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b'If you want to master something, teach it.\\u201d That\\u2019s the old adage, and at Circuit Stream, the thinking is teaching XR helps you develop better solutions, too. Founder and CEO Lou Pushelberg created Circuit Stream courses to give companies the power to educate and empower themselves, and just make the whole XR ecosystem stronger.\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: You\\u2019re listening to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today\\u2019s guest is Lou Pushelberg, founder and CEO of Circuit Stream. Circuit Stream\\u2019s story began in 2015 with Lou traveling around North America, connecting with developers, designers, and creators, pushing the boundaries of immersive experiences. Rather than try to build the next big application like everyone else, Lou saw a bigger need for education and training that could help propel the industry forward. From this journey, Circuit Stream\\u2019s 10-week online course emerged. Their education platform has reached over 25,000 students. They\\u2019re a Unity authorized training partner and their team of 20 people is giving professionals the skills they need to build value-driven XR experiences. They have three business divisions: education, software development, and their platform. To learn more about the great work that Lew and his team is doing, you can visit circuitstream.com. \\n\\n\\n\\nLou, welcome to the show, my friend.\\n\\n\\n\\nLou: Alan, thanks so much for\\nhosting me. It\\u2019s a pleasure to be here.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: It\\u2019s my absolute honor.\\nI\\u2019ve been watching the work you guys are doing. You\\u2019re basically one\\nof the only educational institutions that are teaching people the\\npractical hands-on skills on how to create XR. How did this come\\nabout?\\n\\n\\n\\nLou: Well, I was working for another VR startup early in 2015. They were based out of Seattle. This was kind of the DK2 era \\u2014 so early in VR\\u2019s history \\u2014 and personally was inspired by a lot of the early pioneers, who were building some of the flagship VR content and titles that were coming out on the first wave of consumer hardware \\u2014 so the Vive and the original Rift \\u2014 and was basically looking for an opportunity and a need, where I could create value for the ecosystem and help accelerate the adoption of VR and ultimately of XR technology, and found that kind of service and value that I could provide to the ecosystem in education.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: So how did you begin?\\nWhere do you start with building a course for technology that\\u2019s\\nemerging? Like, \\u201cUnity 101: here\\u2019s how to make a model.\\u201d\\nLike, how did that\\u2013 where do you even begin?\\n\\n\\n\\nLou: [chuckles] Yeah, that\\u2019s a good question. So we began with a kind of a core philosophy that was, the only way to learn anything really in it \\u2014 and especially this technology \\u2014 was to get hands-on and just start building things. There wasn\\u2019t a playbook for VR and AR, there wasn\\u2019t a series of best practices at the time. They were kind of just beginning to emerge. So we really wanted to focus a lot of what we were doing around getting people into Unity and some of the other major engines, and just helping them start blazing their own trails by just building stuff and sharing it with people. That\\u2019s kind of been our MO and what we try to facilitate with all of the professionals, companies that we work with. So in kind of architecting the course in the beginning, we would go straight to the source. So you mentioned travelling across North America. I had basically booked a trip through what were the four biggest hubs down the West Coast. So starting in Vancouver and then heading south through into Seattle, San Francisco, and LA and in each XR hub, I would interview developers, sometimes from startups who were kind o'