The Global Collaboration Village, three Davos in a row.

A mountain town, a fleet of headsets, and the world's hardest audience.

Davos is uniquely punishing for an immersive technology team. Forty-five-minute slots with heads of state. Snow-load, altitude, and connectivity that fluctuates by the hour. An audience that does not have time for a calibration screen.

Across three consecutive Annual Meetings, I helped run the technical and operational backbone for the GCV at the Forum — a metaverse meant to host real public-private cooperation, not a flashy showpiece. That meant managing a fleet of 50+ devices, owning the build pipeline behind the experiences, and training the executive stakeholders who would actually be in the room.

GCV pavilion · Davos 2023

Inside the village

Treat every demo like a flight.

GCV demos got the same discipline I'd later apply to Stratus showcases: pre-flight, live, post-mortem. The difference at Davos was the audience size — 400+ leaders cycled through over the week — which meant the system couldn't be heroic, it had to be repeatable.

1. Pre-flightEvery headset booted, calibrated, and warmed up an hour before doors. No exceptions.
2. LiveOne operator per headset. Their job was to disappear.
3. Post-mortemEnd-of-day debrief, written, in time for the next morning's pre-flight checklist.

From 6 builds a day to 40.

The biggest unlock for the GCV program was automating environment deployment. The team had been building test environments by hand — six builds a day, capped by human time. I automated the deployment pipeline on Azure, scaling testing capacity from 6 to 40 builds per day and reducing operational costs by approximately $10,000/month.

Marketplace

Kelp forest

Climate cave

Delivered the GCV to 400+ world leaders.

I also led a VR product activation specifically for Accenture's CEO Julie Sweet and 20+ Energy Sector CEOs — a smaller audience, with the highest individual stakes of any demo I've ever run. The brief there wasn't to wow them; it was to align the experience with the strategic message Julie wanted to land.

Promenade · Davos

TIME · Davos meets the metaverse

What Davos taught me.

1. Systems beat heroics, every yearYou can carry a team for one Davos. You cannot carry one for three. Automate or burn out.
2. Calibration is the experienceFor first-time users, the first 30 seconds set the tone for the whole demo. Treat them like they're the demo.
3. Operational savings buy you next year$10K/mo isn't dramatic on a deck. It's the difference between scope cuts and scope expansion when the next year's budget conversation happens.