The Ledger
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Haber: Block executed a 40% workforce reduction driven by AI
“And recently Block executed a roughly 40% reduction in force. And they've been pretty candid about AI being a critical component of that decision.”
Haber: AI hurts hourly billers but multiplies contingency legal revenue
“If you're a corporate attorney, you know, and your, you know you know, junior attorney is 50 times more productive, you've just eroded some of the revenue that you can actually charge to your end client. Again, in this case, if you can make your attorneys, you…”
Haber: AI reinforces contingency legal models rather than eroding billable hours
“And so again, while AI is helping automate a lot of the drafting and reasoning work that they do, ultimately it's really about enabling them to take on more clients and make more money. So it doesn't erode, you know, the billable hour. It really reinforces the…”
Haber: AI capabilities offer product differentiation, not long-term defensibility
“But the source, the AI-ness of that capability, in my opinion, is not a source of defensibility. It, it's largely differentiation. The defensibility of a software product resides, in my opinion, you know, from owning the end-to-end workflow, you know, from the…”
Haber: Contingency law firms have an unlimited appetite for AI adoption
“In lots of areas of legal if you make your employee 50 times more efficient, you're eroding your billable hour. In their business, they operate on a contingency basis. Meaning, You know, they only get paid if they make, if they win. So there's no sort of limit…”
Haber: AI wedge features will commoditize and model moats are ephemeral
“Is that wedge product alone defensible? I would argue no, right? Today, it feels like magic to the providers that they're working with, but I think that capability is going to become commoditized over time. They may have an advantage because they've trained a …”
Haber: Every healthcare company will eventually become a fintech company
“Certainly one of our core theses at ASICS and Z has been that every company is going to become a fintech company. And Julie and I have been riffing that, you know, Either every healthcare company is already a fintech company or is certainly going to become a f…”
Haber: The market is on the precipice of the largest IPOs ever
“We are on the precipice of some of the largest IPOs ever.”
Haber: Funds maximize short-term carry while firms build compounding competitive advantages
“The objective function of a fund is how do I generate the most carry with the fewest people in the shortest amount of time possible? And a firm, you know, you have to deliver exceptional returns, which is sort of a prerequisite for doing that well. But I think…”
Most venture funds focus on maximizing carry, not building durable firms
“Most people run funds, very few people in my definition build firms. And the objective function of a fund is how do I generate The most carry with the fewest people in the shortest amount of time possible.”
Haber: Legal AI startup Eve scales rapidly with zero outbound sales
“Eve hasn't had to have an outbound motion, which is kind of insane, given, you know, the scale with which they're operating.”
Haber: a16z has slowed its consumer fintech investments in recent years
“I mean, I would say from our vantage point, we haven't made as many consumer fintech investments in recent years as we have historically.”
Haber: AI software expands TAM by targeting labor budgets instead of IT
“You know, that is a really interesting opportunity for the moment, you know, in large part because it's unlocking markets that were never particularly interesting to software into because IT budgets were small and now, you know, the TAM is largely labor.”
Haber: AI enterprise sales cycles in fintech are faster than ever
“It's making the enterprise sort of sales cycles, you know, for many of even our early stage companies happen a lot faster than I've seen in, in, you know, my experience, you know, investing in this space.”
Haber: AI founders are younger, more technical, and less domain-native
“Founders today are often younger and more technical than we've seen in, in prior generations. You know, and so they're less often native to the particular industry, but they're fluent in the tool set.”
Haber: Many software incumbents will fail to evolve with AI
“Many of these incumbents aren't going to evolve.”
Haber: Traditional software moats still apply in the AI era
“Moats still matter. And a lot of the moats in software today are the same that they've always been.”
Haber: Half of all Americans currently carry medical debt
“Half of Americans, you know, carry medical debt today.”
Haber: Healthcare startup Juniper takes a 3% to 5% take rate
“By the way, they get paid three to five percent just for that, right, for delivering that technology and improving efficiency, which historically has been a very manual, you know, process for a lot of these providers with, you know, a couple of folks in the ba…”
Haber: Healthcare fintech's biggest prize is a unified financial operating system
“Healthcare FinTech's biggest prize was the financial operating system for healthcare. And I think the core kind of ethos was you have a lot of patient data, right, living in practice management systems or in an EHR that are often unbundled or kind of separate …”
Haber: Customer law firms ran 100 percent of cases through Eve
“One of the core, you know, pieces of feedback that we heard when we were diligencing the business was that literally a hundred percent of the cases were flowing through the product.”
Haber: Revenue-generating AI applications will see stronger market pull than cost-cutters
“But I think in instances where AI is actually reinforcing the business model in driving revenue, there's really no limit to the amount that customers may want to adopt that technology. And so the market pull in examples like that are just, you know, so much st…”
Haber: AI voice agents drive higher loan collection rates for lenders
“But I think what's, what they found, which is so remarkable, is that the voice agents are actually driving better collection rates, right? So it's not just a cost reduction story. It's actually delivering, you know, better outcomes, you know, for their end cus…”
Haber: AI model labs cannot access non-public legal outcome data
“Ultimately by being able to process Cases, again, from intake all the way to outcomes, that outcomes data is not public, right? That is not a source of information that, you know, model companies and labs can actually train on and, you know, on the public inte…”
Haber: 25% of venture capital went to fintech during COVID boom
“Like 25% of all venture dollars in that period went into fintech.”
Haber: Large financial institutions are adopting AI developer tools like Cursor
“Many of these institutions are beginning to adopt products like Cursor or, you know, even GitHub Copilot or a broader ecosystem of kind of AI products in their employee base, and people are seeing the productivity gains.”
Haber: Building a bond ladder at JPMorgan remains a manual process
“If you're a wealth management client of JP Morgan today, you know, building a bond ladder is still a manual process. You're picking, you know, individual securities one by one.”
Haber: The marginal cost of software production is approaching zero
“The marginal cost of producing software is, you know, declining asymptotically towards zero”
Haber: Tenor reduces patient intake admin costs by 90%
“We have a company, you know, it's an example called Tenor that is doing this in a healthcare context. So, you know, the problem that they're solving specifically is is around patient referrals. So you go to your general practitioner, they're referring you to a…”
Haber teases unannounced a16z investment in a legal tech startup
“We have a company that we haven't announced yet, so I won't mention the name, but that is solving a lot of the workflow challenges in in plaintiff law. So they operate in both employment and personal injury, Where in, in that model, unlike on a per hour basis,…”
Haber: Fintech is a horizontal layer, not a vertical sector
“I've always viewed it candidly more as a horizontal than as a vertical.”
Haber: 20% of medical debt holders believe they will never repay it
“20% of them don't believe they'll ever be able to pay it off.”
Haber: Embedded fintech playbooks from vertical software apply to healthcare
“I think you've seen that play out over the past, you know, five plus years in areas like vertical software, where again, you know, companies have started by solving kind of a software workflow in lots of different categories, and then it become kind of layerin…”
Haber: Incumbents Are Accelerating Adoption of Third-Party Tech Solutions
“The culture of these institutions are changing very quickly, right? Their recognition that they're not going to build everything in house or that they can't, and their willingness to adopt third party technologies is just accelerating.”
Haber: High interest rates drive deposit revenue for Robinhood and Mercury
“Robinhood, Mercury, many of these companies are generating very significant percentages of their revenue and profits today from deposit flows as rates have gone up.”