When RJ Pittman recognised the man standing in front of him in the queue at Whole Foods back in 1991 as Steve Jobs, he had “plenty of time” to think about how he was going to embarrass himself in front of his idol.
“This was the person who had inspired me for years,” says Pittman, the Silicon Valley veteran who took the reins as the new chief executive of 3D camera and virtual tour platform Matterport in December last year.
“I started my first company aged 15 in a small northern town in Michigan after being introduced to a piece of equipment that changed my life in 1984: the Apple Macintosh,” he says. “By the early 1990s I had moved out to California to go to Stanford, and on my first visit to my local grocery store Steve was right in front of me in the line to pay.
“At the time, he had left Apple for a bit and had founded NeXT. I was working on a music start-up and was using his computers to develop music management software, but I was having some trouble using the machines to do everything I wanted to do, so I thought ‘well, this is as good a time as any to tell him’. So I did.”
Foot in the door
It could have gone so badly wrong. Accosting one of the best-known tech founders, even back then, to point out a flaw in his system was a bold move. But it worked. A conversation ensued, and the next day Pittman received an e-mail from Jobs’ head of music tech. “That was my foot in the door,” says Pittman.
What followed was a career that led Pittman through the ranks of some of the world’s biggest tech companies: Apple, Google – where he was brought on board by the company’s first-ever female engineer, Marissa Mayer – and eBay, which he joined in 2013 as chief product officer.
Now, after a run of almost 15 years at major tech firms, Pittman says his move to Matterport was driven by a desire to “grab hold of the next generation of disruptors”. And the fact that he has focused his attentions on a company set up to support the property sector is no accident.
“Alongside my entire tech career I have had a bit of a love affair with real estate, architecture and property development,” he says. “I have been dabbling in designing and developing small and medium-sized properties in my copious amount of spare time over the years – somewhere between midnight and 4am.”
Grand plans
Sleep, he says, is for retirement. Now, he has grand plans for Matterport. Plans that will take it to new heights beyond pure real estate.
“I saw something in this company,” he says. “An opportunity to take physical space and make it digital. No one has been able to do that the entire time I have been in tech. You can take 360º panoramic images, but to digitise in true 3D? That’s different. Matterport has been toiling away at this for years and has come close to perfecting it.”
Pittman’s goal is to take Matterport over the finish line by making the technology required to create a digital twin for every space on earth open to as many people as possible. New capture devices at a realistic price point will be the key to capturing enough images to turn his goal of creating “Google Maps for the built environment” into a reality.
“I want to take the tech and democratise it to make the physical-to-digital transformation accessible to everyone,” he says. “How do we make tech accessible and cost effective to the point where we can imagine a world where there isn’t any physical space that doesn’t have a digital twin?
“We want to take this technology and try to reach the consumer. So far, Matterport has managed to capture 1.5 million spaces in 100 countries. With a new breed of capture devices, we can take that up to 100 million spaces.”
Game-changing tech
In terms of what that would mean in reality, Pittman is convinced it would be a game changer, from the way people work to how they travel. “If I were to try to use a comparable metaphor, the result might be something like Google Maps or Google Streetview for the inside of all of these spaces,” he says.
“And you could imagine the value of that if you are visiting a new city. From the hotel to the restaurants you want to visit, you could effectively preview your entire journey ahead of time. And be much more acclimated and prepared by the time you get there.”
It might not be for everyone, but Pittman insists that a future that combines the real world with a digital twin is one that he has always been drawn to. “I think it is therapeutic to have a balance between the two: real life and cyberspace,” he says. “They inform one another.”
Click here to listen to Techtalk Radio’s interview with RJ Pittman.
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