Faith in the Future

 

LivePerson Founder & CEO Rob LoCascio discusses the beautiful journey of entrepreneurship, the impermanence of failure, and the breakthrough innovations driving a new age of conversational commerce.

 

Episode Notes

One of the defining characteristics of this age of business is ambiguity. And to face that ambiguity with courage, we need to heed both ambitious visions of the future and the hard-earned lessons of the past. And you couldn’t ask for a better source of prescient ideas and valuable lessons than LivePerson CEO & Founder Rob LoCascio. He’s the rare tech entrepreneur who really may have seen it all.

In his talk with Jesse, Rob discusses the ups and downs of his 25-year journey, revealing how he managed through the dot-com bubble, the Great Recession, and now, a global pandemic. He reflects on his company’s invention of cloud-based web chat for business, achieved decades before the cloud as we know it came into existence. Rob offers thoughts on the future of conversational commerce, and reveals how LivePerson is now building AI tools that can hold remarkably natural and confidence-inspiring conversations with customers. Finally, he attests to the power that blockchain technology can offer to workers, and describes how he’s leading with empathy in support of employees. Throughout, Rob’s depiction of what he calls his “beautiful journey” is refreshingly frank, earnestly offered, and packed with useful advice and encouragement for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs alike.

(4:01) Why the entrepreneurial journey is full of setbacks and unknowns, but worth it

(8:54) Inventing the cloud, decades before the cloud

(13:24) How LivePerson builds chatbots that can hold more natural & personalized conversations with customers

(21:55) The rise and democratizing potential of blockchain tech for workers

(26:25) How conversational commerce can actually decentralize commerce—for good

(28:12) To college or not to college?

Guest Bio

Rob LoCascio has served as LivePerson’s Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors since the company’s inception in November 1995. Additionally, he founded the charity Feeding NYC, hosts the podcast Over The Wall and is a frequent contributor to Inc., and other publications. Rob was named a New York City Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist in 2001 and 2008, and was the winner of the 2015 Smart CEO Circle of Excellence Award.

Helpful Links 

+ Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Rob LoCascio: If you think of what's happened in crypto, especially with Bitcoin and Ethereum, it's a trillion dollar entity, as big as like an Apple with no employees. It's got one of the biggest brands in the world with no marketing campaign. It doesn't have a Steve Jobs. And that is about centralization of power. Centralization is not in vogue anymore. And that's what people are feeling. They're feeling like, "I don't want to be part of a centralized thing. I want to have more autonomy. I want to be more sovereign, but I want to be part of a community." And that's really what's happening in the world.

[00:00:35] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtrics Studios, this is Breakthrough Builders. A series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas, feel some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences. I'm Jesse Purewal head of brand at Qualtrics, builder, coach storyteller, and your host. I believe that a leader who can see the future coming and build an organization to help shape it is the rarest of breeds. It's one thing to be a visionary. It's quite another to create a company in a movement around your vision. That's why I was excited to sit down with Rob LoCascio. 25 years ago, Rob founded LivePerson. He's still a CEO and he's still in growth mode. The company is dedicated to the art and science of building and deploying messaging technologies to power what's known as conversational commerce. Said in other way, Rob and LivePerson help people and brands build more authentic and human relationships using technology more naturally. As you'll hear from Rob, although LivePerson has the Guts & Gusto of a digital enterprise born in the cloud, he and his team were actually creators of the cloud and inventors of a new way for customers to experience customer experience.

Rob and I had a wide ranging conversation that spanned his working as a tech leader in New York, the current and future states of conversational commerce, building an AI through the discipline of conversational design, blockchain as a model for organizational structure and interpersonal collaboration. And in Rob's words, the beautiful journey that is entrepreneurship. Rob also shared some provocative original perspectives on the futures of work, life, and education in our society. He's a remarkable builder, an empathetic leader, and a great human being. Enjoy. Rob LoCascio.

You started live person 25 years ago and you have built the organization, headquartered in New York. You're from New York. What's the narrative around growing a technology business in the city over this past two and a half decades?

[00:02:44] Rob LoCascio: When I started was the first wave in the .com and there was a bunch of us who moved to New York city. I lived in Baltimore before that, I went to school there. I'm originally from New York Long Island. When I saw the internet in 1995, I'm like, "I want to be in that." And you go to Silicon Valley or you would go to New York city because New York city had media and it was all about content. So it was really interesting back then, because basically there was a small group of us like Jeffrey Dachis who ran Razorfish and agency.com. And there was a tiny group of us who got started and we all knew each other and it was really a cool scene. Then obviously the .com wiped out. Most people in New York, there was a couple of us that were left standing. I think of one of the few is a public company left standing. And from there, technology kicked in early 2010, things started to roll until today.

[00:03:38] Jesse Purewal: And Rob you're somebody who really owned the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey, the fits and starts of the path to growth. You write about it. You recently started a podcast on it called Over the Wall. I think in a great way, you are normalizing the conversation around the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey. Talk about the power that you see in being public with that kind of posture.

[00:04:01] Rob LoCascio: When I went public, we were $1 share and then we went down to $0.7 a share. We had to fire 80% of the employees in 2001. I had to go through the financial crisis. I re pivoted and re platformed the company technically about five years ago and that was a tough thing. I wanted to be public about it because first of all, I really do think my purpose in life is to inspire others to take the entrepreneurial journey, but take the journey. I think there's too much thinking that everyone can be Mark Zuckerberg in five years. And the rest of us are out here just building companies. The entrepreneurial journey is a beautiful journey. It pushes you to be the best that you can be as a person. But I felt it was important to tell the stories that it's lonely. It's difficult at the times, you learn from your failure. Failure in itself is not absolute.

A lot of times entrepreneurs, they fail and they think it's an absolute. And I've been through a lot of what I call. It's really learning. I don't use the word failure because I'm learning to be better. I'd want to inspire people to take it and don't think this is easy and I've been successful in many ways, 25 years later, but it took a journey to get here. It wasn't overnight.

[00:05:03] Jesse Purewal: Do you think that there can be a beautiful journey of that? So are for people who are maybe entrepreneurial as an adjective, even if they're not entrepreneurs as a noun?

[00:05:11] Rob LoCascio: I relate entrepreneurism or being entrepreneurial to living your purpose. I believe God gave us all a purpose in life and we know what it is. It's internal. What's very interesting right now they talk about this great resignation. All this is about is when humans go through something profound and we've gone through something very profound. I saw this after 09/11, being in New York city. I saw this during the financial crisis, these create massive movements and change in humans thinking. And what people are thinking about is what is my purpose and life is too short. And when you get into life is too short and what should I do, you'll ultimately get the purpose. And if you can dig deeply inside yourself and listen to your inner voice, your inner voice will tell you something. And that something may seem very silly. It may say you should be a writer.

I met a woman once who was a banker and she came up to me after a conference and said, "I'm very unhappy with my job and I wish I could be an entrepreneur." I said, "What do you want do?" And she said, "I want to bake bread. I love baking bread." I said, "Open a bakery." She goes, "Well, I can't make money at that." "Sure. You can. There are people of big bakeries." Right there. She said, bake bread. And I said, "Everyone has their baking bread moment. Just ask yourself what it is." If you ask a child what they want to do, they're pretty instantaneous about it. And we got to get into that what God put us on earth as a child to do. And what can we affect as an adult with that childhood thinking?

[00:06:39] Jesse Purewal: And how do you counsel somebody to develop the intestinal fortitude to then go put a vision like that or put a purpose that you've divined like that out into the world and take the first step. And the second step and all the steps that are required?

[00:06:54] Rob LoCascio: First, I believe in God, and I'm not talking about the religious God. I'm talking about, to do this type of work, you have to believe there's something higher hand that if you take the risk to live your purpose, you'll take care of... Now, I can tell you this for a fact. I can tell for a fact that I have had the help of a higher hand because there are so many times my back was against the wall. And if you were going to make the whole logic of, if you took a snapshot a couple months, during the .com, we had to do a bunch of things to stay alive. And basically there was probably a 2% chance of us actually doing all the things to make it work, but we did it. So I believe there's a greater force and it could be a spiritual thing. We have to say, whoever is out there and whoever made the world we're in, just help me move forward. Let me take the first step. And even though it looks like it's an awful cliff, actually, it's a step to let me fly.

[00:07:50] Jesse Purewal: Yeah. I often think about it. Like we're motivated by love and by fear and fear can really be the one that takes over for love when you're thinking about all the things that might be different and therefore go wrong and the uncertainties. I want to connect that to the moment when you had the epiphany about starting what would eventually become LivePerson. You had a very specific experience that was not so good. It leads to the start of the company. And I went back and looked at the language in your S-1 from the filing, leading to the March of 2000 IPO. And you wrote, "In 2000, LivePerson is technology that facilitates realtime sales and customer service for companies doing business on the internet. We offer our realtime interaction technology as an outsourced service. No software or hardware installation by clients or their customers." So in that reading of it, LivePerson was digital CX before there was digital CX. And you were the cloud before there was the cloud.

[00:08:51] Rob LoCascio: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:08:51] Jesse Purewal: So how did that happen?

[00:08:54] Rob LoCascio: It's interesting because back then there was no cloud. There was nothing. So we were one of the first companies to do this. And the only reason I did it, it was pure strategic is that I knew installing software was hard. You had to go through a lot of approval processes and it was very expensive. And the idea of the internet was allow us to rent software. That's why I did it. And with a new technology like chat, I invented web chat. We could easily get someone to buy off on the fact that all they do is put a couple tags on their website and they were up and running. If they didn't like it shut it down, but you didn't have to go get the IT department and do an installation and pay a lot of money. So for a $100 a month, try it. And that won the day.

And I remember after I launched, there was a couple of enterprise software companies that tried to make chat as an installation. And we beat the hell out of them because they had this old model and people were like, "I don't know if this will work." And then from there, obviously it became SAS and then it became Cloud eventually.

[00:09:49] Jesse Purewal: But how did you have that prescient notion around it? Because it feels to me like if you wrote that in 2010, I'd say, "Yeah, this is a person who's swimming with the current." You writing that in 2000 tells me you are a person who's originating a trend in innovation and in technology that we are now the recipients of and the beneficiaries of and have been for a number of years.

[00:10:12] Rob LoCascio: Yeah. I felt that the internet and I still feel this way by the way, that websites and the now apps and the form factor, the CX of them to me is a vending machine. The internet was not created for commerce. The internet was created for content and we made it a commerce engine. So when you think about it, it's gotten much better since the pandemic. I think it's like 20% of commerce now is e-commerce. But if you were in 1995, when I started and there was a bunch of us there, we would think... Now, if you said, "What's world going to look like in 2021?" We would've said, "80%" and it's only 20% after 25 years. So something has gone wrong with the CX and it continues this way. Less than 1% of people who go from a Google search to website convert. So it's really not been a great experience. And that's why, where things are going now is what we call conversational commerce. Things are now becoming conversationalize with AI. And we're creating these different experiences that are more powerful than web or app.

[00:11:17] Jesse Purewal: The stats Rob cited reflect the fact that very few brands deliver truly personal experiences online. Service reps give customers real people to talk to which inspires confidence, but the service isn't always worth waiting for. At LivePerson, Rob and his team are helping brands make more one-to-one connections with customers using AI power technology that can have a real conversation. Rob explains how.

[00:11:45] Rob LoCascio: The first thing is that we have to all understand that conversational is about personalization because when we go to a website, we're building something that says, one size fits all. And we know there's things like Adobe has personalization engines and everything, but the reality is they're pretty limited compared to if someone could put an intent in and we can understand that intent, we can then take them down a conversation and keep asking question answer. Humans work around conversations. That's why there's $1.2 trillion spent every year in contact center calls because people, even though they look at websites, they have apps, they have questions because they believe the questions allow them to personalize the experience. What we want to do is scale that with AI and that comes from a data set. We have one of the richest data sets in the world. We generate about 80 million conversations a month.

And those conversations are end to end with the largest brands in the world about 20,000 customers. And we're able to use that data to understand what are good conversations around banking, paying a bill, buying a car, buying a TV, and we're able then to take those conversations and then craft automated conversations around that Corpus that we have, that's unique to us in the world. And that's why we've been growing at the rate we're growing and being very successful because we're able to develop high quality beautiful... We use the word, beautiful conversations, not a bot, but beautiful. Because bots are bad. Bots are a four letter word.

[00:13:16] Jesse Purewal: Can you paint a picture for me of the skills and disciplines that are required to design for beautiful conversations in commerce?

[00:13:24] Rob LoCascio: When we started, we launched the platform five years ago, there was nothing called a conversational designer. I remember looking at LinkedIn, we found a company that we built the automation for one of the Barbie dolls. The Barbie had a conversation UI. It didn't work too well, but they had it and they let go of these employees and we hired two or three of these X writers. And we found it didn't work very well for commerce. So what happened ultimately is we found engineering talent that tries to build them. Data science and tries to build them, marketing people and try to build them, digital people try to build. And we found the hidden resource. The people in the contact center are your best conversationalists. They've opted into this field. A matter of fact, when you talk to them, they really understand empathy and listening.

They'll sort out a personality style on a voice call or chat. And so we spent a lot of time with our agent pools. It was about 60,000 agents on our platform every day. We met with a bunch of them and we said, "What kind of tool would you want? Could you create a conversation, an automated conversation?" And we designed it around them and we built it as a natural, like almost writing a book. They write a piece of poetry in this interface called Conversation Builder. And then they deploy their automation and they watch it in real time. And if it fails, they step in and take it over and then they make it better again. So they are the best conversationalists in the world and there's many of them, there's millions of them. So that's where we found the best leverage for conversational designers, managers is in that pool.

[00:14:50] Jesse Purewal: And what do you think as you reflect on the last 18 months and some of the impacts that the pandemic has had on the way we engage with businesses as consumers, what are some of the conversational commerce innovations that we're massively accelerated or newly deployed that you think are here to stay, that you're excited about?

[00:15:09] Rob LoCascio: Before the pandemic, we had a lot of stuff going around. Banking, telco, these are large contact centers. During the pandemic, we saw everything from one of the largest jewelry retailers in the country of 3000 stores. Their stores were shut down and they wanted to get those salespeople online to sell diamond rings. And it continues because what happened is retailers thought, "Our customers always only buy by coming in the store." And then they started to realize, "They'll buy if we talk, if we have a conversation," even if an automation has a conversation with them digitally, but the websites were always very secondary, compared to their retail operations, which is never going to go back.

[00:15:45] Jesse Purewal: And what are the barriers to adoption? If for consumers, you get to that point, like we got in the pandemic where you just had to do it differently. Once the world is more highly vaccinated and we have a temptation to maybe do things the old way, how do you continue to move behaviors in a direction of, "Hey, we're going to go do more of this digitally. We're going to do more of this online," and enable the back ends of organizations to your consumer behavior is already so that they don't get left behind from a growth perspective?

[00:16:15] Rob LoCascio: So I think if there's two sides to the coin, there's the business side and there's the consumer side. Right now, every messaging platform has been enabled to allow conversational AI or conversational commerce, conversational care. So Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Apple's Business Chat. This is my assumption actually seven years ago, this would happen. And then it did happen. And we've been working with those companies. So no matter where the consumer's messaging, where their friends and family, now they can message with the brand. So that allows consumers to go someplace naturally. The problem with web chat was they'd have to go to the website and find it. It was very unnatural. We weren't in a process of conversation. Either that's a phone call or that would be messaging on a device. Today we can be in both of those areas and create automated conversation. On the business side, the buried entry is that the human today in a contact center who takes a phone call or a chat live is just a person in the middle between a backend legacy system and the human intent from the consumer.

They're accessing these old systems that the human can't get access to themselves through APIs. So that's all the contact center reps are doing all day. So the more and more of those backend systems become available, become digitized let's say, become available for direct consumer, we find that opens up use cases. So if you want to pay your bill, you got to be able to say, "What's my bill?" A lot of times the backend system's not available for that. So there's a human who has to tell you how much you owe and what's wrong. So this is what we're seeing. Those are moving quickly. There's a lot of stuff going on in each of those areas. And the pandemic is ushered in both sides, moving quickly to being more digital together.

[00:17:57] Jesse Purewal: Rob, as you think about what you've stood up over the last couple of decades, what's your ambition for LivePerson now? And where do you see the company and the platform and the team in say the next eight or 10 years?

[00:18:09] Rob LoCascio: The bet we made was a bet that one day there'll be a conversational AI living in our lives. Now we have things like Alexa, Google Home and stuff like this. But I ultimately believe that our company's purpose is to deliver a loving, caring, empathetic AI that you would trust in your life, that you would have live in your home. That would process your most important intentions. I want to get my kid a doctor. I want to get a tutor for my child. I want to take a trip somewhere. I want to pay a bill, whatever it is, this is what I really believe is our purpose as a company.

We started with B2B because B2B is important. You need to have all that connective tissue because if somebody puts an intent, it's got to connect to a brand. Unfortunately, most of AI, we don't trust. We don't trust Amazon being in our house. We think it's listening to us. We believe AI is an existential threat to humanity. In certain cases going to replace our jobs. We don't believe that because we're dealing with it in a different way. We even invested in an organization called Equal AI where we can bring the power of equality, empathy to the industry and invest on industry standards and things like this.

[00:19:15] Jesse Purewal: Hey, it's Jesse. If you like conversations with entrepreneurial leaders in tech who build with purpose, check out one of our past episodes. My conversation with Sheila Vashee. Sheila was marketing employee number two at Dropbox, and she was behind the company meteoric rise from consumer app to indispensable B2B platform. Sheila and I talked about how she built brand love at Dropbox based on clear communication, continuous adaptation, and a commitment to purpose. The episode with Sheila is episode nine of season two, and you can get it wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the rest of my conversation with LivePerson CEO, Rob LoCascio. Talk about the secret sauce that you have as a company or your culture or your values that has helped you differentiate from the modal player in technology that wants to achieve growth and have great impact using AI in other similar technologies.

[00:20:13] Rob LoCascio: There are many opportunities to take shortcuts and do wrong. Business is always a set of gray areas. And I think we've done a really great job on always trying to stay on the right side of the path. And sometimes it's been to our detriment because you could grow faster, but over the long term, we're around. We have a good reputation. We continue to invest in our people. We hire great people and we have customers who have been with us for 15, 20 years, which is really unheard of in the technology industry.

And look, with times we've done wrong. At times we've harmed our customers, not in a harmful way, but we've made decisions that have been not aligned to them. Sometimes it has to be done. And other times we apologize and we make it better. We're always pushing ourselves. It's not easy days, but we learn from our mistakes. We don't quit on our customers and we don't quit on our vision. And I think that's important. We're just on a path. We got to finish our mission. And if we finish the mission, a lot of great things will happen for the world. I believe our company can have a big impact in the world. That's why I wake up every day and do this.

[00:21:30] Jesse Purewal: Because Rob mentioned so much movement and people wanting to figure out their lives. I was eager to get his view on the future of work. As you'll hear from his answer, any expectation I had of a sanitized PR answer on remote collaboration or the number of days to come into an office was quickly shattered by the thoughtful, provocative, and distinctive response he gave. Here's Rob with his view on the future of work.

[00:21:55] Rob LoCascio: That's not a structure we have in place right now, but I believe my children who are three, five and nine months old, my children will be working a thing called a DAO. So they will be working in a Distributed Autonomous Organization. And this is what's showing up in blockchain companies. That model where they don't work for a company, but they work in part of a community and the rewards are embedded with the work in what they call tokens. That's what you're seeing with crypto. Think of Bitcoin as a company, it doesn't have a clear leader. The person started, no one knows who they really are. It's got thousands upon thousand of the people that are working on it every day to make it better. There are thousands upon thousands of people who have made a lot of wealth. And there are a series of people who have made billions of dollars who are faceless and nameless.

And yet they're all part of a community. And the protocol, the technology, the actual system is the governance. The system is the manager. They don't do 360 reviews. They don't sit down and hey, what's my bonus at the end of the year? If you think of what's happened in crypto, especially with Bitcoin and Ethereum, it's a trillion dollar entity. As big as like an Apple with no employees. It's got one of the biggest brands in the world with no marketing campaign. It doesn't have Steve Jobs. And that is about centralization of power. Centralization is not in vogue anymore. And that's what people are feeling. They're feeling like, "I don't want to be part of a centralized thing. I want to have more autonomy. I want to be more sovereign, but I want to be part of a community." And that's really what's happening in the world.

[00:23:27] Jesse Purewal: And what ends up being the set of negative externalities that we have to contend within that scenario? Do we have to think harder about inclusivity? Do we have to think harder about the knock on effects of physical communities? If people are optimizing for ones that might be more digital or more virtual in nature. How do you reckon with the flip side of what you're talking about there?

[00:23:50] Rob LoCascio: I mean, I think you could do it as a physical community. All it means is that the community they're truly shareholders, and we call stakeholders. So if you look today at any of the blockchain companies, they have a core group of people, a part of a nonprofit. They started it with the idea, they own a certain out of it. The rest of it is put out in tokens to the community and then the shareholders investors are coming and buying those tokens and creating value in those tokens. They're not communities based on, I can look at your white, black, green, yellow, whatever it is, they don't see you. So that the bias is taken out of the system. It's all around. Can you be part of this community and help us grow? Employees in the future will have no face.

They may have an avatar. And I know everyone's going, "My God. He is just out there," but there are companies now that generating billions and billions in market cap that have this org structure. So this is not something in the future. This is something that's in the present. And I think in the future, public companies will you'll see their market caps may become their coin caps, if they issue tokens themselves. So this is going to be a great transition going on. It's going to be a 20 year journey.

[00:24:53] Jesse Purewal: But it actually syncs with the vision of conversational commerce very elegantly in the sense that as you've talked about the whole reason that this is a trend, is that this is how we connect with each other through apps and through messaging and through text. So that would actually be a template for even a small part of this D-A-O that you're talking about makes intuitive sense, given the trends that you've seen and that you've helped build. And it also appears to demand a lot of the individual in terms of this reckoning we talked about at the top around purpose. You really have to know what you want to go do with your life or you have to have some thesis about what you want to do next. If you're going to opt into that kind of community where maybe the signals that you're getting are so much more distributed and so much more diverse than if you take a subway to a building and go up an elevator and see the same 8, 10, 12 people day in and day out.

[00:25:44] Rob LoCascio: Yeah. That's just it. And people may be in couple of these communities, right? They may work on three or four of these projects and be part of it. And it gives them a little bit more freedom in their lives. So it's about centralization. In my world also the e-commerce platforms that centralized. Amazon is a centralized power, Google centralized, Facebook is centralized. You're in a fiefdom as a small business. You either live on these platforms and you're paying a toll to them all day. What conversational commerce is doing and this is the vision too, once you connect with the consumer, you'll lose them. You could proactively message them tomorrow. You don't have to go buy advertising again to get to them. Amazon doesn't give you all the data of your consumers, but they hold that data. It'll allow you have a relationship. They they don't put you first as a small business.

They put your product first. And they're saying, "Let me show you 10 different products because the merchants behind here don't matter." As long as this is cheaper and they can get it to you overnight, you should like them. That's not true. I stopped buying on the Amazon some products. I now buy on a thing called Maven. This is a platform of ours. I buy pecans from a guy who has a pecan farm in Texas. He doesn't spray them with crap. I know they're fresh. It's a family farm and I'm chatting with them asking about what's going on in his life.

He's sending me videos, he told me his story. That's empathy, that's connection. Getting Jeff Bezos to send more rich people to the moon, I think we know inherently that there's something just wrong with that. So inherently centralization causes power and the tech, which I never thought could ever become corrupted. They've become part of this machine of power. They just keep grabbing for more power every day. I mean, I'm embarrassed as a tech CEO. In 1995 when I started, I did not see the world going that way for technology and that's where it went. And we need to change that quickly.

[00:27:24] Jesse Purewal: It sounds like you're trying to swing the pendulum from efficiency at scale to empathy at scale. I want to ask you about the kinds of skills that you think people should be thinking about developing, if we're moving to a world that looks anything like a distributed autonomous organization centric view of how the private sector, even in the public sector is getting work done is organizing. What kinds of things have to be true about the skills I'm building, the talents I'm accruing, the kinds of things I should make sure to be good at as I'm going through educational systems, which by rights might not be optimized for the future you're describing. How do I make sure that I get to where I need to get intellectually, behaviorally, cognitively, socially, all of these things, as I prepare for that kind of a future.

[00:28:12] Rob LoCascio: First I would not go to college. I just think that it's done, that day is done. I went to school in '86 to '90. And what was in school? Centralization of knowledge and centralization of experts. The experts were there called teachers and professors. Today, everything is available online, not only teachers online teaching online and there's even experts who never went to school, you could learn from them. The second part is all the knowledge of the world's there in real time. And so what I would recommend personally, if I was coming out of college and I have a brother-in-law, he's 28, works for FedEx in Germany. I told them, "You should quit your job and go join a blockchain company" because it's like me in 1995. I saw the internet in '95 and I was like, "This is our future." And the reason I would join this is that they have the future structure of work, plus the future structure of technology.

And I just think if you are out there, you should dive into that world. It's a rabbit hole. It'll make your brain hurt because the idea you don't work for anybody, but you can become a billionaire. That's hard to put together to think you could be virtual all the time, anywhere, live anywhere in the world and make a lot of money. Hard to understand that. So you can live anywhere, be anybody you want to be. You can connect into a number of different projects and you can potentially make a lot of wealth for yourself because it's the early days like 1995. But I think you got to go down the rabbit hole.

[00:29:32] Jesse Purewal: So the thesis on don't invest in the university education, how much do you put to the fact that it's centralized and it's conditioning you to the wrong things in this future vision versus the cost? Let's say somehow it were a public good, would it still be a bad bet because your opportunity costs then from a time perspective ends up being the thing that is front and center, or how do you think about those two dimensions?

[00:29:55] Rob LoCascio: That's the problem. The cost is nothing. Invest a limited amount of money in your future but if your future is putting you on a path of a past and it's expensive, then you're really doing a disservice to yourself. You can understand the purpose when I went to college, but I can't see the purpose today because you could be online. You can touch all these experts. You can take courses, you can learn about anything. So what are you going to college for? Spend a $100,000 on building a company, spend a $100,000 on investing in blockchain company or tokens. Being in school, you don't get any ownership over your time. A bunch of people tell you what to do all the time. That's a lack of ownership over your time.

[00:30:30] Jesse Purewal: Last question would be, if you could give any piece of advice to would be builders or would be entrepreneurs, what would that advice be?

[00:30:38] Rob LoCascio: Never quit. Never quit on your bad days. That's my one rule of thumb. On my worst days, I will not quit. And that's just the way it is. I know it sucks. I know there's tendencies to want to give up. I know it's hard, but my number one rule is don't quit on your bad days. If you want to quit, quit when you're at your high. Right? So when you're at those bad days, just suck it up. I say, keep walking, you just keep walking forward, make inch by inch millimeter by milometer but don't stop whatever you do, because if you stop, you won't get the lesson. And you'll find on the other side of it, it's a beautiful thing. So just don't quit.

[00:31:09] Jesse Purewal: Rob LoCascio, author of one beautiful journey for sure. Thank you for your time today. I know I'm a better person for it. And I think everybody listening will be as well.

[00:31:18] Rob LoCascio: Thank you, Jesse. Thanks a lot. Have a great one.

[00:31:21] Jesse Purewal: Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. if you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and a review and tell a friend about the show. Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studios original, hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. An awesome team of people puts this show together, including our show writer, Todd Bagnull, the folks from StudioPod Media in San Francisco and Vayner Talent in New York. From StudioPod Media, our executive producer is Katie Sunku Wood, producer is Sterling Shore, editing and music is by Ryan Crowther. And our show coordinator is Kela Sowell, from VaynerTalent, publicity and promotion support come from Samantha Heapps, Hanna Park, Lindsay Blum and Ivanna Lin. The show's designers are Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak, our website’s by Gregory Hedon and photography is by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Ben Hawken, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.

Season 5Jesse Purewalrob locascio, conversational commerce, empathy at scale, artificial intelligence, technology, customer journeys, over the wall, advice for ceos, new york, chatbots, liveperson, customer experience, entrepreneurship