Founder Friday by Canopy Community
It is a great blessing to be able to Follow Your Dreams! To be offered the moment in time where you get to build something of your vision and take it to the world.Not everyone gets that opportunity and not everyone who does so succeeds, in fact many of us fail, many times over, and we know ahead of starting out that the dangerous rocks of the journey are most likely to get us on the way.So what makes us take that leap of faith? What spurs us to back our endeavours with our time, our energy, our money and our life force? What kind of mental and emotional make up is needed not only to start, but to survive and thrive on such a voyage of discovery?In seeking the answer to that question we look to the failures, the examples of success and the many ‘works in progress’ from which we can learn and this is what brings us to the drive behind Founder Friday.More information at https://canopycommunity.substack.com/p/founderfridaywhat-is-it-all-about
Founder Friday by Canopy Community
These founders created a VR experience that calms people in just seven minutes
Katie and Zilla are revolutionising mental health support through innovative virtual reality experiences that help people calm down in just seven minutes while developing vital coping skills.
• Both founders met while working on a Doctor Who VR project for the BBC that received an Emmy nomination
• Their complementary skills create a strong partnership: Zilla as a super-connector with extensive networks and Katie as a strategic problem-solver
• They identified a gap where 30 years of VR mental health research wasn't making it from laboratories into practical applications
• Their approach combines creating compelling content with practical implementation strategies for schools, libraries and universities
• The experiences are meticulously designed to be enjoyable and effective, co-created with medical and healthcare students
• User experience is paramount – they focus on making people comfortable and allowing technology to "melt away"
• Their extensive career experience gives them advantages in understanding what they know, their limitations, and when to seek help
• Testing at Glastonbury festival provided valuable feedback and reinforced their mission to bring joy to mental health support
Try our VR experiences for yourself and discover how we're transforming mental health support through technology that people genuinely enjoy using.
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All right, fantastic. So welcome to our latest episode of Founder Friday. Katie and Zilla, welcome Nice, to see you here today. Where are you both today?
Speaker 2:We're both at different ends of London. I'm in South London and I'm in the North.
Speaker 1:And, of course, you have an epic, epic idea. That's been to at least two demo nights now and got a lot of raving fans across the community, so do you want to tell everybody what is it that you do?
Speaker 2:Yeah well, we've developed some amazing virtual reality experiences that help young people or anyone indeed calm down rapidly in seven minutes and develop coping skills. So it's really fast, it's enjoyable and it really works.
Speaker 1:And it does really work. I've actually seen it in action, although I haven't done the immersion myself, but I have watched many others do it. You're too relaxed already, stuart. You think this is relaxed. I'm like a duck. But it's not just the smile in the moment, it's the smile several hours or even days afterwards or when they recollect the experience. So tell everybody who's watching this and not met. The moment is to smile several hours or even days afterwards or when they recollect the experience. So tell everybody who's watching this and not met you before, like, how did you guys come up with this?
Speaker 3:and how are you connected to?
Speaker 2:each other. How did you meet as co-founders? You can do the similar, right, I'll start this. So, um, well, both of us been working in virtual reality for years, actually. I'd I'd worked for the bbc for 20 years, started in political journalism, did many, many things, but then ended up working in innovation and I got really excited by virtual reality's power to change behaviour.
Speaker 2:And I went on a trip to Stanford for the BBC back in 2014, and Stanford had this amazing big virtual reality lab where they've done years of psychology experiments, and I did this one particular thing where I flew like superman around a city, and the idea of the experiment was that by by giving people these superpowers, um, you had to save a child that had been left after. After a city had been evacuated and one child had been left, I had to go and find the child. I got too excited about flying to find the child, but they proved in the experiments that people who'd done this because they felt they'd done something good and they'd had this exhilarating and superhuman experience that it changed them as people. They became more confident, they became more empathetic and it was just so exciting, and so we set out at the BBC to really understand how virtual reality, what sort of content we could make.
Speaker 2:It was really exciting at the beginning of a sort of new medium to understand how you could tell stories and and what you could do with this, and eventually I ended up running a full on virtual reality studio for the BBC and I met Katie because we wanted to make a Doctor who VR adventure in virtual reality and Katie. We asked a number of companies to pitch to do this for us, for select companies, and Katie won the pitch. So we worked together on a Doctor who adventure that took us to Tribeca. We had to get a TARDIS to New York, which was quite an effort they don't fly very easily and we got an Emmy nomination and that was that was how we met.
Speaker 3:I'll get three onwards so, yeah, we um I mean, yeah, doctor who was just a fantastic project to work on. My background was in video games. I always sort of understood the, the power of kind of interactive media and also just that extreme emotional investment people put in different IP. Huge with games, gaming audiences are particularly hard to please. So are Doctor who fans, it turns out, and I had left games to go to sort of very early VR studio in 2015, where, similar to sort of Zilla's moment with flying around the room, I did a vertigo experience and I hate heights.
Speaker 3:I am no good with heights and this idea that I was basically arguing with myself over whether something was real or not was like there is something in this. I went from there to an animation studio where I sort of headed up their innovation and r&d department and vr was part of my remit. Um, they were very happy to see a vr project, uh, for dr who land at our feet. Um, and I think we we, through that project, we appreciated each other's skill sets from the off. It was very much a sort of divide and conquer between managing BBC stakeholders and a kind of you know, a studio team keen to get on with things and not willing to wait for the BBC to go through many levels of approvals. Off the back of that, I think it was lockdown, wasn't it? We were wandering around Hampstead Heath wondering what to do next. What was wrong with the vr industry many things, um and trying to think about how we use this, this technology we'd both obviously fallen in love with, to do some good.
Speaker 2:Yeah I mean we're really aware that um I mean I I had three teenagers at home was teaching students we were really aware of the youth mental health crisis and the way it was holding young people back and the need for new solutions that could help. And there'd been 30 years of amazing research using virtual reality to support people with mental health issues. But I mean we felt that not enough of that had sort of made it out of the lab and that too often, you know, there were pilots and things that had been started in hospitals but they all hit brick walls and we felt that was a a lack of understanding of how to make good content, but also sort of a an understanding and appetite for understanding how to implement it. And one and another thing that I'd led at the bbc was a big um pilot in public libraries, taking taking VR out across the country up and down to over 170 libraries and making it really easy for librarians to be sent a box with a headset in it and some instructions and some guidance and get going. And we thought the same could be applied to VR in schools and universities and other places like libraries.
Speaker 2:So we were bringing not only our understanding of how to make great content to this and to work in research partnerships with universities, because that's also something we both love bringing these complex interdisciplinary teams together to solve a problem, but also to understand about how to implement new things. And because both of us have been working in innovation a long time, we know that implementation takes time. Innovation isn't just one easy thing where you make something and people start using it. You have to really understand user behaviour and work with them and use research to quickly iterate and make something that's really enjoyable and desirable and easy for people to use to get it going.
Speaker 1:So you two are obviously incredibly passionate about what you do. I've watched you give your demos and stand up there on stage, and you're both very articulate storytellers and very charismatic in the way that you do it. But I wonder what are your true superpowers? Like you guys know each other better than I know you. So, Katie, what would you regard as Zilla's superpower and Zilla, what would you regard as Katie's superpower, and what therefore makes you such a good founding partnership?
Speaker 3:I think it's definitely. I mean, you know, zilla's ability to pull a contact or new member of a network seemingly out of thin air. She genuinely does know everyone ever, um, or someone who knows someone, and she'll be like just I've just been talking to an amazing person who is exactly the right person to to sort of help us or or will be in six months time or so. I think that comes from and also bringing them on board, I think, just years of kind of BBC stakeholder management. It means she was always I know for Doctor who it was it was this combination of diplomacy and the ability to sort of weave around any obstacle or block and find a way around and someone who would help. I think that still is definitely one of Facespace's superpowers.
Speaker 2:It sounds like you're a super connector, zilla Is, would say. I mean Katie's ability to sort of patiently solve a problem and work out the way, the best way forward, to unravel it and move forward Again. That helped us with Doctor who and it helps us with FaceSpace all the time. But also Katie does the most awesome, awesome decks and pitches. I mean that's, that's why. That's why we ended up working together.
Speaker 3:Got to be selling the strategy and then upping the budget, which I think is what I did with Dr Hu. Oh yeah, budget.
Speaker 2:Langling budgets to get the best out of every penny and make sure it goes in the right places, I mean, and that requires immense flexibility. And I think we've realised, in the startup world actually, our understanding of managing budgets, which comes from the sort of flexibility required for really complex productions. Um is is, is um really useful and um we, we really do know how to budget well and and um get the most out of our money interesting.
Speaker 1:Now. I don't know if you've listened to too many of the founder friday episodes before, but one of the questions I'd love to ask is what defines you as founders and entrepreneurs and where this all started from. Was I have this attribute which is I'm an only child and we do put down my entrepreneurial bent to the fact that I am like this and I don't like other people's rules. I only like my own rules, because I kind of grew up with my own rules and so I end up building companies simply so I can be in a place where the rules are the way that I want them. And it's kind of weird, but when you look back at the path, all the companies I built and stuff, this really is a defining feature for me. It's also why I don't play well with others.
Speaker 1:I'm a really bad communicator because I internalize all the time. You know it time you know it's all these only child things that I have to kind of compensate for. But it's the very reason that I get annoyed about stuff enough to start a company rather than just allow things to be the status quo. So my question to each of you is what defines you and what is making you do at a different age. Dare I say it to some, you know, to most entrepreneurs that we see come through demo night right. Different age, different experience level, different life experience. That's happened for you both. What is the fundamental definition of you both that's making you do this?
Speaker 2:well, if I look back on my career now, it's really obvious to me that all the exciting times and the things I've been drawn to are launching new things and the challenge of that and getting people really excited about something new and establishing it to the point where it becomes normal whether it was launching a new program on radio 4 or launching a new VR studio when nobody knew what VR was for and for me, the startup is bringing everything together in the ultimate challenge of not only creating an entirely new product that does something very new that's never been done before, but everything that comes with that and the challenge of that has been incredibly exciting.
Speaker 1:So does that mean you're a shiny things person? Is that what it is?
Speaker 2:I like the challenge of new things. It really uses my brain in terms of understanding what it will be, what you need, and it's always been very audience focused because I come from broadcasting. So if it was a new program, it was how can we make a program that, how can we devise a new program that can then be made every week on budget, on time and go out and delight audiences, and so it's bringing those different things together. But it's also it is about creating a product that audiences will love. That's what I've always tried to do.
Speaker 1:So if you, if you created a in this case, a programme, a show, if you like, went on the BBC that you loved and it was really well put together, it was on budget and on time, but nobody watched, would that?
Speaker 2:be a failure. I didn't. That's a total failure. Um, yeah, yeah, and as a commissioning editor, which I later was, you're not commissioning for yourself, you're absolutely the audience might need and enjoy and like um, that's, that's the art of it okay, so you like breaking down barriers and making new things interesting?
Speaker 1:all right, katie. What about you? What defines you?
Speaker 3:I think sort of like my approach to sort of innovation. Interestingly, both come at different ways on that sort of like, do new things. And similarly I like the challenge of someone saying you know, no one's ever done this before. You're like, well, okay, let's figure out how we do do it. But I think the interesting part of that and I think we've both come from this sort of intrapreneur sort of job where you have to, you have to sell that in as an idea, you have to get people to get, get the buy-in, um, and so that idea of having a really clear strategy and rationale, of really understanding why you're doing it and why it's going to be good and getting people on board is a big part. The other side of that which I think is is sort of this I think I overused the word sort of satisfying. When something next to me is sort of satisfying, I'm like, yeah, the argument is there and the creative is there and this all feels like it's clicking into place, that we know what we're making. I like that bit of it.
Speaker 3:But I think a lot of that is I have a very contrarian nature. I've just been back at my parents house clearing stuff out. I've been reading all my old school reports and this is definitely there at the beginning of you know, very independent wouldn't yeah, don't listen to people. But I get excited when I feel that we are doing something genuinely different. But I look at everyone else and go I don't want to do what you guys are doing. And I'm really happy in this space where we are off on an angle, because this is really exciting. This means we're doing something new and adding some new values along the way, and I think between that, having that, having that idea of like over here is new and exciting and here is why the sort of background, strategy and rationale for it that's, that's where I like working so would it annoy you to be doing the same thing as other people?
Speaker 3:god. Yes, I never have, for good or ill. I wouldn't recommend it as a career path. But yeah, it would annoy me to be just turning the handle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so let's touch on the subject of age. I'm not going to ask you your ages, right, but I'm 52 and I'm usually in the minority in most of the events that we hold right, so that's a 20 to 30,. Come out of university, maybe done a master's. Hold right, so that's a 20 to 30. Come out of university, maybe done a master's. There's a lot of those kind of people circling around doing their first startups or their second startups either. As I mentioned before, you guys have got a bit more life than that. That's happened already. So how does it, how does that fit? Just doing a startup and going through this process and this kind of mind-bending journey of trying to raise money and get customers and stuff? Does that fit with where you're at in life? Or is this friction or actually does it empower you more to have this kind of life experience behind you, compared to somebody who's 22 doing this?
Speaker 2:well, I think. I think it's brilliant because I think a startup has brought together so many bits of the knowledge I've acquired in my I won't say how long my career's been, but long and varied career over different things, and that's why I've got lots of contacts. I've done many things. So, yes, I'm also in the fortunate position I had three children, who are now all at university and beyond, and so I've got this huge energy and time that I can devote to a startup. That would have been much harder when I had three young children in my 30s. So it's a great time as far as I'm concerned, and just a perfect time to bring your experience together to do something really challenging.
Speaker 1:Myself as a perspective Katie.
Speaker 3:I don't have the luxury of children having left home yet. I'm still dealing with that, but it's the same. I mean, I think, yeah, you know, until you sort of step off that existing career path of working for other people, you don't appreciate I was saying this to to someone I used to work with you don't appreciate quite how much you know. You don't understand that actually, yes, I have done. I have done sales and I have managed teams and I have delivered multi million pound projects and I've done, you know, all of these things that you'd never have done earlier in my career.
Speaker 3:I might, you, might you have the benefit of kind of maybe going in a bit more optimistic, a bit more wide eyed. But I think when, when you, when you come a bit more wide-eyed, but I think when you come a bit older, the other thing is I'm a lot more confident in admitting what I don't know and going off to find someone who can help, which I think when you're younger you maybe don't even have that sphere of reference to know the difference. You don't automatically go. Okay, I need to go and ask someone about this try and you know, I think it's easier to feel confident about that when you're older.
Speaker 2:So we're able to work smarter. We know our limitations as well and when we need extra help and are not afraid to ask for it. And I guess a third thing is that we know ourselves and what our boundaries are in terms of when we're dealing with negotiations and stuff. We know what we're comfortable with and what we're not, and that's not something I would have known in my 30s, 20s, I mean.
Speaker 1:And do you? I mean, what sort of peer response or from friends and colleagues and stuff do you do you get for going on a startup journey?
Speaker 2:right, well, I've just inspired somebody, um, who was going to try another intrapreneurial activity to um, go it alone and do it. So I think we're starting to inspire a few others. Um, and I'm sure a lot of other people think we're totally mad, don't know, katie, everything involved, I think I think I mean neither, neither of us came from from this world it has.
Speaker 3:It has you know I think that's that's been the learning curve is the sort of you know the language, the ecosystem, this sort of startup world bubble that exists outside of most people's normal sort of day-to-day work experience. So when you meet most people, I know just don't really have any sort of sphere of reference of how you even do it. Well, there's a lot of admin, but yeah, I think that's the main response. It's like, how are you even doing this?
Speaker 1:not sure I mean you definitely throw all the energy in the world at it. It's quite amazing to see you guys on stage and stuff, and so I've noticed that you get this kind of raving fan thing going on when you. When people use this product, they become raving fans. They tell lots of people about it, they smile uncontrollably about the experience. How have you managed to do that?
Speaker 2:well, it was designing a good product and it's gone through a lot of testing, I think, to get it to this stage. It was it was all co-designed with medical and healthcare students at what was then St George's University of London, and they gave us astonishingly good feedback. I mean, that's one thing we really benefited from. They were very able to articulate and describe when something was working or when it wasn't. So it's gone. That's what I'd say. It's gone through proper design and rigorous design processes to get it where it's at, and we we know how to get the best from it when we're dealing with people and and to introduce them. We we set them up. We we we've learned all this through years of exhibiting and taking VR around, of how to make sure they're comfortable, feel safe when they do it as well.
Speaker 3:I think the fact we've been making VR so long is part of what makes it do. That is, you know, there's, as I said, there's a, there's a lot of kind of mental health VR that stayed in the lab and you put it on and it. I mean, yes, there's some very good medical thinking behind it, clinical thinking behind it, but for me it's like but does it have to look like a PlayStation 2 game? Because I'm pretty sure it doesn't have to look that way, but obviously it does. They're not animators, they're not creators in any way. They're making a very functional sort of experience and I think what you know my experience is is you're asking so much of someone to put a vo headset on right, you might be. You're asking them certainly to put down their phone, probably, you know, not talk to their family for 10 minutes. You might even, for sort of room scale, you might have to move your furniture. You've got like this is a huge investment of people's time to put their headset on and there's the hair thing as well.
Speaker 1:Right for some people. It's not, it's like a, it's a proper barrier to some people putting this on there.
Speaker 3:So if someone is going to be, you know, um, willing to give us 10 minutes of their undivided attention. We have to give them something back that is worth that. Yeah, and that is. You know, when we were experimenting with early graphics, when we were looking at you know tweaks to sort of, you know the audio experience, every, every single detail of that has been made to like let's not pull anyone out of this lovely world by going, oh that you know, a little bit of pixelation there or a little bit of lag.
Speaker 3:We can't do that, we have to make something that that, yeah, that people feel is is rewarding them for their time and attention so you've set the bar quite high, right with your expectations, really high.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's a really people-centered approach. Everything is designed around making people feel comfortable, making it easy for them, um, trying to sort of make the technology melt away so they just have a beautiful experience. Um, and the sort of conversations they have before and after are really important too all right.
Speaker 1:So this is founder friday. This is all about founders and their personalities. I'm going to have to ask you some of the tricky questions what is the biggest mistake you've made and what is the biggest row you've had as co-founders? You can answer those in any order or you can ignore them completely. It's up to you.
Speaker 3:I'm trying to think of what the biggest mistake was we've made.
Speaker 2:I put an extra digit in a bank transfer once fortunately it was to katie because I wasn't understanding that in my age I need to wear glasses um to use my phone now, and that was. That was awful, because katie was on holiday and we had to unravel it. And it was.
Speaker 3:It was quickly unraveled, but it was well, it wasn't, because then my bank flagged it as a fraud when I tried to pay it back.
Speaker 1:Stop giving me too much money.
Speaker 2:So I always wear my glasses now if I'm doing a bank.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was a good one.
Speaker 2:That was a good one.
Speaker 1:And what about the rows? Do you guys row? I mean, you're both creative people right, with a huge amount of passion and energy.
Speaker 2:I would have thought you you would row about something quite regularly. No, we don't. We don't row we. I mean you know we, we occasionally I know I've pushed Katie too far on something right I've um been um over liberal with a some terminology like elevator pitch to mean just like it's not.
Speaker 3:That's not an elevator pitch.
Speaker 2:Occasionally I get told off for that sort of thing, but, um, no, we, we've really had an exceptional working relation. I've never I mean I've never actually had a relation, working relationship like this in my entire career, I would say where we have have worked so well together, solved problems together and, um, supported each other. Um, if there's been other things going on in our lives that required it, tried to make it, um, so that we could make this work, because there was simply no point with a startup, with all the stress and effort, unless you can turn it and this was advice one of my friends gave me early on turn it into the company you want it to be, because you won't survive otherwise. Not at this early stage where there are so many mountains to climb. You have to make it what you want, and that, for us, was was to be supportive.
Speaker 3:The idea of like a creative endeavour. Yes, you can feel strongly about things, but the project only works if you move it forward and get over that block pretty quickly. You know it's not about opinion. It's about how do we achieve the thing that is missing or get us to that. You know, yes, we can all agree. Maybe something isn't working or something can be better. How do we solve it without? You know, you don't need to stick your heels in and go. It needs to be X, y and Z. There's a whole sort of range of things we can do to try to pull a lever to move things forward.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Thank you for answering those. I know they're not the easiest questions. It's an absolute privilege to know you both and I'm really glad that we've got to meet each other through the Demo Night experience and the stuff at City St George's. You know, I really do hold you up. It was one of the reasons we've invited you to the Founder Friday. Hold you up as role models for people taking startup ideas through, and particularly the way you tell stories on stage and the way you kind of carry those stories into people's mindsets and then the joy you've given them through using the headset. So thank you so much for everything you've been bringing to Demo Night into the community. I wonder, as role models in our community, if you could share with the people watching this what's your best advice for a first-time founder thinking about doing a startup today?
Speaker 2:Well, since we're coming from the sort of supporting mental health end, I think we have to say that you do need to find ways to look after yourself. You are going to get lots of knocks and have to pick yourself up after spending months on a grant application that you then don't get, and you know all the frustrations are often the effort you put into things that just don't come off, but you can't understand whether that's going to happen at the time and and and so finding what what I, what I sometimes see in in um younger founders is, is just um running themselves into the ground actually with exhaustion, without um putting some boundaries in to make sure that that um they look after themselves and therefore um have better ideas and um and and can work smarter. Um because every time we take a little break we come back with a brilliant idea and um. There are times when you think I can't possibly do this um. I was.
Speaker 2:I took our vr to glastonbury last week and was extremely stressed before partly getting all the headsets ready, thinking can we provide headsets for hours on end in a tent? Is it all going to work? It did, and we got some amazing, amazing feedback, but again it kind of sort of made me rethink. You know what we're all about the need for bringing some joy to the, to the world of mental health, so that people actually want to use it and get the the pleasure and joy from that. And it was. It was really nurturing and a great experience. And if I'd said no, I must just focus entirely on fundraising, we can't possibly do that, we would have never got to that position.
Speaker 3:It's definitely made us, it's reinforced what we're all about yeah, I'd add some advice from a um, a guy I know who, who in fact, he's a founder um, when I started, he did give me two pieces give me a great accountant. That would be, that would be a good, good contact. Give me a really good, really good accountant to use um. But the other thing he said was that you, you will never get to the bottom of your to-do list, and I think that's that's the advice and be comfortable with that. Right, you have a finite amount of energy. Your job is always going to be what's a priority today.
Speaker 3:Tomorrow, might you know, someone might ring up and and it might change completely. But I think it's that, yeah, just um. Maybe enjoy, enjoy some of that flux. But I think there's a lot. There's maybe, um, a sort of feeling around a lot of, a lot of startup culture and scaling culture where it just becomes a sort of numbers and kind of brute force game, and I think that's maybe what encourages people to work themselves into the ground. But it's not as Zilla says, it's this, it's the stopping and the thinking, and reset the priorities and start again tomorrow with a, you know, slightly rejigged to-do list. Um, but always understand that, yeah, the fact that you've written something down. It's probably good enough some days and you can come back to it the next week with a fresh brain amazing.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, really pleased to have restarted the founder friday series with you guys at the head of it, and I appreciate everything you've brought to the community so far. Thank you and wish you both every success with what's yet to happen with Phase Space, and I'm sure you're going to go on an amazing journey.
Speaker 3:Thank you, thanks, stuart.
