Mental health shapes how a founder builds, decides, and leads, and most of us only talk about it when something has gone wrong. This special episode of The Tech Glow Up is a peek at what I'm up to while the show is on its season break: emceeing the first annual World Mental Health Day gathering in Portland, Oregon, hosted by Joyely at the Upstart Collective.

My own experience is the starting point. Paying attention to my body and my mental health, and to how the two support the work I'm trying to do, has been the biggest investment I've made in Awesome Future. Mental health is something you plan for and work to maintain, and it touches every other part of your life. This gathering gives Portland founders, civic leaders, and neighbors a place to talk about it together.

Join us on Friday, October 9, from 4:00 to 7:00 PM at the Upstart Collective, 111 SW 5th Ave in Portland. Food and drinks are provided, and community organizations will be tabling throughout the afternoon.

• Episode Key Moment Highlights:
• [00:00:00] Founder success and mental health, and why caring for both has been the biggest investment in my work.
• [00:01:20] Planning for mental health the way you plan for any other part of your business and your life.
• [00:02:27] The JQ Emotions Map from Joyely, a tool for understanding your emotions and how they show up in your body.
• [00:03:20] Mental health in the age of AI, with Dr. Ali Maaxa on what an always-on, hyper-productive coworker means for founders.
• [00:04:12] A panel with Portland civic leaders on mental health, startups, and the founder journey in this city.

Small change over time is transformation, and this gathering is a good place to start. I would love to see you there, and I hope you will bring a friend.

Register for World Mental Health Day → https://eventship.com/event/the-1st-annual-world-mental-health-day-hosted-by-joyely

Watch on YouTube →https://youtu.be/kcwona82GSQ

Join the Tech Glow Up newsletter on Substack → https://substack.com/@mxnathanc

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

This is a special episode of The Tech Glow Up from SPECS launch day. I'm at the Beverly Wilshire for the SPECS smart glasses media preview, sharing first thoughts on the day of the public launch — September 16th.

I want to be upfront: I haven't tried every demo. This is about 30 minutes in the glasses from media day, not the full reveal. But the thing that stood out most was something that was missing. There's no hard line between the display and the world.

The screen feels blended with the world, not a picture-in-picture overlay. That's what makes the whole SPECS wearable computer experience feel integrated and contextual — not like you're looking through a device.

The field of view is clean, content is bright and readable, and you can anchor it in place or let it follow you. Fast streaming, clear picture, even in a bright room.

• [00:00:25] Why SPECS exists: technology that makes you more present, not less
• [00:01:32] Enterprise partnerships announced: Salesforce, AWS, NVIDIA, Hololight
• [00:02:54] SPECS Intelligence — the AI layer across glasses, Mac, and iPhone
• [00:03:40] First-person: what it feels like to see through the SPECS
• [00:05:28] The weight question — why fit mattered more than heaviness
• [00:06:15] Multiplayer consumer AR: the moment we've never had before
• [00:09:54] Open questions: battery life, connectivity, and what developers build next

I noticed the fit before the weight. The enterprise announcements were significant — heads-up retail, AI-powered work instructions, 3D spatial workstation workflows. SPECS Intelligence is the piece I'm watching most carefully.

More than anything, I'm excited to see what designers and developers build for multiplayer consumer AR — apps that help people connect and be more present. We've never had a moment where there were enough high-powered devices to see what these interactions could be.

Watch on YouTube →

Join the Tech Glow Up newsletter on Substack → https://substack.com/@mxnathanc

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

This first international episode of The Tech Glow Up was recorded live in Harajuku, Japan at the offices of Mawari — a company building the streaming infrastructure for the next generation of smart glasses and immersive experiences since 2017.

Luis Oscar Ramírez is the co-founder and CEO. He started Mawari in Shibuya with a straightforward premise: if the world is three-dimensional, the internet shouldn't be flat. Nine years later, the company is one of the select few in XR that has earned more in licensing revenue than what they've raised from VC. Despite having an early innovation in a slow developing space, Mawari has adapted and grown; surviving when many of their peers have not.

They also built a distributed compute network backed by a real community in Japan. These are people who show up on Sundays to work on the mission, who sent handwritten congratulations notes to the company's virtual artist at her debut, who see participation in the network as something they actually care about.

This conversation covers what it takes to stay building when a market isn't ready. Luis talks about the moment that reframed everything for him: watching people with no connection to the tech industry spend 60 minutes in headsets at a concert, crying, holding hands. Not because the hardware was impressive. Because the content made them forget the hardware entirely. That's his definition of market fit.

We also get into the Techno Satoyama — his five-layer model for a self-sustaining ecosystem — and why Mawari moved to Harajuku to send a message: they're building culture, not just software.

Key Moments

• [00:00:51] What Mawari does and where the idea came from
• [00:09:50] Earning more in licensing than you've raised
• [00:11:11] What building in Japan teaches you about accountability
• [00:21:38] VTubers and why emotional presence beats impressive graphics
• [00:27:29] The five-layer Techno Satoyama model
• [00:34:44] Six-month milestones: platform launch, community event, 200,000 nodes

Watch the full Harajuku episode on YouTube → https://youtu.be/syDOFUIt6uE

Join the Tech Glow Up newsletter on Substack → https://substack.com/@mxnathanc

About Luis Oscar Ramirez

Luis is the Founder and CEO of Mawari. In this role, his mission is to enable Synthetic Reality for everyone. He is committed to experimenting and developing with emerging technologies such as XR, 5G, cloud rendering and streaming, and has designed a patent pending 3D Streaming CODEC and split rendering technology that runs in the Mawari Network, a decentralized 3D & XR content delivery platform that breaks the bottlenecks of infrastructure supply for real-time rendering, and the lack of local compute power on XR Devices.

Mawari’s proprietary CODEC enables the highest visual quality to be streamed to mobile XR Devices by substantially lowering the heavy processing requirements of rich interactive and ultra-realistic 3D content like real-time digital humans, reducing cost, data size and battery consumption while unlocking scalability.

Prior to Mawari, he spearheaded and co-founded the Japanese version of MUTEK, a world-renowned festival dedicated to the dissemination and development of digital creativity in sound, music, and audio-visual art.

He also served as a Global Head of Marketing at MUSIC Tribe, one of the world’s largest holding companies for pro audio and music instruments.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.