Jeri Ellsworth (Tilt Five) on the Compulsion to Create and Innovate from Race Cars to Spatial Computing (Part 1)

The Guest

Jeri Ellsworth is the co-founder and CEO of Tilt Five, a company that has created AR glasses that bring tabletop games to life. The Tilt Five system enables you to see, hear, and interact with realistic 3D holograms that entertain and educate.

By the time this episode airs, they will have recently completed a Kickstarter campaign where Tilt Five raised more than $1.75 million for their initial product.

Prior to Tilt Five, Jeri was the founder of CastAR, which was also making an augmented reality hardware and software platform, and one that had raised $15 million in venture funding before shutting down in 2017.

Previously Jeri was at Valve as the first member of the hardware R&D team with a mandate to research novel user interactions and bring the entire family together in the living room. Through this, she contributed to the early development for Valve VR (which became the HTC VIVE), the Steam Box, and the Steam Controller.

jeri ellsworth - ny times 2019 crop.jpg

Jeri Ellsworth

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Tilt Five

The Conversation

In this, the first of two parts of our conversation, Jeri shares stories from along her amazing path from being a high school dropout to building race cars to engineering electronic game systems to being recruited at Valve.

Jeri recounts her early attempts to break into an engineering role in Silicon Valley, and the struggles she faced as a high school dropout.

Jeri goes on to describe the painful end of her time at Valve and the start of her CastAR experience. She doesn’t mince words as she describes her missteps, setbacks, and successes along the way.

Note: The photo of Jeri was taken by James Tensuan for the New York Times and was included in the article cited above from 2019.

Jason McDowallAR smartglasses, hardware, consumer, leadership, culture