Derek Belch (STRIVR) on VR Training for Quarterbacks and Walmart Clerks
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The Guest
Derek Belch is the co-founder and CEO of STRIVR, a company on a mission to elevate performance through immersive experience.
Derek incubated the company with co-founder Jeremy Bailenson in Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab while pursuing his Masters in Virtual Reality and serving as a graduate assistant football coach.
Using sports as his proving ground, Derek’s vision quickly expanded from the athlete to the enterprise. Derek is driven by a competitive passion for impacting performance, and with STRIVR, is pushing everyone to train like an athlete.
The Conversation
In this conversation, Derek shares the origin story for the company, including how he landed at Stanford pursuing a Masters in VR, the incubation of the STRIVR product, its rapid rise in sports, and the opportunistic shift to the enterprise.
Derek touches on the science of learning within VR and he goes on to explore more deeply the impact it can have on the field and on the job.
Self-admittedly, Derek is not a tech guy; yet he and STRIVR are excelling with this frontier technology. He relies on strong leadership traits and lessons learned, and he shares a few of them here in the episode.
Links From The Episode
- Article: Walmart is putting 17,000 VR headsets in its US stores for training by The Verge
- Article: The Fall and Rise of VR: The Struggle to Make Virtual Reality Get Real by Fortune
- Book: The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle, Will Damron, et al.
- Book: Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr
- Episode Transcript
- Episode Summary by Mike Boland at AR Insider