Den: AI-native Slack replacement built ground-up for orchestrating thousands of agents alongside human workers

And don't forget to go to vanta. com, addio. com, numeralhq. com, adquick. com, aidsleep. com, wand. Go to every website. Look at the bottom bar. What's going on, guys? Hey, how you doing? Dan, what's happening? Good to have you on the stream. Nice to meet you. Welcome to the show.

Uh, can you introduce your yourself for the stream? Uh, I'm Linus. Linus. Pleasure. It is a pleasure. Is that you want me to go into any more detail? Uh, sure. Let's get Justin's name. My name is Justin. And what are you guys building? We're building Dan. Okay. What is Den? Dan is cursor for knowledge workers.

Break it down. We're an AI native Slack replacement. Um, if you if you load up the app, you'll see a bunch of AI agents and Slack replacement. Slack replacement. Okay. So, I I'm not in Slack at all. I'm just in Den when I'm doing knowledge work. Okay. Uh, what is the typical knowledge worker like experience with Slack?

Because I feel like there's a lot of just like managerial overhead status updates that are going on. This sounds like something a little bit more mature than that. What What am I doing in Den?

In Slack, there's a lot of kind of lost threads, a lot of like kind of lost information um and just a lot of communication ultimately, but no actions. With Den, we're all about actions and we work backwards from um you know what what you need to get the task done. So, give me an example. Yeah.

So, I guess in Slack, you would be asking uh you know, your coworker for how many how many users signed up last month. Um that's going to be like an async process where like literally just happened in the Slack.

I was in one of my Slacks I'm in was like, "Are we reviewing last week's numbers or the week before or the week before was a developer on a team talking to the CEO? " Yeah, for sure. Um, you know, in in Slack, that task might just get lost in the background.

You don't know who like what the status is in Den and AI agents just going to pick that up. Um, so, you know, we're all about like that multiplayer aspect. Um, your inputs are building the agents and kind of configuring your tools and configuring the tasks.

Um and then we kind of provide like the multiplayer environment where you might be orchestrating like thousands of AI agents. Um yeah, talk about uh the path of AI agents, long running agents. We have this idea of like 10-minute AGI, 20-minute AGI. 03 Pro seems to work for 13 minutes every time you kick something off.

Uh are you putting these things on cron jobs? Is there is there some sort of like long running process that can run through my den installation and say, "Hey, like every single hour I want you to check on things that aren't getting done. " Pretty much.

We break it down into three things like you've got your ad hoc tasks. You've got your Yeah. Crunch job task, your scheduled tasks, and then you also have things that kind of respond to triggers. It's like, "Oh, hey, run this task whenever I receive an email. " Got it. Okay.

Uh there there was this idea I think it was in AI 2027 around the idea that like an AI would just spin up a Slack instance and use that to AI would use Slack to coordinate with each other and and I can see a world where that makes sense.

What was the catalyst for you guys to realize that you you needed to kind of rethink the communication stack from the ground up to serve agents over you know first and foremost over over humans.

I guess what we realized was that there's tools like Zapier, tool like tools like relevance AI, but they're external to your communication source. Knowledge workers spend more than 80% of their time in Slack and Notion. And so we wanted to bring the agents to where people actually did the work.

And the most important thing is now the agents can escalate tasks to like the CEO, the head of customer success, whereas they couldn't before because they were siloed. So we had to build it from the ground up for agents in that way.

Do you think we'll still call uh ourselves knowledge workers in 10 years if knowledge is instantly accessible by all machines? Taste workers. There will be taste workers and agent when agency workers cuz knowledge is commoditized now and intelligence is too cheap to meter. Like taste curators. Yeah, exactly.

Taste makers. That's the only job that will remain in the future maybe. Who knows? How how um you guys are creating a platform that other agents can work on top of? How do you rank how do you rank the quality of different agents across categories? Obviously, there's like coding agents.

We're friends with the the cognition team um and and and the factory AI team and things like that. So coding agents are great. Uh I I haven't heard a lot of people saying like I love my AI BDR yet, right?

Maybe there's some use cases, maybe they don't want to talk about it, but like what are the categories that you guys are most excited about? Yeah, deep research is obviously another another category, but um I think it's going to slowly move down like the stack.

I spoke with Shelto Douglas who is a researcher at an recently. Um, we have great like coding agents and kind of math agents because researchers like math and coding. Interesting. But, you know, it's not just a verifiable reward thing. It's that as well. It's that as well.

Um, I think we're kind of building in the infrastructure that's going to allow those like iterations to happen where you do actually get like a really good BDR agent. Um, we're already building like customer success agents that haven't existed before.

Um, because we're providing like the primitives and the building blocks. Um, and I think the verifiability will come. It's just interesting. How's the traction been? What's the roll out? What's the go to market? Go to market is handing out 500 business cards to everyone at demo day.

So, so you want every company here, all the small startups, the the early stage companies. That feels easier than ripping out some massive Slack installation. Right. Exactly. We take a lot of inspiration. Start with Den, stay with Den forever. Got it. Exactly. Okay. Seat based pricing. Yes. Interesting.

Agent based pricing. Yeah. Do the agents have to pay? What about the thousands? Okay. So, the one person company, you're you're cooked. Exactly. Good luck, though. You'll figure it out. I'm sure I'm sure it'll be fine. Have you shared any numbers before this? Yeah. Yeah. I previously started a company when I was 19.

We grew like zero to 5 million AR 50 people series A. Congratulations. Thank you. No, started this 3 months ago now. So, it's been awesome. Awesome. Very cool. 3 months right before I see. There you go. Exactly. What were you doing? Yeah. I mean, Lionus is a beast. He hired me actually at his previous startup.

So I was able to kind of go from like that 500,000 AR to 5 million. Um and we just loved working together. This is what we wanted to spend the next 20 years on. Yeah. Amazing. Fantastic. Thanks so much for hopping on the stream. This was fantastic. Good luck, guys. See you on the next one. And we are ready for our