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.

Yeah. I mean there's two parts that it does for us. It can allow us to be our best creators and it can allow us to get leverage on our time. As in, we, the other business, you are, you are.ai, AI, we allow people, they replicate themselves and they replicate their personalities and everything. And the ability to have people access that can really access your essence, can access your X factor of your knowledge is empowering. Versus you keep, we keep giving our knowledge into ChatGPT or whatever, we keep like using that, it's taking our knowledge and then we don't even get credit for it. You know, like it said it's getting smarter and then there's this perspective that we're getting dumber. And we're starting to idolize what's going to happen is it's idolatry. It's like we're idolizing technology that is better and above us. And it's like the first time that we really think like it's got a, they always put out it's got a PhD, like it's always PhD this and a PhD that and no, it's got my knowledge. Like it's a dumb machine. If all of us took our knowledge out of that machine tomorrow, it would do nothing. It doesn't have, it's not a sentient being. It's just a vacuum cleaner of knowledge of humanity and then it's trying to repackage it in a weird way and making us all think we're dumb. Like you know I have doctors we work with like neurosurgeons and people like that who replicate and they're like, 'God, it's getting as smart as I am.' I'm like, 'Yeah, because you keep giving it your data.' Like it is going to be, if you keep giving it your knowledge about your business it's going to act as smart as you. But it wasn't. So the person's like, 'Yeah, two years ago it wasn't that good, but now it's really good.' I'm like, 'Because a bunch of people in your field of business gave it your knowledge and now it's smart.' So like that has to stop. All that has to stop. Then the problem with kids, as you read, is like there are kids who are using it and they end up killing themselves and hurting themselves because it's kind of that kind of an engine. It kind of leads you down any road you want to go down. So in our case, we built a device that's really just for children 4 to 12 years old. The models are made for 4 to 12 year olds. It wasn't like an adult model that we're trying to fit into a child. So look, AI safety is the biggest part. I saw some senators got together yesterday and were like we're going to investigate AI child's toys because there were a lot that being dumped on the market which is general, you know, ChatGPT or there was some from China with a Chinese model and they're just not safe. You know, we just got our, we got two days ago we got COPPA compliant which is the highest, is an FTC rating for the safety of children in the US. So we just got our COPPA compliance.

Thanks. It was a really high honor to get it. So like because we spent a year working on it with the company that certified us and we from the beginning built purpose-built with them helping us to understand how do we build this thing so we could get the certification.

It goes back to like I want to know that we're, especially with kids and families. I want to know that I'm putting something in the market that could serve my family and that ultimately it's serving this purpose of bringing families together and not just one more thing in the home where parents have to fight with the kids or it creates another addiction or it just creates another disconnected moment in a family. And I guess, you know, I'm older but I have these three young kids, nine, seven and five, and you know, living with young kids and seeing what I've seen through the technology arc and lens is just so fascinating and seeing how they approach technology for good or bad. So and there's just a little bit too much bad versus good and I just feel like that needs to be changed because AI should not be a scary thing or something that parents now don't want in their home. It should be something that's embraced for what it does well which is create, help you create.

That's a, entrepreneurial, all entrepreneurs have addictive personalities. That's what make us, we're addictive and obsessive. So, like we are, you know, we have to be committed on a different level to whatever it is. And it's funny because there's things in my life where more entertaining things I've gotten involved with and like sports is something that I just go all in. You know? I'm like I have to do it like to the, I have to become a master. I used to do this thing called capoeira. It's like a Brazilian dance martial art. I was a capoeirista. It was just the funniest thing. I just would, and it just, you know, I think it's just the nature of a certain personality. Like that's what makes people like us, you know, you build and because you'll go all the way, whatever all the way is.

Yeah. Yeah. Some of my friends are thinking like, you're like what, sometimes my friends in the past will be like what are you doing? They're like you do capoeira and I'm like yeah so cool I get martial arts dance like okay fine. And then I became everything capoeira, you know I had the outfit, like my friend, everything, you know you do everything around that. But yeah, it is what it is.

Yeah, it's definitely. And I've unfortunately seen, I mean I've seen myself at the beginning and I learned a lot because I failed and I had to kind of clean up my act through like working with Dr. Frank. I've also done like the Tony Robbins stuff. I have coaches over the years like you can't get to where I got and continue without help. You have to keep thinking through things. And but I've, you know, I've helped and coached some CEOs and stuff and like the two deadliest things of, I mean founders, two deadliest things of founders is certainty and control. You when you over control and you want certainty and preeminence is the other one. Like you're, that if you're all about your ego and getting that hit of hey I'm important and you want certainty which are these two things, they can destroy you because as an, building a business is, you know, if you over rotate on those two things you're going to end up in trouble whether you like it or not because you're going to be high control people, good people usually don't want to work with you, you're not going to be able to really scale, you're going to stay small and most time you'll fail because just the, it works.

Yeah. Yeah, I definitely learned it the hard way. Like I failed enough times early on that I was like, 'Okay.' You know, but obviously people build companies because they want control. Like you want control on a different level that you don't think you can get working for anybody. So, you ultimately want to be the master of your own destiny. How you control the functioning of that or dysfunctioning of that is the part that's hard. And a lot of times you have to get burned and lose a lot and have problems and, you know, fail enough times to be like okay something I'm doing here is not working for me.

Or fail forward. A lot of, I've heard say fail forward.

But you don't, you know, sometimes you do make the mistake twice. But it goes down to like, you know, you can't look for health over sickness, wealth over poverty. That's just like, it is what it is. This is what I learned recently on my journey with getting closer to God, like it is just what it is. Like we want, you can't want something over something. It will be what it will be regardless. And so when you really think about it, in this kind of formation I'm in now in this journey I've been on since May, it's like the CEO of this business is God. Like there's a CEO above you. And when you think of that, yes, I am working for somebody. I am not the full control. Things will happen outside of my control. Maybe everything, I often think maybe everything's outside my control. And maybe I'm part of this thing, but maybe there's a lot that I don't even understand that's going to happen whether I wake up or not that'll happen whether I think I'm going to push it forward or not. So it still doesn't relieve you of the fact that you want very high standards and high quality of your products. You want to be committed and you got to drive people around a vision and they want to follow that vision. You have to be a leader and you have to be up in front. So, I just think, but there may just be, you know, I think there's something else that's out there and that's kind of it is what it is.

Yeah, that makes sense. That kind of makes sense to me. It's like, yeah. And if you've been through enough in life, you realize that, you know, on the other side of whatever that moment is, you're always in a time of sort of like healing and learning, if you know what I mean. Like that you're in these, there's a cycle at the same exact time where you're learning, you're healing. And so, so we have to think through that. That's just kind of the cycle. So, you know, you're right. It's the, you know, this chaos, whether that's the learning part you're in that and you're healing or the healing part, whatever part, you're moving through something and if you try not to, you try to over rotate on it, it's going to be in balance anyway, you'll keep pushing in the other direction to get you in that cycle of healing and learning. So, yeah.

Yeah, for sure. I've had this conversation with friends of mine over the years because I got dealt, or at least in the past because I was dealt such a tough set of cards. I had that intrinsic, like just I am gonna do anything to succeed and I am going to prove all of you wrong. And you know, just because I have a mood disorder I'm going to rise to the top. And at the end of the day it's like you can either think about the bad, all the bad and all the things that you're going to use to power forward or you can think about how amazing, the amazing moments in your life. And I think that brings it back to the it is what it is.

Oh, definitely. They're not like we're sitting on a podcast and okay, we're doing, no issue with talking about people living in a place right now where they think somebody could burst into my door and murder me and my family just because we have a certain background, religion, we live in the wrong place or we can't eat today because I was born in the wrong place, there's no food or I got a place where there's a lot of disease and I can't, I mean it's just, the human stories are 50 of them are not something you want to be a part of. And we're lucky. So, you know.

Well, yeah. And but the majority of what goes on obviously is there's a lot of good stuff. I always feel like though that like it goes back to my living on the couch and I still have my couch which is a remembrance of that time that things could always be back in the couch. And then I remember feeding people in the shelter. I'm like you could end up anywhere. So look, the bottom line is building things. I go back to like being here, like, you know, building companies or building whatever dream you have is an uncertain task. It's one that may not give you anything, or it may give you, but it may not give you riches, may not give you rewards, may not give you, you're known as someone in the world and people are praising you on Instagram or Twitter, but it's going to give you your life and whatever that is, you know, it's pretty good. So, you know, like the problem is we're living as I say is like the world, especially the world in our phones looks like a fabulous world with fabulous everything. And the reality is like, I, you know, it's like if I see one more person who posted I made a million dollars in a week or, you know, and now it's about I raised, I was going to sell myself to, you know, whatever for a billion and now I didn't and now we're worth six bill. I mean, I'm like, all of this gets, I saw the dot-com where we, I was in the middle of the previous explosion of notoriety and wealth and I lived in the middle and so many dots, my god, it was extraordinary, were up there and praised and you don't even know their name, they're nameless now because they lost, most of them lost their jobs, lost their money and lost everything and they just went away. And peacefully they went away because they didn't have social media to kind of like not go away peacefully and they couldn't make a podcast or do something. And they just went away and did whatever you do when you fail at that level. So, I've seen it and it's the same stuff. People making up things and trying to get the rest of everyone to feel bad. And the reality is whatever life you're leading, you just got to lead it. You know what I'm saying? Lead it. I follow it. Lead it. And that's the hard part. Like, lead it. Get up in the morning and lead the life you want to lead. Whether you're running sales or you're working a company or running your own business, it's, you got to lead. I say this every time, but everyone gives me the title of the podcast at the end of the show. It's like a weird sort of thing.

You know what's so funny? As we're talking, I was making a joke there for a second, but as you were talking now, I remember you. You know, it's funny like the, yeah, because, yeah. And I can now I can see you in that setting because for some reason as we talked now your voice and your face just kind of, I felt like now you were there. You know what I'm saying? When I ran, when you originally, I was like I don't remember you and then I'm like okay now I remember.

So you can find me at kidco.ai is the kid and u-r.ai is the company where we do individual AIs. And but if you're a parent you have a place and a device now to give to your kids that's going to be a really wonderful experience. And if you want to, you know, not be hijacked and have all your knowledge taken by a large language model you can have your own small model and we call it the human life model that's based on your wonderful self. And so come to URI and sign up, get on the list and we'll be live in a few weeks.

Thank you. Thanks for everything.