Ruminations

AR Post-OP

Yesterday the Apple Vision Pro was announced and the world lit on fire. Twitter was obsessing, VCs were starting to pivot back to the Metaverse and everyone was freaking out about having to shell out $3499 for something that they “absolutely” needed.

It’s all really exciting and yet, very expected at the same time. This post isn’t going to center around Apple’s platform and ability to make people pay insane amounts of money for computational devices, this post is about timing, more specifically about mistiming.

You see, before I co-founded Aurvandil, before I founded Litepulse, I started a company called PSTV (pronounced “positive”). PSTV was founded in 2018 with the premise of creating a real-world AI filtering software for positive content on an Augmented Reality platform. We were going to create software that would scan your environment in real-time and when it came across negative content, whether that was graffiti, hate messages, negativity, etc, it would target that content and superimpose positive uplifting content in its place. Resulting in you taking in positive content in excess and making your quality of life better.

The why behind PSTV was we were surrounded by negative content constantly and because your brain filters out the vast majority of stimuli you encounter, the stimuli that are not filtered out are considerably impactful on your modality, and thus your reality. The way you experience the world. If you control some of that stimuli, and reduce the amount of negative content you were exposed to, it would have a remarkable impact on your quality of life and mental health.

The premise was sound and the timing regarding filtering negative content was spot on as well. But, and this is a big But, there was one aspect of timing that I miscalculated and thus caused the company to eventually pivot and then shut down. I assumed that once the first AR hardware came out, people who flock to it in mass and create a large enough audience to build such a business. This was obviously not the case as Google Glass flopped badly.

We struggled to raise capital because the need was there but the timing with the platform was not. You see, there are a ton of companies that could be massively successful, but they were just introduced at the wrong time. Perhaps the best example of this is General Magic. Excellent team, a great concept but for whatever reason the world wasn’t ready for it.

The Apple Vision Pro release probably will be the start of mass adoption of AR and VR hardware which will enable countless apps and companies to be created successfully. I would be willing to bet that if an AI-based filtering concept such as PSTV was introduced to the Apple Vision Pro platform it would be a viable business. I will not however start it again as I’ve moved onto much larger businesses with unicorn potential, Litepulse.

The knowledge gained from the timing failure of PSTV will however pay massive dividends in the future when dealing with Space companies. Litepulse specifically was founded with an awareness of the timing of the growing market, early enough that there isn’t any entrenched competition but yet not too early when the market cannot support it.

Thomas Edison said it best “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Sometimes you have to fall inorder to stand…

Per ardua ad astra