IAM1162- Founder Manages Technology Companies

James Jensen is an entrepreneur committed to working with leading-edge technology and eager to solve problems surrounding how we interact and engage with each other in physical and virtual worlds. He is the previous creator and co-founder of the world-renowned virtual reality company The VOID. Within the last 25 years, James founded and managed several technology companies in video streaming, social networks, mobile games, and creative services. He has partnered with Disney, Sony Entertainment, FOX, MGM, Intel, Microsoft, SyFy, Dreamworks, and MTV through those ventures. He is now launching a new form of virtual reality, called hyper-reality, in the form of the multi-sensory entertainment company JUMP. JUMP will allow people to come as close to jumping and flying as the real thing but without all of the risk.

• CEO Hack: Treat people like adults
• CEO Nugget:  (i) Overdeliver on what you promise (ii) Reputation is greater than anything
• CEO Defined: Creating the culture and maintaining the vision of the company

Website: http://limitlessflight.com/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@limitlessflight?lang=en
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/limitlessflight/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_lrbIHXqNB4wJKBGJ5GuPw
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jumplimitlessflight

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Transcription

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00:19 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:46 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have James Jensen of Jump. James, great to have you on the show.

00:54 – James Jensen

Hey, thanks for having me on. Hello, everybody.

00:56 – Gresham Harkless

Super excited to have you on and super excited about all the awesome things that you're doing. And what I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about James before we jumped into the interview from there. James is an entrepreneur committed to working with leading-edge technology and eager to solve problems surrounding how we interact and engage with each other and physical and virtual worlds. He is the previous creator and co-founder of the world-renowned virtual reality company, The Void.

Within the last 25 years, James founded and managed several technology companies in video streaming, social networks, mobile games, and creative services. He's partnered with Disney, Sony Entertainment, Fox, GM, Intel, Microsoft, Sci-Fi, Dreamworks, and MTV through those adventures. He is now launching a new form of virtual reality called hyperreality in the form of a multi-sensory entertainment company. Jump will allow people to come as close to jumping and flying as the real thing, but without all of the risks, James is super excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:49 – James Jensen

Yes, I love it. Let's do it.

01:50 – Gresham Harkless

Let's do it then.

01:51 – James Jensen

Thanks for the intro. That was a great intro.

01:53 – Gresham Harkless

Well, definitely. It always helps when you're doing great things. It makes the intro a little bit easier. I just had to read the part. I didn't have to do all the awesome work that you were doing. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock. I know it touched on a little bit when I read your bio. I hear a little bit more about what I like to call your CEO story. We'll let you start to get all the awesome work you're doing.

02:10 – James Jensen

My background actually was in fine arts. I actually started as an oil painter. My dad was an oil painter and he taught me how to oil paint. And then I got into oil painting. He was doing a lot of landscape stuff. And so my landscapes were as great as his, but ended up getting to airbrushing. And I did photo realism, started doing portraits and things like that. And then went to design school, commercial art and design, and I got into computers and fell in love with the undo button, which is really nice. That spun off into doing computer animation, visual effects, and then game, video game programming.

So over my career, I've kind of gone from, you know, a creative to owning my own creative agency, to then finding my real passion, which was bringing things into reality that don't exist as an entrepreneur. And a lot of that started with software development, things like that. But I quickly got to a point where I wanted to use all my creative skills and the amazing people around me to build virtual reality worlds and stuff like that. And that's where the void came from. But through those processes and the amazing relationships I created over so many years, they've really enabled me to be able to, and my team to be able to pull off some stuff that's just the leading edge.

And so, you know, that the roles that have gone through the whole process, right? I was, I was a creative and then, you know, kind of changed over time as I own businesses, you know, I've been a CFO, I'm not CFO, CTO, been a CEO, I've been a creative director. And so it's almost to a point now where it's like, well, I need to move past the CEO title and go to something like a chief vision officer or something like that. I feel like that's probably where my end goal lane is, is finding something that's just maintaining the vision of whatever project is or what we're doing. So yeah, that's maybe a quick version.

03:58 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I love that. And I can imagine, and I don't know if it words in your mouth, but do you feel like being able to have that kind of foundation in the creative services, that kind of creative industry allow you to kind of, I guess, create these new realities that you're doing now?

04:12 – James Jensen

Absolutely. You know, going through that process, I think it's helped me be, it's helped me actually be a lot better of a business owner and a leader is being in the trenches for so long. I understand when I talk to an engineer or I talk to a developer, I ask them to do things. I know roughly now what it takes to do those types of things. And so I can relate to the timelines and the pressures that are being put on them. And so I can relate to that. And I think that helps me be a better leader. And so absolutely that's been part of my path. And that's why I think there's a lot of creatives and engineers around me that trust me when I ask them to do things because I've been there before. And it has been a while since I've actually written any code for a video game, but I remember that and I know what it's like.

05:03 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I know I touched on a little bit about, you know, jumping you did as well too. Could you take us through a little bit more on what you're doing there and how you're making an impact there on Jump?

05:09 – James Jensen

Yeah, the jump is, I mean, it's an accumulation of everything that I've done to date, right? But it's very focused on several things, you know, for where we're at on the technology side of things, we're on the very leading edge of everything that we're doing for virtual and what I like to call hyper-real simulations where we're including a lot of physical effects for the end user believe what's going on but the technology side of things has been a challenge because we're trying to map we're trying to match reality as closely as possible So we're using real-time physics and dynamics in the simulation that allow you to fly wherever you want to.

We're really taking the real-time physics from when you jump and then extending that into the virtual world and then providing effects that do that. So the engineering side of things and putting all those pieces together is pretty wild because we have, you know, we have different software engineers, we have hardware guys, and all of these components have to talk to each other dynamically and automatically and rallying the teams together to be able to have a center vision of what that is, I think is one of the most important things you can do. If everybody can believe in that vision and they know what part they play, then it makes a project run really smoothly. Yeah, absolutely.

06:27 – Gresham Harkless

And I think people also feel connected with that vision, as you kind of talked about before if you understand that this part is, this is how it aligns to the vision that you have and what you're trying to do. I think that helps everybody make sure that they are, taking care of what they have to take care of during that time. And so how does it work? I guess for people who are potentially listening to this, I wanna hear a little bit more about that. Do you just kind of show up at one of the locations that you have and kind of go through the simulation?

06:49 – James Jensen

Yeah, if you don't mind, I'd love to talk about that. The customer experience is something that nobody's ever done before in virtual reality on several levels because it's a complete sensory overload and you don't really get to see how you fly. It's a mix between a suspension system and a wind system that you don't see. So you really put on a full wingsuit. You go through a tutorial on how to actually wingsuit jump off of a cliff. And then you put on a parachute, well, it looks like a parachute, and you go into a room, and the only thing that's in the room is this headset, and you put on the headset, and then the room kind of modifies after that, but you don't see any of that, and you end up stepping up to the edge.

This was one of the reasons why we focused on calling the company Jump because flying is amazing, but the decision to actually toss yourself off of something is a big decision. And there's a lot of psychology that's built behind that decision. And so we're really trying to highlight that moment. And I think that's what differentiates us from a lot of other things that are out there that people are trying to fly is the decision that I have to jump past my comfort and trust that I'm going to make it. And that parallel is super cool to think about how that could be for the end user to have potentially a pivotal moment in their life.

So you get up to the edge, you can feel like a breeze coming over the edge, you can smell the pine trees, everything feels very photorealistic and feels very real to you. The way that we're capturing locations too is really unique and nobody has done it at this level. We're capturing 20-plus square miles of a location through a process called photogrammetry and LiDAR scans. So it basically makes a replica of the location as a 3D asset model. And we bring that into the game engine. So it looks completely photorealistic and we don't have any hardware limitations so we can make it look awesome. You step up the edge, you're filling all of this And then you have to basically trust fall, jump out, like you're jumping into a swimming pool, and you start flying.

And the first part of it, you're flying down the face of the cliff. And a real wingsuit actually has to get to terminal velocity. And we do the same physics. And so you have to actually fall for a while before the wingsuit feels full of air. And then you pull out and then you're just flying and you can make decisions. The whole simulator is really cool. And maybe one day we'll show what it looks like. But it's awesome to look at it looks completely sci-fi because this thing is, is just watching what the end user does and then making decisions. And so it looks wild, but you're in complete control. Your body's the controller, just like it is in reality, and you fly wherever you want to in the experience. And then at the end, if you get too low, we'll pull your parachute or you can pull your parachute. You go into a parachute position and you fly down and land back onto the ground.

09:38 – Gresham Harkless

Would you consider that to be what I like to call your secret sauce? This could be for the business, for yourself personally, or a combination of both, but is it that ability to kind of see the technology, understand it on a deeper level, it sounds like, and be able to kind of see how it can be applicable to, I guess, the overall human experience. Do you think that makes you unique?

09:55 – James Jensen

Absolutely, completely makes us unique. People will come in for this X game, hyper-reality, crazy wingsuit jumping experience. And most people will leave with something a lot deeper than they thought they were coming in the door for. It's like, it's all the good movies that you go into for entertainment, you come out and you're like, man, that's actually a great concept. And I wanna apply that to my life. It's like that on steroids, you know? So I think that what I hope to share with people is at least a glimpse behind something that's a lot more meaningful than what exists out there right now. So yeah, that's the motivation for sure.

10:30 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Absolutely love that. And so I want to just switch gears a little bit. And I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:42 – James Jensen

The CEO hack. I think treating people like adults. Honestly, like when it boils down to it's like, butts and seats and hours on the clock don't mean anything. Like honestly, like for my career. It's about having mutual respect for people and setting that you know, having your employees or personnel that are working with you or your buddies, whatever it is, like agree to their timelines and then hold them accountable to it. It's very simple. If they wanna party for the whole week and knock it out on a Friday, but they complete what they said they're going to do, who cares? Let them go do their thing. And that's even more relevant now with the whole thing that's going on, in reality, is like, you got to just trust that your people are going to do what they're going to do.

And honestly, if you go down that path, I've seen that you'll… I've always said when people come back from a vacation or something like my guys are working on it, come back from a vacation or even just over the weekend, more over the weekend, they come back on a Monday and like, hey, I had this thing in my mind I was thinking about and I couldn't help it and I just built it and here it is. It's like, what? You didn't ask them to do that. They just came back on a Monday because they believe in the project, they believe in the vision, and you treat them like an adult, and you allow them to create their own deadlines.

And you just, I mean, you got to hold everybody accountable. But if they're creating their own deadlines, and you're holding them accountable, then you can have mutual respect for each other. And it actually sorts out people that are, you know, that can't operate like that. I mean, some people don't want to operate like that. They just want a 9 to 5 and check in and sit in their seat. And honestly, I don't want to work with those people. I love that.

12:15 – Gresham Harkless

Yep. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something that you would tell your younger business self if you were to happen to a time machine.

12:23 – James Jensen 

The nugget that I've had my whole life is, it's kind of in parallel with what we were just talking about, but I, when I was 12 or 13, started airbrushing. I've told the story before, but I started airbrushing t-shirts and I got about halfway through them. It was like my first job was fun. I was airbrushing t-shirts for this movie theater and I got through half of them and they paid me 50 bucks upfront and it was gonna be 100 bucks to do all of the t-shirts. I think it was like 12, 15, or 12 shirts.

And I got halfway done and I showed my dad my dad, check this out. This is awesome. Like, yeah, 50 bucks, but it's really hard and I don't know if I can finish all of them. And he said, you know, James goes to your reputation will be worth more to you than any amount of money you'll ever make in your life. And I took that to heart. And so that's what I've, that's how I've kind of lived. I've always, I've always, you know, over-delivered on what I've promised and always done my best work no matter what.

13:18 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And so I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We might've already touched on this a little bit, but we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs. And James, I want to ask you, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:30 – James Jensen

Being CEO to me, I think what the CEO position is, I think is changing and morphing. A CEO is currently defined as somebody who structures the business and makes sure the shareholders are happy and all that stuff, which is a good thing. I mean, that's the thing that you need to focus on. Most of the stuff that I'm doing right now is having conversations and talking to people and relationships. And it's not really creative. It's about bringing in money and selling the vision and the dream.

But that's the, I think for me, I might move away from that CEO title and move to something like Chief Vision Officer because the CEO's responsibility or the leader of the company is to maintain the vision of the company, the direction, the North Star, whatever you wanna call it. It's creating the culture and maintaining the vision for the company, as well as doing all those other utilitarian things, right, and making sure that the funding is there for everybody to do their jobs. But the most important thing is that culture and the vision. If you can continue to sell the culture and vision, you'll get an army of people behind you who believe in it and want to execute it.

14:32 – Gresham Harkless

James truly appreciates that definition. And I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get a whole view about all the all-spanning junior team are working on.

14:49 – James Jensen

Yeah, I guess, I mean, people that are out there messing around with technology and the wealth of opportunity that exists in reality right now, I know it's easy to get bogged down on reality and the whole pandemic and all that stuff. But in the midst of what looks like confusion and madness, there's so much opportunity, you guys. The way technology is evolving is unbelievable. And the education that people have had over the last year and a half on virtual reality, this virtual experience we're having right now, there's people that have never done video phone calls like this and have been educated on virtual reality and virtual systems and technology and it's just.

I think that's amplified a lot of things and so there's always a positive side to what perceives to be negative. So I would say out there, there's a ton of opportunity in this space. I love to have you come out and experience Jump. You can follow us on, or look at limitlessflight.com and follow us on our social media channels. Our TikTok channel has really been set up to do like live updates. So I'm just going to be filming stuff as they start installing things and watching people do jumps.

15:53 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, James truly appreciates that to make it even easier. We'll have the links and information in the show notes as well too. And I love your last piece as well too. A lot of times we forget that during times of, I guess, disruption or pandemics or whatever might happen on one side of the coin, we also have a lot of things that aren't what we want them to be. But on the other side, there's definitely a tremendous amount of opportunities because habits, the way that we do things, and the way that we run our businesses have completely been disrupted and disruption provides that opportunity. So appreciate you for reminding us of that, of course, living and breathing that as well too. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:26 – Outro