Lassie had to build agents that work without a human in the loop because small businesses have nobody to use a tool—the staff who could operate software have already quit.
Stein and Frederick explain that unlike enterprise software where humans operate the tools, Lassie's agents must run entirely on their own because the small businesses they serve can't find or keep staff (the 'Betty problem'). ✦ AI generated
Frederick · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-30 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 18:08
A huge difference between SMBs in general and and enterprises is that in SMBs there's nobody to to use the tools. Like you can you can build a tool, but uh there's nobody sitting there that's going to use it... If you take over a job uh reconciling all the insurance payments, interacting with the patient to kind of like bill um it needs to like work. Um so that was like technically like hard to do. Uh, which also makes this super interesting from a technology perspective because you all of a sudden need to build autonomous systems that run on its own and don't have a human in the loop.
verbatim transcript · starts at 18:08
17:52that most of your growth is word of mouth so it's dentists recommending it to other dentists. >> They do. >> How did you approach the technical build process for that? What was it like getting the product to I think you guys are at 98% automation. Like walk us through kind of that that journey. Yeah, I think um a big part of it was us actually spending the time in offices
18:12doing the work ourselves. Um I don't think we could have built uh built a product that works as well as it does if we if we didn't know how to do the job. >> Um I think another part we already kind of talked about it, but I think a huge difference uh between SMBs in general and and enterprises is that in SMBs there's nobody to to use the tools. Like
18:32you can you can build a tool, but uh there's nobody sitting there that that's going to use it. And so uh >> loop at night. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. [laughter] Needs to go into the tool. >> We uh from the very beginning we we focused on um you know initially we were actually the the humans in the loop. So we we kind of took over all of the work
18:50and we were like you know we'll we'll just do this work for you and uh we and we kind of automated away our own problems. Um, and then at at some point, you know, we we got to uh a high enough level of automation that that we felt uh we felt comfortable handing it back back over to the the remainder back over to the office. And I think now um you know,
19:10we learn obviously when uh when we can't uh do something for for some reason, which is pretty rare, but but say say we we don't know how to do a certain case, we learn from what what the staff tells us. Uh and we also think about I think um you know like we we want to get to like a sufficient level of automation across any product to uh before we sell
19:29it. So you know for us I think that's like 95 plus say but not necessarily 100 like I don't think we're going to wait until we get into uh to 100 with one product and then do the next one. Um I think the uh we really think about the business more like as a whole like how much of the business can we uh uh can we automate and how much of the labor can
19:48we can we do with uh with software. Um and as as soon as we can take over a job we take it over and then we move over to the next one. Um and then over time we'll just learn uh learn the long tale of cases. >> Yeah. >> For a business it also doesn't matter that much right like if um let's make Dr. Sloop famous in this podcast. Let's