HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.
My name is Amir-Reza Asadi, and I love working on interdisciplinary projects. AR was interesting for me from when I was in high school in the late 2000s. I began sketching UIs for AR at that time. When I presented my works to my favorite teacher, he said, "Stop spending time on dreamy things, prepare yourself for the University Entrance Exam." He might’ve been right.
Two years later, I entered university to study software engineering. At the same time, I have two other interests industrial design and business administration. So I enrolled in the Tehran Institute of Technology to study business administration too. In the second year of my, I founded my first company for developing mobile applications. I continued my studies and got a master's degree in information technology management.
Then a friend told me about Coursera and edx. Online Learning allowed me to study things that I was passionate about, from product design and interaction design to neuroscience. It also gives me more time to work on my business. Finally, when Apple released the ARKit 1.0, I told my friends, " it is time to follow the dreamy sketches!"
What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?
BeyondBoard AR is utilizing the concept of corkboards as a medium for spatial computing. It allows users to do various tasks through virtual bulletin boards, from mind mapping to project management.
What is the origin story?
BeyondBoard AR is part of my more extensive plans for spatial computing at HumindLabs.
I, for one, think the essential opportunity that AR brings is that we can have relatively limitless space for virtual input-output devices. In other words, when you watch movies about geeks and hackers, they have multiple monitors. If XR HMDs become popular, with the help of cloud computing, everyone will have access to geeky systems! BeyondBoard AR is just one small step for me for enhancing human life through creating XR-based human-computer interactions!
What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
It's hard to find like-minded people who are willing to take risks. My teammates (Mostafa & Reza) are adventurous. They like taking the risk to overcome challenges for reaching new horizons.
If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
Haha, I think I would be working on another startup! Besides that, I love Fashion design! So I would become a wearable fashion designer!
At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?
Honestly, I think mobile-based AR adds a heavy load on user interactions with applications. It's not suitable for long-duration tasks. The actual race begins with the iPhone moment of XR HMDs.
What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
We reached to top 100 paid apps in the productivity category of the Appstore.
What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?
As a tech-savvy person, technologies excite me, but I'm apprehensive about suppressing individual liberties with the help of AI and information technology. Information technology used to be a virtual gate to the free world. Algoracy and projects such as Social Credit System induce Orwellian nightmares for me. And people who have lived in free societies for long years seem to forget the value of freedom. It's not good to lose something to understand its value again.
What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?
HackerNoon is the place to keep yourself updated with the latest trends and best practices in technology. It's a great honor for me to get published on HackerNoon, because its readers are innovative minds and early adopters.
Let me put it another way: if you go on a date with someone you find on a dating app and she mentions that she is a HackerNoon reader, don't let her down; she is your dream girl!
(PS: I'm not sure about tech-savvy guys, because I think we are annoying!)
What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?
Travel more; make your team sooner!
What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?
I learned about survival. Any startup founder must consider the trap of survival or survivorship bias. The world of startups is full of engaging stories of who made it. Survivorship bias is the tendency for failed startups to be excluded from performance studies because they no longer exist. Most of the time, you see articles about innovative, successful startups, but if you study the cases of failed startups in the same field, there might be more innovative companies. So there are factors that the survival bias stops us from seeing.