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One of the first hurdles any organization must leap in the adoption of new technology is funding it. In this special two-part episode, Julie chats with The Startup Station founder Victoria Yampolsky about how to plan your budget, for the best and worst-case scenarios.

Julie: Hello, my name is Julie Smithson and I am your XR for Learning podcast host. Join us today with our next guest, Victoria Yampolsky. Victoria is the founder and president of The Startup Station, an educational and consulting company committed to help founders be successful and get funded faster. She focuses on the creative, credible financials and valuations for early-stage ventures. Specifically she's helped entrepreneurs master the necessary finance skills, so that they correctly translate their business plan into a financial plan, evaluate the financial feasibility of different initiatives, and credibly present their companies to investors, and use their financial model to drive the business forward. Thanks so much for joining me, Victoria.

Victoria: Thank you very much for inviting me, Julie. It's a pleasure to be here.

Julie: Our topic today is going to be a little bit different. We're gonna talk about budgeting, and finances, and starting up a business, and being able to budget for innovation, which is something that not many people understand, what the implications of technologies and the advancements of impacts they have on businesses. So maybe you can tell me a little bit more about your company, and the approach that you started to take and the demand and need for your services.

Victoria: So I started my company in 2013, after I was an entrepreneur myself. And then I began advising the company and I saw a huge need for business and financial expertise in the startup world. My first venture was in media and entertainment. And it was pretty clear that a lot of filmmakers were extremely passionate about the projects that they were making, and they put very little thought into thinking how they going to monetize it, how they're going to bring their projects to market. And when I began advising my first non media and entertainment company, I realized that the same problem persisted in the startup community as well. There were a lot of brilliant entrepreneurs who wanted to propel innovation, who wanted to change the world, who wanted to disrupt industries that were not working efficiently, who wanted to solve problems that were not being sold or sold not in the best way. And they were coming up with solutions, but they didn't yet think through how to make those solutions into businesses, how to bring those solutions to market, how to reach mass adoption. And so that brought me to a starting the Startup Station, where I help entrepreneurs think through those roadmaps, make sure that the plans that they put together are financially feasible, how to put together those baselines which help them to evaluate if their strategy is working, if their plans for bringing the product to market are efficient and react faster to market feedback, to conserve capital and to also be successful.

Julie: Are you working with any startup companies that are dealing with XR technologies like virtual reality, or augmented reality, or artificial intelligence right now?

Victoria: So none of those technologies are one of my clients right now, but I have talked over a thousand founders, because in addition to consulting one-to-one, I also teach entrepreneurs, and I teach them how to evaluate those business plans and put together those financials in their own. And out of those students I did teach a few XR companies.

Julie: So I think that the introduction of all of these technologies into a business where one day, we have brand new ha