Andrew Hart (Dent Reality) on Connecting the Digital Layer to the Physical World at Scale

The Guest

Andrew Hart is the co-founder and CEO of Dent Reality, a company building the digital layer for the physical world. Andrew and his team have solved key technology problems across indoor mapping and accurate indoor location at scale. And they’ve created a user interface centered around people, not AR gimmicks.

Andrew is a CEO by day and pioneering developer by night. Prior to Dent Reality, Andrew pioneered the location-based AR space, building the most popular open-source project for Apple's AR platform, and demonstrated AR navigation and POI landmark experiences for the first time, which have since been implemented by Google and Apple.

The Conversation

Today, Dent Reality is working with two of the UK’s largest retailers to develop solutions for shoppers and store employees. Andrew views Dent Reality’s place to be similar to Stripe’s payment solution: a thin layer of technology that’s easy to integrate and solves all of the complexities of location, navigation, and mapping.

In this conversation, we go on to talk about the benefits of building a holistic solution rather than a series of loosely integrated point solutions as well as understanding where to draw the line between what you build and others build. We also discuss Andrew’s approach to building things customers value, a North Star, core values, and the transition from developer to CEO.

Jason McDowallconsumer, mobile AR, AR Cloud, culture, sdk