Balancing the Grind with Luis Bravo Martins, Chief Marketing Officer at KIT-AR

Luis Bravo Martins is the Chief Marketing Officer at KIT-AR, an industrial augmented reality solution that digitally enhances the worker on the shopfloor by providing them with the required knowledge when needed.

1) To kick things off, could you tell us a little about your career background and current role?

Sure. Started working 25 years ago (!) in the intersection of marketing and technology and kept in that field ever since. Lived through the .com bubble, through a startup exit that made me feel like a genius and drove me to create two others that crashed and burned.

Arriving in 2014, I started working with immersive technologies and, besides working professionally in that area ever since, I became sort of an enthusiast for its possibilities and challenges. Today, I am Chief Marketing Officer at KIT-AR, an Industry 4.0 startup focused on creating augmented workers in the manufacturing shop floor. 

2) What does a day in your life look like for you? Can you take us through a recent workday?

I work at a remote-first company, so I start the day really early with some stretching and exercise, reading daily news portals and then go on to develop personal projects (right now, a book) or contribute to community projects I’m advising.

When my work hours start, I have half an hour to take care of emails, right before my daily online stand-up with my marketing colleague starts. Most of the meetings happen usually during morning time and I try to leave the afternoon clear to take care of everything that needs to be done – sometimes unsuccessfully, but I’m trying to improve that. 

3) What does work-life balance mean to you and how do you work to achieve that goal?

Working from home as a default and being able to go to the office for meaningful, collective experiences makes absolute sense – given you have the necessary conditions for work from home to be performed.

In my life, I feel there my life improved immensely without the commute, as I’ve used that time to bring exercise to my life and have time to think strategically, rather than not executing. Another thing I noticed is that I became more productive – or at least I feel my time generates a lot more results. 

4) In the past 12 months, have you started or stopped any routines or habits to change your life?

Moments of exercise, mainly and routines themselves – which is actually a big win, with COVID striking two house moves while writing a book. 

5) Do you have any favourite books, podcasts or newsletters that you’d like to recommend?

Sure. I’m now reading Matthew Ball’s The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything and I recommend it, wanting to understand the reasoning why this talk about the metaverse makes sense to be had now.

Most probably, as we walk into it, we’ll have a lot of new, exciting transformations that will facilitate work-life balance – like, for instance, working with AI assistants or holoportation, the remote projection in 3D of a person that becomes visible next us in augmented reality, like our pop-culture perception of what a hologram is. 

6) If you could read an interview about work-life balance by anyone, who would that be?

Professional actors – for instance, Robert DeNiro. The way they need to mentally and physically transform themselves to play roles and then maintain that mindset throughout the film or play astonishes me. 

7) Do you have any last thoughts on work, life or balance that you’d like to share with our readers?

Try VR headsets to do exercise – it actually works! 

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