Lead Your Life | Robert LoCascio, Founder of LivePerson

Hey Julie, how you doing?

Yeah, it was kind of funny when I reached out to you. I worked at LivePerson in like 2000. I'm like, oh wow. And then I thought about, not to minimize your work there, but I was thinking about all these people that are all around the world. Thousands of people over 28 years that are in every little corner of the world. And then you meet them every now and then. It's pretty fun for me. I meet people on the street and we're like, oh, I worked at LivePerson from 1997 to now. I'm like, okay. Or 2000. And it's like, wow, okay, so it's cool.

28 years. 28, yeah.

Yeah, they're all everywhere. So, and then there's customers and it's fun. Like building something long-term like that was pretty cool. It was a great experience, you know.

Wow, that's a big question. What makes me me? I mean, I guess the thing that makes me me is me. Which is that I really fundamentally believe each of us has some sort of purpose. And my gift is just the ability to take in ideas and have a vision and organize it in a way and bring people around it and manifest it into products. And I consider that a gift and I'm lucky to have a gift like that. And then I've always felt that I always want to be in businesses with people. And all my companies had something to do with human beings and hopefully, connection between human beings. So, I think that's kind of my golden thread that's been running through my life. Also, I don't quit. Like, I have some weird genetic disposition to not wanting to quit regardless of how bad things get. I just naturally feel like you have to work through the hard times to get learnings to get to the other side. Quitting is not a great option.

Thank you.

The first two years of LivePerson, I slept on a couch because I had a co... I started a company out of college, put like 50 grand on credit cards. That company went under and I ended up in New York City and I started what would become LivePerson. But I decided to get a small office instead of an apartment and I didn't want to feel like I was quitting business. So I got a little space, a guy rented me a sublet, a guy who made t-shirts in downtown Manhattan. And then I had my couch and a pillow and a comforter. And for two years I lived there. And then I showered at a health club down the block, the New York Sports Club or something. And yeah, so that's how I lived. And it was funny when I went public. The auditors go through your books and they go, 'There's something really wrong with your books.' And I said, 'What's wrong?' They said, '1995 to 1997, it looks like you spent, expense-wise, including your expenses, like $6,000. It's like $500 a month.' I said, 'Yeah.' He goes, 'Did you take money out of cash?' I said, 'No, I lived on that. That's what I lived on.' And he's like, 'How could you live in New York City?' I said, 'I slept on a couch, had a health club membership, and ate ramen noodles. I didn't have a life. I just lived in this thing.' It was a very cathartic experience living on it, staying in a couch. And I still have the couch. It's an IKEA couch. I brought it with me here when I moved to California, so it always follows me.

I was, I remember I listened to a lot of Pearl Jam and I had this heavy music to just stay alive. And I tell you, I had a guy, Dr. Frank Memorial, that was on a podcast I used to do. Frank was a therapist, psychologist, and a friend of mine told me to meet with him because I was really in the dumps. And I met with him and he was there, it's a long story, there's a lot of stories of Frank. He really changed my life and got me to think differently. But he said, 'I want you to go volunteer and help others.' And I remember I was like, 'Frank, I'm living on a couch. I don't...' He's like, 'No, you'll see.' So I went to a homeless shelter at St. Bart's Church on Park Avenue and I would volunteer once a month to sleep at the shelter and feed people. And I remember thinking I'm lucky. Like there are people who don't have family, who are living because they were abused. I mean, they had tough lives. It wasn't like a lot of them were just, they got into these situations and they didn't have a net. A lot of them didn't have a safety net of a family. I always tell my mom and dad if I need to, I could always go home in the worst case scenario. And it was interesting because I just, so you should never feel sorry for yourself. There's always people that are in worse situations, you know. At least I had a couch and a dream, you know.

Well, if you put yourself out there in life and you're really trying to do things that are outside of yourself, which are new things, inevitably you're going to get into some sort of place where it's hard. And I had this podcast called Over the Wall and I would interview people and I named it Over the Wall because I said like, God, whoever, whatever you believe in, puts up these walls and gives you these challenges and that's what it is. And all of us face it. Like everyone suffering and challenges in life is all part of the human experience. And some people end up with cancer at age five. There's every spectrum of suffering. And I just feel like these things are given to you as gifts at times and you work through them. You just got to kind of work through the hard times. And so I don't think it's that, I think everyone has it in them. I think every human being has the grit. It's a question whether you're going to put yourself in an unsafe environment. You see what I'm saying?

Like if I take someone who's got the most safety and certainty in their life and I stick them in a very uncertain place, it's amazing how you will change to try to survive to move forward, or you die. I don't know if I've gotten older or just I've seen a lot more things, but I just started to move. I ran a company for 28 years and then I now have two startups and they're startups, so they literally feel like startups. They're like every day you go in and they're exciting and there's ups and downs, a lot more volatility. But then I've got young kids. I got three young kids, but I definitely have been recently in the last seven months since my birthday, I've been really putting a practice together to get closer to God. And I don't know, there's like, I think as an entrepreneur or you're, I don't care if you're selling, I'm really fascinated with this idea of having a closer conversation with God. And I'm not some holy, I didn't go to church, so I'm not some, you know, I was raised Christian but I never had that. But somehow in the last seven months, like I said, man, I'm building something, I'm building these companies, I have these big visions and I just, I need something. And I will say as an entrepreneur, if you can get there, and I'm on a journey, it definitely makes things more understandable. It makes things more just focused, you know, because there's a lot of noise when you're building a company. There's a lot of noise when you're out in the world running teams, leading teams, I don't care what it is. A lot of noise. And how do you cut through the noise? A lot of noise in your head most of the time. It's a lot of noise in your head. You're talking to yourself half the days. It's like crazy talk. So, how do you kind of elevate that conversation above yourself?

I don't know about that. I think people got used to not being in person, if you know what I mean.

Yes. Yeah. It's, you know, there's a post-COVID world because I saw even working when I was working at LivePerson, like nobody wanted to come back. And I always felt the office, you know, you were there, you experienced, like we had this culture and you would come and even I got to meet everyone. And some of my best friends, a godfather to my youngest kid is the first employee I ever hired at LivePerson, Mike Colossio, and our families are great friends. I would never have met him if I didn't start the company. So I always looked at the company as this experience of connection. And the more diversity you meet of minds and people, the more you're going to grow as a human. So I just felt the company had this kind of purpose. Post-COVID it was like nobody cared. I just saw a place where people weren't really valuing that anymore and they were valuing their individuality, which we're kind of in that place today. We're in a place of myself versus the community. You know.

It's interesting because when I left LivePerson, I had a board member at LivePerson called Peter Block and he's like one of the foremost people on community and connection. He's written many books and worked anyway. Somewhere like five years into him being a board member we were at some event and it was during a cocktail party and he said, it was at a small tech event, and he said, 'You know, all these people here, all these CEOs, everyone's so certain about everything they're doing.' And he goes, 'I've got a question for you.' He said, 'Do you think what you're building is creating better community and connection?' And I'm like, I couldn't answer the question. I felt like as a culture we were trying to get, because meaningful connection is one of our core values, but create meaningful connections, but I could not answer it as a company. So, when I started these new companies, I've got one called Kid, which is a kids device for children to bring AI safely in the home. Then the other one is a platform for people to replicate themselves and own their own AI models. So they own their own data sets and models. I wanted to be able to answer the question. And so I felt like AI, I feel like AI is this opportunity to redefine what an AI company is because no one defined it. And I said I think I can do this to actually put products in the world that can drive better connection, community and creativity within people. So yeah. So I guess for me I felt like I have this kind of calling that I learned so much over 28 years of one company but now I feel like I can apply it to this very massive change and that's going, that right now is heading into a direction that's uncertain. Like it's a very uncertain time. Like we have big tech owning big models with a lot of big money with a lot of big power and that usually ends up in a really big mess. And so I feel like it should be small models, people owning their knowledge, their intelligence, being credited for that intelligence, and then on the other side, they can have that living inside of these devices that are unique and they're helpful. And I see a different world than the iPhone and large language models. And so that's the world I'm trying to create with these two companies. So yeah, so I feel like there's definitely, I kind of feel much clearer purpose why LivePerson where it sits in my life compared to where these two companies sit.

I mean LivePerson had a very, the product had a purpose. It was a very, you know, it was chat and messaging and stuff and it had a very tactical purpose and a utility. It was a utility anyways. Where I think these companies are more about delivering this connection between human beings. Like I built this device called Kid and it's really about children and their parents. I call it 'bring back the bond.' Having a device where they can create together, they can create stories together, they can create art together, they create music together. And I feel like because these, I see with my kids, I have three young kids, like I'm on my phone then they're grabbing my phone. So I just feel like there is, technology can play a part in bringing people together where today it's kind of ended in a place where it's, we're fighting to not be disconnected. It's driving disconnection every day. We all know it. We're on a call, people there, they always talk about it. You know, I don't have to, there's people writing about it and research about it. But I can do something about it. Like I can actually build products, organize people and drive something into the marketplace that people can have an alternative because the alternative today is bad. It's large language models and devices that make our kids be addicts. Our kids are addicts. I mean, really, you think about a 12-step program, not like my, what drove me is like my seven-year-old son a couple years ago, like at three o'clock in the morning, I hear noise and he's downstairs just going like this at 3:00 in the morning on an iPad because he didn't even know what time it was. He didn't know what he was doing. He didn't know. It's the addict thing. Like he couldn't answer the, 'What are you up for?' 'I don't know.' 'Why are you looking at YouTube?' 'I don't know.' 'How do you know it's 3:00 in the morning?' 'I don't know.' So, you know, he got out. His first instinct was that, not go back to bed, not go to the bathroom. His first instinct was jump on the drug. It's a drug for children. It's very bad.

You know, the Kid device is really about, it doesn't have the scroll. It doesn't have the internet. It takes the power of AI and like a four-year-old, my four-year-old can create, you know, can say, 'I want to have an image of a unicorn flying to Mars' or 'I want to create a story with daddy and me and we're going on an island' and it creates all that. And the thing I see is that children have the best creativity. Like as we get older, we kind of lose it a little bit because of society. But they have so many wonderful things in their minds and they can be great writers, great directors, great painters at just four years old, like at five years old, because they can speak their minds and have the AI make it and create it. And that's where I see there's just a joy that comes with it. And that's why I wanted to create versus like get them on the, you know, another thing that they're going like this and they're looking at how. And the people who create that content are terrible people. Like people who create most of the people who create content for children on YouTube Kids are just total bad human beings. They're not out to help children. They're not here to educate our children. They're here to get our kids to be addicts. And they disguise it as funny humor animation, but it's really drug dealing to me. Let me be. So, it really is. And they know what they're doing over there. I mean, even at YouTube, the CEO said the other day, I don't let my kids, like he doesn't let his kids use it. And he said, and I talked to some very senior executive a couple months ago, and I asked her about it, and she was like, I won't let my kids scroll on YouTube. Like they know what they have. I don't mean to be so, but it's got to, you know, they don't care. Just want to sell a lot of ads.