Connecting with TRIPP CEO Nanea Reeves

Is virtual reality the next exciting frontier of mental healthcare innovation? What does the age of experiential wellness mean for hospitals and clinics utilizing VR in the future? In this episode, we talk with TRIPP founder Nanea Reeves about accessibility and the future of mental healthcare.

Make sure you like and subscribe to "For Startups, By Physicians" wherever you get your podcasts. And keep up with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Medium at @InflectHealth, and on the web at InflectHealth.com.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Lindsay Kriger: Hey everyone. This is Lindsay Kriger, director at Inflect Health, the innovation hub of Vituity, where we strive to be a catalyst for better care. I'm thrilled to be hosting For Startups by Physicians where we share insights and guidance to healthcare startups and technologists looking to create the future of health.

[00:00:18] Lindsay Kriger: As a physician-founded firm, we have connections with clinicians and intimate knowledge of what they need and how. We will be interviewing our executives, frontline providers, and industry leaders to help your business be effective and scale. Thanks for joining and let's get going.

[00:00:41] Lindsay Kriger: Hey everyone, thanks for joining us. I'm once again joined by Inflect Health President Andrew Smith, and today we are sitting down with Nanea Reeves, CEO and founder of TRIPP, a category-leading global XR wellness company. 

[00:00:55] Lindsay Kriger: In this episode, we talk about how a focus on the power of personal [00:01:00] loss can ignite change, and what we believe mental healthcare can transform into.

[00:01:05] Lindsay Kriger: We will discuss creative solutions both inside traditional healthcare as well as in the comfort of your own home. Rooted in this conversation, you'll hear how important it is to have a founding team that is united in their shared vision. 

[00:01:19] Lindsay Kriger: Nanea is an inspired founder and CEO. She brings a tremendous amount of experience from the gaming world and is a brilliantly accomplished leader.

[00:01:28] Lindsay Kriger: TRIPP has been broadly recognized as a hot startup to watch, and we are honored to be joined by Nanea.

[00:01:33] Lindsay Kriger: Andrew Smith, who is president of Inflect Health, as well as the Chief Operations and Innovation officer at Vituity. He's responsible for driving innovative businesses that disrupt the status quo and transform the healthcare construct.

[00:01:46] Lindsay Kriger: In addition to spearheading our investment program, partnerships and strategies, he also serves as a board member for the Vituity Cares Foundation, which is the philanthropic arm of our enterprise. 

[00:01:57] Lindsay Kriger: Nanea, let's kick this off and [00:02:00] just get right to it. Tell us about TRIPP, what it is, and how it works. 

[00:02:04] Nanea Reeves: TRIPP is the largest XR mindfulness application. We're actually now cross-platform. We're currently available on the Oculus headset or Meta Quest headset, PlayStation VR, and the HTC Vive Flow. We're starting to expand into augmented reality. 

[00:02:27] Nanea Reeves: And what TRIPP does is it's an experience that allows you to feel calm, feel focused as opposed to the way that a lot of mindfulness apps work on mobile, where audio is guiding you. With VR, we can do a lot of the work for you and bring your awareness present. We use sound frequencies, gameplay mechanics, and everything's architected to produce specific feelings in the user who's experiencing it. 

[00:02:59] Lindsay Kriger: That sounds [00:03:00] amazing. I know you've had such a storied career. Tell us a little bit about how you got interested in this field and what really drove you to create TRIPP.

[00:03:10] Nanea Reeves: Well, it's actually been a very organic journey for me. I had found when I was younger, that turning to video games and even technology was a way for me to feel more in control of the world around me. And I think a lot of the narratives around playing video games focus on the violence and some of the negative aspects of it.

[00:03:36] Nanea Reeves: And everyone should have some concerns and especially parents should know what their kids are doing in video games. But for me, I found a lot of benefits from it. One, it just gave me a natural interest in technology as a young female, which I think is really important. Secondarily, being a video game where I was building worlds and being a [00:04:00] hero, resource management, I think it gave me a sense of myself as a builder and a maker and just psychologically too, it was a world I could retreat into. And when I was very young, I experienced a lot of mental health challenges. As a child, my parents struggled with drug addiction and as a result, my sisters and I went through a lot of negative experiences and a lot of neglect. There were some benefits to that though. When you look at things long term I found a lot of internal strength. I developed a line that really had to figure a lot of things out, but by my teenage years, I was completely overwhelmed by what was happening.

[00:04:50] Nanea Reeves: I ended up in psychiatric treatment and it was then that I was gifted the meditation practice that I have evolved over [00:05:00] many years. And at that time I was really embarrassed to tell anyone that I meditated. It wasn't like it is today where the stigma around addressing mental health issues have shifted, but it was really those two things I think turned my life into a productive, and allowed me to change the decisions I was making on a day-to-day basis to be more supportive and positive. 

[00:05:26] Nanea Reeves: The idea for TRIPP really came through a long career in the video game industry. I experienced a good amount of success and then there was this point where I saw, what do I wanna build? What is the idea I wanna bring forth? And it was to take these gameplay mechanics that had helped me so much combined with a meditation practice and bring that into the immersion of VR, which really multiplied that retreat or that respite effect that I had always [00:06:00] experienced with technology and application interfacing. 

[00:06:04] Lindsay Kriger: Yeah. That's so fantastic and thank you for sharing your story.

[00:06:08] Lindsay Kriger: One thing that's very important to us at Inflect, and part of the reason why we're creating this podcast is that all of us believe strongly in founders that have a story and that have lived experiences and are passionate at a level that really goes deeper than the business opportunity or the trends in healthcare.

[00:06:29] Lindsay Kriger: One thing I know, and that I know has been impressive about our connection is that Andrew, also you have personal stories about why you do what you do, and maybe Andrew just share a little bit about what you in TRIPP and why you were so drawn personally and professionally to this cause. 

[00:06:47] Andrew Smith: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:06:47] Andrew Smith: Thanks, Lindsay. Thanks, Nanea. For me growing up, my father suffered from mental health disorder, mixed substance abuse, and at some point that was too much for him to handle and [00:07:00] ended up taking his life when I was seven years old. And so my mom obviously very traumatic life experience was like I want to be a nurse and I want to help take care of people and I wanna make it my life's work to give to others. And that was instilled in me and every job I've had in the hospital since I basically was born. I never left the hospital. But the idea that people aren't getting access to the care that they need, different types of therapy or really anything to help them consider and think about their mental health and where they're headed.

[00:07:31] Andrew Smith: And so what really gets me excited about TRIPP is when you've got a bunch of kids and gamers and adults online and saying, Hey, I wanna get better and I want to try this TRIPP thing. Let me go experience this. That's amazing. Because we're not cramming it on them. We're not shoving it on them. It's not a parent signing you up for therapy.

[00:07:50] Andrew Smith: It's like someone in their own space, in their own. Actually trying to get healthier. And immediately when I learned about TRIPP, I was on fire about it. And I think the idea that [00:08:00] kids and adults and people are gonna go seek out their own way to get healthier and feel better every day is really what set me off with TRIPP.

[00:08:08] Nanea Reeves: Thank you. We connected right away on that mission and one of the things that was important to me as I thought about how to build a company in my own way was to ensure that we were all coming from the right intention. And even then you'll make mistakes. But that, and it's always I think one of the things for founders, it's very hard what we're doing, taking an idea that it's just an idea and bringing it to reality, and many will fail at that attempt.

[00:08:46] Nanea Reeves: And how do you keep going through failure? To get that cumulative knowledge to maybe the idea changes along the way and in this incredibly stressful and you'll encounter a lot of [00:09:00] negativity and rejection, and how do you find that resilience from within? And one of the things I really wanted to do with TRIPP was to give people that sense of agency that I felt when I would go turn to video games or turn to meditation as a way to self-regulate how I was feeling in the moment for my own benefit. And then I could see ultimately I was having a ripple effect on others as well. I was a better friend, a better partner, a better employee. And so that really was the motivation. 

[00:09:36] Nanea Reeves: One thing I'm really proud of that you brought up: over 60, I think last I looked, it was like 63% of our audience are male and millennial male and Gen X as well, and we're starting to get younger audience members show up.

[00:09:52] Nanea Reeves: VR is still a shared device, so we tend to track ages based on the credit card given to [00:10:00] us or the, but the fact that we have a predominantly male audience I think is really important because men specifically still have a stigma associated with expressing emotion and that shows up in research very clearly shows up in longevity, impact on health span when we hold feelings in.

[00:10:23] Nanea Reeves: And there's been some really surprising learnings that we're starting to see on the opportunity that we have specifically to help men create this container where it's okay for them to connect to self and also open up emotionally with others. 

[00:10:41] Lindsay Kriger: That's such an interesting point, Nanea, because men are also very hard to reach in that 20 to 45 range for health and wellness benefits too, right? 

[00:10:51] Nanea Reeves: Oh, really? 

[00:10:52] Lindsay Kriger: Yeah. They're statistically the ones who, they don't go for primary care visits. They don't go for an annual checkup, like they're [00:11:00] nagging them. Yeah. Go get something done. So I think that's why we see this power in innovation in technology, especially from the more traditional healthcare setting, is like, how can we meet patients where they're at and not even call them patients, but how can we call customers and people and families and bring health in a way that doesn't feel disruptive to their lives, but feels inclusive?

[00:11:22] Lindsay Kriger: And obviously video games is such a place... Andrew, I know you have a young son and you guys play video games together. You can imagine just the future of how you and Lave interact and how that video gaming experience can be transformed in the years to come, I'm sure. 

[00:11:37] Andrew Smith: Yeah, for sure. Actually, Lave has played, if Rode ridden a rollercoaster and seen part of TRIPP on his album so that it's very cool.

[00:11:45] Andrew Smith: I think, for me too, TRIPP doesn't fit the American healthcare construct, and that's why I love it. We built this system that you have to show up at someone's hospital door or clinic door, and then you follow these [00:12:00] protocols and it's really not a way to get someone really engaged in their own healthcare until it's catastrophic.

[00:12:06] Andrew Smith: And so when a startup comes and says, Hey, we're gonna flip this in reverse and let someone access care on their own and do that, and then actually see the results from it. I think that's incredibly inspiring. 

[00:12:18] Nanea Reeves: Yeah. To be clear, we don't make any therapeutic claims just yet. We are working on collecting evidence.

[00:12:25] Nanea Reeves: So TRIPP really is a tool to help support you, but it's not to replace professional. , and I think that these tools can emerge in ways that can be very complimentary to how you take care of yourself, how you work with medical health and mental health professionals. I'm very excited about how the metaverse itself can be used in mindful ways.

[00:12:51] Nanea Reeves: And one of our, I'll give you a couple of really good examples that have been really interesting to me on this topic. 

[00:12:59] Nanea Reeves: [00:13:00] We found that in the Evolver community, which is now a part of TRIPP, we merged in January and it's one of the largest meditation groups in virtual reality or virtual worlds. They do 40 live group meditations a week, and on the weekend versions, they'll have a hundred and fifty avatars show up for these support groups, group meditations, and their most popular conversation is on death and dying and it's death doula. And I wouldn't think that would be the place I want to hang out in the metaverse, but what we're finding is that people really open up emotionally, and I think there's something to using the digital veil of an avatar and being able to be present without this sense of feeling judged by other people or being seen feeling emotion. And there's some data. [00:14:00] Skipper Zo has worked. He's a neuroscientist out of USC, and he has worked with veterans who suffer from PTSD using VR, and he found some data to support what we're seeing, which is veterans will be more open and expressive about some of the things they've been through with a virtual agent where they don't feel the judgment of another human being. So it doesn't replace the clinician, but it can be used as a tool to get someone to just open up with expressing difficult feelings and emotions, and then from their treatment might actually be able to build upon that.

[00:14:41] Nanea Reeves: So I think it's very interesting. We can create these mental health and supportive environments and communities. 

[00:14:49] Lindsay Kriger: It is so interesting, and one thing I think about is that a lot of these podcasts we're talking about advice that physicians can bring to technologists, but so much of TRIPP [00:15:00] and what we're working on together is really almost the reverse, which is how do we talk to clinicians about this new age, about this evolving opportunity to provide care in a different way.

[00:15:11] Lindsay Kriger: Many clinicians outside of those that work in some of the upper echelon academic institutes are gonna be people that are like the meta what? The who? No. Like I have to touch my patient. I have to feel my patient, and this is this work that we wanna do together, right? It's like transforming what we think of as care and how to convince some clinicians and some hospitals and clinics how to use the metaverse and how to use this digital-first experience towards health. 

[00:15:42] Lindsay Kriger: Andrew, I know you wrote a piece about that and just curious if you'd share a little bit of thoughts like, how do we go about doing that together? How do we go about working through the challenges of traditional healthcare to get to a place where we can bring a more innovative solution forward, a more open [00:16:00] solution forward? 

[00:16:01] Andrew Smith: Yeah, if I think about all of the people that are suffering in an emergency department right now that are in crisis or having a deep anxiety or depression, they end up in an ER. They get overmedicated. They get restrained mostly because we don't understand everything that's going on with the patient.

[00:16:18] Andrew Smith: It's a busy place and we don't take the time. Things like TRIPP could be really valuable in the de-escalation of those patients. If I think about someone that's stuck on an inpatient unit for nine days of their life and worried about where they're headed next, are they headed to a skilled nursing facility or headed home, or can they be with their family?

[00:16:37] Andrew Smith: Is their family there to help them money? All the things that they're worried about. I think TRIPP could play a role in that. And then when I think about provider, And resiliency and working in the trenches every single day through covid and pandemics and death and the pain and suffering in the hospital.

[00:16:53] Andrew Smith: I think how can something like TRIPP really change the way that they're practicing every day? And so I'm excited for the day when [00:17:00] the American Health system gets on board with a lot of these new technologies, virtual reality, meta, all of it. So we can unlock our brains a little bit here and de-stress so we can be our best.

[00:17:12] Nanea Reeves: We're in this technology transition right now, where in 2000 we actually saw the beginning of computing moving from the desk or the desktop to the end. And all the innovation that we've seen in the last two decades around mobile computing and how that has accelerated, how it's created new tools and even new economies when you look at the gig economy and how people can earn even the influencer marketing. All these new things roll off of that, but now computing is moving from the hand at the head, and I think there's going to be a tremendous amount of innovation. In that transition, obviously TRIPP is already a part of that, [00:18:00] especially in the category of wellness and mindfulness.

[00:18:03] Nanea Reeves: A new way to meditate using these head-mounted displays, and I think it's gonna be explosive. There will be a day where we all just have our glasses. and we can experience reality in different ways, whether it's augmented with spatial sound or little overlays that help us just reminder to breathe and connect to self, or even bio signals coming in to let us know when we need to take a break and take care of ourselves or attention wandering, et cetera.

[00:18:44] Nanea Reeves: So with that ecosystem though, it comes great responsibility cuz it's a closer connection. We've seen how walking around with a computer all day long staring at it has even shifted the way that our brains work has affected some people's [00:19:00] self-esteem positively and negatively. All these things, we didn't really have any visibility.

[00:19:06] Nanea Reeves: I know when I started working in mobile games in the year 2000, I wasn't thinking about some of the things that we've. Emerge now after 20 years of having handheld computing available, and I'm excited about the next 10 years ahead on what's going to happen and especially how we can use this computing interface that's a little more integrated with how we're seeing the world around us and how we're seeing ourselves in the world to benefit people.

[00:19:41] Nanea Reeves: There are some very dystopian concepts that can also come out of that. And so working closely with medical community ethics, community researchers to understand the impact, good and bad of what you're putting out into the world, the, these are things [00:20:00] that are very important to us as a team for sure. 

[00:20:04] Lindsay Kriger: You guys are at the forefront and leaving so many of these conversations, I guess I'll just close with my last question. 

[00:20:10] Lindsay Kriger: Piggybacking off that, Nanea, what do you want mental healthcare to look like, specifically mental healthcare in and how should it play a role in all of this evolution of experiential technology? 

[00:20:25] Nanea Reeves: It's a wonderful question and it is something that I feel strongly about that mental health should just become health.

[00:20:34] Nanea Reeves: We should approach our physical and emotional wellbeing in the same way that we approach our physical wellbeing. We know that if we exercise and take the time to be thoughtful about how we're eating and interacting with others, that it has long-term effect on our health. I, we should be thinking about our mental and [00:21:00] emotional wellbeing the same way.

[00:21:02] Nanea Reeves: They're not different, and I don't think you separate them on the clinical side. I would like to see more measurement in the same way that we, for mental states of being and in a way that is much more quantit. Like how we have physical biomarkers. The development of biomarkers specific to mental health I think are really important.

[00:21:27] Nanea Reeves: I know there's some work on that. Digital therapeutics can play an important part in that, and I think all of that will allow us to, again, have that ability to understand how we're being affected moment to moment in ways where we can adjust and respond in real time in ways that support. Very well said.

[00:21:51] Lindsay Kriger: Andrew, add on, what do you think the next five years look like for mental health and how can technology and clinical teams come [00:22:00] together to create that future? 

[00:22:03] Andrew Smith: For me, it's empowering the person themselves to improve their health. And I feel like I'm on my soapbox about this, but whatever it's gonna take to walk through the virtual door or the physical door to get healthier, get the mental health treatment you need, that's what we need to focus on. 

[00:22:20] Andrew Smith: And I think TRIPP offers an extremely unique pathway to, and like Nanea mentioned, like maybe I'm not willing to see a therapist, but I might be willing to try TRIPP. And then I might say, "Hey, I want to go to the next level and I'm gonna call my primary care doctor, and I'm gonna call my therapist. I'm gonna go get seen. I wanna live a healthier life." Even the anxiety we feel at home, like maybe that gets too much and I'm willing to try new outlets. And I think the technology potential is un, like we can't even fathom what it could do for us in five years if people really get engaged in their own mental health and treatment.

[00:22:57] Andrew Smith: And I think TRIPP is just [00:23:00] the beginning of opening this wild door that we could see it five years. 

[00:23:04] Nanea Reeves: And thank you so much for supporting our company to both of you. It has been a joy to work on and the feedback we get from users has been amazing, especially during the last 24 months and the pandemic where we really found our true mission as a company.

[00:23:23] Nanea Reeves: It was very clear that we were already making a difference, but I still feel it's at about 15 to 20% of the vision I have in my head. And I'm excited to stay mentally and physically healthy to deliver on that mission. And I just wanna thank you and neglect health for supporting TRIPP. 

[00:23:43] Lindsay Kriger: Thank you for being here, and thank you for being a visionary, both of you, and sharing your stories and being so real about this opportunity.

[00:23:52] Lindsay Kriger: We look forward to a really successful future together in supporting you. Thanks for joining us, and again, I'm Lindsay Kriger, director at Inflect [00:24:00] Health. 

[00:24:00] Lindsay Kriger: Here at Inflect, the future of medicine care and health delivery is not just right for disruption. It's increasingly personalized, accessible, and human.

[00:24:10] Lindsay Kriger: Make sure you like and subscribe to For Startups by Physicians wherever you get your podcasts. And keep up with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and on Medium at @InflectHealth and on the web at InflectHealth.com.