Amir Bormand: [00:00:00] On this episode of the Day Track, I speak to Dennis Mortenson. He’s the c e o and founder of X AI bills and maintains an artificial intelligence powered personal assistant that schedules meetings for business customers. I think we covered a lot of topics, especially focused on entrepreneurship and his journey, what he has learned in terms of the process that works for him, the risks involved, and just the type of person you have to be to wanna go down the startup journey.
We touch. What x.ai is doing and how they are really changing the way we can work with AI and the way we think of AI in our daily lives. Hope you enjoy this episode.
Hey Dennis, thanks for being on the podcast. Thanks much for having me. Absolutely. So just to start off, I was hoping to see if we could have you do a little introduction to yourself and who you.
Dennis Mortensen: Ooh, yes. Do I have half an hour? Then I can do the grand backdrop of exactly how awesome my mom think I am.[00:01:00]
But the short version is certainly one for where I’ve spent the last now 24 years working startups, and this is my fifth venture expert ai. And we’ve been working on this for the last about five years, and it’s this idea that we certainly believe. This intelligent agent that can go schedule meetings on your behalf so you don’t have to one of those little chores that end up in your inbox that you certainly know how to do.
But if you could choose, you would rather be without that little chore. And if I were to create any theme across those five ventures that we’ve done, It would be that most of them would have some strong data backdrop where we figured out a source of data and how to potentially extract value from that.
Interesting. Or shorten the whole thing down to, I’m just a geek who likes to do tech in his spare time.
Amir Bormand: There you go. You love to start things from scratch. That’s a lot of, I looked at the LinkedIn background. You have gotten into a lot of [00:02:00] different aspects and startups and acquisitions.
Obviously lots of.
Dennis Mortensen: There’s something almost romantic, in my opinion, at least about that first, zero to 10 employees on any new venture for where you got no money, no customers, no revenue, nobody loves you. The whole thing is complete uphill. But that struggle, I do find some romance in that struggle. Cause if you can overcome it, it’s almost like sport for where you’re not supposed to win today, but somehow through good prep, you ended up winning the game anyway.
So I do find that rather romantic even though sometimes when you’re in it. Is perhaps not as romantic as when you think back off some 18 months you spent in some basement on some product with a little prospect. But we’ve been somewhat fortunate over the years to extract some value and some good exits out of those products.
Interesting.
Amir Bormand: So when you go back and you look at when you started Xdi ai. What was the original, the romantic [00:03:00] idea of why you would’ve started this particular venture? What was that frame of mind? So I don’t think
Dennis Mortensen: you, and this is of course all opinion, we all have our own processes and tactics for why and how we go start new things.
But I’m not so sure you should start things because you fall in love. I think you should start things because you’ve somehow stumbled into a pain that somehow you either. Can’t. Craft a future where you have to do this again and a thousand times over. So my little idea list is really just a list of hate for where I keep a list on my phone whenever I stumble into something, which I don’t like.
I added to my list. So it’s really just a very negative list or really just a young boy who isn’t very happy, who somehow got a piece of paper and a pen and just started writing. That is my list. And then once every blue moon, I’ll go back typically Postex exit [00:04:00] of some of our ventures and take a look at that list.
And module you’ll see is then four years of this angry boy just taking notes. And when we sold our last company back in 2013, I went back and took a long look at that list again, and what I found was that on not one or two occasions, but a dozen or so occasions, I’ve taken note of this. Why am I sitting at 11:00 PM in my underwear on a Thursday night trying to plan a meeting for next week Wednesday, one o’clock I.
I must somehow have better talents than having to do this. And sure, there’s all sorts of kind of solutions to that. Go spend 60 K of your money to hire some sort of assistant Tom, who can do it for you. But I was always kinda too entrepreneurial, too frugal to go hire somebody to do that for me. I said I’d much rather hire half an engineer.
And then I’ll just fucking do those meetings myself at 11:00 PM on a Thursday night. [00:05:00] So when I looked at that list, it just came back so often that I thought it was least worthy exploration to see whether it was just a nifty idea or something that could potentially be implemented. And then we brought the team back together first days of 2014 to do some of that explor.
When
Amir Bormand: you’re looking at, I’ve got that list, and you’re, and you’ve obviously curated couple years of pain of dealing with repetitive tasks and stuff, you just don’t wanna have to do yourself again. When it comes to looking at those two, three ideas that start percolating up, what’s the thought process in the trade offs of looking, one versus the other?
Dennis Mortensen: So I try. To call in a set of experts. So depending on the idea, you could typically assemble a handful of experts around that idea. Whether that be on the data science ends on the business, ends on some particular infrastructure challenge that you might think come attached to it. But certainly a set of experts and those experts.
And if I look at [00:06:00] my last venture, I invited six people over to New York for a full week. The only. Is to try to disprove the idea. Don’t come here and pat me on the back, as in I can very easily as an entrepreneur, fall in love, as in you and me. If we talk for another two hours, we can agree to do eventually this weekend.
As in I’m that entrepreneurial. So that is the easy part. The much harder part is to somehow tell me not to do it. So their job now is to tell me that here are all the obstacles, certainly as an expert that I see. If you don’t have a good. You’ll be crazy to start. And my job now is to make sure that when I go into that meeting, whether that be a week long or a weekend long, that I’m prepped to the degree where there’s nothing which they can say that can disprove it.
And if I can somehow survive that session. Then the idea survives whether we then do it. That comes on to that next set of kind of processes that you put in place to validate an idea. But that’s certainly [00:07:00] the bigger hurdle and plenty of ideas will die in that phase for where you fell in love.
You spend a month fall in love, even harder, and then upon four hours in the seven things you knew or thought you knew, were just disproved and at least you’re so lucky that you only spent you. A week or a month on it, not five years of your life. Absolutely.
Amir Bormand: And I’m curious cuz it sounds like that’s a pretty rigorous process and you’ve gone through this multiple times.
When you’re actually executing at the company day to day. Do you have a similar structure that you like, cuz obviously sounds like you do the romantic side of embracing the idea and running with it. Is there an internal structure around you now to that check and balance of making sure that even as the product’s launching, that you stay focus.
Dennis Mortensen: So I am not a fan of the pivot or this whole idea that a startup upon success is rarely what it was the day it [00:08:00] started, and to me that doesn’t ring true, as in a startup is not supposed to survive at all costs. I think the most natural outcome for any startup is that it goes, hits. And we should just accept that as a fact, and there should be no kind of negative thoughts attached to that.
Again, just like in sports, the way, if you win all your games, I’m not sure you’re in the right league, so you’re supposed to lose and probably lose often. That is how you gonna move upwards. And this idea of pivoting away from what you started on. Again, it doesn’t ring true to me, so I certainly like to make sure that whatever we started out with, as in what it was that we wanted to solve.
We continue trying to solve that perhaps to the degree where we can now conclude confidence that it cannot be solved and or hey, hell yeah, we solved it and now we can trying to extract a few monies from the [00:09:00] market with whatever solution we put in place, but not the idea of moving away from it.
So if there’s anything that I try to stick to day is that whole set of. Knows, right? That’s, we should not do this, not that. That’s not what we set out to do. Doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, it’s just not for us. So certainly when I speak to investors, new candidates, press, whoever wanna speak to me about what we do.
It is always one way. Ah, Dennis, tell me what you’re gonna do when you grow up. I said scheduling meetings. How important is that? Is that even a company and for us, that’s what we do. We schedule meetings no more, no less as in, I’d much rather be somewhat good potentially world class at one thing than halfass at seven things.
I haven’t really heard of anybody who won or being half good at seven things. I’ve heard about a few people who want on being really good at one thing, so I’d much rather take that.
Amir Bormand: Yeah. [00:10:00] Interesting. I’m gonna continue that. But one question to go back. So the other previous startups, was the process the same?
So I guess going back to the first startup, you hadn’t had an exit when you established that. Was the process the same in terms of bringing in and having that idea being challenged? Let me answer that
Dennis Mortensen: in two ways. One, there’s this. Peter Teal Silicon Valley idea that you only do a startup if you somehow stumble into something for where you simply can’t exist without you doing it.
And if not that, then don’t go about doing it. And entrepreneurship is not a career. It’s a calling and all sorts of things that will rhyme with that. I tend to disagree, actually. Do think. Entrepreneurship can be a career, and if anything probably should be a career. As in why is it that we accept, say, a VC fund with.
Some X amount of millions of dollars, go invest in 20 some art startups and [00:11:00] 16 of them should go belly up and two of them sideways, and you get one or two winners, which will suggest that of a pool of many startups where they supposedly pick the 20 better winners. They’re still only one or two winners.
If you and me then say, we only do one that seems like crazy talk, I. Who are we to believe that the very one that we pick the very first time will be a winner? That seems not right. So what we probably should do, if you want to use the BC analogy, is not run the four year horizon for where they go invest in 20 starters.
Cause we can’t do that as entrepreneurs. So we need to do them not in parallel, but in serial. So I’m running the 50 year fund where I can do 10 startups over 50 years. And if I do that, I should also accept that most of them probably won’t work out, but some of them will. And some of those who do go well will pay for the ones that didn’t go so well.
We just happened [00:12:00] to be so fortunate that some of our early startups did quite well, and we have a reasonably good connect adding average, I think you’ll call it here in the. Up until this point, but the idea is still honest, I think, which is that you should run this as a career over a long period of time.
Having said that, and then to answer your question, I think if you. Know everything. On your first startup, you’re probably a little bit naive, but if you do it five times over, you should also expect that you become slightly better from one venture to the next. Doesn’t mean that it is not risky on the fifth one, it is still extremely risky, but you certainly have.
Some education that you brought from one venture to the next that you can utilize and take advantage of. So whatever process I did back 24 years ago when we started our first venture, it was certainly not as rigorous. And perhaps we stumble around a little bit more than I would’ve liked if I could go back in time.
But I think that was just part of the the education and the idea that you [00:13:00] running this in as in a career. And I’m now halfway through. I’m good. I get gonna do another five and. I’ll talk to you when I’m 68. There you go.
Amir Bormand: Yeah, it’s funny I listened to some of Gary Vaynerchuk’s podcast and he has a very similar thesis on the macro being 50, 60 years and several careers within that Spain.
So it’s interesting how you are looking at it as the race is not a two to four year window, it’s a 50, and you might have multiple startups and within that phase, you might have the successes and expectations. Our failures will, our learning pin.
Dennis Mortensen: And I think some people will find it hard to mentally sign up for some idea of this being a 50 year journey, because that sounds beyond scary as in almost some sort experience of drowning for where I just can’t think 50 years into the future.
I can barely think 18 months into my future and what my kind of career will look like. But then again, if you ask people if they spent the last seven years [00:14:00] becoming an architect, Can you see a life for where you work in or around architecture and then at some point call it quits. The only thing that will challenge on that is the calling it quits that says, I can see myself spend a life around that.
It might not be the same thing, but I can see myself spend a life around that. And I think if you can perhaps reframe it, I can certainly see. I was never really scared to kinda see a life around entrepreneurship. Not one for where you need to sit in this basin for 50 years working on this one particular code base That sounds perhaps scary slash sad, but a life around entrepreneurship sounds awesome, like a life well lived.
Amir Bormand: So you’re a serial entrepreneur, you’ve got a very interesting view of the journey. I think being in love with the journey, the process more than anything else. And obviously you’ve had a lot of successes, but the driver. For some it’s fear, and I think it goes in a [00:15:00] counterbalance of being an entrepreneur.
You can ha be fearful of being an entrepreneur because you’re not going to optimally make that risk, that assessment to take advantage of opportunity as your personal self because of your entrepreneurial viewpoint. Are you risk averse or are you somebody that just views risk as a part of just any decisioning process?
Dennis Mortensen: I’m certainly not risk adverse, and I don’t think you can be an entrepreneur if you are risk averse. It doesn’t mean that you should take unnecessary risk or silly risk. Those are just poor decisions. But I don’t think, and perhaps if you just take a step back, and you have certainly seen this, I’m sure that some people will attach their life’s worth to the success of their company, as in if the company is killing it.
They are not just happy, but ecstatic, but if the company is doing the opposites, they’re not sad, they are depressed, and neither those two I think are [00:16:00] right. Again, I think it’s wonderful where you should really enjoy it, as in. If you were a professional footballer, I think you should just really like the idea of you playing football if you like just playing football, whether you are training or playing on Saturday.
Hey, this is all part of me just living a good life. Somehow I ended up doing exactly what I wanted to do, and if you asked me, I wanted to be a tech entrepreneur, and all I wanna do is just play the game. Doesn’t mean that the game is without risk or I don’t understand that losing comes along with this particular game of course it does, but that shouldn’t frighten you.
That should just be a learning experience. If anything else, just don’t make silly choices along the way for where. You put up the house as collateral when not necessary, or whatever other silly decision you can make along the way that makes it way more difficult to do the next venture? Yeah, I think that’s
Amir Bormand: what happens a lot of times.
I think people innately, we try to avoid [00:17:00] risk. That’s, I think, our human nature. I think there’s some that can see through the risk and still see the right decision. And then it depends how much you’re leveraging yourself to attain your goal and. It’s the undue pressures that you can’t quite cope with that tax bill comes due and you’re not making the right decisions for the macro of whatever thesis you’re working on.
I agree
Dennis Mortensen: on that, but I also think this is something that you can go train on for where if you are slightly uncomfortable in. Whatever setting is necessary in some entrepreneurial backdrop, you can go train on that. If somehow you are just a little bit uncomfortable in calling customers and you think that the venture is somehow hinging on you being able to speak to these customers, once you call the first 100, you are not as uncomfortable as when you call the first.
And that is a muscle that you can [00:18:00] train like any other thing. Then there’s certain things for where that might just be a requirement to be an entrepreneur. So as you walk into this career, you should probably just accept the fact that is a skill I need to have. And if you are a professional footballer, there’s certain skills for wherever you’re on the field, whether a forge or a defender.
You need certain skills and there’s no cheating on those skills, so you should just start trending those even ahead of you doing your first venture. And we can pick any number of the first 10 things that are necessary. So you can certainly not run a venture without having some form of sales skill, and you might not be the salesperson.
I got a CS degree. But you not sell. If you wanna do a venture, you need to sell your co-founder, sell your family, sell your first customer, sell the first candidate. Sell the trust. You need to sell everybody all the time. And if you are uncomfortable in selling them [00:19:00] your story, then it might not be the right career for you.
If you know that is necessary and you want to be good at it, hey. Now figure out how you can best train against that so that it becomes way less uncomfortable come tomorrow and the day after.
Amir Bormand: Interesting. So you mentioned being good at one thing and, meetings and actually on a side when we were scheduling conversation and talk, I know the AI assistant, Amy, I mentioned to you responded and I, it took me a little bit of time to comprehend that it wasn’t a real person, it was a virtual assistant.
So when you were doing one thing, you’re doing it well. And X AI’s apparently a fantastic product for booking meetings. I’ve experienced it first. When you’re talking to investors and potential employees, how do you phrase, we’re going to do meetings really well. Like how do you pose that to somebody for them to realize that there’s such a broad market for such a narrow AI focus?
Dennis Mortensen: It’s actually a very good question, for where I’m sure [00:20:00] that anybody listening to this. If they’re also engineers or just in or around engineers, selling them on the idea that they should come work at a company for where we do meeting scheduling for a living is really an uphill battle, as in the last thing they wanna do is sit in yet another meeting.
Dennis, bugger off. As in, I’m not working on that. I hate it. And if I can get that emotion and that comes often easily. Then I think without them immediately knowing it, they’re hooked. I said, yeah, you got it. I fucking hated it as well. That’s why we are here. There might just be this opening in time for where if somebody comes along crazy enough to say, I’m gonna sit in that basement for five years, then this show might just disappear.
Just like that. What’s the time for where if I needed to sign a contract? I would sign something on a printed piece of [00:21:00] paper, fax it over to you, you would sign it and fax it back. That just disappeared. I said that was another little chore for an easy walk up the hall and find a fax machine. But over kind of half a decade we blinked and nobody barely knows what that was like as in, even as I say it out loud now that sounds like Denise’s.
That was decades ago. No, it was not. That’s six, seven years ago. This might just be the same for. Two days ago when you replied back to that email saying, I can do next Wednesday at one. If not that, we can do three. Can you come by my office? That email might just disappear. You and me can make that happen.
And if there’s anything, me included that really get people hooked off, get all of us. If there’s some sort of glory attached to what we do, whether that be winning the game or making how small a dent in the universe, but as in some glory attached to [00:22:00] it. And I think what we have here is at least the opportunity, the most likely outcome is that next time we speak, we died.
And that’s fine, but there’s certainly some opportunity here that, Hey, you know what? I did speak to Dennis. Four years ago now, somehow the world changed. This whole idea of doing email ping pong just disappeared. Of course it did. And as I’m sure you can imagine here, there’s some really strong network effects to what we do for where there’s probably some sort of very slow start and at some inflection point.
There’ll be an explosion. I would like to be on the winning side of that explosion, but that’s not the point. The point is that as I CC’d in Amy for this particular meeting, I said, you know what? I’m up for a chat. I ceased in Amy, so you can put something on my calendar for half an hour. Come next week, so and so forth, whatever.
I said, we can go back and have a look and you received an email. Your response should have been Oh, awesome. I’ve ceased it in Andrew on my end. He can hash it out with Amy, but if [00:23:00] Andrew is Amy, Who the hell is she talking to? She’s talking to herself. It becomes instant. And you don’t mean never need to do anything, but just agree.
We want to talk and then we can start to say things like, Amy, can you get me and the product design team together early next week for half an hour over Skype as I click send blink, blink. Oh, next Tuesday, three 30, and here’s the Skype detail. That is fucking sexy. I said, that is the world we want to live in.
So that coming back full circle is what I think sometimes have people say, Dennis, I’m up for that. I actually like the dramatic focus applied here. If anything, I dislike the kinda. Six sagging we are doing at my current company for where we’re kinda all over the place and doing a few things here and there and it’s not bad, but it’s not great either.
This though, I can die on [00:24:00] this sword, but I can tell people whatever sort I died on, not just I did some engineering for a couple years. It didn’t work out. No. I tried to solve this problem. We were heroes. We didn’t survive though, but we.
Amir Bormand: It’s interesting just as you were mentioning, having Amy and Andrew and they’re just figuring it out.
And I just wanna, I was just thinking, so the application, via email was very seamless. Do you see the application tapping into Siri or hey Google or an Alexa so that it’s literally you just speaking in your office, Hey, can the product and the engineering teams that next week sometime, can we schedule that?
Is that the future of how X AI can really help? So I think we might
Dennis Mortensen: be able to categorize the upcoming agents into two buckets. There’ll be some set of Horizonal, ais, the Alexis, the Katanas, the Bixby, Google Assistant, and the one from Apple, which is right next to me. So I’m not gonna say the name, and [00:25:00] they will be able to, you.
Answer questions or take any requests for where there’s some immediate action like, Hey assistant, can you set my alarm for tomorrow morning, 6:20 AM please, and I’ll be able to set that alarm. But those are a thin layer of instructions. Then you’ll, I think it’s likely to see this kind vertical ais that.
Hyper specialized and only able to do one thing or do that one thing extremely well. And it can take in not just instructions with kind of direct outputs, but objectives like you and me wanna meet up for an hour at my office when you are in Manhattan, first week of January. I said there’s multiple true outcomes to that, but you and me have already agreed what we want.
Then the agent just need to figure out how to kinda solve for that. And that I think is. Likely to happen. I’ll like us to be one of them as we are in the kind of meeting scheduling space. But there’ll be 10,000 other [00:26:00] highly specialized vertical AI right next to us. Doing your receipts, doing your travels, submitting simple tax forms and so on and so forth.
But I certainly don’t imagine some sort of all-knowing AI from Google that comes out tomorrow in some sort of moment where anything, which I can imagine, whatever job I want done, it’ll be able to do that job. That doesn’t sound realistic to me. I think it’s gonna be this combination, almost like the app store.
But of kind of specialized agents now to then answer your question, then I think it’ll be some sort of relationship where you should think of these verticalized ais as opposed having somebody on payroll just not at a hundred k a year, but at $8 a month. And in that regard, we’ll be able to say things like, Hey, Alexa.
Could you have Amy reach out to Tom and John to get something in the calendar for end of next week for an hour? Suggest the new UX designs. That means Alexa now needs to know I cannot [00:27:00] do this, but I also know we’ve got somebody on payroll called Amy. Let me package this request. Reach out to Amy, give her the job.
She’ll then reach out and try to solve that job either instantly if she works for all of them, or reach out and do it over. On average 1.9 day because guests are tardy and upon solving it, pack and Sta and go back to Alexa and say, Hey, remember that thing you asked me about on Monday? I solved that. You can go back to your boss and say so, and that suggests that you as an employee will probably end up becoming an instant manager.
Write out college. You don’t have any human employees who have kind of seven AI employees that you need to figure out how to hire, train, and employ well. And upon moving to another kind of workplace, you’ll take them with you as some sort of reference of who you are, how you work, why they should employ you.
Amir Bormand: It makes sense. As is, as in the concept of the narrow ai, I think, the broad, all-knowing AI that was on sci-fi, 10, 20, 30 years ago seems very difficult to [00:28:00] ta. But having a framework where there’s a structure around allowing you to access these narrow ai, agents in assembling your own assistance sounds like it’s a much more feasible, I know in the legal field, similar things are happening, and from that stand, I think it sounds like you’re executing on a very, again, your premise of be good at one particular thing, the adoption of the one particular thing.
I know you guys integrate, you mentioned handling the sales aspect. Does it matter the application of x.ai? Like I know right now it’s focused on a couple of different areas, but in terms of what you’ve built in the core technology, is this something that, as long as there’s something that could be a meeting and I’m heading down the path of, my wife uses, the Apple Assistant to schedule tons of stuff and then when she wants to coordinate with me, just person, Very complex, like we have to go back and forth to find the time that works.
Is your product able to head into the personal space as well? One day? I think so.
Dennis Mortensen: I believe a good analogy perhaps would be that of Dropbox [00:29:00] 10 years ago. So at some point it seemed extremely natural and sane to save all your files on your laptop, say you just pay for it. And those 128 gigabytes the mine.
And then over the next kind of decade, it became completely insane if you saved any files on your laptop. And if you do that at any moment in. You should really be rethinking how you manage your files. Cause they’re all now in the cloud. And most of that at least initially started out with people needing to share big ass files.
And there were certainly some verticals that were gravitate towards that faster than others. And they propelled into the organizations. And then it became normal just for the account manager to share a symbol kind of word doc that he could have emailed, but. You know what? I don’t like the idea.
It has seven versions in my inbox, so I’m gonna share one file instead. And then over time it became normal for you and me. It’s gonna have our family pictures [00:30:00] somewhere in the cloud and not on a sip drive, right? So I do think there’ll be some sort of trajectory for where we certainly see ourselves do well within the enterprise and within companies.
So just really with any type of knowledge. And I do imagine then at some point, and we even see this today, it’ll just spill into the outside workplace as well. And we have students and professors and mommy groups and what have you. Also using Amy. But it’s certainly. I would say the vast majority, we use it for very traditional business meetings.
Interesting. I need to do a product demo. I need to do a recruitment call. I need to do a kind of check-in. I need to do a support call. Any number of those things that just happens to kinda run any type of company. That’s what we fit really well. That’s certain what we designed it for, to begin with.
But we do see also as a footnote that most people actually connect two calendars. They connect their business calendar. [00:31:00] Because that’s how I do my work. But they also connect their personal calendar once every kind of four weeks. There’s that PTA meeting at the school I like, it’s gonna be the good dad.
So I do add that to my personal calendar, but rather Amy to not book on top of that. But I don’t wanna put that on my business calendar, but I want her to be aware of it. So she’ll go look at two calendars so that we certainly see, and that’s perhaps that first initial kind of.
Amir Bormand: Yeah, I think I mentioned to you before we started recording that I’m super eager to see how we can integrate this in our process.
I know I reached out right before the holidays. I’ve been thinking about it cuz as a recruiting company we do a lot of scheduling, coordination. We use Calendly, HubSpot, whatever meetings to set. But I just think the back and forth with our clients who do share calendars with us has ads.
10% minimum overhead to our personal week. And I think this would be a great, solution for us personally.
Dennis Mortensen: Bias a alert. So this is where I think we are certainly unique. So we provide all of the kind of usual meeting types [00:32:00] where you can have a meeting type called screening and it’ll have some kind of constraints attached to it.
You do it these days, these times, this duration, that zoom link and so on and so forth. And that’s all good and fine. And you probably set up the same in. Apps that you just mentioned, but there’s many times, and in particularly in recruiting for where there’s a different taste for how eager you are to close something with a particular candidate.
And sometimes you’ll have the upper hand and sometimes, you know what you won’t have the upper hand. And it’s the same with me for where if I wanna go meet some investor at some moment in time for where we are raising some capital, I accept the fact that I don’t have the upper hand. So you wanna be able to.
Instant constraints for this particular person. And I’ll say things like, Hey, Amy, set up a meeting with Jaws from SoftBank at sometime next week between 8:00 AM and 9:00 PM we’ll meet at his office. That’s not really a meeting type I do often, but for him at this [00:33:00] moment, what I want is complete flexibility.
Me going to his office, max hours available, he can then decide. Not to do the meeting at 9:00 PM if he doesn’t want to, but I’m certainly available, but I’m not giving that to everybody cause I don’t wanna hang around the office until 10:00 PM every day. So that I actually do and I think the ability to is slightly more personal.
And again, this meeting was very similar for where. I think we somehow agreed to do it this week and not last week. And I posted to it this week by saying even though had you looked at my calendar, I’m sure you could have squeezed in kind of 45 minutes somewhere, but I didn’t want that. So I said, Hey, do something next week and then she’ll package that.
So that’s certainly where I think we are unique. Fire
Amir Bormand: alert over. Yeah no, a hundred percent. Cuz I was you said next week and all of a sudden your whole calendar just changed and shifted to availability for next week. And I thought that was really interesting cuz a lot of the dialogue we have with.
Clients are candidates is I can meet today, it’s next week. I have, two hours free this [00:34:00] day. And then you’re, you doing the calendar hunt and trying to find the slot that works for them most of the time. So I think the fact that the product’s smart enough to, just instantly figure that out.
That’s just ridiculous that we’re doing it manually. I think now I’m starting to realize.
Dennis Mortensen: Yeah, and here’s the funny thing. Many people see an agent like Aim, and Andrew as certainly agents will help you put things on your calendar, and that’s what we built them to do. And if you’re in sales or recruiting or account management and customer success and 17 other kind of verticals, that’s all good and fine if you’re a hardcore backend infrastructure engineer.
The last thing you want, as we talked about, is a meeting on your calendar. You should probably of all people then go employ. Amen. Andrew. If you really dislike meetings, then you need an assistant, if anything. The very people who are so lucky to win the corporate lottery and get human assistance, they actually don’t use their human assistance to get shit on their calendar.
They use it to [00:35:00] protect their calendar. Cause my time is valuable. So if you ask that backend infrastructure engineer really would like to keep. Open space to get work done. Why don’t you hire Amy and Andrew somehow set it up so that you only do meetings on Wednesday and Thursday and you only do it after 11.
So whenever you CC and Amy, nobody can steal any time in the calendar that you’re not comfortable with. And all of a sudden it becomes not a more shit on my calendar agent, but a protect. That will make sure that you get the maker time that you deserve. So I think that’s actually the reverse picture as well.
Amir Bormand: Yeah, actually it’d be interesting, I think sometimes when I hear candidates are interviewing, I think I’d like to tell them maybe you should sign up for X AI and schedule your interviews and know when you’re available and let the product handle it for you. Sounds brilliant.
Dennis Mortensen: So we see this with Tim, with strong talent all the time for where they many times, [00:36:00] Senior, got the other hand, a comfortable not hunting for the next paycheck and for them, I have some specific hours I’m willing to kinda dedicate to this idea of me potentially go working somewhere else.
If you can work within that, I’ll be happy to do it yet, but it’s within these constraints and then perhaps something comes along where they wanna open it up a little bit, then they go do that. Interesting. We do have this lust though, and easy ability. You’re gonna. If you’ll meet often, like every two week we are roped into some project we need to speak.
Could even be a recruiter candidate relationship signing up so you’re both on. It will make sure that neither of you would have to speak to Amy, but only the availability of the hiring company needs to be kinda extracted. So we tend to see people who meet often for whatever the reason typically cause they’re on the same project.
They both sign up pairs because then, okay, least we have this agent who will [00:37:00] forever know when we have overlaps. Then we can go hunt for the other one. I
Amir Bormand: think the use cases are, I think protecting the calendar. You mentioned the assistant, that’s the main job. And I think that’s actually interesting use case because from my mind I was thinking, oh, it’s gonna help me because I if it’s a candidate who mentioned is as comfortable as passive, they have to leverage in the relationship.
But I think on the flip side, I do get a lot of candidates, the book time through these, different booking meetings and they’re not at the opportune times and I know there’s some flexibility they want, but I think having a protection over not just blocking the calendar off. The two hours on my calendar for everyone is difficult because it arbitrarily has blocked, 10 to noon off for every human.
But if it’s 10 to noon except for maybe these particular people, then I think that’d be very powerful to protect myself while still, giving myself flexibility.
Dennis Mortensen: Now full on sales mode. I’m so sorry. I like it. We have this concept called VIPs for where you and me have a number of people for where they have probably.[00:38:00]
Same amount of right to book things on our calendar as we do say let’s pick somebody dramatic, say my wife. She could pick any time on my calendar as any reason. Yes. And make sure that I turn up right. And you probably have something similar for if somebody pays you $15,000 a month to sit here and do some work.
They could probably suggest that we meet up tomorrow at four. So there should be this. They can just email Amy and say, Hey. Can you get me and Tom together tomorrow afternoon please? And it needs no verification from your end. Cause you have already designated them as VIPs, your boss, your wife, the two kind of major customers, and even just tell your customers that I told my assistant that you are VIP and you can email them at 3:00 AM She’ll help get something on the calendar.
I don’t need to approve it. That’s an kinda, I think, interesting feature that again, carries over this idea that it’s somewhat similar to have hired. You’re just paying either dollar zero or a few bucks for
Amir Bormand: it. Yeah, it’s a fascinating [00:39:00] product. I think the use cases, I think while the technology’s narrow, like it does one thing really well.
It’s very interesting how, you’ve obviously the product is well bought out. Like the concept of the v i p cuz scheduling as I mentioned with my wife is always difficult with work cuz she can’t see my work calendar and it’s always a texting game back and forth. And this would be interesting cuz then she can literally book anything she wants and I don’t have to worry about that back and forth.
You should. Yeah, I will. Like I said, I we’re, on the side. Now, I like the product. We’re gonna definitely test it out. I know you’re busy. I know you’ve got a constraint. I’m gonna wrap it up. Thank you for being on, I think fascinating your journey and views on entrepreneurship, but I think the product itself is really just a great application of what AI can do.
If it’s doing one thing and it’s doing it well. And again,
Dennis Mortensen: be fully aware that there’s some sort of bias attached to this. But forget about whether you wanna become one of our users. I certainly think of all of the solutions out there. If you wanna fool around with AI just a little bit to get some exposure outside of what you can read in Wire [00:40:00] Magazine, go sign up.
It’s free forever for extra. Try to send in a couple of kind of meeting requests just to kinda get a feel for, so how is it and how does it feel when I write this machine agent and what were some of my worries or anxieties? Cause that I think will make you finally stronger in that kind of next conversation at work or elsewhere when people talk about ai because this is something you can actually touch.
So we read about this all the time. A lot of it, we can’t really touch this. You can, and then if I’m lucky you fall in love, but the point is really just, it’s an easy, cheap way to kinda test the AI in December,
Amir Bormand: 2019. Yeah and it’s interesting to that, Dennis is, I think I was speaking to somebody else about the applications AI and it’s getting AI implemented at a cost that everyone can adopt is really the end goal versus the high, pie in the sky concepts of what AI might do three to five years from now in exorbitant.
Dennis Mortensen: I also want that self-driving car. Yes. [00:41:00] I also find it extremely sexy. I also read those articles every week. It somewhat seems that it’s gonna come out next year, but they said that 10 years ago, and I’ll say it next year as well. I don’t think we should stop chasing it, but we still need. I think to try to take advances of whatever’s possible today.
And I think this is one of those applications. There’s many others as well, but this is only one of them and that I find interesting outside of my
Amir Bormand: office bias here. Absolutely. I do the use case of it and I think it’s a very interesting product and like I mentioned, I’ve definitely go signed up to try it out.
I appreciate it. Thank you for your. Time. Well done.
Dennis Mortensen: Absolutely. Thanks, mark. Cheers. Cheers.