Venture with Grace
00:15:42 · Dan Mishin
[00:15:42] S1: That that's a wonderful question. I mean, I... You nailed it. I think that the single biggest bottleneck to AI native services business model, whether or not it's law or anything else, is human inertia. That will be the single biggest bottleneck. Practitioners who are ready to change. And look, my answer is there is 18,000 immigration lawyers in America. And by the way, funny fact, 11,000 out of 18,000 applied for jobs that manifest at this point, which is kind of ridiculous. But let's say out of 18,000 lawyers, there is 5% that are early adopters, that are truly understanding that the way they used to practice before doesn't make sense. Look at Nicole. Nicole was a practitioner at traditional immigration law firm handling high profile boutique difficult cases. Nicole saw the writing on the wall that the profession is about to change and Nicole joined the company that was three people at that time. Right? And there are other people who are forward thinking. So the other interesting piece here is that because AI enhances productivity by multiple fold, let's say twofold, threefold, fivefold, tenfold, who knows over time. You need less practitioners to service the same number of cases. So the most sort of like advanced and for in attorneys are going join the wave early and then the following group, late adopters of technology, they may get to it at a later point. I guess my answer is there is a subset of lawyers who are there already, who understand the change and we just focus on those. And reality is with a 100 lawyers that currently work at Manifest, we can service so many cases like we're talking tens of thousands cases. Did I answer your question?
00:17:31 · Jake Saper, S2
[00:17:31] S0: Yeah. Good. [00:17:37] S2: Thank you, Dan. You've mentioned that there is a difference between AI native services and AI roll ups, which are becoming very popular. Right? Can you expand on that? How they're different and what the founders who are building AI native service companies should do differently to compete with AI roll ups in the same space? So for example, in accounting, there is a lot of them and I'm sure you're competing with some of the private equity that is doing the same thing with lawyers. Right? With the lawyer firms. So what's the difference and how do you approach it as a founder? How do you compete?
00:18:03 · Jake Saper
[00:18:03] S0: It's it's a really good question. This microphone is more powerful, which is amazing. I'm a singer, so I'm always excited when I have like an amazing microphone. So let's talk about the accounting example. I invested in accounting firm called Hanover Park that does accounting for private equity firms. It's called Fund Administration, and it's an AINS business not a roll up. So they started from scratch, and I'll explain to you what... How this looks different from a roll up. In their case, they started by building the GL, the general ledger that is the core thing for accounting, themselves specific to their customer base, their their private equity firms. Then they build agents that work exclusively with that GL, that can manipulate that GL. Then they hired people like Nicole from impressive existing fund administration accounting firms to sit on top of that and deliver the service. An accounting... An AI roll up, you take, you know, five, 10, 20, 30 existing accounting firms often like regionally distributed that have been using an existing GL that's often off the shelf by definition. You try to kind of slam them together, do a private equity move where you eliminate back office redundancies, and then you try to build an AI product and then try to change the way they behave to use this AI product. I think the odds of success of that are much lower. What I'd say is the odds of success of a massive venture scale outcome are lower. I think you'll have some really impressive private equity style outcomes where, like, you buy something, you know, at this price and then you're able to sell it, you know, eight years later at two and a half times the price. What I'm trying to do is venture. I'm trying to invest in the next Zoom, but I'm trying to do it through the services thing. So I need Hanover Park to be able to do their service a 100 times better than the incumbents and grow without having to hire hire too many Nicole's over time. And to me, like, doing it from scratch without all the cultural baggage and the human baggage and the software baggage of the legacy thing is cleaner and more likely to hit. I'm getting an end of panel thing. So thank you guys all. Sorry. I've... Where... She's, like, done it for a while, so I gotta cut it. Thank you, guys. Thank Dan.
00:20:11 · Dan Mishin, Jake Saper
[00:20:11] S1: Thank [00:20:11] S0: you. Great job.