Today we’d like to introduce you to Suzanne Borders.
Suzanne, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
For the past 8+ years, I’ve been working as a user experience/product designer in the tech industry, helping determine how tech products and apps should function and how the interfaces for these products should be structured and displayed to users. During this time, I ended up leading the design of several 2D data visualization and analytics tools, geared towards providing solutions for the real estate industry. At of these companies, called Remine, my task was to design an interface that displayed up to 250 individual data points per property on a nationwide level. The primary users of this product were non-technical real estate agents, so I had to make sure that the interface displayed the data in an easily understandable, intuitive way. This was very challenging, especially when you added in additional functionality like filtering, zooming, etc. and the need for users to view this product on mobile phones and tablets.
Eventually, I was able to successfully design the product and interface, but during the process of solving this challenge, I briefly entertained the idea of combining immersive (virtual and augmented reality technology) with data visualization. I thought – it would be so much easier for users to understand this geospatial data if they could see it multidimensionally, in a geospatial format. I did some brief testing and determined that I could dramatically increase the amount of data displayed in a single view without increasing the user’s cognitive load (or brainpower required to use the product) if I showed them the data in an immersive format. Unfortunately, at the time, 2013 / 2014, VR and AR technology was really new, buggy, and not really ready for prime time. Plus, the company I was working for at the time really wanted to focus on delivering a 2D product, so I shelved the idea for later. But I never fully forgot or moved away from believing that immersive technology would be a great way to display large, complex datasets!
Eventually, in late 2017, the stars aligned – the hardware market had matured and the first truly mobile VR headsets were being released, my personal life had stabilized and I had found a technical co-founder I trusted to help me actually build the vision I had for my VR data visualization platform. So, I quit my job, founded BadVR, and we’ve been operational ever since! We really got operationally rolling in early 2018, and we’ve been through many ups and downs along the way, but I’ve never been happier! It’s truly a dream come true to own my own business, to build and execute my own vision. I’m extremely excited to see what the future holds and look forward to continuing to build the future of data!
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Oh, I wish! As with anything in life, there are ups and there are downs – this constant rollercoaster is pretty much an unavoidable reality of the startup experience. If you’re into stability and need daily repetition, being a startup founder may not be for you! Me though, I LOVE the rollercoaster rides, the constant change, the fact that none of my days are ever the same. It’s a core part of my personality, my love for chaos and novelty, and that’s honestly one of the biggest things that drew me into the startup world – the high risk, chaotic, insanity that comes along with any startup.
Personally, doing the same thing every day or even waking up at the same time, or dealing with the same people bores me to a state of insanity. Call it not wasting the crazy; my personality is very well suited to dealing with the specific challenges that arise as a startup founder. Some of these include things outside my control – market timing, hardware events/releases, industry trends and sentiments towards immersive technology. Others are things within my control, such as my decisions around product strategy, what to build, for whom to build it, who to hire, where to locate my office, when and if I should raise money, etc. All of the items listed above are things I’ve struggled with at one time or another. But the struggle itself, the challenge, stimulates me. If it was easy, I wouldn’t want to do it! I take great personal satisfaction and joy out of conquering and solving seemingly insurmountable challenges and in doing what no one believes I have any right to do.
Traditionally speaking, I am not the best credentialed person, I’m not the most experienced person – trust me, I’ve been told a million times on Twitter why I don’t have the ‘right’ to be a founder or a founder in my particular industry. But guess what, the only real qualification needed to be a founder is the ability to be strong enough to just go ahead and DO IT. Which I did. 😉 That feeling of accomplishment – of doing what I ‘shouldn’t’ be doing, of solving major challenges that I’ve never solved before – drives me. It’s what makes me get out of bed in the morning and what gives me a sense of peace and satisfaction when I lay my head down at night. I think you have to have that perspective going into founding a company because if there’s any guarantee at all, it’s that it will be a challenging, rocky road, and if you don’t love that, and don’t love fighting and struggling and pissing people off, lol, you’ll have a really hard time being successful or enjoying the process.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
BadVR is the world’s first immersive data visualization and analytics platform. We bring data into high-definition, making it easier to discover and identify hidden problems and opportunities, helping businesses make better decisions, faster. Based in Marina Del Rey, our rapidly-growing tech startup has attracted industry attention with its pioneering AR and VR demos, allowing people to – quite literally – ‘step inside their data.’ We are known for using immersive (virtual and augmented reality) to visualize large, complex datasets, making it easier for everyone to access their data, to help make better business decisions faster. Our product is an analytics platform where you link up your dataset to our advanced interface, that then projects your data into an immersive experience that you can put on a headset to explore. None of our ‘data experiences’ have any charts or graphs, instead we create immersive, interactive data-driven experiences that users can interact with to discover and better understand their data. An example is our product, SeeSignal, that allows anyone to put on a headset and visualize their entire wifi or cellular network data in a given environment, in real-time. Instead of wondering about dead zones and hot spots, you can easily and immediately see the entire network via interactive holograms and watch the data flow through it in real-time. It’s pretty cool!
I am most proud of our company’s mission: to democratize insight. I’m very passionate about making it possible for everyone, regardless of technical skill level, background, or industry, to access, and work with, the world’s data. I strongly feel that right now, only a certain set of highly technical people are privy to the world’s most valuable resource – data – and that this imbalance of access results in an unfortunate inequality of power. Additionally, because data is generally analyzed by mathematicians and data scientists, all whom often attend the same schools and come from the same socio-economic background, we end up with the same conclusions drawn and the same understanding. Boring! What are we missing by excluding most of the world’s population from this process? What if a poet or an artist could see and understand the data? How would their unique and different perspective change the way we understood and contextualized the insights drawn from these datasets? This way of viewing the world, this way of understanding data, and who has the ‘right’ to access and understand us sets BadVR apart. Art, music, poetry – all of these things are baked into the core DNA of our business and our passion for inclusion and diversity (vs elitism and exclusion) makes me proud. I look forward to continuing our mission and someday making the world’s data as accessible to artists as it is current to data scientists!
What were you like growing up?
I was born in California, in La Jolla, down near San Diego. My father was attending UCSD Medical School, and we lived in the student apartments. We were pretty poor, but my mom always made sure that us kids – I have two sisters – were rich in culture, love, and enrichment. She’d take us to the zoo, to local museums, and libraries. When my father graduated college, he founded his own private practice in Kansas City, Missouri. At age 8, I was moved across the country from San Diego to the Midwest. Culturally, my parents are second generation Californians from LA, hippies from Topanga Canyon, so it was a hard move for me. I didn’t fit in AT ALL with any of my classmates in Kansas City, and my mom and dad were ‘weirdos’ as we didn’t go to church, I hadn’t been baptized, and all of us wore handmade, handwoven clothes.
During this difficult transition, I really got into the TV show, Star Trek: The Next Generation. They had a device on the show – called ‘the holodeck’ – that allowed anyone to step inside and be transported anywhere they wanted, at any time. This captured my imagination! In my head, I’d transport myself back to California, to Torrey Pines beach, to my grandma’s house near the cove. The holodeck really sparked my love and passion for immersive technology and to this day, the idea of just putting on a headset to have any experience, anywhere in the world, blows my mind in all the best ways! Other than loving Star Trek, I was really into riding horses (I was national champion in the pony jumpers one year), playing music (I played the bagpipes), and punk rock. At one point, I even had a 6″ mohawk! In that way, I haven’t really changed one bit. I’m still a punk on the inside, even if my mohawk days are behind me. I still enjoy riling people up, challenging the status quo, and basically saying ‘why not?’ at every instance. I think that punk mentality has been very helpful as a startup founder and I’m surprised more founders don’t come from that scene.
Contact Info:
- Address: 4505 Glencoe Ave.
Marina Del Rey, CA 90292 - Website: www.badvr.com
- Phone: 833-600-DATA
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/badvr_inc
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/badvr_inc
- Other: https://www.medium.com/badvr
Image Credit:
Copyright BadVR, Inc.
Suggest a story: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
