The Glow Up - Fabulous conversations with innovative minds.

From Warhammer to 15 Million in ARR with Augmented Reality and Robots - Nils Pihl

• Nathan C Bowser • Season 1 • Episode 35

Share episode

Nils Pihl is the CEO and founder of Auki Labs, a deep-tech company redefining how augmented reality (AR) can power meaningful social and business experiences. What started in 2019 as a passion project to create AR overlays for tabletop games like Warhammer quickly evolved into a multimillion-dollar company at the forefront of spatial computing. Nils shares his conviction that new business models and decentralized technology will fundamentally reshape software—and even capitalism itself.

Key Takeaways

  • Start Small, Think Big: Auki Labs began with playful AR overlays for games but scaled quickly by focusing on community ownership and decentralized models.
  • Decentralization is the Future: True value creation in software will come from platforms owned and operated by their users, not just corporations.
  • Augmented Reality, Real Impact: AR is at its best when it enhances live, shared experiences—turning the virtual into a collaborative tool for everyday life and business.
  • Innovation Through Openness: Embracing open-source and collective funding accelerates innovation and broadens the impact of new technology.

Beyond the technology, Nils’s philosophy challenges traditional business frameworks: he explores open-source, collective governance, and decentralized funding models as the future of innovation. He remains motivated by the “software upgrade of capitalism,” aiming to empower people—not just companies—through technology that invites participation, not just passive consumption.

About Nils Pihil

Nils Pihl is an entrepreneur, behavioral engineer, and social transhumanist with a deep focus on the intersection of modern technology and human behavior. Nils founded Auki Labs which is advancing the development of the Auki Network and posemesh protocol, a decentralized machine perception network designed to help devices, robots, and embodied and physical AI perceive and interact with the world around it through a shared understanding of space. 

A thought leader in the realms of technology and memetics, Nils applies his expertise in meme theory, game theory, and behavioral psychology to craft compelling narratives that shape the path of the AI revolution, future of augmented reality, and the acceleration of robotic technologies. 

About The Glow Up

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Nathan C Bowser:

Hello and welcome to The Glow Up. I'm Nathan C and today I am talking with Nils Pihl, CEO of Auki Labs. Nils, it's great to talk with you today. Thanks for joining!

Nils Pihl:

Happy to see you here online! We met again in real life not long ago at AWE.

Nathan C Bowser:

It was so good seeing you at AWE and I can't wait to dive in and hear a little bit more about the inspirations and work that went into that very dynamic and interactive booth that you had there. Before we get into maybe the coolest spatial computing event of the year, let's wind back a little bit and could you introduce yourself and the work that you do in innovation at Auki Labs?

Nils Pihl:

Sure! So I am Nils. Auki is a company focused on collaborative machine perception. The idea is that digital devices have to have a shared understanding of the physical world. It started out very innocently in 2019 with us trying to make augmented reality overlays for the tabletop game Warhammer. That's where we got started. And, what we ran into as a problem was that shared augmented reality was very difficult. Like we want to be able to see a shared overlay over the table. And I didn't know the first thing about augmented reality back in 2019 when I started the company. So I naively imagined, like I think many people imagine, that AR was in a much better state than it actually is. And I had the cold shower of realizing that like, oh the GPS is actually not fit for purpose at all. You can't use the GPS for Warhammer. We need millimeters of precision. And the GPS doesn't even know I'm in this house right now. But it was COVID, so rather than giving up, I had my Warhammer and I could just sit and lean on my autism for two years and think about how do you solve this problem? And over those two years I came to realize that a very big problem for the future that I had always imagined, you know, a future with AR glasses and robots, is that digital devices just don't understand the physical world very well, and they don't have a shared understanding. By 2021, I had invented something that made it possible to do what I wanted to do with the Warhammer thing, and that helped me raise a very generous amount of seed funding to build an open source collaborative protocol for all kinds of machines to see the world together. And this year, we finally launched an SDK at AWE, that is focused on collaborative machine perception. And we launched our first product built on that SDK earlier this year. A spatial AI tool for retailers and we just recently broke 2 million ARR on that product and hope to hit 10-15 million ARR by the end of this year on that product.

Nathan C Bowser:

I think we just discovered the title of this episode, which is something along the lines of"From Warhammer to 15 Million in ARR with Augmented Reality and Robots." Actually we gotta put the time-based in there so"Within Five Years" is a pretty amazing journey to capture!

Nils Pihl:

Many people predicted that if I spend too much time playing Warhammer, I will end up working in retail. And look I did!

Nathan C Bowser:

This is very much like the entrepreneur's curse, you fulfill those predictions of other people. You just do it in a way that they've never imagined, right? Like, so I'll be working to transform the back of house supply chain operations for retail, not just helping people find where the lettuce is. That was really fantastic Nils! I love how this journey kind of starts innocently, includes a lot of special interests. A lot of like inspiration. You mentioned the seed round and this goal to produce open source technology to connect people and robots and AI to an understanding of the world. Building a business around open source feels like it has extra complication. I'm curious and might not always be the thing that like venture investors are looking for. Can you talk a little bit about, why open source for something, so cutting edge and on the future of where it seems like technology is going?

Nils Pihl:

Yeah, but now we're really going on a trip here! So I believe that the internet itself is missing a protocol. The internet itself is missing a way for machines to shake hands with each other and say, here's what I know about the physical world. And I really want for our solution to become a part of the internet itself and not become a big corporation. The reason why was I had a somewhat mushroom induced moment of clarity when working on the Augmented reality solution and thinking about the AR glasses coming, right? So. You know, go back to 2020 or so and I'm learning about how will we do positioning in a post GPS world? And by 2020 there were only two candidates that I could see it could possibly be. Either we're gonna do it entirely blind using ultra wideband trilateration. You know, the AirTag was pretty new back then and ultra wideband seemed like a pretty promising way forward where, you know, maybe we could even build a pair of AR glasses that didn't even have a camera! Maybe we could.

Nathan C Bowser:

Kind of like the earlier teens idea of IoT driven by beacons, right?

Nils Pihl:

Absolutely!

Nathan C Bowser:

But that was back on Bluetooth.

Nils Pihl:

Yeah ultra wideband was promising to maybe save the idea of the Bluetooth beacon. Do something that could be a higher precision. The other alternative, and I think what the industry had already settled on, you know, people didn't believe ultra wideband and now I don't think I do either, was visual positioning. The idea that the device tells you what it's looking at and you tell the device where it is. What visual positioning is, is that you compare an image feed of what the device is seeing to a model of the world that you've previously made so that you can try to match where was this frame taken and saying the quiet part out loud means that you're quite literally telling someone what it is you are looking at for this service to be able to work. And that's not the scariest thing in the world when it's our phone and we only whip it out every now and then. But when we're wearing AR glasses all day, the thought that Mark Zuckerberg or John Hanke or any one of these guys would be able to know what my kids are looking at at all times. I realized that the positioning infrastructure needs to be privacy preserving, otherwise the augmented reality future that I was so excited about and I was listening to a lot of Terence McKenna at the time and I was imagining the cyberdelic future. I could see how it could very easily turn very dystopian if we build this under the traditional Silicon Valley surveillance capitalist business model. And we would have to find some other kind of business model. Luckily for me, I had a couple of early backers that were very big into Web3 and DePIN who basically bullied me in 2021'cause I am, I think to this day, very largely anti-crypto. But they bullied me into looking seriously at what it is that Web3 could enable you to do, both from a technological point of view, but also from a business model point of view. And that you could build a business model that can survive the corporation and become a part of the internet itself. And by late 2021, I had embraced that fully. That like, yes there is a light at the end of the tunnel. In all of this Web3 noise, there is a promise of a new kind of business model, civilization scale infrastructure funded, owned, and operated by the people. And that is radically exciting! Those investors have no qualms with open source at all. In fact, they think open source is fantastic, right? The decentralization community don't want power to be centralized with anyone and are very happy for the technology to be open source. So I, accepted their support. They gave us almost$20 million in seed funding to build this thing. And that also was very convincing because normally traditional VC would not give 20 million to an idea that was so early. And it gave us an opportunity to try to do things that normally a startup would not be able to do. Part of the selling point, like oh my god! Web3 has the capability to crowdfund infrastructure projects that no VC would. Well, not no VC. There are certainly some VCs that write these checks every now and then, but it's not easy to get 20 million in seed funding from traditional VCs. But being able to have this new business model and have, again, civilization scale projects that are funded, owned, and operated by the people deeply red-pilled me into a potential future software upgrade of capitalism itself. This is an exit for surveillance capitalism, we can build another kind of company. And now I'm all about that.

Nathan C Bowser:

Hell yeah! I love that a very sort of, almost cute idea about augmented reality led to such an expansive understanding of the infrastructure that goes into 3D like coming economies powered by robots, and like what that's gonna mean. This very compelling idea that like traditional models for funding in startups

Nils Pihl:

are

Nathan C Bowser:

extremely risk adverse and have maybe not been the greatest predictors of like where things are going. And that crypto, you know, Web3 is like one of the areas where there's a lot of capital and investment that's going on pushing some of these new models and, I think really the most exemplary thing that I want to call out is when you're thinking about the problem space, when you're thinking about the value, when you're thinking about delivering something that will unlock even just like the next things you're trying to do in your work that by really upleveling where you take your solution, right? It's not just a Web3 platform that you can use in Auki. It's literally giving the entire ecosystem a missing piece and allowing that to like potentially change the way that we interact with technologies. Beautiful artwork by Keiichi Matsuda in that hyper reality, corporate augmented dystopia. But like man, I don't personally want a single corporate oligarch owning all my spatial data!

Nils Pihl:

Last year Elon was on Lex Fridman's podcast and he was asked,"What will it take to win the AI race?" And Elon said it will take two things, right? You need to have the best compute. That's why he's building this data center in Houston or wherever, and you need the best data. And what he said was,"Oh we've already, you know, consumed all the data on the internet." Turned out there wasn't that much data on the internet to begin with. But reality scales, he said. And then he said something that should have scared us all, which was Optimus, his humanoid robot is going to be the greatest source of data in the world. Without any shame he just goes on Lex Fridman's podcast to say like, hey, I'm building a robot to spy on you in your homes. And I actually think that the problem with the traditional VC model is not that they are risk averse because I mean, clearly they do take risk and they lose a lot of money making bad bets. I think it's a more pernicious problem of group think around business models. To this day, we get a lot of pressure from VCs that like,"Why are you letting your customers own this data? You could own this data. Imagine if you owned all this data." It's like, no exactly! Imagine if I owned all this data. That would be terrible! We should let our customers own their own data. And it is possible to build other business models. You know,"Data is the new oil" is so deeply ingrained in Silicon Valley, that they often don't take anything seriously that is not an attempt to collect data. Like a good friend of mine recently raised a round for building smart glasses and I'm an advisor to his company and I got to listen in to a couple of the VC pitches and there's a lot of pressure to just be like,"Are you going to be collecting the data from the glasses? That's going to be so valuable." The call is coming from inside the house. The VCs are behind a lot of the excesses of surveillance capitalism, and I think they've just gotten caught in a group think loop that this is the only business model that could work.

Nathan C Bowser:

One of the things that I talk a lot about at Awesome Future is this idea that innovation usually fails in the last mile connection from that good idea to where the customers actually are. And I think your conversation around like owning people's data is one of those really clear instances where like in a boardroom level, at a VC level, obviously owning the data is a resource and you wanna have as many resources available to your org as possible. On the flip side, right you're also calling out that spatial experiences, AR, VR, even like any experiences, any digital experience at this moment doesn't have enough metadata attached to it to actually interact with the world or to really know like where it is and what it's supposed to be doing beyond little actual boxes that we tape on the floor for robots. And so spatial experiences, digital experiences are lacking key understanding and metadata just period. And you're trying to own it all, even though it's like it incomplete. There's just gaps in really understanding like what happens in that last little bit and, we want all the data, but at this moment it is incomplete and doesn't know what it's supposed to be doing. Is that actually as valuable as you think it is? And, I love this position that Auki's taken which is, it's actually way more valuable if we incorporate this in this kind of spatial data, this awareness of where you are, who you are. Oh my goodness!

Nils Pihl:

A lesson from history that I think VCs should remember, right, is in the gold rush, you should be selling picks and shovels. It's not about the gold itself, right? If data is the new oil, that doesn't mean that the game is to be collecting all the data. Make picks and shovels that make it possible for your customers to collect data that's valuable for them.

Nathan C Bowser:

The internet is full of basically 2D data, right? It's text, it's images, it's pixels, it's spreadsheets. You know, when you actually think about adding a third dimension to your data, right? Like you start getting these exponential growths in what's going on. When I started in XR about a dozen years ago the conversation was like, we're gonna use machine learning to have a semantic understanding of the physical world. Are we just renaming what's happening now? At AWE, I would say one of the biggest themes that I saw there was that every computing platform, whether it's Niantic, whether it's Qualcomm, whether it's Auki Labs was talking about this idea of"geospatial intelligence" or a map of the world that humans and robots can both understand. Has this idea, you know, actually changed from the terms we were using a dozen years ago? Or is there something like really unique about what's going on in this moment?

Nils Pihl:

Oh, it's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. I think that, the spatial computing industry has run out of money. Which is a big problem. I think that one of the things that I noticed at AWE this year and last year is that, there's been a while since there were big cash infusions into the XR ecosystem. A lot of companies are looking for the exit. A lot of companies are on their last bit of gas and as such, they are in fundraising mode and are going to speak the language that the VCs want to hear. And this year the VCs want to hear about robots. They didn't want to hear about robots in 2021. Like I told people about robots in 2021 and they were like,"Please just talk about the metaverse." But like in my original pitch in 2021, I pointed out that look— an iPhone is just a robot without arms and legs. We can get started building the spatial awareness right on the iPhone. We don't have to wait for the glasses. We don't have to wait for the robots. We can build this for the iPhone now. And when the robots are ready and they're like,"Robots?! Metaverse!" And now it's like,"Don't talk about the metaverse! Tell us about robots." But there's also I think, a couple of interesting new developments in tech that are making these things a lot more realistic. I think people have had the vision of this spatial semantic understanding for a long time, but there's been so much homework to do, and in just the last two years, there's been an explosion of things that make it possible, and a lot of it is open source. But I also wanna give credit where credit is due. They've put out a lot of amazing open source research. And China has been putting out just enormous amounts of open source research when it comes to machine perception. Now, things that were complete sci-fi, like people literally telling me in 2021, it's in principle impossible. Things like monocular depth estimation. I had people tell me were in principle impossible has gotten surprisingly good. Tencent and ByteDance both released open source, monocular depth estimators that are crazy and can run in almost 60 frames per second. It's remarkable! A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. I think the language has changed because there's a little bit of an era of desperation in the XR community because, we had our hype cycle, we got a lot of funding during the hype cycle, and there hasn't been follow up investments since. There are very few active investors in the XR space, and they are all in the pre-seed and seed stage. Who writes a Series A check for an XR company, right? So that's a problem.

Nathan C Bowser:

They have to have"XR AI" in their name.

Nils Pihl:

Yes!"Something-something Robots."

Nathan C Bowser:

Maybe that's the title of the show! The market changing its interest, investors like shifting where they're funding is probably one of the most dramatic inflection points, learning moments, decision points that a founder is going to have to encounter. So, through your experience in spatial computing and the amount of like shifts of attention, even in the last five years. I'm curious like how you've approached, maintaining your core vision while adjusting to the market, or if you have advice for folks who are on this journey and experiencing so much change and disruption in the current models.

Nils Pihl:

There are two sides to this answer. I have to be honest about having had to make a lot of pivots on the way to where we are today. It wasn't just from Warhammer to retail, it was from Warhammer to AR pets, to retail. One thing that has been constant since 2021 at least, is this vision of a collaborative machine perception network. How to get there has changed somewhat over time. Frustratingly it has changed back a lot to what it originally was in 2021, which is also a painful lesson of who you should listen to and not listen to. When you take on investor money, one thing that you open yourself up to is that they are gonna start giving you advice. And one piece of advice that I've been given is to not say what I'm about to say, but I'm gonna say it anyhow. A lot of VCs have never built anything themselves. They have backgrounds in banking. They've never shipped a product. They've never had to fire 20 people. They don't know anything really about what it means to be an entrepreneur, and they don't have to be fair, you know, their job is not to be an entrepreneur. But they will look at the world differently'cause their job is not to make your ideas like come true. Their job is to get a positive return, and it doesn't matter to them if you end up pivoting or whatever, as long as they get their money. So we've constantly been getting pushes to pursue the latest hot buzzword from our investors. In early 2021, one of the first things that we thought, you know, what are you gonna do with collaborative machine perception was like, well we could start helping people navigate in warehouses and retail environments and we could make it easier to deploy robots for these things. And investors came and said like, no, no, no. You need to make a B2C product. And we had a first demo, just a tech demo, which was an AR pet that you could see in shared augmented reality. Like it really just, it was just an art asset, Nathan. Like there was no game there. It was just like, here's an animated animal and we can see it together. And they're like,"You should totally build that! You need to build it, build it!" And we did. And it turned out, you know, that an AR pet was actually worse than a 2D pet because we didn't have collaborative machine perception yet, right? Like we had cracked, having a shared coordinate system so we could see the pet together. And that was great, but the pet couldn't see its environment. So we would walk through chairs and things like this that would break the immersion. So you were literally better off not using the AR. In hindsight, you know, if we had just stayed the course and done what we wanted to do, we could have launched this retail thing two years earlier maybe. So, you know, it's hard because being an entrepreneur is also very scary. But now I've learned that look, your job is to be the entrepreneur. And their job is to find the right entrepreneur, not to shape the entrepreneur. And they should be okay with potentially losing money. You are supposed to take a venture scale swing, right? That's your obligation as an entrepreneur. You need to take a venture scale swing, and you need to understand that it's okay to fail. As long as you're trying to do something that is venture scale. And that's a little bit counterintuitive because you know, you feel like, oh maybe if I take this less risky path, I could have a profitable business. Yeah but a profitable business is not what they are looking for. They're looking for a venture scale return.

Nathan C Bowser:

Oh my gosh! There is such a terrible tension in innovation, in technology. This is what we know, this is what feels safe, and this is the size of the swing we need to take, are so often on such different ends of the spectrum. And this idea that taking the easy route or taking the advice of other people above you as an entrepreneurs, that vision, that unique perspective on the future that only you see and what your intuition, your team can build. That you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot. If you don't think that big, if you don't push beyond what is comfortable as an entrepreneur, your role is to be larger than life to have the idea that is bigger than today's capabilities. And so if you are always playing the safe and short game, yes, you may build a business, but are you swinging at the scale that your customers, that your vision needs? As an entrepreneur, you need to swing at the venture scale. I don't think people say that enough!

Nils Pihl:

I had a call yesterday with an investor, where we were talking about one of the things that we are about to release later this year together with our partners at Mentra that make this next generation pair of smart glasses. And the investor asked like, look— these are two startups working together. You are an early stage startup. They're an early stage startup. Isn't this incredibly risky? Aren't there so many things that could go wrong here? To which I said yeah, it's incredibly risky. That's why there's a venture scale opportunity here. There wouldn't be if it wasn't incredibly risky. To which he laughed and said,"Love that answer!" An older version of me would've tried to defend like, no, no, it's not risky. You know, they're very competent. But now I'm old enough to say like, yeah, this is very risky. So who knows? This could be huge.

Nathan C Bowser:

Partnerships feel like the way that you can make step growth or you can add features or you can go to market faster, better, stronger. But like you said, those partnerships aren't always coequal. They're not always focused on revenue or value. They're focused on like shipping a next tech thing, but not necessarily shipping a product. How do you keep this partnership focused on value, on revenue on the future of your young startups while you're also figuring things out?

Nils Pihl:

With difficulty and with a couple of long hikes to align incentives, between founders. Take a couple of long walks in nature, talk about the future you wanna see, check each other out. Do you see yourself being able to pull through the tough times? I have tremendous faith in Cayden and Alex, the founders of Mentra, the smart glasses company that co-exhibited with us at AWE, because I've seen them work really, really hard when they didn't have any resources and they were just fueled by passion. And throwing some gasoline on that fire is bound to do something very interesting. You know, it's gonna explode in one way or another. So very excited to work with them. We've had many partnerships that didn't pan out, obviously, where either no work ended up being done some conflict of interest arose that made it impossible to proceed. You end up arming the competition or whatever. But I have maybe a naive faith in the size of the spatial computing opportunity that you can make a very big pie that you can share with a lot of people. There has probably never been a bigger economic opportunity in humanity's history than spatial computing. Like I'm completely red-pilled about this and have been red-pilled about this since before ChatGPT proved that AI was right around the corner because, 70% or so of the world economy is still tied to physical labor and physical locations. And if we look at that through an AI lens, it means that the AI revolution is still stuck in first gear because AI cannot perceive the physical world. Almost definitionally, whoever builds an OpenAI for the physical world has a much bigger addressable market than OpenAI has. And even skipping AI, I believe that augmented reality is an inevitable part of humanity's future. I think it's the future of language itself. It's as inevitable as like internet pornography. There is no timeline where we invent this kind of technology and don't end up adopting it, right? It's just bound to happen. Augmented reality is what humans do, right? I think looking at the arc of history from the Stone Age to now, it's been a constant push to towards the AR glasses.

Nathan C Bowser:

From the proscenium stage somewhere in Greece, to the expo hall at AWE. Overlays and AR glasses is inevitable. I love that! I'm curious, what's the glow up or notable transformation or just audacious goal that you're working on?

Nils Pihl:

Hybrid robotics. Let me explain. A lot of people are excited about humanoid robots now. And we believe, have believed for some time that the future software stack for humanoid robots needs to have six discrete layers that know how to talk to each other. Locomotion layer, which is the robot's ability to walk and not fall over. This is most of what we've seen demoed today. Like, look the robot is walking. But we also need a manipulation layer. The ability to grab things and pour things. Let's say that we wanted to have a robot that could empty all the trash cans at AWE, right? What would it take to build something like that? It needs to be able to walk, it needs to be able to manipulate its environment, but it also needs a spatial semantic perception layer. It needs to be able to perceive the difference between a trash can and a toddler, right? So that we don't throw the toddlers out, but we throw the trash out. And it needs to also have a mapping layer so it doesn't have to bounce around like a Roomba looking for trash cans. It has an understanding of where the trash cans were last time and where it can walk and where it can't walk, and it's gonna need a positioning layer to understand where it is in relation to the map. And then finally an application layer that ties all of these things together and gives it the instructions. Now the cool thing is that you can just skip the locomotion and the manipulation, if you keep a human in the loop. Put a pair of glasses on a human being, and you have human locomotion and human manipulation. We call this hybrid robotics, right? So together with the guys at Mentra already last year we built a really cool prototype of an AI that sees the world through your eyes. And helps you figure out what to do in the retail environment. It detects things like empty shelves and automatically reports the empty shelf, in 3D space with AR guidance. So that even if you are busy carrying a box, I can get a notification to go fix it and know immediately where it is. You have AI perception, AI cognition, combined with human problem solving and human locomotion and manipulation. And we think this is going to be incredibly big. We think that this is what's going to be the main use case for the glasses over the next three years or so, and that realistically we can move millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of these glasses to provide AI co-pilots for people in the physical world. Like we've seen that an AI copilot is incredibly helpful for people on the upper end of the IQ distribution, doing things like programming. There's no reason it wouldn't be even more transformative for those of us that are on the lower end of the IQ distribution. Like people forget that about a quarter of the male population has an IQ below 95. And below 95 you start struggling. You know, that's a lot of us, right? And at that IQ level, you start struggling with multi-part instructions and you start struggling with imagining the steps that you will need to take to solve a multi-part problem, and having an AI assistant that can help you think through those things will help you be more productive, be more motivated, not feel so alienated at work. You know, retail for example, has this enormous staff turnover issue. If you take a job at Walmart today, there's a 70% chance that you quit before the end of the year, right? A 70% chance. And a lot of this is because it's an alienating place to work. Retail is a tough industry, right? And giving people better tools to succeed I think is going to be super transformative. So we're all about hybrid robotics. Putting glasses on people, putting phones in their hands and letting them have an AI copilot that helps them do better and be happier.

Nathan C Bowser:

Nils is there, on this journey, whether it's to combine robotics, whether it's on open sourcing, a visual understanding of the world, is there anything that Auki is looking for? Connections, networking, research, support?

Nils Pihl:

So a lot of the work we do is fully open source, and you can find it on our GitHub and we pay for contributions. We have a grants program for people that wanna undertake to build things on top of the protocol. If you have a great applications idea. But we also have bounties, and just ad hoc payments for people that make contributions to the protocol itself. So you should check out the posemesh repo on our GitHub, that's P-O-S-E-M-E-S-H, the posemesh, which is the name of the underlying protocol of the Auki network. And see if there's anything you wanna contribute. And if you have an idea of what to build on top of this protocol, we're very happy to write you a grant. The goal here is civilization scale, infrastructure funded, owned and operated by the people. We, the people. Let's do it together!

Nathan C Bowser:

Oh my gosh. That's gorgeous! Nils, each Glow Up episode likes to make space for a community shout-out to a nonprofit or other organization doing good out in the world. Is there somebody you'd like to give a spotlight to?

Nils Pihl:

I want to express my sincere gratitude to our Discord community, discord.gg/aukiverse, for helping us stay motivated when things have been tough, because startups are always tough. Even showing up, in physical space to help out at AWE. We had Max from the community fly out, to help out and set up our booth and talk to customers. In Singapore we had Roddy do the same thing, even picking me up at the airport. Amazing community! I am deeply thankful to everyone on that Discord. So love to you guys!

Nathan C Bowser:

Amazing! Nils, I really appreciate, the conversation that we've had today and how there is this careful blend in your founder's approach. Open source collaboration. Unwavering confidence in your vision and your role as an entrepreneur. And a very open and pragmatic view on the pace and the process of innovation. I'm excited to see, compared to some of the others working in this geospatial intelligence space you're kind of small. And I love to see big visions thrown down by ambitious companies. So thank you for embodying a lot of the ethos that we like to talk about here on The Glow Up. It's been such a pleasure to dive in to this journey sparked by Warhammer and ushering in maybe an inevitable AR era of computing. So cool to talk with you today. Thank you!

Nils Pihl:

If I can just go out on a Terence McKenna quote,"In the cyberdelic future, artists will rule because the world will be made of art." This is what spatial computing is all about. We will be able to manifest our knowledge and imagination in the minds of others. In ways that our language has not allowed before. The AR journey is a journey to improve the very stack of language itself.

Nathan C Bowser:

That's fantastic!