YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Rapel

lines on the record: 71
first: 2026-01-19
most recent: 2026-01-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I mean, one of the distinctions that I often draw is this notion of differentiation versus defensibility. And I think AI is an incredible tool often for differentiation, right? So the idea that the voice agent can speak to folks in 50 languages and gather that evidence, highly differentiated versus the human, right? Obviously delivering value, but that capability alone, in my opinion, is not a source of their defensibility, the source of defensibility for Eve is in owning the end-to-end workflow, right? It is actually in building a product that is contextual to all the work that that attorney has to do. And then I think not unique to Eve, but one of the kind of X factors is that the data that that business is generating, which Alex will get into a bit in this sort of wall garden, it has a bit of these characteristics of this sort of walled garden, is not public and it sort of creates a source of compelling competitive advantage for the product itself. So the more cases that Eve can prosecute for all their different”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make them 50k, and suddenly they can afford to take cases at 5k, you know, the market expands, right? And there's a big sort of supply and demand imbalance, Tate on the plaintiff side that Eve is unlocking. And as a result, it's just the market pull for this product has been stronger than we even anticipated. My hope is that it has a lot of characteristics that will be continuously investing in where AI is just incredibly aligned with the business, both driving revenue and saving these folks money. Thanks, David. Yeah, and the reason why I wanted to talk about this is I think it's really cool as Eve, but it's a metaphor for the types of businesses that we find compelling and why zero to 30 certainly or two to 30 is not normal, but it actually is normal if you're able to move very, very quickly and just deliver, again, this promise of, I'm going to make you lazier and richer. So let's go to the next slide.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is known as a demand letter. It'll file complaints. And ultimately, I think what's so interesting about this business, and it speaks to, I think, why moats matter, one is these attorneys are living in this product all day long. Like one of the core pieces of feedback that we heard when we were diligent the business was that literally 100% of the cases were flowing through the product. But interestingly, as Eve begins to generate data on outcomes, that data isn't public, right? That's not something that the large labs can train models against. And that data is actually informing better intake, right? So that they can then go back and say at intake, hey, given the characteristics that we've seen in all the cases that we've prosecuted across all the E platform, these have these three variables that make this case potentially worth a lot more money. Or to Alex's point, it can reduce the cost of taking on a case. an attorney was only taking a case that minimum could potentially”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the Eve guys had a particularly interesting kind of point of view from a product perspective. They really wanted to own the end-to-end workflow from intake all the way to outcomes. And so to Alex's point earlier around voice, they recently launched a voice agent, which is actually collecting evidence from their perspective clients. And it's sifting through mountains of medical records or employment documents and helping these attorneys figure out which cases to take because it is generating sort of this data set of case characteristics such that it can say, hey, this case is potentially worth 50K. This case is worth $5 million. You should probably spend time on this case over here. And then it'll just help step through all the different phases of prelitigation and litigation for these attorneys. So it'll draft a medical chronology. It'll draft a kind of core artifact of these cases.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're a corporate attorney in your junior attorney is 50 times more productive, you just eroded some of the revenue that you can actually charge your end client. Again, in this case, if you can make your attorneys 5x more productive, you can potentially increase your revenue by 5x or more.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of the governing principle here. You go look at a job front desk receptionist plaza and optometry. In the space, most of what you probably heard around companies like Harvey, serving the defense and the corporate side, maybe less familiar to you might be the plaintiff side, which is really about representing the individuals in areas like employment law or personal injury. And we spent a bunch of time looking at the different companies on the plaintiff side, in part because one of the unique characteristics about that side of the market is that these attorneys operate on a contingency basis, meaning they only get paid if they win. And so they're incredibly aligned with their clients. They don't bill by the hour. They take a percentage of the actual case outcome. And so as a result, for every 100 leads that a plaintiff attorney gets, they often take one case because anytime you take a case, it's an investment in your time and your labor. So just incredible alignment with AI's impact on their core business model. To contrast that.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New in the market, or at this inflection point of do I use this old one or do I need this new one? So next year, so the second theme here, which I am personally most excited about, is we're new categories are emerging where labor is software. And there's no Bingo board for this at all. And the reason why is because there weren't software companies that did this before. And like the predominant theme is that you have a lot of things where you would hire a person, you can't hire that person, or that person that you're going to hire doesn't speak 21 different foreign languages and won't work 24 hours a day, but software can do 90% of what that human would do. Now you will pay for software, not necessarily at the same rate that you would pay for labor, but this is not something that you would hire a software product for. This is not something that you would ever have a software product for before. So I'll talk about a couple examples here. And obviously, you know, I mentioned this. I can mention this ad nauseum, but the labor market is astronomically bigger than the software market. So next. So again, this is.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can be answered by the support software. I want to pay per outcome. So we've been aggressively betting on the bingo board. Let's evaluate every company that we see in this space. So if it's payroll, if it's support, if it's ERP. And the important thing is that these are systems of record. So this is the best companies take hostages, not customers. We don't want to invest in hostage companies. We don't want to invest in companies that have negative 100 NPS. We want to invest in companies that still have a very, very strong moat. And that's what I mean when I use that expression. All of the companies that we're looking at here, what is a system of record, it just means like it runs the entire business. Everything on that bingo board, like how do you get rid of NetSuite? It's basically impossible. You can enter in with an AI wedge or more often than not, a lot of these bingo categories are we're just building the new system of record. The existing incumbent is doing that as well, but it still is a no-brainer whenever your brand”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are all adopting AI and they're going to make their businesses much, much better with AI like Bill.com is going to be a stronger business or SAP is going to be a stronger business or Adobe is going to be a stronger business because of AI. They're just going to be able to charge for new things. Workday will start charging and I mentioned this in my presentation that I gave a couple months ago. Workday will say, hey, do you want us to do reference checks on every new employee that you enter into our system? That's $500 per reference check. Why can't somebody do it for $499? Because you're stuck with workday. And there's a saying that I use a lot, which is the best companies have hostages, not customers. And I'll talk about a couple examples here. So RPA, there's an existing company called UiPath, public company, customer support. There's an existing company called Zendesk. It's now a private company, ERP, SAP, NetSuite, or in some cases like Zendesk charges per seat per month. That is almost an extinct business model for support software because, well, wait a minute, I don't want to pay perceit per month when 99% of all queries.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New company, and this is what I mean by Greenfield you have no existing product, you're not using anything, you're a brand new company, or sometimes you hidden inflection points. So the inflection point, I'll pick on NetSweet here for a second. The inflection point is I have 50 employees. Now I have three entities and two currencies. I've been using QuickBooks my entire life, QuickBooks can't handle for whatever reason. They cannot handle multi-entity, multi-currency. Support very well. KPMG says, hey, you got to go move to a better ERP system that supports that. And now I have an opportunity to pick the better product in the market. And NetSuite is a product in the market, or I can try this thing called Rillet, which is one of our companies, which is basically like NetSuite, but it closes the books for you. It has 50 AI features built in, and is a greenfield example. Now, these things don't grow like weeds because you have to wait for the new company creation. You're going entirely for greenfield and not for brownfield, but every single one of these spots on this bingo board, the incumbent.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the key lessons that I had as an investor is, and Mercury is kind of a great example of the tortoise that beat and is still beating the hare. Mercury built a neobank for startups. So they said, we're going to be the better source for you when you start your company to go deposit your money with us. We're going to help you pay your bills, track your expenses, be a basic accounting system. Mercury never stole an existing customer from Silicon Valley Bank until the weekend that Silicon Valley Bank failed. And it is what I would call the canonical greenfield opportunity versus brownfield opportunity. So brownfield is you're selling to an existing market. So let's just take an example here, email marketing. You use MailChimp. I want to go sell you a competitor to MailChimp because it has AI. That's going to be really hard. Or you use NetSuite and I'm going to say like, hey, ditch your Net Suite. I'm going to give you AI Net Suite. That's going to be really hard. If you're a net.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, category one is Trad software that's going AI native. Category two is arguably the biggest, which is basically it's not competing with the software market at all. This is, if any of you saw my talk that I gave in May, software is starting to eat labor. You're basically selling software that does the job of what people would do before. This is arguably a much, much bigger market. The laws of business still apply. You have to build real modes. You can't just build something that's a little widget that somebody underprices your widget by a dollar tomorrow. We're going to talk about that in a second. And then lastly, I call this the walled garden, but basically really, really interesting proprietary data models where the value of this business, because you're able to deliver the finished product thanks to AI, becomes much more valuable. And I'll talk about number one. So existing categories are going AI native. So this is a little, we actually have a post coming out about this in a couple days, but I'm sure everybody here has heard of Bingo or played bingo. I'm from Florida. There's lots of bingo in Florida. Lots of different names on this list.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Until now, like we really have entered the golden age of apps, and I base that purely numerically. I'm used to companies that will grow from, I don't know, like we used to talk about like double, double, triple, or triple, triple, double, or all these different ways of measuring revenue growth.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the key paper, which was co written by this very, very smart guy, Noam Shazir, in 2017, Attention is all you need. It introduced the transformer model. I remember we have a partner here, Frank Chen, who's been here for a very, very long time, and he demoed GPT or GPT2. And it didn't really work that well. It reminded me of this thing called Eliza, which was like a famous Markov chain-based thing. It was basically a therapist that came out. It was an AI-based therapist in the 1960s or 1970s. It's still around. You could try it. And basically, you say like, doctor, I'm not feeling well. And then it just kind of says, and why is it, Jen, that you aren't feeling well? It just basically takes the words that you say, turns it into a question. It feels kind of sentient until you ask it, like, hey, I want to complain to the school about the bus driving. And then it says, and why do you want to complain to the school about the bus driving? It doesn't actually give you an answer or anything that you need. You know, OpenAI, it's hard to imagine that this just happened a couple years ago. But from 20”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bet with their friends over, like, you know, how does this work or that work, or I want directions to this thing, or I'm really puzzled. My wife just used it to complain to the school because our kid missed the bus and the bus driver said, he can't open the door because it's against the law to open the door. This is the true story. So my wife had ChatGPT scan all the laws of California and the U.S. federal system writ large, even though our government has closed down. Nope, that was completely made up. Send a very, very polite note. I'm sure that the school is going to start adopting ChatGPT too to start responding to people like my wife, apologizing on behalf of the bus driver, but they did send apologies. Sorry, we made that up. Next time we can open the door for your child if he is on time when the bus has already closed the door. It's like a countably infinite number of use cases for these things. And the growth of minutes per user in the US, I mean, this is just astronomical. And as these things work better and as they unlock more use cases, it's kind of obvious that the growth in minutes will go up. This is happening at a break.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bit of a flat curve, but it has been inflecting a lot, and you see this in the expense yet, you see it in the growth of all the companies, both at the infrastructure layer and at the app layer. And again, whether they're overvalued or undervalued is almost not the point, it's hard to time to market on these things. The amount of value that they are generating is just tremendous, and we're going to get into this in a second. If anybody knows Maslow's hierarchy of needs, this is like this philosophical term of what is it that humans need? At the base of the pyramid, people would joke is Wi-Fi. So it's like, okay, I need all these things that have been true for hundreds of years. And at the very, very top of that pyramid is this self-actualization concept. But what I really, really need, if you talk to any teenager, it's like, you know, where's my Wi-Fi? Where's my Wi-Fi? And what's starting to happen now next is it's actually AI. So obviously you can't have AI without the Wi-Fi, but something like 15% of adults on planet Earth now use ChatGPT every single week. Why are they using it? It's just part of their daily routine, whether it's settling.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Credit card expense management products, and you see this giant tick up in January of 2025, which is when did enterprises? And these are much more like who uses ramp? This is not necessarily a startup, but it's a more forward-thinking company. It's not necessarily GE. It's a company with thousands of employees, maybe in the Bay Area or New York that wants to be more tech forward. And they've just realized like, wow, this stuff, Jen, to your point, like GPT 3.5, pretty good, 4.0, I was like, wow, it's pretty amazing. I can run a new episode of Seinfeld with it. Like amazing things that I could do almost to kind of wow my friends like a magic trick. But now the magic trick has actually gone into the enterprise and is saving people time and money. And one of the things that you'll potentially get out of this presentation for me is that I have this prevailing view of human behavior, which is everybody wants two things. They want to be richer and lazier. They want to do less work and get more economic value. And this is really what Gen AI unlocks. And it's really starting to happen right now. And this has been a”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's really remarkable what these things have done. I mean, one of the ways of joking about this is that we have this idea of artificial general intelligence or the Turing test. Like, when can we tell the difference between a computer and a human if we don't know who our interlocutor is? And the answer is if you were to take a person 10 years ago and show them or 20 years ago or 30, like, oh my God, this is like a fully sentient. This is smarter than any kind of human out there. We kind of keep changing the goalpost a little bit on what exactly is AGI. But yes, the pace of innovation here is just remarkable. And the important thing is just the opportunity set that it unlocks. So whenever you have a bull market and very, very exciting tech, there's always somebody saying it's a bubble or it doesn't work or it's all overhyped. And I think there was some MIT paper that came out. This is not a faulty MIT. This is somebody who published the paper. It's like, oh, you know, most enterprise deployments really, really aren't working in terms of AI. We're seeing the exact opposite. So there's a company called Ramp, and they are kind of...”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Majority of whom have smartphones in the adoption of this new technology is taking off like never before. So the AI era is here. The vast majority of net new revenue that's happening in software land is actually coming from AI, both at the application layer and the infrastructure layer.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“eBay and Amazon that were built on top of that. Then you had cloud, so AWS accounts for the vast majority of market cap of Amazon. You've got Workday, Shopify, Viva, others that were the application layer. Mobile took all of these things that came before and now put a supercomputer in everybody's pocket. So the vast majority of humans on planet Earth have a smartphone, which is pretty amazing. That was the mobile era, which is still actually kind of playing out. Like I just bought an Android phone to test things with. It was $40. And this was more powerful than the ENIAC in 1946 or whenever the Eniac came out. And then two years ago was this AI era is coming out as well. And the Nasdaq is higher. We know that. But the AI era really is playing out. And the cool thing is this is not a net new thing. This is building on everything before. Like if we didn't have smartphones and we didn't have cloud, but we just had the ENIAC, AI would be pretty cool. Like you could go check it out in a museum. But the fact is you now have 8 billion humans on planet Earth.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm Alex Rapel on the AppSphon. I've been at the firm for 10 years, and I stole this from Chris Dixon, who published a post like this about probably 12 or 13 years ago. And the whole premise is that product cycles drive growth. And the top of the chart here is the NASDAQ from 1977 at present. It goes up sometimes. It goes down sometimes over the long run and has gone up. But there have been some very scary down points. So there have been four major product cycles. There was the PC. I'm absolutely before the PC, there was the semiconductor. But we got to start. We'll start with the PC. There's always an infrastructure layer of companies that are building the back end. There's the application layer of people that are building things that actually are used. So Lotus was one of the first infrastructure, sorry, application companies, Adobe, Symantec, all of these companies that kind of grew out of the 1980s. But the infra players, if you were Apple and Microsoft, then you had the internet. That was enormous. Lots of bubbles along the way, but some very, very enduring infrastructure companies like Cisco and Akamai, enduring companies in the application space.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source