The Pomp Podcast
#557: Joshua Browder on Automating Consumer Rights
- Do Not Pay started as an accidental project to dispute parking tickets while Joshua Browder was at Stanford, then expanded into a compound startup covering 200+ consumer products automating legal disputes.
- The company operates on a fully automated model requiring no lawyers or armies of staff, using APIs and technology to generate and file demand letters, appeals, and other legal documents for consumers.
- Do Not Pay challenges institutional gatekeeping in law, finance, and government by reducing friction and costs—fighting 30% App Store fees, San Francisco's 0.5% gross receipts tax, and proprietary legal systems.
- New products address robocalls (with honeypot credit card tracking), facial recognition (Photo Ninja), HOA disputes, crypto fund freezes, and pandemic relief applications, with development cycles as fast as 4 days.
- Browder has become an angel investor in Stanford and Teal Fellowship founder friends, preferring to invest pre-Series A and emphasizing the shift of power from institutional VCs to solo GPs with faster decision-making.
- The company is profitable on $16.6 million raised and plans to go public, with the ambition to serve every American consumer facing unfair fees, debt collection, and bureaucratic overreach.