20VC: X.ai's Dennis Mortensen on Why There Is No Incumbency Advantage in Artificial Intelligence

Dennis Mortensen is the CEO and Founder of X.ai, the artificial intelligence driven personal assistant that lets people schedule meetings using plain English and nothing more than a CC to [email protected]. Their female persona Amy is so lifelike that users have asked her on a date at a rate of one request per month! X.ai is now one of the best funded AI startups having raised over $30m from our friends at FirstMark and a big thanks to Matt Turck for making the intro and from DCM, who also helped us with some of the questions for Dennis! In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Dennis came to found X.ai and what the a-ha moment was for him? 2.) What did the training look like for X.ai? How long did it take? How much data did you have to painstakingly annotate? What is more important; data or algorithms? 3.) Many VCs are concerned about large incumbents having proprietary data sets. Does this concern Dennis and what can be done to mitigate this 4.) Question from David Cheg @ DCM: How will AI startups interact with giant corporates also investing heavily in AI research? 5.) How was the fundraising journey for Dennis? How did he approach it strategically? What challenges did he face? How did he go about choosing his investors? Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode: Dennis’ Fave Book: How To Get Rich by Felix Dennis Dennis’ Fave Blog: Wait But Why As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Dennis on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! If you are looking to make your move into the world of VC or improve your investing skills, Venture Capital Unlocked: Secrets of Silicon Valley Investing is a must! It is a 2 week crash course at Stanford run by Stanford Professional Development Centre and 500 Startups. You will learn the mechanics of all things Silicon Valley investing, check it out here. The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa. Lees is like the TOMS Shoes or Warby Parker of the mattress industry. Here are 3 reasons why they are the best place to get your new mattress: Leesa has done away with the awkward mattress showroom experience by allowing a fully online experience, shipping to your doorstep for free. Their 10 inch mattresses come in all sizes and is crafted with 3 unique layers o foam including2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of really cool latex like foam design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are made 100% in the US or UK and they give you a 100 night trial, to make sure the mattress is perfect for you. Go to leesa.com/VC and enter promo code VC75 to get $75 off!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back to the 20 minute VC and following the excitement of my birthday on Wednesday, which you can find on Snapchat at H Stebbings, I'm sure I left a very interesting story for you all to see. I'm thrilled to welcome an incredible founder to the show today. He's the founder of our favourite Artificially Intelligent Secretary, Amy. It is of course Dennis Mortensen, founder at X.ai. Now Dennis and X.ai have made Amy so lifelike that she is now asked out on a date once every month. My word, she has a better love life than me. And X.ai is now one of the best funded AI startups, having raised over $30 million from our friends at First Mark, and a big thanks to Matt Turk for making the intro, and the likes of DCM, Lira Hippo, Crunch Fund, SoftBank, and many more incredible investors. But before we

• 0:45Harry Stebbings?

  meet the man behind most of the meeting scheduling of the VC community, if you're looking to make your way into the VC community or improve your investor status, then Venture Capital Unlocked really is for you. It's an incredible two-week course where you get to learn the tips, tactics, and strategies of some of the valley's best investors, including the likes of my good friend Jason Lenkin, Mark Suister, Dave McClure, and many more incredible investors. And it's jointly run by Stanford Professional Development Centre and 500 startups. But watch out as the closing deadline is the 1st of July, so make sure you don't miss out and head over to 500.vc for more information and to sign up. Also, I have to say a massive thanks to Lisa, whose mattress was the perfect end to the celebrations of

• 1:29Harry Stebbings?

  my birthday night. After the mojito session, there was nothing like climbing into the scientifically engineered three-layered mattress with two inches of memory foam and two inches of latex light foam, because you really noticed that after 10 mojitos, I'm sure. Having said that, the one thing I did notice was not having to leave the house to buy the mattress, as they offer a fully online experience with the mattress being delivered to my door in just a few days. So if you live in the US, UK, or Canada, you can also get your mattress delivered to your door. Check out leesa.com/vc and enter the promo code VC75 at checkout for an incredible $75 off your dream mattress. However, Amy the Artificially Intelligent Secretary is now telling me it is time to welcome the main man, Dennis Mortensen, founder at X.ai.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:24Harry Stebbings?

  Dennis, it's a huge pleasure to have you on the show. I feel I know you very well, having interacted with Amy so many times now from all my VC scheduling. But thank you so much for joining me today.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Thanks much for having me.

• 2:34Harry Stebbings?

  So talk to me, Dennis. I want to start today with how a very young Danish man came to found one of the hottest startups i- in the world and in AI with X dot AI. So what's the brief kind of origin story for you?

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Short story is one for where our prior prior company got acquired by Yahoo. And one part of the set of terms and conditions that comes with that acquisition was that I moved to New York, which I actually pissed very hard against because I wanted to move to the valley and do my next thing out of there. All the good things that comes with that story, but I wouldn't take it. And I moved to New York and it's just very hard to not fall in love with the city. So I spent the last eight years here and we built up post having integrated into Yahoo, a predictive analytics venture out of New York as well that got acquired by Outbrain in 2013.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Post integration of that company, we brought the team back together late 2013 and thought it might just be time for us to remove this pain of setting up a meeting once and for all by implementing this intelligent agent. And then over the last two and a half years, we've been in the basement, in the dark, alone, engineering away.

• 3:52Harry Stebbings?

  Sounds very much like my recording patterns. But but I mean, I want to start then by discussing that kind of the dark basement and the the training. By discussing the core technology behind Amy and Andrew, we can't forget Andrew. So what did the training look like? How how long did it take? And how much data have you kind of painstakingly gone through to to build accurate patterns?

• 4:15Speaker 02

  That's a fantastic question. And I think a lot of people who today, June 2016, decide that the solution to their pain is some intelligent agent will be surprised about the amount of effort they have to put into both their definition of this conceptual model or this universe in which they exist and that of assembling the training data set.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Those two things seems like, sure, it's a whiteboard session to define the universe in which we exist. And it's a couple of weeks on getting just some raw data. And then we start kind of engineering and train the models we wanna put in place. But that is just not the case. I think of all the things that I've been surprised about, and any startup is just one big surprise, is the magnitude of the work which you have to apply to those two. Something as simple as defining time, as in Amy's understanding of you saying Wednesday, one o'clock, June something, EST, daylight saving. The sad thing is that that's just not how you speak.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  So however you say that, I need to be able to translate that into a true time. That alone would probably spent a year and a half coming up with the right model. Because humans will say stuff like, we'll meet up later, this afternoon, upon my return, before the demo. They're all items where you're trying to say something about when you and I should meet. So that is massive, just defining it. You haven't even collected the first two characters. Then after that, any one of these new intelligent agents is probably in a space where there is no pre-existing dataset. Just like if you and I wanna go build a self-driving car. There is no self-driving car dataset we can download and then go model on it tomorrow.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  The only thing you and I can do is buy a Toyota, put a lighter, a camera on top, drive around the parking lot, collect a little bit of data and look at that. And if you're Google, you do that exercise for six years and then you haven't even solved it yet. We're in a similar setting, perhaps not as dramatic, but equally hard for where there is no dataset. So you schedule one meeting, one late afternoon, the very first days of 2014, and you look at that and say, this is just noisy. Let's schedule another meeting tomorrow. Let's do ten next week, let's do a hundred, let's do a thousand. Then years later, now, mid 2016, we haven't even finished yet. And I'll just give you, so whoever's listening. Listening here can start crying in the background.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Just a small hint of what it means to annotate this data. So it's not just creating an environment for where, how do you even take in this data? And how do you just disintegrate, say, an email, because that is our primary medium, into the individual entities that you wanna label? But how do you even label time or location or people? What is it that you mark? Say you wrote Wednesday dash Friday. Is that marked as one? Is Wednesday or Friday marked as two? Do you mark the dash? How do you even do that? And I'll give you just a hint here, just one of those entities which I mentioned, whether it be time or people or location. That's a twenty-six page set of guidelines just to label it.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  You haven't even labeled the data, just to figure out how to label it. Once you figure out how to do that, how do you even train an AI trainer to be able to decipher the data to label that accurately? Does he memorize twenty-six pages to figure that out? So, great question. It is a massive undertaking. And I think anybody who believes that it's about getting five good engineers into the basement and we can start hacking away on TensorFlow come Sunday, is probably gonna be quite surprised. I've hacked that, that that's gonna be a lot of crying and a lot of grunt work. Very few PhDs working on this for the first many, many, many months.

• 8:17Harry Stebbings?

  And I'm really pleased you touched on data sets there because whenever I speak to VCs on the AI space in general, they all cite the same concern and it's the strong incumbency issue that comes from titans like Facebook and Google having the massive proprietary data sets. So I'm intrigued to hear what you think that means for startups and how they can get access to similar training data.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  So I'm not so sure I agree one hundred percent with the statement of them having pre-existing massive data sets. They most certainly have massive data sets. But I think we need to just take a step back and reevaluate whether they are worth anything in this new.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Software paradigm of not a million apps coming over the next two years, but perhaps hundreds of thousands of intelligent agents instead. If that is the new paradigm, which a lot of VCs would agree with me, that is the next paradigm. And if that is the case, if you take something as simple as Amy, the vertical that we're trying to attack here, where we just wanna set up meetings, a very quick statement would be that, oh, Google have Gmail, it's nine hundred million users, they have Google Calendar, they have all the meetings being negotiated, they already have the data sets. They actually have no data set, as in zero, nothing.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Because there is no agent-human negotiation under a given dialogue model that exists in that data set. And you can't label it in the past, as in, what if the agent said this, what would the human then say? So you have to then go out and say, now the agent says this to a human, what is the response? And that becomes part of your training data set. So I'm a little bit skeptical when somebody just, as a knee-jerk reaction, will say they have a ton of data. Because I actually think, to just repeat myself, that this new paradigm levels the playing field. And there's not much pre-existing data set that you can really take advantage of. Doesn't mean that they don't have the capital and resources to go kind of dedicate a hundred

• 10:24Speaker 02

  people to sit in that basement for a year. But sometimes that is politically hard to go set up in some of these organizations. And what I think is actually even harder for them, which provides me an advantage here, is that some of the data that you wanna label is a little bit intimate. And you need to have a very close relationship with your users to be able to do that. I feel very good about certainly the vertical that we're in. That doesn't mean there's not other verticals for where you are competing against a massive data set that they already have, and it's only a matter of time before they either start to label it, or that they have something for where a model can be created for where they don't even need to label the data set.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Fair enough, then you should just be fully aware of that risk before you start. But again, I'm quite skeptical of every single startup being at risk. I actually think we all have a little bit of an advantage here.

• 11:17Harry Stebbings?

  But but still, it's remaining on those uh big corporates. I've got a question now from from one of your investors in in Amy and X dot A I and that's David Cheng from D C M. Uh and he says, oh, still on the strain of this corporate. David asks, what is your take on how A I startups will interact with the giant corporates? Also investing heavily into A I research, meaning your Googles, Facebooks, Microsofts. So so what's your take?

• 11:42Speaker 02

  I think there is so much work to be done in traditional productivity. So the way you and I have worked pretty much since we got out of college. Is in a setting for where software assisted you and I in doing a job a little bit faster, a little bit more accurate. Whether that is playing around with a data set in Excel and you create a pivot table, or whether that is submitting your receipts. Or creating an invoice, all of that is somewhat done on software. But you, Harry, are doing the job, not the machine. And this new setting is a setting where you will hand that job over to an agent. You won't create the invoice.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  You will tell Stephen, the invoicing agent, can you go create an invoice for Nike on nineteen thousand dollars for these three services? And then it's up to the agent to kind of figure out who's the customer, what are these services, how to create an invoice, how to send it to them and so on and so forth. And this new setting will have a massive positive impact on productivity. And I don't see the enterprise take that on. That is, we've seen that play out already. So it used to be that any massive enterprise would go create their own E R P system. Nobody does that today.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  You somehow decide whether you want to use S A P or Oracle or Microsoft and you use one of those platforms. Anybody in the past will be setting up and engineering their own C R M system. Nobody would do that today. That would just be completely silly. And I think it's going to be equally silly to go as an enterprise, say, I want to engineer a meeting scattering agent like Amy. An invoicing agent like Tommy, a some some agent like this. I think they'll have to go into the market and figure out.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Which of these pre-existing agents should I employ and at what scale? So I feel quite comfortable and if you really ask me, I think in the end X dot A I as a company will derive most of its revenue from the enterprise.

• 13:52Harry Stebbings?

  So what's your vision then for enterprise? Carl Louis again at D C M stated that you had a vision for enterprise and how everyone should should have the assistant. So so what's your your vision for enterprise?

• 14:03Speaker 02

  I do think that these agents, including Amy, and that of just managing your calendar is a setting for where you go from having a luxury that used to be provided only for the select few into a new setting for where you can completely democratize it, as in it is not a luxury. It is something where I don't even want the most junior account manager of ours to sit and do email ping pong to figure out when to talk to the customer. If the customer agreed to speak about this new feature come early next week, then he's on board. Then we just need an agent to figure out exactly when on Monday or Tuesday is this and what phone number is it? Or what's the address and do we pop by?

• 14:47Speaker 02

  But that is not the account manager's skill set. His skill set is to know our product, have empathy for the customer, know to tease out whether he truly understands the new feature. Now that's what we hired him to do, not to do meetings scheduling. So I don't want, and if we can take a good example here, post-acquisition of our last company, we were four hundred and fifty employees, two assistants for about seven executives. That means you have four hundred and forty-three people left to their own devices. Amy is for them so that they don't have to do this. This is not about making sure that any human personal assistant becomes unimplored in the future.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  I think all of them will continue to be employed and I think they'll thrive and do proper work, not email ping pong. What I think is really cool about that is this type of agent and many of these agents will turn superhuman in the sense that even if Harry somehow decided that you want to pay the sixty thousand dollars to have a human personal assistant. System, sit in your front office and to a last degree, manage your calendar. There'll be many things that he or she just cannot do. He or she would be a little bit bitter working at eleven P M on Saturdays, on Christmas Eve, on rescheduling those ten meetings that you set up in Atlanta, but now you need to postpone the trip.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Or her inability to speak in multiple languages, memorize all time zones throughout the world. All of those things are superhuman. So I'm very optimistic about this kind of idea of agents democratizing access to what used to be luxuries.

• 16:24Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. No, I completely with you. I'm very much a fan of the democratization of assistance. And it's helped me enormously, I do have to say. But I wanted, we mentioned some of your investors there and obviously investments ramped up massively into the space of A I and A I startups. So I'm intrigued to hear how you approached the fundraising journey tactically then. You've probably raised more funding than most A I startups. So how was your fundraising journey approached tactically and what were the challenges that you faced?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  So we've been quite honest from the very first days that this would be a long, very hard journey for where a lot of people will sit in downtown Manhattan in a basement and not have a product in market for which we could charge. And anybody uncomfortable with anything outside of that shouldn't participate. The pitch was a little bit more slick, but that was the message. That means when we raised our seed round, we pitched nothing. But for these two million dollars, you will get an answer. Not a product, not customers, not revenue, not really much. You'll get an answer, a thumbs up or a thumbs down on whether this is even possible.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  Worst case, we've only invested two million dollars and not four years and thirty five million dollars. Two million dollars to know whether it's early twenty fourteen the point for where we should start working on intelligent agents. And remember, at that point, it was a whole lot less sexy than it is now in twenty sixteen. This is before the Microsoft and Facebook and Google announcements. A little bit early, so it was all about, it's now the time. That, I think, set the tone for how we raised capital from that point on forward. The A round, where we raised about ten million dollars, was on, we believe now through this dataset that we can prove that it can be solved.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  And we need a sum of capital to go engineer the product. And that is pretty much what we did for the A round. Not get customers or make revenue, but make the product, collect the data, annotate painstakingly, one word after another in millions of emails. Come this spring, we were certainly at a point for where we felt very comfortable that we could see the light at the end of the tunnel. And we raised the B round to put our professional product to market this early autumn. And for that, we raised twenty-three million dollars, perhaps a little bit more than you would otherwise have asked for.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  But there was some sentiment in the market, certainly if you look at it from afar, where things could change a little bit. And I just wanted to make sure that I had enough runway to get to the other side. Hell, even to the other side for where we can break even on that if that's what we want to. And that is certainly what we are executing against. That could come opportunities for where we want to invest further, say, attack another market, another language, a certain set of skills that Amy does not have today.

• 19:27Harry Stebbings?

  I'm intrigued on current kind of investment. How does, how far does twenty, uh, does the twenty-three million get you in terms of runway?

• 19:36Speaker 02

  So without giving you my monthly investment, which is not as dramatic as I think some people believe, we are quite frugal. I could be biased here, but quite frugal. And if we did nothing and just kept everything intact, we would be way into twenty eighteen on making no revenue, existing monthly investments. So we're in very good shape in that regard, especially because come early autumn, we will start to make some revenue, and that will only extend that runway.

• 20:07Harry Stebbings?

  Talk about monetization there. How do you think about a pricing strategy from here? So so far it hasn't been employed and you know, people love the product. There's obviously huge scope for monetization. So how do you start to begin thinking of a pricing model from here?

• 20:20Speaker 02

  So we've always had this idea in mind of this being for the masses, not for the few. So we wanted a price that was completely disconnected to the idea of humans being involved in any way, shape or form. This is a software SaaS product. And if it's a software SaaS product, there's certainly a number of good examples that we can lean up against. Whether that be a Dropbox or a Salesforce or something similar. I'm very confident you'll see us be in market with three editions. A free edition where you can schedule a few meetings in the name of Amy or Andrew at X dot A I.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  A professional edition for where you can schedule unlimited meetings, tune the signature and do some of those pro things you would expect. And pay me twenty nine, thirty nine dollars, whatever that might be a month. I think that will be the very high price and that will probably decrease over time. And then you'll see us have a business edition as well for where you can move the whole thing to your domain. Buy eighty nine seats or four hundred and fifty seats for the whole organization. Get one invoice, get an admin and security setting so you can manage it. And there's nothing new or innovative about what I just explained here. And that's not where we want to be innovative. We think that is a tried and tested setting.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  And we think our product fits really well into that setting.

• 21:47Harry Stebbings?

  And then I'm really intrigued on that kind of strain of of pricing and how pricing compares amongst your competitors. I want to talk about finding before we go into the quickfire, the competitive market around you in the personal assistant A I space. And I think the likes of Clara Labs charge, charge much more like two hundred dollars, I seem to remember. So I'm just intrigued how you view the competitive landscape as a whole now, taking a more macro view.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  We can look at the competitors above me, whatever the metric might be, and the competitors below me. Again, whatever the metric might be. And if you look at other startups that have similar offerings to what we have to offer. The offering today certainly look alike, but we are very different companies. Potentially a good business for Clara in having humans employers at an hourly wage. Figure out through good software how you can slice and dice them and sell them between two to five hundred dollars, which is what they charge. Which is not necessarily expensive compared to having a full-time human assistant in your office.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  But it's still an outsourcing play of sorts. And I'm not saying that to dismiss them, it's just a different business model. And good for them, and I'm sure you can turn that into a twenty, thirty million dollar business. And that's fine. And it's actually been tried and tested before. So Fancy Hands and Searchal. And others have done that for years, even at a higher price point. And there's certainly a lust for that. That's just not who we are or who we want to be. We want to be this massively scalable. Software company for where there's both an opportunity to take advantage of the inherent virality.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  And the network effects that comes from two Amys touching each other. And that only works at scale. And I actually think that whoever solves the software challenge will have this opportunity to take the market. It's a potential winner takes all, or certainly winner takes most, given the positive outcome of Amy speaking to Amy. So that's what we're trying to attack.

• 23:53Harry Stebbings?

  I have to say, my, I've got, I've got a call in, in like half an hour, and it was scheduled through Amy and Amy on both ends.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  That is, we call it scheduling Nirvana around the office because we're geeks, but it, it is lovely when it happens. Because nobody is talking to anybody, just magic.

• 24:09Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I have to say it was pretty, pretty cool. We did, we did laugh about it. They're saying, how's this gonna work? And it worked perfectly. Um, so, so yeah, so, so thank you for scheduling my next meeting. But I wanna dive now into a quickfire round. Uh. So I say a short statement and you give me your thoughts. How does that sound?

• 24:25Speaker 02

  I'm game.

• 24:26Harry Stebbings?

  So your favourite book and why?

• 24:28Speaker 02

  One book which will sound completely silly and a little bit off-putting, but I really like it nevertheless. So there's a British entrepreneur called Felix Dennis, who wrote a book called How to Get Rich. I think it was actually published in the UK under the title of The Narrow Road, which is a little bit less off-putting. And it's not one of those traditional health books. It's really just a story about how he got from nothing to something. And he is so honest. Everybody is just too polite when they write anything because they'd rather not offend people. Or it will hurt business later, or half my network will disappear if I really tell you how this works.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  He just doesn't give a shit. And I am a huge fan and I think once every eight months I read it. It's a two-hour read and I laugh a little bit as I read it, thinking I need to be more honest. I need to be more true with myself and the world and it's a it's a wonderful book. People should read it.

• 25:30Harry Stebbings?

  Fantastic. And then Matt Turck, New York over the Valley. Are you pleased that you're in New York now?

• 25:35Speaker 02

  I am very long New York. I am never moving out to the valley. And if I'm doing anything in the future, it's gonna be in Manhattan.

• 25:45Harry Stebbings?

  Uh. And then your favourite blog or newsletter? What are your must-reads?

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Favourite blog and newsletter newsletter is probably Wait But Why. I've somehow fallen in love with that of late and I came into it, I think, a year in after everybody else somehow recognised it. And one of my favourite posts from that is the long one he did on the Fermi paradox. Which is just so sexy because you read it and you thought you were somewhat in control with yourself. Your family, the universe and everything. And then at the end, you don't really know what to believe. It's just, it's just such a good setting and Tim just does such a good job in explaining any and all of the topics that he brings up.

• 26:32Harry Stebbings?

  Have you, have you read their deep dive on A I?

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:34Harry Stebbings?

  That, that was a phenomenal piece.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Yes, it was. Even though I disagree, and it's still one of my favorite blogs, I think he is Elon Musk, Bill Gates and a pool of other people, too too pessimistic. But, you know, that's for a whole other two hour session between you and I.

• 26:52Harry Stebbings?

  That's opening up a can of worms. And then, and then I want to talk about the funniest story you have with regards to user behavior and Amy or Andrew.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  I continue to go back to this one story where a male guest were trying to charm Amy into a set of drinks on a Friday night. And I was obviously just a little bit sad to begin with on behalf of my gender, but also a little bit excited on behalf of Amy and our technology and where we add in life that we can create this initiative where there's a real relationship going on here at some level. He thought this chat we've had over the week warrants me asking you out for drinks on Friday. And I do actually read that exchange sometimes because it's it's a little bit beautiful.

• 27:42Harry Stebbings?

  That's fantastic. And then, and then I want to finish on the next five years for you and for Amy and X dot A I. Where's the roadmap going?

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Here's the thing. There is a little bit above ten billion formal meetings being set up in the U S alone every year. Not date nights, not walk the dog, formal meetings. You and I talking on Skype this morning, oh nine hundred E S T. Ten billion. I'm chasing those. No more, no less. I want you to get to a point later in life where you look back and say, "Hey, ha, fuck, we did email ping pong for thirty years. Then these dudes came along and solved it and it disappeared. And I can't even remember, why would we do this? Why would I suffer through email in and out to manage that calendar? We should have done that agent

• 28:32Speaker 02

  decades ago." But here we are. So that's what I'm chasing. That's us.

• 28:36Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Dennis, it really has been such a pleasure having you on the show, hearing your amazing journey. I thank you myself for saving hours of my time with Amy, and I really appreciate you joining me on the show today. Thanks so much.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Thanks much. This has been fun.

• 28:51Harry Stebbings?

  And again, I'd like to give a huge hand to Matt Turk at First Mark for the intro to Dennis today, and to Dennis for giving up his time to reveal the incredible X dot AI journey. It really was such a pleasure to have him on the show. And if you're loving all things twenty minute VC, then you can follow me on Snapchat at H Stebbings for many a mojito session. And you can also sign up for the newsletter on the twenty minute VC dot com for all updates and future episodes. But before we leave you today, if you'd like to join the world of VC and invest in incredible companies like X dot AI and Dennis, or even improve your status within the VC industry itself, then VC unlocked really is for you. It's a phenomenal two week crash course where you'll meet and hear from some of the best investors in the valley,

• 29:34Harry Stebbings?

  including the likes of Mark Suster and Jason Lampkin, just to name a few. And this incredible course is run jointly by Stanford Professional Development Center and five hundred startups. And it will also give you an incredible ability to make lifelong connections in the industry. So head over to five hundred dot VC for more information. And a warning, there is a deadline with this. So the deadline is the first of July. So make sure you're there in time to not miss out on this incredible opportunity. Now, before we leave you and go into the weekend, I have to thank Lisa for making my weekend of sleep so much more enjoyable. The thing I used to have with mattresses is I did not know which one to choose. There were so many different types and I was merely confused. But with Lisa, their mattresses are designed to take the guesswork out of buying a mattress.

• 30:19Harry Stebbings?

  For example, the whole idea of soft, medium and firm mattresses ignores the fact that there's actually a best feel. They call it universal fit and it helps almost everybody sleep better. And even better, at Lisa, you have 100 nights to trial the mattress to make sure that it's perfect for you. So take advantage and check out leesa.com/vc and enter the promo code VC75 for a whopping $75 off. I really can't emphasise enough how much I appreciate all your support. For all feedback and suggestions, please do email me [email protected] and I look very forward to bringing you next week's episodes.