Spatial Computing
Based on an episode with Rosario Casas 🇨🇴
Welcome to Latinx in Power, a podcast aiming to help to demystify tech, the way we do that is by interviewing Latinx and Caribbean leaders all over the world to hear their perspective and insights.
We talked with Rosario Casas (she/her) , an entrepreneur with over 7 years of experience in data and technology platforms and over 20 years of executive experience. She is a spatial computing expert, co-founder of XR Americas and BCPartners Tech, and she is also dedicated to promoting women in technology.
In this episode, we discussed Rosario’s cultural identity and journey to becoming an entrepreneur in technology. Rosario shared insights on spatial computing systems, failure, team-building, risk-taking, and the future of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
What does it mean to be a Latina for you?
I love to be a Latina. That means two things. I think that talent is everywhere, but we Latina people, we learn how to build things with less resources than many others. I think that gave us bravery. That’s the first thing that I think is to be a Latina. And the second one is when I was checking the Latinx in Power website and everything, I saw the merch about “we have an accent”. That means we are bold people who are always creating something, changing something, moving something in a way that is not necessarily the regular one. I think that could be a phenomenal opportunity when we are able to join forces as Latinos.
How was this process of learning English and feeling comfortable with your accent?
I really learned English as an adult. I’m a perfectionist. Being an entrepreneur, I learned how not to be that much perfectionist. But, of course, I was judging myself all the time with that voice in my head saying, “Hmm, that’s not the pronunciation, that’s not the word, that’s not the tense of the verbs.” So, back in 2013, I was recruited to be a CEO for a big data and artificial intelligence company in Silicon Valley. And that was a big challenge because I was selected, because I was a good manager, because of my track record as a manager.
I knew at that time that I didn’t have the English level to manage a company or at least to report to the board and the investors. That was my main challenge. I was like, “No, I know how to manage the team, but I’m not sure how this experience will be.” There is this joke that we say “I’m smarter in Spanish.” At that moment, it was very challenging. I hired a coach, a language coach, to train me for the first board in six months. I need them to fight against me if they don’t agree with me. But I don’t want anybody to say, I didn’t get it. What are you saying? No, I don’t want that part. The other I can match.
Since then, I realized that it’s not the pronunciation, it’s not the grammar. It’s that you are able to connect your ideas with the audience. I really think nobody cares if you have an accent or if you use the incorrect tense of the verb, sometimes that happens everywhere. The important thing is to transmit your knowledge, your ideas, your passion. So, how was that more important than the accent or anything else? And at the end, I realized that people remember who I am because I have this accent, maybe I’m not an average person.and this might be my superpower also.
I think we need to create something for the next generations. It is like the possibility to see a leader in every style. I mean, I’m curly, the majority of the time I’m very curly. It’s like the Ratatouille effect. Any person can be a good chef, meaning that you don’t need to have that specific type of dress, that specific professional background to be a leader. You can be a leader because you have different things and also as we started saying Latinx can do a lot of things with less resources. We can do the same things as other people in the world, even if we don’t have a background in X, Y, or Z university, because we are often complemented with other skills that we develop because of the environment where we live. So showing younger generations that you can be a leader with a background, with a style, with a tone, with an accent, that is not the regular one, the one built by the stereotypes, I really think that’s very important.
What inspired you to pursue a career in technology entrepreneurship?
I started in politics, I started in anticorruption many years ago. My dream was to be president of Colombia. Down the road, I was doing my task very well. I was working in the government, I was even chief of staff for the first lady in Colombia. But I realized that private sector entrepreneurship is the only way to really promise a job and create the job. When you are in the government, you can ask for a job and whatever, but when you are an entrepreneur, you can really create the job, take the decision, and contract that person. That makes a difference.
I switched my career from the public environment to a private company. My first business was in finance and I had an investment banking boutique. We were doing mergers, acquisitions and raising money for companies, and so forth.Then the Silicon Valley company arrived at my office. They were acquiring a Colombian company. We lead the merging process and, in the meantime, they offer me to their global CEO. That’s how I enter into the technology world, in the weirdest possible way. Completely crazy thing.
When I entered, I was thinking of something short term. It was like, “I can help this company while they grow and then I can return back to my finance world.” But really, I became in love with what was happening in frontier technologies. I saw the potential of advanced analytics, call it in any of their addresses, but I saw all the potential of well used analytics and all the potential of the new technologies. We were flying drones also at that time. I am a nerd, I also realize that the world is changing every day, so I have an excuse to learn new things. And that’s how I moved to technology.
One day I was hearing all the people say, “No, you are not a technical person.” I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, that’s my decision, not their decision.” I started learning code and learning how to develop products and learning how to prototype and build a product. From there, I changed my career and my profile 100%.
This morning we were talking about a book, Kant and the Platypus by Umberto Eco. It has a chapter that I love because the day I read that it changed my vision of many things. When Marco Polo arrived in Central Java, he saw an animal with a horn in the nose and he assumed that was a unicorn because that was the image that he had in his brain, in his mind. Instead of thinking maybe this is something that I don’t know, he assumed it was a unicorn. He wrote in the diary that it was amazing how incredible, how European people were wrong about unicorns because their horns were not soft and beautiful and the skin was not beautiful, and so forth. Instead of thinking, this is super different than the things I know, so this is not a unicorn, he was thinking that the other part of the world was wrong about the unicorns. Sometimes we do the same thing. We judge what we don’t know and we miss opportunities.
How was your process getting to work with spatial computing systems?
Everything I write is because the analytics company that I managed at that time was doing path recognition on top of video and images. One day after that, I resigned and we moved to New York with my husband because of his work. I was working with a company doing programmatic advertising, analytics, and building on top of digital video. I saw how it worked and I was telling the founder and CEO of that company, who is a good friend and also a business partner. I said, “Tom, do you imagine when we will be able to run analytics on top of the real world with a layer that is just digital and we see it with the phone or with glasses or with something?” He was like, “Mm. I could, but I don’t know when this will be happening.” So, we started to have conversations around 360 Video at that time.
We started XR Americas and we started developing content on 360, and then Virtual Reality Interactive and then augmented reality. That layer that I was imagining, of course, the combination between standards, hardware, and software that I imagined at that time, 2015 is not yet here. It’s arriving slowly, but it’s arriving. That’s what I was imagining and of course, it’s unique.
All this opportunity of augmented reality, especially, is where I concentrate more. With computer vision, the recognition of the real objects in the world, and you connect both to advanced analytics in any form. You have a magical world where you can think anything in there, on top of the real world and create realities or opportunities or education or safety improvement for many industries where I work in that convergence.
How do you approach failure in your career and what lessons have you learned from past setbacks?
I’m an optimist by style. Basically, I really think that failure is always giving you an opportunity to know how not to do things anymore. I had a lot of initiatives that were not successful. Some because of bad decisions we took sometimes, some because of the environment, the market because when you dream big, and I used to dream very big, the world is not necessarily ready for it. Let’s say if I would like to have everything running for XR Americas, I imagine as I invade it for the future. If I should have used it running that way in the past, I would be completely frustrated.
What I was doing was trying, testing, checking if the things work or not, and pivoting from there, improving from there. I think my approach to failure is resilience, and adaptation. Of course, there are projects that I would love to see growing and will never grow because of anything, because of me, because of my decisions, because of the lack of resources in some moments or because of the lack of the correct partners or the team. It’s complex to find a team with the skills that you want to build the future at some time. But patience, learning, and self-awareness of what I’m able today with what I have and what I dream to have and how can I bridge that gap? That’s my approach, basically.
How do you approach risk-taking in your career and decision-making process?
I really think that there are two things. One is, I don’t perceive myself as a risk taker but the people around me perceive me as a risk taker. It means I would like to take more risks than I take, but of course, I take enough and I really think about making decisions. If you want to build the future, you need to make decisions very early, with very few contexts or information to start. Otherwise, you will be late. So, I used to take decisions to get into the things before everybody is there, before everybody steals the things, but I think it’s the only way if you want to build the future and be part of it.
I compensate that with a business that is the regular one. BC Partners Tech, we are the technical team for non-technical founders. There we’ll have that we have in XR Americas. I think I compensate for both of them. But at the same time with BC Partners, we are helping small businesses, regular businesses to grow on a scale, thanks to technology and the use of technology. So, trying to balance things. But for sure the future is risky and if you are not taking a risk, you will not be part of that future.
How do you see artificial intelligence and machine learning evolving in the coming years and what impact do you think it will have in various industries?
I love that conversation is evolving in many different ways. I think technology is here to start doing really interesting things. I mean, I’ve been in this topic since 2013, in depth. One of the key challenges is to keep the human component, the human analysis, the critical thinking aware in the teams, because the wow effect of what is possible with the current technology status and what will be possible with the technology that will be available in three months, six months, one year, that will be crazy.
But keeping your mind sharp in the real needs of the world, in the real solutions that you need to build, in the problems that you want to solve, instead of the shiny part of the technology, I really think that will be the main challenge of the company. Keeping the employees and the leaders, being able to say, “No, no, no, no, here I need to create a human context before. Here we need to create a human ethic.” That will be a big challenge for the companies, I really think this will change every industry. I mean, it’s already disrupting everything.
What do you think of the opportunities for Latinx folks, especially, who want to get into AI, for example, which advice would you give or any take or any insight?
There are two things. One is, no matter the area of the industry where you are, try to start learning advanced analytics in any way or data science or data principles, or data visualization. It depends on the industry where you are and the area that you like.
If you are a professional, ready to start in any career, understanding data is a must. That’s not negotiable, that will give the people the professional huge advantage. Understanding data, understanding what it means, creating context for the data, and understanding how to solve problems with the correct data. That’s the thing that in any career will make the difference.
The second thing is, if you have a child, try them to start learning code. Python maybe in the near future, nobody will need code, but the logic and the discipline that you develop when you are learning code makes a difference. So, if you have kids, every time a friend is telling me, “No, my kids are all the time with the video games,” and I’m like, “Okay, invite them to start coding them.” That will be a way to change and switch the problem into an opportunity because the world will be needing more data developers, but also as humanity, we need the systems built with artificial intelligence or based on data, to be more diverse, to be more inclusive, and to be aware of the different realities of the world.
I want Siri to pronounce my name well because there are enough Rosarios who are developing. I want my Siri or Alexa or Google to be aware that I am a woman, that having my name ending in an O doesn’t mean I’m a male, that I’m a Latina who like X or Y or Z topics, because of the possibility of having people with different backgrounds, different interests, different mixes of personality, and having less biases, let’s say it that way. So, the only way is having more Latinas, more Latinos, more Colombianos, Brasileiros, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, etc, building these technologies.
Which advice would you give to women who are interested in pursuing a career in technology?
Don’t stop, because this world still has very few women. Don’t change yourself, your style. I mean, one of my tips to young developers is keep your nails pink if you want, keep your heels or the type of dress that you want. Don’t try to eat like the average people in the industry, because, of course, we still have too many males, very few females in the industry, very few women. We need to keep ourselves as we are, it is more productive and comfortable to be yourself in any industry.
The companies who are supporting you to be yourself will be a winner. And don’t stop. Search for role models. Of course, now there are many more than I had back in 2013. Fortunately, you see the difference in the market and you see organizations with more Latinas and more Latinos in technology. Of course, I want to see more women who are bringing their accents to the technology that they are building.
Which resource helped you in your journey?
From a personal perspective, I think developing discipline, some personal skills, I think that’s our habits or traits of your personality, that’s a thing that definitely really helped me. I’m very disciplined and obsessed with that thing. So, that helped me.
Second thing that was very useful for me, communities. Communities of developers, communities of women in business. I think that’s a very important resource, I also volunteer time for some of those communities right now. I think finding your trait and asking for support and asking for knowledge and everything, that’s key.
The third thing, mentors. I have mentors, phenomenal mentors. Some of them are not anymore alive, but I had them. I’m always looking for mentors who can help me with things that I don’t know. They already walked the walk.
The last thing is platforms. I mean, things I really think one of the things that added a lot of value to me was Google scholarship because that’s how I took the risk to start coding. Finding those resources, training resources that are in the market and taking them because sometimes we are not applying because we feel like we don’t have enough of what is needed to apply and keep the energy advancing to finalize.
The last, some movies and books with stories of entrepreneurs who are doing things, because sometimes when you see and there’s, for example, one movie that I love, Walt Before Mickey, I don’t know if you ever saw it, but when you see a phenomenal rockstar entrepreneur and you understand that, yes, sure, that picture of the entrepreneur is taken when is already in a successful moment, but is not the image of all that person was walking before. That helps to understand that you need to keep being persistent.
You will have ups and downs in the road but at the end when you want to yield something and you persist and you move forward, it is completely possible to do other things. In the hard moments, you never remember that. That’s why I think seeing the stories of other people is a good way to remember that.
Latinx people, we don’t trust others easily, and that’s a disadvantage because trust has an infinite value. If we can start trusting others, creating communities where you can trust others and help the others and ask for help, that will be phenomenal because it’s a huge opportunity to keep supporting each other and create communities of trust.
I hope you enjoyed the podcast. We will have more interviews with amazing Latinx leaders the first Tuesday of every month. Check out our website Latinx In Power to hear more. Don’t forget to share comments and feedback, always with kindness. See you soon.
Additional Reading Mentioned in the Interview
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosariobcasas/
https://www.instagram.com/rosariobcasas/
https://www.facebook.com/rosariobcasas
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