Bill Kerr: In 2007, Derek Belch took a class with Stanford professor and virtual reality expert Jeremy Bailenson. A kicker on the football team, Derek saw the technology’s potential to improve player preparation.

When, several years later, he returned to his alma mater as a grad student and assistant coach, the technology had caught up to his vision.

He founded STRIVR with Jeremy to introduce virtual reality to college football and then to the National Football League.

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host Bill

Kerr:. Today I’m speaking with Derek about how STRIVR is applying virtual reality to learning in the enterprise.

Virtual reality seems like a natural fit for professional football. Quarterbacks are paid millions to make split-second decisions based on their visual read of a situation.

Derek, however, is also going to tell us how virtual reality has the potential to revolutionize workplace learning – from stocking produce to having difficult conversations and better empathizing with a customer.

Welcome, Derek.

Derek Belch: Cool. Thanks, Bill. Thanks for having me.

Kerr: So, Derek, we’ve had on this podcast a number of different technologies—from chatbots up to artificial intelligence. Position for us virtual reality—maybe, how is that different from augmented reality? Get us set on this technology.

Belch: So, virtual reality [VR] is taking your brain to another place, and that is achieved via complete immersion. So when I put a headset on, if VR is done correctly, right, there’s going to be very little to any light let in that headset. I’m going to look left, I’m going to look right, I’m going to look behind me. I am going to feel mentally—maybe physically—but no wind or heat or any of that yet, at least today. I’m going to feel like I’m somewhere else. And this could be gaming. This could be helping cure a fear of heights. This could be work. So that’s VR, right? Mental transportation via immersion. Augmented reality [AR], on the other hand, is really just like it sounds: augmenting the world around you. Heads-up displays for pilots. The miles-per-hour flashing on your windshield, right? AR has been around for a while, and what it really comes down to there is: I’m wearing something on my face. I have a screen in front of me—whatever—but I’m not taken out of the real world visually, auditorily. I am augmenting the real world around me with some sort of graphical overlay on another display. Think Minority Report. That’s, at least, where the world wants it to go. I think that’s going to be a scary world. But those are the fundamental differences.

Kerr: Yeah. And in the virtual reality earlier this year we had to chance to put on your headsets and so forth. It is immersive. How does people’s sort of cognitive state change? How much are they “tricked” into this new reality?

Belch: When VR’s done correctly, your brain is taken elsewhere. The bottom line is: We are not evolved to the point where we can tell the difference between a virtual simulation and the real world. And lot of people won’t spend enough time in VR over the next year, five years, 10 years probably, to be able to do that. So for the next decade, highly likely that good VR is always going to be taking us to another place, from a mental standpoint, right? And basically there’s two different forms of VR right now. There’s 360 video, which is largely rotational. I can’t walk through a video because it’s a real video, right? I can’t go inside those pixels necessarily. So when I’m watching 360 video, I’m just rotating. And I’m looking around, up, down, left, right, behind me. And I’m in that scene but I can’t walk over and touch you, right? But if I’m in a CGI experience, more of a game, and I’ve got sensors tracking my physical position relative to those pixels, I can. And I can move. I could walk to you. I could walk to that door. First person shooter, stacking a box on a shelf, whatever it is, I can actually really have my mind and my body feel like they’re there, and that’s the Holy Grail.

Kerr: Okay. And now, take us back to the football. And it’s rare on this podcast series that we have a company whose ... Minnesota Vikings was one of their early customers. So how are you using this in football? What was the sales pitch that you gave to organizations?

Belch: I played football at Stanford as an undergrad, and then I went to... I worked in consulting for a couple of years. Went to business school. And then went back to Stanford to coach with this thought in my head that if I don’t see coaching before I turn 30, I’ll regret it forever. And while I was coaching, my master’s thesis—because I was enrolled in a master’s program as well—was to come up with a way to train football players using virtual reality. And, basically, the Stanford football team was the lab rat, right? And Coach Shaw, the head coach, endorsed it. He’s like, “Hey anything you want to do to get an A and that could help the team get better, let’s go!” And the reason why it makes so much sense is because, in the NFL and college, especially—and this is starting to trickle down to high school, too—there are rules related to how long you’re allowed to spend on the field. So you only get 90 minutes on Sundays, two hours on other days, right? On top of that, it’s a very physically demanding game, so you don’t want to be out there all day. Well, the thing that people don’t realize is how mental the game is. When you watch Tom Brady throw a touchdown on a Sunday, odds are he got that play one time on the field during the week. And he relied on his film preparation and his visualization and the chalkboard, right, to prepare him for what that play could be against this defense, this defense, this defense, or this defense. Then he goes in the game and he just reacts, and hopefully his preparation takes over. So what we’ve been able to do—why VR made a ton of sense early on—was, how can I just bring the field into the film room so I have a more realistic experience of being on the field without actually being on the field from a preparation standpoint?

Kerr: And were there positions other than quarterbacks where this was principally being used?

Belch: So we’ve done just about everything at this point, literally every position on the field. The main home run applications are quarterback, linebacker, safety …

Kerr: People that have got to read a whole bunch of information.

Belch: Yeah, and where there’s a lot of information in front of them, honestly, before they even move, right? So think about a linebacker. He is not even moving to go make a tackle until he diagnoses what happens. So that’s why this is great fit for football. Whereas soccer, hockey, basketball, there’s a lot … they’re very fluid sports. So if you put a headset on to do virtual basketball training, and we’re running you down the court, you might throw up in 10 seconds. But in football, it’s “read, react, go!” So those mental reps before you go are super important. So quarterback, linebacker, safety. And then the kicker.

Kerr: Yeah, yeah.

Belch: I’m a former kicker. But visualization and training your brain to see “makes” and not “misses” ... I can tell you as a former kicker and an avid golfer, you visualize misses, right? I’m over a three-foot putt. I’m a scratch golfer. I’m pretty good. I’m over a three-foot putt, I’m visualizing a miss. Training the brain to not visualize misses …

Kerr: And does virtual reality help at all with the stress of the situation?

Belch: We’ve had some kickers—and quarterbacks—but a lot of kickers. They pump crowd noise in there, right? They hear the call, “All right. White, white, white, set go,” whatever. And they’re seeing the ball snap. They’re seeing themselves make a kick. So they’re putting themselves emotionally in that situation.

Kerr: So tell us about how this transitioned to Walmart. That’s an amazing story with the Arkansas Razorbacks and... Walk us through how you got your first regular client.

Belch: I call it a fortuitous inbound. The way that it happened was Bret Bielema, the head coach of Arkansas football at the time, they were a customer. And he texted me and said, “Hey this guy from Walmart was just in the office, a donor and avid fan. He wants your number. Can I give it to him?” I’m like, “Sure!” So that was it. That was how it happened. And I went down there a month later, and two weeks later we had a signed deal. And the cool thing was, I went down there having some ideas of how it could work, but everything they’re telling me about the pain they have to train people effectively is identical to the quarterback use case.

Kerr: Yeah, I think you have to unpack that a little bit more for us, because it’s hard for me to think of a Walmart front-line worker who’s being paid $13 an hour vs. the NFL quarterback, $13 million.

Belch: Yeah.

Kerr: How are they similar?

Belch: Sure. So, Walmart’s very unique, and they have an academy system, not unlike a lot of companies that have regional training facilities and stuff. But Walmart has invested a ton of money into this academy program. They’ve got 200 of them throughout the United States, and they’re attached to stores. So their curriculum is based on videos, lectures, PowerPoints, et cetera, like everyone does. But then they actually go in the store for probably 70 percent of their training. And if you put yourself in Walmart’s shoes, they can only do so much related to, “Here’s where the bananas go. Here’s where the vegetables go. Here’s what a spill looks like. Here’s what an angry customer looks like.” They can only do so much relative to paying customers in the stores 24 hours a day, right? You’re not going to close down aisle six to train 30 managers. So they need to just watch things, and they don’t know what they’re going to get on any given day. So when we started working together, they were like, “Okay. Where are all of the incidences?” just like with sports, where we can bring the store into the classroom. And now we don’t have to go into the store for certain things. Or, for some of those random one-offs that you may see once or twice a year but are really high impact, we can train on it right now. And we can train on it 100 times.

Kerr: Yeah, like Black Friday. Great. So tell us about the range of use cases that you’re currently now working with.

Belch: Yeah. So we work with about 30 customers in the Fortune 500. We’re actually very selective. Unlike a lot startups—and I’m sure you’ve seen this before—saying no is really hard, and we say no a lot, which is weird when people want to pay you money and you’re trying to build your business, but we do. And Walmart, everything that Walmart’s doing, mainly related to operations, customer service, et cetera. We’ve been working with Verizon for about a year now on emotional preparedness in case the store gets robbed. JetBlue, airplane mechanics and certain stuff there. BMW, assembly line, Six Sigma type stuff. So it’s a pretty wide range right now.

Kerr: And if you had a way of sort of summarizing what makes a good use case, how would that …?

Belch: Yeah. Situational awareness is probably where I’d go. We are not, at STRIVR, we’re not doing a ton of what I call tactile VR, where you’re walking across a room, you’re picking something up, you’re stacking a shelf with a virtual box. The reason for that is, from our perspective, that doesn’t scale operationally—meaning these companies don’t have a lot of space to have someone move around a room, right? Walmart has four headsets in every store. They don’t have four rooms in every store that they can commandeer to have someone run around and chase zombies in VR, right?

Kerr: Yeah. Got you.

Belch: Or stack a shelf. So really what it comes down to, with our formula, using 360 video, is situational awareness. All right. We’re going to drop your brain into a scene that you will see from the first minute to the hundredth hour, to the hundredth day, when you do your job, when you come out of training. And let’s see how you react. Let’s teach you from the shoes you’ll actually be in, and let’s quiz you, and let’s see where you look right vs. left. Then let’s assess you, and let’s see how you do when this is the real deal, not a pencil-and-paper exam. That is what we’re doing, fundamentally.

Kerr: How do you move from situation awareness into the broader soft skills, learning how to interact with customers?

Belch: We’re doing some of that right now in different ways, both content-wise, as well as business goals and software-wise. I feel that … soft skills is what I’ll call the long tail. Eventually, hopefully everyone in the knowledge-worker world vs. the front-line worker is using VR for training, largely on soft skills, because there isn’t a ton that we could train on with VR behind a computer necessarily, which is what a lot of us do. So what do they train on? What do managers train on? Well, they train on hiring and firing. They train on giving feedback. They train on executive presence, right? So that’s our vision for the future. We think we’ll have an opportunity to have some off-the-shelf content there. You can only teach those things so many ways. But, probably four or five customers right now are doing something in that area. It’s a little different execution, both software-wise and content-wise. Then, really what it comes down to is change management. I mean, your question was how do we do the soft skills? It’s different, operationally. In a Walmart store, in a BMW factory, with a front-line worker, their work environment and their time is structured in a different way than yours as a knowledge worker, as a professor. So when are you going to use this? Where are you going to use it? What are you going to use it for? Ten minutes? Twenty minutes? Thirty minutes? We’re trying to replace role play, first and foremost, when people do training, and then we’ll see where it goes from there. Fidelity has been a customer of ours, a local company headquartered here. They approached us with a use case that I was not very high on from the beginning. They said, “Hey, we want to use this for call center training.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?”

Kerr: As an entrepreneur do you usually come back with, “What are you talking about?”

Belch: Yes and no. They said, “We have seen our customer-service scores in certain areas suffer as a result of a lack of empathy for the person calling on the other end of the phone.” Okay, that’s interesting. So what we did was, we kind of created this dual experience that’s kind of 20 percent to 30 percent transactional, just teach you how to operate within the busy call-center environment, and then really 70 percent to 80 percent building empathy for the person on the other end of the phone. There’s a handful of different scenarios that they can choose from. And in one of the cases, you are literally taken into the living room of the person on the other end of the phone. For example, why is this woman calling me asking for this $8.20? This is a waste of my time. I’m going to move on to the next caller. Well, her husband just died, she’s got bills stacked up, her dog’s barking, she just got a hip replacement. Theatrically, we actually take them into the living room of—and it’s actors, right?—but of this fictional caller that was off a real recorded transaction or a real call to build that script. And lo and behold, it’s been working.

Kerr: Maybe from situational awareness to situational empathy for the person that’s on the opposite side.

Belch: Almost immediately, we saw a 10 percent bump in customer-service scores within the first six weeks when we compared people who had been through this training to people that hadn’t. So it’s been a home run. And we’ve done a lot of stuff since with them, but empathy has been an interesting one, to say the least.

Kerr: In our classroom discussion about STRIVR earlier this year, we were imagining incoming faculty members—having them train for their very first days in the classroom. Let’s stick with the traditional Walmart, hotel chain, and so forth. How do you approach the organization? It’s going to come up. What’s the ROI on this?

Belch: Sure.

Kerr: Can’t I just use a computer screen or the old-fashioned manual? I’m sure you get this all the time.

Belch: All the time. The No. 1 question that we get when we go to sell to someone is, what’s the ROI going to be? If we’re doing our job as a sales team and as a thought leader as we’re building this market, we should retort right away, respectfully, “With all due respect, can you tell me the ROI on your current training?” The videos, the PowerPoints, the lectures? Most of the time they’ll say, “We don’t know.” Let’s just stop there. Let’s level the playing field. We don’t even know what the ROI is on what you’re doing today, so how can you hold us to that standard, too? So that’s that. I’ll try to go in order of how you just asked these. First of all, the L&D function in an organization is critical to our success, right?

Kerr: Learning and development.

Belch: Exactly. They’re often the ones administering the training strategically and tactically, so they have to be involved from day one. That said, with some of our larger deployments we’ve had with the Walmarts, the Verizons, et cetera, L&D can’t do it alone, and they know that. Now we’re being a lot more forthright, like, “Hey guys, our philosophy is L&D plus two.” Getting other parts of the organization engaged early to help with scale—maybe operations is part of this, to help with the ROI, maybe finance is part of this, to help with … Sometimes L&D is not part of HR. Sometimes it is. Maybe bring HR in—but bringing in other parts of the organization early so they can have visibility a) so when you’re ready for scale beyond the pilot, they can help; b) so maybe they can write a bigger check to take this around the organization. We kind of go down this list. ROI? This is it. This is the biggest thing, and we learn more and more about ROI every day. We have landed on the No. 1 ROI driver that we can produce—if we have a well-defined business problem—is time and money relative to proficiency. Here’s what I mean by that. There are a ton of companies doing three-hour lectures, a week-long of this. This e-learning video, whatever it is, they add up to hours or days or weeks. We have proven that you can go in a headset and go through … learn the same material in 15 minutes and be just as proficient. Minimum bar is, we’ll be just as knowledgeable on the core competencies of the job as we are coming out of the three-hour lecture as in 15 minutes.

Kerr: And retention of the knowledge?

Belch: Identical. In some cases better, because it’s a different way to learn. It’s experiential learning, so there’s your ROI right there. We’re pushing our customers to say, “Okay, No. 1: What’s your business problem? We’re not just going to do this for fun. Then give us all the things you do to train people. How long do you spend? What materials? Let us see it all.” Then we will recommend, “Okay, let’s start here. Let’s do it for this long.” Walmart’s a great example. They have this pick-up tower.

Kerr: Very common.

Belch: You’ve seen that?

Kerr: Yeah.

Belch: They’ve been installing it in stores around the country.

Kerr: It’s where you order online, and you can go to the store and pick it up.

Belch: So before STRIVR, they would train the associates in the store on how to use that tower for an entire day, and now they do it in 15 minutes. The output is identical. Sometimes better. So there you go. That’s, what? Seven hours and 45 minutes of wages that you get back, that someone can be doing something else or working on the job.

Kerr: A lot of the hidden costs of labor and training, and so forth. One of the things we talk about with technology is, you’ve got to be careful about just overlaying technology on an older process. You can put a lot of technology around it, but it’s still not the process that you wanted to use for the new way of work. When you think about taking this set of training documents—“This is the way we trained for that tower in the past at Walmart”—how do you go from that into, “What’s the 15 minutes that you need?”

Belch: There’s two sides of this. There’s a content side, kind of like a learning side. All right, how do we take all this material—that was hours, or thousands of words, or pictures—and how do we boil that down to four minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes? Whatever it is. Then, honestly more importantly is the change management side. Cool, we made this module. We guarantee you that they’re going to be just as knowledgeable or more in a fraction of the time. But now, Mr. or Mrs. Customer, it’s on you to integrate this into the flow of what you do. When you actually peel back the layers of how these companies train, on the surface it seems really hard for them. They’re like, “Oh my god, when am I going to have them do this?” I do this, I do this, I do this.” Usually we can say, “Well, why are you doing that?” That’s three hours that you’re pulling them out of their job, and we’re telling you, you can just give them this headset in a 10 minute chunk on a Tuesday, and boom! They’re good to go. They need to stop and think about it. The change management side ...

Kerr: This is a challenge, because at some level, you’re selling a product to them, but the value of that product is enhanced or embedded in the way the organization is using that product.

Belch: Yeah, and on top of that, I’m very open about the challenges we have at our company as well as the industry. On top of that, you’re putting something on someone’s face.

Kerr: All over.

Belch: All over.

Kerr: Immersive.

Belch: My hair, my makeup. Bumping into a table. There’s a lot of friction to using virtual reality. A ton. And we don’t shy away from that. This is something the industry will continue to chip away at as the form factor shrinks and shrinks and shrinks to be like a pair of glasses, lightweight glasses. But there’s a change management component, and there’s a like, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to put that on my face. I dressed up today.” That’s hard. That’s a big barrier to overcome.

Kerr: What’s the estimated ETA on when the headsets won’t be so bulky, so invasive?

Belch: Well, Oculus Go and Oculus Quest have already come down considerably from how big these things were five years ago. Cheaper, lighter, faster, better. That said, it’s got to come down a lot more to be more like a pair of swim goggles probably for mass adoption. I’d say five to 10 years. I’m not overly ambitious. There’s a lot of cool stuff in labs around the country, and I’ve seen a lot of prototypes—the Magic Leaps of the world—but if we’re just being honest with ourselves, five to 10 years before we really start to see that form factor change dramatically.

Kerr: Great. Let’s go to the, you say no to a lot of customers. Tell us the times when you say no. What are some examples that you frequently get, and you’re just like, “That’s not going to be for us”?

Belch: Innovation. The innovation function within a company can be your best friend or your worst enemy—as a startup, as a technology startup. Let’s just go broadly and not even just us. We have seen pilots via an innovation group that couldn’t have gone any better with respect to what they were looking to get out of it, and we still haven’t expanded. We’re still sitting in purgatory. We’ve asked them like, “Guys, what more did we need to do here?” “Nothing. It was great.” “Okay, so what was your plan for once this went well?” “Well, we didn’t know. We just wanted to tinker, and we’re measured by how many new innovations we do.” “Not if they go well or they don’t go well or if you spread them to the rest of the company?” “Honestly, no.” We look for those red flags. We don’t not want to talk to innovation because we’ve been—some of our companies, our customers that are very big right now, we came in through innovation. So we don’t pooh-pooh it by any means, but we have to make sure that innovation is aligned to …

Kerr: You’re talking to the core, and to people that will affect this across the whole HR function.

Belch: We have to make sure that it’s aligned to other business units, other parts of the business, that they have executive eyes on this thing or that the company has a history of doing innovative things and then bringing that to scale in their own organization. That’s the No. 1 thing we look for. If we think—we call it triers vs. buyers—this could be innovation, this can be L&D, this could be engineering, whatever. A trier vs. a buyer, that is the No. 1 reason we say no. If we think you’re a trier, “Hey, we’ve got enough work right now so we’re going to put you in the slow lane.”

Kerr: What about from a use case perspective? They would like to use technology for this function. You’ve got the HR director, but that’s not the best application of this. You’re better off using some other ...

Belch: Yeah. A lot of people want to do meetings in VR and, “Hey, so-and-so couldn’t go to the meeting last week. Can we film it and have them put on the headset and feel like they were sitting in the front row?” We’re like, “Yeah, you could, but no one wants to be in a headset for an hour.” That’s not a good, powerful use of the technology from our perspective. Just watch it on video. It’s no different. We get a lot of that stuff where it could otherwise be done in 2-D or it should just be done in the real world and let’s not reinvent the wheel here or try to do something out of left field. That’s a lot of what we see on the no side.

Kerr: As you think about the future of STRIVR and also virtual reality, what’s the next big things that are on the roadmap?

Belch: Actually, I think it’s not about VR, it’s about AR—augmented reality—and really how the two are going to come to work together. Right now, they’re being treated very separately, but our vision …

Kerr: You began by talking about how distinctive one was from being immersed in vs. the other one.

Belch: We see the future of work boiling down to three buckets: hiring, training, and doing. We hire people, we train them to do the work, and then they do that work. We’re already using VR with simulation-based learning, simulation-based assessment, et cetera, in the hiring and the training bucket. Then we feel really confident that AR is going to impact the doing bucket. At STRIVR, we want to be the software glue and the data glue that holds all that together. For example, we bring Bill in, and we hire him, and we put him in a simulation that tells us something about him, and we collect data about him relative to this role or whatever it is. We make a hiring decision. That is one data point. That feeds the training experience because we can customize it to you relative to your strengths and weaknesses that we learned in hiring. Those two things feed the doing experience because you’re a front-line worker on an assembly line and we know that, “Hey, there’s 10 things that you need to know on day one. You’ve got eight of them nailed. You proved that through your hiring and your training, and AR is going to make sure that you get those other two things rock solid.” Even in knowledge-worker jobs, giving feedback. We think those three buckets, AR and VR are going to be a big, big piece of this in the next five to 10 years.

Kerr: Great. Another big broad application if you talk about it is people not coming to work. Are we going to move to everyone sitting on the beach somewhere. Do you see that kind of application, or is it more like steady stream, future of work type?

Belch: I hope not. I like ...

Kerr: You’re in California. You’re already on the beach.

Belch: I’m on the beach, yeah. I like people, and I like talking to people. I’m kind of the anti-tech tech CEO. I’m not on social media. One of the things I’m really proud of with STRIVR is that we didn’t invent a solution and then go and look for problems. We found a problem and then we made a solution out of it, a solution to address it. And we still do that to this day. I really hope we don’t get to a world where no one is with each other physically face to face every day and we’re all sitting on a couch, putting our glasses on and that’s how we talk to each other. I just really hope we don’t get there. I think there’s a benefit to it, and I think hopefully maybe a virtual meeting between me and you in a headset will be better than a choppy video conference or a phone call where we can’t see each other or whatever.

Kerr: Or even we talk about that, if VR hits the real strides, and AR as well, you and I might be in the same room and we put on the headsets so that we can explore the models, we can see ...

Belch: You and I in the same room, it’s like, “Yeah, let’s pop our headset on for 20 minutes, let’s do the visualization.” But then let’s take it off and talk to each other. Let’s not just be interacting with a computer all day. That’s pretty scary from my perspective.

Kerr: When you go back to your hiring, training, and then doing the work, there seems to be some progression or arc that, if you’re doing a lot with the hiring and you’re doing a lot with the training, then people will become dependent or find extra application around this.

Belch: Yeah. So you’re right, but I think it’ll be job specific. Factory workers already wear hardhats right? So now, if our hardhat includes a shield or a set of glasses that is feeding some of this performance information, pretty seamless. Someone sitting at a computer or a manager doing a one-on-one with an employee? “Okay, I’ve got to put on my headset and dial into see what you ate for breakfast this morning.” That’s just a scary world. So I hope we don’t take it that far and we realize the limits of the technology relative to social interactions.

Kerr: We have a lot of MBA listeners to this podcast series. Any advice to them for the future, either from the entrepreneurship perspective or the VR perspective?

Belch: Yeah, I think we’ve talked enough about VR today, so let’s go a little bigger. I often get asked, “What’s the No. 1 thing you’ve learned in building your company?” We’re almost five years old, 130 people, we’re bucking the trends. We pivoted our business because we knew that we needed to evolve. If we were just married to what we were doing before, we never would have gotten this far.

Kerr: A final fascinating question here is, you began in the sports market and you’re still in the sports market. And you’ve also gone into the enterprise market. How has that evolution evolved when you have two, in some ways, quite different customer bases and perspectives and needs?

Belch: Yeah. Again, the use case and the formula, that’s pretty similar. The ROI and the value is very similar, but the markets couldn’t be any different. No. 1, sports is—I’m holding up something to you in the room right now—that market’s this big. It’s tiny. It’s all the teams in the world couldn’t pay us as much as three enterprises. The enterprise market is just bigger. From a TAM perspective, that’s pretty simple.

Kerr: Total adjustable market.

Belch: The things that we’ve had to do to evolve our company, given the differences, has been pretty massive. This is an enterprise software play. It’s not a virtual reality play, it’s definitely not a sports play anymore. It’s an enterprise software play. And VR is the medium through which we deliver information in the experience. Knowing what IT requirements there are, security and infrastructure, data and compliance, PI High, all this stuff that it takes to scale in an enterprise, that’s what we’re doing. Wake up call for some of the other startups that want to be STRIVR one day, they’re going to be hit with a ton of bricks because I meet with a lot of them because they want to partner with us, and “How can we scale?” I’m like, “Well, are you SOC-2 compliant?” They’re like, “What’s that?” “Well, you’ve got a year’s worth of work ahead of you to get there.” We’ve just evolved for really a lot of the things that we need to do to exist in the enterprise that we never would have known even two years ago when this was transitioning from sports.

Kerr: Derek, thanks so much for coming in today, telling us about STRIVR, also where virtual reality is in terms of enterprise training in the future that lies ahead.

Belch: Thanks, Bill. Appreciate it!

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven't already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work project on our website at hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work.