The following interview is a conversation we had with Matthew Stoudt, CEO and Founder of AppliedVR, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $70 Million Raised to Build the Future of Chronic Pain Relief

Matthew Stoudt
Brett, thanks for having me here. Looking forward to the conversation. 

Brett
No problem. Super excited chat. So, to kick things off, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? Yeah. 

Matthew Stoudt
So very briefly, I’m originally from the midwest, though I’ve lived in a lot of different places in my life, which I think has been actually beneficial for me as I’ve been building professional side of my life. But I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart. And so even when I was a little kid, I was causing havoc at school, creating bubblegum empires where I was selling things to kids that they couldn’t get access to. And so when I ended up coming out of college, I went the traditional route of going after investment banking and ultimately private equity. But I’d always wanted to get back to my roots of wanting to build things. And so after I came out of b school, I did my first startup. This was back in 99. And the original idea of it, quite frankly, was Dropbox. 

Matthew Stoudt
Before Dropbox was a thing, we called it a virtual hard drive, and we built that thing up and probably crashed it into the ground, although we lasted longer than other companies. This is the original mom days, and it was, a lot of learnings came out of that. But then I ended up doing a few other things in the entrepreneurial world. First was a bit of a safe harbor when I went to McDonald’s corp, and I was an in residence there. Came out of that, and last thing I built was, you ever go to a gas station in America, with the exception of Oregon and New Jersey, and you see those terrible flat screens that advertise crap that you don’t want or need? That was my company. 

Matthew Stoudt
And I started that back in about the middle of around 2005, built it up over a ten year period and sold it and learned a lot along the way. 

Brett
Wow, that’s awesome. That’s good to know. Next time I’m at a gas station, I’ll be looking for those. 

Matthew Stoudt
Yeah, sadly, that’s the scourge. 

Brett
So I felt like I had to. 

Matthew Stoudt
Make amends for my period doing that, although I loved doing it. 

Brett
And I want to ask a little bit about that first company there in, what would you say it was? 99 to 2001. So, wow, you’re, like, right in the heart of.com boom and.com bust. What did you learn from that entire experience? 

Matthew Stoudt
So that was my first time truly branching out on my own. And honestly, I feel like you learn as much, if not more, from the things that don’t go right versus the things that do go right. And in this case here, I talked about that early vision that we had around this virtual hard drive. And I think one of the key things I learned coming out of that is because then we morphed and we pivoted and we started to pursue other things that sounded hot and cool at the time. We ended up kind of going down this path of being a city search for universities, if you will. We thought about it from a customer acquisition perspective and whatnot, but we completely broke away from that original idea of a virtual hard drive. 

Matthew Stoudt
And sometimes you got to come up with an idea that fits with the right time and space and market need. This was definitely well before its time, but I do think we kind of got caught up in that, trying to chase what was hot and sexy in the moment versus saying, we have a true vision, and now we may take different paths and have to pivot along the way to achieve that vision, but keep true to that original vision. And so that was, I think, one big thing I learned out of that one was making sure you stay true to yourself and don’t lose focus. 

Brett
A few other questions that we like to ask, and the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick. First one is what Founder do you admire the most and what do you admire about them? 

Matthew Stoudt
Actually, I think a lot about that. And I’m going to frame this two different ways, because I think about sort of what is my connection to them or something that they’ve done that I really connect with, or conversely, there’s something in their dna that I just really appreciate. So on the one end, a name that most people will know is Tony Shea. And one of the things I was listening to an interview of him on how I built this, and he was being interviewed, he had his big exit from Zappos, and the interviewer was asking him. So I understand he only owned like, one or two pair of shoes and he still lived in this little airstream or something. And the comment or the answer that Tony Shea gave to this thing was, I’m a collector of experiences, not material things. 

Matthew Stoudt
And that really resonated with me. It sort of framed the way that I’ve always viewed my life, is that I much prefer going out and living the world and capturing the experiences of things around me. And one of my things that I’m on, my mission in my life is to go visit every country in the world. I’ve been to 105. I use the UN as my marker, although I haven’t fully accepted South Sudan, just they’re too new. So I’ve been to 105, right? And the thing that I always think about are all of the experiences that I have collected over time, experiences in terms of places that I’ve gone, people that I’ve met. And to me, that’s what really rewards my life or fuses my life with passion. Another one probably very few people have heard of is a guy named Ben Lewis. 

Matthew Stoudt
And this guy Ben Lewis, he probably doesn’t even know that I would say this about him. He’s someone I’ve gotten to know. And as part of my journey here, he was a little bit behind us in what he was doing, was going to go down the same path in VR, trying to do something from a medical perspective. But he is, in my mind, that definition of a scrappy entrepreneur where I don’t want to get into much of the detail behind this because I don’t want to breach any confidentiality from him. But he ran into a lot of challenges along the way and was very close multiple times to not knowing if there was going to be it tomorrow. But every time he had that fortitude, that grit, and that resilience to find a way forward. 

Matthew Stoudt
And those are things that I think are rare in entrepreneurs, true entrepreneurs. To be able to do that, you have to have that type of mindset and mentality and then never give up. And in fact, he actually just ended up having an exit of his company to big health. So I’m super excited for him. I’m super happy for him because I was kind of with him along or part of that journey. And so I just love to see that. 

Brett
I think it’s always fun to have a front row seats to the behind the scenes of a company. You read the headlines and the media, they’ve raised all this money, or they got acquired for this much, and it just all sounds great. And then you actually know these people and talk to these people and are working closely with them, or you’re just talking to them a lot and you know the hell that they went through to reach that point. And I think you have a lot more respect than you can just see those behind the scenes stories and events. 

Matthew Stoudt
That is absolutely correct. 

Brett
Now, with all of that travel that you’ve done, and because you’ve collected experiences, I have to imagine that you’re not just, like, sitting at the four seasons hanging out, and that’s your experience. I’d have to imagine there’s been some crazy experiences, maybe some adventures in there. What’s, like, the craziest experience you’ve collected so far? 

Matthew Stoudt
All right, so I’ll give the way I talk about this and something that’s actually really important to me in my life. And as we think about the values in both my own personal life and in our company, I’ve had the fortune of going to some of the wealthiest countries in the world and some of the poorest countries in the world. I’ve met some of the wealthiest people in the world. I’ve met some of the poorest people in the world. 

Matthew Stoudt
And this is the only thing I ever get on my soapbox about, by the way, is the one thing that I have experienced across all of this, all these different types of people that I’ve met all around the world, is if you take the time to meet them where they are, without preconceived judgment and just listen and bring a curious mind, you find that there is so much more that connects us to each other in this world that divides us. And again, this is my little soapbox here. The thing that truly breaks my heart right now in America is I see the divisiveness on the left and the right, and we talk about her side, his side, my versus my side. And I feel like we’ve lost the capacity for empathy. 

Matthew Stoudt
And that, to me, is so important as we, especially when we think about a world where you have generative AI coming up to be really disruptive. The importance of empathy has never been greater, but in terms of the experience, this is going to be one of the more unique experiences. So, through a set of circumstances, my travels initially was supposed to take me to India. I ended up accidentally in Burma. And as I was going around with a girl that I was having to see at the time, and were just off the beaten path in this little village and just checking out some of the temples that were there, and this old man comes up and he starts trying to talk to us in extremely broken English. 

Matthew Stoudt
And at first, we don’t know if he’s trying to sell us something or follow us around or ask for money or whatever. And he keeps coming up and trying to get our attention. He wants to show us these certain things, and he’s trying to explain as best he can. And at some point, he asked us to follow him, follow him. Because you kept trying to ask us something. We didn’t know what it was. And we finally go back, and he brings us to his. 

Brett
This. 

Matthew Stoudt
It’s a hut bond, stilts lifted up. And we go up and we go inside and remember, this is Burma, where there’s a lot of sort of encourage to rat on each other, if you will, and to call each other out if you’re breaking the rules under the hunter there. And so he pushes this one chair away, pulls back this rice mat, and blows off some dust and opens up this hole in the ground that’s been clearly hidden. And he pulls out this dilapidated, beaten up old dictionary. It was a Burmese English dictionary. You literally would feel as if you touched it. The pages might disappear on you. And so he’s scrambling through trying to find it, and he finds this one word in Burmese, and it was dinner. 

Matthew Stoudt
And what he was doing was he was trying to invite us to dinner with his wife because he wanted to show that he cared about us. And he would keep saying along the way, he would say, america good. America good. Butternut bad. Butternut bad. That was the one that he actually could say very clearly. And it was just so touching to me that this guy, who didn’t have anything in the world, really, but wanted to share what Lily had with us because he wanted to make a connection, and it was so touching and unfortunately, didn’t. Weren’t able to do the dinner with him. But as we spend a little bit time, as we get up, we get ready to go. The part I feel really bad about is he wanted to share some. Desperately wanted to share something with us. 

Matthew Stoudt
And so he runs over and he grabs his wife’s purse, and it’s this probably a 1015 cent type purse that has these plastic beads on it and whatever, and he takes, and he dumps it all out. Everything was inside. Dumps it out. And she’s like, what are you doing going at him? And he brings it to us to give it to us as a gift. And it was just, again, this guy had nothing but what little he had. He wanted to share with us. He wanted that connection. And those are the types of moments and the experiences that I’ll always remember in my life, no matter what my lot in life is. 

Brett
That’s amazing. I love that answer and I love hearing those types of stories as well. I feel like you could have just told me like, oh, skydiving in Dubai or some random adventure like that. But I like when guests answer that and go deep on their answers. So appreciate you sharing that story. That’s so cool and so inspiring and just awesome to hear. There’s humans like that in the world. Yeah. 

Matthew Stoudt
Now, flip side of that is there is a place in Oman. I haven’t been there yet. So this is on my list of one that when I get a chance to go over there, knock that country off. But there is a place you can stay that is at the base of a bluff. And you have two ways of getting down. You either take this atv that can take about an hour, or you literally run off the bluff connected to a guy on a hang glider and you hang glide down. So that one would definitely be on my list of something I got to do. But again, for me, truly, it’s always about the connection to people because that’s what I think really empowers our lives. Yeah, that’s amazing. 

Brett
Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive a little bit deeper into the company. So can you just start us off with maybe talking about the problem that you solve? 

Matthew Stoudt
Yeah. So it’s really we’re trying to address is first and foremost is the pain epidemic that I would say is not only in America, but quite frankly, on a global basis. I know hopefully people understand, obviously the big issue we’ve had with opioids here in America and the epidemic. And by the way, we like to think that this opioid epidemic is a bit behind us, but we continue to set annual records in terms of the number of deaths from it. But where we’re focused, that’s partly connected to acute pain, but it’s also connected to chronic pain. And the problem that we’re ultimately going after is the chronic pain epidemic. And just give you a little bit of sense of the scope and size of it. So in the US, there are about 100 million sufferers of chronic pain, about 1.5 billion around the world. 

Matthew Stoudt
And in the US, we spend about $650,000,000,000 a year trying to address it. And the question is, why do we spend so much money trying to address things? And by the way, from the size of it, just to put in comparison, it is bigger than the combination of diabetes, cancer and heart disease. So it is absolutely massive. In fact, I think the CDC just came out and said it’s the number one diagnosed condition, topping all others right now. So it’s a major issue. Again, going back to the why. Well, the challenge is that we have always viewed chronic pain as if it’s acute pain. So we think about it from the physiology of it. 

Matthew Stoudt
That means we give people nsaids, things like Tylenol, Advil, then we give them opioids, and then we give them injections, and then we give them implants, and then we give them surgery, surgery. But we don’t fundamentally treat it for the condition that it is. It’s something that we call a biopsychosocial condition. What that means is it’s not only about the physiology of the pain, but it’s also about the comorbidities of depression, anxiety, catrivization, sleeplessness. And that gets exacerbated by social isolation. You think about these patients, what’s happening is the pain is migrating from the acute centers of the brain down to the more the emotional centers of the brain. And yet we have only traditionally tried to address it by focusing on the physiology. We’re only addressing a part of that. 

Matthew Stoudt
And if you’re not addressing it holistically, then you’re never going to solve the problem. Now, the good news in all of this is we recognize this. We finally have started to truly understand what’s driving chronic pain and what we need to do to address it. And in fact, for the first time in 50 years, we’ve updated our definition of chronic pain, and we actually are now calling for as first line treatment, what we call integrated pain management. That means it’s going to be not only trying to address what the physiology side of it in the ways we talked a little bit about, but also trying to take integrated pain management. That includes the psychosocial side of this. So concepts like cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance, commitment therapy, et cetera, this we run into the second challenge of this whole thing. 

Matthew Stoudt
So what we need to do, but we don’t have the capacity in America to deliver on this on a scaled basis. One of the numbers that we’ve seen is if you’re everyone that should get it, there’s only one provider of integrated pain treatment for every, call it 50 to 100,000 sufferers that are out there. And the waitlist to be able to get in to see a pain psychologist can be six months and beyond. In addition to that, you’ve got the great resignation, which kind of started during the COVID You’ve got practitioner burnout that’s occurring in healthcare, and so the supply is shrinking, right. There’s 700,000 professionals have left the industry, and that’s only going to get worse here over the next several years. And so there’s this gap in care, this gap in access is getting worse and worse. 

Matthew Stoudt
So it’s how do we actually deliver on a scalable basis? True integrated pain treatment for patients. So that’s the problem that we’re going after. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Now let’s talk about the solution. So I put on the headset and what happens? 

Matthew Stoudt
So I think it’s important to take a step back and understand how VR works and why it is uniquely equipped to address this, because we’d like to talk about VR as truly a new category of medicine that’s been 30 years in the making. So going back to that, where this really all started was back in the early 1990s, an innovative researcher at the University of Washington, a guy named Hunter Hoffman, was trying to help burn victims go through debridement. Now, debridement is when you’re literally, it’s the cleaning of the burn wound. So you have the raw, exposed nerves, and it is one of the most painful things you’ll ever go through. And this is back early 90s, before we had the opioid epidemic. 

Matthew Stoudt
And even then, and that’s what, by the way, they would use traditionally, is they would use opioids as that analgesic to help through that acute moment, right when they’re cleaning the wound. And opioids are only effective on about 30% of the population, and, by the way, have terrible side effects. So in this case of acute pain, right, this is going to be different than chronic. But in case of acute pain, what he recognized is that our brains are basically processors, and it’s about interceding the signal. So what happens is, let’s say you cut your finger. The signal goes from the wound through the central nervous system up to the acute pain receptors of the brain. It lights it up, you feel your pain. So his insight was, well, if our brains are basically processors, what if we flood the neural pathway with alternate signal? 

Matthew Stoudt
What if we put them in a VR headset and we engage them and interact with them and flood that pathway with an alternate signal? We can actually get them to feel less pain. So he did a test and control. The test was VR back in the early ninety s, the control was opioids. And he was then measured it both on a subjective basis. So the patient reporting back how much pain was reduced from their own perception, as well as actually using an fMRI to measure how lit up the pain receptors were in the brain. And he demonstrated, on both a subjective and an objective basis, the potential for VR to outperform an opioid. Right, the power of a pixel over a molecule. Absolutely fascinating. Early insight on the acute pain side launched hundreds of studies all validating that same insight. 

Matthew Stoudt
The challenge you had in this case, though, was the technology weighed 50 pounds to other to 50 machines, cost $50,000, and so it was confined, if you will, to the laboratory, to the world of isn’t that interesting? And so, fast forward to where we are now. And I still think we’re only at version called it 1.5. And maybe when the Apple vision Pro comes out, it’ll be 2.0, what the future will be. But it’s just amazing how far these have come just in the last couple of years. And so what that means for us is when we started building, developing this, we ended up partnering with a woman named Beth Darnall, probably the top pain psychologist in the world out of Stanford. That woman is absolutely incredible and does more by 09:00 a.m. Than I think I can do an entire week. 

Matthew Stoudt
Puts me to shame. But it has been great. We’ve been working with her since about 2018 in developing this and with chronic pain, to contrast it with the acute pain, it’s not necessarily about solving the pain, but it’s really trying to address that. Take that holistic approach and teach the person skills on how to manage their pain on a day to day basis so that they can lead a better quality of life. And so what we did in partnering with Beth on this, we took a lot of evidence based approaches and developed an eight week therapy that the patient is supposed to use once a day, every day. But we only need to do it about, on average, six minutes a day, and we teach essential skills over the course of these eight weeks. 

Matthew Stoudt
Each week is a different theme that we have, and we do a lot of reinforcement of the previous week’s themes, so that when they walk away from this, we don’t want them living their life in the goggles and the headset, as we say, but we want to give them these skills that they can go and do something, live on their own and be able to control their central nervous system, if you will, the self regulation, and be able to manage their own chronic pain so they can have that better quality of life. And I’ll give you one example of something that we do in there. So we’re big believers in trying to use basically your own biodata, if you will, to help drive the experience. 

Matthew Stoudt
And so we did this thing where were able to build up some patented technology around this to capture your breath. And what we do is we put you in the headset, and there you’re in this scene with bit of a desert scene of this dilapidated tree in front of you that looks like it’s essentially dead. And then as you start breathing at the right pace, with the right consonants on this, it actually starts to breathe life into that world around you. And as you continue to breathe into this space, you can actually see your own breath coming into the space around you. You’re actually bringing life to the world around you. So it gives you that sense of agency, but also connects you to what’s going on in your body. 

Matthew Stoudt
And you start to build this beautiful tree, and then the tree starts to essentially almost breathe at your own pace. And it’s fascinating when you talk to some patients afterward, anecdotally, you’ll hear some of the patients talk about, when I was in the garden doing something, I had a pain flare, and I would remember that tree that I brought life to, and I would start to breathe, and I could visualize it in the moment. And so it’s really powerful when you are able to get the patient to go through the process and then see the impact that it can have on their lives. 

Brett
Are there any non believers of this approach or critics to say, that’s not how we can solve this public health crisis, or that’s not how we can solve this? Are there any people like that? 

Matthew Stoudt
Well, there’s always going to be questioners, right? The one thing I’ll say is, at the start of this, one of our early mantras, is that we wanted to build an unparalleled body of evidence to demonstrate this. Because anytime you’re going to bring something novel into the marketplace, there’s always going to be a lot of questions around it. Is it real? Is it VR? Isn’t it just a game or shit? Can I just download something off the web and use that? And so we’ve really been extremely methodical in building a body of evidence that can answer. You’re never going to answer all the questions for all the people. But over time, and it does take time, unfortunately, in our crazy healthcare world, we ultimately want this to be a part of standard of care for us. We have this much bigger vision. 

Matthew Stoudt
And again, we talk about this fact that we’re creating this new category of medicine that’s been around for 30 years. We’re just putting it all the pieces together to be able to have that commercialization model that can get it into the hands of those that need it most. But for us, the most important thing is the seeing is believing in VR, right? And so people can challenge us. And by the way, this isn’t right for everybody. You’re never going to find any medicine that is universally successful. So it’s about finding, making sure you’re getting it to the right patients. They’re going to benefit most from this, but you’re always going to have naysayers. 

Brett
Who stands to be disrupted here then? Is it like the maker of OxyContin? Is that who’s going to hate you here for disrupting their approach, or who’s being disrupted? 

Matthew Stoudt
That’s a great question. The way that we think about this is, again, going back to that concept of it’s not one size fits all, and from an FDA perspective, so we are the first and only that has been approved by the FDA to actually treat a form of chronic pain. In our case, our labels for chronic low back pain. But we think about this as one of the tools that a patient’s going to have. And ideally, what you’ll be able to do is you’ll be able to slow down or eliminate the need for that patient to run into the emergency department because they can’t control a pain flare. Or obviously, we want to get to a world where we’re not prescribing much of any. On the OxyContin and the opioid side, there is a role for opioids, by the way. 

Matthew Stoudt
We’re not saying that there’s not, but let’s make sure that’s not the first thing we do. That should be one of the last things that you do when you’re thinking about what’s the right approach. So the idea here is, and we do think about healthcare utilization. So to your point about who gets disrupted, ideally for us, you would see this used earlier in that patient’s trajectory. And that means potentially your savings down the line are going to be the elimination or reduction in terms of number of surgeries that are required, the number of procedures potentially that are required for a patient, and then also the continued shopping, if you will, because what you’ll see is some pain. Patients are trying to find relief. They’re going to go from one doc to another. 

Matthew Stoudt
And ideally, if they can go to a doc that’s able to be more integrative, then it can keep that patient there longer, because they’re finding that they actually have a solution or a care pathway that’s working for them. 

Brett
Whenever we’re talking about emerging technologies or frontier technologies, at least what I see out there a lot is a lot of startups with a cool idea, and they’ve said, okay, we have this technology and we have this problem. If we solve this, it’s going to be massive. I want to highlight here that you guys aren’t just talking about this technology and talking about this problem. You’re having people really use it. 

Matthew Stoudt
Right? 

Brett
So the numbers I see on the website, 60,000 patients have been immersed so far. You’re in 1500 plus homes and 200 plus hospitals in ten countries. So this is not just at the r and D phase, right. This is something that’s actively being used by patients. 

Matthew Stoudt
I do want to put some clarity around those numbers that you threw out. I think this is how we think about how ultimately we came to market. Remember earlier on we talked about a vision? So when we first started AppliedVR back in 2015, we had a vision. The vision is that and really understanding that for too long, I believe in America, we have forced patients to go and find care versus bringing the care to where they are. And that’s when you think about a tech enabled world. How can we use technology to better help our patients where they are, meet them where they are, versus forcing them to come find the care. Right. And so the idea, our long term vision, is that we ultimately want to be able to have a headset in every home in american around the world. 

Matthew Stoudt
And this becomes a healthcare hub, if you will, to deliver this next generation medicine, not just in the world of chronic pain, but there’s tons of clinical evidence that can be used to treat a variety of conditions, ranging from PTSD to anxiety, depression, obesity, stress, et cetera. And you can also use this for group therapy, you can use this for one to one. And so it really can become this health hub that we talk about. 

Matthew Stoudt
But when we started, that idea was very far into the future, because the headsets at that point in time, on the one hand, you either had a headset that was the oculus, that was the quest that was connected to a laptop, was completely unscalable, or the other extreme was Google cardboard, where you’d put your phone in this little cardboard thing and be like a viewfinder and you’d want to throw up after about 30 seconds. And so how we started was we said, we know the technology is the friction in this whole equation. We know the technology is only going to get better and better, but it’s not ready today to go into the home. 

Matthew Stoudt
And so we started off by saying, all right, we’ve got to build credibility, we’ve got to build our body of evidence, we’ve got to drive innovation, and we’ve got to build our brand. And so we literally picked out the top 20 hospitals in America and said, we’re going to do something with each and every one of those hospitals. And that started us off in the world where were limited by the technology. With that point, the best in class for mobile was a Samsung gear plugged into a headset. And we used that as our initial entry to build those things that I talked about. And went out and we started to sell the sash model into hospitals and everywhere else. 

Matthew Stoudt
But all of that was always meant as a way to get us, ultimately, when the headset was to the point where you could do something in the home, that we would start to go into the home and we would shift. So we actually don’t do anything in hospitals anymore. We don’t do anything. Back then, it was more of a wellness product because we hadn’t gone through FDA, and so now the product we have is for in home use, and it’s being self administered by the patient. Right? So now we’re finally living up to that product promise about saying that we’re empowering the patient in the comfort and convenience of their own home to be able to use this. 

Matthew Stoudt
And so where we are in sort of our lifecycle here, and by the way, all of that work that we did helped inform everything from user experience, what worked from a patient perspective, for engagement, what worked for hcps, what do they care about, how do we continue to build our name and brand? And all of that helped us to where we are now. But now we are very squarely focused on going the prescription route where you get a doctor to write a script, it’s covered by insurance, and then we send it to the patient in their home. And when we talk about this number by being 1500 homes, I think the number is now well north of that. 

Matthew Stoudt
And that’s how many devices we’ve got a lot of scars in our backs of devices we’ve sent into the home, and what works, what doesn’t work. And so that know how is incredibly important, because when you’re thinking about building a novel product like this into the marketplace, we talk about the three e’s of design. Number one is it’s got to be easy to use. I don’t care how efficacious it is, I don’t care how engaging it is, if it is complicated, if it is hard to use, if there’s friction in the equation, the patient’s never going to use it. It’s going to sit in a corner and gather dust. And we learned a lot of that stuff, by the way, just when were going into hospitals with our wellness version earlier, the stuff that were doing. And so that’s our number one mantra. 

Matthew Stoudt
And we are willing to make some certain trade offs along the way. That breathing thing that I talked about earlier, we actually started with this idea of being able to use a pulse oximeter attached to your finger, connected to Bluetooth, that would use your own heart rate variability to drive the experience inside and in a laboratory. That is awesome. It is so cool to see it, but you send that into a home to a 55 year old male, female, whatever, and they got to put a pulse. What? On their finger? I don’t have blue teeth. What are you talking about? Right? It’s going to fail. And so we used a derivative of that. No, that in the future, just like we have with the eyewatch and their sensors built in the dial watch, it gives us a heck of a lot of information. 

Matthew Stoudt
The same thing is going to happen on the headsets. So ease of use was incredibly important to us, and that’s where we learned a lot from all of the different work that we’ve done. Engagement is the second one. Engagement is incredibly important. Anytime you’re looking at therapy and healthcare, and quite frankly, it doesn’t matter really what it is, whether it be pills or different types of interventions, pt or whatnot, the adherence rates are pretty bad. Even in the world of cancer, where you would think that someone’s life is depending on it, and yet still you can see adherence rates that are only at a 50%. And so in this case, we’re asking you to do something once a day, every day, over an eight week period. So it’s got to be engaging. And then the last piece is the efficacy. 

Matthew Stoudt
Obviously, it’s got to make an impact, but if you get the first two, you’re going to get the third on this. And so where we are on that commercialization pathway is our first entry channel is actually going into the VA. And when I think about what your product market fit is, the VA for the world of this idea of immersive therapeutics or immersive medicine, I couldn’t think of a better entry channel for us. So, one, there’s about 6 million vets that are suffering from some form of pain. 1.5 million of them are deemed to be moderate to severe pain sufferers. Two is, sadly, in America, every single day, over 16 vets commit suicide. It’s absolutely tragic. 

Matthew Stoudt
The good news, again, we’re recognizing that work and the VA is trying to address it, and they’ve made pain and mental health as the top two priorities that they’re focused on, which is great. And so now they’re trying to find different solutions that can address that. And the good thing about this idea of VR as medicine is that they’ve actually been one of the earliest adopters of this and testers of this, dating back almost as long as when I talked about this idea of acute pain management. They started off in the world of PTSD and exposure therapy. Today, there’s over 100 and 2170 facilities that are actually using some form of VR as medicine, or in the medical capacity over 1000 plus. We call them hcps. Healthcare providers are using it on a regular basis. 

Matthew Stoudt
And so the understanding, acceptance, awareness and adoption is through the roof. And that’s really where we’ve just now started in earnest this year when we got on contract with them. 

Brett
Well, we are up on time here, but I want to do one final question, or squeeze in one final question. And that question is, what’s the vision for the future? Can you just paint a picture for us three to five years from today? What’s that big picture vision that you’re woodsing towards? What’s the company going to look like and what’s that impact going to look like? 

Matthew Stoudt
So I talked earlier about this idea of a healthcare hub in the home and probably wouldn’t be three years, five years. You have a shot of starting, really starting that, probably more in the eight to ten year time frame. But this idea that VR immersive therapeutics is now a part of standard of care, where you’re going to have this in most homes, and we’ve got millions of patients that have either used it or in the process of using it. And we’re actually truly making this that standard of care that I talk about so that this becomes one of the first things that a doctor prescribes versus one of the last things. Right. We always believe that start from what is the least invasive that you can do, and this is probably the least invasive that you can do that can actually make an impact. 

Brett
Amazing. I love the vision, love the problem you’re solving, and really love the approach that you’ve taken here. Now, like I said, we are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap if any founders listening in want to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision. Where should they go? 

Matthew Stoudt
Our website, appliedvr.io. I know we’ve got LinkedIn and I know we’ve got Facebook, but Sony, I’m sure they can find us on any one of those. 

Brett
Awesome. Matthew, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about what you’re building and share some of the lessons that you’ve learned along the way and share some of those personal moments as well. This has been a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. I know it’s going to be an audience and really appreciate you making the time for us. 

Matthew Stoudt
Brett, much appreciated. Absolutely love the conversation and I love what you’re doing, brother. 

Brett
Thank you, man. Appreciate it. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.