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© 2026 The Tech Glow Up - Fabulous conversations with innovative minds.
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Get an unprecedented front row seat to vulnerable founder conversations with innovation leaders from Blockbuster, Meta, Sony, Cisco, Nokia, and more. Join Nathan C, founder of Awesome Future, for authentic discussions with product leaders, CEOs, and startup founders who share the real challenges of bringing breakthrough ideas to market.
Because having a good idea is only the first, easiest part of the entrepreneurial journey.
Each episode delivers relatable stories and actionable strategies from people who've navigated the startup trenches. Discover the soft skills and mental resilience that separate successful launches from failed attempts—without getting bogged down in tech jargon.
Perfect for founders, product leaders, and entrepreneurs seeking genuine advice on innovation, scaling, and surviving the long haul. These aren't polished product pitches, they're honest conversations about staying in the game until your idea hits.
Subscribe to The Tech Glow Up and transform your approach to building successful companies.
What is a glow up - you might ask?
A "glow up" is defined as "a positive transformation, often involving significant changes in appearance, confidence, or lifestyle.
We use "Glow up" to refer to the process of becoming a better version of oneself, more attractive, and more successful.
If you're a founder or a product leader who's looking to have a glow up of your own - or if you're a seasoned entrepreneur who's stories can support others, we'd love to hear from you. Please add you name to the guest list with the link in the show notes.
Each episode will also feature a community spotlight for innovative NGOs, nonprofits, and other organizations that are driving innovation and change in their communities. There's another link in our bio for community groups and sponsors to learn more!
62 Episodes
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Holly Taylor was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer after selling her last company. Her rare form usually gets caught at stage one—99% survivable. Stage three? Different story. That personal experience drives everything she does at Lucem Health, where she's general manager of strategic partnerships focused on early disease detection using AI to find patterns in patient data before symptoms even start. Cervical cancer went from deadly to 99% survivable once pap smears became norma...
Sabrina Runbeck spent a decade in cardiothoracic surgery. She operated on hearts. Now she operates on healthtech companies—fixing what's broken before founders even see it themselves. As co-founder of PulsePoint Path and the Health Tech Impact Awards, plus Chief Strategy Officer at Health Board Advisors, Sabrina teaches founders something critical: your pitch deck means nothing if you can't clearly explain who you help and what problem you solve in under two minutes. Many founders get t...
Nic Fonta leads XR at Autodesk, where architects, engineers, and designers collaborate in virtual reality to catch design problems before construction begins. The math is stark: $280 billion spent globally every year on rework and material waste on construction sites because of poor communication and misalignment. Workshop XR (autodesk.com/workshopxr) , Autodesk's immersive collaborative platform, lets teams put on VR headsets and walk through their designs at full scale before a single brick...
David Nussbaum started Proto Hologram in his living room in 2018 to answer a simple question: what if instead of using holograms to bring back dead musicians, you used them to connect the living? The result is a seven-foot-tall holographic display that lets people beam into rooms across the world—live, prerecorded, or as interactive AI avatars that speak more than 300 languages and dialects. His background is broadcasting. As a kid, David sat in his dad's Volkswagen listening to talk radio, f...
Most of the time spatail computing isn't rocket science, but for this conversation, it is. Alex Goldberg leads augmented reality at Blue Origin. He helps rocket scientists and manufacturing engineers work faster, collaborate better, and solve problems that require precision at the edge of what's possible. His tools include AR glasses for remote assistance, digital twins built from reality capture, and spatial data that tells the story of how a component travels through a manufacturing l...
Cortney Harding thinks the Spatial Race has already started, but most companies are lookiing 10 years ahead. As founder of Friends with Holograms and author of The Spatial Race, she works with Fortune 100 companies to build strategies in spatial computing and artificial intelligence before they get disrupted. Cortney's real focus is solving the actual business problem first. She built an Amazon training where warehouse workers promoted to management roles could practice difficult conver...
There's a philosophical difference between making a film and creating an experience. Paul Raphaël discovered that difference when he put the Oculus Rift on for the first time in 2013. He realized immediately that everything he'd been taught about cinema—framing, pacing, narrative structure—had to get rethought from the ground up. Twelve years later, he's still figuring out what immersive storytelling actually is. At Felix and Paul Studios, they've designed cameras that didn't exist, built exp...
Caitlin Lacey was supposed to teach Shakespeare to high school sophomores. Instead, she started at Facebook in 2010 answering ad review tickets; a move that turned into a decade shaping how billions of people connect online. Now as Director of Global Product Marketing at Cisco, Webex, she oversees the WebEx collaboration suite and the hardware business that powers conference rooms, airports, and enterprise spaces around the world. Her career has been defined by one principle: get out of...
Innovation is just a creative response to a challenge. For Amy Hedrick, CEO of Cleanbox Technology, that challenge was the "ick factor" of sharing virtual reality headsets. She saw the future of learning, but she also saw that nobody would adopt it if it meant putting on a sweaty device used by a stranger. Amy Hedrick is the founder and CEO of CleanBox Technology. Her journey started at Mobile World Congress in 2015 when she put on an Oculus Rift. With a background working with the Smithsonia...
Death by a thousand clicks. That is the problem facing clinicians who spend hours navigating scattered tools for documentation, billing, guidelines, and decision-making. One doctor-turned-founder accidentally built 50 apps trying to solve it before realizing he was an entrepreneur. PJ Park is co-founder, chairman, and chief product AI officer at Avo MD. He came to the United States from Korea about ten years ago and joined a residency program barely able to speak English. On his first day, a ...
Wearables track thousands of data points daily, but most becomes noise instead of signal. Clinical notes document critical patient information, yet we cannot extract meaning at scale. Two founders solving how we turn data into trusted care. Oren Nissim is the co-founder and CEO of Brook Health. He has type two diabetes himself, which drove him to build remote care for people with chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, CHF, and COPD. The company works as part of the health syste...
From testing hundreds of cancer drugs in 10 days to unlocking healthcare stories through audio—conversations with two innovators solving how we personalize treatment and tell those stories live from HLTH 2025. Jim Foote is the founder of First Ascent Biomedical. He built the company after losing his 17-year-old son to cancer. First Ascent takes a biopsy, enriches cancer cells rapidly, and then tests hundreds of FDA-approved drugs to determine which work against your specific biology. Th...
From a bootstrap founder using spreadsheets to track her own cancer treatment to a data infrastructure veteran start-up leader uncovering $10-15 billion in hidden healthcare value—this episode of The Tech Glow Up features conversations with two entrepreneurial CEO’s solving what happens when you center patient empowerment and unlock trapped data live from HLTH 2025. Jennifer Johnson, CEO and founder of JennJ Health and Fitness, has spent 15 years in healthcare operations, strategy, and oncolo...
More of Nathan C's conversations with 2 healthcare leaders solving what happens when medical devices talk to each other, and what happens when patients have real choice. Bilal Muhsin, EVP Connected Care at BD, is building infrastructure that moves healthcare beyond disconnected devices. With expertise from his first company where he scaled embedded device providers into solution platforms, Muhsin now oversees pharmacy automation, infusion dispensing, and patient monitoring—all communicating w...
From translating medical jargon into human language to using AI to keep healthcare human—conversations with two founders solving opposite sides of the same problem live from HLTH 2025. Aaron Patzer, CEO of Vital.io, is the founder of Mint.com and former head of product at Intuit. Seven years ago, he started Vital with his brother-in-law Dr. Justin Schrager to guide 7 million patients through urgent care, emergency room, and hospital journeys by translating medical language into terms patients...
Thanks for tuning in to these conversations with two founders changing the future of healthcare live from HLTH 2025. Zachary Ziegler, co-founder of OpenEvidence, built a platform that reached 40% of practicing clinicians in just two years by centering a simple principle: every answer includes citations to peer-reviewed research. With access to 40 million papers updated daily with 10,000-20,000 new studies, doctors can verify every claim instantly. Growing 30-40% month-over-month and adding 60...
Julie Smithson, Karen Alexander, and Sophia Moshasha are the co-founders of XR Women, a groundbreaking organization celebrating five years of empowering women in extended reality. What started as a pandemic-era virtual meetup has evolved into a global movement spanning 60+ countries with 1,500 members and nearly 240 consecutive weekly immersive events in the metaverse. Key Takeaways: Consistency Builds Community: XR Women has produced nearly 240 consecutive weekly immersive events—not Zoom ca...
Please join me in celebrating the 44th, and final episode of Season 1, with a very, very special guest. We'll be back soon with more stories of innovation and entrepreneurship from founders, CEO's and Product Leaders of disruptive and innovative products. - Nathan C. Leslie Shannon, Head of Trend and Innovation Scouting at Nokia, reveals how a 160-year-old company continues to lead by relentlessly adapting, trend-spotting, and cultivating innovation. From sawmills and rubber boots...
With over a decade in XR and a career that began in marketing and product development, Thaisa Yamamura is dedicated to bridging the gap between complex engineering and creative user needs, bringing innovative 3D, XR, and spatial computing technologies from prototype to market. Thaisa Yamamura is the Head of XR Products and Business Development at Sony Electronics, where she leads the creation and launch of XYN, Sony’s new end-to-end ecosystem of 3D tools for creators. Key Takeaways: End...
Aidan Wolf is the Co-Founder and CEO of DreamPark, a company reinventing the future of theme parks by bringing massive, multiplayer, mixed-reality experiences anywhere—malls, parks, or even your own backyard. With a background spanning games, social apps, and AR, Aidan and his team are proving that immersive play can spark joy, community, and real-world revitalization. Key Takeaways: Downloadable Theme Parks: DreamPark turns any large space into a "downloadable" theme park—no physical...
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