AI for America's Small Businesses | Lassie

AI is overhyped in Silicon Valley but underhyped in Iowa. I would actually argue software just kind of took things that were stored in paper format and then they made them available first on prem via green screen computers, but people still had to do the work. I never forgot what I saw. The number one great top from Yelp spending two hundred hours a month on paperwork. The models are trained on so much data and they're so large and yet they actually don't really know how to do any of this work. Initially, we were actually the humans on the loop. We kind of automated away our own problems. The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets the distribution before the incumbent gets the innovation. We come by and we say, Hey, we actually have built agents that can provide you already with tens of hours of labor. They then adopt it, like, very quick. They see us as someone they break in to, like, actually run the practice for them. There was a great quote from doctor Kwan about you guys, which is that Lassie isn't replacing humans, but, like, freeing them from wearing so many hats. It's not like, oh, AI is gonna take the jobs. In many cases, you can't find somebody. How are you prioritizing what you build, who you sell to? Is there a world where Lassie for dentists makes Lassie for physical therapists better? The end goal here is that AI isn't just changing how software is built. It's changing what software does. For decades, software mostly stored information. Today, AI can increasingly perform the work itself. In this episode, Alex Rampel and Olivia Moore speak with Lassie co founders Stein Pella and Frederick Rankin about building AI agents that automate administrative work for health care practices, from insurance billing to patient payments. They discuss why small businesses may be one of AI's biggest opportunities, and what it takes to build software that operates autonomously, and why the future of enterprise software may be measured less by features and more by the amount of work it can take off people's plates. So welcome and thank you for joining us. Thank you for inviting us. It's lovely to be here. Maybe we'll start with the basics. So Stein, this whole company started with a conversation with you and your own dentist, doctor Kwan. What did he tell you that made you decide to quit your tech job at Robinhood and go process payments for him by hand? Yeah. I did not know that my American dream would look like this. It was interesting, like, I was at Robinhood at the time, and I came to this country to start a company. So after six years, I moved from Amsterdam to Silicon Valley, like, I was looking for a heart problem to solve. And then my doctor, Doctor. Quan, I was a patient there, so I saw him …