.