By Ian Gauger, Chief Operating Officer Circle Optics, Inc. was founded in December of 2017, though, the company’s origins extend much further back, to a senior lens design course at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics attended by founder Zak Niazi. The question that kept him up at night was during this course was “what if Google Streetview had parallax-free 360-degree cameras on top of all their cars for creation of seamless VR content?” This question followed him beyond the classroom from Spring of 2012 until December 2017. With the selection for the Luminate Accelerator in late 2018, it was clear that answering this question had a lot of potential and was going to require a team to execute on. In January of 2019, as the Luminate program was kicking off, I was brought on with the directive of building and scaling a team, and that is still one of my main focuses to this day. I have taken time to outline how we are leveraging company culture as a flywheel for strategic growth. Phase I – Find Your Cornerstone Employees  Phase 2 – Recruit the Familiar  Once we had our cornerstones in place, we needed to start to fill … Continue reading Leveraging Company Culture as a Flywheel for Strategic Growth-continued