Dearflow co-founders on moving past prompts, how tech can free up thought, and why user understanding is key to the future of AI

How often have you wished for a personal assistant that could organize your calendar, take care of admin, remind you of important meetings, respond to emails, help you prepare research, and notice the little to-dos you might otherwise overlook? It’s time you met Dearflow. (Caveat: you’ll still have to make your own coffee.)?

Co-founders Henry Diep and Benjamin Drury, just 23- and 21-years-old respectively, are seeking to make good on the initial promise of technology: an AI that effortlessly saves us time and enables us to focus on more creative, strategic, and interesting work.

Both Henry and Benjamin got the building bug at a young age but took very different paths to becoming founders. Henry had been hoping to become a monk until he got his first laptop at 16 and tech suddenly changed his life. He chose to skip college and go straight to building products like an IoT device for rice farmers and hand sanitizer for hospitals, and gained a lot of experience freelancing in product and technical roles.

Benjamin started building software projects as a kid with the support of his dad and uncle to connect his gaming world with real life. At just 14-years-old, he started taking an economics and IT undergrad degree alongside his high school education, graduating from both at 18, all the while teaching himself how to code.?

Techstars Berlin sat down with the co-founders to learn how they’re combining their skills to build Dearflow, why the perfect product might be one you don’t have to use, and where AI might take us in the future.?

Hi Henry and Benjamin! Can you explain Dearflow??

Dearflow is what we call the proactive productivity partner. The way it works is very simple. Right now there are plenty of cool widely-used AI tools but you have to spend a lot of time prompting and requesting.

So we started with a very basic idea: what if an AI was smart enough to know what you want, anticipate that, and get things done for you even before you ask? Let me give you an example. Before this call today, our assistant tells you:?

“You have a call with Benjamin and Henry. Do you want me to prepare something for you?”?

In this case, the AI is the one who starts the conversation. You don’t have to prompt it.?

So how did you come up with this idea??

Henry: We actually came to Techstars with a slightly different product: a workflow automation platform. And it was doing pretty well but we quickly realized [that] where AI falls down is that people don’t understand its full limitations or capacities.?

So we thought: what if the tool is the one who tries to understand you and tries to do the work instead of the other way around?

We believe this will be extremely valuable not only for business executives, but for every knowledge worker or employee who has to deal with daily administrative tasks.?

So where is your focus right now??

Henry: Our first focus is administrative tasks that involve inboxes and calendars because these tasks are very tedious and can be automated fairly easily.

We just switched to this direction a few weeks ago so it's very new to us. But so far we’ve got our product up and running and since launching three weeks ago, 300 users have already had their first call with our AI assistant, Flora. You can have your own call with Flora here.?

Now that you’ve changed your product, have you realized any major challenges??

Henry: We have a quite good idea of the directions this can go because we’re so deep in the AI rabbithole. One of the current dilemmas of the AI industry is that it’s very new and a big shift for a lot of people. So it’s difficult when you’re talking to users because, like Henry Ford said, if you ask people what they want, they’ll say they want a faster horse, not a car.?

So in the AI world right now, you have to balance between user needs and product innovation. Because it can happen that the product is incredibly capable, but the user might never imagine it could work like that.

We want to take an educated leap of faith and try to be the first ones to tap into this and bring the power of AI to a lot more people. We’re going to do that by making it incredibly simple.

You say you’re deep in the AI rabbithole so I’d love to hear your perspective on how you think things will change in the next 5 years and how we’ll see AI integrate into our lives.?

Benjamin: I think AI and LLMs will force us to rethink how certain processes work. An example I always give is that when we use LLMs/AI to generate everything, a professor will use it to write a script and generate questions to send to students and then students will use it to write the answers which the professor will then check with an AI — we’ve run through the same process we’ve had before but this time we gained nothing as people. If anything, we’ve just used people’s resources and time. So I think that digital processes and the way we think about them has to completely change.?

Henry: I think what’s different with AI is the invisibility of the change. In my opinion, our adoption of AI has been invisible to most people because many big companies have started to use AI in the background, not just for chat products, and it’s getting better results at enormous scale. But when you look around, everything seems normal.

My hope is that AI can gift people who don’t have technical ability a new tool they can use to build new, better futures. It could remove barriers to access and they won’t be constrained by a lack of information. And I hope that will enable more authentic thought. Because with GenAI built in, general consensus is going to be very similar, but maybe that will allow truly original thought to shine.?

Finally, what’s something you each learned from this founding journey and your experience at Techstars Berlin??

Henry: I think for me it’s been really cool to get to know Benjamin more on a personal level and to learn how to work better as a team. We already worked well together but it’s improving over time. And also it’s been great to build so many great relationships with other founders and mentors which I think are relationships that will stay with us.?

Benjamin: I agree with everything that Henry said but I’ve also learned something that feels a little contradictory to what you might think: you don’t have to work 24/7. Obviously, as a founder, you have to work a lot more than you would in a normal job but it doesn’t really feel like work as you have so much fun doing it. I think I learned indirectly through seeing what other founders do that you have to give yourself time to relax and see your friends, too.?

A really nice and very important point to end on. Thank you both so much and best of luck with Dearflow!