Introduction

Maryam Sabour is the General Manager and Head of Business for the AR Headsets group at Niantic, where the goal is to enable everyday adventures and real-life social interaction through location-based augmented reality.

Maryam studied law and business at university, going on to earn a Juris Doctorate at McGill University. Early in her career, she was drawn to entrepreneurship, having founded an e-commerce company and a legal clinic for startups.

Maryam was drawn into the world of VR, where she spent several years working as a founder or consultant across several projects, before taking on the role of the business development lead for Niantic’s then nascent Lightship AR platform about 5 years ago.

In this conversation, Maryam shares her path from law to entrepreneurship to Niantic, and explains why Niantic became a hardware innovator.

Maryam goes on to discuss: 

- the tradeoffs and challenges in making a device suitable for outdoor gaming, 

- some lessons learned from early explorations, 

- how the hardware fits into the broader Niantic strategy, 

- and how the company thinks about privacy.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.