Evan Sitler-Bates is the co-founder and CEO of XpertVR, an Ontario company that builds virtual reality training simulations for firefighters and other first responders. He co-founded it in 2017 with Drew MacNeil while both were students at Brock University's Goodman School of Business, spent the early years on 360 video and academic research studies, and pivoted in 2020 when COVID left pre-service fire and police foundations students with no way to get hands-on training. XpertVR now works with multiple Ontario colleges and with the Office of the Fire Marshal of Ontario, and runs in California, Colorado, parts of South America and into Europe.In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Evan explains what a fire simulation is actually for: not the physical work, but the strategy, the communication and the resource management that a classroom cannot rehearse. He describes the shift from characters you drag out of a building to characters you can question about their injuries and who else is in the house, the Gaussian splatting pipeline that will let a department train in the buildings it actually covers, and why the heat, smell and haptic hardware he has built with before stays out of the kit on purpose. He makes the case that mixed reality, not pure VR, is the two-year horizon, and that the useful version of Ready Player One is the one that gets people looking at the world instead of down at their laps. Asked what he needs most to grow, he says new markets, bought the way Ontario bought it, at the provincial and state level rather than department by department.Evan is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He has spent years convincing a profession that trains for the worst day of someone's life that a simulation is worth its time, and he can show what changed when a province bought it at once. Authority is earned by building things worth talking about, and an honest account of that work is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers.Learn more about XpertVR: https://xpertvr.comEvan Sitler-Bates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evansitlerbates/What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter.Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLaPodcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com#vrtraining #firefighters #firstresponders #simulationtraining #mixedreality #immersivelearning #founders #podcast

Stephen Deason is the founder and CEO of The OPARASA Group in Roswell, Georgia, a family of businesses that ties healthcare staffing and home care to helping people in recovery build worth. The group includes OPA Home Care, a Georgia-licensed private home care provider serving the elderly, the disabled and veterans across metro Atlanta, OPA Staffing, and the OPA RASA foundation, which runs an earn-as-you-learn path from apprentice to journeyman for people in long-term recovery. He has spent more than 30 years building healthcare and technology companies and was previously CEO of the martech firm GRYYT.In this Founder Talk conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Stephen explains what happens after addiction treatment ends, when the formal stages of recovery stop and a person who has learned to stay sober is told to go forth and prosper. He describes OPA RASA's staged path into work the world will pay for, why the tenacity and resilience people bring out of addiction are exactly what employers value, and why OPA deliberately keeps its recovery workforce and its elderly clients apart. He walks through the four ways companies put people to work and how a licensed home care provider differs from an agency, makes the case that an entrepreneur and a person in early recovery share the same first job, being the guardian of what they have been entrusted with, and shares his plan to franchise the model. Asked what he needs most to grow, he says more veterans to serve, after OPA Home Care was approved to provide care through the Veterans Administration.Stephen is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He has built a business that does well by doing good, and he can show the stages it takes for a life to be rebuilt. Authority is earned by building things worth talking about, and an honest account of that work is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers.Learn more about OPA Home Care: https://opahomecare.comOPA RASA: https://oparasa.orgOPA Staffing: https://opastaffing.comStephen Deason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephendeason/What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter.Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLaPodcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com#addictionrecovery #socialenterprise #homecare #veterans #workforcedevelopment #recoveryworks #founders #podcast

Paul Battle is the co-founder and President of Medome, an AI-powered personal health record platform built on five years of research at Stanford and Harvard and designed to prevent primary care misdiagnosis before it happens. He spent more than two decades in technology at IBM and then Lenovo, where he rose to run healthcare as one of Lenovo's verticals, and he left to work on the problem full time after losing someone to a misdiagnosis. He vetted 25 AI healthcare companies first, found that nearly all of them were automating the administrative side of medicine rather than the diagnostic side, and co-founded Medome with Dr. Steven Charlap, MD, MBA, who had lost his brother, a trained cardiologist, the same way. Neither founder takes a salary.In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Paul explains why layering artificial intelligence over a broken process does not repair the process, it just reaches the wrong answer faster, and why that led them to rebuild the primary care diagnostic interview itself rather than speed up the one clinicians already use. He makes the arithmetic case that no primary care physician can hold the problem space, citing 28,000 possible diagnoses against the roughly 1,000 a physician may see across an entire career. He describes trying to sell to physicians first and being told they do not make mistakes, which is how consumers became the customer and the physician became a reader instead of a buyer. He is candid that his biggest conversion problem is his own product, a 30 to 45 minute upfront interview against an expectation of 5 to 10, and why he will not shorten it. And he names the single most valuable thing he could sell, the clean data, before refusing to sell it.Paul is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He walked away from a route to fast growth because it was the wrong one, and he is rebuilding a process most of his industry has decided to automate instead. Authority is earned by building things worth talking about, and an honest account of that work is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers.Learn more about Medome: https://medome.aiPaul Battle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulbattle/Dr. Steven Charlap, co-founder, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-charlap-md-mba-8911906/What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter.Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLaPodcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com#healthcare #misdiagnosis #personalhealthrecord #healthtech #AIinhealthcare #primarycare #founders #podcast