Dennis Mortensen
Founder & CEO, LaunchBrightly. On 3 shows, 7 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthoracademic@DennisMortensen ↗LinkedIn ↗evcrp.com ↗
Dennis Mortensen is a serial entrepreneur who founded x.ai, an AI meeting scheduling assistant acquired by Bizzabo, as well as Visual Revenue and IndexTools. He currently leads LaunchBrightly, an automated product screenshot platform, and authored Yahoo! Web Analytics.
3shows
7appearances
69statements
11resolved
6supported
4contradicted
55%fully supported
4said about them ↓ Everything Dennis Mortensen said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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: Scaling AI before solving accuracy risks polluting training data
“The worst thing that can happen right now is that I start to pollute my data set because I think I have everything solved. So we are extremely protective about that data set.”
Intelligent AI agents should never pretend to be human
“Now, number one, do not pretend to be a human.”
AI agent developers should over-invest in reasoning engines over parsing
“And I think there's probably even more value in whatever agent that you go engineer to over invest in the reasoning engine.”
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: x.ai has no backup plan to rely on human labor
“What we kind of set out to do is to kind of create a setting for where there is no plan B. There is no kind of backup plan, and I know SoftBank kind of, you know, shit their pants whenever I say that, but there is no plan B of, ah, perhaps we can just have hum…”
Mortensen: x.ai lost one-third of customers after removing human verification
“That was the worst moment, I think, in our history for where we churned in that next couple of months, a third of all our customers, our whole customer base.”
The tech industry fell in love with conversational UI too early
“I certainly think we just fell in love with the conversation of UI a little bit too hard, too early, because it certainly was fucking sexy, to be honest.”
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.”
Giving Google Analytics logins to non-analysts is naive
“Editors should be editors, not analysts. I think that would work in pretty much any industry, because the idea of handing out random logins to Google Analytics and believe that your organization is wiser seems Naive tomorrow, perhaps slightly smart today, but …”
Mortensen: AI navigating external scheduling links is beyond current capabilities
“Our solution doesn't have the intelligence to pick up some link in some text, visit that website, look at it through the eyes of, say, something like a human, and figure out, I should probably click one of these links and determine from what I see what time we…”
The other half of the tape: Dennis Mortensen's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 4 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 4
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: YC's Daniel Gross on How YC Can Democratise AI & Reduce Incumbency Advantages, Why ML Enabled Software Will Eat The Software That Ate The World & Whether AI Will Produce Independent Companies or Be Technology within Incumbents
- 20VC: The Power Of A Concentrated Seed Portfolio, Why Operational Value Add Models At Seed Do Not Make Sense & Why We Will See A Shakeout Of Growth Stage Investors with Roger Ehrenberg, Founder & Managing Partner @ IA Ventures
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dennis's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, LaunchBrightly | 3 | 33 | 56% 5/9 | full record on 20VC → |
 TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder & CEO, LaunchBrightly | 1 | 21 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Top Founders → |
 MADLEDGER | Founder & CEO, LaunchBrightly | 3 | 15 | — | full record on the MAD Podcast → |