March 26, 2026 • 12 mins
Interview with Rebecca Liao - The Culture News
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ladies and gentlemen, Good afternoon, Welcome on the Culture News.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
My name is David so Roy and I have the
pleasure to have today.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
On iHeart Radio and all the platform a wonderful, wonderful lady.
Her name is Rebecca Leao. Let me spell it for you.
It's l Iao. She is the co founder and CEO
at Saga. Spelled Saga. It's an AI hyper scaling protocol.
(00:28):
She's going to talk to us about all of that
and AI right.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Now, it's in everyone's mind.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
So this is perfect to have Rebeca because she's definitely
an expert on that.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Rebecca, how are you today?
Speaker 3 (00:42):
I'm great, David, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
How are you I'm doing wonderful. Thank you for being
with us today. So I would love to know more
about yourself. Can you tell us a little bit where
you're from and how did you start and how did
you arrive to build the Saga.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Yeah. Well, I am a California girl, born and bred,
and I was born and raised in San Francisco, and
so I have been in technology most of my life.
I saw the first tech boom in the late nineties
and then I went to school at Stanford undergrad And
what's interesting is back then I was hyper focused on
(01:23):
a career in politics, so I was not necessarily part
of the group of students at Stanford who were looking
to do their own startups, really looking to get into
the tech scene. I was a little bit more removed
from that. But right after college I went to Harvard
(01:43):
Law to chase my passions, and for a while I
was a lawyer, I did focus mostly on technology, but
soon after that I joined the Clinton campaign in twenty
sixteen and the Biden presidential campaign twenty twenty. So I've
always had a through line, but it became very clear
(02:04):
to me that I actually do have the entrepreneurial bug.
Anytime that I was practicing law for my clients, I
realized that I wanted to make the strategic decisions and
the subject matter was fascinating to me as well. And
I was starting to meet entrepreneurs in the San Francisco
Bay area, and so in twenty fourteen timeframe, that's when
(02:25):
I stepped out and I was part of the early
team at a startup called Globality, which does AI based
procurement of international services. So this was early days in AI.
We got backed by SoftBank pretty quickly, and so that
got us to Unicorn status. I was there heading up
(02:47):
all business development, opening up the market to Asia, and
I was there for the hyper scaling period from ten
employees or so to over one hundred. So that was
a ton of fun. But you know, my background is
largely in developing economies and developing market economies, and so
(03:07):
I started to hear about this thing called bitcoin, and
I started to hear about crypto, and while a lot
of it seemed very speculative and not terribly substantive, I
think the core technology held enormous promise for countries that
are looking to leave frog in their financial infrastructure. So
(03:28):
I left Globality and I co founded skew Chain with
a few of my friends, and sku Chain is more
of a DeFi company. I was co founder CEO there
for about four years and grew the platform to five
billion in annual volume before stepping away in twenty twenty one.
Now I did think I would go into government at
that point because Joe Biden actually won his campaign. But
(03:50):
after a while in public sector, I realized, after you've
done two early stage startups successfully, it's very hard to
go into public sector. The work culture is entirely different,
and I really missed the fast pace and the fulfillment
of building something. So I came back to California from
(04:14):
DC and I co founded Saga with a few of
my friends in a space who were looking at the
same problem set, which was how do we build a
hyper scaling platform for this cutting edge technology. So we
started off in the crypto space, but very soon our
product evolved into being AI focused and now we are
(04:35):
solely AI. So all the hyper scaling that we had
built previously applies now. And well, I would be happy
to chat more about what Sanga is doing, but that
is my personal journey to becoming the entrepreneur that I
am today.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Well, what a beautiful journey, and again, congratulations for all
the great things that you have done. Really, that is beautiful.
So you have profounded Saga. If you had to explain
what Saga is, can you do us?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Absolutely?
Speaker 3 (05:09):
So Saga does what are known as character AI agents.
So these are AI agents that are based on characters
from gaming and entertainment, from sports brands, from consumer brands,
so they are agents that are in the personality of
a character. We focus on working primarily with highly recognizable ips,
(05:35):
and honestly, it's pretty fun to bring some of the
most iconic characters that all of us anywhere around the
world would be familiar with to life as twenty four
to seven AI agents. Now, the focus for us in
terms of technology is really training the agents such that
(05:56):
they have all the nuances and the full character of
these of these characters that we know and love. So
there's a lot of nuanced personality training that goes into it.
Because we are working with big studios, obviously we get
to keep within brand guidelines and so the training has
to be effective for that, and the agent has to
(06:18):
continue to develop and also to have real conversations with users.
So as we were developing this training model, what we
realized is that we were just getting very good at
something called synthetic relationships, and so from there we're able
to form good relationships between these characters and any user
(06:38):
and basically any context. We have focused a lot on
gaming to start with, just because it is uniquely useful
there to connect with communities, to find new users, to
increase what's known as lifetime value for all the players
that you currently have. However, we are branching quickly into
(06:58):
sports so using character agents to help with sports leads
as well, again to engage with the fan base, to
open up new experiences and to activate people who may
not be as engaged at the moment but certainly can be.
And that helps with the sponsors for all of these
(07:20):
leads as well, and then branching into entertainment and general
consumer brands. So that is the heart of what we
have been able to achieve here. We have taken our
scaling protocol and we've been able to really leverage it
for these highly nuanced, compelling character personalities that form synthetic
(07:45):
relationships with users.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
And you've done an incredible work again for this wonderful company, Saga.
So the name of the website is Saga that xyz
very easy to remember. Saga again, Saga dot x y Z.
So how do you think AI will change our future?
(08:07):
In perhaps so the entertainment industry.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
AI has the promise to create a whole new category
of content. I think that's the revolution that we're looking at.
A lot of people in entertainment in gaming have been
highly concerned that AI is just going to replace human
(08:34):
talent in things that we already know. So in games,
in film, TV shows, in podcasts, in music, I mean
basically any form of content that is currently produced. People
have been fearful that AI is going to replace any
sort of human creativity there. I think that's completely overblown.
(08:56):
Anyone who has used AI tools knows that they are
just tools. They are extensions of productivity. There is no
way that AI can come up with original content the
way that humans can, and so I think the industries
are safe in terms of their value proposition. But I
(09:19):
think what AI really promises is that if you are
looking to bring something to life twenty four to seven,
for instance, with these character agents, if you are looking
to empower your fans or new users to create their
own content and then extend your brand, then AI can
uniquely let you do that. And so that's what I'm
(09:41):
looking forward to is really a new category of content
that was previously not possible before AI became widely available.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Indeed, and there is a beautiful change, and we love
to have pioneers such as yourself who are really enlightening
us about what AI is. I think it's a great
progress and we should all embrace it. And the way to
embrace this is definitely to follow your wonderful company Saga
that x y z is the website. The name of
(10:15):
the company is Saga Saga. And of course, if you
want to know more about Rebecca Leoo, once again, Rebecca
Leo l Iao. She has a great website Rebecca Leo
dot com and you can read about it, wonderful biography
and all the great things she has done. Before we
(10:35):
say goodbye to each other, what are your next projects
and what would you like to say to our audience.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Well, thanks so much for having me, David, it's been
fun to be with you. This is a big year
for us because we debuted our first character Agent a
couple of weeks ago. This is Willie from Trevia Krag.
Willy is the main character from the Trevia Crack game,
which has been downloaded by over eight hundred million people
the world. It is the world's number one trivia game
(11:03):
and Willy has been delighting fans everywhere ever since, ever
since he was born. So the next character, Agent's going
to come out very shortly, and then the cadence will continue.
We are working with some of the most iconic brands
that again would be recognizable to anyone in the world,
and we're very excited that people are finding these characters
(11:28):
highly engaging that oftentimes, especially when the agents are interacting
with users across social media, people forget that these character
agents are just characters. Sometimes they believe that they're actual people,
and that tells us that our training model is doing
the right thing. So we look forward to continuing to
(11:48):
improve our technology stack, for sure, but also again just
to open up these characters to fans everywhere and do
our part to usher in a new revolution in gaming
and entertainment. Year for us, a lot of announcements will
be coming out with agent releases and we can't wait
to share it with everyone.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
And we will be there with you to support you
and to applaud you.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Lady gentleman, my name is David, So we write the
pleasure to have to do on iHeart Redeo on the
Culture News the wonderful Rebecca Leo Leo spelled l I
A O Leo wonderful lady. She has a website Rebecca
Dao dot com in the name of her company.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Saga s A g A dot x.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Y Z is the website right now.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
More music to follow up on I Heart Redeo statue
with us. It's a beautiful day
Ladies and gentlemen, Good afternoon, Welcome on the Culture News.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
My name is David so Roy and I have the
pleasure to have today.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
On iHeart Radio and all the platform a wonderful, wonderful lady.
Her name is Rebecca Leao. Let me spell it for you.
It's l Iao. She is the co founder and CEO
at Saga. Spelled Saga. It's an AI hyper scaling protocol.
(00:28):
She's going to talk to us about all of that
and AI right.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Now, it's in everyone's mind.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
So this is perfect to have Rebeca because she's definitely
an expert on that.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Rebecca, how are you today?
Speaker 3 (00:42):
I'm great, David, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
How are you I'm doing wonderful. Thank you for being
with us today. So I would love to know more
about yourself. Can you tell us a little bit where
you're from and how did you start and how did
you arrive to build the Saga.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Yeah. Well, I am a California girl, born and bred,
and I was born and raised in San Francisco, and
so I have been in technology most of my life.
I saw the first tech boom in the late nineties
and then I went to school at Stanford undergrad And
what's interesting is back then I was hyper focused on
(01:23):
a career in politics, so I was not necessarily part
of the group of students at Stanford who were looking
to do their own startups, really looking to get into
the tech scene. I was a little bit more removed
from that. But right after college I went to Harvard
(01:43):
Law to chase my passions, and for a while I
was a lawyer, I did focus mostly on technology, but
soon after that I joined the Clinton campaign in twenty
sixteen and the Biden presidential campaign twenty twenty. So I've
always had a through line, but it became very clear
(02:04):
to me that I actually do have the entrepreneurial bug.
Anytime that I was practicing law for my clients, I
realized that I wanted to make the strategic decisions and
the subject matter was fascinating to me as well. And
I was starting to meet entrepreneurs in the San Francisco
Bay area, and so in twenty fourteen timeframe, that's when
(02:25):
I stepped out and I was part of the early
team at a startup called Globality, which does AI based
procurement of international services. So this was early days in AI.
We got backed by SoftBank pretty quickly, and so that
got us to Unicorn status. I was there heading up
(02:47):
all business development, opening up the market to Asia, and
I was there for the hyper scaling period from ten
employees or so to over one hundred. So that was
a ton of fun. But you know, my background is
largely in developing economies and developing market economies, and so
(03:07):
I started to hear about this thing called bitcoin, and
I started to hear about crypto, and while a lot
of it seemed very speculative and not terribly substantive, I
think the core technology held enormous promise for countries that
are looking to leave frog in their financial infrastructure. So
(03:28):
I left Globality and I co founded skew Chain with
a few of my friends, and sku Chain is more
of a DeFi company. I was co founder CEO there
for about four years and grew the platform to five
billion in annual volume before stepping away in twenty twenty one.
Now I did think I would go into government at
that point because Joe Biden actually won his campaign. But
(03:50):
after a while in public sector, I realized, after you've
done two early stage startups successfully, it's very hard to
go into public sector. The work culture is entirely different,
and I really missed the fast pace and the fulfillment
of building something. So I came back to California from
(04:14):
DC and I co founded Saga with a few of
my friends in a space who were looking at the
same problem set, which was how do we build a
hyper scaling platform for this cutting edge technology. So we
started off in the crypto space, but very soon our
product evolved into being AI focused and now we are
(04:35):
solely AI. So all the hyper scaling that we had
built previously applies now. And well, I would be happy
to chat more about what Sanga is doing, but that
is my personal journey to becoming the entrepreneur that I
am today.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Well, what a beautiful journey, and again, congratulations for all
the great things that you have done. Really, that is beautiful.
So you have profounded Saga. If you had to explain
what Saga is, can you do us?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Absolutely?
Speaker 3 (05:09):
So Saga does what are known as character AI agents.
So these are AI agents that are based on characters
from gaming and entertainment, from sports brands, from consumer brands,
so they are agents that are in the personality of
a character. We focus on working primarily with highly recognizable ips,
(05:35):
and honestly, it's pretty fun to bring some of the
most iconic characters that all of us anywhere around the
world would be familiar with to life as twenty four
to seven AI agents. Now, the focus for us in
terms of technology is really training the agents such that
(05:56):
they have all the nuances and the full character of
these of these characters that we know and love. So
there's a lot of nuanced personality training that goes into it.
Because we are working with big studios, obviously we get
to keep within brand guidelines and so the training has
to be effective for that, and the agent has to
(06:18):
continue to develop and also to have real conversations with users.
So as we were developing this training model, what we
realized is that we were just getting very good at
something called synthetic relationships, and so from there we're able
to form good relationships between these characters and any user
(06:38):
and basically any context. We have focused a lot on
gaming to start with, just because it is uniquely useful
there to connect with communities, to find new users, to
increase what's known as lifetime value for all the players
that you currently have. However, we are branching quickly into
(06:58):
sports so using character agents to help with sports leads
as well, again to engage with the fan base, to
open up new experiences and to activate people who may
not be as engaged at the moment but certainly can be.
And that helps with the sponsors for all of these
(07:20):
leads as well, and then branching into entertainment and general
consumer brands. So that is the heart of what we
have been able to achieve here. We have taken our
scaling protocol and we've been able to really leverage it
for these highly nuanced, compelling character personalities that form synthetic
(07:45):
relationships with users.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
And you've done an incredible work again for this wonderful company, Saga.
So the name of the website is Saga that xyz
very easy to remember. Saga again, Saga dot x y Z.
So how do you think AI will change our future?
(08:07):
In perhaps so the entertainment industry.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
AI has the promise to create a whole new category
of content. I think that's the revolution that we're looking at.
A lot of people in entertainment in gaming have been
highly concerned that AI is just going to replace human
(08:34):
talent in things that we already know. So in games,
in film, TV shows, in podcasts, in music, I mean
basically any form of content that is currently produced. People
have been fearful that AI is going to replace any
sort of human creativity there. I think that's completely overblown.
(08:56):
Anyone who has used AI tools knows that they are
just tools. They are extensions of productivity. There is no
way that AI can come up with original content the
way that humans can, and so I think the industries
are safe in terms of their value proposition. But I
(09:19):
think what AI really promises is that if you are
looking to bring something to life twenty four to seven,
for instance, with these character agents, if you are looking
to empower your fans or new users to create their
own content and then extend your brand, then AI can
uniquely let you do that. And so that's what I'm
(09:41):
looking forward to is really a new category of content
that was previously not possible before AI became widely available.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Indeed, and there is a beautiful change, and we love
to have pioneers such as yourself who are really enlightening
us about what AI is. I think it's a great
progress and we should all embrace it. And the way to
embrace this is definitely to follow your wonderful company Saga
that x y z is the website. The name of
(10:15):
the company is Saga Saga. And of course, if you
want to know more about Rebecca Leoo, once again, Rebecca
Leo l Iao. She has a great website Rebecca Leo
dot com and you can read about it, wonderful biography
and all the great things she has done. Before we
(10:35):
say goodbye to each other, what are your next projects
and what would you like to say to our audience.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Well, thanks so much for having me, David, it's been
fun to be with you. This is a big year
for us because we debuted our first character Agent a
couple of weeks ago. This is Willie from Trevia Krag.
Willy is the main character from the Trevia Crack game,
which has been downloaded by over eight hundred million people
the world. It is the world's number one trivia game
(11:03):
and Willy has been delighting fans everywhere ever since, ever
since he was born. So the next character, Agent's going
to come out very shortly, and then the cadence will continue.
We are working with some of the most iconic brands
that again would be recognizable to anyone in the world,
and we're very excited that people are finding these characters
(11:28):
highly engaging that oftentimes, especially when the agents are interacting
with users across social media, people forget that these character
agents are just characters. Sometimes they believe that they're actual people,
and that tells us that our training model is doing
the right thing. So we look forward to continuing to
(11:48):
improve our technology stack, for sure, but also again just
to open up these characters to fans everywhere and do
our part to usher in a new revolution in gaming
and entertainment. Year for us, a lot of announcements will
be coming out with agent releases and we can't wait
to share it with everyone.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
And we will be there with you to support you
and to applaud you.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Lady gentleman, my name is David, So we write the
pleasure to have to do on iHeart Redeo on the
Culture News the wonderful Rebecca Leo Leo spelled l I
A O Leo wonderful lady. She has a website Rebecca
Dao dot com in the name of her company.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Saga s A g A dot x.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Y Z is the website right now.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
More music to follow up on I Heart Redeo statue
with us. It's a beautiful day
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