Could virtual reality make us better coworkers?

Work isn’t just the place where we work. It’s also the place where we meet new people who are different from us, which is why Elise Smith thinks the office is the perfect place to start building a more empathetic world. She is the co-founder and CEO of Praxis Labs, an immersive learning startup that is reimagining diversity, equity, and inclusion training for corporate America. Using virtual reality, workers take on new perspectives, experiencing incidents of bias or discrimination from multiple points of view, and get to actually practice responding. The goal: to build empathy and spark behavior change. 

In this episode, Elise talks to Dwayne about what it is like to raise venture funding as a young, Black founder; the early virtual reality experiences that changed her life; and the surprising similarities between poetry and virtual reality.