AI for America's Small Businesses | Lassie

**Alex Rampell** (0:00)
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.

**Steijn Pelle** (0:13)
I never forgot what I saw. The number one great doctor on Yelp, spending 200 hours a month on paperwork.

**Alex Rampell** (0:19)
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 in 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.

**Steijn Pelle** (0:35)
We come by and we say, hey, we actually have built these agents that can provide you already with tens of hours of labor. They then adopt it very quick. They see us as someone they break in to actually run the practice for them.

**Olivia Moore** (0:46)
There was a great quote from Dr. Kwan about you guys, which is that Lassie isn't replacing humans, but freeing them from wearing so many hats.

**Alex Rampell** (0:54)
It's not like, oh, AI is going to take the jobs. In many cases, you can't find someone.

**Olivia Moore** (0:58)
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?

**SPEAKER_4** (1:08)
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 Rampell and Olivia Moore speak with Lassie co-founders Steijn Pelle and Frédéric Renken about building AI agents that automate administrative work for healthcare 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.

**Olivia Moore** (1:56)
So, welcome and thank you for joining us.

**Steijn Pelle** (1:58)
Thank you for inviting us. It's great to be here.

**Olivia Moore** (2:00)
Maybe we'll start with the basics. So, Steijn, this whole company started with a conversation with you and your own dentist, Dr. 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?

**Steijn Pelle** (2:13)
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. After six years, I moved from Amsterdam to Silicon Valley, like I was looking for a hard problem to solve. And then my doctor, Dr. Kwan, I was a patient there, so I saw him twice a year, as you do with a dentist.
Knew that I was looking for a hard problem. And he said, do you want to see how I run my business? And I said, absolutely. And he walked me to the back, and I never forgot what I saw there. A small business owner that is the number one rated doctor on Yelp, spending 200 hours a month on paperwork and busy work. So, submitting claims by hand, and he had to stick around himself because he couldn't find people to bill the patients. So, I'm like, wow, it's fascinating. This is a couple of years ago, so I thought that this was a solved problem, because in the 70s, my mom worked in the hospital, and that's what she did. She brought bags of cash to the bank and then processed payments by hand, but it wasn't a solved problem here. So, that's why this piqued my interest.

**Alex Rampell** (3:08)
So, I have to ask, when he gave you this offer, were you like, was it that kind of reclined? Could he actually process your answer as yes versus no if your mouth was open and the drills were in your mouth? Or how did that go down?

**Steijn Pelle** (3:20)
Well, up until now, I don't have cavities, so there was no drilling happening yet. So, knock on wood.

**Alex Rampell** (3:24)
Examination.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:25)
Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Steijn Pelle** (3:26)
Exactly, yeah. No, he took me inside after that. Because he knew that I was looking for this heart problem and was roaming around. And then after that appointment, he showed me what was going on. And then I thought, maybe it's him, right? But it didn't really make sense to me because he was very well rated. He used all these modern technologies. So then we started talking to other doctors because maybe this doctor one was just an anomaly.