Virtual Reality, the Future of Retail, & Selling to Big Business - Tracey Wiedmeyer / Co-Founder of InContext Solutions

Tech In Chicago

Tracey Wiedmeyer is the CTO and a Co-Founder of InContext Solutions, the leader in scalable virtual reality (VR) shopping and retail solutions. InContext Solutions lets manufacturers and retailers simulate real in-store shopping situations to ideate, evaluate and activate all types of merchandising, display, layout and other in-store shopping experiences within a VR store environment before implementing them in the real world. Just last month, they closed their Series E round of funding, bringing their total funding to $42.5M.

In This Episode You Will Learn:

• Why Tracey and his co-founders started InContext Solutions
• How he raised their seed capital from his family over Christmas
• How similarly do people behave in virtual reality vs the real world
• How InContext Solutions recreates stores
• How they landed their first customers
• How they try to lure tech talent away from quant trading
• What he’d like to see big companies improve on
• Why you have to focus on ROI and business cases when selling to large enterprises
• Whether we are in a simulation or not
• Where the future of virtual reality is heading in 5-10 years
• What the future of retail may look like
• How they landed a partnership with Intel
• How a partnership with a big company can benefit a startup

Favorite Books:

• The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't by Jim Collins
• Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles That Fuel Success and Performance at Work by Shawn Achor
• The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

Best Sources to Learn More About Virtual Reality:

• Unreal VR
• NextVR
• Samsung VR
• Microsoft HoloLens
• Google VR