The Pursuit of Scrappiness #52 Augmented Reality, career path from an engineer to CEO and beating billion dollar startups in global MedTech space with Madara Kalnina-Kalnmale (Lightspace Labs)
Madara Kalniņa-Kalnmale is the CEO of Lightspace - optical reality headset manufacturer for high-end medical operations. They've raised $14M USD in total funding to date. An electrical engineer by training, Madara is now leading the company to bring a revolutionary augmented reality (AR) product to the market after several years of R&D.
In this episode we talk about the Lightspace and usage of AR in medicine as well as funding, developing and building a deeptech product. We also discuss the overall VR/AR industry with its successes and failures. Finally we talk about turning an engineering career into a business executive role, motivating your team and dealing with challenges acquiring engineering talent.
The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps
[02:30] - ON LIGHTSPACE LABS AND USING AR IN MEDICINE
- Ability to show AR images from tip of the nose tip to infinity
- Close distance visualization for doctors
- Sci-fi-like applications of seeing through patients skin in realtime
- Next level applications of the technology
[08:05] - ON THE CHOICE OF MEDICINE AS THE FIRST APPLICATION FOR AR TECH
- Readiness of the industry
- Price-sensitivity aspects
- Becoming smaller and cheaper over time to meet consumer needs
- Ease of doing business in healthcare industry
- Go to market strategy for MedTech
[14:55] - ON GLOBAL AR/VR ADOPTION AND DEVELOPMENT
- No broad usage still
- Lots of hype and not so many successful products and applications
- Apple, Microsoft, Magic Leap struggles
- Shortcomings of current technology
- How affordable AR technology is
- Privacy concerns
[24:20] - ON BECOMING CEO
- Developing a corporate spinoff
- Engineer turns CEO
- Applying technical knowledge to run a business
- Selling and communicating for engineers
[31:30] - PRINCIPLES FOR MOTIVATING YOUR TEAM
- Team always first
- Building relationships
- Women in deeptech and engineering
[34:55] - STUDYING ENGINEERING AND STUDENTS OUTLOOK
- Scarce students resources
- Big competition for talent
- Close collaboration with universities to get talent early
Check out the awesome tech Lightspace is building: https://lightspace3d.com/
To reach out to Madara use: ttps://www.linkedin.com/in/madara-kalnina-kalnmale/
Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/
Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/
Support for this episode comes from Venetor > https://www.venetor.co/
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