Dennis Xu | A World Without Folders

Srini Rao: Dennis, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Dennis Xu: Hey Trini, thanks for having

Srini Rao: me. Oh man, it is my pleasure to have you here. I have been wanting to have you as a guest on the podcast for such a long time. You are the co founder of probably what is my favorite app.

In fact, I talk about it so much that people probably think I either work for you guys or that I'm a member of a cult. You're the co founder of Memm, all of which we will get into. But before we get into that, I wanted to start by asking you, what did your parents do for work? And how did that end up shaping and influence the choices you've made with your life and career?

Yeah. Yeah.

Dennis Xu: So my dad was a is a mechanical engineer. And it's funny, he, he has quite the interesting story because he he immigrated to Canada from China and he actually, I grew up wanting to, he wanted to do business, but then when he immigrated, I think my mom forced him to, to Canada he, he decided to go into engineering.

So now he's like a, he works in like the nuclear energy space, way smarter than I am, honestly. And every time I talk to him, I feel like I learn a lot. And then my mom she works in basically in banks, right?

Srini Rao: With what they ended up doing and where your, was your household like a typical Chinese household, typical Indian Jewish household where it's like doctor, lawyer, engineer, as the sort of career advice.

I would say it was,

Dennis Xu: It was typical in many ways and the value of education and just like they they really, they really cared about. But I think they. They were less like, Oh, you have to be a doctor or a, or an engineer. They were more so like my mom really wanted, she made me read a ton of books of just like great historical figures and, kind of leadership and all of that.

And yeah, a lot of stuff around that, but less, less, less of the doctor. Yeah.

Srini Rao: Just from the conversations I've had with you, it seems like, their influence is subtle, but still relevant. When you were thinking about a career, obviously technology has probably changed so much from the time you were starting college to now.

When you went into school, what were you thinking about in terms of potential career paths? And particularly at Stanford, which is like this breeding ground for, founders like yourself.

Dennis Xu: Yeah. Yeah the, I mean my college journey was actually quite interesting.

I I applied to a bunch of American schools. The only school I actually ended up getting into was Stanford. Wait, previously

Srini Rao: that's, how do you get rejected from everywhere but Stanford? So what where did you apply other than Stanford? M i t and Harvard.

Dennis Xu: It was like a lot of the Ivys.

But yeah basically, ended up, I was. It's funny because it was on my birthday or IV day, it's like historically all of the IVs get back to at the same time and That was my birthday in my, in my senior year, and every single one was like a, either, a rejection or a wait list, and Stanford was the next day, but at that point, I was like, okay I guess I'm gonna go to school in Canada which is fine, Canada is some, I didn't know if you grew up in Canada.

I did. I grew up in Canada. I was actually born in New Brunswick, which is really it's, that's real Canada. But I was only there for seven months, so I don't, remember anything there. And then we moved to to, to the Toronto area. So I grew up there and then, moved down here for school.

Srini Rao: You know that I was raised, born, raised in Canada, right?

Dennis Xu: No. Where? What

Srini Rao: part? I grew up in Edmonton for four years. My sister was born in Edmonton. Oh,

Dennis Xu: Edmonton. Really? Yeah. So it's pretty Canada too.

Hockey fan

Srini Rao: or, it's funny, I'm not. But the crazy thing is that Wayne Gretzky used to play on the Oilers when we lived in Edmonton and I used to walk, I saw the Oilers practice in West Edmonton mall.

You just see Gretzky and, the team basically practicing when you'd go to the mall, which at that time was not, it was basically being built. One thing I wonder, particularly if somebody comes into one of our most elite universities in the United States from Canada, what have you seen, particularly in K through 12 education, being raised in a family where education is of high value.

What do you see as the sort of differences, between your peers at Stanford who are educated in America versus yourself being educated? It's

Dennis Xu: there are, I think it depends where they came from. A lot of the people who go to Stanford it's 33 percent of the population like I, at Stanford is from California.

And I would say, a big chunk of those people and also just of other folks that came from these like highly competitive theater schools, right? There's like these high schools where. For a lot of my friends, they said high school was harder than college. And I think, there's some, that's one of like probably the.

Best kept secrets, which is just once you get into Stanford, how easy it is to get a degree from there. But yeah I think I wasn't in that pressure cooker environment necessarily. I was, I think I was much more balanced, I went to a good school. It was a public school in Canada one of the better ones, but it wasn't like, my whole existence was.

Was the SCTs and was like figuring out how to, be, become the president of every club and all of that. So I think basically I had like more of an opportunity to actually be, a kid then a lot of my peers and, my, my first passion was actually basketball.

So really, yeah, it was basketball. I started playing when I was around 10. My parents just. Signed me up for a bunch of sports and then I really fell in love with basketball and, started to play pretty competitively. Wanted to go to the NBA. That didn't end up working but So you would have been like another Jeremy Lin, basically.

When that was happening, that was insane I love, yeah, that was one of the craziest moments of my life, part

Srini Rao: of the reason I am so intrigued by your educational background is because if you look at the way that the narrative around college has basically been distorted, say over the last five, six years with the college admission scandal, with the, pressure cooker environment that you mentioned, I feel like college has become this, just next step that people take without questioning whether they belong there, what the hell they're doing there, what they're going to get out of it.

And particularly in an environment like Stanford, because like when I was in college, which was far before you, the thing is we didn't have access to the kind of knowledge, the kind of information we do, the kind of resources that you do on the internet. The internet was in its infancy when I was in college.

And I still feel like the people go to a lot of these places and they are choosing from the options that are put in front of them and they're blinded by the possibilities that surround them. So if you're talking to freshmen at Stanford who are looking at, okay, how do I make the most out of this college experience or freshman at any university for that matter?

What do you say to them? Because I think there's this tendency to be so caught up in the future that you forget to actually enjoy the present. Like I was the idiot who went to a career fair the third week of school thinking, okay, let me start thinking about this now. And I remember I went in to talk to Anderson Consulting, which is now Accenture.

And the guy tells me we don't hire English majors. I never took another English class again, and I've never interviewed at Accenture. It was the stupidest thing ever. Like we're making decisions on a future we know nothing about.

Dennis Xu: Yeah. Honestly I could not agree more. I think both on the point of just the reality is college is becoming I think at this point it's very much a glorified like a signal, it's like a stamp of approval and from really a lot of in terms of do you learn more in college, right?

I think there are certain topics and there are certain subjects where there, there are things that are really hard for you to actually, self teach or just learn from the internet. And a lot of the time it's because it's really hard to do that to have the discipline to do. I think for, for the most part that, that isn't the case.

I think there's a tweet I saw recently that I wholeheartedly agree with funnily, which is there's so many people going to these, elite institutions and then they just end up all doing the same things, right? They all want to be, become consultants or investment bankers or product managers at, some large tech companies.

And I think one of the probably, best kept secrets at a school like Stanford is it's known for entrepreneurship, but if you actually look at the. The percentage of the graduating class, even CS majors and really people who did a lot of, technology it's tiny, it's a tiny percentage.

And I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of kind of like innate risk aversion that's there that I think end up reflecting what you're expressing right now, right? And I, I think for me the way I think about college, if I were to, do it all over again, I think it's all about the relationships you built, like the deep relationships, that you build.

There's, I think most people don't really understand while they're inside of it that you're never going to be around that many people ever again. And, in such close proximity.

Srini Rao: I think the thing that struck me most about what you said was this notion of innate risk aversion that's almost embedded into these types of environments, which is funny because, these are some of the highest achieving people that, that we get that, produced from our school system.

Yet the thing is, because they're so used to getting straight A's doing well, that risk aversion is just baked into them from the get go. Clearly you decided to do a very risky thing, which is to start a company. Tell me, how do you think about developing that tolerance for risk? Because Yeah. One thing is you are young, right?

Like you don't have a family and kids from what I know, and so you don't have as many responsibilities. And I always say, take the biggest risk when you have the least to lose. But I think that when you are in an environment like that, there's almost an irony to it, right? There's a paradox.

It's here you are surrounded by some of the brightest, most creative, innovative people on the planet. And yet, I'd said this before, that Berkeley is like a breeding ground for conformity in a lot of ways. And it sounds that, like Stanford in some ways is similar. So how do you think about that, tolerance for risk and developing that and building that?

And how do you think about it in terms of older people? Which I realize is a weird question because you're

Dennis Xu: not older. No, a lot of it is if you just think about how people get into these schools. It's it's, I think it's very telling, right? That the way you get into these schools is.

Do you and it's not really by being unique or standing out, they basically they'll say it is, but It's there's in many ways, there's like a formula, right? Do a lot of extracurriculars, you get good grades you get some international awards in, some category, some Olympiad or something like that.

And so everyone just ends up doing the same things. And and then you get to school and a school like Stanford and everyone's still trying to get straight A's and everything like that. And the reality is grades are more of a measure of your willingness.

to do bullshit than it is your intelligence, right? Or your actual problem solving abilities and all of that. And so I think at the end of the day, what happens is, a lot of people who graduate from these schools end up end up not really knowing how to solve problems from first principle is just looking for, okay, how do I game the system?

And how do I, how do I do this? Is, am I doing this the right way? Where, whereas in, if you think about, entrepreneurial settings no one's ever going to give you that feedback, right? Very rarely, maybe your users sometimes, but they're going to get, they're going to give you conflicting signals as well.

I think a lot of it is just. Developing, like how do you develop your innate it's like self confidence and that's, I think a lot of what is missing.

Srini Rao: Yeah. I realized business school teaches you absolutely nothing about running a business and to your point, you're solving problems where there are no instructions for these problems.

There's no book you can read. You have to figure it out because each one of them is unique to you. There are models you can follow and principles, but yeah, I think I see this so often with prescriptive advice. People are like, okay, if I do exactly what this person said, I'll get the result they've got.

**Dennis

,

Xu:** Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what, that's what a school rewards. But the real world doesn't reward that at all. Yeah. The real world, rewards you being, doing something that that's unique, having a unique skill set, delivering a product or service that is differentiated.

And yeah.

Srini Rao: The first part of this question, the answer is probably pretty obvious, but the second part, I wonder about, where do you think that. Being a Stanford graduate in your own life has been both an asset and a liability.

Dennis Xu: Yeah. As an asset the reality is in terms of intellectual horsepower, you're around some of the best people in the world.

And so I think if go there with the idea of, Hey I'm going to learn from these people. And I'm going to, find the best people to learn from and to build, things with, I think that it's a fantastic breeding ground for that. In terms of a liability, I think you end up having a very distorted and developing a very distorted view of reality over the four years that you're there.

I always joke that it's basically a country club. It looks like a country club. I've been there. Believe me. I know. Grass is perfectly trimmed. The bush is, absolutely perfect. And it just like tiny bubble and a huge echo chamber in terms of all of the kind of ideas and ideals that are espoused there.

And so I think, a lot of people, Either end up, bring that to them sorry, with them, into the real world. Or in a lot of cases, they have to adjust and adapt to, to realize, the world is not as, as they expected.

Srini Rao: Yeah. I really appreciate that you brought this idea of a distorted view of reality because I think that's just the nature of being in an elite school.

Like even at Berkeley, like you walk around and go, this is what the rest of the world is like. And then you get out and realize it's wow, people have it way harder than

Dennis Xu: I ever did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Total.

Srini Rao: I gotta ask. Did you ever have a real job? I'm just starting mem and we'll get into mem.

I did. I

Dennis Xu: worked at I work, it's funny. I worked as a PM at Yelp for two years right out of undergrad. Okay. And I, I recently tweeted that I think people should avoid every urge in their body, resist every urge in their body to become a PM right out of college. And I just think it's, it's one of those things where and this is a kind of another, I think, downside of a school like Stanford, which is.

You hear you hear these things like, Oh, being a PM product manager is like being the mini CEO of a company. It's nothing like that. You're not a mini CEO at all. And it's over time it's become this kind of like distorted view. And now everyone who graduates with a CS degree out of Stanford, not everyone, but let's say like actually like most people, they want to become a PM, right?

So I, I did that honestly, mostly because. I needed to as a Canadian, I needed to actually go to a place that would sponsor my visa. And I definitely enjoyed my time at Yelp. I thought it was I learned quite a bit but it's just not in my DNA to be at a large company.

Yeah. Follow the process. You and I

Srini Rao: both have that in common, clearly. All right let's get into talking about them because like I said, I. The way that I talk about men, people think that I'm obsessed with my friends. Do you work for these guys? The half the people who are even in your Slack groups I thought you worked for me.

I was like, you don't work for them. I just happened to be absolutely in love with the product. But yeah, you spent, I've never had a tool where I spend 90 percent of my day using only that. You know what? I do a lot of things, so that should give people an idea, but tell me, what is the impetus for men?

I'm like, what? Was the reason you guys

Dennis Xu: started this? Yeah. Yeah. First of all, my, my co founder and I, we've been best friends for 10 years. I met him in the first week of school at Stanford, and he actually got me into I would say he really got me deep into technology.

Obviously, I was already interested in it. He was someone who had been programming since he was 13 had built countless things before, he arrived in college that real people used. And then we hit it off like really quickly and he brought me into this world of not just, products, but actually like how to build products and all of that.

And over the course of our time the time that we've known each other, we've built so many random little things together from an app that tried to force us to go to class which, which didn't end up working to. The and the Wikipedia game where you start with on, on any page and you figure out the shortest path to any other page.

We tried to, build a program for that, like algorithmically and we also started this I wouldn't call it a real company but in 2015 and, that summer, instead of taking traditional internships we worked on this thing called Rhythmic, which was basically an anonymous posting and polling platform inside of Organizations.

And then we try to sell it to HR, which was a horrendous idea. I

Srini Rao: can see why. And I'm guessing you do too, now that you're running a company. Oh yeah.

Dennis Xu: We had a collective six months of work experience before then. And it was just a disaster, but it was, so many different things we built together.

But one of the things that we just repeatedly kept coming back was this idea of why is it that we produce so much information in our day to day lives, whether it's explicitly produced, right? Like you taking a note or whatever, or just. Implicitly produced through our emails, through our communications nowadays it's even bigger, right?

And our CRMs in our data warehouses, like just everything, this vast amounts of data and we can't actually make use of it at all. In fact, the only people that can make use of it are. Big tech companies that are using it to advertise, and there's all of this information that we actually have access to that we've come across before that we just can't use at the right times when we need it.

And so fundamentally I remember, I distinctly remember being at a restaurant with with Kevin, my co founder. I pulled out my phone and I said, imagine if I gave a person access to my phone right now and they were, they were benevolent, obviously, whatever, they would be able to help me so much, right?

Because I could ask them to do anything for me and they would just be able to use the information that's in there. The text that I'm sending all of that's actually help me accomplish what I wanted. And that's if you think about it that's really what we're, our purpose men, which is how do we maximize the utility of of your information.

And we're starting by essentially building like this you can think of it as like a personal search engine just for you. So Google knows so much about the general world, right? But it knows nothing about you, right? It knows more about Beyonce's birthday. Then it does about your grandma's birthday, right?

So how do how do we reconcile that? And there's more and more information that you're actually producing that only you have access to nowadays, right? So how do we unlock the power of that? That's fundamental to memory.

Srini Rao: It's funny. I actually wrote that down in a note in meme saying, the purpose of Google is to organize the world's information, the purpose of meme is to organize your

Dennis Xu: information.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think a lot of given a lot of the technological changes that have happened, I'm sure, everyone who's listening to this has probably, heard of all the crazy things happen in AI, right now from chat GPT to, just the AI generated images and all of this stuff the really unique opportunity, this is I would say what we're really focused on is if you imagine.

Today, how much effort is required for the typical knowledge worker? And if you think about what a knowledge worker does there's obviously different breeds of knowledge workers and, different types, but you do the same. You do many of the same things. And a lot of that actually involves essentially gardening, right?

It's it's gardening your knowledge base. It's maintaining it. It's, people spend so much time just organizing information, right? But if if we can have computers now, nowadays that can actually understand human language and that's the implication, right?

If you look at these these chat bots and the ability for you to say, Hey, give me an image that is, a flying pig, blah, blah, blah, blah, over the Golden Gate Bridge and an AI can generate that image. Essentially, what that means is these machines can actually understand humans, right?

And if you can have a machine that can understand humans, why do we ever have to organize anything ever again ourselves, right? And that's that's fundamentally what. The world we're going into and I think a lot of, there's there's always going to be people who want extreme control over exactly how their information is organized and all of that.

But I think the reality is, the everyday person, vast majority of the world myself included just, I want to be lazy. I don't want to have to think about how to, how to manage my information and all of that. I just, I want that to happen automatically for me. Yeah. And just be able to

Srini Rao: access it.

So I think that is one of the first hurdles. I remember something distinctly when I was talking to somebody in marketing, maybe even you, and this quote always stayed with me so much so that I actually included it in one of my articles. And you said to me, five years from now, a world without folders will be our default.

People will look at folders like they look at floppy disks now. So talk to me about that idea of a network structure, because I think that when people first come across this idea of network thinking, it's so counterintuitive, and it to me, it's always been one of the strange paradoxes because.

The more that I spent time in mem, the more I started to understand this. I was like, I started reading all these books about, like how information is organized in the brain how the brain works. And I was like, wait a minute. This literally mirrors the way my brain is structured. This is insane.

And yet. It's so counterintuitive because what we've done our entire lives is that we've used linear structures to do nonlinear things. And so I think that hurdle and I think I even told you this, I said in my mind, your biggest hurdle isn't adoption, it's behavior change. It's getting people to change this idea and this perception.

But before we get into that, talk to me about this idea of a world without folders, because I think that is something that when people hear that, they're like, What the hell? I remember somebody, I told somebody this and they're like, no, folders are fantastic. I was like, folders suck. Now that I've used mem for a year and a half, I'm like.

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Srini Rao: Holders have to be the most idiotic way to organize things. And the way I describe it is like people organize information, like going to a different grocery store to buy every item on the list when all they want to do is make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Dennis Xu: Totally. Totally. Yeah. I think the easiest way to think about this is. Really understanding how folders came to be in the first place and the context in, of the world that we lived in when folders were invented, right? So the first folder was was not a digital folder.

It was, it was filing cabinets. And so that was invented in like the 19th century, late 19th century in a. And if you think about that, okay that makes sense. We don't have, these computers that can arbitrarily just index information that you can just retrieve from instantly.

And so you need a, what, the physical incarnation of a filing cabinet. That was actually a huge kind of a huge point of innovation for it in terms of how people organized information. And I think you'll

,

still, you'll walk into most dentist offices today and stuff like that and you'll see these like massive, on the wall, it's like folders, files of various people, right?

And so when, then when computers were invented because people had become so familiar and, from everyone, from doctors to lawyers, just like everyday people to with these filing cabinets that the people who invented the personal computer, they said, okay we're just going to take this morphic, filing cabinet and we're going to turn it into something that is very familiar to people.

And that's ultimately how a folder came to be. And whenever you have, this. Whenever you have new technology that, that arises, a lot of the efforts goes into making it look and appear familiar so that people can actually adopt it. That's about it. But now we're You know, we're half a century in, into computers being a thing and, the computers of today are nothing like the computers of, 50 years ago.

And it, if you look at just how, also this new generation of kids growing up there have been countless articles. The Verge actually did a really interesting one last year about how kids nowadays who grew up with, things like Google Docs or.

Whatever, have no clue what a folder is. They have no clue how to, dig down into this like hierarchical structure and find files within their system. And basically it's because it's not how our brain works, right? And if you don't actually use, if you don't actually use software that forces you to think in folders, if you've never used it before, then you actually don't think hierarchically in that way.

Hierarchy is still. I think it's still important, but just in time hierarchies is important, right? When you have these rigid structures that basically never change or are really hard to change. I think that's where the problem arises. In terms of a world without folders, I think it's just, if you think about like a the last time that you had to decide on a folder structure, how anxiety provoking that is because you just know, Oh, this is probably I'm going to have to change this completely two weeks from now as I acquire new information.

How can you possibly know how you're going to organize something that you haven't even seen before? And so the malleability of of the brain is a really good, I think, analogy where if you look at how the brain works because it's, this network model. If something is no longer relevant you can basically just attach that node from the rest of the network and you can just rewire everything, really quickly.

Whereas in a folder structure that doesn't happen. Yeah.

Srini Rao: No, absolutely. I, that's why I tried to explain this to people when I made that I wrote that post title, why the personal network of knowledge is a new second brain. Because I think that Tiago did amazing work and yet, I remember when I finished my conversation with him, I was like, Tiago, you left out something fundamentally important in this book.

He's I know. He was like, the network thought. I was like, yeah. He was like, that's the next, and even Tiago himself said, this is the next iteration of the second brain. Because the second brain concept is brilliant, but I realized the biggest issue with it Is that it requires ongoing maintenance and organization.

And to your point, the biggest limitation I saw was that once you start to add more and more information, it becomes more and more of a mess to manage, not scalable. But one thing I wonder about this, when you think about the organizing information, like people use complex databases, suddenly it just occurred to me, as you were saying, I was like, wait a minute, could hospitals be using this to manage patient records?

Is this. going to totally change the way that we, manage these complex databases because suddenly everything becomes very simple. It's like you create a record and everything is linked to it. I, even when I was showing this to my dad last night, he was kind of jaw dropped at what it could do. I was like, yeah, you want information on the polymerase chain reaction.

He's a virologist. He was like, this is crazy. I was like, I know.

So I remember what I, I had asked you, you said, other note taking apps are not our competition. Folders are a competition. I think that you made a good point in these hierarchical structures are deeply embedded even inside organizations.

Like I think about databases, right? Complex databases like CRM systems. So what is the future of that going to look like when, you layer networks on top of it? Yeah.

Dennis Xu: That I'll explain our vision for the future. So if you think about. All of this information that you interact with, within, let's say within an organization, different people interact with salespeople, interact with the CRM customer support interacts with Zen desks, recruiters interact with an ATS, right?

These like all of these different things. None of these. Things can actually talk to each other, right? They end up being these, these silos where information essentially goes to die. And so I think the important piece of all of this is you actually need a structure where you can have and again, I think this is, this all happens in the background, right?

And this is, I think, truly where. The magic of mem is and is going I don't think we're really close yet. Honestly, I think we've made good progress, but we're not really close. And really you should be abstracting away all of this complexity of the underlying databases and everything, and just be able to give people this, almost like this black box where they can just throw things in there or, they can integrate their.

Email or whatever data source that they want to actually, make use of and then not have to think about at all, okay, is this even how, even have to think about this as like a graph, right? It's just, it doesn't matter if I just throw this piece of information over there. It's if you told a person, right?

Imagine you could just. Okay. Tell a person everything that you knew and e and give them everything you had access to. You don't have to tell them, Hey, this is how you should remember things. They just end up remembering things. , although, humans are actually, have horrible memories and this is why computers are actually helpful.

But that's the experience that that we're built, right? And it's very much of a

Srini Rao: You obviously, you don't have to preach, convince me you're preaching to the choir. Given that, I've built a course about this, I've created YouTube, videos about this, I'm basically trying to convert every person I talk to into using this.

Let's talk about use cases because, we've been explaining this at a theoretical level. I'm glad. And the other thing that, I'll preface this by saying, and Tiago and I were talking about this as well, is that some of this is very hard to grasp because we're talking about it in audio and you have to see it in action to really understand its power.

And more than that, you have to experience it. So we're talking about the network. There's one thing that I realized that was really difficult for people to grasp. And I, this is a realization I had when I was trying to help my old roommate use mem. And he was really overwhelmed and confused. He said, I don't get it.

And it finally hit me. I was like, you know why you don't get it? You don't have enough information in here. You need a critical mass of knowledge before the network works. So I always say it's like your brain, but it's a version of your brain that has amnesia and your job is to restore its memory. But let's talk about use cases.

Like, how are people using this? Because I'm sure there are use cases you haven't even told me about. I remember you were telling me about, biotech companies I can tell you, you talk about my use cases all day long, but I want to hear other ones.

Dennis Xu: Sure. Sure. There's there's people are using this kind of for it always amazes me to find kind of new use cases and just all of the different ways that people are using this right now.

I think very tangibly, here's a very specific one. This is actually a product we launched recently that I know, you've been a big fan of, but. It's, let's think about smart write and edit, right? So fundamentally what it is is you can think of it as it's this like AI assistance where it is capable of producing entirely, new writing or editing existing writing that you have inside of mem in a way that actually takes in the context of everything that is inside of your mem knowledge base.

So if you've, what we'll see is. We'll see, let's, people who are in, in, in marketing, they'll have a bunch of their blog posts that they produced inside of mem, for their company. And then now you can actually use this and you can say, okay, cool. Write me something about this new topic, but in the same style as the other blog posts that I've written before, right?

And now you, it can also then integrate existing kind of knowledge, not from blog posts, but just from, the company knowledge base and actually produce like really interesting outputs and really interesting writing at which I know you've seen before and you're. Oh

Srini Rao: I'm not a fan.

I'm a super fan. I'm a fanatic. What I will tell you is I'm, one of these people who tries every new thing, every new tool. And I've stuck with mem for God knows how long. And at this point, I remember I told you, I was like, when I spoke to your investors, I was like, you guys would be crazy not to invest in this company.

And my life will fall apart if you don't invest in this company because I've become so dependent on it. I was like, I can't live without this now. That's how integral it is to my workflow. And not only that, up until now, when I'd seen AI tools produce writing, I was like, this is very general. It doesn't sound like me.

But what blows my mind consistently is that it does sound like me. I've just to give people examples of some of the crazy things, and I'll include a link to the video. Tutorial that just went live today in the link for this episode, I've been compiling lists of links. Like yesterday, I was like, give me a list of the 10 most popular TED talks.

And it literally just gave me a bulleted list, right there with the hyperlinks or, I had this list of books of Amazon, that I read in 2022, I was like, give me the hyperlinks for all the books mentioned in this note. And it just instantly spits them out. What I realized was that this wasn't a replacement for creativity.

It was just taking the most tedious aspects of knowledge management out of my day to day. I think the entire best of 22 social media campaign was done using this smart right feature where we looked at all our transcript. I was like generate. It's 10 social updates for every one of these transcripts done in seconds.

And I remember talking to you the day this came out because when you showed it to me, I was like, this is the final bottleneck that has prevented me from being able to promote content on social media because I don't want to spend time on social media. But the other thing that I think you, I want to emphasize here, and I want to hear your take on this as well, is this is the ultimate deep work tool because when you are no longer looking for information in a thousand places.

It drastically reduces the number of context shifts that you have to deal with. I don't I'm literally in mem all day, which is why I'm always stunned. It's like, why do you have a Slack group? How come you don't have a mem group? Yeah,

Dennis Xu: I think that's going to be in the cards.

Srini Rao: That's why I started one, so I could understand how it worked. And, you're in our mem group.

Dennis Xu: Wow. Yeah. And, just digging into, a few more use cases, right? I've seen, for example, there, there are lawyers who, and this is like one of the really interesting, pieces where for any profession where your job is like, Oh, I'm, I need to make like these weird connections, right?

And between things that might not be obvious. So for a lawyer, it might be like, Hey, And there's this case that I'm working on right now, and I need to find like precedents that I could use that might matter. And historically, that kind of like search or discovery problem, searches is, has only been keyword based search.

Like even Google today, it's like a keyword, right? If you search something, a word in the wrong way, you won't find what you're looking for. But a lot of the same technology that. That powers smart, write and edit is also powers this thing that we call similar maps, which essentially across everything that you know, from the maps that you write from, the emails that you have from, the links that you save, the things that you read, all of that we can just in time essentially surface the most relevant piece of content for you.

So if you're, let's say you're a lawyer and in the near future, you're going to be able to load in. Like a lawyer data set of all of, the court cases that have ever happened in the United States, for example or you're a biologist and a researcher and you'll be able to load in all of the research papers

,

from, from archive, or something like that. Then as you're actually producing a piece of work this deep work that you're describing where you're really diving into a topic imagine a, just a proactively helpful assistant that can say, Hey, Based on what you're writing right now, this might be an interesting thing for you to reference, right?

And we can pull that not only from, the web at large and like everything that exists in the public internet, but also your organizations or your own unique knowledge and the things that you've actually acquired yourself, right? So people talk about data all the time and people talk, Oh, it's this like data advantage.

We have this proprietary knowledge. But that's only true if you actually make use of it. And it's only true if, while you're actually producing information, you can actually make use of it. And that's one of the hardest problems of today because now organizations are producing.

And so how do you connect the right piece of information, knowledge, or even person to to the work that's being done?

Srini Rao: I can tell you this. So I, when I do market research surveys, I realized, they all go into a spreadsheet and in the past it would take some skilled data analytics person to make sense of it and say, okay, distill this into actionable insights.

And I remember showing this to you. I said, I took a bunch of answers from survey questions and I basically created customer avatars from those questions. I created summaries from those questions. I had it rewrite copy for a landing page based on those answers. Recently I was like, okay, generate some ideas for video tutorials based on the survey data.

I literally took probably three or four interviews that I did with my own students. I was like, okay, what are the biggest problems these students have? Summarize them. And I remember I sent this to you and I was like, this is insane. And then I remember the other one was like, Hey, do a recap of my year.

That one was a little bit inaccurate because I didn't put all my tasks in a memo. Although I'm starting to do that now, finally. But I think to your point, the ability to do something with all this information is really where mem shines above everything else that I've used. And I've used it all.

It was just one of those things. And I think, like I said, it took me about two months before I saw the magic. And I, and that's the thing that even, it's so hard with the course that I teach is you have to get to the end of it in order to see what it does. And I remember the, one of my students who was like one of my top students who finished the course, I asked her.

She said everything clicks when you get to the end. So you need to emphasize that throughout the course because you have to build this network out. That's what I think people miss when they see this because it starts out as this blank slate. And not only that, you're not organizing anything people like how am I supposed to find anything?

I was like, that is the whole point. You don't have to worry about

Dennis Xu: that ever. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of I think that's. Like a great point. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff we're working on there to really make that turn that from what might now be like a two month process where, someone has to essentially hope and believe and have faith into something where, you know, in the very And Right.

In the first five minutes, we make it really easy for you to connect the things that you care about and do that. Yeah, and I think, you were telling me about some really interesting use cases and I think where this becomes like really powerful and where we're starting to see this like more and more is where it really gets deeply integrated into your existing workflows.

So going from things like, Oh, taking a a lot of people now record their meetings and have these like odd audio transcripts. And going from a transcript like directly to a blog post that is written in your style and we can, extract the relevant insights and all of that.

There's some really interesting things that are developing there. And I think it's a lot of the stuff, obviously some of the stuff we're working on, but overall, I would just say how this market is developing is really going to dramatically change how people work. Yeah. Yeah.

Srini Rao: Talk to me about the aspects of being a founder that I think people tend to glorify, right? Like people probably read the press, they don't see the reality. Oh, if these guys are, you 23 million round of funding. Dennis is going to be a billionaire. That's, I think the default, but you and I both know that's not the reality of running a company at all.

And I think that people tend to misinterpret the reality. It, what are the ups and downs? Managing your psychology, dealing with things like, are there moments where you're just like, man, this is problematic? What are the things you deal with? Like mentally as a founder,

Dennis Xu: It's funny.

It's funny. They're, just last week there were, there's some, Wells Fargo I hate banks and all of this, but there was a snafu where they I logged in and I just saw zeros in my account, not like zeros following a number just zeros, cause they, they closed my account cause, long story short, my parents opened, helped me open the account when I was just coming to school here.

And they recently instituted a policy where it's if you if you have anyone who lives outside of the U S on your account, we're going to close it. Okay. Anyways I think, people don't really realize there's a lot of your company raising a lot of money actually doesn't mean anything in terms of you, there are, of course certain founders who will who will treat that money like it's their money.

And yeah, I wouldn't recommend that. It

Srini Rao: raises stakes. Like now you're on the hook, man. Yeah.

Dennis Xu: Yeah. And I think there are like, for me the biggest thing is I enjoy the agency of. What I call radical agency, which is no matter what happens, I know that I had maximum control over the outcome, over what happened, where if I, if things don't end up working out, I can blame myself.

I don't have to blame some external force, right? As much as possible, obviously there are some things that are still left to chance, many things, right? I think it's, I think it's less than what people actually really think in the grand scheme of things. But That is to me, it's the most important thing.

It's being able to actually essentially, the corny way of saying it is control my own destiny. And I love that. That's one thing. And then the other thing is just feeling like you're at the forefront of the very forefront of technology and what and essentially bringing.

This technology to the world. Yeah. Having a maximum impact. Yeah. Yeah that, that's like what gets me up, every day. I

Srini Rao: love the fact that you didn't mention anything about money. Yeah. And everybody says this over and over again is this cannot be about the money.

And I remember talking to you. If you want

Dennis Xu: to make a lot of money, there are. A lot of better ways. There are a lot of better ways to make that in a way more guaranteed manner. Yeah.

Srini Rao: The other thing I think that struck me, I remember when I talked to the team that made the investment, I remember they called me and I was like, look, I'm like, I don't know any founder who will get on a zoom call with a customer on Christmas Eve and help them fix a problem.

Like I remember that to this day, I never forgot that. And I think the thing that always impressed me about you was a combination of Insane humility and work ethic. Cause I remember even when we put that post up, you're like, Hey, don't make me Srini, can you make a correction? And change me to the co founder.

And I was like, and that, that always stayed with me, like the level of humility and just insane work ethic that I've seen from you. I think.

Dennis Xu: Thanks Srini. Yeah. Where does that come from? Honestly, I think part of it is just survival instincts, as a startup, like no one.

When you're building something from scratch, the default is people don't care, right? And I think this is something a lot of people don't understand either. It's people are worried that people are going to hate their thing. That's actually one of the better outcomes. The worst outcome is no one cares and that's the default outcome, right?

And so I think the effort that's required also, to get someone who uses, who uses an existing product to solve a problem in their lives. To go and switch over to yours, I think is just it's gigantic. It's a lot to ask for from a user. And I think at the end of the day. You have to pull out all the stops for that.

So I think that's one thing I think, probably another piece of it just comes from a lot of the people that I think I grew up really admiring and especially coming from like a sport ground and really going deep there where, where the gym rats, or the people who just left it all out on the floor.

And I think honestly, that's a big piece of what's missing in Silicon Valley nowadays, which is. You can see the professionalization of tech, right? Where I, this you know, this happened with finance, back in the day when it was like the sexiest thing to do, which was people realized, oh I People didn't care about the thing.

They just realized they could make a lot of money doing it. And so you had all these tourists, I call them tourists come in. And I think at the end of the day, like that's that's a lot of what's happening right now. And I'm just trying to do my part in, in, in showing people, Hey, I think this is the right way to do it.

You have to have real passion for the thing you're doing. You have to really care about it. And if you don't, then you probably shouldn't be doing it.

Srini Rao: Like I said, I remember when I started the mem consulting business, I was just like I'm solving my own problem. That's the only reason I'm starting this business.

I'm this is just interesting to me. I don't know where it's going to go. It's a little experiment. And here we are a year later and a thousand subscribers on a YouTube channel. He's been friends. Like you started another business. I was like by accident. Yes, but it's the flywheel because I managed every other aspect of my other business inside of mem now.

Dennis Xu: Yeah. Yeah. That's great to hear. Yeah.

Srini Rao: This has been awesome. I, like I said I just, I knew I wanted to share you with my audience cause I've been just, beating them over the head endlessly with why I think this is the greatest thing ever. And I figured, you know what, instead of me telling you why it's great, why don't I let the founder tell you why it's great.

He can probably talk more articulately about it, but I want to finish with one final question, which is how we finish all of our interviews. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

I think it

Dennis Xu: is, I think it just comes down to what I describe as radical agency. I think it's, it's people who refuse to accept that they have no control over. their lives and the world around them, and that they can change things. I think like one of, one of my favorite quotes of all time is, it was basically a quote that says everything in the world around you is w it was built by people who are no smarter than you.

And all of these decisions right are changeable and you have the power to change. I think to me, that's like my life model. And I think Those are the people that are barring your term become a mistake. Amazing.

Srini Rao: Like I said, I have wanted to share you with our audience for a very long time.

I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us. Where can people find out more about MEM, about you and everything

Dennis Xu: else you're up to. Yeah. So mem, go to mem. ai. It's five, re letter domain followed by ai. So it should be relatively easy and yeah, that's it. Yeah. And if you

Srini Rao: want to learn more, you can also check out my YouTube channel.

I'll include a link to tutorials and a bunch of other stuff in this interview. We even wrote an ultimate guide to building a second brain in mem. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show. With that,