“Every small business should run itself” | Lassie with a16z

Alex Rampell (a16z): I would actually argue that the world didn't get that much more efficient with software because all that software did was like take HR like did Peopleoft and then workday make HR efficient make make HR departments more efficient like I don't think so because the same number of people worked in HR for the exact same size company in like 1950 as probably 2000 and instead of using filing cabinets that are you know that are guarded by Stein and Frederick you know making sure that nobody breaks into the HR files. Now you have an IT department and a CISO to make sure nobody hacks into the IT files or the you know the HR filing cabinet. So nothing really got more efficient.

Alex Rampell (a16z): What you can now do with software is it can do it can edit the filing cabinet, right? It's no longer just the dumb storage. It's actually like the smart implementation of changes against those things. So like if it's HR, let's do a background check, right? Right? Or let's do an onboarding or let's explain the benefits to this person. If it's accounting, what do you do with the financial statements? Like imagine I'm a dentist and I see I have all these overdue invoices and I can look up look up in QuickBooks. What do I do? Well, I might want to call and say please pay me. Like that's what the filing cabinet should be doing and not just giving you the information. So it just turns out that the work is orders of magnitude bigger than the storage of information that the work is done on. Um so that that's really the been the thesis and that you know you need the technology to catch up so it can actually do it. ... this massively expands the market size. And if you think about fintech, fintech massively expanded the size of many non-financial markets because now you could you could bundle in financial products with non-financial products. ... fintech made the market much much bigger for software because of this bundling effect. Um, and that pales in comparison to now software doing the job of labor because it's like, yeah, fintech made it a little bit bigger, but now instead of just being a dumb pipe for data or a dumb storage of data and instead of just like charging incrementally more by bundling in, you know, financial processing, now we can do work and we can charge for work and we can charge for work at a way that is cheaper than humans, better than humans. But I think both of those sell the opportunity short because in many cases you can't even find a human.

Stein (Lassie co-founder): Yeah. I think three steps like the end goal here is that uh every small business should run itself, right? And the busy work is done by uh agents. uh we want to build agent for the business that then will interface with the personal agent of a consu consumer highly likely that then will interface with an agent at the insurance company or other parties that the business needs to interface and interact like with. Uh but step one is to Alexis's point like there are 160,000 dental practices in the US alone $200,000 in labor that Dr. Sloop and others can't find. So like um serving that market first. You're looking at a $1 billion in like a recurring revenue as a market um so we're that's like step one and then uh likely like we will pick another doctor office type um that like is not well served and has a big temp um and and needs consumer-l like product right because what we discussed a big part of not this you get the AI to work 95% accurateish it needs to really work and the onboarding needs to be as simple as onboarding on Coinbase. um or stripe. Um so like it will likely be another like doctor office type like um and then [sighs] uh the last uh part there is I think uh we've then trained AI agents uh to like run the small business and all small businesses at an abstract level like have a system of record they need to read and write into. Um they all have customers in doctor offices they happen to be patients but it's interacting and transacting around payments. You need to book appointments. So I think the end goal is if we served all the the doctor offices that we help all the small businesses across the world because we're just the best in you know building AI agents that uh salt of the earth people or people in Iowa and Paduka Kentucky and hopefully in Amsterdam like down the line where I'm from um and Germany Hamburg where Frederick is from can can start like using as well.