You founded Infinity Marketing Group in 2011. What do you do there?

I’m the CEO. I’ve been in digital marketing 17 years, which is probably three years shy of how long it’s actually existed. And, to be fair, those first three years were the Wild West. Now, you can throw a rock and hit a marketing agency. At my agency, we’re like personal trainers for our clients.

I grew up in Silicon Valley. My dad worked for Sun Microsystems for 20 years. I had two computers when most people didn’t have any. So, I became a big tech guy. Digital marketing became part of that. I found out what I wanted to do in business really early on. So that’s lucky, too. I’ve been doing it so long that people describe me as an expert or guru, which is not yet on my business cards — but I might have to add that on.

You recently participated in Denver Startup Week. What is that event like?

I met people from all walks of life, but my big concentration there was augmented reality and how that relates to marketing. People are looking at it right now thinking it’s pretty cool, but not knowing what it’s going to be…. When the internet first came out people thought it was going to be used as a place you can just find lists of things. Which we laugh at now, because it’s used for literally everything. Augmented reality is going to be that, too. It will literally be in everything because it’s going to be information overlay on top of our actual world. And that’s the biggest thing that I was at Denver Startup Week for — to meet those big brains in that world. And anyone who’s in that world now is way ahead of their time because this is not going to hit really hard for the next eight to 12 more months. That’s because Apple and Google just released the augmented reality tool kits, which is essentially software that will allow people to build augmented reality apps. It’s going to be a flooded market soon.

How are augmented reality and virtual reality, such as Pokemon Go and Snapchat, changing the future of marketing?

The good news is that people already have experience with augmented reality because of Snapchat filters. How it’s going to change marketing is soon you’re going to have thousands of people creating augmented reality apps — mostly games. But you have about 10 percent that will be utilitarian stuff — things that can help navigation, real estate or home decor — and they’re going to need to make money somehow. So, you’ll have a massive demand for advertising on augmented reality apps. The problem is, there’s no such thing as augmented reality ads yet. You have banner ads, video ads, game demo ads… but none of those are going to play well with an augmented reality app. If you’re playing a zombie shoot `em game and they’re coming at you in the park, and then you have to watch a 15-second video ad, it’s not going to connect well. But if McDonald’s had an ad where the Hamburglar came from behind a tree and starts throwing cheeseburgers at you and you’re catching them with your hand, and then he starts running away and you have to follow him, and he’s running toward the closest McDonald’s — that is a very engaging, relevant ad. So, because we’re seeing this, we’re going to be creating a new company that deals only with creating augmented reality ads.

The Denver Metro tech market is exploding. What are you seeing? Any trends in Arvada, specifically?

Here’s why Arvada is really important, especially in the Olde Town Area, closer to Highway 70 — there are so many new buildings going up and a lot of them are commercial buildings. Real estate offices are going to be in high demand and downtown is really expensive. So, as the tech market explodes, you’ll have more companies expanding to the outskirts. And Arvada’s going to benefit a lot from that. Tech is booming here. One advantage Denver has is we can grow out, we’re not restricted to only growing up. Google is building a complex in Broomfield. Amazon, we’re on the short list for their new headquarters. And I’ll make the prediction they’re coming here. It’s like when Payton Manning was up for grabs. The second he sat down with Elway, it was over because it wasn’t about the money. When it comes to Denver and Amazon, Bezos, although he wants a good deal, I believe he realizes what the millennials are after. Gone are the days you move to go work for a company. Now the companies are moving where you want to be. And Denver is a place where millennials want to be. It’s a lifestyle culture.

What are your thoughts on the new iPhone X?

Here’s why the iPhone X is so important. The one thing Apple’s been able to do historically is create hardware that allowed people to come up with their own imaginations of how to build into that. The big leap was when they first came out with the iPhone they made the app store. They said, here’s all the tools to do it and go nuts. That was brilliant because it’s basically crowdsourcing content. They haven’t done anything that big since then. But this is huge because they know augmented reality is the next thing and they built something that we get to reverse engineer — and your imagination is the only ceiling. The only people that can make these apps now are super-high end, extremely skilled coders. But the tool kits are allowing more people with slightly less skill to do it. The iPhone X, in my opinion, is another leap because it was built for one purpose: augmented reality. This phone is the augmented reality phone.