YC Partners Answer Your Questions | Office Hours

**Pete Koomen** (0:00)
Two of the really hard questions you have to answer as a founder when you're getting started are, who am I selling to, and how do I get their attention? And those are like the two big magic tricks that every founder has to pull off.

**Nicolas Dessaigne** (0:11)
When I came to YC, I think I had to untrain myself for a couple of years of like all the learnings I had and how they were not applicable to startups. If you have a lot of time to think about this question, it's probably too early.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (0:27)
Welcome to another episode of Office Hours. Today, we're going to respond to questions from the YC community, starting with several about AI go-to-market advice. Here's the first question we're going to take a look at. If you're building an AI company in a legacy industry, with a long-term vision of fully automating everything using agents or LLMs, but you can't deliver that on day one, what's the best way for you to go to market as a startup?

**Nicolas Dessaigne** (0:53)
I think that there are three types of companies if you're going to bring AI to your legacy industries. Let's take, for example, the accounting industry. So, there are three ways you can do it. You can either build an AI software company that you sell to accountants. The second one is you can start your own accounting firm, and it's sort of full stack or does everything. Or third, you can try to buy an existing accounting firm. There are pros and cons to all three of them. The most common one is the first one. This is how most YC companies do it. They will try to understand the world of accounting. They would try to figure out what are the areas within the accounting that are most valuable to go after when you're building AI software, that is also reasonable to build in the first couple of months or first six months of the time of your company. And then they try to sell that service to the accountants, and they are not supporting all the other features and all the other things that accounting firms are doing, but they're doing that thing really well. And that tend to work pretty well, as long as the thing you're doing is valuable enough for them to buy. The second option is to start a new accounting firm. There are a bunch of ways companies do that too. The biggest challenge is the lot you have to do as a company to do that. You have to probably do taxes and closing the books and doing a bunch of less common things, but you still have to do if you want to take on that role. The challenge here is you probably have to have an accountant on staff, or maybe several, to be able to do all this stuff.
You will have a lot of manual work. If you do it this way, the thing that you would track is the percent of the work that is automated. You want that percent to go up over time. The third way is to buy an accounting firm and then try to ingest AI there. The good news is you get customer story exist. The difficult thing is you're changing the culture of an existing company. The bigger that company is, the harder that will be. I'm not sure I've seen a lot of ice companies try the third thing. The most common one has been the first one and the second one is like a close second.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (2:46)
With the second one, you mentioned tracking how much of the work is being automated. Do you have any thoughts on what they should aim for or how they can force themselves to do it? Because what I've seen is when companies have tried this, they get so bogged down in just the execution of all the work that comes in and being a successful accounting firm in this example that they'd never get around to shipping the automation or becomes the second thing that they have to think about every day.

**Nicolas Dessaigne** (3:12)
I would say this is where software founders are the most powerful because they can see at all, look at all the works that you do and they can try to figure out what of this work is going to be easiest to be automated like right away, and versus someone who say is an accounting founder, who's not a software founder, might not see that in the same way. So it helps to be a software founder in that category. The second thing I would say is you just have to find a metric. The failure mode I've seen here is basically, it works and you try to scale up a revenue too early. So say you automate 20 percent of the work and 80 percent of the manual and then you're trying to scale up the company, and you're hiring like 20 accountants and then 30, and then you actually manage an accounting firm with some software. That's just not recommended and it's going to be difficult to manage at times and the more like at Airbnb we had this metric, which was percent of technical people that work at the company. The reason we had the metric is at some point you have too many non-technical people, all they do is request things from the technical people, and then you can't get anything done. So you need a certain, I think, forgot the percentage, 30 percent or something like that, was counted as technical. It's a framework that I find helpful because then you could make sure that the number of technical people in the company is always enough, and you can continue working on automation while you're also trying to do the other stuff.