As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.
This time it is Derek Belch, CEO of Strivr, which positions itself as a platform to elevate employee performance through virtual reality-enabled immersive experiences. I was introduced to him by the Workday Ventures team.
Derek played football at Stanford from 2003 to 2007. He went back to Stanford as a graduate assistant for the football team in 2013 and simultaneously worked on a Master’s thesis on training football players using virtual reality. “The whole premise was here's a VR device, a headset. The quarterback puts this thing on their face. Their body is off the field, but their brain thinks they're on the field. It's a much more realistic way to see what's going on during a play. And you can get an infinite number of reps in a short amount of time.”
The quarterback simulator was their first application and he says it was reasonably successful (I think he is being modest – Tom Brady used the tool for reps when he arrived in Tampa in 2020 and went on to win his 7th Super Bowl). Importantly, it led to an introduction at Walmart and a foray into enterprise applications. He says “six years later we have over 20,000 headsets out in the field at Walmart, Bank of America, Verizon and FedEx among others.”
Classroom and keyboard-based learning are ineffective, he says. “Goes in one ear and out the other.” “We're building a flight simulator for any job from quarterback to janitor to CEO and everyone in between…we want the VR headset to be part of every employee’s starter pack along with a phone and a laptop”
He walks through various front line and knowledge worker use cases. The ROI is pretty compelling. “we've had customers take three-hour long lectures and e-learning (content) and boil them down to 20 minutes on a headset. Some of our customers are cutting their on-boarding times in half. And the outcome is the similar in terms of proficiency. So that is a major ROI opportunity when you add up 10s of 1000s of people. Some of these are very high churn roles.” He says there may be focus on augmented reality and blue collar roles down the line. Plenty of white collar opportunities to focus on for now.
He walks through his platform and the content creation ecosystem he is growing. Very nicely done in about 20 minutes. There is plenty of sports talk, quotes from Confucius and use cases for the white-collar Metaverse.
BTW I think I have found another recruit for my Technology and my Passion series. He has 264 golf balls and growing in his “stamp collection” from courses from around the world.
