Strivr

A former Stanford kicker under Jim Harbaugh, Belch earned both his BA and MA from Stanford, where his master's thesis in journalism explored using VR to train football quarterbacks — developed in collaboration with Jeremy Bailenson's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. He later served as a graduate assistant coach for Stanford football under David Shaw and worked as an associate at PR agency Taylor. Belch launched Strivr in 2015, initially bringing VR training to the Dallas Cowboys and other NFL and college programs before orchestrating a decisive pivot into enterprise learning. His ability to translate sports-performance insights into scalable workforce training — landing Walmart, Verizon, and other Fortune 500 accounts — marks a defining thread in his leadership.

Founding director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) since 2003 and a professor in the Department of Communication. Earned his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University. Authored *Experience on Demand* (2018) and co-authored *Infinite Reality* (2011), both examining the psychological and behavioral effects of immersive virtual environments. Strivr grew directly out of VHIL research: Bailenson and his then-graduate student Derek Belch used VR to train Stanford's football team, demonstrating measurable performance gains that translated into enterprise applications. His work is distinguished by a rigorous, evidence-based approach to VR—consistently foregrounding empirical validation over techno-optimism—and a focus on how virtual experience concretely changes real-world behavior.

Trent Edwards co-founded Strivr alongside Derek Belch and Jeremy Bailenson, with the company emerging from Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. A former Stanford quarterback who went on to play in the NFL (Buffalo Bills, 2007–2010), Edwards brought firsthand experience with the cognitive demands of high-stakes decision-making — the very problem Strivr's early VR simulations set out to solve for football training. His athletic background lent early credibility to the platform's efficacy before the company pivoted into enterprise learning, where it now serves immersive training modules to over 10,000 Fortune 500 locations, including Walmart and Verizon.