Welcome everyone to episode number 116 of underserved.

Joining me today is Kurt Iverson, senior manager of UX at Alterix.

Let's get started.

Welcome to this week's edition of Underserved, the podcast for the rest of the tech industry,

where we focus on stories of tech industry leaders,

their insights, and their lessons learned.

And now your host, Andrew Jalina.

Kurt, thank you so much for joining us today on Underserk.

Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it. I'm excited to be here.

Where'd you grow up and what got you interested in technology? I grew up in Aurora, Colorado,

mainly participating in theater and a lot of creative adventures like that. You know, even

started off doing a garage band in high school and doing a lot of music during that time. We were very

into New Wave. And that's really what got me into the electronic side of things.

You know, working with new synthesizers, sequencers, learning how to put it all together.

Having grown up playing piano is very kind of myopic in a sense of there's only one sound you can get out of.

There's a lot of emotion you can put into it, but there's only one sound you can get out of it. And so getting into keyboards and sequences and adding all types of instruments and having a complete orchestra at your hands was really what started the whole journey. And then you continued to kind of dive into the entertainment scene after that. I did quite a bit. You know, I went to BYU and was in the acting track. A couple notable people came out of there. Aaron Eckhart was probably the biggest one that was in my grade, did a lot of plays together, and he went off to go into Batman. I did not. But the interesting thing about that scene in Utah was there was a lot of church films being made at the time. And so it was very easy to get experience

on sets going through the church route. I always played the bad guy. There was one specific

film that is really well known in the Mormon community called the Whole Armor of God, in which I

try to convince friends of mine to go to a party, drink, and do all kinds of bad things so that they

can't go on their mission when they're done. That was usually my role in those films. If you don't know, I'm half Asian, half Mexican. So unfortunately, as it was, you know, a lot of the ethnic guys weren't playing like the lead roles in these films. And so that's what I did throughout BYU. I did a lot of video acting and then I also got into video production

while I was out there. Now you told me a kind of noteworthy story about the proximity of the

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