In the mixus: Elliot Katz with Scott Hartley
Elliot Katz, co-founder and CEO of mixus, chats with Scott Hartley, General Partner of Everywhere Ventures on episode 115: In the mixus.
In episode 115 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, co-founder and general partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Elliot Katz, co-founder and CEO of mixus AI — a legal AI platform that lets attorneys delegate work to agents directly from email. Elliot shares how riding in early autonomous vehicles and seeing the gap between the hype and the technology convinced him that humans would always need to stay in the loop — a conviction that drove him from law to co-founding mixus. He discusses how mixus is cutting through a crowded legal tech market by demanding zero behavior change from attorneys, meeting them in email and Word rather than asking them to learn yet another dashboard.
In this episode, you will hear:
Applying the human-in-the-loop thesis from autonomous vehicles to legal AI.
Winning AmLaw 20 firms through zero behavior change integration.
Taking financing workflows from days to minutes with email-native agents.
Shifting corporate legal work from billable hours to fixed-fee engagements.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:32 Scott: Hi everybody, Scott Hartley, co-founder and general partner at Everywhere Ventures. Super excited to have my really good friend, longtime friend, and portfolio CEO, Elliot Katz on the call here today with mixus AI.
00:00:45 Scott: So Elliot and I both grew up together in Palo Alto, California. We’ve known each other since we were probably 10 years old playing knockout basketball in the driveway. Elliot went on to Vanderbilt and Cornell Law, and then built a career at DLA Piper, where he was an attorney.
00:01:02 Scott: I know you started the autonomous vehicles practice well before that was a thing. You really had incredible foresight to dive in deep and build the AV practice at DLA.
00:01:12 Scott: And then, I think from that, you learned a ton about this whole world of human-plus-machine automation, went on to found Phantom Auto, raised a lot of money for that. And then saw this movie replaying in the legal space with mixus AI. We’re super excited to be investors in the company, and welcome to the podcast, Elliot.
00:01:31 Elliot: Thanks, Scott. Great to be here. It’s been quite a journey for us over, I think, about 30 years at this point.
00:01:37 Scott: I know we’re not gonna recount trampoline stories or knockout basketball stories today, but there’s plenty of that for the off-podcast conversation later.
00:01:47 Scott: Walk everybody through your journey because you started on a traditional career path in law. Went to a great firm, became a partner. What was it that you saw in this development of autonomous vehicles and human plus machine and robotics that made you want to start the AV practice and then jump out into Phantom Auto and into mixus.
00:02:06 Elliot: As you mentioned, I started at DLA Piper. I became the chair of their Autonomous Vehicle practice. Then I went to McGuireWoods, became a partner and chair of their Autonomous Vehicle practice.
00:02:18 Elliot: But by dint of the fact that I was very early on autonomous vehicles, I was one of the only attorneys at the time—if not the only attorney—that was focused on legal, regulatory, and policy issues pertaining to that space. Because of that, I got to represent a lot of the biggest players in the space at that time.
00:02:41 Elliot: It was still very, very early days. And through that, I got to ride in all of their vehicles. I had a front-row seat to see the delta between the actual state of the technology at the time and the marketing.
00:02:58 Elliot: So if you asked my grandma in 2014, she read a New York Times article that told her she was gonna fall asleep in Palo Alto and wake up in New York and never have to touch the steering wheel in between. The car was just gonna do everything.
00:03:12 Elliot: And at that point in time, that couldn’t have been further from the truth. When I’m riding in these vehicles, my clients’ vehicles, you couldn’t go more than 100 yards without something going wrong.
00:03:23 Elliot: What I started to think about at that time was if you actually want to commercially deploy these vehicles at scale, there has to be some sort of technology that can keep a human in the loop. There’s just too many things that were going wrong and that would go wrong in the future. There’s just such a long tail of these edge cases. A lot of weird things happen out on our roads.
00:03:48 Elliot: And so fast forward to 2017, I was connected with my now co-founder, Shai Magzimof. There was a VC that I was doing some work with that came to me and said, “Hey, there’s a new guy in town. He built this technology and we think it’s the technology that you’ve been talking about for some time. Go meet with him.”
00:04:06 Elliot: “We’re thinking about making an investment.” So I went over to Shai’s house in Palo Alto. He put me in a car in his garage. He went to his living room. He drove me around the block in Palo Alto via remote control. My brain basically exploded because that was exactly what I had been dreaming about.
00:04:23 Elliot: What happens when something goes wrong with these vehicles? Well, if you can have a human sitting thousands of miles away, that’s able to remotely assist or even operate the vehicle, then you have a full system.
00:04:35 Elliot: And so at that point, I left the practice of law entirely. We started Phantom Auto together, and our technology was just that. Now, the problem there with autonomous on-road vehicles is it was still quite early days. I mean, now you can actually get a Waymo, especially if you live in the Bay Area. I would highly recommend it. It’s an amazing experience.
00:04:58 Elliot: By the way, they still use some form of remote-assistance technology—exactly what we were talking about all the way back then. But it was very early days, so no one had actually gone to market.
00:05:09 Elliot: We ended up pivoting to vehicles that were more so in enclosed areas like forklifts in a warehouse, like yard trucks in a warehouse yard. That was a great business because even when you’re in an enclosed environment, again, you still need a human to help out the autonomy. So that took us through Phantom Auto.
00:05:31 Scott: Just to jump in there, I remember it was probably around that time, 2016 or so, 10 years back, maybe even before that, where we had lunch at the Four Seasons on University Avenue in Palo Alto and you told me that you were thinking about leaving law to go and be a startup entrepreneur.
00:05:48 Scott: Even though I live in this world, I think I said, “Time out. Beware of what you’re wishing for. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t leave the confines of a highly paid, nice office to come out into the wilds.” But you had such conviction at the time and really had the foresight to make that leap.
00:06:03 Scott: It was something that really resonated with me as well, because that was around the same time that I was writing my book about human and machine and all these interfaces that needed to come together.
00:06:12 Scott: Actually, I think you inspired me to talk to a woman that’s featured in my book, Melissa Cefkin, who’s the lead anthropologist at Nissan, but running the autonomous vehicles practice. The whole idea there was that the edge cases of autonomous vehicles are often tacit communication. They’re human edge cases issues.
00:06:31 Scott: And so why would you have at the helm of an autonomous vehicles practice somebody who has a PhD in anthropology? It really confirmed all of those things that were the thesis behind Phantom Auto and even the thesis behind mixus today.
00:06:45 Scott: That there’s rote and routine tasks that can be automatable up to a certain point. And then there’s generally a gap where you have to have human in the loop. You’ve been beating this drum for 10 years, and I think you’re still right on the money.
00:06:59 Elliot: What myself and Shai, my co-founder, like to say when we open any meeting is “We are the human-in-the-loop guys.” If you believe that AGI is here and humans are just going to be able to go frolic at the beach and the AI is just going to do all the work, we’re not those guys.
00:07:16 Elliot: Our view is that autonomy and autonomous vehicles, they can do so much. Again, you will be blown away if you ride in a Waymo or if you’ve already rode in a Waymo, but they have their limitations.
00:07:29 Elliot: We took that same concept and now applied it to high-stakes work. In legal. there’s amazing things that our AI agents can do for attorneys. They can do so much of the work, but they can’t do all of the work.
00:07:48 Elliot: There’s so many things that you need human judgment for, especially in the law. Typically, people don’t come to lawyers for just straight-up black letter law. They’re looking for their interpretation, their judgment, their assessment of risk, et cetera.
00:08:05 Elliot: Even though AI can do a very good job with the basics, you still need to “mixus” together. That’s the name of the company—mixing together human intelligence with artificial intelligence. That is the way that you’re going to get a complete product.
00:08:23 Scott: 100%. Shifting gears, so Phantom Auto obviously had human in the loop, remote operators and drivers of forklifts in facilities, say, in the US where you could have that vehicle driven from Mexico. You could do cost arbitrage and 24/7 support without needing to deal with some of the current issues that we have around immigration and various things like that.
00:08:46 Scott: But fast forward to where you guys are today with mixus. Taking that same principle, but rather than a forklift operator operating remotely from Mexico to Central Valley, California for Home Depot, it’s instead a lawyer being able to offload tasks to agents in specific workflows where they can interface with both their associates, but also with AI agents powered by mixus to supercharge the expertise that those lawyers already have.
00:09:14 Elliot: That’s exactly right. There’s a lot of differences between Phantom and mixus. It’s a different space. But at Phantom, you hit the nail on the head. So, we worked with very large Fortune 50 customers, some of the biggest businesses in the world. They had remote operators sitting literally, in some cases, thousands of miles away, in some cases on a different continent.
00:09:41 Elliot: Those remote operators were not employees of our customers. They were employees of Phantom Auto. Now here, everyone who’s working with our system is an employee of whatever the organization is that’s using the system.
00:09:56 Elliot: So right now, we’re working with some of the largest law firms in the world, multiple AmLaw 20 firms. And to be clear on exactly what we’re providing them, we’re providing them email-based AI agents with that built-in firm-level oversight.
00:10:15 Elliot: What is important about that is a couple of things. First of all, we are mimicking exactly the way that attorneys work today. What attorneys do today, they’re mainly on email, they’re in Word.
00:10:29 Elliot: So, when you want to use one of our agents, instead of emailing your associate “@John do X, Y, Z,” you email the agent, agent@mixus.com, and say “@Agent do X, Y, Z.” It’s all collaborative because the law’s a team sport, so you can CC any of your colleagues. Everyone can talk to the agent together. Anyone can review the outputs.
00:10:53 Elliot: But the point is that you just email. You do exactly what you’re already doing today. You email the agent, the agent is going to email back the work product. Then there’s a human attorney who will review and make sure that everything looks good.
00:11:07 Elliot: A very overlooked piece of this whole transformation that we have in AI is that change management piece. A lot of other tools in the space, it’s providing a net new tool with a net new UI, and you’re asking attorneys to learn that and bring that into their workflow.
00:11:28 Elliot: We’re doing the opposite thing. We’re starting where the attorneys already are and just saying, “Keep on doing what you’re doing, but now do it with an agent involved.”
00:11:38 Scott: It’s a really important point because I think that as these tools, we’ve seen a whole glut of legal AI tools come to market. This was a space that probably wasn’t that heavily trafficked five years ago.
00:11:49 Scott: Nobody was in their thesis, from the investor standpoint saying, “We’re looking for legal automation software.” That wasn’t a thing. Now, it’s probably one of the hottest categories that there is. You see the rise of forms like Harvey and others in the space.
00:12:03 Scott: But to your point, they really have a new work dynamic where they’re not catering directly to how law partners and operators are historically working. Which, to your point, it’s… you’re running between meetings, you’re running from a launch to something else, you’re rifling off a contract to an associate to redline and come back with feedback.
00:12:23 Scott: And instead of that workflow being at the desk, sitting down with the dashboard, it’s primarily happening over email. It’s happening on a mobile device. And that’s where mixus is trying to embed is in these specific workflows that partners to associates are already doing and have been doing for a hundred years.
00:12:41 Elliot: Absolutely. The work is also happening in Word. So, we have a Word plugin as well, but we are tracking exactly where they work. It’s all in the Outlook, Microsoft Outlook, and Word. That’s where we sit.
00:12:52 Elliot: What I will say is that when I was at DLA, for example, when I was a very junior attorney, I remember working with one much older partner who he was a brilliant attorney, but I don’t even know if he knew how to turn on his laptop. I’m not exaggerating.
00:13:11 Elliot: Attorneys are not always at the bleeding edge of technology, especially in the older generation. I think the newer, newer generation, the folks that are going to law school now and coming out of law school, they’re going to be trained on this new technology because it’s such a big part of how you practice the law.
00:13:27 Elliot: But this idea that you can get this certain subset, which is a large subset of attorneys to learn this new technology and integrate it into their practice, I think is a non-starter.
00:13:39 Elliot: We’re seeing that in real time. Most of the firms, if not all of the big firms that we’re working with, they already have seat licenses to use other legal AI tools. But what we hear consistently is they brought in those tools, not because they don’t think they’re going to be value add. Of course they do. But the uptake isn’t there amongst their attorneys.
00:14:02 Elliot: So again, that zero behavior modification that we’re enabling, I think is often overlooked, because people are really focusing on the technology, but critical piece in getting AI technology into his attorney’s hands and having them use it on the daily as opposed to something that’s on the side, “Okay, maybe I’ll use it once a week.”
00:14:23 Scott: And that’s a prime case of having domain expertise, understanding workflows, understanding the ICP, the customer profile and how these guys operate day to day. You’re not building technology in the abstract and then trying to shoehorn it into a law firm in the form of how Salesforce works.
00:14:40 Scott: What you’re trying to do is look back historically at how you operated as an acting attorney and partner at multiple law firms and saying, “This is really where the rubber hits the road. Our go-to-market has to be through zero behavior change integration into existing workflows,” which I think will serve you guys well.
00:14:57 Elliot: Absolutely. It’s hard to think like an attorney if you’ve never been an attorney. I am a recovering attorney. When I was practicing law, my brain was always thinking about how can I bill the next six minutes of time.
00:15:13 Elliot: And if you have to take six minutes, let alone an hour or two to learn a new tool and then get used to that new tool and integrate it into your practice, that equation is tough. You want to keep on doing what you’re doing and effectively bill time pretty much all of your day.
00:15:27 Scott: Thinking about like the specific workflow is, where have you guys seen the most traction as far as hyper-specific point solutions around specific legal examples? Is it in redlining? Is it in contract review? What are some of the workflows where you guys have come to market with the initial agents and where you’re seeing a lot of uptick from these AM 20 law firms?
00:15:48 Elliot: First of all, we have many, many different agents that we’ve deployed that do everything across the board. That’s from document generation to document redlining to data extraction.
00:16:00 Elliot: But I’ll use an example that’s near and dear to my heart as a startup founder and probably near and dear to yours as a VC, which is… we work with a lot of ECVC practices. We can take them with our agents, soup to nuts, through that financing process.
00:16:18 Elliot: Let’s say that Everywhere sends me a term sheet today. What’s the first thing that I’m going to do? I’m going to send it to my ECVC partner and that partner is probably going to send it to one of their associates to do the actual underlying work. And then a few days later, I’ll get back what I want, which is a red line of the term sheet and an issues list.
00:16:39 Elliot: If you’re using mixus, if our attorney is using mixus, I forward them those materials, they forward it to agent@mixus.com. The agent in a couple of minutes will send them back the exact same thing, which is a red line of the term sheet and an issues list, which is exactly what I want. So, that’s step one.
00:16:58 Elliot: What’s the next thing that you have to do in the process? Well, as a founder, I want to see the pro forma cap table. So again, the attorney emails the agent. You attach the previous cap table in the new term sheet. A few minutes later, it’s going to give you the pro forma cap table.
00:17:12 Elliot: What’s the last step of the process here? Well, let’s say that we’re raising series A and in our seed, we had the MVCA docs, but they’re for seed. So now, we need the MVCA docs for the A round.
00:17:23 Elliot: So again, you email the agent and they’re going to provide you with those new docs. Soup to nuts, we’re taking them through this whole process that used to take days in minutes. It’s a great outcome for them. It’s a great outcome for us.
00:17:37 Scott: It seems like, in the go-to-market, the benefits of this for the law firm could be two-fold in the sense that if you’re a top tier law firm utilizing these tools, where you can gain more efficiencies.
00:17:48 Scott: The obvious question for a lot of these guys is, isn’t this going to reduce my billable hours and therefore my business revenue? The general consensus is it allows the attorneys to up level and upskill, have more human interaction, and obviously offload the really rote and routine tasks that they didn’t want to do anyway.
00:18:05 Scott: That assumes that there’s unlimited business maybe behind that law firm where they can continue to eat away at more interesting work and give away this less interesting work.
00:18:14 Scott: The other bucket is maybe empowering smaller law firms to be able to compete in the sense that you have this idea of strong and skinny with AI. Skinny being you can save costs and cut corners here and there and have the same output.
00:18:29 Scott: Strong being you could be a really small team and suddenly punch way above your weight, where you may be a team of 20 attorneys. But now with mixus with supplemented and enhanced and amplified with AI, you could compete with a law firm that has 200 attorneys.
00:18:44 Scott: Where are you seeing more uptake or demand? Is it more in the big law firms enhancing efficiencies and outputs, or is it in the smaller law firms that really now can punch above their weight and compete?
00:18:55 Elliot: There’s a couple things there because you looked in the billable hour too. So let’s cover that. First of all, I was shocked at the pace with which the firms that we’re working with now engaged with us, in the sense that law firms are very conservative. It’s like enterprise sales.
00:19:13 Elliot: But they’re moving very quickly right now because if their competitors are leaning into AI and they’re not, they have a big problem, potentially an existential problem. That’s number one.
00:19:23 Elliot: Number two, in terms of the billable hour, we work with and speak with a lot of different law firms, some of the biggest law firms in the world. Maybe that won’t change on the litigation side, but I get the sense that on the corporate side, there’s going to be much, much more fixed fee work.
00:19:40 Elliot: Meaning, you handle our entire financing. Instead of billing us by that hour, we’ll pay you a hundred thousand dollars and you do all of it. And then the client doesn’t care if it got done in 10 minutes or it got done in 10 hours. They’re just looking for an outcome.
00:19:57 Elliot: I think that the way that large firms are looking at this right now is… listen, we have a ton of competition out there. Everyone’s kind doing the same thing. If other people are getting these gains, they’re going to pull clients away from us.
00:20:10 Elliot: Now on the small firm side, we are working with a firm that’s about 100 attorneys. They’re very, very innovative. And I think that they’re very much so thinking about AI in the right way.
00:20:22 Elliot: They’re very much leaning in with our product and they are already rolling out a client facing version, where their clients can email in to firm email address, their AI email address. They can email in term sheet or MSA or an NDA, whatever it is.
00:20:40 Elliot: The agent is going to take the first pass at doing the work. And then our agent is going to route that to the appropriate attorney, the subject matter expert within the firm, to just review and make sure that everything is okay. They’re going to charge a lower fee to do that.
00:20:56 Elliot: Now, My initial thought was, how is this going to work? Because if you’re just charging a lower fee, you’re going to take a revenue hit.
00:21:03 Elliot: The founder of the firm, who’s a very forward thinking person, said, “No, you’re not seeing it. If we do it this way and it catches fire, which I think it will, we’re going to have more and more clients coming to us. Because they can get the same service.” It’s not better. The agent does an incredible job and you still have the human in the loop for a much lower cost.
00:21:24 Elliot: That’s the basic ways that I think firms are thinking about this. Now, the interesting thing here is a lot of firms are using these legal AI tools that have been on the market now for some time.
00:21:38 Elliot: But I don’t know where the advantage comes at the end of the day if you’re all using the same thing. So they’re all still trying to seek out alpha and see where the edge is. Only time will tell as to which firms really pull ahead and which do not.
00:21:53 Elliot: Now, one other thing that I’ll mention, Scott, real quick is we’ve had some very interesting discussions with some elite law firms, old school, white shoe law firms, which from a technological perspective, I’m pretty concerned about their ability to lean in.
00:22:13 Elliot: There could be a big shakeup in this space because we talk with firms that have not yet migrated to the cloud, right? They’re still completely on-prem.
00:22:23 Elliot: So I think that there’s going to be a separation, not based on how people have viewed these firms before, meaning their level of lawyering, but based on their ability to lean in to AI. Because now everyone, or soon everyone, will have access to the same intelligence. It’s how you’re able to use and maneuver with that intelligence.
00:22:47 Scott: It’s fascinating. I wonder if you looked back at the prior rise of LexisNexis or the earlier technology waves that hit the legal industry where you had old school law firms literally utilizing law libraries and looking up case law versus those in the 90s or the 2000s were heavily leveraging the new systems like LexisNexis at the time.
00:23:09 Scott: If there was a big inflection point of who won clients and who took market share during that time, it’d be interesting to see because we’re probably at another inflection point, where those firms that can lean in and adopt these new tools are going to have a structural advantage to be able to win clients, get back faster.
00:23:27 Scott: The other parallel it reminds me of from 10 years back was the debate about radiology and medical imaging. And everybody said AI is going to take away all these jobs because what’s a radiologist do but look at images and find certain anomalies.
00:23:43 Scott: Of course, what it did was it lowered the cost of MRIs, made radiology a more in-demand service, and you have the rise of things like Pronovo, Ezra, Everlab, all sorts of at-home almost MRI scans where you can, for 500 bucks or 1,000 bucks, get something that used to cost 20,000.
00:24:00 Scott: It really democratized the space. It didn’t erode the demand on radiologists. It actually made that a more sizable career path because the costs of running MRIs went virtually to zero.
00:24:13 Scott: Similarly, to the partners comments about increasing demand, if the cost and the marginal cost of doing some legal service was super low, I would probably get more feedback, more advice on a much higher cadence than I currently do because we play defense as much as we can and only talk to lawyers when we want to pay them $2,000 an hour, which is not very often.
00:24:32 Elliot: By the way, there’s more radiologists today than there were five years ago. People ask me all the time, even attorneys. We work with a ton of attorney. Is AI going to take my job completely away?
00:24:45 Elliot: And my answer is a resounding no. You are not going to lose your job to AI. The risk to your job is losing it to another attorney who’s very good at using and savvy at using AI. I do think that attorneys absolutely need to lean in to using these tools immediately.
00:25:07 Elliot: Because like you mentioned Westlaw, LexisNexi, those are all tools that I used when I was an actual practicing attorney. They’re helpful for doing the job. With our agents, you’re talking about things that do the job completely.
00:25:20 Elliot: And so, the attorney needs to get used to being the final sign-off, being the person who has the knowledge to be able to make the judgment call. Did the agent get it right? Did it not?
00:25:32 Elliot: AI is just guessing the next most probable word. Actual attorneys have the experience to know, “Hey, I need to make a judgment call here. I need to base this on risk. I need to base this on the risk profile of my client, who the counterparty is, et cetera.” Lawyers are still going to play a huge part of the role. It’s just a changing part of the role.
00:25:53 Scott: There’s a great piece that somebody that you know. Omar Jarun from UDF, wrote a piece a week ago about the compression of Pareto. And so this Pareto principle that came from wherever it was decades ago, that 80% of outputs are driven by 20% of inputs.
00:26:09 Scott: And the compression of Pareto being that with AI, maybe that 20% compresses down to 5% where each attorney needs to find their edge where they have a real true comparative advantage in whatever domain. Because those that are the best in those domains, they’re in the top 5%, they’re really going to be able to supplement 95% with AI.
00:26:30 Scott: You got to be farther out there as the tip of the spear in whatever domain is your expertise. And a closing question, existential question for the bottom rungs of the ladder. The way I think about it is maybe the middle rungs are the ones at risk to your point where attorneys that are in the practice don’t fully yet adopt AI.
00:26:50 Scott: Because as you said, the new graduates coming out of law school are going to be heavily adept with this stuff and come in swinging way above their weight. And they’re going to be supercharged from day one as first year associates. And then maybe you have the bleeding edge AI doctors that are the tip of the spear, those top 5% in their practice areas.
00:27:08 Scott: And where it seems the real erosion in the legal industry could happen is in folks that are already in the role but are not savvy enough to adopt AI or lean heavily into tools like mixus. Where do you kind of see that hierarchy or where the opportunities might be or the erosion might happen?
00:27:24 Elliot: I already see it today. When we work with firms, it depends on how long we’ve been working with them. Usually, we start with a practice group or maybe 20, 25 people.
00:27:35 Elliot: The people that are using the tool every day, and I know they’re using the tool every day because they’re constantly giving us feedback. They’re excited. They’re pinging us. How can I do X, Y, Z?
00:27:44 Elliot: Oftentimes that’s the first-year associates, first and second year associates. They’re very much leaning into AI. So, those folks, I’m very bullish on their careers, not because they know a ton yet. Law school doesn’t actually teach you how to practice law. It just teaches you how to read cases.
00:28:03 Elliot: And so, they still have to learn the practice of law, but they have a very unique in right now, is they understand how to use the AI tools. That’s making them very uniquely situated at these firms to be value add.
00:28:17 Elliot: Because in the same way that partners, long time partners at those firms are teaching them how to practice law, they’re essentially teaching the partners how to adopt AI technology. So, that’s on the low end.
00:28:29 Elliot: On the much higher end, say a 30-year partner or whatever it is, those partners have years and years and years of practice under their belt of being able to make these assessments, being able to make these judgment calls because they’ve gone through all the motions.
00:28:46 Elliot: Law is not about black letter laws. It’s interpreting that based on many different client interactions. Those people have a very valuable knowledge base that the AI, at least at this point, cannot replace.
00:29:01 Elliot: I do think that those people similarly need to lean into AI and/or have very savvy junior associates that can do the AI component of their practice and they come in from above.
00:29:12 Elliot: The portion that I’m worried the most about is if you are, say, a senior associate. You’ve been practicing law maybe for six or seven years. So, you don’t have that same knowledge base as a 30-year partner who knows this stuff like the back of their hand. They have the judgment. It’s almost a reflex at this point.
00:29:34 Elliot: That seventh year is still learning how to practice law and if they’re not leaning into AI, I would be worried about them. Because again, you can get the same baseline intelligence now that a 30-year partner has. You don’t have the judgment.
00:29:49 Elliot: But if you’re not using the tool that gives you that baseline knowledge and you don’t have the judgment, you’re left in this murky middle. And that’s what I’m seeing playing out in real time. Even at the firms that we’re working with, the people who are really pulling ahead are leaning into using the tool.
00:30:04 Elliot: Now, to figure out how amazing the tool can be for your practice, you have to experiment some. You have to get used to using AI. But there seems there’s an inflection point right now where the firms themselves are really coming in from the top and saying, you must use this tool. We’ve seen other attorneys make massive gains and we want to see that for everyone here.
00:30:28 Scott: It’s such a fascinating time to be building and congrats on everything that you guys have done at mixus. We’re super excited for the path forward and can’t wait for my law firm bills to go down through the floor when they start using more of these AI tools.
00:30:42 Scott: I guess in quick lightning rounds, you’ve spent a lot of your life between Tennessee, New York, and obviously Northern California. If you were to live anywhere else outside of those spots, where would you pick to live?
00:30:54 Elliot: I’m a California boy through and through, but if it was outside of California, I’ve spent a good amount of time in Austin, Texas. I really, really like it there. It gets a little too hot and humid for me, for my likes, during the summer, but I think it’s an amazing place to live. They’ve got a thriving tech ecosystem. So, I think that’s where I choose.
00:31:16 Scott: You’re going to follow the train of every other Silicon Valley entrepreneur to Texas for one reason or another.
00:31:24 Scott: What’s one podcast or book that you’re reading you found really insightful recently?
00:31:30 Elliot: I love podcasts. That’s my favorite medium because I’m generally quite busy, but you can listen to it on the run. What is my favorite podcast?
00:31:40 Scott: Other than Venture Everywhere, of course.
00:31:42 Elliot: Obviously, obviously. That goes without saying. I really like the Hard Fork Podcast. The New York Times puts it out. They do a lot of good coverage on AI and other stuff as well.
00:31:55 Elliot: But I think they have a very good and balanced take on where this is all going. What I mean by that is I feel like AI right now, the sector is very similar to American politics, in the sense that it’s very extreme.
00:32:14 Elliot: Either you think that AGI is here and you’ll never have to work another day in your life and the AI is going to handle everything. Or you think this is total and utter BS and these things are guessing the next word and they’re not going to be that helpful.
00:32:30 Elliot: What I like about Hard Fork is they take a very measured approach. They’re journalists, so they’re not trying to hype the technology, but they use the technology a lot themselves. They’re like, both of these extremes are wrong. It’s somewhere in between. And they do a nice job of breaking things down from that lens, which I appreciate.
00:32:46 Scott: I love that. Finally, where can listeners find you online?
00:32:49 Elliot: You can go to mixus.ai. The main other place that you can find me is LinkedIn. If you message me on LinkedIn, I might not be the quickest turnaround, but I’m usually able to get back to those messages. So, that’s a good place to find me.
00:33:04 Scott: Awesome. Elliot, always great to see you. Great to chat. Super excited about mixus and thankful for 30 years of friendship with you and getting to work with you now more than ever. So, it’s great.
00:33:15 Elliot: Likewise. Likewise. If you had told my sixth grade self that we’d be doing this podcast in 2026, I would have been pretty happy about that. So great to be here. Glad to do it.
00:33:24 Scott: Awesome. Thanks, Elliot.
00:33:27 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.