Looking Back in Gratitude — BadVR’s Year End Wrap Up, Pt. 3
Hello followers and friends! Welcome to Part Three of “Looking Back in Gratitude” — our company-wide year end wrap up! This week we’re excited to share the love, positivity, and gratitude from 4 more of our awesome teammates. 👍
We at BadVR are proud of our team’s cultural and professional diversity and strongly believe that it powers our wholly original and creative solutions; solutions that have made BadVR the world leader in immersive data visualization and analytics! 📊 We’re grateful for our team and honored to introduce you to the next batch of teammates and their gratitude stories. 🎉
Time to sit back, relax, and enjoy the final installment of BadVR’s 2020 “Looking Back in Gratitude” series!
Jad Meouchy (CTO and Co-Founder of BadVR)
What are you grateful for professionally?
I’m grateful for the wave of innovation crashing through the professional world. Organizations, through prosperity or desperation, are now more willing to explore novel solutions to traditional problems. This is the inflection point for the corporate work process and a ripe environment for the next generation of computing to sprout.
What are you grateful for personally?
I’m grateful to be surrounded by grounded individuals during an extended period of surreality. Individuals who are not consumed by infectious fear of the unknown, but who use their isolation time to imagine and manifest a new future. Entrepreneurship is evolving beyond quarterly profits and losses, and I’m grateful to be part of an emerging culture characterized by societal impact.
What are you hopes for 2021?
After spending most of 2020 quietly assembling and fueling the metaphorical rocket ship, 2021 is the year of liftoff. New adventures are ahead, new opportunities are incoming, and our momentum is unstoppable. Hope is endemic to every startup, but too passive a word for the building sensation of self-generated inertia. As long as we keep the nosecone firmly pointed away from “status quo”, the sky’s the limit.
What are your goals for BadVR in 2021?
Do everything like before, but more. Hire more amazing people, build more inspiring technology, take more calculated risks. Another goal is to tell more stories about why and how we do what we do, to better articulate the mission and vision. My goal is to make storytelling the central theme of 2021.
What achievement are you most proud of this year?
Our greatest achievement was “product-market fit,” a concept that is considered an elusive mythical creature within the startup community. Most startups burn through all their coffers just to stay in the hunt and fail or falter during pursuit. For us, the target was always in sight. We just needed the right combination of creativity, competence, and constitution to reach it. 2020 was the year we built our core team.
Jason Tam (UX Designer)
What are you grateful for professionally?
As one of the most uncertain and unprecedented years on record, I consider myself extremely lucky to have been able to continue to advance forward with my professional career. As a recent college graduate (shout out to UCI, ZOT ZOT!), being able to shift straight into a working role at BadVR is something I definitely do not take for granted. I am extremely grateful to all the people who have given me advice over the years, especially my coworkers and bosses here at BadVR. They have both validated my efforts in design, as well as given me a bevy of opportunities to comfortably improve my craft and skill sets.
What are you grateful for personally?
2020 was definitely a year for self-reflection. With everything that has happened, I have taken the time to reconnect with what truly matters in my life. I have made amends with family members, reached out to old friends, and built new relationships for the future. I am grateful to everyone who has looked out for me this year, grateful for this job, grateful to my partner, Florence, for her never-ending support, and grateful for the privileges I have been given in this life.
What are you hopes for 2021?
I truly want quarantine to be over! I wish the whole world healing and understanding through this process. I know the pandemic will have many unexpected ripple effects but I am ever positive about what the future holds.
What are your goals for BadVR in 2021?
I am planning for 2021 to be my most ambitious year yet. With more time and team members on board, I am looking to finally implement some of the suggestions I posed this year during our company brainstorms. My goal is to make the BadVR of this year pale in comparison to the BadVR of 2021!
What achievement are you most proud of this year?
My proudest achievement of this year was receiving a job offer for the role of UX Designer at BadVR. It has been a goal of mine to become a UX Designer since I was in college and to be able to actually work in this position makes me believe my hard work has finally paid off. I am truly grateful to be here and am looking forward to the many projects we have in store for the future.
Justin Chow (Project Manager/Ideas Man)
What are you grateful for professionally?
Thanks to BadVR, I’m formally stepping into a new industry that I love and whose selection I made after much in-depth self reflection and re-orientation of goals, a journey that began in 2019. In the same vein, I’m thankful for the many selfless individuals who helped me along the way. Being able to apply the culmination of engineering, PM, and Unity skills I’ve acquired to-date is truly fulfilling. During the time I’ve been with BadVR, it has a been a pleasure to learn from all members of this talented team and to share their passion and joy of providing data immersion to the world. I’ve got a job. That is something I wish could be granted to everyone talented and able who has lost theirs this year due to COVID.
What are you grateful for personally?
I’m grateful to be in shape (I think), grateful that have not experienced cabin fever during COVID, and that my immediate family is safe and without COVID. Also, thankful that I’ve not lost touch with the majority of my friends and grateful for all the new ones cultivated while living remotely thanks to the wonderful world wide web and telephone. Lastly, thanks to the Atlantic Monthly for keeping me educated and relevant when I do talk to people. Tangentially, I’m grateful for my eyes for letting me keep my ability to read, despite all the increased screen time.
What are you hopes for 2021?
I want to position myself as a respected leader in the XR world, not only to help myself grow professionally with respect to uplifting BadVR’s potential, but also personally to have the credibility to help others who want to break into the XR world. I want to pay it forward to people who are struggling to find an “in” to this amazing industry as this challenge was once mine. I also hope that the world does not lose sight of climate change, which is the biggest crisis of my generation but unfortunately took a backseat this year. I want to look back 1 year from now and be content that I continued fighting for the environment and inspiring people to act, not just talk. A dark knight once said “It’s not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.”
What are your goals for BadVR in 2021?
I want to actually have lunch with everybody face-to-face over a Double-Double or the equivalent. Also, long before BadVR, a friend once asked me if my business card said “ideas man”. I aim to boost BadVR’s product line with my ideas. Once I am familiar enough with the current lineup of things, maybe get buy-in for the craziest ones to really spice things up and show the XR world how much badder BadVR can get. Additionally, I want to pass the knowledge I gained when I first started to new team members to make their onboarding process as enjoyable as possible.
What achievement are you most proud of this year?
I have 2. First, that I never lost pursuit of my personal goal to find a new career and organization to which I can add value and find personal alignment. It took a lot of introspection, patience, grit, and support from friends and family as I left familiar territories. This would also never had happened without BadVR and team for accepting me, so I really appreciate everyday we work together. Secondly, I can still do a mean stretch. Staying flexible is major plus points for someone who sits for over half the day. Yep, still got it.
Will Semmes (Government Projects Manager)
What are you grateful for professionally and personally?
In 2020, both personally and professionally, I am grateful for COVID because it cut out non-work activities and made me far more productive.
What are your goals for BadVR in 2021?
My hopes for 2021 are that BadVR wins more grants and contracts!
What achievement are you most proud of this year?
My proudest achievement is getting to work with BadVR.
Thank you so much for taking the time to join us for this three-part Medium series. 😃 We had a blast connecting with our team, sharing their gratitude with you, and we’re thankful for the opportunity to share this series with our followers and friends. 2020 has been an unprecedentedly difficult year for so many reasons, yet the challenges we’ve all faced have created unique opportunities. For this, we all share a tremendous amount of gratitude and hope you can take a minute to do the same, to find your silver living in this challenging year. 🙂
If you’re interested in learning more about BadVR, we would love to chat with you! We’re here to democratize insight and make the world’s most important datasets accessible to all! 🚀
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Thank you again for a super rad 2020! We hope you have a happy and healthy holiday and we look forward to connecting with all of you again in the new year (and in person as soon as this is possible)! 🥳 🎉 🎊
