Joshua Browder on why boring vertical AI is the best opportunity beneath foundation model labs
Sep 10, 2025 with Joshua Browder
Key Points
- DoNotPay founder Joshua Browder argues the best startup opportunities lie in unglamorous vertical AI markets like waste management that foundation model labs will ignore, enabling realistic paths to $100–200M revenue.
- YC Demo Day seed valuations have shifted sharply upward to a $20M pre-money baseline, with top deals hitting $100M, a significant jump from the $12M valuations Browder recalls as strong in his early days.
- DoNotPay has moved past template-based legal letter generation as ChatGPT commoditized that function, now competing in background automation while battling an escalating arms race against enterprise anti-bot tooling.
Summary
Joshua Browder, founder of DoNotPay, argues that the best startup opportunities sit in unglamorous verticals that foundation model labs will never build. At YC Demo Day 2025, he points to a founder working on waste collection AI software as an example. OpenAI is pursuing knowledge retrieval, health, coaching, shopping, talent, and coding. Waste management is not on that list. Builders in overlooked verticals can realistically reach $100–200M in revenue without direct collision with frontier model labs.
DoNotPay product evolution
DoNotPay has moved past its original template-based model. Anyone can now ask ChatGPT to generate a legal letter. The company is pushing deeper into background automation, though Browder remains deliberately vague about specifics. The constant pressure is detection. SaaS startups now sell anti-bot tooling explicitly designed to stop DoNotPay's automated agents. Browder frames the ongoing arms race as a motivation advantage. DoNotPay is more invested in winning it than the average enterprise software vendor.
YC Demo Day valuations
Browder's read from conversations at the event is that $20M pre-money is now the baseline for YC companies, with some deals reaching $100M at the top end. He recalls raising at $12M being considered strong in his day. That floor has since moved up sharply.
Generational entrepreneurship
Browder sketches an informal theory of how technically precocious teenagers have monetized each successive platform wave. iPhone jailbreaking and Cydia themes were his own entry point at around age 13. Minecraft server businesses, sneaker bots, and now Roblox have all hosted their own cohorts of young founders. Whoever is printing money on Roblox today will likely show up as a notable founder in five years.