Replay: Jeri Ellsworth (Tilt Five) on Resiliency and the Path to Compelling AR Smartglasses

Replay of an interview originally published in Dec 2019.…

The Guest

Jeri Ellsworth is the co-founder and CEO of Tilt Five, a company that has created AR glasses that bring tabletop games to life. The Tilt Five system enables you to see, hear, and interact with realistic 3D holograms that entertain and educate.

By the time this episode airs, they will have recently completed a Kickstarter campaign where Tilt Five raised more than $1.75 million for their initial product.

Prior to Tilt Five, Jeri was the founder of CastAR, which was also making an augmented reality hardware and software platform, and one that had raised $15 million in venture funding before shutting down in 2017.

Previously Jeri was at Valve as the first member of the hardware R&D team with a mandate to research novel user interactions and bring the entire family together in the living room. Through this, she contributed to the early development for Valve VR (which became the HTC VIVE), the Steam Box, and the Steam Controller.

Jeri Ellsworth

LinkedIn | Twitter

Tilt Five

The Conversation

In this conversation, Jeri shares stories from along her amazing path from being a high-school dropout to building race cars to engineering electronic game systems to being recruited at Valve.

Jeri goes on to describe the painful end of her time at Valve and her tumultuous CastAR experience. From those ashes emerged Tilt Five. Jeri describes what’s different this time as well as some of the underlying technology and its tradeoffs, and the deep seated ethos and focus of the company.

She doesn’t mince words as she describes her missteps, setbacks, and successes along the way.

Note: The photo of Jeri was taken by James Tensuan for the New York Times and was included in the article cited above from 2019.

Jason McDowallAR smartglasses, hardware, consumer, leadership, culture