Kyle Russell
Chief of Staff at Bigscreen VR
Brooklyn, New York
Overview
Work Experience
Product Enablement Lead
2025 - Current
Valon is a tech-enabled residential mortgage servicer.
Raised $197,100,000.00 from WestCap and Andreessen Horowitz.
Chief of Staff
2024 - 2025
Building next-generation VR hardware and software. Driving operations, finance, and marketing as we scale Bigscreen Beyond, the world's smallest VR headset. Launched in 2023, Beyond is 4-6X lighter, 2X higher resolution, and supports the most popular SteamVR games including Beat Saber, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and VRChat. We're also the developers of Bigscreen, a VR app that lets you watch movies, play games, and hangout with friends in a virtual living room. Bigscreen has millions of users and is available on the Meta Quest and Valve Index headsets. Bigscreen is funded by leading Silicon Valley investors True Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
Bigscreen is a popular VR/AR platform that enables people to work, play, hangout, and collaborate in immersive worlds
Raised $14,000,000.00 from Andreessen Horowitz and True Ventures.
Founder/CEO
2019 - 2024
- Assembled a team from backgrounds in tech and games at places like Google Material Design and ArenaNet to build an iOS app letting users create, play, and remix games from their phone. - Launched to the App Store after hitting 10,000 user TestFlight cap with zero spend on customer acquisition by creating videos to highlight user-made games on TikTok.
Platform Partnerships
2018 - 2019
- Worked with companies in the insurance, power transmission, and law enforcement industries to conceive, demonstrate, and ultimately deploy commercial solutions built around Skydio's fully autonomous drones. - Spearheaded the successful pursuit of the Short-Range Reconnaissance program of record to deploy Skydio's drones with the US Army for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance and led the pursuit and fulfilment of our SBIR contracts with the US Air Force. - Worked with engineers at Skydio to build necessary APIs and tooling for third-party developers to successfully prototype and ship applications built to operate Skydio drones for high-value workflow automation.
Product Marketing Manager
2017 - 2019
Launched Skydio R1, the world's first self-flying camera.
Skydio uses artificial intelligence to create flying drones that are used by consumer, enterprise, and government customers.
Raised $740,000,000.00 from KDDI, Axon, Linse Capital, Linse Capital, Hercules Capital, Axon, Andreessen Horowitz, DoCoMo Capital, Next47 and UP Partners.
Deal Partner
2015 - 2017
Worked with Chris Dixon (early investor in Oculus, Coinbase) to invest in startups building "emerging computing platforms" in virtual/augmented reality, drones, robotics, and machine learning.
Andreessen Horowitz is a stage-agnostic venture capital firm with assets under management across multiple funds.
Writer
2014 - 2015
Interviewed startup founders, venture capitalists, and technical subject matter experts to write news and analysis about virtual reality, app development, backend infrastructure, drones, and other emerging technologies.
Technology Reporter
2013 - 2014
- Primarily covered Apple and enterprise software for the technology section. - Contributed features to the entertainment, politics, and advertising sections.
1 minute view of the world as it happens
Founder, Editor
2009 - 2013
Managed a team of five other writers, blogging about technology, politics, media, and more. Responsible for keeping everyone on schedule and writing about topics our audience found appealing.
Technology Director
2013 - 2013
Created a new website for “California Modernization and Economic Development Act” campaign on NationBuilder’s CMS after prototyping on Wordpress. Managed social media presences and mailing lists for subscribers and volunteers for the CMED Act campaign.