Utilizing AI to Minimize Toxic Communication and Violence in the Workplace with Ty Smith

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Blum, San Diego's tech ambassador and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

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All right, and welcome back to the Tacos in Tech podcast. I'm your host, Neal Bloom and I am thrilled to be joined with founder and CEO of ComSafeAI, Ty Smith. Ty, thanks for being on the pod.

Thanks so much for having me, Neil. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, we're excited to get to know you, get to know what you're building and your connections to San Diego. So do you want to first give us a quick one minute overview of what ComSafe is?

Sure. ComSafe AI is a technology company that specializes in conflict and violence prevention. So our flagship technology is an AI driven communication safety analysis software that sits on top of the internal communications that our clients use. So, corporate email, corporate chat, it measures for negative sentiment and it sends trigger alerts to the head of human resources whenever an employee sends A communication to another employee that contains a trigger that's associated with any case of sexual harassment, bullying, toxic communication, Title 4, Title IX, discrimination, diversity and inclusion issues, so on and so forth.

Okay, so super important in protecting us, our families, our colleagues. So we're going to dive more into that. But we want to get to know you a little bit. Where'd you grow up? Where are you from?

I grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois. Right on the Illinois, Missouri border.

Awesome. And how'd you work your way over all the way to San Diego then?

Yeah. When I was graduating high school in Illinois, I didn't have anything other than a dream of someday becoming a Navy seal. I wasn't ready for college. I hadn't really taken education seriously growing up in East St. Louis or even in high school, and I didn't really have anything else to do. And I knew that if I hung out for too long in East St. Louis, that I was going to develop a habit of not really doing much with myself. So I joined the Navy right after I graduated. Figured I would accelerate my life a little bit, and the rest was history.

Okay, and so SEAL was on your mind immediately? Like that was the whole intention?

Yeah. I made the decision when I was 12 years old that I wanted to be a Navy SEAL. So, you know, again, coming out of high school, I didn't have anything else to do, but I knew I wanted to get out and see the world, so joined the Navy. Spent the first four and a half years as a military police officer and an Italian translator, believe it or not. I was stationed in Sardinia, Italy, for nearly five years. And I just had the time of my life. Italian became my second language, and I was having such a good time. I was considering getting out of the Navy and just staying in Italy. I was going to go to the University of Rome and continue building a life in Europe because I loved it that much. But 911 happened, and fortunately I was given the opportunity to. To get back out to California. So my SEAL training package was approved, and I found myself in Coronado being indoctrinated into the waves of Naval Special Warfare in February of 2002.

Oh, wow. Not a bad place to. To end up. You know, after Sardinia, it was great.

Other than, you know, the pain and misery and cold water that is. That's the nucleus of field training. But I had a fantastic time, fortunately. Successfully navigated training and spent the next 14 and a half, 15 years in the field teams and had a phenomenal career. Retired from the SEAL teams back in September of 2016 as I was finishing grad school at Marshall Business School up at usc and building this company.

Wow. Well, thank you for your service and for your protection of us. And it obviously you've taken that to task where you want to continue in the protection space. But now with the tech vibe, did you know, coming out and retiring in the seals, did you already have the idea to build a tech company or what was the plan?

I did not. You know, as I was retiring, you know, my plan was to go over to the FBI. I knew that eventually I wanted to take the leap into entrepreneurship at the very beginning of my retirement planning, you know, my plan was to go over to the FBI, stay with the FBI for at least 10 years, and then I would take the leap into entrepreneurship. I wanted to start a personnel recovery company, because kidnap and ransom is something that's near and dear to my heart for personal reasons. And, you know, maybe that's something I still might do someday because I think that every human being deserves to make it home, you know, whether dead or alive. But as I was a few months into business school, I felt as though, you know, maybe I wasn't ready to create something at that scale. And so I kind of went back to the drawing board and was leaning on the FBI. But on December 2, 2015, I was sitting in class at Marshall Business School when the Inland Regional center in San Bernardino, California, got shot up. And a couple of weeks after that happened, I started personally receiving phone calls from my life colleagues in the medical industry that had concerns around, you know, hey, Ty, how do we keep ourselves safe? How do we protect the patients? We're scared. You know, this place isn't giving us any training. We don't know if there's any planning in place. Will you come up and talk to us about this? You're the only person that we know that understands this kind of thing. Will you help us out? And after doing that several times, it was almost as though I could hear my entrepreneurship professors in the back of my head telling me that, you know, hey, man, the market's telling you what it needs right now from someone with your skillset. And so I eventually turned down the role at the FBI and decided to take the leap. And that's when I originally founded Vigilance Risk Solutions back in December of 2015, which became the predecessor to ComSafe A.I.

Got it. Okay. So you've had some iterations of what you've wanted to do and build, and obviously you jumped into it early, earlier than you planned. You said you're going to wait 10 years and you didn't at all take us through. What's that like as an entrepreneur with an idea to then pivot and move, find where the market is?

I would say that for me it's been one hell of a journey. And it's kind of gone in cycles over the last five years of, you know, feelings of elation to the feelings of, you know, despair and feeling sorry for yourself and, you know, like you're alone on top of the hill. I remember first launching the company and just having delusions of grandeur really about how difficult it would be. I knew that it would be difficult. But to be honest with you, you know, launching was easy. Starting the company and launching it was easy. Keeping the company alive and growing over the last five years has been extremely difficult. But the flip side of that coin is that we've managed to do that. We've managed to keep the company alive and growing even through a global pandemic. And although it's proven to be an emotional roller coaster really over the last five years, I can honestly say that never in a million years would I have thought that I would have experienced as much growth personally and professionally as I have over the last five years. I had no idea. So even though it's been an emotional roller coaster of good days and bad days and high fives and sometimes, you know, licking your wounds and trying to figure out how you're going to keep the ship moving forward, I would say that it's all been worth it because I mean, man, I've just grown so much. I've taken on an entirely new skill set that now I can teach to other veterans as they transition out of the military or other aspiring entrepreneurs. So it's been an emotional roller coaster. But I've had fun and I've grown tremendously.

I love hearing that. I think you started as more of a service based business. Right. Consultancy and eventually started build it out into a technology. What's that been like from being able to learn how to scale yourself and the business?

Sure, yeah. So, you know, we, that's exactly how we started. We, the business has gone through this evolution over the last five years that really our customers are responsible for that evolution because we started out as basically a training company. You know, we built training curriculums around things like active shooter and enterprise travel safety and workplace violence prevention. But as we started to collect our first several purchase orders and really get into deep conversations with our customers regarding what their problems really were and what they needed in order to solve those problems, Our offerings began to develop over time, so we began to really technology enable our company over the first several years. And we did that by launching a web based training arm of the company. We launched a social media threat monitoring arm of the company. We even partnered with Zendesk and built a proprietary case management platform. But all of those evolutions, or pivots, however you would call them, were a result of us spending a tremendous amount of time talking with our customers, trying to fully understand their problems, their needs, and then develop solutions, you know, based off our skill sets in order to answer that. And over the last five years, we've done a really good job of that. We went from bootstrap to over seven figures in revenue for the first time last year. But then coming into this year, I was really kind of forced to go, okay, like who do you want to be when you grow up? Do you want to be a SaaS technology company or do you want to keep playing, like, in this space in between? And we made the decision to take the leap and to get rid of our services, even the tech enabled services, about seven months ago and to rebrand as CommSafe AI as a 100% SaaS technology company. And that was primarily because again, we continue learning from our customers. We knew that we would have a hard time selling some of our tech enabled services in 2020 anyway, because, I mean, the writing was on the wall what the pandemic was doing to small business. You had this massive shift to work from home and we knew that that was going to give us a hard time. What we also knew that we believed and no one else seemed to get, is that the mission that we are trying to accomplish? All the variables revolving around that mission of defeating conflict and violence in the workplace, it all stems from toxic communication. And we learned that over the last five years of working with our customers and again, really trying to drill down into what is the problem that's keeping you up at night and how do we catch it at the earliest moment possible. And it all came down to toxic communication. And ultimately that drove us to take the leap and focus on artificial intelligence and being a SaaS technology company.

Got it. So take us through a little more in detail what the product's doing and how it's protecting.

Yeah. So ComSafe AI APIs into the internal communications that our clients use. And when an employee sends a message to another employee, either over corporate email or over chat comp safe AI automatically measures the contents of that message versus our configured protocols and proprietary data. And if there Is anything within the contents of that message that is triggering, that is even remotely close to being associated with instances of toxic communication or DNI issues or bullying or sexual harassment. CompSafe automatically grabs that message, flags it and labels it as either being toxic, threatening, obscene or insulting. And it sends an alert immediately to the head of HR letting that person know who said what to whom. Even further, these are the next steps that we recommend you take as a decision maker to cure that particular situation. And these are the comps AI web based training courses the affected employees need to take in order to recover from that situation. And especially for the antagonist to understand that your behavior is against company policy and we're aware of it, needs to change right now.

Interesting. So employees, I mean they kind of auto opt into this, right? Like they, I guess they already assume that you're already being watched. Is that kind of the assumption? So now it's actually being monitored for something. It kind of seems like now like Big Brother's watching for employees.

Yeah, it seems like that. But when it comes down to it, the fact is, is that more than 80% of the Fortune 500 are already monitoring every email that their employees send. So this isn't something that is totally unheard of. And you're absolutely right. When the employee accepts the position at that organization, they are opting into that monitoring because any communication that's taking place on the company dime, especially on company device or within company communication channels, the company owns that communication and it's somewhere in the employer's agreement that that employee executed when they accepted the job that they would accept that, that any communication that they take part of belongs to the organization. Now when you consider privacy from the individual side, again the employee doesn't have a legal right to that privacy. But we are sure to coach our clients that it's important that if they are going to make employees aware of the use of this technology, that they really talk to employees and let them know why the technology is being used and exactly how it's being used. Because this is artificial intelligence. So there is no human being that's sitting and reading en masse every message that an employee. There's not a human being reading the message at all. Unless you know this is a class one. One of our experts needs to get on this and start talking to law enforcement right now. Unless it's one of those kinds of messages. But we coach our clients that the most important thing is that your employees understand that you are not using this technology to spy on them. You are actually using this technology because you care about them and you want to be forward leaning when it comes to keeping them safe, regardless of their location. If they're working from home or in a brick and mortar environment owned by.

The organization, I think that's super important of just the. It's here to protect you. You know, can you talk? I know it's kind of early in it, but have you, do you already have some examples of how this is kind of, you know, successes or do you know how employees and companies are going to kind of say this is a win, this is success for us?

At this point, it's a little early to know. We are in the process of implementing with our first paid beta client over the next couple of weeks and we plan to beta with a total cohort of three companies and we're working on the other two as we speak. And our plan is to beta between now and the end of July. And of course we are going to advance the predictive capability of our AI models as much as we possibly can over the next several months so that as we go to market with version one of the tech around the middle of this year, then we'll actually have those user cases and those case studies to prove to the market that this is actually the future of physical security. But you know, where my mind actually goes immediately when you ask me that question, Neil, is what we witnessed as a nation last Wednesday with the siege on our United States Capitol. And when I put on my threat assessment hat based off, you know, the years of training experience that I had from my previous career, you know, I can't help but feel like if our technology had been just a little sooner, maybe we would have been able to catch that. Because it was no coincidence that thousands of people showed up at our nation's capital at the same time, all with the same goal. Those people were organized and they did that organizing over time, over the phone, over email, over chat, over social media. And the only reason why federal law enforcement was overwhelmed in that situation is because they did not adhere to early warning. And that's exactly what our technology is. It's early warning. We are unhiding liabilities for our clients.

Interesting. A great example of that, that we're obviously now seeing tech companies being reactive to it, even though there is also, like you say, signs of this mounting on all platforms. So yeah, I think that's really interesting the way you talk about reactive versus active in that regard. You also talk a little about what it could save companies from in terms of cost, even for just the Things that could happen there. Anything else you want to kind of mention in terms of what it does for companies?

Sure. I mean, what we know about these particular instances is that first and foremost, a couple of things. But we have to start with what it's doing at the individual level. When an employee experiences this type of trauma, whether it be from sexual harassment, bullying in the workplace, or some type of discrimination, it's been proven that employees productivity decreases by approximately 50% and for up to 18 weeks post incident. And so when we consider, you know, how this is affecting an organization, we have to start there because the organization immediately starts losing money when the employee's productivity begins to dip because the organization is paying the employee to be on their A game. But if the employee can't even focus on their job because of the psychological trauma that they're living through, then it makes it really hard for them to bring their A game to work or even show up to work. So the organization has to be concerned about how it's affecting their bottom line. Also, the average lawsuit for one of these instances is around $3 million. So the organization has to worry about, okay, well, what happens when all of a sudden we get hit with this sexual harassment lawsuit that we had no idea was coming? Even if we just settle this out of court, it's going to cost us about a half a million dollars. That's the average out of court settlement. But if we have to go to court and even settle this case, it's going to be around $3 million. Not to mention the damage to our brand, our reputation and company culture that we're going to have to deal with. So this creates a pretty big problem for companies.

Wow. Well, super important. We're really glad you're building it and we're excited to hear more about how the beta goes. And so congrats on the big pivot to full SaaS. You know, you're super involved in your community as well, so I've noticed that about you. Not only are you building a company, but you're helping others in your community. What's that like trying to juggle both at the same time? How did you make the decision to actually manage that?

Well, it's hard, but I mean, entrepreneurship is hard, right? Deal with wasn't something that I really had to make the decision to do. It's just something that's in me to do for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I'm a protector of people. And I didn't become a protector of people because I became a Navy Seal and Because I started this company to protect people. No, I became a Navy SEAL and then went on to start this company because inherently I am a protector. So it's my nature to give and to want to help people. But also there's just no way I would have been able to build what I've built over the last five years without the help of other people, people that are smarter than me, people that love me and care about me and that genuinely just want to see me be successful. So I can't even imagine, you know, what kind of person I would be, how I would view myself if I wasn't paying that forward. I get help, I stand on the shoulders of giants on a daily basis and so I feel like it's my duty to pay that forward and help other people to experience some of the success I've been able to experience.

Thank you for that. You know, a lot of us feel that way as well. And so thanks for giving that time and energy and passion and you know, while you're out in the community, you got to eat. We got to know. Favorite taco spot. What is it?

Great question. Easily Dom Ponchos and Imperial Beach. I fell in love with that place when I was a Seal trainee more than 20 years ago and it has always been my favorite taco place ever since. I mean, when I graduated from SEAL training, I took orders to a SEAL team out on the east coast and I'm pretty sure for like that entire five years I just didn't eat Mexican food because I knew it wasn't going to hold a candle to what I was used to, which is Don Pancho. So to this day it's my favorite place. I live in Coronado, so it's right down the strand, easy for me to get to. And I think I'm going to get some Don Panchos tonight, as a matter of fact.

Love it. I just found a new one near my place up in Encinitas, Los Tacos that I ate yesterday and had it brought back in again today. So cheers to that. But now I'm going to go try Dom Ponchos. Appreciate that.

There you go.

Ty, it's been fantastic getting to know you, getting to know not just what you're building but why you're building it. And so thank you for that and we're really excited for a great 2021 and your guys success. So thank you.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for joining us on the tacos and tech podcast with Neil Bloom. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eealbloom as well as Fresh brewed Tech and Tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.

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