DoNotPay's Josh Browder: Your very own robot lawyer
What is Do Not Pay? It helps you fight against every way a big corporation or government either rips you off or takes your time. We have 15 different products in our iPhone app.
One example that is really popular: You connect your Uber receipts. If the driver takes a wrong route Do Not Pay automatically finds that and gets your fare reduced.
Other things Do Not Pay does: Reduce overdraft fees, bank fee refunds, credit card fees. You can sue anyone in small claims court by pressing a button. We have 60 new consumer rights products coming in the next year.
Where did you get the idea for Do Not Pay? I got 30 parking tickets. I was writing the same letter over and over again to challenge the tickets. I started doing this for my friends too. I automated this process. This was the first version of Do Not Pay. Do Not Pay has saved over $15 million on invalid parking tickets.
The size of this market is hard to fathom: In New York alone they make $1 billion from parking tickets. It’s a global scam. The average person has nothing to defend themselves except technology.
I think of Do Not Pay as the world’s first robot lawyer: It’s entirely automated and free.
The biggest threat of AI is to all white-collar jobs: I think 50% of all jobs in the next 10 years will completely shift to something else.
Why do you hate lawyers? They don’t add any value. They copy and paste documents and charge thousands. They can do this because they also create the system. They create rules that you can’t practice law unless you are a lawyer. They protect each other to keep prices high for everyday people.
At Do Not Pay we are excited to slowly chip away at their monopoly: I think lawyers have continued to charge ridiculous amounts of money for doing very little.
What is the end goal of Do Not Pay: The average person doesn’t even need to know what a lawyer is. I think lawyers will become like actuaries. Corporations will still employ them. An ordinary person won’t need one.
I’m doing the least noble thing in my family: Bill Browder [my dad] is fighting Russian torturers and murderers. His lawyer was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in Russia. He got the Magnitsky Act passed which punishes human rights violations all over the world. My grandfather [Felix Browder] was a famous mathematician that invented concepts that are used today in self-driving cars etc. My great grandfather [Earl Browder] was the head of the American Communist Party.
Do Not Pay is completely free. What is the business model? The companies I admire in this space are Robin Hood and Credit Karma. They sell services not related to what they do. We are focusing on building trust first. Once the users trust you they will buy other services from you. We touch a lot of things: fee removal, travel, finance, etc. So build services around these things and take a cut.
Do you think a general AI will happen? If it is going to happen it will start with Alexa. You need a lot of data and no one has more data than Alexa. There are now 10,000 people working on Alexa. That’s more people than all of Y Combinator startups combined. I wonder what they are working on.