3 Patterns for Great Business Ideas with Jack Abraham, Founder, Managing Partner & CEO at Atomic

that there could be an hour that comes in your life that is worth more than the cumulative sum of everything else you've spent, all of the time, all of the effort, all of the energy that you've spent doing everything else. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

This is like a hit podcast. Like, we're growing, we're doing good. And yet, Sean, your microphone is the most like hoodrat thing I've seen. What is that? Is it like balanced in there?

Yeah. So there's like, you know, there's some way that this is supposed to sit and then there's the way it actually sits. And, you know, don't mess with success. It's our good luck charm.

So, Jack, we're recording now. I think you— someone— I don't know how much you looked into it, but someone sent your team a little update on or a little description on what we do. And it looks like you sent an agenda. This looks awesome. So I have a feeling you know what's up a little bit. Is that right?

Yeah, I listened to a few of your guys' podcasts. I think it's great, great content. Sean and I kind of go way back. We used to know each other back in San Francisco in the early days when tech was getting going there.

And when tech was in San Francisco.

Yeah, when tech was in San Francisco. And excited to be on. Thanks for having me.

How did you, uh, how'd you guys know each other?

I was gonna ask you this. I didn't know how much you remembered. I remember pretty vividly. I was at this time I was running Monkey Inferno, which was an idea lab or sort of a startup studio. And I don't know how we got connected. But Jack came by the office. And I remember sitting in this conference room. And he was thinking about launching his own, you know, sort of like personal incubator, idea factory, whatever you want to call these things. What do you call it, Jack? By the way, you call it a startup studio?

We go with startup studio, just given that the industry seems to have gone with that.

And I remember before the meeting, I like kind of Googled, I was like, okay, who's this guy? And then I saw, oh wow, this guy's like done all this stuff. He had, he built Milo, he sold it to eBay. And this was like, you know, not his first rodeo. And, and in the meeting, I just remember you had like really good questions. You had like, because a lot of people like this idea of a startup studio, it sounds really fun. You get to sit around all day and just think of ideas and build them. And like, if something hits, you know, hooray. And, but you had actually like done a lot of thought, put a lot of thought into it. And so you asked a bunch of questions. And I remember thinking, Hey, I've been doing this for a few years. I can share a bunch of insights. I remember everything that I had told you. I was like, hey, here's a common trap.

Avoid it.

Go this way. You were like, yeah, that's why we're doing it this way. You had already, you were sort of two steps ahead. I remember. And I was, I remember walking away being like, okay, I think this is one of the few startup studios that might actually work. And I think it has done so. I think it's one of the few startup studios that has actually worked. You guys had Hims come out of it, which is like a breakout success public company. And, and what are some of the other ones that have come out of Atomic that are big? I know there's the— there's some that have sort of spiked and I'm not sure where they're at now. They didn't kind of go, yeah, full.

Yeah, like, like we've, we've created a ton of different companies. Bungalow has been doing incredibly well. We just announced a huge raise for that company. Homebound, which is kind of revolutionizing construction and how that's done with a marketplace dynamic. Replicant, which is using AI to transform call centers. Radiant, which is kind of cloud software for screens for B2B applications. So we kind of touch all sorts of industries. We have now actually a few dozen companies that we've started, right? So we operate across everything, and a lot of our companies are doing really well.

We're—

we actually try to keep a lot of our companies stealth because people have started to try to copy them, and by the time we announce them, they've usually raised pretty significant funding. So a lot of them are, are under wraps. But we tend to do a lot in healthcare and telemedicine. We do a lot in prop tech, we do a lot in fintech, education, AI, and then marketplaces.

And what is the like idea process? Because you're right, you do stay in stealth for a while. I think I feel it feels like when you come out to market, you've already like the company's already got a bunch of traction. You announce a big raise at that point. But what that means is that people are willing to copy you. If Jack's doing it as an idea, It's probably a good market and a good idea. Let's just— if we just use that and we copy that, we're already skipping a bunch of potential points of failure. And, you know, I think everybody thinks they're a good idea person. You actually seem to be a good idea person. So where does that— what's the process? What's the process for ideas? You know, how are you coming up with so like a high number of good quality ideas that turn into businesses?

I heard you have 600. You have a list of 600 in an Evernote doc, just an Evernote doc, right?

Yeah, 600.

Yeah. So you have a lot, a lot of ideas.

Yeah.

So, okay, multi-part question. Um, so I think the first part of this is where do kind of good ideas come from? And I have a view on this which is a little contrarian, and actually I think where startup studios and incubators can fall apart, which is a lot of times if you're incubating companies, the temptation is to brainstorm on ideas. So think about things, get into a room, whiteboard, come up with solutions, and you're kind of coming up with these contrived solutions to problems that may or may not exist. And that's kind of a problem, you know, versus what we do at Atomic is we don't have brainstorming sessions. So we've been in business for over a decade. We've never had a brainstorming session on ideas, which is kind of crazy, right? So what we do is we observe problems in the world that could be problems that we have personally, problems on our team, problems in our portfolio. That our companies have that create enterprise companies. And in that case, we observe the problems, we see a pattern, we actually build the product to solve it, we deploy it across our portfolio, we have built-in customers, we, we dogfood it, we make sure that it works within our portfolio. And then once we know it works, then we release it to the world. But it's really a problem-first kind of mentality and then solving the problem that I think makes us stand out and a little bit different. From other people that have attempted this. And I, uh, in terms of the 600 ideas and where they've come from, it turns out our view of the world is like, it's actually fundamentally very broken. There's just a lot of stuff in the world that could be improved. And that doesn't mean that everything's like broken, broken, right? Like, it just means that there's, there is an opportunity in many, many facets of life and many parts of the economy to up-level things. And this could be in just like everyday parts of life. This could be in going to the doctor's office. This could be in commuting to work. This could be in interacting with a company or running a sales team or, you know, something like that. You just observe all of these things and think, wow, that doesn't seem, you know, that seems a little bit broken. There's probably a better way. And then I just got in the habit of writing those down.. And now that list has grown to over 600, and that's a seed that we use to start companies out of at Atomic.

And I have a whole bunch of questions that, like I was telling you, I watched a lot of your interviews, so I understand a little bit about your process and I want to ask you about that. But before you did this, so you're 30, are you 34 now?

I'm 35 now.

You're 35. So before you were doing Atomic, your first big win was Milo. You sold that for like $75 million at 24, right? Yep. Stayed there at eBay for 2 years.

By the way, Sam, do you know who his dad is?

I do. Comscore.

Yeah. So I didn't know that till I was doing research because we had met. I just thought, oh, he's kind of like a whiz kid.

And I love Comscore.

Behind every whiz kid is some unique childhood, I think, where you get exposed to something. So, so, Jack, so your dad started Comscore, is that right? Was CEO. I don't know if he's still CEO. And you were working there like at age 12 or something crazy. Is that right?

Thanks. Yeah, um, yeah, I had an interesting childhood where I got exposed to entrepreneurship at a young age. My dad was an immigrant. He came to the US literally without a dollar to his name. From where? Um, he was born in Lebanon, and then he actually went to college in France studying science and engineering and math. He came to the US to get his PhD in math at MIT, and he literally didn't have a dollar to his name. So he slept on a concrete basement floor at MIT in a sleeping bag. I was born while he was there in Boston. And then, you know, he took math and he applied it to business. He actually invented all of these really cool new forms of marketing, which at the time were revolutionary. He ended up winning these international marketing awards for them, ended up getting promoted in the company that he joined, and eventually became president of it, and then decided to become an entrepreneur. Can you imagine the world dream? I mean, he was basically born at the bottom of the third world. He rose to the top of the first world, started a company, sold it. And then when I was 12 or 13, he said, Jack, I'm going to start a company that's going to measure everything everyone does on the internet and make sense of it. Do you want to join it? And I joined it as the third person, as a software engineer. And I learned how to write code.

Did he give you equity?

Uh, well, so he was like, do you want cash or equity? I said equity. I don't want cash. Nice. Give me equity. So I took the equity and it ended up working out. Also, child labor laws meant he couldn't pay me cash, so I had to get the equity.

And at its peak, it was worth it. Like, he took it public. It was worth like $6 billion or something like that. Like many billions.

Yeah, it ended up being worth billions at its peak. He basically— yeah, he grew it on his own, took it public. It did really well. And then, you know, 2 or 3 years after it went public, he decided, I don't want to be a public company CEO. And he got off of that, started doing investing and being on boards. But I got to see that grow just from like an idea in my parents' sitting room to, you know, 1,000-plus person company to public company. And I just got hooked. So I started starting companies at age 15 and I've just been hooked. It's just been in my DNA ever since. Technology has been in my DNA.

How old were you when you went— when it went public?

Hmm, that's a good question. I was in college, so I probably was like 19 or 20 or something like that.

So he gave you shares when you were 13. When you were 20, what did they end up becoming worth? Were you like the richest 20-year-old there is?

The podcast is called My First Million. You might have been the youngest— the youngest person to make your first million, uh, if that math adds up.

You know, my dad was a— is a very fair person, and that would have been nepotism to give me an unfair amount of shares.

You're number 3.

He gave me what I deserved, which I was a 12 or 13-year-old that didn't know how to code. So I got basically paid the equivalent of like close to minimum wage in shares, which is kind of what I deserved. But it ended up being worth a lot of money, and it was great. And yeah, it was a good taste of equity.

And you start Milo— it, it, it's acquir— was it acquired for $75 billion? Is that right? So you're 24. So correct, just massive success. Milo ends up becoming a pretty big deal, like a main part of eBay. You work on a, a bunch of big parts at eBay.

You become this kind of big shot, like you kind of climb up there because in the last 2 years, but basically me, so I got acquired, uh, we got acquired by Twitch to like, you know, go from a little startup to, okay, it's a 2,000-person company. Sam just got acquired, his company just got acquired by HubSpot. I don't know how many employees does HubSpot have?

Probably 3,000, I think.

3,000 employees. And so, and I know I would say like the default path for entrepreneurs, and I know because I talked to a bunch of them during the acquisition process of like, all right, what's the next year of my life going to look like? You know, what's your advice to me? And I got a whole range of sort of opinions. But I would say the common, the default path was sort of like, look, somebody who's like you, true entrepreneur at heart, it's going to be hard for you to be in a big company for a long time. You could choose choose to either like, just not play the game, you kind of like coast and just do your own thing, maybe do build a couple interesting products while you're there, and then bounce whenever you're ready. Or you like try to play the game, you try to climb the ladder a bit and, and actually, like figure out what, what this looks like. There's a different game than the startup game, right? You're not zero to one, you're sort of in the one to n phase of things. And you know, it's all about sort of about management of a large organization. And I think most entrepreneurs go the first route that I just mentioned, but it seems like you actually kicked ass at eBay.

Like, I remember reading some article where you were basically like the VP or something.

You were the MVP, really. You were like the guy who's helping turn this thing around. I think it was like part of a bigger story of, hey, eBay's turning itself around, but you seem to have done extremely well. Talk about that. Is that something where you— what was your approach when you got acquired?

And is that true?

Yeah, yeah. How much of that story is true?

Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting. First of all, it's definitely true. It wasn't told when I was at eBay, partially because I don't like that much attention and I don't claim credit for a lot of things while I was there. I was just catching up with like a reporter that I liked and I told him this story and he was like, this is amazing. Why hasn't anyone written about this? And ended up getting written up and Eventually the story got told, but yeah, I'm a pretty impact-motivated person overall. And I had just heard all these stories about founder friends that had sold their companies and they sell to the acquirer and they languish and they actually kind of become depressed. They're just kind of like they lose their mojo. They're just like, what am I doing? What's my life becoming? They almost become like robotic. And I was just like, you know what, life's short. Like, let me figure out how to use this experience for the good of the company, of me.

I'm proud of what I built.

And, and, and after that, you started a couple things before Atomic, I think, right? And those things, they're— I feel like when I was researching your story, they're kind of like footnotes, like they're not like major parts, and yet I researched them, they were really successful uh, like a couple software companies, right?

I remember three of those traps. I want to say them because I'm sure there's somebody out here listening who, who would be curious. I remember one was exactly what you said, which was focus. So the theme is basically startup studios are great, they have a bunch of advantages, but you don't want to lose the natural advantages that startups have. And so startups have desperation and focus. Those are two of the core ingredients of a startup. And I said, you know, shiny object syndrome is a trap. When you have an idea lab, you could do exactly what you said. You could just go on a whiteboard, brainstorm it. That's kind of your job. And then you take one of those ideas that sounds semi-plausible and Paul Graham, I think, calls these sitcom startup ideas. It's like you come up with a kind of a manufactured story for a sitcom, like, oh, guy and a girl fall in love in college and then, you know, their jobs take them across the country and they break up, right? Like you come up with these manufactured ideas. And then the second thing is because you have multiple ideas going at once, when you're doing at the beginning, when you're doing one, it starts to hit some rough patches or plateaus or just things get challenging like every idea does. Well, that shiny object over there is unproven. That one might be easier. Let's just go. And you either intentionally or unintentionally start to shift your focus away from the hard thing that you should really be pushing through and start just focusing on other shiny objects. The second one was desperation. You had said something smart. You go, we're going to fund the team. I think you said for 9 months, you go, then their job is to raise the Series A in 9 months. And I was like, that's great. Because if Otherwise, in an idea lab, these things can just languish forever. You could just keep them in sort of this feeling that, you know, if not this month, the next month, no problem. And you're like, the people working on this are only going to work on this one project, their project needs to raise money, or sorry, guys, it's a bust. And like, of course, you would probably recycle the best talent into the next idea. But I liked that having a sort of a deadline and a do or die moment of like, you either proved your shit or you didn't. That was the second Second one I remember. And the third was you're like, we're going to focus on B2B initially and not consumer stuff because we know a bunch of pain points that we've had as entrepreneurs or our companies have. And so we can kind of scratch our own itch and not try to make the next hit social network.

And frankly, it's probably so much easier.

Although Hims was a consumer company. So, you know, you know, but maybe, who knows? I don't want to pry, but maybe you're scratching your own itch there too.

Well, you know, it, No, well, no, that was a bunch of, that was a bunch of, that was a hair loss company. I still have my hair, as you can see.

He was about to, Jack was about to skip that one over and then he was like, I gotta address that.

Who said that?

Um, that's a good question. I think it was one of the managing partners from General Catalyst, if I remember correctly. Um, and they're great. We do some work with them. They're pretty fantastic. And, you know, since then, B2B has actually been able to become home runs, right? Additionally, right? Like, the valuations on some of these B2B companies is absolutely astronomical. But the great thing about doing B2B is you can talk to the customer and you can trust what they say, right? And that is not necessarily true for consumer. Consumers, you can talk to them and you almost have to read between the lines with what they say. You can't trust what they say. You can trust what they do, You have to kind of run them through the product. You have to look at the data and see what they do. But what they do is actually usually different than what they say. And what works is not always what they say is going to work. Part of that is consumers don't know in their mind what they need. They don't know. It's hard. They can't dream it up. So it's a very different practice creating consumer companies from B2B companies. But to address your other point, Sean, of the 9 months and, you know, having companies raise on their own, that is like a purposeful element that we designed Atomic in, which is we tried to design Atomic to be uncomfortable at the atomic level. So companies are pushed out and people are pushed out of Atomic, and there's not this effect where people just stay in the incubator forever because it's dangerous to do that.

And that is— is it 9 months and $300,000? Is that right? Or $250,000 or something?

Did you— when you, when you were starting this, how much of your own money did you put up to do this? And were you like, all right, uh, you know, I made this much money, I'm willing to lose $1 million over the next 2 years to see if I can make this work?

Yeah, it's a good question. So my general philosophy with things is you shouldn't sell what you wouldn't also buy. So I wanted to prove to myself that this would work before raising outside capital. So The first year or so of Atomic, I did it with my own capital, which was roughly on the order of what you described. And then once I was convinced, okay, I think this is working. I think we can pull this off. I think this model is going to work. Then we raised our first fund and our first fund was, you know, roughly the first, first part of the first fund was roughly a $10 million vehicle that was primarily individuals. And we had some great founders of venture capital firms involved, like Mark Andreessen and, um, Iden Sanket and Peter Thiel and people like that that helped us a lot in the early days, um, and that helped us prove out the model from there. And since then we've raised much, much larger funds.

You have a couple things on the agenda that I, I want to know the answer to, and one is what you just said. You've, uh, Andreessen backed your, your fund, Chris Dixon, David Sachs, Peter Thiel, and you said on here, he says some of, some of the learnings from some of these kind of like pretty amazing people. These are some of the, like, architects of, like, you know, the modern Silicon Valley. Um, I guess, do you have any, like, fun stories, anecdotes, or lessons learned that are, you know, not what's, you know, I guess, like, just absolute common sense where you just say we all already know that? But what have you learned from some of these guys that's, that's been— that stood out to you or stuck with you?

And add in Josh Kushner on there too, because he interests me as well. He— which, he almost has a model like yours.

Question. What's an example of that for you? Do you have an hour? Is there something that stands out to you that's like your version of that hour with Zuck, or how do you engineer it?

Um, I like that.

I used to have a job that was kind of like a shitty job. It paid really well, but I just didn't like it. And I remember talking to my friend there and I go, He's like, why don't you like it? Like, it's all good. Like, it's an easy job. We're making great money. We're, you know, they really respect us. They like us. What's the problem? And I was like, the problem is I feel like if I didn't come here today, nothing would change. And if I, you know, and then you boil that down. It's like, if I don't do anything this hour, definitely nothing's going to change. And we called it, it's kind of like you said, you look at all those blocks and you sort of figure out which blocks matter. And we literally said the same thing and we called it the Jenga Law. Which was, you know, in a tower of Jenga blocks, if you remove some blocks, the tower's totally fine. And then other blocks are like the key linchpins. And there's some, some point where you remove too many and the whole tower tips over and it falls. And so you don't want to remove those anchors, but there are plenty of sort of useless blocks that are in there. And if you take them out, you make space, then something interesting can happen. And so we started doing that. I started, I first started with an hour. I said, okay, every day from 1 PM to 2 PM, I'd do nothing. It wasn't to be lazy. It was to test what happens. And then of course nothing happened.

Nobody noticed. Your office space moment.

Yeah, exactly. And I took half a day off. I'm just gonna do nothing for the second half of this day. See what happens. Nothing happened. Then I just stopped coming to work for like 2 weeks. Right. And finally by like the 4th week, it was like, they, you know, they were like, hey, what the heck? Where are you? We noticed that these things were behind.

And what job was this?

It was a job I had in Australia. I went, my, after my first company kind of got like acquihired, I was working for this thing and Yeah, it was a fun— it was again a nice place, but it really taught me that like one thing that matters to me is that my hours matter. Like I want my hours to matter. That doesn't mean I want to work super hard, but when I do do something, I want it to matter. And I started doing what you're doing, which is like recognizing that it's not linear. Every hour is not equal. We kind of get trained this way, right? You're going to work Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. There's this assumption that Monday equals Thursday. That, you know, the first hour of an 8-hour day is the same as the fourth hour, but they're definitely not in productivity or importance.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that that's absolutely right.

Honorable mention.

Good question.

That was a good question, by the way.

Let me, let me think through that. I mean, there, there have been plenty, plenty, plenty over the years to think through. I'm just trying to think through some worth calling out.

Take out your Evernote and just scroll.

I know, I know.

Click share. And then add sam@samparr.com.

Yeah, totally. Okay, well, I'll give you some examples. So one example is, um, all right, so talk about problem solution. So we got this, we got this new office in, in Letterman and the Presidio. For those of you who don't know, in San Francisco, it's kind of like a national park. There's like a lot of trees around. And we got this new office and I was just a mess. In this office. I was sneezing, I was feeling awful like every day, and I just had these horrible allergies and I couldn't get rid of these allergies. And I like— it took me 3 or 4 months to get an appointment at an allergist.

Was it like mold or something?

Well, I had no idea. I was like, what could this be? Like, obviously there's something new about this environment. So I went to this allergist, I got tested, and of all the possible things I could be allergic to, it was the one tree that was growing outside the window of my new office that I could not move, that was like protected by the city. Anyway, so I, I had to deal with it in the process. You know, what are your options in terms of getting treated for allergies? Well, you can get allergy shots, which are painful. You have to go every week. They have to be scheduled. They're expensive. Like they take a lot of— we're talking about time power law. I don't wanna be driving around the city, getting these allergy shots every week. Or you can do something called sublingual immunotherapy. So basically like there's two ways to get get these allergens in increasing quantities into your immune system so that you, you get used to them. One is through an injection, another is by putting them under your tongue. Both ways they get into your bloodstream. So I, I said, well, I want to do the thing under your tongue. You can do it at home. It's a drop a day in the morning. That seems a lot easier. So I did that and I got it and it completely cured me of my allergies. And I was like, this is amazing. Why doesn't everybody have this? Look at all these kids, they're going, they're getting these allergy shots. You go and you look and structurally it's really messed up because the allergists get paid for giving these allergy shots. That's why there's so many allergy shots. You go to the allergist, they bill your insurance. So every visit you do, they get paid versus every sublingual drop you do at home, they're not getting paid. So that's actually, you know, normally the perfect setup, right? For like creating a company. It's Okay, let's disrupt. There's this misaligned incentive. Let's go ahead and disrupt this. A lot of people suffering, huge pain point. People really, really hate their allergies. So we went, you know, we found a compounded pharmacy, we found like supply chain is actually pretty difficult to like source and get right and treat all these allergies and figure out how to do via telemedicine. And we went and we, we tested it and just the economics just don't work. And it's just— I think they should work. I think it's dramatically better than getting shots at the allergist. I feel like I don't understand why this isn't the way everyone gets cured of their allergies. We attempted to make the world better by giving everyone this way of getting cured of their allergies, but we just weren't able to figure it out. And then we tried selling it through doctors and, you know, the allergists, of course, don't want their revenue stream to be disrupted of getting the allergy shots. So that's not going to work. So eventually we said, you know what, we got a lot of other problems to solve and opportunity cost is really high.

Well, what about it didn't it work? The, the meds were too expensive.

Just the unit economics. Yeah, we couldn't, we couldn't get the unit economics to work.

Do you remember how much, like some, what some of the numbers were?

Well, let's see, we were trying really, we tried a bunch of different price points in terms of like the monthly price for these sublingual drops. Ranging from like $79 a month all the way up to like $250 a month. As these are our tests, you know, we're testing the pricing. That obviously gets you a gross margin depending on that price. And then, you know, there's a CAC to acquire the customer. And the problem in this case was just the CAC was really, really high. I don't know if it's, you know, a new thing. Customers don't know about it. They need to be educated. Maybe they're skeptical. Hard to sell over the internet. I'm not sure, but the, you know, we're really good at producing low CACs. We're really good at scaling things. We just couldn't figure out how to get the CAC low on this. We did a lot of different iterations. Um, and you know, the other way that can work is if the churn is really low and you just get payments for a long time. This should be— it takes about a year to 3 years to fully cure. Um, but it just didn't work out. The math didn't work out. And, you know, that's the kind of thing— the world should be that way. It should be that way. And like, you can be an entrepreneur and believe that, and I still believe that, but you'll be knocking your head against a brick wall forever and get nowhere. And there are other problems like that that you can solve that can become huge, and it's just better, in our view, to work on those. So that's why I've adopted philosophy, which is exactly what you said, which is distribution is more important than ideas. And we only want to work on ideas that can achieve mass distribution because our view is life is short. And, you know, for us and our co-founders, we want to, you know, prize our time. And we only want to work on things that can reach a lot of customers, whether they're consumers or businesses. We want it to matter. So we try to validate that as much as possible upfront.

What are some other ones that you've done that maybe could have worked, but just missed the mark?

You have a different bullet here that you can do if it's hard to think of that, which is patterns for great company ideas. And it says 3 ideas to talk about. So I'm curious about those.

Yeah, go to the patterns. I'd be curious. To what those are.

Like what?

Like Uber was a classic example of this, right? People had private drivers. Now everybody can push a button, have a private driver pick them up.

Yeah, private driver, um, with Uber, private chef with DoorDash, private shopper with Instacart. Those are all, you know, really good examples. You could even argue, you know, second home Airbnb, it's kind of like having access to a second home, much in a much cheaper way.

And so what's a— what's an idea in that space? So what are some other things that you've seen that either very wealthy people or very wealthy companies have that the rest of us don't? What are some other— what are some other examples in there that, that, you know, haven't looked into it but might be, might be interesting?

Well, I think that there seems to be some kind of a renaissance happening in fintech partially because the wealthy seem to have access to financial planning, financial resources around planning, access to the markets. You know, there's this whole 99% versus the 1%, and people have kind of figured that out. And I think that's why you're seeing this boom of new companies. If you can give the 99% what the 1% has access to and the ability to generate wealth, I think that that's actually really interesting. I think there are a lot of interesting startup ideas that are being formed there. We are starting one or two, um, that we think can help empower people in that area, for example. Um, so that would be, you know, one example of, of an area that—

are you going to do anything in the wealth advisor space?

Um, we are kind of tangentially doing things there. I think that there's probably a lot more to do there. You know, wealth advisory is a compounded issue where even the wealthy, when they have access to wealth advisory, it's not great.

It's not great. Have you heard of— have you heard of AdPar, Sean? No. So I, I bet you have, Jack, right?

Adipar?

Yeah, Adipar. Sorry. And so Adipar was started by Joe Lansdale, I think, right? Um, I only know like you know, the Wikipedia version, but basically it's a— it's kind of like Mint.com but for really wealthy people. I actually— but like billionaire wealthy people. I actually don't know what features necessarily it has that, uh, something a little bit— what would you— Jack, what's it have that's more robust?

You know, it basically has tracking of like everything, every fund everywhere in the world, every wealth manager, all of your assets, but they tend to work more with wealth managers instead of individuals. But Joe and that company has an in— like a big vision for where that can go, um, and you might be able to work with it as an individual now, but that's kind of along the lines. So I could disrupt that.

So I work with some of these folks and they send me like the jankiest stuff ever, and their login— so like Morgan Stanley, the login to like look at your investments, it's horrible. Yeah, I was like, you guys, this is just absolutely awful. Like I'm just using spreadsheets on my own. This is really bad. You know, I've heard of this Adapar thing and they're like, well, you know, you can't use that unless you're worth $500 million or like a billion dollars. It's really, really expensive. Like it's crazy high. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Just like give me a Mint.com login or something and you guys like become the admin and just like, let's share this. You could just tell me because this is dog shit. And so I think that, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in that space. But to go back to your point about distribution, I think selling to those people can be quite challenging because they're very old school and they're very conservative. But, uh, that— I was bringing this up to ask you if that's a space that has been interesting to you lately, because you— I know you're being a little cryptic because you like to be stealth until you, you go live. But so I was trying to— I'm trying to get something out of you.

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting space. I would encourage people to look into it. I think that there is a lot that can be done there. I think there's dissatisfaction amongst everyone basically in that space. It's pretty universal. A lot of room for improvement.

Cool.

So that's one pattern for great ideas. So what are the wealthy companies that people have that can be democratized? And if a few people have that desire and they've pushed out to that limit, other people would want it if you can make it accessible, cheaper, and more available to them. That's an amazing one. I think there's tons of great ideas there. What's another framework or sort of pattern you've seen for great ideas?

you said this once, which was anytime there's somebody has 14 tabs open to do this, to do one task, that's a business opportunity.

That's a business opportunity. Yeah, I mean, just watch for that. If you ever see that people are doing a lot of research, there are tons of tabs open, it's really arduous, that's an opportunity. Another example of that, that we kind of found with Hims Hers and other telemedicine companies that we've started, is going to the doctor's office. You know, people need to go to the doctor's office. Think of that process. You're calling the doctor's office, you're scheduling an appointment, you're whipping out your calendar, you're putting it on your calendar, you're going to the waiting room, you're sitting there, you're getting prescribed something, you're going to Walgreens, you're waiting in line for half an hour, going around the store, going home. You know, this is a big process. And as a result, the next generation kind of doesn't even really engage with the healthcare system. You know, close to 9 out of 10 of them don't even know who their doctor is, and/or they haven't even gone. So, you know, telemedicine takes that process and makes it a 5-minute process where you can do it on your phone and go through and get treated for whatever condition that you have. I think another interesting example of that is selling your house. People need to sell their house, right? And it's a really hard, long, arduous process fraught with a lot of anxiety and things like that. Opendoor came along and said, hey, come to this website, tell us what your house is, and we'll make you an offer to buy it, and you can sell it right now. And, you know, not everyone has to do that, and not everyone does do that, but enough people do it that it created a really, really big company that's doing really well. So those are some, some interesting—

Yeah.

9 out of 10 friends I talk to who have an e-commerce store don't even know what you would do if you wanted to sell.

They don't even know.

Yeah. What, whose door do I knock on? What do I need to have ready? And so therefore, I just, I'm just not going to do it. And, um, and it's like the Open Door thing where not everybody's going to do this, but sure, if Open Door captures, I don't know what they modeled out, but you know, 1%, 3%, 5% of all house sales, like multibillion-dollar company. Same thing for, for open source. So I'm super, super bullish to the point where I was like, why the— what am I doing with my life that I'm not doing this idea? This makes total sense.

Oh man, well, thanks for saying that.

Don't worry, I'm not gonna copy you.

But Keith and I are having a ton of fun, ton of fun building out that company, um, here in Miami. That's been a blast, building a, a great team, a huge team. And yeah, it solves this pain point in a market where it's really hard to sell your and all you need to do is come to a website, we give you a price, and you can sell your company. And it's, it's really interesting. We have an amazing data science team. We're hiring really aggressively if anyone wants to join. It's, you know, anyone who joins that team, it's such an unbelievable team. I think it's going to create this almost Miami Mafia, so to speak, around here of amazing people. I think it's an exceptional opportunity and scaling really quickly. So that's been a lot of fun. Thanks for saying that.

In another pod, you said something like you have this list of ideas, but every once in a while you'll meet someone who's so amazing that you say to them, well, what's your idea? And how come we— just tell me what your idea is and we'll partner with you. Or, you know, you said something like that. I don't know if it was exactly that. What attributes would a person have to have in order for you to say that to them?

Yeah. So we're, We're open, you know, the ideas don't necessarily have to come from us. We're totally open if people want to bring their ideas and co-found companies with us. Um, we just kind of ask that they be baked off in a process and that the data wins. We're just such big believers in this distribution over ideas thing that as long as we, if we test their idea and the distribution's great, fantastic. Let's go. Let's do it together. That sounds great. But otherwise, you know, we just ask that we do that kind of testing process that we like to do. But some of the attributes that we look for, you know, we really like people that are just tenacious. They just wake up in the morning, they want to play offense. They have 3 things they want to get done by the end of the day, and they get them done, and they knock down walls, and they're creative. They have a lot of raw intelligence. They inspire other people. They can hire. They're charismatic. Charismatic. Um, you know, it depends on the idea, right? Like, some ideas that are more technically oriented, obviously you're looking for a slightly different profile versus ideas that are maybe more, you know, sales or product oriented. So we are a little bit founder idea or product fit as well. We do consider that. But, um, yeah, those are some of the attributes that we look for in people. But sometimes you meet someone and there's just a really strong connection You know, you have these high-bandwidth conversations, you're feeling great about everything, and we'll just say, you know, we just want to work with you. Um, we're totally agnostic to the idea, and come in and join us. Let's look at 10, 12, 15 ideas over the next 3 to 9 months. If we find something we love, great, let's start a company. If we don't find anything, no harm, no foul. Hopefully, you know, you've met some cool people and we've had fun along the way, and You know, you're on to your next thing and we'd love to be as supportive as we can.

I, one of the biggest differences between Sean and I, although we're very similar in a lot of ways, he tends to do many different things and he likes doing many things at one time. I am always teasing him and jokingly criticizing him. I'm like, only do one thing. If you only do one thing, you're going to be, you're going to succeed more. And he's like, well, no, but I like this and it's working. And he's right. It is working for him. You have both started one company or, you know, Milo was like your baby, or I imagine when you were running that, that was like your only focus. Now your focus is on launching 10 companies a year, although, you know, you hire people to help you make it happen. So I guess your baby's kind of Atomic, but do you think that starting multiple companies is going to be a bigger wealth creator for you than if had you just done kind of one major thing and you only focus on one let's say a software company or something like that?

Um, it's an interesting question. So before I answer that, just one comment on that. I have noticed a pattern, which is that the smartest people I've met in the world fall into one of those two camps. They either want to be like singularly focused on one thing, almost to a fault, where they are so focused on it and they just absolutely have crush it. And that's one archetype of success, and it works really well. And some people are super successful that are that way. There are other people, and I put myself more in the camp of like, I just get energy from working on a lot of things with a lot of different people. It's how my brain works. I have to work across a lot of different things. And that's also, you know, part of it is what you enjoy and what makes you happy. And that's kind of what I enjoy and what makes me happy. It's inventing, it's the early stages, it's what could come next. Um, so when I thought about doing Atomic, it actually wasn't, believe it or not, a wealth-building exercise. It was really, you know, one, is it possible to build a company that builds companies? Nobody's really figured out how to do that at scale before. Two, how could you do that? Three, is that the most interesting and impactful problem in the world to work on? I believe that it was. At that time. And, you know, would it be fun? And would I get to work with really great people on really great problems? And I thought the answer to those questions was yes. So I decided to do it. Um, it can be very lucrative. I do think probably you can do better by just focusing on one. Like, if you had one thing that was gonna go to the moon, that you can probably do financially better just going all in on that thing. At least in the short term. Um, I don't know in the long term, because in the long term, if you build a company that builds companies, what's the value of that?

I don't know. It's like asking a genie for unlimited wishes, right?

So, but I— that's not really, you know, what drove the decision-making or kind of how I think about it.

Well, you said it's not been done before. I mean, um, maybe— I don't know where they were at the time. You know, Rocket Internet, for the listeners, there's a company called Rocket Internet based in Germany, started by these 3 crazy, crazy brothers, and their whole shtick was basically copy Silicon Valley companies but do it in Africa, Asia, and other places where that thing didn't exist. So Airbnb in Europe or Amazon in Thailand or whatever it is, Zappos in Nigeria. And they created a few companies that were fucking huge and they did it so— but their whole thing was copying to the point of they would have this chief scientist who would basically study, let's say they're copying Pinterest. He would send out an email to the Pinterest of Africa and the Pinterest of Germany and be like, Pinterest changed their button size on the top right from this to this. Do it. Have you ever thought, what do you think about those guys? And have you ever thought of doing that strategy where instead of invention, let's copy?

Yeah. So it's just not our style. It's a very different style. First of all, I think the kind of talent you can work with that you can motivate to just copy other people's ideas, I think is very different than the kinds of people we're able to attract at Atomic and work on our companies. You know, it's more of a mercenary probably than a mission-driven approach. We pride ourselves in everything that we've done has been innovative. It's been original. We haven't been copying other people's ideas. It's not in our ethos to do that. So, and the processes and how it operates is very different and the culture is very different fundamentally as a result. So I do think you need to pick one of those two things. Would it be easier to build something that just copies other people's ideas? Yeah, it would be easier, but it probably wouldn't work as well because I don't think just copying other people's ideas is as valuable. And I don't think that it would work as well anyway. But it's also just far less interesting to me. It seems like the ideas that worked well for them were the ones where there was like a local network effect in the US that hadn't gone to Europe yet, and they did it in Europe before the US company could go to Europe. Um, but there were a lot of companies that they copied that they had a hard time because they kind of installed someone who—

yeah, they just hired guns. They would just hire bankers and say, just spend more money than this other company. Exactly. And, you know, missionaries often outlast mercenaries, and you have to— longevity is one of the key factors you need to win.

Yeah. Let's talk about—

worked to some extent, but it's just different.

Let's do a couple minutes real quick on crypto. So great. On a scale of 1 to chugging the Kool-Aid, where are you at with crypto? Just kind of personally investing in it? And then what do you think is exciting or completely overrated? I don't know what your take is. There's sort of— it's pretty polarizing. So people are usually very into it or, you know, think it's toxic and Ponzi scheme. So like, where do you stand?

Yeah, good question. I mean, I think crypto is real and it's here to stay. I think the question is, what are the fundamental, like, real innovations in crypto, the things that are going to be around? And what are the things that are— there's a lot of manipulation, there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes people don't know about. On these chat groups and apps and like forums of like pump and dump things. Yeah, really bad. You know, this is stuff that people like in a normal market would probably go to jail for. Like, seriously, this is happening somewhat regularly in this market. So it's a little concerning to like the average person to know what is and what isn't real. And that's my big concern with it is you know, there's a lot of people rushing into it, there's a lot of enthusiasm. It is real, but knowing what is real and what isn't real, I think, is, is really difficult.

Um, so what's real to you? What do you think is real?

So to me, you know, I think one indicator to look for is where are developers signing up. This is also true with companies, by the way. Whenever there's platforms that are built— and this is true for like enterprise companies or like app stores— where do the developers go? Where the developers go usually works and is a good place to invest. And I think that's true of crypto as well. So on that thesis, I think Ethereum is a great place to go. Solana seems to have a lot of developer interest. I think there's a lot of other places, um, you know, one that I was kind of early involved in and help get off the ground, um, was one called Terra and Luna that just launched a new mainnet that had like 50 to 100 apps just launched that are super interesting. They're very interesting to me because they're solving a different problem than a lot of other people in crypto are solving fundamentally.

What does that mean? You— but sorry, go ahead, go ahead.

Um, so A lot of, you know, if you were to kind of knock crypto, if you were like a macroeconomist and you were like, wow, what does the world look like 10 or 20 years from now if this really catches on? The big critique would be, well, if this is digital gold, imagine what would have happened to the world if everyone just held gold and nobody put money into a bank. There'd be no jobs, there'd be no economy, because people put money into the bank, the bank lends out money to companies and to people, that money gets spent, it creates jobs, those people spend the money and it goes through the economy and it just has this domino effect that's really important for the whole, like, system to work. In crypto, someone puts it in crypto and it stops and it doesn't keep traveling through the economy. It's not a productive asset. So you basically take a productive asset and you make it unproductive. And I feel like for, like, decentralized crypto to work and scale in the world, That's got to be fixed somehow. And the Terra and Luna people are very, very attuned to this problem. So instead of just focusing on purely technical things like, you know, NFTs or, you know, new apps they can build or APIs or smart contracts or things like that, they're actually thinking about, you know, how can you lend crypto, how can you borrow against crypto, how can you invest in stocks? You can invest in stocks. Directly with their stablecoins. You can earn 20% interest with Anchor, you can borrow against that, and then there's a way to earn 30% interest. And there's this whole ecosystem of basically ways to make crypto productive in a decentralized way within the crypto ecosystem that I think is really interesting. And I don't know, they're a really, really good, really smart team. I don't know of too many other people that are working on that. And then the other one that I would call out that I was an early investor in is a project that hasn't launched yet, but if there's anyone out there who knows how to mine, I would say mine this cryptocurrency. It's called Iron Fish, and it's basically this genius— I can vouch for her, she's a genius— and she basically created what I think is the first true cash on the internet. So the whole idea of crypto was it's going to be cash on the internet, it's untraceable. I give this to you, nobody knows, just like with cash. In reality, what happens with Bitcoin, we make a transaction and it's public forever. Literally, this, this record is going to be public and replicated across the internet forever, and everybody's going to know about it. Now people realize that, um, and it's an issue. So you had, you know, coins like Zcash and Monero that were created, but it turns out those actually can be decrypted and you can figure out where all of that went. So she's the first person that really figured out how to make truly anonymized crypto, um, and it's called Iron Fish. I think it's a really exciting project. I don't think it's tradable on exchanges, but I think it's mineable and it'll probably be tradable at some point. So those are some early ones that I think are exciting, worth, um, worth kind of looking into.

Love it. And, uh, and do you use like DeFi? Uh, are you like an actual like participant or user of DeFi?

Um, I don't use DeFi too much per se. I'm more— I do actually a little bit, but I'm more of kind of like a set it and forget it, buy and hold, long-term and patient. Type of a person. So I'm not actively doing— I, you know, I know there's a lot of stuff out there going on like yield farming and things like that that I'm not as attuned to. But if I had more time, I'd be interested in learning more about it.

Yeah, kind of. That's what I wanted to leave it with, which was if you weren't doing all the shit you're doing now and I took away kind of the reputation, the network. So like, you know, you're, you're still you, you're still, you know, sharp. But you're 21, 22, 23 years old, where do you think you would go work? What would you work on?

Hmm, that's an interesting question. Hmm, I might consider working on, you know, Web3 and crypto, specifically figuring out how to use crypto to build new networks that can be built that are totally decentralized. Socialized, um, like social networks or, or other types of networks. Uh, they could be marketplaces, they could be social networks, but I think what the internet taught us is networks are what's valuable at the core. And I don't think Web3 is— I think it's still early. There's like 10 million sort of users out there of this stuff. There's, you know, 4.5 billion people on the internet, so it's it still has a long ways to grow. If you can build some of these early networks with network effects, you can probably build things that are really valuable. And I know there are some people that are working on it, but there are probably still some really interesting opportunities out there.

Well, this is, this is, this is awesome, man. I, I mean, I could talk to you for another few hours. I've got so many more questions. Hopefully you can come back and do this again.

Um, of course, would love to. Thanks for having me.

This, this is badass. I pay attention to everything you guys do on Atomic. I'm always looking at your job page to see like, what are they— who are they hiring for now? What are they going to launch now? And trying to figure out if I could kind of like reverse engineer and see everything.

And so you have good taste, dude. You, you invested in or co-incubated a company with my cousin. I don't know if you know that.

Rohan. Which one?

Rohan Puri. He started Stable Auto. Uh, that's my kind of—

he's great. Rohan's awesome. Yeah, we love Rohan.

Yeah, he's super smart.

Yeah, he's great.

Well, thank you for doing this. This is badass. Um, this is awesome.

Of course, thanks for having me.

We're excited to publish this. We're excited to make this happen. It was awesome talking to you.

If people want to get more, where do they follow you, find you, you know, subscribe to your newsletter, uh, buy your OnlyFans? What do you want them to do?

Not on OnlyFans. Uh, but you can follow it yet. Uh, you can follow me on Twitter. I'm just Jack, @jackabraham, or, you know, you can find me on LinkedIn and, or, you know, we're just at atomic.vc is our website. You can actually apply on our website for a program we have called the Future Founders Program, where we'd love to co-found companies with people. We love co-founding companies with diverse people of all sorts of backgrounds. We're agnostic to location, can be from anywhere, and we want to start a lot of great companies. And it'd be an honor to start, you know, maybe we can start a company with someone listening to this. That would be great.

Well, this is awesome. Thank you very much. We'll, we'll be sharing a bunch of links. I'm so excited that you came on here.