Ep 52: Madara Kalnina-Kalnmale

Augmented Reality, career path from an engineer to CEO and beating billion dollar startups in global MedTech space

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.

CLICK one of the links below to listen to the episode

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/ 

Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/

Support for this episode comes from Venetor > https://www.venetor.co/ 

===

See the video content exclusively on Linkedin > https://www.linkedin.com/company/pursuit-of-scrappiness/ 

Questions/suggestions? Join our Telegram group > https://t.me/pursuitofscrappiness 

---