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Derek Belch is the co-founder and CEO of STRIVR, a VR company that seeks to make on-the-job training tactile with interactive, simulated experiences, rather than ho-hum videos and PowerPoint presentations. Since its founding in 2015, it has raised $86 million from a variety of investors, including Workday Ventures and Accenture Ventures. We talked to Belch about how STRIVR’s VR tech works, and his thoughts on the future of vocational training.
What product or service does your company offer? At the highest level, STRIVR provides virtual reality-based simulations and solutions for employee training and the enterprise...At a more specific, granular level, we have built a very robust software platform that enables the content creation, content distribution, data and analytic collection, and enterprise-grade security and compliance to do VR at scale in the enterprise. Big picture: VR training. More specifically...we’re selling the content services and software that is necessary to pull that off.
How does the service work? There’s so many nuances here, but from a basic perspective, in order to do VR training, a company needs VR headsets. We do not make hardware, but we work with the hardware manufacturers and the customers to figure out what the best hardware is for them. We procure and provision that hardware on their behalf. They need content to go in the hardware…There’s the software required to pull this off—it’s one thing to sideload an app onto a headset, it’s a whole other thing to get on a company’s network and have employees enter their idea and get through their security and IP process….So, the organization purchases a software license, not unlike how they would buy Salesforce, Workday, SAP, or Microsoft Word.
What specific issue in HR does your company intend to solve? I think we can all agree that a lot of the ways that organizations approach training and learning in the enterprise just doesn’t work. Very often, it’s e-learning, it’s PowerPoint, it’s lectures. That information goes in one ear and out the other, and STRIVR is aiming to disrupt the older way of learning. VR allows for a “flight simulator” experience for: insert job here, insert task here, insert role here. So, we’re looking to bring learning into the 21st century, speak the language of the younger employee, and at the end of the day, provide a better learning outcome and ideally real world performance outcome for the enterprise.
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How does your company solve that specific issue? When we engage with customers, we very often ask them to give us everything—tell us everything that they do in the 2D world. Very often, what we’re doing is we’re “VR-izing” occurrence, process, procedure, or training methodology. There are four use-cases that most customers are doing right now. Number one is operations process and procedures. Number two is safety and hazards. Number three is customer service. And number four is all things soft skills and interpersonal skills.
What kind of companies are your primary customers? Most of our customers are Fortune 1000 organizations with 10,000-plus employees [and] large distributed workforces. Lots of restaurants, retail stores, warehouses, logistics centers, in general. Most importantly, frontline workers are the end users and are very often our customers.
So, how do you think the HR tech field will evolve over the next five to 10 years? In one word, I think it’s going to get more experiential. Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen it get more digital, from paper and pencil and in-person, to online, e-learning on phones and tablets. The next 10-plus years are going to see get more experiential, with technology like VR, AR, and eventually mixed-reality and holograms. Again, that flight simulator metaphor is just so good. How can we give our employees flight simulator-like experiences, so they can learn by doing versus learn by watching or listening?
How will your company help drive that evolution? We’re the industry leader in this space. We’ve got over 20,000 headsets out in the field across our customer base, we’ve had over a million different employees put headsets on their faces in the last five years for the purpose of training and learning and development. We’re going to keep going, we’re going to keep innovating, we’re going to keep leaning into the data and analytics that are possible with all of this.
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