The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 33 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Mortensen: Tech incumbents have zero usable data for training AI scheduling agents
“There you have no data set, as in zero, nothing, 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?”
Mortensen: I Will Never Start a Venture Without Owning the Underlying Data
“I would never, and I'm underlining this, never start any venture for where I didn't own the underlying data on which my venture operated.”
Mortensen: Startups Should Accept Dying Over Pivoting From Their Core Vision
“Dying is ok. Change the direction is not ok. Like, pivot, or what have you.”
Mortensen: Enterprises will buy third-party AI agents rather than build them
“And I think it's going to be equally silly to go, as an enterprise, say, I want to engineer ERP. A meeting scheduling agent like Amy, an invoicing agent like Tommy, a some agent like this. I think they'll have to go into the market and figure out which of thes…”
Mortensen: AI agents will not cause unemployment among human assistants
“This is not about making sure that any human personal assistant becomes unemployed in the future. I think all of them will continue to be employed, and I think they'll thrive and do proper work, not email ping pong.”
Mortensen: Human-in-the-loop assistant services top out as $30M businesses
“Sell them between two to 500 dollars, which is what they charge, which is not necessarily expensive compared to having a full-time human assistant in your office, but it's still an outsourcing play of sorts, and I'm not saying that to dismiss them, it's just a…”
Mortensen: Founders Should Err on Giving Up Too Late, Not Too Early
“I'd certainly much rather err on the side of giving up a little bit too late than giving up a little bit too early, because the whole most likely outcome of any startup is that we will die. But the only way you're going to figure out that you will not die is t…”
Mortensen: Focus on Customer Pain Rather Than AI-First Hype
“You shouldn't try to be mobile first, or AI first, or cloud first, or big data, or whatever the term might be of the particular era. You should just really let onto that customer pain, because that is the truest thing that you can let onto.”
Mortensen: Conversational UIs Shift Computing From Executing Tasks to Setting Objectives
“All of the prior UI paradigms had one thing in common, that they assisted you in doing a task, doing that task a little bit faster, a little bit more accurate, doing the task in such a way that you couldn't really do it by yourself to begin with, as in, you're…”
Mortensen: x.ai Should Have Prioritized Data Labeling and Hybrid UIs Earlier
“I would spend less time on building the first models, as in, none of them survived anyway, and I would spend more time In trying to define what data to collect and how to label it. Two, I would have leaned into a mix of UIs quicker, not have spent three years …”
Multiplying per-seat pricing for teams reflects a lack of product imagination.
“Our team edition is just you pay more, as in you've got more seats, and then if it's 17 seats, I multiply the price by 17. If it's a thousand, I multiply by a thousand. I'm not so sure that you've exhausted your imagination if that's what you get to.”
Mortensen: A startup without competitors isn't solving an interesting problem
“And that competitor can be a weak one, or it can be a strong one, but they always arrive. If they do not arrive, I'm not so sure you're doing anything interesting.”
x.ai will sell its enterprise edition at $59 per active seat.
“So we're going to be selling the business edition at 59 bucks per seat, but under a fair billing policy, meaning that whoever uses it will pay for it. Those that do not use it within the month, they do not pay for it.”
Frontline workers will become most valuable as AI automates enterprise answers.
“Because the answer will become easy when we have AIs. Then I think there'll be a whole new bunch of employees. Actually, those at the bottom of the organization, those that are closest to the customer, they'll become the most valuable because they have very in…”
Mortensen: AI scheduling assistant market will be winner-takes-all
“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.”
Mortensen: I will never move my ventures to Silicon Valley
“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 going to be in Manhattan.”
Mortensen: Define Startup Shutdown Criteria Upfront While Sober and Sane
“I think the best way to do it is to do it up front while you're still sober and sane, not while you're fighting the good fight.”
Mortensen: Conversational UI Will Dominate Alongside Existing Interfaces, Not Replace Them
“Though I am very bullish on this being a very dominant UI of the future, not the one for where every prior app that we have had up until this point will move over to this newer UI, I don't think that's the case. I think we'll still have a mix of UIs, just like…”
Mortensen: x.ai Reached Record High Retention, Meetings Scheduled, and NPS
“I said, we've never had better retention than this week. We've never had more meetings per host set up. Than this week. We've never had a higher NPS than we've had this month.”
Product-market fit means inbound demand outpaces sales hiring capacity.
“I do think, though, that upon product market fit, the market will arrive, but that is that moment for where you would almost know that you reached it, that you can't build up Your sales team quick enough. The incoming leads are faster than what you can train n…”
Mortensen: Enterprise software vendors will broadly adopt Slack-style fair billing
“So, I think you'll see a whole bunch of other people outside of us starting to pick that up.”
Mortensen: Future AI agents will operate on existing enterprise protocols
“These agents, and I'm so bullish on this future of agents, will be so lightweight that they would probably exist on existing protocols.”
Netflix and Amazon employees adopted x.ai without any sales contact.
“On the thousands and thousands of people that have adopted the single-use case version of Amy, I never talked to the New York Times, or Netflix, or Amazon, or Salesforce, but those companies, they just have employees in pain, and since there's no integration, …”
Mortensen: AI agents require massive data grunt work, not quick TensorFlow hacks
“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 going to be quite surprised.”
Mortensen: x.ai will derive most of its revenue from enterprises
“I think in the end, X.ai as a company will drive most of its revenue From the enterprise.”
Mortensen: I Should Have Shut Down My Failed Startup Earlier
“I think I could have closed it down better, but I fought so hard to the very last day, then another three weeks, then another two months for where, hey, Dennis, this thing died three months ago, and somehow you kept it on life support, and everybody would have…”
Dennis Mortensen: x.ai spent three years in R&D before monetizing
“We spent three years in the basement working on the core R&D on this before we released the first premium product.”
Mortensen: x.ai spent 1.5 years building its time-parsing AI model
“That alone, we 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.”
Mortensen: x.ai wrote 26-page guidelines just to label single data entities
“Just one of those entities, which I mentioned, whether it be time or people location, that's a 26 page set of guidelines just to label it.”
Mortensen: x.ai's $23M Series B provides runway deep into 2018
“And if we did nothing and just kept everything intact, we will be way into 2018. On making no revenue existing monthly investments.”
Mortensen: x.ai will launch with free, pro, and business pricing tiers
“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.ai. A professional edition for where you can schedule unlimited meetings, tune the signature, and do some …”