Today we’d like to introduce you to Suzanne Borders.
Hi Suzanne, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Whew, what a wild ride it’s been! I was born in California (San Diego specifically) but moved to the Midwest (Kansas City) when I was about eight years old. I lived there for most of my childhood and early adult years and moved back to the West Coast as soon as I finished school. At the time, I didn’t know what I wanted to do professionally, so I just waited tables and worked as a bartender in various bars. Eventually, I started going to various different professional meetup groups, trying to make new friends and generate some interest in a ‘real’ profession.
Back in high school, I started and ran my own local music production company. I helped create graphic designs for local band t-shirts and built websites for local venues and bands. So I was vaguely experienced and interested in software programming and graphic design (as well as obviously being a lifelong music lover – I even had my own punk band). This interest eventually lead to me stumbling into a UX design meetup group in Santa Monica and was immediately hooked! UX – or user experience design – was the perfect intersection of my academic studies (psychology), my natural interests (design and software), and market opportunity (basically any job in tech at that time). I quickly decided I wanted to start a career in UX design, but I also knew there was NO WAY I’d go back to school to do that. So how would I go about doing this?
I figured the best way to start building a UX career was to find a mentor, so that’s what I set out to do. Lucky for me, I quickly found a mentor who taught me the ropes, kicked me some freelance work, and helped me build my portfolio. He also helped hone my resume, coached me through interviews, and soon enough I had my first real UX designer job. From that point onwards, I’ve never looked back (although bartending and working in the nightlife/music industry was pretty fun).
For the past 10+ years, I’ve worked as a user experience/product designer in LA, helping determine how tech products and apps should function and how the interfaces for these products should be structured and displayed to people who use these products. 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. 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 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 multi-dimensionally 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, 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 and I found a technical co-founder I trusted to help me actually build the vision I had for my VR data visualization platform. So, in 2018 I quit my full-time job and founded BadVR, and we’ve been operational ever since! 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 and 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!
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
Oh, there have been so many! That’s the nature of life though, isn’t it? If something comes with an easy, smooth path, it’s not usually worth having or working towards. The value of most things in life tends to correlate directly with the level of difficulty required to obtain it; I’ve yet to encounter anything of value that has ‘come easy’ to me. That being said, while I haven’t found any easy way to accomplish things I’ve accomplished, I have learned to enjoy the challenges necessary to achieve them; to use these obstacles to propel my personal and professional growth. And that’s all we can really do, lean into the difficulty, lean into the struggle, and leverage it to the hilt for maximum self-growth and improvement.
That being said – what were/are some of my struggles? Being a female in the tech field – that alone has been a struggle. It’s better now that men are more self-aware of their own behavior in this post-‘Me Too’ world, but back in the day, it was pretty gnarly. Male bosses assuming that I’d sleep with them for a promotion, getting propositioned by strangers at tech conferences, and being called ‘the booth girl’ when I had actually designed the entire product single-handedly, on my own. And these are just a few of the challenges I’ve lived through professionally. For the first half of my professional life, I felt entirely like an office plant – something decorative that made the place look nice but something that was functionally useless and that contributed nothing of real value to anyone. Just window dressing. Thankfully, I didn’t let that feeling stop me from continuing to push forward toward success, but man those feelings were so viscerally upsetting, uncomfortable, and real. Eventually, I learned to speak up for myself and I stopped believing that if others didn’t value me, that I shouldn’t value myself. I finally found an environment that did appreciate what I had to contribute, that didn’t fixate on my looks. That was such a transcendent moment in my life!
Personally, I went through many challenges as well – I was a runaway kid growing up who lived in foster homes and halfway houses for the last two years of my childhood. I won’t get into the stories about that because they’re far too dark and messed up, but needless to say – it was not easy. No one escapes from foster care unscathed. I fought major battles with mental health, dealing with the trauma of what I managed to live through. Some of my best friends growing up ended up committing suicide or dying from cancer. I’ve lost many friends. Too many. Honestly, when I look back on my life, I’m one of the only ones I know who didn’t end up dead or in jail. That was a long, hard, difficult battle I had to wage with myself, a deep dark hole from which I had to dig my way up. Some days I really didn’t think I’d make it, yet I did. If anything, watching myself overcome these personal challenges helped give me the confidence I needed to pursue bigger, professional challenges. If I could live through that trauma, hell, what’s a little casual sexism at work? I figured after surviving so much trauma – nothing can break me, I am unstoppable. Again, it comes back to the real purpose of our struggles – as a way to recognize and believe in our own resiliency and power. What’s so scary about starting a business when you’ve lived through things a million times worse? It gives you a sort of blind courage and faith in your own ability. I wouldn’t be who I am today without all the challenges and obstacles I’ve had to overcome.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit 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 of 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!
We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
The COVID-19 crisis taught us all a lot! For one thing – it taught business owners (myself included) how to apply for PPP loans! I think we all ended up face to face, alone with our own weaknesses – physically, psychologically, professionally – during the first year of lockdowns. Many people didn’t deal with it well, but if there’s one thing I can say about myself is that I am a loner, I enjoy being alone, I enjoy introspection, and I naturally spend a lot of time on my own, pandemic or not. So in that sense, I didn’t struggle too much during this period, at least not with the isolation part. However, I did learn how many people did indeed struggle with being alone at home, which helped me understand the need that so many people have for human contact, socialization; simple, basic things like eye contact. It helped me understand the value of community and team building from a psychological point of view.
In terms of professional lessons, I learned a great deal about planning ahead, cutting costs, and running a lean ship. I learned the long-term value of keeping my company’s burn rate low, at least in times of uncertainty. A lot of startups went into the pandemic on shaky ground, knowing that their runways were short and fundraising money would become difficult to obtain. Thankfully, due to decisions I made in the very early stages of my business, I didn’t find myself in such a situation. Before COVID, so many people used to tell me to raise, raise, raise as much money as possible from anyone who offered it. My more ‘thrifty’ approach of NOT taking every dollar offered and NOT raising tons of money, of keeping the team small, tight, and lean was considered at best, incorrect, and at worst, ‘unfundable.’ But, because of my lean and thrifty mindset, I was able to enter into the pandemic with a multi-year runway, survive it, and even thrive (we doubled our size from 2020 to 2022)! Another lesson learned: don’t do what everyone else is doing just because everyone else is doing it. Some more lessons: Don’t assume that others are right when they criticize you; don’t assume the path others are taking is the path you ought to take too. Walk your own road, dance to the beat of your own drummer, and trust yourself and your own instincts first and foremost, even when everyone else thinks it’s the ‘wrong move.’ COVID certainly taught me these lessons!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.badvr.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/badvr_inc
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/badvrinc/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/badvr_inc
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc2b4MC9tB2_QLbpzJReyHw/featured
- Other: https://medium.com/badvr
Image Credits
All images should be credited to BadVR, Inc.
