Podcast: Strivr CEO Derek Belch on VR Learning Today

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Mark:

Welcome to PeopleTech the podcast of the HCM technology report. I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today is Derek Belch, founder and CEO of Strivr. They’re a company that provides immersive learning solutions. That means they combine virtual reality tools with content and implementation services. We’ll talk about how it all works and where it’s going on this edition of PeopleTech. Derek. Welcome. So, can you give me a brief overview of Strivr and what it does?

Derek:

Sure. Strivr uses virtual reality… At the most basic level, Strivr uses virtual reality for employee training. If we want to go a little more nuanced than that, Strivr has built an enterprise grade software platform that allows organizations to create virtual reality content, manage that content remotely through the cloud, manage devices and we have a very substantive data and analytics portal for our customers.

Mark:

OK. Now, does that mean that you are sort of governing every session from a central platform or is every user’s headset working on its own?

Derek:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I’ll kind of give you a two-part answer. So, first off, Strivr, as of today, we are an end-to-end solution. It’s very early in the market right now and there are a lot of companies, a lot of startups out there and even large companies attacking different pieces of the value chain to put VR in the hands of organizations for employee training. With the exception of hardware, we do not make hardware. Now we have to do a lot of things to touch the hardware and provision the hardware and get it ready to go, which I’m happy to talk about if necessary, but with the exception of hardware, we’re literally doing everything else. We’re making content, we are doing strategy and alignment sessions with our customers, we ship devices out, we do change management, we have data analytics. And we built all the software to make that happen.

Derek:

So, from a software and a services perspective, we’ve built pretty much everything that you need, an organization needs to successfully deliver VR training to their associates. Now, the other part of that answer is what’s happening when an employee puts a headset on their face? And the answer to that is well, could be a couple things. Many of our customers actually as of today, when they use Strivr, that headset is operating in offline mode because they want it to be kind of locked down. They don’t want people playing games, they don’t want them in the Oculus store or whatever’s going to happen. So, in that sense, that headset is like dark to the world when they’re using it and it doesn’t go back online until we tell it to go online.

Derek:

And then when it does, we can upload and download different pieces of content. We can get the data analytics that we need to do, we can remote into devices if there’s a technical challenge, the list is very long of what we can do once it’s online. And then in other cases, sometimes customers use Strivr streaming, pulling it down directly from an internet connection in real time. So, kind of a long-winded answer. Not super simple but in a nutshell, we are kind of powering the entire experience as of today.

Mark:

Well, you say, not a short answer but I don’t know how you could answer that briefly. I was able to try out Strivr and there are parts of it that are really impressive. I mean, more impressive than I would’ve expected. I’m talking about recordings of users themselves that sort of mimic the movement the person made and walking around an airplane, a jet, to how to fix it. Can you talk a little bit about how you make that all happen.

Derek:

Sure. So, the metaphor that I love to use when talking about VR period, and then we’ll go to Strivr specifically is a flight simulator. So, why have pilots use flight simulators for decades? Well, it’s because they’re basically flying the plane without actually flying the plane and they can get those repetitions again and again and again until they prove that they’re going to fly the plane the right way in the real world. They’re not going to crash the plane and kill anybody, flush a 100 million asset down the drain, et cetera. So, at Strivr, we take a flight simulator like approach when we engage with our customers. And first, Mark, that’s from through the lens of building content where we actually sit down, I mentioned this before, we actually sit down and do almost like strategic consulting engagements with customers.

Derek:

Tell me how you train your workforce. Where do you train them? Why do you train them? What do you train them on? Where do you see VR fitting in? What kind of ROI are you looking for here? The list is very, very long and so, what’s on your mind? We hear a hundred ideas from customers and candidly, most of the time, 80 of them, aren’t in a very good use for the technology. And so we kind of got to whittle that list down smaller and smaller. So, we start with heavy, heavy strategic consulting. And then from there, we’re doing, we’re building learning plans. We’re doing hardcore and structural design and writing scripts. We’re either obtaining assets by filming 360 video in a live environment or building 3D models. And then we go and we actually build the learning modules with our authoring tools that we’ve built as well, which is part of the platform.

Derek:

So, it really is a suit to nuts process. And that’s the first lens, which is the content build. We want the content build to resemble a flight simulator as much as possible, where an associate, an employee puts a headset on their face and feels like they are in the shoes they would be in, in their job. Whether that is on an assembly line, whether that’s in a Walmart store, whether that is sitting across from an avatar, I have to verbally fire this person and how’s that going to go. It feels real. That’s what we’re going for from a content perspective. And then the second half of this is the vision. And again, back to the flight simulator. Today, the industry and Strivr’s no different, but we’re further along than others. It’s very much a content first sale, very much a content first engagement.

Derek:

Well, we’re trying to build the flight simulator. So, our vision is all about predictive analytics. And we want to productize what is happening in and around the content to where, when Mark takes the headset off after going through his training, Mark’s employer will know if Mark is prepared to do the job. And as of today, how are we measuring preparedness? Did you take the training or didn’t you, what was your score on a multiple choice exam? It’s just a check in the box on some of these 2d mediums. Whereas VR allows for a learning by doing experience and you can actually prove efficacy and that you know what you’re going to do when, when the real world comes along.

Mark:

Now, it seems that in the last few years, more companies have been getting into this space, both VR in general VR learning in particular. What sets Strivr apart?

Derek:

Yeah. Great question. So, first off let’s acknowledge what you’ve said is an accurate statement. The tide is rising for sure. There was that kind of initial push of investment dollars back in 2014, 15 when it was more kind of a pure consumer play. And then there was a little bit of a cool off period and now there’s a lot more money going back into VR. Given that consumer usage is actually on the rise. Quite significantly, COVID probably helped with that with people being stuck indoor for the better part of 2020. So the tide is rising for sure. And what makes Strivr different and our competitive advantage comes down to two things. Number one, we are an end end solution.

Derek:

So, we, we look our customers in the eye, we show them the value chain of what it takes to pull this off and we say, if you want to do this yourself, we are happy to give you a list of vendors in each of these columns and good luck. But it’s going to take, it’s going to take longer, it’s going to cost more and it’s probably going to fail if you do that. We’re just very direct with our customers about that. So, the fact that while the market is being built and the categories are being built, the fact that we do, basically everything is a huge competitive advantage for us. Not only can we pull it off and actually back put our money where our mouth is and back up what we say we’re going to deliver, but also we’ve just learned more than everyone else across the spectrum.

Derek:

I mean, even the companies that are making hardware and making it very successfully with Oculus under Facebook, HTC, Lenovo, Hewlett Packard and eventually apple, Microsoft. They’re all calling us and we, we tell them something new every time we talk and they’re like, oh, wow, that was interesting. I didn’t know that’s what an organization would need to be successful. So we’ve just built a ton of trade seekers in addition to a lot [inaudible] IP. So that’s kind of like the first part of it. And then the second part is we can scale. We have built the software infrastructure. We have the people, the bodies, the humans to be able to do this at scale and objectively, not arrogantly because I’ve met with every other startup under the sun at this point in this space. No one else has that. And we do. And so, obviously our job is to take advantage of this lead that we have over everyone and make it bigger over time and not let people catch up to us.

Mark:

Okay. Now, to talk a little bit about the learning itself, does VR learning fit with some topics better than others?

Derek:

I think so. Yeah. As I alluded to earlier, we hear a lot of ideas from customers and they’re usually the same. Virtual tours of headquarters, data visualization and onboarding and all these other things that were like, yeah, why not just keep doing that in 2d? That’s Microsoft Excel and VR is not a great use of the technology right now and we hear you on the virtual little tour of headquarters, but that’s going to be pretty boring after like 19 seconds. And they’re just looking around in an office, what’s the big deal? So what we focus on are action oriented things. Skill building things, decision making moments and the four buckets of use cases that we’ve observed at this point, kind of the themes are operations process procedures, whether it’s literally doing a task or mentally making a decision, a situational awareness type thing, something operational bucket two is safety and hazards.

Derek:

A lot of stuff on the that can fall into that bucket. Bucket three is customer service and bucket four is soft skills, management, training, giving, and receiving feedback, all things associated with empathy, put myself in that person’s shoes type of things. So, those are the four buckets. As of today, I think VR is best for buckets one and two, the operational and the safety and hazards buckets. You know, more of a, I like to say kind of more of like a frontline worker type use case as of today. But we’ve already started doing buckets three and four with many of our customers. Customer service and soft skills. And certainly the knowledge worker is the other half of the workforce in America and in the world. And that’s where this is going to go over time. It’s going to be a frontline worker tool and a knowledge worker tool.

Mark:

Now, how does it stack up in terms of cost? I think most people believe something like VR is going to just be expensive, is it?

Derek:

It can be. But I mean, what’s expensive? Honestly, as of today, it’s not that far off from a lot of 2D learning methods. The making of an e-learning module, a short film, a commercial flying 20 executives into a one city for a three day workshop. I mean, it’s not that far off, if you’re, and I don’t want to go too deep on every nook and cranny but you probably… If we’re talking about just building a piece of content, you could find everything from a million dollars, high end, crazy, George Lucas ask content to free because someone’s so desperate to get a logo on their website that they’ll give it to you for free. So, if we set the polls aside, I would say most learning modules are anywhere in the $30,000 to $130,000 range as far.

Derek:

And that’s not that far off from a lot off from what exists today within the old way of learning. And then you hardware and yeah. Buying 50,000 headsets is probably going to add up to several million dollars, just like buying 50,000 computers and tablets and phones. And so maybe an organization isn’t quite ready yet for that level of spend based on the ROI that they’re maybe yet to see, but buying a couple dozen headsets, a couple dozen headsets, even a couple thousand headsets, it’s not cost prohibitive. It’s not cost prohibitive for the fortune 1000, maybe for a mom and pop shop. So, we’re not quite there yet. The market’s not quite ready for the democratization of the technology and the cost associated with a small business per se, but for large organizations, it’s not. It’s not expensive. And the ROIs real from where we sit at least.

Mark:

Okay. Last question. Where do you want the technology to be? What do you wish that VR could do right now and do you think it’s going to get there eventually?

Derek:

Are you referring Mark to the headsets themselves or just the whole world of VR technology? The whole world. Okay. Yeah. I mean, how long do we have? I have a very long wish list. So, the hardware has improved very significantly over the last five, six years, but it has to get better. It has to be less of a brick on your face and more of a pair of swing goggles or glasses or something that is less obtrusive, cumbersome, heavy, hot, whatever. The field of view has to improve, the resolution has to improve. So, the hardware just has to get better. I mean, it’s not bad today. It’s totally good enough for a really awesome user experience as Strivr and lots of others are proving. But that’s number one of my wish list. Is hardware to improve significantly to where that is not an area of friction for an end user.

Derek:

I mean, I’ll just tell you straight up. Here we are in 2021 and I’ve done hundreds of demos over the last few years and I still have folks that don’t want to put it on their face, because they’re worried it’s going to mess up their hair and makeup. And that’s just where we are right now. And that has to improve obviously. And then obviously there’s a lot of other stuff that I mentioned. So, first off it’s hardware and then the second part of it is… And this, again, that’s why I asked are we talking just the hardware or bigger? It goes back to our vision as a company. What needs to happen for that flight simulator to be real? From an AI perspective, from a content perspective, from a degrees of freedom, with a device perspective, from a change management and social acceptance perspective and companies making enough room a building for devices. The reason why flight simulators are so effective is because when the pilot walks in, they’re literally walking into a cockpit, like I’ve been in one, they look identical, the cockpits.

Derek:

And so for us at Strivr, we need, a) we need our own product to be able to do this but b) there’s a lot of things outside of our own product that we don’t control necessarily that we need that experience to feel like a flight simulator for employee. When they put that headset on and they’re like, holy blank. I am in the store, I am in the restaurant. I am sitting at my desk and there’s nothing that can distinguish… What’s the word I’m looking for. Nothing that can break that extended sense of reality. And there’s a lot that goes into that but I think that’s my dream right there from a vision perspective.

Mark:

Derek, thanks for visiting today.

Derek:

Thank you mark. Anytime

Mark:

My guest today has been Derek Belch, the founder and CEO of the immersive learning company Strivr. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM technology report. We are a publication [inaudible] daily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM technology report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us@www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m mark Feffer.

Image: Strivr

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