AI Leadership: From LivePerson to Kidco.AI | Rob LoCascio’s Mission to Protect Children

Yeah, you know, I was running this company LivePerson which I founded for 28 years and we were the leading provider of conversational AI systems for the enterprise. So if you ever chatted or messaged in a for a big telco or bank, that was the company. I invented the technology, invented the company, I created it. So I had this company, it was public, 3,000 people, all this, and I think there was a series of things that kind of made me think about change. You know, and after running something for 28 years it sort of becomes an appendage on your body so change is not easy. But I think post-COVID and then with AI becoming a central force of, I would say it's a revolution versus an evolutionary technology, you know, my mission always was at LivePerson, the number one core value was create meaningful connections. And I've always felt that LivePerson, its name in itself and the idea that human beings were powering interactions on a website, the simple concept was like you could chat on a website. And when I invented that technology it didn't exist, but the idea of bringing humans forward has always been somehow my mission around, you know, what I do in life. And as I went through COVID, managed through that, came out the other side, you know, and then sort of looked at the future where it was all going to go and a lot of the talk track around AI was all about existential threat and then large technology companies continuing their power forward. You need billions of dollars in infrastructure. You need large language models. You need nuclear power now. We need to go to Mars. I mean, it's all this thing. And although I'm living in Silicon Valley now, I was always kind of an outsider living in New York looking in. Now I'm here because I moved here to start these companies. But I really feel that the power of every technology, of the humanity is first. And I felt like I should take my knowledge and my resources and my focus and put it towards building companies that could create a different narrative, a different path for all of us to be on, which is AI is helping us. AI makes us better creators. AI will help us be our best individual selves. But it's not that AI is taking our jobs and gonna control us and it's smarter than us and there's a few companies that are going to be very powerful and the rest of us are going to be wherever and the thief of all that. I just felt like that's just such a BS narrative and there just needs to be alternative companies and I felt like I was in a position to go after that.

Yeah. So if I take what I just said to the strategic and then bring it down to the tactics of building a company, my sense was the way to create an alternative path was by creating small models, like instead of large language models let's have small models that could be controlled by humans and be used by humans. And the second part was let's get those models onto small devices and AI native devices. So it gives us a lot more control over the technology. So I created these two companies. One called Kid Company which is a device for children and families to bring AI safely into the home. And the second company is called UR AI where we can replicate you and your AI is a reflection of you. Your AI has your knowledge and your voice, but it's there to serve you. It's a way in which we see we have doctors and lawyers and writers on our platform and they're using it to allow leverage on their time so people can interact with them like it's them but they don't have to be there. And so there's a power to that technology sharing it and monetizing it but it's yours and like I've always said like your AI will never take your job. Like that's the idea. It's not going to take your job. It's your AI. You control it. So this is really what I went after and created these two companies about a little over a year ago. And then now we launched Kid during the holidays and we're launching the UR AI product, the platform in March. Although it was already launched as a company called Eternos a year ago where we started really replicating people for their legacy and that's where I got all my learnings about, you know, AI is reflecting humanity and people's stories and their voice and their emotions and how we can bring that through an AI experience.

Yeah, I mean the big things that I see right now is, I mean let's start with Kid and parents. There's a continuation and now there's the legislation going through, you know, around children engaging with chatbots and AI. During the holidays like a lot of Chinese companies dumped a bunch of toys in the market with a wrapper on ChatGPT or actually they put wrappers on Chinese models and these models, these bottles are harmful. They're adult bottles. They're not for kids. So what I'm seeing is just a lot of junk I guess is the best way to put it being thrown at our families and our children. And what's happening is there's a reaction by parents like, I don't want anything in my home again. I've really been bombarded with YouTube and YouTube Kids and Roblox and all this stuff that's harming my children and creating them to be addicted to technology in a bad way. Now we got AI. So it's like what I'm seeing is, and then I'll flip over to the other company in a second, there's an assault on people and their children and I'll say their individuality and their values. I think this all comes down to values. Like a family has values and on the other side there's a bunch of companies trying to intrude on those values and reshape those values with our children. I have three children below the age of 10. I started the company because I saw that they were changing. They're being influenced by strangers who were there to make them addicts to scrolling and they're cursing and they're hitting each other. And I'm not blaming everything on there, but their pattern, they see a pattern that's funny. They see that comedy and violence and abusiveness is funny. You see it. If you're really a parent, you dig in. You see whether it's a cartoon or people are hitting each other and they laugh or they say the f-word and they laugh. There's a lot of laughter around stuff that's not funny if you're an adult looking at your kids. So, I'm trying to say it's like an assault. And then let's go to the other side. You know when we look at, we've been doing a lot of work in Hollywood with like writers now, famous writers who are now being threatened basically. AI is a threat because the courts ruled that I can create a work and the models can assume that work, those writings, that book and they don't pay me for it and then they can use that to go build a business. And this is a very creative group of people who want to be in the game, but they see it the same thing. It's all threats everywhere. And so we're like, look, come on to our platform. You own the data. You own your storage. Let's create a unique AI based on your creativity. And more importantly is you got to establish yourself somewhere where you own your identity because they've taken your identity and they're taking it through your works and your creativity. So I just see it as like there's this a little bit of an assault. So for me it's all about let's put the power back into the people like you control it, you control the tech, you control more or less the data set is really what you need to control an AI to be in total control. So my learnings here was a little of my history is that there tends to be a lot of noise and then eventually the consumer will make a choice to what serves them the best. And what my hope is by giving them choice that they're going to choose a path that's not the path we're on which is assaulting them every day.

Look, I've given this advice before. Think of tech like homework that you do with your children. And unfortunately, we got into a pattern. It's all patterns and behaviors. Like, I've got my phone and I'm handing it to my kid and they go away. It's all about they go away and they're giving me some time back. This is not the place to do that. You have to think of it like I got to sit down and I'm doing homework with my kids and I'm going to invest in that time. And what I see even when we've launched is some parents take Kid and they treat it like let me hand it to my children and they're going to get addicted, good. That's what they're thinking like we didn't create addicted good on our platform. There's no scrolling. You're interacting with characters, you're making movies, you're making images, you're making music, but the children can make stories with the parents and it's a wonderful thing, but you got to be engaged with it. So my advice is that, you know, if you're not engaged with it with them and you're not creating a moment of connection with your children through technology, then we end up in these places that are really bad.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I went public. I was 33 years old when I took the company public. So, I was young. I started the company at 27. So, I did a lot of things. I was thinking back on that recently about all the things I did being young and now I'm 57 with young kids and I still have the same energy but definitely I have a different perspective on stuff. Look, you know, and I don't want to sound old. That's the problem. So I don't want to say anything that makes me stop because like it's like I remember my grandparents like I remember when bread was 50 cents and you don't appreciate anything, you know, like every generation thinks the next generation is just a bunch of lazies. But the way my success in life, I've never claimed to be the smartest person or the most aggressive or the most, everyone has to be the most something. I think the world that I've lived through and that I've been successful in is to be in a place of service. And if you think about why you're here, it's to serve others. And to build a company for 28 years and we had some customers with us for over 20 years at that company. I remember matching customers who built their careers off of the technology we created, but we had these friendships and it was through our business that we had them. But I always looked at like we have to serve our customers. We have to serve the company. And the company, you know, company comes from the Latin word, the root word corpus, which is body. And if you're a young person, I see this sometimes is that there's really a sense of me. And I saw this, one of the things I just got very disappointed on with COVID was somehow really COVID was the last nail in the coffin to me. I started to see employees perspective of you got to take care of me. You know, it's like the company's got to take care of me. There's a lot of injustice in the world. Therefore, take care of me. And this has destroyed what companies were all about which is that I'm here to serve. I'm here to create connections. So if you're a young person showing up, whether you're building a company or showing up in a company to work there, you have to be there to serve. And if you come with what can I get out of it? How can I get rich? How can I get something from someone? It creates this very distorted perspective on what the nature of business is, you know. So I would just say be a servant leader. I say servant leaders I think are the best leaders in the world.

There's a lot. It's like, you know, there's a lot. I mean, I went through the dot-com. So I actually, we survived the dot-com. That was our bubble that we survived. We did, I had to fire like 90% of the company in one day to get us to survive. And then we went through the financial crisis, COVID. So you know I have a couple of key lessons that I live by which is the macro of everything, so those big things that happen like I live through them and you're going to live through them if you're building a business, they're uncontrollable and what makes them macros is that everyone in the world is experiencing them at the same time. What I learned though is that the best thing you do is slow down time. So I remember specifically when COVID hit and we all went home and I remember being on a Zoom with my team, there was all these opinions that oh my god, the company's not going to survive, you know, because it was really back then like we all had to be dead. We were powering contact centers and so there's people in those contact centers. What's going to happen to our technology? Anyway, I was like, we don't need to do anything right now. So what you need to do is instead of being ahead of it, you want to be like if this is the wave of the change, you want to be here and you want the wave to go out. Like if a wave is passing you and you're on a beach or you're out surfing and it's about you want it to work through you, past you and then you're going to get a perspective on it to understand how you're affected by it or not when you get inside of it and that's what people tend to do. They react and now they're inside, you're going to get in the washing machine tumble. So, I'd say if you hit a macro event, slow it down. And in our case, I was like, let's just see how it plays out. It played out really well for us because people wanted AI and automation and we had it and we grew like a weed during COVID, but at those first couple of days and weeks, nobody knew what was going on. So, I just say kind of like on that level, slow it down. The next one is really about, you know, I call like skill and will is the essence of the people you work with. Do they have skill and do they have will? I learned this during the dot-com when we had to terminate a bunch of people in the company. We made a list of everyone's name and we checked, there's three of us and each of us took our own sheets and we checked and we then we compared our sheets and everyone who stayed had to have skill and will. You can't get away without it. You may have someone who's brilliant but they don't have the will or you may have someone has the will and they don't have the skill. But you need to have these two things to operate the business. And then I would say the third thing which is important is like as a company you have to be really clear about why you exist and core values. Which I learned I didn't have them in LivePerson for the first 10 years. We never had them. And then as we grew I realized we need them. But all my companies now we start by doing a workshop, a couple of days of figuring out why are we here? What's our values? So I would say like be clear about what the values are of your company. I would only pick one. Most startups can't afford one. Even when we're LivePerson doing a half a billion in revenue, I was like we can only afford two. And you can't do one. But I'd say pick the one thing you think the reason is why we're all coming to work and we're building a company. Get clear on that and make sure everyone's aligned because that gives you a north star to the will. Why are people coming to work with you? And we're in a people business. If you have great people, it's easy to run a business but usually you don't. You have like a mixture of people that are good, great. You have people that are good that could be great. You have people that are great that all of a sudden become bad because eventually the company outgrows them and they don't want to grow. I've seen all that. But the idea is you got to stick to the north star. Don't change with all the things. Stick to your north star.

We don't have the capacity. You know, that's why I worked with, when I was at LivePerson, I worked with 400 of the largest enterprises in the world and I was always looking around for what are the core values and the great ones, it was like they were there. You know, they were definable. They were on the wall, but they weren't on the wall as letters on a wall and words on a wall. They were living and breathing in the people that work at the company. I knew the best companies in the world. Everyone was very aligned. Like Home Depot, like we had Home Depot 20 years ago and it was like at its heyday and it was just amazing to be in there to see the culture of that company. It was through the, a lot of times it's through the founders like great founders will, you know, put something up there and have the company live by it.

That's a good question. You know, yeah, I'm in an interesting position in life. And you know it's a good question. I'm being thoughtful about it. You know obviously I'm trying to build something in the world or put something in the world that can I think once again create a better way for us to engage in this technology. But in the end, you know, let's go through it all. I mean I have young kids and when you have young children you think about their lives and how I can personally affect their lives plus what am I building something that and the way I'm building it can have an impression on them. You know, someone told me about parenting like parenting is about your children observing you and what you do. And I feel like even since I left LivePerson and I didn't leave by the way LivePerson in the end it wasn't a big parade for me. I left, I got tossed out of my company and I left it like that because it got taken over by an activist and ultimately has been hacked as a company since I've left it. Lost over half of its revenues. So I've had to watch that. And so it was that story that happened to Whole Foods. I saw the interview with the Whole Foods CEO. Same thing like activist came in and it disrupted the company. I ended up leaving in a very, it wasn't a parade and a party and it was nothing like I expected after 28 years of building something from nothing. But with that my children, the first thing when I left I'm like my kids will observe how I go through my change in life. And I didn't think they would ever see that kind of change. They never saw the startup. My wife never experienced it either like of me starting companies or taking them public or restructuring them during the dot-com. So they've seen now this change like extreme change and now they're living through how am I evolving with that? Am I down? Am I up? Am I building? Am I creating? So what's important to me is really how they view the work I do, you know, because it's a unit of one. Yes you want to change the world and you want to do all those things if you're, you know, I have that, I've always been like that even when I was a kid I want to do big things but in the end like the unit of one which is my family and my children like they're the greatest observers to my life, you know, everyone else is a stranger, everyone else when I pass away is going to who knows but my children will be living with whatever I've done for the rest of their lives and they'll either say, 'Oh, my dad achieved something. He went through that change.' So, it's interesting for them because they're experiencing something that they get a front row to change, you know.