Ignite AI: Dennis Mortensen on Startup Failure, AI Agents, and Why Boring SaaS Problems Win | Ep268

**Dennis Mortensen** (0:00)
If I speak to any young entrepreneur who's a few years in and drowning a little bit, if I were to give them one piece of advice is, if you can just figure out a way to just not die, that's probably the best way you can somehow win. Because most people just die off naturally, as they couldn't get it to work. Doesn't mean that the idea, team, product, or customers didn't exist. It might all have been in place, but somehow you didn't live long enough to see that flourish. So if you can just arrange for you to not die, you might be winning. And there's plenty of time for where not. I'm just not dying here. I'm just going to keep leaning in. And the more I lean in, the more I become world class at this one thing.

**Brian Bell** (1:05)
Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we have Dennis Mortensen on the mic. He is a Danish-born, New York City-based serial founder who has sold four companies and torched one. He ran enterprise web analytics at Index Tools, sold to Yahoo, predictive media analytics at Visual Revenue, sold to Albrain, and then spent eight years building XAI, which I totally remember from back in the day, an AI scheduling assistant whose email boss, Amy and Andrew Ingram, booked your meetings before most people knew what an AI agent was. He raised 44 million from FirstMark and other VCs, sold it to Bizzabo in 2021, and did this all years before LLM made AI agents a dinner table phrase. He wrote a book, Data-Driven Insights, published by Wiley, taught analytics at UBC, and his first venture, Evonux, am I saying that right? Evonux, a grub hub for Europe attempt in 2002 That's super early, went bust in what he calls a rather expensive MBA. I love that. Today's building, LaunchBrightly, which automates the product screenshots in your help center. And he has very loud opinions about why that unglamorous problem is core AI infrastructure. He is a rare guest who can tell you from scar tissue exactly what building an AI agent costs and what an AI doesn't actually work yet. Thanks for coming on, Dennis.

**Dennis Mortensen** (2:18)
Yeah, looking forward to it.

**Brian Bell** (2:19)
Yeah, so I'd love to, I mean, I kind of gave your background, but I'd love to hear the, you know, between the lines, what's your origin story and backstory?

**Dennis Mortensen** (2:27)
I think you did a very good version. There's the short version that I'll add to my title on LinkedIn. Then there's the four-hour version, which you can call my mom for, which is spectacular. And then I think that's the kind version you just did. But the origin story is probably me deciding early on that I did not want to be an entrepreneur. All I wanted was to get my CS degree and go work for IBM. So my whole family is the whole kind of nature versus nurture, where entrepreneurs, not in tech, but elsewhere. So my dad, uncles, cousins, what have you. And I see the whole thing up close, what it takes.
And it doesn't matter whether you're in tech or not, it just takes effort when you try to bring something to life. And that whole kind of zero to one story. And I thought, nah, you know what? I want to take my bicycle, go code. IBM had an office in my town, go code at IBM, get home at whatever four, hack away on my laptop, be free on the weekends. And that was the plan. And during university, I did game development. And we can talk about how programming anything have dramatically progressed. And we've certainly taken a step function of late for where perhaps the programming language of the future is English, or even poor Danish English, which I can kind of throw at an LLM and get out reasonably good code. But did that, and the company I kind of worked for went bankrupt, and I ended up for very little money acquiring the assets of that company. So I was just so to put it bluntly, and I hope this is not kind of PG-13, but I was pissed that the year and a half that I've spent along with some other geeks working on this particular title would end up in nothing. So I bought the assets and ended up selling the finished game shortly thereafter, made a few monies. Back then, I thought I made it big.
Now, of course, in hindsight, that was not the case. Hey, I had a few extra monies in my pocket. And I thought, you know what? Let me go start.