#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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