Dennis Mortensen, CEO of X.AI | Analytics, Data, Failure, Success

Thank you for joining me on the success story podcast where we speak with incredible leaders mentors who have achieved successful trials, tribulations, wins and losses. Today I am sitting down with Dennis Mortensen who is the CEO and founder of x.ai. Now I'm going to let Dennis tell his story but to give you a Cole's notes, Dennis is an expert at data and delivering data through business insights, he's a serial entrepreneur, he's successfully exited several companies before founding x.ai and AI in 2014, along with two of us other co-founders, Matt Casey and Marcos Belanger, Dennis is solving a problem with x.ai meeting scheduling which I've used the platform myself, I like it a lot and from 30,000 feet it may not, you may not understand why you have to solve for meeting scheduling but I can tell you firsthand with the amount of hours and stress and back and forth that there is a problem in the meeting scheduling space which a lot of business people, sales people have to deal with. So a couple more things about Dennis, he's a recognized leader, author, he is an adjunct professor for the University of British Columbia, west in Canada, so I recognize the university out there, he's the author of data-driven insights and he frequently speaks on analytics and data, he's a native of Denmark but he's currently in New York, so Dennis, give me a summary of your background where you came from and how you got to x.ai. Sure and thanks so much for having me here, how did I end up here, I could also kind of give you the number for my mom and she will give you the four hour version and it will be fantastic, I promise you, but let's see if I cannot give you the more compressed, less flattering version, so I took a CS degree some 23 years ago and immediately decided that I would not ever want to be an entrepreneur because my dad, my uncles, my cousins, all were entrepreneurs in one way, shape or form and I've seen the amount of effort that needs to go into that hours coming home late, working six days a week, falling asleep at the front of the tele, not eating dinner with your kids, those are kind of the bad things, I didn't immediately see the positive things, so all I wanted was really just to get my CS degree and go work 5 PM, I hadn't even called them but in my mind I would just get my certificate, take my bicycle, go outside and say hey, so where's my desk, I'm ready, let's do this. Funny beginning though was that I did game development to kind of fund my studies and the last title that we worked on, we've worked on probably for a year and a half and certainly the way you pay most students is undelivery because they're super bloody flaky, so let me see something then I give you some money, they'll be the exchange but the company went bankrupt and in my disappointment, business, I ended up acquiring the assets of that company and that sounds like something major but this was at a time for where most lawyers didn't understand much if anything about software, all they wanted to sell me was chairs, tables, leases, cars, what have you, all I wanted to buy was two CDs and they just didn't get it so I bought it for next to nothing, the company came back, had it refinanced, wanted to figure out that one of the engineers had bought all the software assets, so I sold that, surely thereafter and made what I thought at that moment was a fortune, in hindsight not really but at that moment, certainly if you're kind of right out of school and you get a little bit of money in your right pocket, you're winning, that was not enough for me to kind of decide that that will be the beginning of my entrepreneurial life, no what I wanted to do was take that money, put it on red, play the night out, lose it all and go work at IBM, so I started a internet analytics type company in June of 96, if you want to be part of the internet revolution, you should probably start it in June 96, so I did that and we ran that up without any funding, so entirely owned to an exit in April 2000, if you ever want to sell a company in the .com boom, you want to sell it in April 2000, so timing was just fantastic and that gave me a lot of additional money in my left pocket and that was probably the beginning for where I guess I'm an entrepreneur now, and we did then multiple ventures after that, and the one, this is my fifth venture, the third one we actually did out of Budapest ended up being acquired by Yahoo and some of the acquisition terms were that I moved to New York and I arrived here 11 years ago and that's how I ended up in New York, then we did a predictive analytics venture for three years that got acquired by Outbrain and then brought the team back in 2014 and kind of off to the races again, and if anything, I just like playing the game, so the whole idea of just being an entrepreneur, I am so long on that idea that I'm probably just going to run this to the end, sit at 65, still be pitching you on some idea that I'm working on, that we had to get the last weekend, so that's my short story. I love it, you know, I think that you I think that you're describing what a lot of entrepreneurs describe because from the outside, they look absolutely, you know, batshit crazy, but it's not, it's a love of the game, it's a love of understanding how to play the game of, listen, we're in 2020 and people are realizing that jobs are not secure, that working for big companies are not secure, obviously nobody expected this, but you know, the traditional work for somebody, work for an IBM, we're for business machine, like the the place to go work, it's not it's not the safe option anymore and people don't spend 30 years in a career, so you know, I think that the takeaways go go try something, go try something. And I think that's at least that from me and it sounds like I'm on commission from some organization, I'm not, but there's this need for me to tell people to at least go try the ones, it might not be for you, you might actually dislike the initial chaotic setting and what I see as romantic, you see as frightening and for every kind of step forward, what I really end up liking and falling in love with just gives you anxiety, but I still suggest you go out and try it, even if you lose, as in you spend 18 months trying to bring something to life that just didn't survive, it was still born, that's okay, that is probably the cheapest, most valuable MBA you can go acquire, as in you can go spend that 200K up at Columbia and I'm not saying you're gonna come out dumber, but if you really want to come out smarter, I suggest you do the two years on some startup idea because that is just knowledge that is very hard to acquire elsewhere, almost impossible, so that's certainly one bullet, I think the other bullet is, if it is for you, when you do lose that first startup, which must be the assumption, as in almost every startup will have a super optimistic beginning and a very sad ending, that is how most of them are defined and that is okay, you just need to at least assume it won't go well, but then you should imagine, not a single venture, but probably a lifelong career as an entrepreneur for where you can do 10, 12 in-reaching ventures, only two or three of them need to kind of work half okay, it's gonna pay for the remainder of them, so that's a lifelong entrepreneurial career, or as I tend to call it, it's the 50-year fund, so most ECs will run a four-year fund, you can't do all of them at the same time, you have to do them over 50 years, I'm 23 years in, on my fifth venture, am I got five more in me, perhaps? Yeah, well listen, I think the biggest thing that you mentioned that's important to remember or take away is you're gonna fail a lot, and if you can get over that hump, then you're just onto the next one, onto the next one, onto the next one, and you learn every time, and that's why you're here, I don't want to hijack this, but Zuckerberg and whatnot, and he's like how many things he'd try before Facebook, and I'm sure all the other apps that you can name he used on a day-to-day, they've all tried and failed many, many things before they become successful. And I know it's easy to say, but you certainly see plenty of people, and you must have friends who work at Margaret Stanley, and finally assemble the courage to quit their job, go do that thing that they've dreamt of doing for years, and failed on it, but they sometimes attach their life's worth to the success of their company, which is completely unfair, and those two got nothing to do with each other, so your life's worth, I said, you're just a nice guy, whether you're making 40k minus 300k or 800k a year on your newly established venture, you're still a cool guy, so somehow, which is why I tend to, not out of disrespect, speak of startup as a game, just like any professional football, if you want to really become good at your craft or any other sports that you go watch, you must just assume that you play a lot of games, and you lose many of them, but the reason you had this particular level is that you were willing to lose along the way, so your life's worth is not this particular venture, it's just how you play the game, and if you assemble a little bit of knowledge along the way, you'll probably smash on the next one, and that's how you become a pro, but not one for where, sadly, some end up with, not a full-on depression, but just a sad set of months, if not years in life for where I hated the last eight months, I had a difficult time in assembling, again, the courage to go back out into life and tell people who I am, given I told everybody up until this point that I was an entrepreneur, and now I have to tell them that, well, it didn't work, so I have, this is my fifth venture, one of them didn't work, I proudly put it on my CV, and I proudly speak of all the mistakes, why I think we failed, and hell, I might even still pitch it, I said, hey, I think we could have made it work, had we done this, but it's not something I would want to hide, it's really not a part of my life that I want to be without, but how do you, and why do you think that is, why do you think that, like, how do you get over that, because I know, actually, I know why it is, the silly question, it's tough, innately, to accept that you're bad at something, but how do you get over it, how did you get over it, because I think that's a lesson people can definitely learn from. I wish I had some magical process, if you just weren't about applying that, then you would escape this depressive moment that might come along with not winning, I do think, and it's the best thing that I've come up with, and I know I'm repeating myself, that if you try to at least not attach yourself to the success of the company and think of it as really just a game, it sounds extremely disrespectful, if you raised any amount of money, $100,000 from a pool of friends and family, or millions of dollars from institutional investors, it's probably the same emotion that comes attached to any one of those pools, you should still make both yourself and them aware of the fact that I'm taking this very serious, it's silly game though, for we all agree, I'm probably going to lose, all the odds are against us, but we know that, otherwise it wouldn't be a start up to begin with, it would be a going concern, and you're wanting me to sell whatever wedges we can buy for $10 or we can sell for $13, so we know we're going to lose, and at least making sure that all your constituents are equally aware of where this will end, if we then escape it, we should all be ecstatic, that's just not what we expected, we expected that the next 18 months, 24 months will be an unfair amount of work, and from the end of it we'll have nothing to show for it, but you know what, it'll be an amazing story, if we do, you want something, otherwise where else would you think you get hundreds of percent of return, if you want something else? Well, I think Citibank is doing 0.2 percent at the moment, you should put your money there. It's true, and I think that I think that a lot of entrepreneurs, they go in and they get money, and I think they may be intimidating, especially for first time entrepreneurs, but you have to align with the right money, you have to have smart money, you have to have a partner that's going to invest, it's going to provide value, and you have to have a partner that is putting money into 100 ventures knowing that only one's going to be successful, and if you have the right partner, then it's not so stressful anymore, but they have to, the venture has an owner to educate entrepreneurs too. I think you're right, and yes, he picked up on a point for where you can add unnecessary stress to the equation yourself, if on your very first venture, your first 40K is your parent savings, all of their savings, not one out of many investments that they will make, this is their only investment, that is not healthy, so you should try at least to find people where you know I'm one out of many, and they have a portfolio, and in that portfolio, there'll be a lot of bodies, and it'll be okay, because there'll be a few winners, it'll pay for the rest, and I can still come back, be in his next portfolio, so in that regard, try at least to design it in such a way that you aren't adding unnecessary stress to yourself. I agree with that a lot, okay, so question before we go into x.ai, why multiple analytics companies? Analytics seems very dry from my point of view, so what makes somebody have a passion for data? I think there was an article in the economist at some point many years back that was titled, data is the new oral, and I think that headline sounds perhaps a little dated at this very moment in time, but there are some truth attached to it, that if you have a reasonably good understanding of where data might originate, how you can tap into it, how you can extract it, and how you can then refine it to the extent where some people will see value. That is a skill, and like any other skill, if you continue to kind of perfect it, you're perhaps even good at it, help perhaps even world class, if that's what you spend your life on. I do think sometimes a little bit of serendipity is attached to where we end, and I'm not suggesting I woke up last year of college thinking I should be the data barren of the 20th century. It was just one for where our first venture, we saw plenty of people running websites without having any idea of how they failed, and at that point nobody could slap a set of Google Analytics pixels on a website, they just had raw web server log files, and we would mind those, and we stumbled into that perhaps a little bit, but then once you go into the mines, and you work there a little bit, that becomes your identity, and you learn something, and then you learn a little bit more, and all of a sudden you start to see things that other people can't see, just like you can see things I can't see, because you have an expertise that I don't have, so you can kind of look out the window and see things, or be at a meeting and have people say one thing, and hear something else. I'll just hear what they say, but you heard something else, and that particular vision I think is interesting once you start to get it in whatever particular attack angle you add, and for me, it ended up being data, and then the next one you figure out, where else can I go drill for some data, and if you think about x.ai, even though we're in the meeting scheduling space, we're still really one big data science bit, like anything else, and we can kind of go into detail on why that is, but that's only been the root of any one of our adventures, and I imagine that there'll be the root of any future adventures that we might do. To look that level deeper than the average person, that's where they find the pain point, or that's where they solve the problem, and then that's how they become successful. That's why you see all these people that have been in a career, the most successful entrepreneurs are the highest rate of repeated success, or they're in a career, they know their industry, then they go and branch out and they build a company, after mid 30s to 40s, whatever, not the Stanford MIT grads, that's the rarity, it's usually the ones that are much older, right? That is funny, and there's been multiple studies, so if you ask anybody who's not in this particular ecosystem to draw and then to pronounce, it would be that 22-year-old dude from Stanford with a hoodie, and that will be what they would turn in for that assignment. In real life though, it is exactly what you describe. It's people who spend around typically a decade or longer, and at some point feel like they have the expertise needed to go do something, and those that turn out the most successful outcomes are people of our age. It might not sound as sexy, but that is where success starts to arrive, and that should, I think, provide a lot of people, a lot of comfort for where I think the curve I looked at last, and I'm sure there's a lot of elasticity attached to that, suggested 42, I'm 47, so that might suggest I'm on the other side of that curve, but there'll certainly be a lot of people before 42 thinking, well, that means I'm not even at my peak yet, even though you and me don't fall into, and it's all about the individual, the team, the execution, the idea, the market, the timing, but still there's something when you take a step back and look at that curve, let's suggest it's obviously not too late, and I think a lot of people who have this is too late, and sometimes the too late is really not on them being able to do it, it's all of the commitments they signed up for, come 42, like kids and family and cats, apartments, all the things in the background, yeah, so okay, so let's let's talk about x.ai, so first what is it, what does it do, and then let's talk about why you're doing it? Sure, so x.ai is a SaaS solution that helps you schedule your next meeting, so anybody really in any function will be asked to either get into a meeting later this week, get a meeting on the calendar for next week, and some will certainly do more than others, so if you're an SDR and you really just qualified leads for your account executive, you might actually have 12 calls on the calendar every day, if you're a PM, you might have two or three with some design teams around the organization, every day, if you're a backend infrastructure engineer, you might have two a week, but we all, if we turn up at an office and touch a computer, have some meetings on our calendar, the vast majority, if not almost all of those we see on people's calendars today, and in the US, you'll have short of 90 million knowledge workers will be scheduled by people themselves, they don't have a human assistant, they don't have any kind of software assisting them, they just have the hey Tom, do you have 10 minutes later today to kind of go through this or dear customer, could we set aside two hours for training early next week at your office, and anything in between those two, and the way it works is that we typically use email, that is the primary source, do a little bit of ping pong, and then we come to a conclusion, and then either you or me will do the insert on the calendar and add the participants, and it's not that this is difficult, it's just yet another chore for where you and me speaking, we could speak today at 230, at 130, tomorrow at 10, we could speak help next Tuesday, they're all equally good for me, what's not cool though is me having to kind of work it, I know already I want to talk to you, then the system just figured out, now the software then provides you a couple of opportunities, one you can do, what you see in plenty of other people do, just send a link to a page, but where you expose sometimes under certain constraints, like I set up a calendar for interviews, that is in certain times, lots, certain durations, certain locations, say Skype, or Zoom, then I might have other constraints and other meetings that are a little bit more distinct, for there you can email our agents, Amy at extra AI, or Android extra AI, like I did for this meeting I believe, and you email me, I then reply back, CC and Amy and say sure, I'm up for that, Amy, can you find time for a Zoom chat early next week or whatever I said, and as I send that, the agent will see who is Dennis, do I work for him, yes I do, what is Dennis' preferences, what does his current calendar look like, what other promises have I made on behalf of Dennis, and assemble then a response to you, send it out to you, and all more participants, try to extract the response from you, either in a click at one o'clock, or you trying to move it out to say made because something kind of came up, and then upon conclusion, assemble an invite, and insert that onto my calendar, and then send you an invite, and again, it is not necessary, rocket science and concept, it's just a little tiny chore for where if you and me could be without it, we'll be slightly happier. Now, we've gone to market with this as on one end, a free solution, anybody can sign up, and then like any other SaaS vendor, think Trello, Dropbox and others with some premium features, and you can upgrade and pay us eight bucks, and hopefully you do, and if you do, I make a few monies. So I like that a lot, so how did you, I'm coming from again, so business or data analytics, how did you think of or conceptualize the problem that you're trying to solve here? Because it makes sense, but why, you know, there's, I'm not going to name them on the podcast with you, but there's a whole bunch of people that do the link to the calendar schedule, so how did you think of taking it to the next level? Any entrepreneur will have some process for how they come up with new ideas. The one process I suggest you do not implement is that idea of getting a couple of pizzas, a handful of beers, you pop by my apartment, we work the whiteboard a little bit, and we come up with an idea. That is so forced that I simply can't believe that it's of any good, they'll be exciting because we'll be a little bit bust and we'll tell ourselves how did you add them in the back that this is awesome. Note what you should do is probably the opposite, which is try to come up with a list of hate, and that sounds very sad. So I run a little list on my phone on anything which I hate. So whenever I stumble into it, instead of immediately trying to figure out how can I solve that, I just write it onto my list, this I don't like. So you stand in line at city bank thinking, as you look left and right, this is fucking shit. And you write, I should figure out how to solve the retail bank pain. Might not even mean anything, but it's just from major pain points to little tiny ones. And then once you're going to get to the end of one story or one venture, you take a look at your list and sold it I, and in our prior venture, which we ran for a thousand and fifty nine days to be specific. Given I'm a data geek, we allowed ourselves to go back. And I think I had 14 pages of one line of things I really disliked. And when you look at the list you're thinking, that is one sad boy. He needs to go into that. But really what you have is a treasure trove of good ideas. And then you start to sort that. And what I saw on that list multiple times was that I was, I don't know, too petty, even as a VC bank company, to hire either an office manager or a personal assistant. So I would sit at 10 p.m. in my underwear with a bowl of cereal trying to get the next meeting on the calendar. Thinking, is this my life? Yeah. Now I'm 42 now. Is this my life? And then I would write it onto my list. So I came back and looked at it. It just came back so often that I thought, okay, if I dislike this so much, there must be other people who dislike it. And the first qualification I do on my own ideas is one for where I try to disprove it. So the first thing you should try to do is to kill your ideas. So it's so easy to fall in love with them. I said, that takes nothing. Any entrepreneur will fall in love with their own ideas. Twenty minutes. I said, you could call me tonight and say, Dennis, I'm coming over. I got an idea. And then come Monday morning, you'll need a lot, you'll need a lot of some sort of ad for whatever thing that's going on. I said, I get easily excited, but your job is to kill it because you can kill it. Your stages of fall years of your life. So in this, I tried to look at, as you alluded to, why is it that this particular epiphany isn't unique to me? And if it isn't unique to me, there must be some solutions. And when I look at the space, there's not one solution. I found I think 81 some odd solutions. People who tried and died, people who tried, were still alive, people who tried, who were barely alive, but they were all seeing the same pain. But they were all, also, at least to me, and I know I'm heavily biased here, walking down the same avenue, which was wonderful where they couldn't come up with anything else, but okay, I need to book a meeting with somebody. So I don't know their times. They don't know my times. How about I just send them my times, then they can figure it out. But that seems a little unfair as in the pain that didn't disappear. You just transferred somebody from you to your guest. So it looked like some total, the same amount of pain existed in the universe. Our take was one for where, what if we could perhaps create this agent for where I could describe specifically what I wanted so that I could remove some pain from the universe and not just put it on the guest so that if not in full, then a lot of it could disappear and we would both be slightly happier. And now it's the beginning of that agent take that none of the other folks have been able to do. And we're still the only vendor out there giving that a whirl. It was also way harder and way more expensive than we had assumed on day one. And as we did that, I'll just give you one last step in my little interbranola validation process. I actually hired two assistants full time on my dime, even before we started the venture. I said, hey, you're going to be working for 50 of my friends. And I'm going to call up 50 of my friends who are who are not in any position to have a human assistant until you're going to have one tomorrow. And you can't ask them to do anything but to get your meetings. So what is you going to see? Would they even want that? That won't say huge success because they knew I'm fortunate years out in my career because before I become SVP, a flimflammer timing and I get an assistant called so I'm going to use a dentist's system. He's paying for it. And they went wild. That was a good indication. Then the next step was to figure out, now I know they want what we have. But that's a human. That's way too expensive. How do I then use data to see if I can not replicate the human and turn that human into a machine? And that's where our, you know, traditional expertise came into play. Very long answer. Sorry. But there's no, no, that was a good answer. I like the rigid story. It was a good story. Listen, that's the podcast. You're supposed to tell a story. It's so why, okay, so a couple things out of that. First of all, why was it expensive? Why was it an expensive, was this a bootstrap or was it a VC back? That's actually a really good question. So I think most people who are about to embark on this journey should have a clear understanding of whether it is bootstrap or whether it is not. You and me just can't imagine how you can bootstrap yourself into a new car company. I think that probably requires some capital. As in, there's not enough you and me can do in the garage to kind of get that started. Then there's other things in particular in software for where you and me can easily imagine a new note-taking app being brought to life for very little capital, a couple of laptops, some dialogues, three months in the basement. And we could probably pull that off. And then everything in between those two, this particular venture, we just assumed, given language, is not a solved science, that we needed an unfair amount of data labeled so that we had a corpus for where we can go create a set of predictive morals for how people talk about meeting scheduling. That corpus, we initially assumed would be of one size. I said, I get in an email, I label it for time and dates, locations, people, intent, and you do that many times. Now you have to figure out so many times, so how many is that? 10,000? 10,000? 100,000? 10 million? We thought it would be a little less. It ended up frustrating about 32 million times. Hand-labeled. Imagine I gave you four highlighters and 32 million pieces of information. I said, hey, could you please highlight that? Imagine the amount of time. So I'll just give you some magnitude. So we had at some point a hundred people doing nothing, full time, 24, 7, and labeling data. That is a staggering amount of people trying to put in place a very strong, unique corpus that really only we sit with. Now it's an us to figure out whether we can now extract some value from that corpus, but we suddenly had mined it. We also think we refined it. And now it's time to bring it to market. But that was brutal. That sounds brutal. So you went out and you had to, like, this was not your own pocket. Like, in theory, yes, you could pay for that yourself, but that's not smart. So we raised capital, yes. Yeah, that's, you know, it makes sense when you break it down, but I think AI is still very much a black box to most people and they don't understand it. So they think they, again, they categorize it into all the other software development type projects that are really just calls of different things, right? That's really all it is. But there's so much more to mimic a human to an extent. It's funny, right, for where some software, which is cheap, could still be very valuable, but cheap and very predictable to engineer. As in, you can almost put a project plan in place before you get started on how much time you need to go apply to this, before you are able to have a product in market can be difficult, say, for my mom to understand. But my mom immediately understands the idea of a self-driving car. You cannot ultimate engineering challenge of the day. As in, I get it, I'm in downtown Manhattan. I want to go to Midtown. I just asked the car and here we go. Yeah, but there's probably a thousand predictions for every kind of meter you drive. Somebody needs to be able to make a thousand predictions and make them at very high accuracy unless, of course, you're comfortable with hitting a pedestrian every 100 meters. Probably not. Probably not. That is very interesting. Just going to see how these very complex technological ideas are easy to understand on the consumer side, but have become ever more complex on the engineering side. But that is obviously, this is where the excitement kind of takes over on my end. That is obviously what you want in any good venture, for where if you have a small or no delta for where it is very easy to do and they don't necessarily immediately understand what you're doing or why it's a value. Now, you want those to have a very large spread for where they immediately understand what you do, but it's almost impossible to make. Because that means you'll be able to create some sort of a mode here for where any three guys are a Y company that tomorrow aren't immediately going to say, you know what? Let me stop by hiring a hundred people and label some data and see if we can not do what Dennis is doing. So that creates some sort of mode here. Certainly for us to be able to do predictions that other people can't do, but it just took way longer than we had anticipated. So I thought we would be sitting in that basement for a couple of years. We were in this sitting in that basement for four years before we could escape it. And any machine learning startup want to have some sort of escape if you depend on labeled data for where you can't label data forever. As in those self driving cars who for the most part have safety drivers in the driving seat right now, which is part of how they label data, those safety drivers need to disappear. So everybody's running towards some sort of point for you cross an inflection point for where the very use of your product becomes the new labeling. So just by you and me sitting up this meeting, you helped me create a little bit of data. You know, a few sprinkles, right? But if you do that a hundred thousand times, I get a lot of data. So we crossed that threshold on June 1st, 2019. So that was the point for where I went from a dramatic negative margin to a dramatic positive margin. But that was June 1st, to be honest. That was not what I pissed in my first two decks to the seats, I'm really honest. It was a different set of dates. So what is it? So how is this? Okay, so now it's obviously it's got some most significant momentum. So how are you seeing it being used? And where do you see like a product like this going in the future? Let me use an analogy here. I know that I'll tell you about my fantasies. All right. My wish takes something like you and me signing almost all of our contracts digitally. Yeah. What's some do? Yeah. And now we all are. Yeah, exactly. Now we all are. But do you know what? Go back half a decade. I can tell you with the hundred percent G every single offer letter in my last venture. I signed by hand. It was printed out. It had my signature. We had two copies and I sent you home with your own version. All of the MSAs, the master service agreements that we signed without clients, all 102 before we got acquired, I signed by hand with this pen because that's what you did in 2010. Now, even still I know some companies like for RFPs, for you have to, I've, when I used to work in telecom, I used to deliver, I used to have to deliver RFPs sealed in an envelope by mail with a soft copy on a USB like it's insane. We're still there though. One for some industries. I think you're right. I do think at some point we crossed from you and me signing a contract online being part of the future sexy for the few to it being so normal that I don't even advertise it anymore. I just make the assumption that you recipient obviously would assume that at some point in the next hour you're going to receive an email and in that there'll be a link for you to sign this. I don't even say, hey, by the way, we use this system and you'll get an email and I need to go in and sign it there. You're not going to receive anything in the mail, but that's kind of what we said some years back. Now we don't because it became normal. Now, if we take that and take what I do, today you don't have to say anything if you want to set up a meeting yourself. You just do a little bit of email ping-pong because everybody just assume that is what is going on. However, some people, you, me, others, are moving towards a setting where you know what? I'm not sure I want to do this. It seems a little bit eccentric in the year 2020. I'm going to either add a link, help. I mean, you're going to see see an Amy. I might even say, hey, by the way, I'm using this service, Amy will send you a set of times in a moment and negotiate and get this on the calendar. But at some point to answer your question then, what I want is for this to be normal. I want it to be odd, eccentric, and way old school. If you start to say Dennis, can you do Wednesday one if you're not that Thursday or two? I'll be thinking, what are you doing? I don't know time for this, making mouse balls shit. Then I'll take control and say, you know what? I don't know. But I've seen see the Amy, she can find some time for us. So that is the infection point I'm looking for for where we are suddenly signing up, you know, thousands of users and I'm very happy with that. But many of them are text savvy or certainly savage to the extent for where they feel comfortable enough. They're not yet my mom or people just in the workplace. You and me might just think, oh, I've seen a link to a calendar a million times. Yeah, because you and me kind of work with people who are kind of tuned in for normal people. We're still at the beginning. So I'm kind of waiting for that curve. And then once that starts really, that wave really, when that can arise, I want to be the one surfing it. Well, you are. So you'd be like the docus sign of the sign contracts or whatnot. But yeah, you're right. You know, there's still, I think that and the more, it's funny. I was just speaking about this. I did an earlier episode and we were speaking about collaboration tools and whatnot and just tools that people are people are being forced to be more technical with the pandemic that we're currently living through when this is being filmed. I pray that, you know, this is this episode is going to go out in about a month. I really hope that things are a little bit better when this goes out. But right now we're living through this. If we can't leave everyone's work from home. So people are going to be forced to be more tactical companies are going to be forced to enable their workers to have access to all these collaboration tools slack, Skype zoom. And I think with that wave, we're forcing people to modernize. So it's right there. It's like we're at the precipice, but we're just, we just have to, for some things a little bit more than others, but we're going to move in that direction very quickly, I think. I think you're very much right. Certainly, the data we're looking at right now on signups, usage, engagement, churn, all metrics that you would care about if you ran my business are up and to the right. Not necessarily because we are more clever today than we were yesterday, but because as you alluded to, there's a moment here for where they wouldn't have planned for it, but now it's forced on us. Now that it's forced on us, we need to pick up some tools. And I think in that kind of tools it, some will sign up for soon for the first time. Some will sign up for XDI for the first time. Some will start on slack for the first time, but there's a set of tools here that are perhaps not to use a pop term, but anti-fragile. We're almost becoming stronger by this forced move to a distributed setting. And that is sunny. Nice to see that the wave is moving closer, even faster. Obviously, not nice to see the very reason for why that is happening, but it is only more faster. I like the reason why you want this to keep pushing that way. It's more than just a business. It's the advancement of how we use technology as professionals. And this will be one of those things. And I really haven't seen anything like what you're doing right now, to be quite honest. So good on you for writing down that list of things you hate and figuring out because you're right. There is the worst thing as somebody who deals in business and sales and communications with other stakeholders all day every day is you set up a meeting and then the thing is who has the authority to ask the other person to put it in their calendar. It's almost like you've stacked ranked your professional value based on who allows the other person to put it in their calendar. And even worse is when you just seem like, oh, you know, find something in my schedule. There's still a little bit of animosity around just sending over like a link because it's like, what about my schedule? And it's silly. But you're right. There's like a pain point there. So I do like the you're removing your sort of defaulting at all to an AI tool that gets rid of all the awkwardness and the extra 30 seconds and the things that we just bug us. It's yeah, yeah, that's really it. No account manager was ever put in place to arrange meetings. Surely he can't do his job without that. But the values him speaking to our customers. Yeah, no account agencies was put in place to schedule meetings. I want you to speak to leads help if you could deploy a little bit of software and you can speak to 14 over 12. Well, I can start add up. There's two extra weeks. There's 100 every year. I know my funnel. Shit. That's 70k in additional potential MRR that could be extracted from you if I could do two extra. So that wave is arriving. Some is already taking advantage. Agreed. Agreed. Okay, I want to I do like to ask some questions or bring out like your experience and some insights. But before I go into that, because we're going to move off of x.ai to close it up, is there anything that you wanted to bring or discuss that we didn't chat about? I think it's been a good chat. Good. I'm glad. That's what I like the year. Okay. So a few more there more vanilla questions, but I like them because they give me a little bit of insight and I like the people that listen like to hear this stuff as well. If you could tell your 20 year old self one thing, what would it be? I used to be very attached to the idea of each and every team member being with the company from beginning to end, not fully accepting that other people might have careers where they go from one company to the next and I took it as almost betrayal when somebody resigned. Where's the silly and completely misguided. What I would tell myself is if somebody comes in and they want to have a two year career helping you out doing certain stuff, you should try to just both make sure you're both in agreement on that that is what he wants and then craft a setting for where he can succeed in doing that and you can get some value from that. But I used to be very emotionally attached to people quitting because I would never quit I said, we quit when we run out of money. That's the only day we quit and just didn't see that. I've become way more relaxed and way more tuned into the fact that we have different trajectories. I'm on one, you might be on another one. Sometimes we're very aligned and we're kind of sitting together for years and then and that's cool. But I should just try to figure out exactly what trajectory you're on and figure out how we can you know, inject that into our organization and make the most of it so you have a good beginning, a good poor and a good end. Now that's that's experience has taught you that but I know a lot of people that over their entire career don't come to that conclusion. How do you as a young entrepreneur or even perhaps as somebody who's working for a startup, how do you enable that mindset? I don't know how you would do that without offending somebody. If I was going to think about working with a CEO and telling them like I only want to be here two years, they're not going to give me a job, which is wrong. I think that you can still add value and if it's purposeful and it's transparent and there's communication, it's better always 10 or 10 times but I don't know how to enable that. I do think and again as you alluded to, it's got a lot to do with the transparency within the organization. Some organizations are through their values, quite transparent, some are not. Those that are not might not really need to go work on this challenge first, they might need to go work on the transparency value first. If that is a value that they want to go apply but I think that's where you should go solve it first. Read Hoffman was it in one of his books? I think so wrote about this idea of the tour and anybody who haven't read it should pick it up. I do think it's in one of his books and the tour is one for where the hiring manager or the organization should be crystal clear about what does your tour look like? If your tour is one for where I want to come in as a junior SDR and I want to leave as a senior account executive. Fair enough, if that's what you want, if that's something I can give you, if I can give you that, how can we then craft a tour around that so that you guys can get to the end but when you get to the end you can now do two things because there's a fork in the road, you are making craft a new tour together. Do you have aspirations of becoming director of sales? Perhaps I can create a tour of that or perhaps I cannot and then you fork out and you go find that somewhere else but I do think again being super transparent trying to figure out why are you here? What would you like to achieve and can I help you achieve that? Because if I can't even, if I don't think I can help you achieve that, you shouldn't get started because you will both be disappointed. If I just really wanted to sit in your seat, be an SDR for three years, don't move. Well, you're going to be sad by the day. So that is what I recommend but it does take some transparency and I do think as you suggest, it might not be immediately, emotionally easy for the 22-year-old to just sign up for that because it certainly wasn't easy for me. Yeah, that's fair but I like the recommendation and the concept of the tour. I like that a lot. I've never heard that before. I've heard it said different ways like career mapping and I can make your 135-year plan and things like that but the tour is, I like it because it's very purposeful. It's like, let's just discuss and it's no BS. It's like you're allowing them to set an end date and an expiry date on them within the organization. It's not the whole BS, where do you see yourself in the organization in five years? Even asking that question is presuming that they want to be in your organization in five years and it's a leading question as they would say in court. Anyways, but I like that a lot and you also, you kind of answered my next question probably not entirely but I wanted to ask some books, podcasts, mentors that you recommend for people to go learn from and you just drop the book but any other things that you tell people to go check out. I can give you the usual books. So anybody on this podcast would have read Syner to One or the hard thing about hard things and any one of those that we supposed to read and they're not bad. I like them as well. I'll give you three recommendations, not that we prepared for this, but I'll give you three recommendations that are not on your current list, I'm sure. I'll tell you why I think they're interesting. So the first one is by Felix Dennis, a British entrepreneur who did Max Sim, he did a book called The Never Road. So Felix is not a good person. He's probably an awful person. He just died recently and I'm not saying that to this him. But he says so himself. He lived an awful life and then changed come the end but it was probably too late. That book will teach you one thing to cherish your shares and not depart with a single share unless you think it's a good idea. That is worthy of the 200 some odd pages because I can tell you as an entrepreneur that you shouldn't just willy nilly hand out equity for the fun of it. You depart with equity because you think there's a real purpose and value in doing so. That is an interesting book and the text is rather rude throughout. He starts I think on the first few pages of the years since I read it last in describing just the different brackets. And I think the true to 10 million dollar net worth is what he calls comfortably poor. So you and me are in the kind of comfortably poor category perhaps just to kind of set the scene. That is is a good book. The next one would be the Mike Tyson biography. Again perhaps at some point in life a person is not awful certainly not as nice as one would hope people would be but it will teach you one thing and you end up with a ton of empathy for Mike in the end. And if a single person end up being able to create an unfair amount of wealth and that is relative to your situation. So that could just be you and three friends or a family and creating 800K or for Mike 300 million dollars doesn't matter but some setting for where you now ended up mostly on your shoulders creating a lot of value. Who can you trust? So in my life that will add up to nobody sadly as in everybody is trying to take advantage of you. How do you then determine who you can trust? As said what particular investor is a good investor? What particular co-founder is a good co-founder? What particular employee is a good employee? What particular customer or partner distributor is a good distributor? Have you even thought about how you evaluate that? What risk do you attest to the fact that if you cannot trust them what does the worst case that you look like? That is an interesting book. It's a little sad but it is very honest. He wrote most of himself at least according to what the commentary is and it looks like that. So that means there's a lot of foul language attached to it. Then the last one would be and I think that's fresh where our circle starts over that. Shoe dog by Phil Knight, founder of Nike. Read it for two reasons. One the first 300 pages is a good story. You can read it in a single setting and you just get used to the ending thinking. You know what? I'm surprised there's something called Nike today because there was seven reasons for this to not exist. So I am completely baffled because at no point did he really want it into existence? At many points he wanted it out of existence. So it's just an interesting book. What I want to point people to is the last really 5-10 pages. If you read it he almost between the lines given his son dies. Suggest to people who are about to embark on this particular journey. To at least take a step back and ask themselves are you sure it's worth it? Whatever the journey. I'm not just talking about the entrepreneurial journey but whatever journey you're about to embark on. Allow yourself at least a moment to deliver it whether it's worth it. I think what he's trying to tell us or at least that's how I've read the last few pages that he's not entirely sure that it was worth it for him and you can read throughout the book that he had one child. That was Nike. No wife, not the kids, not the house, it was just Nike. And that is also a little sad. So all these three books have kind of silly sad endings but I think good strong points to make. So they had three missing books. I love it. Thank you very much. Those are good recommendations. I've never heard those recommendations before. I've heard of a shoe dog. The book by Mike Tyson. What are the titles of the book by Mike Tyson? Just so do you remember I can look it up but I've never heard of that one. There's only one. But they're still amazing recommendations. Lastly, how do people get in touch with you if they want to reach out? I am everywhere on the internet. So if you look at Dennis Mordenson on any platform, there'll be a picture of me and there I am. And if they want to go wild, I'm on Dennis at human.ex.ai. That's my email. If you got anything to say, email me. I'm an inbox zero kind of guy. So I'll get to it. I love it. All right. That's all I got. Thank you very much. I really appreciate the chat. It was really, really good. As always, this has been another episode of the success story podcast. If you haven't already, please like, subscribe and share with your friends, families, peers or co-workers. You can leave us a rating. It would be much appreciated. Any rating is fine as long as it contains five stars. And you can always stream or download this podcast on any podcast platform. And you can also catch it on YouTube. As always, have a great week. Have a productive week. And we'll speak again soon. Bye.