3,000 American teens attempt suicide everyday, this man wants to put a stop to the madness with AI.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoted Show. I'm delighted to be going all the way across to California to have Scott Sandland on the show. Scott, welcome.

Thank you.

Now, Scott, tell us, you're just south of San Diego and you have a company called Cyrano.ai. Can you help us to understand how you're using AI to help people to understand?

Sure. So the name of our company comes from Cyrano de Bergerac, which is, you know, The play, if those of you who are watching this don't know, it's a play by a guy with a big nose. And what he's really good at doing is writing effectively. So it's a love story and he tells the guy, this is what you say to have the girl fall in love with you. And that cliché in movies and TV shows where there's a guy whispering into the ear, they put in the little radio receiver into the ear and the guy's telling them what to say. All that comes from the original version of that is Cyrano de Bergerac. And so our company is built on that idea where our system, our AI analyzes people and then gives you information. And the idea is to have, you know, your customer or the user fall in love with you. And so we say, this is what matters to this person. This is what they care about. This is how you can engage them to have a better and more satisfying relationship.

So Cyrano de Bergerac, I think that was Gérard Depardieu, wasn't it? The Frenchman. Uh, who played that role?

Uh, Steve Martin in a remake of it called Roxanne. But, but the same story.

Love that story. Now you say for people to get to know more about the other person, do they need to be there physically? Or is this happening through text or voice? What's the way that AI is engaging?

So our AI is linguistic analysis and I believe words and speech are a behavior. And I think they're the defining behavior of people. I think peacocks have feathers and deer have antlers and humans have words. And it is our most defining quality. And the reason we run a planet is because we can effectively communicate with each other. And so I really look at this from a behavioralistic standpoint. And so the more you can understand the way a person talks, the more you can understand the way a person thinks or approaches anything. And no matter what a person's talking about, they're telling you about themselves and their priorities. And so we analyze words and that can be spoken. That can be on Zoom. That can be email, text message, wherever there are words. We think of it as like a fingerprint of that person and deeply know a person and then transmit that information to the other person on the other side of the conversation.

So Scott, you've got an academic and medical background in psychology, haven't you?

So I was a clinical hypnotherapist and then the CEO of a mental health clinic. And then my co-founder is a sociologist and neurolinguist. So the two of us sort of had these different educational and working experience in linguistic strategy and just kind of paying attention to words in a slightly different way.

So you're well qualified, Scott. So how does it work though, from a practical point of view? Does the person that uses Serrano have like an app on their phone or in the Zoom meeting? And are they getting sort of Numbers or charts or emoticons? Is it real-time or is it, you know, a sentiment analysis after the event?

Right. And I'll even start there with the sentiment analysis. So sentiment analysis is this fascinating thing because it's got really low standards for people to be happy with it. It really is about a 5th grade reading level. And so we've got all these multimillion-dollar companies focusing all their efforts on trusting a 5th grader with advice after the call is over. And so how'd the call go? And the 5th grader goes, not good. And you go, why?

And he goes, I don't know.

I'm a 5th grader. And that is sentiment analysis. And so what we can do is we can do real-time. We can do after the call. We put together a report that shows graphs of this is when they were highly committed. This is when they were curious and open-minded, which is not bad. It's just a different thing. Um, and this is where they were talking about a need versus a want. And this is where they were applying logic to this. And this is where they were being irrational. And all of these things are graphs. And then we have that. And then we also have sort of icons of here are the priorities that this person was using in ranked order. So for example, this person was highly focused on facts and data versus this person was highly focused on their ego. Says this person was highly focused on the relationships of the community. So on and so forth. And then we turn all of that into a so what. So we give bullet point sentences on what to do about it. So we make it really easy and actionable. So we say how to collaborate with this person. Here are the next steps you should do. Here's how to have a long-term lifetime value of the relationship. Here's how to deescalate conflict. Here's how to mentor the person. Here's how to negotiate without losing rapport. So we really come up with very specific, what you need to do to more effectively engage with this person.

And what are the applications then, Scott? I mean, I can think of myriad ones, and we talked earlier before the mic about, you know, young people and what they're saying, how they're communicating. Is this being used in commercial or sort of social settings? How's it being used?

So both of those. So the impetus behind this was, you know, me being the CEO of a mental health clinic, working with at-risk teens and watching The teen crisis unfold in America. And to people who are listening around the globe, who may or may not be aware of this, teenagers in America aren't doing so great. To put it lightly, the second leading cause of death under the age of 24 in America is suicide. Pre-COVID numbers, every single day in America, just in high school. So a 4-year window. So in high school, there were 3,000 suicide attempts every day. For years. And no one was talking about this. And you could look at it and it was, you think socioeconomics, what could this be? And it turned out rich white kids were killing themselves at historic levels. And the reason I bring it up that way is you say, okay, this is the population that should have access to all the best solutions. And it's not getting them there. And so if it's happening there, it's happening everywhere. And so I was looking at that and saying, we need to build a tool that can help people feel audienced and understood. We need to build a tool that can create empathy and strategy so more therapists can do work. We need to create tools that can listen to these kids and help them when the problems are small, et cetera, et cetera. So we built the tool for that. I was fortunate enough that I got to speak at Geneva at the United Nations AI for Global Good conference and talk about how our work is being done there. But really where we have our tens of thousands of users today is on the sales and commercial side. And we do it that way because ethically it's a safer place to start and to kind of iron out wrinkles. Because in a sales environment, there's better data, there's better apples-to-apples comparison. And when you get it wrong, you can still sleep at night.

Yeah, I was going to say, if you lose a sale, that's one thing, but if you lose a life, that's very costly indeed, isn't it?

Yeah, I'm, I am very happy with the idea that my, my system might be wrong today. And so somebody, you know, doesn't sell a Honda Civic. Like I can, I can live with that. But if a kid needs this thing to work, we need to make sure it works.

But Scott, I know we were talking about this is still a passion area. It's not that you decide just to be commercial, right? So as a business, perhaps we just transition into how you're getting noticed because you also talked about the sort of sell one, give one. policy as well. So do you just want to talk about, you know, this is a business with a, with a mission, right? And you're commercializing the product, which means the business is sustainable, which is great.

100%. Yeah. The idea behind this was I built this for the social good idea, but then I needed to figure out the economics and just have it be sustainable. And I didn't want to do anything with, you know, charities or endowments or anything like that. I wanted this to be something that We could, we could run it our way and do it right. And, and that meant, you know, own it. And so we came up with this, like you said, sort of the sell one, give one. And basically what we've come up with is a pricing model where every time we sell a 1-year subscription to the software to a salesperson, a real estate agent, a car salesman, you know, whatever that is, that one sale subsidizes One, uh, user in a social good scenario. So call that a volunteer to teen crisis hotline, call that the suicide hotline, call that subclinical support groups. So just, you know, on-campus college support groups that need to help each other out. We now give our software to those people. And what that means is these wonderful volunteers who are listening to people who are in crisis or texting back and forth with people who are in crisis. We can help them be better at their job. We can onboard them more quickly. We can help them connect with the person on the other end of the call or text more effectively. And we can do that at scale.

This show is around getting noticed. And of course, in a way, what we're talking about is being noticed at a deeper level. Isn't it about what's happening emotionally for someone rather than just from a publicity point of view? So very powerful. And Scott, is Is Serrano omnichannel? And by that, I mean, you've got people maybe messaging by text and WhatsApp, or maybe TikTok and Facebook. Is it collating all this data from, if you like, one person's multiple platform correspondence?

Increasingly so. So we are an API-first company. So my COO created a company called Cirrus Insights, which was the number one app in the Salesforce marketplace for almost a year and it was a top 10 app for maybe 8 years. And so he and his programming team that he brought with us are API integration, plug this into a more complex stack. And so that's our philosophy is to scale that way by empowering existing tech. And so we're in all email providers today. We're in Zoom today and we're building out the APIs to plug into specific apps, you know, healthcare apps, crisis support apps, things like that. And so the game is just building out those integrations. And then when people come to us and say, we want to integrate you with our API. So we go back and forth with integrating the input and the output. Over time, the goal will be to be everywhere.

So getting everywhere, and I guess this idea that Gates had of a computer on every desk. How are you getting Serrano noticed apart from having a brilliant Name, of course. How are you getting the company noticed as an entrepreneur?

You know, there's a cliché quote that I think really applied. I was very busy patting myself on the back for being smart for a little while and coming up with a neat idea and being awarded a patent and these kinds of things that I thought were it. And then the cliché quote is, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And, and that was the, the obvious aha for me was, well, of course. And so the word is community and everything in my life that has gone well has been about community. And I just, I love community. And whether that's a sports team, you know, growing up in high school and college, I played sports teams, whether that's early in my career, finding peer networking groups or continued education groups. Those kinds of things, there are communities and groups that you can plug into that you don't need to create, where you can find like-minded people who want to hear what you're doing. And so for me, that was the game. And the real turning point for our company was when I got away from, look how smart all our stuff is, and instead said, hey, how are you? And started listening to the specific needs and wants of the communities, seeing where my tool organically fits in those and provides value, or just where my experiences and ideas, you know, have merit. And that has been what's gotten us noticed, proving that we're sincere, proving that we care, proving that side of things and that we are deserving of trust. I think that's the game because it's very easy these days to do hype. It's very easy to get 1,000 likes on LinkedIn or something like that. You know, anyone can do that once, but it's about once you reach a certain threshold of quality, I think it's about consistency and that trust within a community. So that's been the way we do it.

Perhaps some irony that you've built a business based on, on listening and you know, then you had your own moment where you learned to listen as well. I think probably as entrepreneurs, we kind of all start with an ego and then at some stage realize it needs to be about more than our own ego.

Again, the irony of the name of the company is Cyrano de Bergerac and he wants to be in the shadows. He wants to be hidden, you know, in or behind the bush and just whispering the truth. And that is true of my company. And when we built it, You know, I was talking to, uh, you know, the 3 of us that are sort of the, the officers of the company. And I said, if we do this well, everyone will use us and no one will have heard of us. And that's the vision, but that means that someone has to have heard of us.

Yeah. I was going to say someone somewhere has passed on the message, right?

Yeah.

And so how is that happening, Scott?

There's a guy who wrote a book called The Remarkable Effect. Tan Dabi, a very smart guy. And, and he hit me with a great idea was don't be better, be different. And doing so, get people to rally behind your cause. And it turns users into advocates. And so all of that idea is we really built our company to help kids. We really, really did. And the commercial applications are neat. And no sane person can hear our mission statement and say it doesn't matter.

Just share then, Scott, what is your mission statement? There you go. I'll put you on the spot.

We want to be able to create an AI that is a world-class therapist and be able to give it to every single kid for free and just have it live on your phone. And because we're making the money on the commercial side and we've earned the trust, people know what they say to this app. Is confidential, is safe. We're not marketing to them. We're not selling this data. We're not data mining them. It is a sincere philanthropic good faith. And that's what we're doing. And so I can say to, you know, I just did to the president of a regional real estate group here. I said to her, you know, I mean it. I need you to go first. I need you to just trust me and show people that you trust me. And that is going to help save lives. And she said, I believe in you. I believe in this. I have no idea what your tech does. The answer is yes.

Nice. Yeah. And that's beautiful when they actually don't even care about the product anymore. It's the mission.

Completely.

Yeah. Sounds an absolutely wonderful system. And so in terms of the business and the app, is this a global app that runs on multiple languages? I'm going to ask that because we have listeners in Asia, China, and Japan.

So, uh, multi-language is on our roadmap. We're, we're starting with English for obvious reasons. And we've done testing in 7 languages and in all 7, it's done better than we hoped. Um, and so the way, the easy way to think of it, you know, we've done Italian, German, French, Spanish, Mandarin, 2 others. It didn't do great in Portuguese, but it did better in Mandarin than Portuguese, which was very surprising to me. We haven't put a lot of work into any of them and When we, when we graph them all out, the ratios look good, but the confidence thresholds drop precipitously. So there's going to be the need for a lot of training. We actually just, we just partnered with a company called hearme.app. And one of the great things about that partnership is they have a big presence in India. So we'll be getting a bunch of Hindi training data that we can start doing work with.

Okay. So that's wonderful, Scott. And if people want to find out more about Serrano, it's serrano.ai. If you want to reach out to you, Scott, and hear from you, how can they do that?

The easiest place to find me is LinkedIn. You know, we have a Twitter account as a company, but the tweets are few and far between. Really what we're doing is, you know, my LinkedIn and then our website. We have, we have a blog, we have a newsletter, we have ways to contact us. We have ways that you can use the software. for free for 2 weeks. And it's not like a trick where you have to give us your credit card number. We genuinely want people to see it and, you know, just take it for a test drive themselves.

Scott Sandlin joining me all the way from just south of San Diego. Thank you so much for sharing about the power of purpose really, and the merit of following community. Thank you so much.

Thank you.