IAM2635 – CEO and Inventor Shares About Joyful Leadership and AI Adoption

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Kevin Surace Teaser 00:00
And so I have the book talks about one of many rules, but it's a roadmap on how to live your life in a certain way. And the science backs this up. So if you drive yourself to only one complaint a day, it changes your life. The more you live your life with joy, the more success you are likely to have.

And that's because your mind is open to find those pain points and solve those pain points for others. You're open to see things you couldn't have seen before.

Intro 00:32
Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I Am CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:58
Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have an awesome guest on the show today. I have Kevin Surace.
Kevin, excited to have you on the show.

Kevin Surace 01:07
So glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Gresham Harkless 01:08
Yeah, super excited to have you on. Talk about all the awesome things that you're doing. And of course, before we do that, I want to read a little bit more about Kevin so you hear about some of those awesome things.

And Kevin, known as the father of the AI virtual assistant, is a Silicon Valley disruptive innovator and leader in the application of AI with 95 worldwide patents.

He was Inc. Magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year, a CNBC Top Innovator of the Decade, World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer, featured for five years on Tech TV's Silicon Spin, and inducted into RIT's Innovation Hall of Fame.

He led pioneering work on the first cellular data smartphone, the first AI virtual assistants like Siri, the first generative AI in software testing, and many artificial intelligence inventions. His upcoming book, titled The Joy Success Cycle, changes the way people act and think every day, leading to a more fulfillment in life success.

One of the things I really loved preparing for this is Kevin's done so many things. I mentioned the 95 patents or so that he has. One of those was Quiet Rock, the soundproof drywall that he invented that I thought was absolutely awesome.

He also has spearheaded energy-efficient retrofits for iconic structures like the Empire State Building, if you hadn't heard of that.

And then one of the really cool things I read that you're also interested in music as well, too. You're music director and Broadway producer, I think, as well, too?

Kevin Surace 02:29
Those are both true and some other things. We can talk about all of that if you'd like.

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Gresham Harkless 02:34
Yeah, absolutely. No, I want to love and hear all the things. So let's rewind the clock and hear a little bit more on how you guys started what I call your CEO story.

Kevin Surace 02:43
Sure. Well, you know, the first time I was CEO, I was 29 years old. I was terrible. Absolutely horrible CEO.

Company was really great. We designed and came to market with the first cellular data phone. It's called Air Communicator. And the government used it and all of these cellular carriers started carrying it.

It was the first time you could send data over cellular. So it's the first really wireless thing you had. Remember, there was no Wi-Fi. This is early 90s.

There's no Wi-Fi. There's not yet the internet. So you're talking to AOL, CompuServe and Bulletin boards, right? BBSs.

But that's what there was. And so we developed a wireless phone that was your phone, but also it plugged into your laptop. And when it wasn't plugged in, it would still gather data and emails and faxes and voicemails and all kinds of things it would store inside and then dump to you once you logged in. or once you hooked it to your laptop.

And the reason for that was that screens were incredibly expensive then. So we had a tiny little screen on it that would give you some information, but if you really wanted to see more full information, you needed to plug into a laptop and look there, right?

But it was really cool, because I could travel anywhere, and our customers could travel anywhere, plug into their laptop, and they were wireless in an airport. Today we take wireless in an airport for granted.

So that was my first CEO experience. I didn't really intend to be the CEO. I started the company with another guy, and we went out to raise money, and the funders decided I was the CEO.

We actually had recruited another CEO, but the funders didn't choose that person and chose me, and boom, there I was.

With absolutely, and I don't recommend this for anyone, right? I think, you know, with no management experience, large company experience, I had a little bit of experience, but not, you just don't understand what it is to be a really good leader until you have learned from really good leaders and you've become a really good follower, right?

So I think, look, my view is you get to be a better CEO every year. And, you know, tradition in this country was, if you go back 30 years, most CEOs didn't become a CEO until they were 60 something.

Why? Well, because you needed 40 plus years experience to be a good CEO. Who would put a 20 year old in charge, right? Well, today, of course, in startups, people are CEOs at 21 years old or 20 years old or 19 or 22, and probably with varying rates of management skills, but really no practical experience.

And Alan with this is, the learning I took from that and the learning I take every day as a CEO is a CEO is primarily, yes, you're gonna set the tone and yes, you're gonna set the culture and yes, you are going to set the direction of the company and you're certainly gonna be a big part of that if you're not the biggest part of that.

But in the end, when you're managing a real business, you end up as CEO managing all the crap. because the happy customers rarely make it to your desk, but the unhappy ones do.

And so unhappy customers, product problems, people problems, that ends up being your job as you grow a company. And I think people starting out don't think that, oh, I'm gonna be the CEO and I'm gonna be in charge and I'm gonna drive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, once you've got a real business, You're dealing with, how am I going to make payroll? How am I going to pay the vendors?

How am I dealing with these personnel issues? Who dated who in the company that wasn't supposed to? How do I deal with that? Why sales aren't meeting the quarterly expectations?

You're just dealing with the crap. And I'll tell you some of the most successful people I know. meaning billionaires right remove started a company and removed themselves from the CEO role almost instantly they hired a professional manager.

Now they stayed as chairman chairperson they made it might have stayed as chief strategy officer etc etc they could always vote to remove that person as CEO, but they hired a professional CEO that they trusted.

Gresham Harkless 07:00
Yeah, absolutely. So I would love to hear more about, you know, how you're working with and serve your clients and what you work with. And I would love to hear, of course, more about your book and what we can find there.

Kevin Surace 07:08
Oh, there's so much. Well, let's see how I work with my clients. I always work with the clients that are unhappy.

Because the happy ones don't show up at my desk, as we said earlier, right? And that's almost always the case with a CEO. Look, I do try to get out and connect with as many clients as I can. I like to hear the happy stories, too.

But it's actually important to hear the ones that are unhappy. And I think every business has churn, and every business has some unhappy clients. I mean, we get very angry with any churn. I get that.

And we go, oh my god. And then your investors and board members will say, well, we can't have any churn. Really? Procter & Gamble has churn, right?

They've been doing it a long time. So of course, there's churn. Of course, some people leave. Maybe they leave because they didn't like the salesperson.

Maybe they leave because you didn't give them the right support. Maybe they leave because they found some other figure. Often, they leave because the team changed.

And so I have the book talks about one of many rules, but it's a roadmap on how to live your life in a certain way.

And the science backs this up. So if you drive yourself to only one complaint a day, it changes your life. And I say this because if your listeners get up tomorrow, and count the number of complaints they have, internal or external, in a day. It's going to be over 100.

So now when I get out of bed in the morning, I know I'll only get one a day. So I'm not going to waste it on, oh, my knees hurt from exercise yesterday. It doesn't matter. There's a lot to say about the joy-success cycle.

And what science tells us is, the more you live your life with joy, the more success you are likely to have. And that's because your mind is open to find those pain points and solve those pain points for others. You're open to see things you couldn't have seen before,right?

Gresham Harkless 09:04
Yeah, that's such a huge thing. And I almost wonder if that is part of what I would like to call your secret sauce or something you cover in your book is like, the way that we're approaching these changes.

And I think so many times we get so stuck into like, this is the way things have always been.
This is the way I always want them to be, because it's kind of like the safety.

Do you feel like being able to kind of see that, hey, there's joy, there's opportunity. in what is happening in this transformation that's happening? Do you feel like that?

Kevin Surace 09:31
Great question. So first of all, there's joy in learning, as long as you stay curious. So some people stopped learning when they left school. If you stop learning, you no longer know how to learn.

You have no critical thinking skills, and you don't want to learn. And look, I'm not going to point at any particular jobs for any particular organizations.

But you and I, and everyone listening to this, knows people who stopped learning. and they see retirement's only seven years away, they don't wanna learn anything else.

Well, all right, well, they're gonna get left behind. Number two, we have thousands of years of human history, thousands of years where technology shows up and it wins every time, it never lost. Fire came. Those who used fire were much more successful at surviving than those who didn't.

Okay, the wheel shows up. Those who use the wheel, much more successful. Okay, the car shows up. You know, there were still people who stuck while there's even today, I'm in upstate New York right now.

We have certain groups of people who only use horse and buggy. They won't use a car. And they do things in the traditional way. And that's fine.

That's a choice. But you understand that those who use a horse and buggy even five years after the car and the truck were invented got left behind. You couldn't run a business that way. So every single time these come, technology wins, and the person who ignores it loses.

We have thousands of years of history of this. So stop thinking that way. AI is here. It's not going away.

And so you've got to hop on board. Just because we've got AI that can now create illustrations and create artwork and create music, et cetera, doesn't take away from the fact that you can still sit down and write the notes yourself and create yourself.

It didn't make that go away. But it does say that some artists and others are going to use these tools to accelerate what they what their output is.

Gresham Harkless 11:26
Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I love even I'm gonna ask you for the hack. And I feel like that is probably a hack in and of itself is like, understanding like what AI can be. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more into your book.

And I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget, which is a little bit more word of wisdom or piece of advice.

I like to say it might be something you would tell your younger business self, or you would hop into a time machine, or your favorite client. So do you have something from your book that is one really powerful nugget that we can kind of take away?

Kevin Surace 11:55
If you're an entrepreneur, or CEO, or startup, or whatever it is, solve real problems for real people who have real money. Real problems, real people, real money.

If you can't find people who have this problem, Or it's not a real problem. Or it only sells to people who don't have money.

This probably doesn't make a really good business. It might make a nice non-profit. It might be nice for many other reasons, right? But you have to go solve real problems for real people who have real money.

Or nothing happens. And I think this is key, because Silicon Valley is famous for solving problems that don't exist. Now, we also solve amazing problems, right? But often, I see these companies come up and say, I have solved whatever.

I can make paper even better than everyone else. Really? First of all, is that a problem? Second of all, are there people who are saying it's a problem?

And third of all, is anyone going to pay you for that? And an example is, you know, I've worked for 20, almost 20 years on and off with companies making clean cement. Clean cement doesn't need calcining. It doesn't take a tremendous amount of energy to create.

And cement generates about four or 5% of the world's CO2 today, the creation of cement, the making of cement. And so there's these zero CO2 cements and you go, wow, this is amazing. but they're $300 a ton versus $100 a ton for regular cement. They get value engineered out in every project.

People go, yeah, it's interesting, but nah, I'll go for the marble countertops instead of that, the heck with it, right? So there's a pain point that unless someone can deliver it for the price of regular cement, no one will buy it. And once you can beat the commodity price of cement, you can sell an unlimited amount. But you can't, unfortunately.

Gresham Harkless 13:51
I love that piece of advice. So now I want to ask you one of my absolute favorite questions, which you might have already touched on is the definition of what it means to be a CEO or goals that have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Kevin, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Kevin Surace 14:03
First and foremost, you have to be a great leader. People have to want to follow you. They have to want to follow you, which means you were probably a good follower at one time, because you know what it takes to follow. You probably had good leaders as mentors, right?

You probably had that. You have to be a good follower to be a good leader, and then people want to follow you. Now that you've got a team that wants to follow you, well, then you can set up the culture. Then you can set the guidelines.

Then you can set the targets. Then you can set with them, right, as a team member. Now, the one thing I talk about team management and exec staff and all of that is, in the end, listening is also a two-way street. I need to listen to them, really do, because we want to come up with solutions that use everybody's experience.

But at the same time, they have to listen to me. So I often get this, and I tell people this in hiring, right? I'm gonna always hear you. I'm gonna always listen.

We're always gonna be a team. But in the end, if we can't agree because I've got five different opinions, that's fine. I'll decide because I'm not gonna sit here and do nothing. So you do need your people to listen to you too.

And you do have the right to try to get consensus but move the company forward because Time is of the essence. Every day, if it's a startup, every day you don't move forward is another, call it, who knows, $50,000 a day that you're burning, right? So you better move quickly and fail fast. It's okay to move, be wrong, and then change.

Gresham Harkless 15:36
Yeah, no, that's perfect. Kevin, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time as well, too.

So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, and of course, how best people can get a hold of you, find out about all the awesome things you're working on. Of course, get a copy of your book.

Kevin Surace 15:52
Yeah. Just go to my website, kevinsurace.com. That's the easiest way. It's got a lot of my background on keynote.

I do about 50 keynotes a year. So, so my LinkedIn link is there. So you can go and see whatever today's one or two posts are.

Gresham Harkless 16:05
Absolutely. Well, I appreciate that so much, Kevin, of course, to make it even easier. We'll have the links and information that's shown us as well, too, so that everybody can connect with you.

You get to copy your book, find about the keynotes, all the awesome things that you're working on.
And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Kevin Surace 16:16
Thanks for having me.

Outro 16:17
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co.

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