Interview with Derek Belch, Founder and CEO of Strivr
Derek Belch is the Founder and CEO of Strivr, a company that uses VR technology to assist in employee training and sports training. Prior to starting Strivr, Belch was a football player at Stanford, worked in consulting, and was a football coach at Stanford.
Can you tell us a little about your background before you started Strivr?
I went to Stanford as an undergrad, I played football there from 2003 to 2007, I worked in consulting for a couple years after that, Bruce Allen Hamiliton, then I went to business school in USC in Los Angeles, and while I was in business school I had this thought that if I didn't see coaching before I turned 30, I would regret it forever, so I actually ended up going back to Stanford after my MBA to coach for the football team. While I was coaching, I was a graduate assistant, and my master’s thesis was to come up with a way to train football players using virtual reality. I partnered with a professor at Stanford, Jeremy Bailensen, who runs the VR lab, I had some grad students help me build this prototype, and then at the end of my two years coaching, what we had built was pretty good. David Shaw, the head coach at Stanford, literally sat me down and said you have to get the heck out of here and start a company. So that’s basically how it started- I did some soul searching, talked to my wife, talked to my parents, and decided to give it a run, and here we are today. So that is the genesis of Strivr. I guess the one other thing I’ll add is the first 18 months or so of the business, it was mainly a sports play, using virtual reality to train athletes, and then about 18 months in we got a pretty fortuitous phone call from Walmart, and they wanted us to come down and show what we could do for employee training. That obviously set us on a much different path, and here we are today; we still do sports today, but it’s mainly an enterprise play.
Where did the idea come from for Strivr, and what was your experience like starting it?
It was a collaboration between myself and Jeremy, Professor Bailensen, we were talking about what my project could be. Actually, Jeremy and I, we were fairly close when I was an undergrad, I took a couple of his classes, and so when we were talking, we were like, “Hey, remember your virtual people class I took as an undergrad? What about using VR for sports?” And Jeremy said, “Well, if you had come to me a year ago on this, I don’t think it would be possible, but based on some recent developments in the industry, I actually think that would have a chance now.” So that’s basically how we came up with it.
What challenges did you face while trying to grow the company?
My personal opinion is that ideas are a dime a dozen, it’s all about execution. There are very few truly revolutionary pieces of technology that are actually so unique that nobody else can do it. So once I decided we were going to make a go of it, there was a lot of grit, traversing the country to meet with teams and get our products in front of them. It was a lot of hard work, a lot of luck along the way, we were very fortunate to meet with the right teams at the right time, I have some very great relationships in sports to this day from some of the general managers and coaches that bought our products. And once you get a product in a customer’s hands, and someone’s paying you for it, you have to deliver. Then you’re like customer support, and making improvements along the way, and there’s a lot. So a tremendous amount of execution is necessary for any business to get going. Then, less about VR but more about starting a business period, we grew very quickly. We went from 0 to 30 employees in about a year and a half, we went from 30 to 60 employees a year later, we went from 60 to 120 employees a year after that, and when you’re growing that fast in people and revenue and products and customers, honestly it’s just a shitshow. You have to figure out how you’re going to continue to keep your sanity and deliver a quality product and communicate with each other, and that’s just Business 101, that’s not necessarily VR related.
Do you use your own hardware and software, or do you use third party solutions? If you created it, how did you develop the necessary technology for it?
We don’t make hardware- we use other people’s hardware. We’ve mainly used Oculus to date, but that’s starting to change because more and more companies are starting to produce other devices. Our vision is to be more and more agnostic over time and make our stuff work on all of the hardware that’s out there. Software-wise, we’ve developed all of our own software from scratch, basically. The software that is powering everything is our own proprietary technology that we built from the ground up, and we build all the content, too, for our customers, and there’s a lot of stuff that we built that is unique to Strivr.
How do you tailor your technology to fit the needs of different industries to train their employees?
Honestly, if we had to build custom software for every industry and every customer, we would be in trouble. They call that a product-driven organization is a company that’s building one project for many people versus an ad agency that’s building specific, customized products in the form of advertisement, commercials, brand campaigns for many customers. So we’re trying to be very mindful of not going overboard on custom work on a customer by customer basis. That’s something that we keep in mind. So the software that’s powering everything is pretty much the same, minus a few little tweaks here and there. The content that customers use for the VR training, that is specific to them, but it is built from a platform that is identical from customer to customer.
What are some of the fields in which VR training is more effective?
At this point, honestly, it’s still really early. It’s kind of everywhere, there isn’t one particular field, but we have personally seen the most traction in retail, Walmart is a very big customer of ours, we have FedEx as well, so logistics has been another big area for us, we have Verizon, so telecoms, the military and DOD has been using VR technology like this for a long time, and there’s also a lot of traction in healthcare right now. Anywhere where there's a front-line type worker, more of a task worker than a knowledge worker, those are all really good fits for VR. Eventually, it will become more of a knowledge worker-type tool. But engineers, financial analysts and stuff, that’s just not the right fit right now.
How do you plan to expand Strivr, either making it applicable to more fields or making it more widely used?
We’re selling. We’re doing everything we can to sell, and we’re fortunate to have many big customers in many areas: Walmart, Verizon, BMW, FedEx. These are all household names, so we’re just trying to leverage those relationships, trying to leverage the success we’ve had with those customers, and try to reproduce it. We have a sales team, we have a marketing team, I’m personally involved in a lot of our deals, so we’re just trying to do what we can.
Do you see VR training completely replacing the traditional form of employee training?
I don’t think it’s going to completely replace everything. I think it’s going to complement and supplement, for the most part. The world of training and learning was already going through what’s called a blended learning approach, so we’re fitting into that. I think there are a few areas where it will replace things, the biggest thing that we’ve seen is in respect to onboarding time we’ve been able to help customers reduce their onboarding time from, for example, 40 hours to 20 hours. There are a number of things they’re doing where it’s just replacing it. They’re saying, “Hey, we don’t need to do this anymore in a classroom, we could do this in VR instead. We don’t need to walk them into the store anymore, we can just have them put on a headset.” So there are a lot of those opportunities, but for the most part, I don’t see it replacing things. I see it being another tool in the tool belt.