Navin Chaddha, managing director of the 55-year-old Silicon Valley venture firm Mayfield, is betting big on AI’s ability to transform people-heavy industries like consulting, law, and accounting. The veteran investor, whose wins include Lyft, Poshmark, and HashiCorp, recently discussed at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC evening in Menlo Park why he believes “AI teammates” can create software-like margins in traditionally labor-intensive sectors, and why startups should right now target neglected markets rather than compete head-to-head with giants like Accenture — though he acknowledged that disrupting outfits where relationships and trust matter is sometimes harder than Silicon Valley anticipates. This conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
You think that law firms, consulting companies, and accounting services – collectively a $5 trillion market – will be completely reimagined by AI-first companies that operate with software-like margins. Prove it. What have you seen beyond PowerPoint presentations?
I think an advantage of a firm that has been in business for over 50 years is that it has seen all the trends, from mainframe to minicomputers to PCs, to the internet, to mobile, cloud, social and now this AI era. The example I would give is in the late ’90s, this concept of e-business came, which was: if I’m a physical business, I cannot survive if I’m just brick and mortar; I need to be click and mortar. Then outsourcing became a trend, and offshoring became a big trend. You couldn’t build a software services company without a presence in India or one of the emerging markets. The same thing happened with supply chains and manufacturing — China and Taiwan rose. So what is this new era with AI? Clearly, AI is a 100x force, and AI is teaming up with humans, hopefully to make them better. And I think it is, and it’s going to help reimagine business.
A lot of the repetitive tasks are going to be done by AI… and there’ll be two models. One is that you grow organically. The second is that you grow inorganically. . .
Can you give a specific example of how this will work?
What are the kinds of things an LLM or AI can do? Well, say I have to implement Salesforce. Who wants to go do that work? The human will come in and say, ‘I’m your client manager. You have to implement Salesforce.’ It’s the same set of things. Use AI as the horse to do it, and whatever AI can’t do, have the human in the loop.
Now, suddenly, if you start doing these kinds of things, you can have less work done by humans and more work done by AI, and [customers] only pay for AI when [they] use it.
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And the market [entry] should not be to go after [big consulting and IT companies] like Accenture, Infosys, or TCS. Go after the neglected masses. There are 30 million small companies in the U.S., and 100 million worldwide that can’t afford knowledge workers. Provide them service as software. They say, “I need a receptionist. I need a scheduler. I need somebody to build my website…” AI should be used to [create] startup funding forms, with some human [involvement] for negotiation. You don’t compete with the Accentures of the world. You go after fragmented markets, where instead of charging per hour, instead of charging per month for a contractor, you charge per event.
So outcome-based pricing rather than time-based billing.
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