Using AI The Ethical Way With StoryFile CVO Heather Maio-Smith

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You want tech and tacos? Tacos in tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean watch the sunset la Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the moon SD Tecos with your host, Neil Bloom.

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I'm thrilled to have you here. On the Tacos and Tech podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly, so thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview, and on Fridays, we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode. I'm thrilled to have Heather Smith on. She's co founder and CVO Chief Visionary Officer of Storyfile. Hey, Heather, thanks for being on the pod.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, it's a real pleasure. We've gotten to know each other a few minutes before the podcast, but what I always love is people get to actually get to know you right alongside me, you know, listen in on an actual conversation happening. And so do you want to give us a quick overview of what storefell is?

Great. It's exactly that. It's being able to have a conversation with somebody. You know, you're fortunate that I'm here in person to talk to you and have that conversation, but sometimes people aren't that fortunate to be able to talk to a person in the moment. And in real life, either they've passed away or they're just, you know, it's someone that you wouldn't have the normal opportunity to meet and learn from. So we enable people to have those kinds of conversations and just be able to get your answer and whenever you want it, whatever you want to ask, and it's there. So we enable conversations.

Oh, super. Interesting. But asynchronously, it sounds like, yes, yes, we do. Got it. Okay, well, lot to talk about here. Obviously, Covid, I'm sure, has influenced this or done certain things to the company, which we'll get to, but how'd you get here? Were you always born and raised to build Storyphile or where are you from? And how'd you find yourself in the tech field?

Wow. It probably happened the reverse way that normal people would think of it. And I actually think it helped me in a lot of ways. I'll get to that. But I was an exhibition designer and primarily mostly a temporary exhibitions that museums would have, and some of them would travel around and et cetera. And for whatever reason, I got in this kind of niche area where I was interviewing and doing a lot of exhibitions that surrounded Holocaust survivors and genocide survivors, or survivors of genocide, different genocides. And I was having these amazing conversations with these survivors. I would sit at their kitchen table in between takes or, you know, talking to them before the interview and things like that, after the interview, for hours. And I guess one day it occurred to me that, you know, my great grandchildren would never have the opportunity to have the kind of conversations and learn what I was learning and just be in awe of life the way I was experiencing it. So it was bothering me, obviously. And I got to a point where I said, there's got to be a way not to replace these conversations, but to replicate them. They're mostly sort of aligned with the Q and A process. So, you know, if you go to a lecture, you hear the lecture and what happens, Everybody, invariably the energy changes in the room. You start engaging a lot more once it's open to the Q and A and you start, you know, you keep going. I have not been in one scenario where a Q and A could not have kept going, and they actually had to stop it, which is unfortunate because I think people really learn so much when you're able to ask your own question. So when you're able to engage and you're able to ask your own question, have the conversation yourself and ask what you want to ask. Not listening to something like a documentary is made with A point, right? It's the point of the director. And they want you to know something. But what if you have questions about that? What do. Where's all the rest of it? So we wanted to enable people to have these conversations. And I said to myself, there's got to be a way to replicate this. This was in the Latter part of 2009. So, you know, Skype wasn't really a thing. It started, but it didn't really become ubiquitous until 2012. There was no facetime, no, you know, speech recognition, nothing. But you could see that it might happen, which was, I guess my superpower was to just see things that if you can do A, you should be able to do B or Z. You know, if you can put A together with Q, then you should get this. So I embarked on this journey. I found some great partners to help me develop it. We developed this whole program. It was called New Dimensions and Testimony. And it. Ultimately, we filmed about 60 individuals. We. We thought we'd only do 10. It was extremely cost. It's extremely expensive process to do at the time. But we didn't know at the time we did about, you know, we had to do the first one. And what was interesting to me is I. We were going to people that I thought had a lot of vision, but they couldn't understand what we really wanted to do. So I kept getting these things like, you want to talk to dead people, you know, and you want to do what you know. And I. So it finally, we said, okay, we've got to do a proof of concept. We did one proof of concept that worked okay. We convinced a lot of people to invest in a pilot. The pilot actually was amazing. And we didn't know, and I didn't know until about 2006, 2016, 2015, 16, that it would actually work and the way that we intended it to. And so that was a real pivotal moment.

So a lot of time invested in to get to that point.

You know, I was determined, very determined, and you kind of have to be. We had money to raise. It was. I worked with a university. And so it was a research project on their part. And so it does take time. I think it takes more time to go that route than it does a private sector route. And it. Anyway, we got that project off the ground. We did know. We did find that it actually had the effect on people that we were expecting it to. And it was. It was engaging. It was really drawing people in. And they were having the kind of conversations that they would even have with a normal Person, like, with a real person. And they were finding it just as effective and impressionable as they were talking to the individual. Then we, about 2016, I was taking this one interview that we had done around the world and just gathering information and gathering data, and I started to get all of these questions from people. Can I do this with my grandparents? Can I do this with my parents? Can I do this for myself? Can I do this? My aunt just got diagnosed with a terminal illness. Can we do this with heart? Can I do this with the founder of our company for institutional memory? So many use cases, you know, people coming up. I want to do this with my child, like every five years. This would be awesome. I want to do this for autistic kids, for them to practice talking to people. It just. They all had so many ideas. So about 2016, 2017, we started looking at it and said, all right, what would it be if we could make this ubiquitous for everyone? And it was at that point we thought, okay, it has to. You have to be able to use whatever camera people have. What cameras do people have now? Now they have their phones, they have smartphones, they have computers that have really good cameras on them. You know, nobody has a little camcorder anymore. So you had to make it automated, you had to make it cloud based. You had to make it. And you had to do it all in real time, which was key because the system that we had been doing was completely manual. I mean, it was from beginning to end. And that has a purpose, that has a place to do it that way, but it's not for everyone. And so we just kept working at it and working at it. And, you know, things had to happen around technology to enable us to build what we built ultimately. But it did take the better part of the last four years to do it.

Yeah, super interesting. I think you. You mentioned the original Genesis. Kind of reminds me of Steven Spielberg's show, a project, right? Which is that. That documenting of as many Holocaust survivors as possible, which I.

Our family has. That's who we. So that's who I partnered with was the USC Shoah Foundation. And that was the organization that Steven Spielberg started after Schindler's List to create the archive that they created. And it's the world's largest audio visual archive in the world. So. But this project had the one particular one that I started with. It had to sit in that institute because. Had to if it was going to have a life of its own and be a. You know, the Shoah foundation is a resource to education and educational outlets, schools, universities, museums around the world, you know, other institutions, et cetera. And for this project, which is basically bringing the. That interview process and telling the story up, you know, six different levels past the regular methodology behind doing a life history, that it had to sit with them. So I think when you asked me earlier, you know, gosh, that's a long time for that to happen. I think that was one of the reasons it took so long is I was just. I was determined that it actually. That the show foundation was the partner to do this and that it had to be with them. So it did take a long time, given the context, you know, given the content and the people that we were interviewing and planning on doing this experiment with. You don't mess with the Holocaust. So it's. I had to take a lot of people on this journey with me, essentially.

Oh, yeah, I bet. So you brought. It sounds like you brought a diverse group of people with you as well, people with different backgrounds, because it sounded like technology really wasn't there. You had kind of more. That sounds like the artistic and storytelling narrative. How did you. Because you always get the question from people like, how do I find co founders? Like, how did it really come to be from idea, the right people on tables to, this is a business. Let's go and do it together as a group.

The challenge was, you know, one point, I remember the Shoah foundation board looking at me and they said, okay. And the C suite, the staff, the executive staff said, okay, go away and come back to us when you know how to do it. Because, you know, I didn't know exactly. I was convinced that it would work, but I didn't know exactly how we were going to build it. It didn't matter where in the world that I found the people that had the right tech to develop it. But just so happens, you know, serendipitously, or whatever you believe in fate, that I found an another USC institute. And I didn't know they were a USC institute when I contacted them. And they happened to be working. Their entire purpose for living in this. This institute was created out of the armed services, the army, basically. And they, for example, they created virtual characters. They created training aspect. They created the VR headset actually for the Army. They. They did a lot of training, research and scenario setups for the Army. So a lot of this technology that they had created and built and then kind of evolved and moved into the movie industry in VFX and, you know, movies like Avatar and things like that would not have been able to happen had it not been for this institute and the people that worked there. I just, I went to them with a challenge, basically, and they accepted. So they're like, yeah, hell yeah, let's do it. Let's try. It took a lot to get them because I needed several different labs within this institute to come together to solve this. You know, the, the. To come together and find a solution and build the technology and expand. Expand on it. But we did it. In the end. It did work the way we all.

Thought it would and did, in a sense. Did you eventually bring the technology in house or you kind of licensed their IP or what? How did that all work out from a technology ownership perspective?

Didn't have to license any of their technology because to do it and make it ubiquitous for the public, we had to completely reinvent it. So we had to start from scratch.

Okay.

So then it was a matter of, okay, who wants to come with me and do it and take that, that leap that you and I were talking about earlier. After you get a thousand questions, the same after you get a single question a thousand times, basically you start to go, okay, I can't ignore this anymore. I have to try. So I was really fortunate. I had a really great group that I. And a team that I had built. And there were a lot of people in believe that believed that conversational video, the act of being able to engage with and talk to video, had enormous potential, obviously in so many different verticals, so many different points in our daily life that we could use this. I mean, think about it. You get diagnosed with anything, what do you do? The first thing you do is go to Google and you go through 25 pages. You're down a rabbit hole like you've never seen before or experienced before. What if you could just find a person and just ask them the question that you're asking? Just talk to somebody. They don't have to be there. They can just talk about their experience, tell their experience, do their own story, file, tell their life history. And then you would be able to talk to them and ask them what they experienced, ask them about their life. How did I tell my children? You know, how did you tell your children that you had. That you were diagnosed with this? What happened after that? What happened after you were diagnosed? Like, how did you feel? How did you cope with it? It's not that we're asking people to diagnose people, but there are life experiences that we all have. Neil, I'm sure you learn from something, from everybody you talk to, just like I do. And we have. Everybody has something that we can learn from. And if you've lived on this planet for any given time, you've had different experiences than I've had, so why wouldn't I be able to learn something from you? And we just set out to, you know, enable people to tell their stories so that either their families can get to know them in a different way than they might have known them. Okay, I'll give you an example. My daughter right now is losing her grandmother. And we did a story file. She texted me this morning and she said, I'm so grateful that I was able to do Oma's story file because I asked her to give me a message for my children. So that would be my grandchildren, but it would be her great grandchildren that she'll never meet. You know, and I think that everybody has had somebody in their life that they've lost, that they never got the chance to ask those questions.

Yeah, no. Very powerful to save that especially it's usually you feel like it might be too late, especially later in life. And now to be able to be kind of trained people to use this in other places starts to expand like, oh, I can use this here, I can use this in other parts. That's gotta be an interesting train of behavior.

Companies FAQs. How many times have you tried to find an answer on an FAQ site from a company on a website? You know, just ask the freaking question and get your answer and have a real person, have a real person talking to you, giving, telling you you know, it. It's not a chat bot that is trying to determine exactly what you're asking. Sometimes is. It's so much easier to talk to somebody when you can see them, you can see their body language answering you and you feel that connection even if that person's not really there. It's amazing because we've done this thousands of times and it's constantly amazed. Amazing to me how quickly people get to that point where they don't realize the person's not really there.

Yeah.

Like you just get involved with the conversation. You just, you kind of feel after you're done. Yeah. They can't answer everything. Maybe. But it's okay.

Yeah.

It's just better talking to, feeling like you're talking to somebody than feeling like you're talking to a chatbot.

Yes. And that applied. That's interesting. Applied to the family idea of thinking a few generations before. What have you learned from life, especially related to knowing your family is pretty incredible. To get those life lessons down to so that's kind of interesting, almost like a family FAQ of just like, how do you live, how do you live your life? Especially as the Smiths or the Blooms. Right. For three generations.

That's super interesting. And all those stories that get manipulated and changed over the years, they don't have to anymore. You can hear them in your grandmother's voice, the same way she used to tell it all the time, you know.

So, yeah, that's pretty great. And I've got to imagine it's applied to the beginning of life too, with around memories of babies in the same way too, right?

Oh, we had somebody do a story about. With their two and four year old, which was hysterical, but they're going to do it like every 10 years and it'll be so cute to see yourself.

Pretty great. So take us through kind of a little bit of what happened during COVID because I got to imagine a rapid acceleration, right. Like it's pretty much a given now that this is just how life is, so therefore we accept it. But also I'm curious if you can give me in that context some new examples that you weren't expecting the platform to be used and kind of where it's taking the company now as well.

One thing that was interesting is that we've always said from the very beginning that we don't actually know how people are going to end up using it, because what we ended up building were essentially a set of tools, right? So, yeah, I mean, we get. So there are so many different ways that people can use it. You know, book clubs, authors can do a story file and every single book club in the country can have them actually at their story file, answering their questions, selling products, you know, or what if you could go to your professor and you can, you know, all professors have these office hours. They get sent, they get asked the same questions over and over and over again. What if you had that conversation, you asked the professor all the questions that you wanted to ask and then you actually met that professor in real life, think how different that time you have with that individual would be and the kinds of conversations that you would actually be able to have had you had the. Had you taken the time to have an hour's worth of conversation before going to meet that individual or, oh, getting to know you, Neil. So you do a whole story file, you put it on you embedded in your LinkedIn page. Anybody can ask you questions about your life. They can feel like they get to know you before they actually get to know you. It's. It's you know, an owner of a company, a new company, like a new app or a new restaurant or a new flower shop, they can put a little widget of themselves on their website and they can answer people's questions. How'd you start your business? Why'd you start your business? What's the best part about all the same, all the questions that everybody might have. Why do you love flowers so much? Or what's the best flower for, you know, me to get for my girlfriend in February? It just, the list goes on and on. It's anywhere that you want that you have question. We wake up every morning and we have questions. The first thing that you communicate with your, I don't know if you're married or you have a partner, whatever. I guarantee you within five minutes of seeing each other in the morning, you ask a question. You know, so we, that's how we learn. That's how everybody and the human beings learn is through asking questions.

Was that with that powered with kind of this new. It feels like AI applied a transcription where you can actually start take videos and get a little text out of it. Is that where some of the newer technology has gone with Storefile?

Yeah, it's, it's not really keyword based anymore. We have our own natural language processing system. It's trying to understand the syntax, the, your tone of voice, what you intended. It's understanding whether it's past or present that you're talking about in conversation. It's tracking that conversation. It's using the transcript to say, oh, you're really taught, you know, you're talking about this so you, and you're telling this story, even though that wasn't actually the question you were asked. You could also talk about this. Given a different question that's asked of somebody. They're always going to be finite data sets of responses that we have to go with because out for us at Storyphile, it's about keeping the conversation in your voice, in your words and authentic to you. So we don't, we're not creating chatbots of you, we're not putting words in your mouth, we're not making you say anything that you didn't say. And we're sticking to that. So you can't manipulate any of these videos. And if they are manipulated, people will know that they've been manipulated. And that's very important to us. And that kind of comes out of, you know, where this company grew from our subject matter. You had to be authentic. I don't want my grandmother's story 50 years from now to. For somebody to question, oh, did she really say that? Or, you know, oh, I can now make her say all kinds of different things. Well, all right, so maybe in the future you want to do that. But I don't want that done for my story. I want to be able to talk to them and tell them the stories in my own words, in my own voice, the way I told I tell it. So.

Yeah. And honestly, with the world seeing more and more deep fakes and other versions of this, like, the authenticity is just going to become more and more important because don't know how to trust anymore.

Right. Well, we think, you know, we think so. But, you know, there's a place for all of that as well, I'm sure. It's just not what we want to be.

Sure. Super interesting. So you've been building this tech company in Southern California. You obviously know we were having a little talk about talent and the opportunity for talent. Take us. Let's rehab that conversation a little bit about how story file could even be used for this. Of how could we locally be, in a very, maybe not authentic grassroots way, help use storyfile to actually train people to be in the tech world?

Yeah. You know, natural language processing, for example, massive potential in that market, in that whole field. Not a lot of people being trained in it for some, for whatever reason. And we're constantly pushing the boundaries of it, but it is really hard to find people that are, that have been trained or even exposed to it. So, you know, we end up training a lot of our people that test our story files. But it goes beyond that. Where are all the software engineers that are working in natural language processing and figuring out all these neural networks and putting two and three together or being able to try to really attempt to have a natural conversation? It's a field that's come a long way in the last four years. We wouldn't be able to do what we do had we not pushed it. But it still has a long way to go for sure. And we need the talent. We need to, you know, start mining that, start finding that talent. And I think as we were talking about earlier, it's not a matter of that people aren't smart enough. I think you, you find plenty of smart people anywhere in this world, any city, anywhere. Anything and anybody can be trained to do almost anything. You know, you do have to have a natural, probably interest or inclination towards some things. Like I'm, I personally am not going to be a soccer star. So because I don't have that Aptitude. But I'm smart enough to figure out other stuff. So, you know, why can't you train people?

Yeah. They often say. They often say talent is everywhere, opportunity is not. Right. And so maybe one, maybe you've got the natural skills to be a soccer star. You just don't even know or you didn't know at the time that there was a path for you, a career path for you in that. Right. And so the same with others who may be fantastic salespeople selling flooring or cars or roofing may, May not even realize that they could actually do even better selling software.

Yeah. Like you and I were talking about, you can train a salesperson. Great salespeople or great salespeople. I don't care what they sell. They can. You can train someone to sell anything.

Yeah. And with the visual or the digitization of industries like, let's take even some of the industries that have come before what you're doing. Let's take the scrapbooking industry. Right. Or crafting and others. Right. These are things where are going digital. People who may have worked in a crafting store now could be saying, let's help you do digital crafting.

Perfect. I mean, you've got a great. You've got a great idea. So in Story for Life, we're going to be introducing what we call living albums and what we want. People like, how many times have you gone into an album and you've looked at the people and you're like, I don't even know who half these people are. So, you know, before that happens, have someone come in, pick out 20 or 30 photos that you want to remember, and you'll be able to upload them into your story file Life. But you can video record an answer talking about that story, that, that picture. Tell the story behind the picture. Every picture, every item that's precious to you, every. Everything has a story. And you can video record yourself telling that story and talking about this photo. Who's in the photo? What were you doing? Why is it important to you? You know, that's going to be a huge thing for people, I think, especially generational. They'll be able to save photos that. And really it'll mean something to them. You know, maybe they could do a book every year. We have some clients that do like shutter books every year with their family. And that's a great idea because it does preserve those stories. You know who those people are at least, because you can write text in those and you just type it in and you do it. But what if you could add video to that and I could hear you how excited and how cool the vacation was, or this wedding. And, oh, it was so gorgeous. You can't write that.

So anyway, yeah, no awesome applications. Excited for our audience to get to know this a bit. I'm excited to create a few as well myself. Yeah, maybe we said the tech sales bootcamp. We'll do a story about four, but, yeah, what's been super interesting. Let's talk a little about, like, your role from CEO to cvo, Chief Visionary Officer. You know, there's some entrepreneurs who would never give that up. Like, when was it time? How did you know that it was time for a leadership change?

Oh, that's a really good question and probably a better question to ask the CEO, the current CEO, because it took me about two years. He's. He happens to be a founding member of Storyfile, A founding. Founder of Storyfile as well. And it took me two years to get him to come on board full time and do this. And a lot of various reasons. Everybody has reasons. I'm not going to say that his reasons were any better than anybody else's for not just jumping in, like, and not diving in, but it's a leap of faith, you know, it's like anything else in life. You know it when you know it. And that sounds. I don't know if it's cliche or if it's hard for people to understand, but when you know something's right, you know it, and it'll be time. I also come from a long line of entrepreneurs. My, My grandparents, my mom and dad, my. Myself. So I think it was probably a little bit easier for me to envision, you know, not having that safety net and, like, and being out on your own. But as far as the going from CEO to cvo, my grandfather always said to know what you're good at, know what you're not good at, and get the best possible people around you if you want to be successful, get the best possible people around you to compliment what you're not good at, to fill in those gaps. And I can honestly say that this, the current CEO that we have in Stephen, fills in all the areas that I definitely needed help in building this company to take it to the next level. I built it from the ground up for the last four years, and it was just time to make that. You know, now we're at a stage where we've tripled throughout. We tripled in business through Covid, and now it's time to take it really to the next level and, you know, global domination type stuff. Yeah. So I needed a whole nother team. As you're growing, there are a lot of things that come up that you need to fill. Not a lot of. A lot of talent you need to surround yourself with if you really intend to win.

Absolutely. And especially you focus on. You mentioned the complimentary talent. Right. It's very easy for founders to just be carbon copies of each other and enjoy each other, but not say, this is the best for the business, that we actually are polar opposites and we fill each other's holes and gaps.

So, yeah, I'm committed to the vision. I'm committed to what I know that the vision and what I know that we can be. And we just need. We needed to find the right people in the right time to do that.

Absolutely. Well, we're very excited for continued growth. To to have a happy team is to also have them happily fed. This being the Tacos and Tech podcast, we have to know, do you have a go to favorite taco spot?

I love Mexico. I mean, I grew up in San Diego, so. God, that's hard.

There's no wrong answer here.

Well, yeah, I have to say, El Coyote's still one of my favorites, but if you're in la, there's a new Mexican restaurant on Beverly, and I think it's Vista. I think it's called Ellis Escuela. I'm really into that one right now, so that would have to be my favorite. My suggestion.

Okay, good ones. Both new to the taco database. Heather, thanks so much for having just a great conversation together and for building a product that's really going to capture, you know, our memories, but even more so, you know, educate the world on so many other things. So keep up the great work and thanks again for being on the podcast.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for tuning in to the Tacos and Tech podcast. You can find all of our episodes on freshfoodtech.com as well as on Twitter at Tacos and Tech Pod. Also, follow Fresh Brew Tech on all of your social platforms and make sure to share and give a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify or Google Play. Thanks again.

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