The early history of smart glasses is getting a retrospective look. On the podcast Business Wars, host David Brown took listeners back to 2011 to revisit the humble origins of Vergence Labs, a startup founded by Stanford students John Rodriguez and Eric Miller.
Brown painted a vivid picture of the founders standing on an elevated walkway on an overcast day, filming their pitch. He described Eric Miller as having "sandy hair, a round boyish face, and black-framed glasses" as he prepared to pitch the incubator. The show frames this moment as the foundational spark for what would become a highly contested hardware category.
The podcast's focus on StartX shows how critical academic incubators were to the early 2010s hardware boom. By securing "mentorship, buzz, and funding," early startups like Vergence Labs were able to lay the groundwork for the modern smart glasses era, long before the tech giants took over the space.
As the industry awaits the next major leap in augmented reality, looking back at these early Stanford pitches serves as a reminder of how raw the hardware dream once was. Whether today's players can capture that same early-stage energy remains to be seen.