Dieter

Building

[Dieter @ddmskr]

Most companies hear from consumers once a year. Google hears from them continuously.

They’ve run 20,000+ AI-moderated interviews with @ConveoAI across seven European countries, and the program is still expanding.

Pablo Perez from their EMEA insights team explains how 👇

[Dieter @ddmskr]

It's official: Friday is the favourite day of the week at @conveoai, because it's when more interviews happen than any other day of the week.

Research has always run on office hours, so I expected things to wind down going into the weekend. Instead, Fridays brought in about 1.4x the interviews of a Monday.

When a study launches on a Friday, it just keeps running through the weekend, because people answer whenever it suits them. By Monday morning, the typical Friday study is 93% done.

So a team can launch on Friday afternoon and spend Monday morning reading what their customers actually said. That kind of speed changes how quickly a business can act on what it learns, without anyone on the team working the weekend.

[Dieter @ddmskr]

Every engineer has the same AI tools now. The gap between the best engineers and everyone else has never been bigger.

A really good engineer who applies AI well can now produce 100x, even 1,000x what they used to. The ones who get there stop being the bottleneck. They set up loops that run on their own.

On our team at @conveoai, AI agents keep shipping code around the clock, even while we sleep. That's pushed our engineering talent bar way, way up.

It's also what tips people our way when an offer is close. If you're an engineer and you're not building with AI every day right now, you're falling behind really fast.

[Dieter @ddmskr]

Not long ago, @conveoai was a handful of people in Antwerp. Today, we have offices across Europe and the U.S., and we work with more than 400 enterprises, including 50+ of the Fortune 500.

This week at Tectonic in Ghent, I swapped founder stories with Manu Vanderveeren from Spott.

Here are three things I’d tell any founder starting out:

👉 Early on, hire people who can grow into the job, because nobody knows yet what the job will look like next year. Later, add people who’ve done it for years. You need both.

👉 Start looking for senior leaders months before you need them. By the time it hurts, you’re already late.

👉 When you open in a new country, send a co-founder. Hendrik Van Hove moved to New York to head up our office there, because whoever goes first sets the culture.

I’m proud of Conveo’s Belgian roots. The next few years are about showing the world what a company from here can do.

[Dieter @ddmskr]

I asked @paulg at the @ycombinator Founder Retreat last week if we could find some time to talk through a project I'm working on at Conveo. I figured I’d get a 30-minute slot a few weeks out, maybe.

He asked: “Do you have your laptop with you?” Yes. “Great. Let’s do it right now.”

We ended up going for an hour on the spot.

PG has nothing left to prove. He could have spent that time catching up with old friends at the event. He chose to sit down with a founder and dig into the details. What a legend.

That’s the thing about great builders. The itch to build never goes away, even when it’s someone else’s company.

And the best time to help someone is almost always right now, not “let’s find a slot.”

(As for what was on that laptop screen, keeping it under wraps for now, but you’ll see it very soon.)

[Conveo.ai @ConveoAI]

"We want to interview 300 consumers in the UAE... By next week."

Finding good participants is hard. Too many vendors. Inconsistent quality. Lost time.

Data Diggers is now live on Conveo. Our 10th panel partner. Adding 2M+ participants across 30+ markets. B2C and B2B and very strong in the Middle East.

That brings Conveo's recruitment network to 250M+ participants globally, alongside Cint, Toluna, Rakuten, Bilendi, Norstat, Sago, NewtonX , Respondent io, and User Interviews.

Book directly from the platform. One workflow. No extra vendors.

Maximize quality, trust, and coverage.

Welcome to the ecosystem, DataDiggers 🤝

[George Journeys @GeorgeJourneys]

So, basically, if Anthropic was not a US company, we’d be facing zero days with multiple unknown points of attack on virtually all of our systems to an adversary who developed this capacity before us.

[Conveo.ai @ConveoAI]

If you grow fast, things break.

Servers go down. Security gaps open. Cloud costs spiral.

The fix is not a tool. It's a person.

A really reliable person.

Hiten Kacha just joined Conveo as IT Manager. 18 years across every topic that matters.

He knows what he's doing.

His job: keep everything running. Secure. Scalable. Invisible.

When Hiten does his job well, nobody notices. That is the point.

We noticed when we hired him.

Welcome to the team. 🧡

[Vadim @VadimStrizheus]

Maturing is realizing that Tony Stark was a vibe-coder.

[gaut @0xgaut]

"yea so i do my plan mode in claude code, just to get my thoughts on paper, then I ask it to write the prompt for codex, then I send it in codex, let it cook, and I have claude critique the output"

[Dieter @ddmskr]

@jesslivingston @garrytan That’s crazy. @t_blom should write a book about this.

[david friedberg @friedberg]

free speech. but we’ll shoot you.
something is deeply broken in the west. if we don’t fix it, eventually everyone could be ushered at gunpoint to sign the proclamations of the Truth Ministers.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

"We worked in the shadows on a 1500 page bill and then some random unelected citizen can point out how it's full of bullshit and blow everything up?"

Inject it into my veins.

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

YC S24's @ConveoAI is an AI-powered platform that conducts and analyzes voice and video interviews, helping businesses gather deep customer insights at scale—quickly and efficiently.

https://t.co/myCY5ERH0z

Congrats on the launch, @ben_de_smet_, @vh_hendrik + @DieterMesmaeker!

[HVH Accelerate🇧🇪🇺🇸 @vh_hendrik]

The @ycombinator Sunday pace for @ConveoAI
Waking up at 6am
Working till 6 pm
Team gym session

[HVH Accelerate🇧🇪🇺🇸 @vh_hendrik]

Excited! @ycombinator

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Sure would be ironic if civilization ended because of a fight over browser/search market share

[Sam Altman @sama]

a new version of moore’s law that could start soon:

the amount of intelligence in the universe doubles every 18 months

[Dave @dmvaldman]

In 2019 I was one of those chuckling in the audience.

Each year I laugh less and less.

"You can laugh, it's alright. But it is what I actually believe is going to happen." - @sama

Looking forward to an even more serious 2023.

[Antonio García Martínez @antoniogm]

Most of tech Twitter this week playing with the @OpenAI chatbot.