The Tech Glow Up - Fabulous conversations with innovative minds.

This is a special episode of The Tech Glow Up from SPECS launch day. I'm at the Beverly Wilshire for the SPECS smart glasses media preview, sharing first thoughts on the day of the public launch — September 16th.

I want to be upfront: I haven't tried every demo. This is about 30 minutes in the glasses from media day, not the full reveal. But the thing that stood out most was something that was missing. There's no hard line between the display and the world. 

The screen feels blended with the world, not a picture-in-picture overlay. Tha...

This first international episode of The Tech Glow Up was recorded live in Harajuku, Japan at the offices of Mawari — a company building the streaming infrastructure for the next generation of smart glasses and immersive experiences since 2017.

Luis Oscar Ramírez is the co-founder and CEO. He started Mawari in Shibuya with a straightforward premise: if the world is three-dimensional, the internet shouldn't be flat. Nine years later, the company is one of the select few in XR that has earned more in licensing revenue than what they've raised from VC. Despite having an early innovation in a s...

Episode one started with a hypothesis: innovation is hard, and you shouldn't have to do it alone. 101 episodes later — recorded in under two years — that's still the most consistently true thing on this show.

This is a solo episode where I'm marking The Tech Glow Up's milestone and sharing what 100-plus conversations with founders, CEOs, and product leaders have actually taught me. The patterns are real: the innovators who make it through the barren middle — that stretch where insights come slowly, nothing is quite done, and the uncertainty is constant — are almost always the ones who built the righ...

XR is the most fragmented technology ecosystem since the early internet — and Sean Mann, CEO of RP1, thinks the industry is making the same mistake AOL did. 

Get a front row seat to the conversations about AI, AR smartglasses, and the future of enterprise technology from Augmented World Expo 2026.

Everyone is building walled gardens. Devices don't talk to each other. Enterprises can't build things that will work everywhere. And every developer who invests in one platform risks watching their skills disappear when that platform does.

The web broke all of this open in the...

Most conversations about smart glasses focus on the software, the display, or the AI. Omar Abed, CTO of InvenSense, a TDK group company, wants you to think about what's underneath all of that.

Get a front row seat to the conversations about AI, AR smartglasses, and the future of enterprise technology from Augmented World Expo 2026.

Today's smart glasses carry 10 to 20 sensors each — and by count, sensors are the most numerous component in any pair. They're what connects the glasses to the person wearing them, connects the glasses to the world around them, and generates the ra...

Get a front row seat to the conversations about AI, AR smartglasses, and the future of enterprise technology from Augmented World Expo 2026.

Michael Allen Nesmith spent 10 years as a creative director at Amazon's Brand Lab — and built something there that had nothing to do with e-commerce: an in-house interpreting agency that embedded sign language interpreters across his team and eventually scaled to Amazon's global workforce. He left that behind to start Non-Breaking Space, a consulting firm helping tech companies build products that actually work for deaf and hard-of-hearing users from day one.

His argument is st...

Get a front row seat to the conversations about AI, AR smartglasses, and the future of enterprise technology from Augmented World Expo 2026.

Poz Long is Director of Creative Technology for Sports, Media, and Entertainment at Salesforce. Their job is to help people understand complex products through experiences — not documentation or demos, but through things that move people and actually solve something. 

Poz's background runs from a theater degree through reality TV post-production, America's Test Kitchen, Bay Area music videos, and eventually into XR at Meta and Apple, where they built a VR synoptophore for pediatric eye...

Get a front row seat to the conversations about AI, AR smartglasses, and the future of enterprise technology from Augmented World Expo 2026. Joe Darko has spent twelve years at Snap making developers feel heard, supported, and paid. 

As Global Head of Developer Relations for SPECS, his team answers every email, monitors every Discord thread, and reports directly to CEO Evan Spiegel — who, Joe said, stopped him on the AWE floor to ask one question: "What are devs saying?" The answer that morning: blown away.

At AWE 2026, Snap announced SPECS — the consumer AR smart glasses Evan has b...

Get a front row seat to the conversations about AI, AR smartglasses, and the future of enterprise technology from Augmented World Expo 2026.

Oscar Falmer has spent eight years helping developers build for wearables — at Meta and at other companies doing interesting work in the space. As developer advocate for things like smartglasses, his job is to lower the floor for anyone who wants to build for AI smartglasses, whether they write code for a living or picked up an AI coding agent on a weekend.

The Meta Display Glasses use the familiar Ray-Ban form factor wi...

Get a front row seat to the conversations about AI, AR smartglasses, and the future of enterprise technology from Augmented World Expo 2026.

Neil Trevett has spent his career connecting software to silicon. As president of the Khronos Group — the organization behind OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenXR, and glTF — and president of the Metaverse Standards Forum, he works on the open interoperability standards that let developers build once and deploy across many devices. His day job is at NVIDIA, developing GPU developer ecosystems. His life's work is making sure the industry doesn't have to rebuild the same foundation six times.

Get a front row seat to the conversations about AI, AR smartglasses, and the future of enterprise technology from Augmented World Expo 2026. 

For six or seven years, the XR industry has been selling upgrades to people who already believe. Better resolution, more compute, a sleeker strap — for the same early-adopter audience already wearing a headset. I kept waiting for someone to answer the obvious question: when does this technology reach anyone else?

Amir Khorram, Head of Enterprise at XREAL, is back on The Tech Glow Up — we recorded this one live at AWE in Long Beach...

Smart glasses had a moment at Augmented World Expo 2026 — and I was there for all of it. Here's your preview of what's coming.

Sending this from a co-working spot in Japan, where I'm traveling for work and a little pleasure after AWE. I'll be honest: rather than wait to record a polished intro for every episode, I wanted to drop this quick update so you know what's heading your way before it starts hitting your feed. The content is too good to sit on.

At AWE 2026, Snap announced the new Specs AR AI-powered smart glasses, an...

Rural hospitals hold some of the most reliable receivables in finance — money owed by the US government — yet they can't borrow against them. Banks won't price the risk. So hospitals pledge buildings instead, starving themselves of capital. Joseph Riddle, Chief Commercial Officer at Capital Pulse, watched this problem up close before his company built the AI that cracks it: a model valuing any medical receivable with greater than 95% accuracy, flagging denials early, and giving lenders confidence to treat those receivables as real collateral.

Joseph is also an angel investor in eight startups. He was employee number 25 at Smar...

Most climate communication talks at people. It delivers facts, projections, timelines — and wonders why nothing changes. Facts land in the head, not the gut. Immersive media like XR, AR, VR changes that. When you're standing inside a story, it stops being abstract. You feel it. That's the conviction behind Agog, the Immersive Media Institute, and why co-founder Chip Giller believes XR is one of the most important tools the climate movement hasn't fully picked up yet.

Chip didn't arrive here in a straight line. He founded Grist.org in the late 1990s — one of the first digital-only nonp...

What does it take to stay committed to a vision when the technology is still developing? Russell Patton has been inside Snap working on camera glasses and AR smartglasses for over a decade. 

He's a Staff Product Manager on Snap Spectacles, and we recorded this episode at Snap's Spectacles Developer Bootcamp in Santa Monica, where 50 of the world's top lens creators gathered to advance the path toward wearable AR.

Russell's through-line isn't hype — it's conviction built on evidence. Snap started making camera glasses in 2016 — not because the product was perfect, but because each generation taught the t...

Every health tech founder wants to change the system. But Warren Templeton, Managing Director at Health2047, will tell you that without financial sustainability, the mission dies on the vine. "No mission without margin" isn't a compromise — it's a precondition. In a sector where impact is measured in lives and dollars at the same time, Warren argues that founders who can't do the math on their own business model are the ones who don't make it.

Health2047 is a venture studio backed by the American Medical Association — and that structure matters. Warren and his team don't just writ...

We train our bodies. We track our steps, our sleep, our resting heart rate. But when it comes to mental wellness — the skills that help people regulate, process, and recover — most people never learn them until something breaks. The tools exist. Cognitive behavioral therapy has 50 years of evidence behind it. And those tools work just as well before a crisis as after. Almost nobody knows that.

Leah Blain is a licensed clinical psychologist and Chief Clinical Officer at Chimney Trail Health. Her conviction is simple: get evidence-based mental wellness tools to people upstream — before a problem starts, not af...

Meet the HealthTech Impact Award Winners. Five innovators with five real, personal inspirations that keep them focussed and building. 

Ellyn Ito co-founded InnerStill after her 15-year-old son became suicidal during the pandemic. Every avenue they tried fell short. That search led to MindVybe — a patented wearable neuromodulation device using vagus nerve stimulation and acupressure point regulation for stress, poor sleep, brain fog, agitation, and lack of focus. No side effects, no overuse risk. MindVybe has 5,000 users in clinical studies, three state innovation grants, and is on the FDA 510k pathway.

Claire Dixon is bui...

Most vehicle research happens in ideal conditions — short commutes, familiar routes, full battery. Katie Tucker wanted to know what happens when the conditions aren't ideal. As Global Customer Research and CX Insights Manager at General Motors, she led a study that sent 40 Blazer EVs and more than 80 drivers on cross-country road trips to find out what customers actually need when the stakes are high and the variables are real. 

What they uncovered reshaped how the team thinks about EV onboarding, range anxiety, and the critical first 60 to 90 days of vehicle ownership.

Katie's approach sits at the...

Most technology implementations in healthcare fail in the same place: the moment after go-live, when clinicians are supposed to just know how to use the system. Dr. Stephanie Lahr, Chief Medical Officer at uPerform, spent years watching that happen from the inside — as a physician, as a CIO, as a CMIO — before deciding to fix it.

uPerform is a just-in-time learning platform built for health systems. When a nurse forgets how to document a medication, when a physician can't remember how to write a specific order, when a revenue cycle team member needs to get a bill out...

Value-based care has a transparency problem. Payers have their number. Providers have their number. Nobody can agree on what truth is — and that disagreement is quietly costing providers money they should be reinvesting in their communities, their staff, and their patients.

Rachael Jones, CEO of Syntax Health, a Lightbeam Health Company, spent 25 years in healthcare — starting in a hospital in Paterson, New Jersey, moving through Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, Anthem, and multiple software companies — before building Syntax specifically to solve the friction in value-based care contracting. 

Her platform and services do three things: help organiz...

America's healthcare system has been claiming to put patients first for decades. Miriam Paramore, founder and CEO of RX Utility, has spent 42 years in health IT watching that claim go unmet — and she built her company to fix the part where patients get hurt most: what they pay out of pocket at the pharmacy.

The math is stark. Employers pay the negotiated net price on medications after rebates. Consumers with high-deductible health plans pay the full list price. Eliquis: $600 at the counter for a consumer with a $10,000 deductible. The employer's net price after rebates: $300. 

That cos...

In December 2024, a Guidehealth customer needed blood pressure readings from thousands of seniors — fast. Over 200 people making calls for 20 straight days was the traditional answer. Guidehealth deployed an AI voice concierge instead. It collected over 2,000 readings in days, and about 15% came back elevated — undiagnosed hypertension cases that needed escalation. That was the proof of concept. Now it's the operating model.

The Tech Glow Up from Vive continues with another experienced leader in Health IT sharing their journey in innovation.

Sanjay Doddamani, founder and CEO of Guidehealth, is a physician who spent two decades running population heal...

The NIH issued a policy encouraging the inclusion of women in clinical research in 1986. It took until 2016 — 30 years — for sex to be formally accepted as a biological variable. Camille McWhirter, VP of Clinical Trials, Real World Data, and Cancer Registry at Omega Healthcare, has been in and around clinical research for over 20 years and considers that gap one of the most consequential data problems in healthcare. 

The Tech Glow Up from Vive continues with another experienced leader in Health IT sharing their journey in innovation.

Her team's job now is to clean it up — taking the exp...

We're almost 60 episodes in and I haven't really introduced myself.

Oops.

Hi. I'm Nathan C (they/them), and I started The Tech Glow Up as my love letter to the founders and innovators I've had the privilege of meeting throughout my career. The people who are building things that matter, quietly, with everything they have, often without nearly enough support or recognition.

I saw a disconnect early on that I couldn't stop thinking about. There were so many teams putting so much passionate work into the world — and only a fraction of them we...

For 25 years, Dr. David Buchanan called quality his hobby. In healthcare, you get paid for volume — not for keeping people healthy. Every hospital admission he prevented, every chronic condition he managed well, was essentially unpaid work. He did it anyway. Then he discovered global capitation, and everything changed.

At Town Square Health, the company David co-founded after eight years as Chief Clinical Officer at Oak Street Health, the business model is built on outcomes. Town Square contracts with insurers to take full financial responsibility for a patient population — so every dollar invested in prevention and primary care come...

The same surgery. The same doctor. The same hospital. Same insurer, but a different insurance plan and a price that's three times higher. That's not a hypothetical. It's the daily reality of healthcare in 2026, and it's what Dr. Allison (Alli) Oakes, VP and Chief Research Officer at Trilliant Health, has spent her career trying to fix.

Alli sat down with Nathan C Bowser live at Vive 2026 to talk through what health plan price transparency data reveals about the American healthcare system. 

Trilliant sits at an unusual vantage point: not a provider, payer, or employer, but a...

Everyone says AI in healthcare needs a "human in the loop." Fewer people can tell you what that actually means. This live Vive 2026 episode of The Tech Glow Up features two health IT veterans who are done waiting for theory to catch up with practice.

Virginia Halsey, SVP of Product and Strategy at First Data Bank, has 35 years in health IT and a clear view of where medication workflows are failing. Pharmacists spend 30 to 40% of their day verifying prescription orders, while the clinical judgment they trained for goes unused. FDB is building tools to fix medication reconciliation...

The revenue cycle is one of healthcare's most expensive blind spots. Health systems pour everything into clinical excellence and then leave money on the table through billing leakage, under-coded claims, denied authorizations, and documentation gaps that erode reimbursement for genuinely complex care. Nitesh Shroff, co-founder and CEO of Arintra, has spent five years building the AI infrastructure to close that gap.

Nitesh came to healthcare from an unexpected place. He was an early AI engineer at Zoox, the autonomous vehicle company now owned by Amazon, where the work was perception models, real-time object detection, and safety-first architecture. 

Most AI reads your words. Attune Media Labs built one that reads your body, your mannerisms, your culture. David and Robert Bosnak, the father-son co-founders and HLTH Foundation Techquity Impact Award recipients, spent decades waiting for the technology to catch up with their idea. 

When GPT-3 arrived in 2020, they launched MIM, an artificial emotional intelligence companion that processes the tone, pitch, cadence, facial expressions, and body language that make up 93% of human communication.

Robert has been a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst for 55 years and first developed emotion recognition at the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s, w...

Most CEOs at VIVE were talking about what AI could do. Brent Dover, CEO of Carta Healthcare, came back to the Tech Glow Up with receipts. Since we last spoke in October, Carta grew revenue 50% in a single quarter, retained every customer, and is now in conversations with major health systems about platforming their entire abstraction operations at scale.

The work is specific and the impact is real. Hospitals spend $15 billion a year paying nurses to log into patient records, scan through dozens of entries, and manually abstract the data that goes into clinical registries. 

T...

What if the biggest barrier to healthcare AI wasn't the technology, but it was the workforce not yet equipped to use it? Dr. Pavitra Krishnamani is the newly appointed Director of AI and Digital Health Education at MD Anderson Cancer Center and an emergency physician who's been at the intersection of clinical care and digital health innovation for nearly a decade. Her answer to that question is the job she was literally just handed.

Pavitra's path here started in a fellowship at Jefferson, where she was the clinical voice embedded in a team of designers and developers...

The reality of health equity starts not in a clinic but in the community, addressing fundamental needs like housing, food, and transportation that doctors and nurses can't solve. These critical factors, known as Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), are the true barriers to living healthier and happier lives. 

But who is on the ground, doing the vital work of connecting people with these resources and building the necessary trust? Community Health Workers (CHWs)—trusted community members with invaluable lived experience—have been the hidden backbone of this effort, often operating with just paper and spreadsheets.

 Founde...

Healthcare has a data problem, but not the kind most people assume. The information exists. It's scattered across dozens of systems that don't talk to each other, and every provider encounter requires reconstructing your story from scratch. In this live Vive 2026 episode, I sit down with three leaders each working on a different layer of that gap.

Joe Hickey, VP of HIE and Provider Solutions at Verato, makes the case that stable patient identity is the foundation everything else is built on. Healthcare poured billions into EMRs, CRMs, and data lakes over the past decade and got...

One pattern keeps showing up in the hundreds of conversations I have with CEOs and clinical innovation leaders: the companies that last are the ones that stay in service of the human relationship. Dr. Louise Chang, Global VP of Clinical Strategy at Elsevier and practicing internal medicine physician, is one of the clearest examples of that principle in action.

"What if AI could actually take the jargon and confusion out of healthcare — so patients and clinicians could finally talk like real people?" 

Louise has spent 20+ years asking that exact question. She's building toward AI that bri...

Rural communities often face a grim choice: drive three hours for a specialist or wait nine months. This massive barrier to specialty care is one of the biggest drivers of health inequity. 

What if a primary care provider could get a specialist consult and a clear next step for their patient in a matter of seconds, right there in the exam room? Reza Sanai, a cardiologist and founder of Picasso MD, is on The Tech Glow Up to detail the curbside consult platform that’s transforming specialty access.

Picasso MD’s three-pronged approach is designed to re...

Recorded live at the VIVE event: The healthcare industry is hungry for AI standards, governance, and certification, making the need for genuinely trustworthy tech more urgent than ever. CEOs Dr. Tim O’Connell of emtelligent and Oren Nissim of Brook Health return to the show to cut through the hype and share where the industry is actually going and what applications are delivering real results today. 

We dive deep into the next big applications for AI—from saving a doctor half their time on consult chart review to tackling the isolation and loneliness epidemic of chronic illness—and how...

Live from The VIVE Event, powered by HLTH and CHIME: The average cancer patient makes 500 decisions during their treatment journey, often in rushed, 10-minute appointments, feeling lost without a map. Samira Daswani, CEO of Manta Cares, turned her own frustration with a broken system into a mission to build a platform that puts the patient first, full stop. 

On this episode of The Tech Glow Up, live from the Vive Event, Samira shares how she's redefining the healthcare industry by creating an "objective fourth pillar" that drives patient incentives, starting with breast and lung cancer.

S...

The spatial computing world is buzzing, but not everything is growing: while virtual reality (VR) hype might be flattening for consumers, augmented reality (AR) in the enterprise is exploding. 

The key to this growth? Moving beyond bulky headsets and figuring out how to make AR glasses lightweight and wearable for long periods of time. Global Head of Enterprise at XREAL, Amir Khorram, has had a front row seat to the entire XR journey and shares why lightweight AR is finally delivering massive value for industries like healthcare, aerospace, and education.

Amir's philosophy on innovation is d...

14 years ago, before the AI boom, marketers were stuck in "batch and blast" and data-overwhelmed. I talk with Colin Nederkoorn, CEO and co-founder of Customer IO, about his company’s journey from convincing people to use behavioral data for deterministic paths to becoming critical infrastructure for the new era of AI-driven, real-time customer communication that has fueled the company to over $100 million in ARR.

Colin shares a profound philosophy for early-stage founders: not every company needs to "blitz scale." His methodical approach was about building the machine for compound growth, raising "a little bit of money" only to...