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. Yeah.

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like my day song On the road less 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 Hood rat 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 um

You know, don't mess with success. It's our good luck term. So um Jack, we're recording now. I think you um someone I don't know how much you looked into it, but someone sent your team a little update on or a little uh 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. Um we used to know each other back in San Francisco in the early days when tech was Getting going there and Windows. Yeah, Winter was in San Francisco and excited to be on. Thanks for having me. How did you uh how did you guys know each other? I was gonna ask you this. Um I I didn't know how much you remembered. I remember pretty vividly

Um I was at this time I was running Monkey Inferno, which was an idea lab or a sort of a startup studio. And uh Jack 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 uh 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 kinda Googled like okay, who's this guy? And then I saw, Oh wow, this guy's like done all the stuff. He had he built Milo, he sold it to eBay. And this was like, you know, not his first rodeo. And um and in the meeting I just remember you had like really good questions. You had like 'Cause a lot of people Like this idea of a startup studio, it sounds really fun. You get to sit around all day, just think of ideas and build them. And like if something hits, you know, hooray.

And uh but you had actually like done a lot of thought uh put a lot of thought into it. And so you asked a bunch of questions, and I remember thinking, Yeah, 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 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 Hymns come out of it, which is like a breakout. Success public company. And um And what what are the some of the other ones that have come out of Atomic that are big? I know there's the

F there's some that have sort of spiked and I I'm not sure where they're at now. They didn't kinda go Yeah. Full like like Hamstead. We've uh we've created a ton of different companies. Um 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 um cloftware for screens for B to B applications. So

We kind of touch All sorts of industries. We have now actually a few dozen companies that we started. Uh 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 w what is the like idea process?'Cause 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 like if Jack's doing it as an idea, it's probably a good market and a good idea. Let's just That that if we just use that and we copy that, we're already skipping a bunch of potential points of failure. And um 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 what's the process? What's the process for ideas? Um You know, how are you coming up with so m like a high number of good of good quality ideas that turn into it? You have six hundred you have a list of six hundred in an Evernote doc. It's just an Evernote doc, right? Yeah, six hundred. Yeah, so you have a lot.

Lot of ideas. Yeah. 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, a temptation is to brainstorm on 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 dog food 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 six hundred 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 light. 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 you know interacting with a company or running a sales team or you know something like that. You just observe all these things and think, Wow. That doesn't seem you know, that seems a little bit broken.

There 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 six hundred, and that's a seed that we use to start companies out of at Atomic. And I have um a whole bunch of questions that I like I I uh I was telling you I I watched a lot of your interviews. So I I I understand a little bit about your process and I wanna ask you about that, but before you did this, so you're thirty are you thirty four now? I'm thirty five now. You're thirty five. So before you were doing atomic, your first big win was Milo. You sold that for like seventy five million at twenty four, right?

Yeah. Stayed there at eBay for two years. Sam do you know who his dad is? I do, Com score. Yeah, so so I didn't know that until I was doing research'cause we had met I didn't I just thought, Oh, he's kind of like a whiz kid and it's I love Pam score. Behind every Whiz Kid is some unique childhood, I think, where you get y exposed to something. So so Jack, so your dad

Started Com Score, is that right? Was CEO for uh I I don't know if he's still CEO. And you were working there like at age twelve or something crazy, is that right? Thanks, yeah. Um yeah, I had a 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 it's fun. 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 twelve or thirteen. He said, Jack, I'm gonna start a company.

that's gonna measure everything everyone does on the internet and make sense of it. Do you want to join it? And I joined it as a 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 for equity? I said, Equity. I don't want cash. Give me give me equity. So I took the equity and it ended up working out. Also

Child labor laws meant you 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 six billion or something like that. Like many billions. Yeah, it ended up being worth billions at at its peak. Um he basically yeah, he grew it on his own, took it public. It did really well and then, you know. Two or three 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 thousand plus person company to public company. And I just got hooked. So I started starting companies at age fifteen, and I've just been hooked. It's just been in my DNA ever since technology has been in my DNA.

What were you when you w when it went public? Hmm, that's a good question. I was in college, so I probably was Like nineteen or twenty or something like that. So he gave you shares when you were thirteen.

When you were twenty, what did they end up becoming worth? Were you like the richest twenty year old there is a podcast is called My First Million. You might have been the youngest The youngest person to make your first million, uh if 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 share.

He gave me what I deserved, which I was a twelve or thirteen year old that didn't know how to code. So we got basically paid the equivalent of like close to minimum wage in shares, which is kind of what I deserve. 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 acqui it was it acquired for seventy five billion? You're twenty four. So correct just massive success. Milo ends up becoming a pretty big deal, like a a main part of eBay. You work on a

uh a bunch of uh big parts at eBay you become this kind of big shot. Like you kind of climbed. In the last two years, but basically me so I got acquired uh we got acquired by Twitch to like you know go from uh a little startup to okay, it's a two thousand person company. Sam just got acquired, uh his company just got acquired by HubSpot. So I don't know how many how many employees does HubSpot have? Probably three thousand, I think. Three thousand employees. And so um 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 gonna look like

You know, what's your advice to me? And I got a whole range of idea uh of sort of opinions, but I would say the common the default path was sort of like. Look, uh somebody who's like you, true entrepreneur at heart, it's gonna be hard for you to be in a big company for a long time. Uh you could choose to either like Just not play the game, you kinda like coast and just do your own thing, maybe do build a couple of 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 uh and actually Like figure out what What this looks like is a different game than the startup game. You're not zero to one. You're sort of in the one to end. phase of things and you know, it's all about so sort of about management of a l large organization.

Um 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 you were basically like the VP or something. You were the the the M VP, really. You were like the the 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 um You seem to have done extremely well. Talk about that. Is that something where you uh what was your approach when you got acquired?'Cause And is that true.

Yeah, yeah, h how much of that story is true. Yeah, so You know, it's interesting. First of all, it's definitely true. It wasn't till 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 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 Um 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 they sell to the acquire.

And they languish and they actually kinda 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 short, like I'm let me figure out how to use this experience for the good of the company of me. I'm proud of what I built. I want to see it succeed. Let's figure out how to do that. And I went, and you know, there's some funny stories about things that we did while we were at eBay to try to maintain our culture. We at one point I I rallied the troops. We had this house. They tried to put us in cubicles. I had the whole company rise up and go and rip down the cubicles and throw it on the front lawn and we almost got in trouble and kicked off campus and

All sorts of crazy stuff, but I basically took the approach of like look, what's the worst thing that can happen? They can fire me. If I get fired. I don't really care. So I might as well just go for it and try to do great things while I'm here.

Right and what's what's a great thing that I can do? Well, there's a bunch of products that eBay can build. I like building products, I'm an entrepreneur. I haven't tried building multiple products at once. What if I use this time at eBay? to try to put together multiple teams under me and try my hand at building multiple products at once. And see if I'm any good at that versus just working on one product. And I convinced the CEO to let me do that and give me a shot at it.

And the majority of what we built was hitting and like a lot of it was driving press cycles and the stock price. The biggest thing I did. I convinced the CEO to do on a Friday That night I convinced six people to cancel. their next two weeks, fly with me to Sydney, Australia, rent an Airbnb, turn it into an a hacker house. And we built the entire thing in two weeks. There's actually a story written about this online.

And it ended up becoming the feed and the homepage of eBay and a hundred thirty million people were using it nine months later. um as like the primary discovery mechanism on the site. And and and and after that, you started a couple things before Atomic, I think, right? And those things There

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 of software companies, right?

Yeah. We've started a bunch of software companies that are still successful. They're kind of Part of Atomic. is kind of how we consider them. Everything's kind of been folded into one umbrella at

at uh one point or another. The the other thing that I would say that is a lesson that we learned, and Sean, I don't know if you remember when we talked about startup studios about this, but One trap you can have with startup studios is when you have hundreds of ideas. And when I left eBay, I had two hundred and fifty potential ideas for my next company. Um Is the temptation is to try them all.

And the thing that we did at Atomic is we only did one the first year Two the second, three the third. For the fourth, we really paced ourselves. And I think, you know, now we're at the point where we can do ten or twelve a year.

Um, but that was kind of part of that pacing process. I I remember three of those traps. I want to say them because I'm sure there's somebody out here listening who who who We'll be curious. Um I remember one was w exactly what you said, which was focus. So Uh the 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 can do exactly what you said. You could just go on a whiteboard, brainstorm it. That's kinda your job. And then you take one of those ideas that sounds pl semi-plausible, and Paul Graham, I think, calls these sitcom startup ideas. It's like

You come up with a uh a kind of a a manufactured story for a sitcom, like, oh, guy and a girl fall in love in college and then bre you know, their jobs take them a cr you know across the country and they break up, right? Like you 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.

Um Well, that shiny object over there is unproven. That 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 you had said something smart, you you go We're gonna fund the team, I think we said for nine months.

You go, then their job is to raise the series A in nine months. Um, and I was like, that's great because the if otherwise in an idea lab, these things can just languish forever. You could just keep them in the sort of this feeling that, you know, if if not this month and next month, no problem. And you're like The people working on this are only gonna 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 like that having a uh sort of a deadline and a and a do or die moment of like you either proved your shit or you didn't. That was the second Uh second one I remember. And then the third was You're like We're gonna focus on B to B 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 it No. Well, no, that was that was a bunch of that was a bunch of that was a hair loss company. I saw my hair, as you can see. So it was a hair loss company. You know that Uh A V C told me

Who I really respect. That The way you make your money in the venture business. is B2B, those are your singles and doubles typically, and consumer can be your home runs. That can be your lightning in the bottle.

And you should plan your portfolio accordingly. 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 additionally, right? Like the valuations on some of these B2B companies is ap absolutely astronomical. But the great thing about doing B2B. is you can talk to the customer and you can trust what they say. 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 gonna work. Part of that is consumers don't know in their mind what they need. They don't know. It's hard, they they can't dream it up. So it's a very different practice creating consumer companies from B to B companies. But to address your other point, Sean. of the nine 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. 'Cause it's dangerous to do that. And And is it is it nine months and three hundred thousand dollars? Is that right? Or two hundred and fifty thousand or something? Um

So we have Multiple stages of investment. The first check that we'll write to kind of get something going and do some initial research and homework. Is around a quarter million dollars, but it could range from a hundred thousand to four hundred thousand. And then if that goes well, we can write a check that's usually two million dollars, but again, it could be one to four million dollars.

And then from there We can actually write a check that could be three to eight million dollars. Um, that sometimes we do with other VCs, sometimes we do on our own. kind of depends on the circumstances, depends on the needs of the company and what we need to get to the next set of milestones. Um

But that's kind of how it works now. That's been evolving over our funds. And our first fund it was smaller, so we obviously only did like the early rounds, which is what Sean is describing. And then as it's gotten bigger, we we're able to get the companies further, which is why we can keep them self longer. And now when they come out, they usually have raised these really big rounds.

Did you w 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 a million dollars over the next two 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's gonna 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 ten million dollar vehicle. That was primarily individuals and We had some great founders of venture capital firms involved, like Mark Andreessen and

Um Iden Senkid 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 you have a couple of things on the agenda that I I I want to know the answer to. And one is what you just said. You've uh Andrewson brought back your f your find, Chris Dixon, David Sachs, Peter Teal, and you said on here says some of the 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 a add in Josh Cushner on there too,'cause he interests me as well. He he which he almost has a model like yours. Yeah, he also starts companies. I love Josh. Josh is fantastic.

Um Wow. Well, those are great people. The first thing I'd say, and you know, this is just a general thing, it's like There are some amazing people out in the world. I'm surprised how many people don't approach them and just ask them for advice and mentorship. And that's something that

Was a major way that I learned throughout my career. And I'm so thankful to have had those people in my life and grateful for everything that I learned from them. Um You know I'd say Maybe going

going through some of them. One of the things that I learned from Mark Andreessen was actually a a really interesting story About

Peter Tiel, um, that led to a really, really big insight that I had that has kind of driven a lot of my decision making since then. Um which is this concept that Time exists on this massive power law basis. Um You know.

They were having this conversation, apparently, Mark was telling me. Where Peter was talking to Mark and he was talking about, you know, this big moment where he made this investment in Mark Zuckerberg and he made this investment in in Facebook. And you know, he said Yeah, listen, Mark.

I worked so hard. My whole life to be able to get into Stanford. I really worked hard in in high school and I did this and I did that and all these extracurriculars. I finally got into Stanford. I got into Stanford. I crushed it at Stanford. I tried to get, you know, the best grades while I was there. I did really well to get into Stanford Law School. I got into Stanford Law School.

I did really well while I was there. I you know was really crushing it while I was there because I wanted to get into the best law firm. I got into the best law firm. While I was there, you know, I realized it wasn't for me, but that enabled me to start a hedge fund. From there I met Max Levchin. I got

The opportunity to go run PayPal, I ran that. It went public. You know. ended up being merging with eBay. It led me to start clearing capital this hedge fund, which was kind of a dream that I'd wanted to do for a long time. All of this effort.

All of this time, all of this energy Everything that I had done up until this point in my life Got me. One hour. with Mark Zuckerberg.

And that hour Was worth more. Then the cumulative sum. Of all those other hours that I had spent. In my life.

And That is a crazy mind blowing fact, if you think about that. 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. And I think that can be true for everyone. So Looking out for those kind of like power law time moments or those power hours. can be so important and I believe that they exist and sometimes they're in plain sight. So thinking about those critically, how do you put yourself in those positions where you can discover those kinds of opportunities?

And how do you almost engineer your calendar so that you can create those opportunities for yourself, I think is an interesting question. What's an example of that for you? Do you have an hour do you is there something that stands out to you that's like your version of that hour with Zuck or How do you engineer it? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So

This is something I've never met Jeff Bezos. I'm a huge fan of his. But one of the things that he does that I think that I adopted that I think is a really, really cool practice. Is You take a look at your prior week. And how all of your time is spent.

And you you look at your calendar. You look at each block, each half an hour, each hour. And you You basically I I basically modified a little bit what he does, but You ask the question.

For all of these things that I did last week. What are the things where if I hadn't done This thing nothing would have changed. And you cross it off the lists. And if things keep getting crossed off that list.

You probably shouldn't be doing that. You should probably find a way to get out of those kinds of meetings or replace yourself in those kinds of meetings or Hire someone. perhaps to, you know, take those kinds of meetings for you. Um because they're not as productive.

And then really circle. The things that really, really mattered. You know, there could be within a week if if it in a lifetime. You can have an hour that's worth the cumulative sum of the hours. You can certainly have that in a week.

Right. You can have that in a month. You can have that in a year. So really training your mind. toward you know what those things are. Um And circling them and having that pattern recognition can make a lot of sense.

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 why don't you like it? Like it's all good. Like it's easy job. We're making great money. We're you know, they 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 gonna change. And we've called it. Uh it's kinda like you said, you 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 Django Law. Which was you know, in a tower of Django blocks, if you remove some blocks, the tower's totally fine. And then other blocks are like the key lynchpins, 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 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 one PM to two 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 this day. See what happens. Nothing happened.

I used to stop coming to work for like two weeks, right? And finally by like the fourth week it was like They you know, they were like, Hey, what the heck, where are you? Uh 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 acquired, I was working for this thing and Yeah, it was a 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. Um that doesn't mean I want to work super hard, but when I 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.

Um, we kind of get trained this way, right? You're gonna work Monday through Friday nine to five. If there's this assumption that Monday Thursday. that, you know, the first hour of an eight 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.

I wanna ask you about very specific idea. So in the Pomp podcast Basically you you said something I entirely agree with, which is distribute or I don't know if you said it or if it it but it was discussed distribution over ideas. So you look at um you want to know um how do I get early customers and can this actually scale? Some of the ways that you do that is you look at the payback period. So you try to see You try to get that as low as possible. So if I acquire a customer, how much

How long does it take to get my money back? Um, you said the best in class is three months. You also said that the L T V to CAC best in class is five. Uh meaning uh you acquire a customer for a dollar, they're worth five dollars to you. Um

And you also said that you have a very at this point very strides for launching companies. So you said you have six hundred ideas you can launch up to ten now, and that's many years into this. So What I want to talk about is What ideas didn't cross this Threshold?

But in your head you think It could have, or if the right person does this, it it definitely maybe could work. Or Maybe it couldn't meet some of those benchmarks, but it's still pretty cool and pretty good. What uh can you tell me some ideas that keep you up at night? Honorable mention. Honorable mention.

Yeah. Good question. Um 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. I'm just trying to think there's some worth calling out. I know, I know. And then just like click share and then add sam at sampi.com. Yeah, totally. Okay, well I'll I'll give you some examples. So One example is um

Alright, 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 kinda 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 that these horrible allergies and I couldn't get rid of these allergies. And I like it took me three or four months to get an appointment at an allergist. Was on 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 want to be driving around the city. Getting these allergi allergy shots every week. Or you can do something called sublingual immunotherapy. So basically like there's two ways to 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 s I said, Well I wanna 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 a company. It's like, okay, let's disrupt. There's this misaligned incentive. Let's go go ahead and disrupt this. Lotta 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 if getting the allergy shots, so that's not gonna work. So eventually we said, you know what, we got a lot of other problems to solve and opportunity cost is really high. Wha what about it didn't it work? The the medits were too expensive. Just the unit economics, clear. 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, we let's see.

We were trying really we we tried a bunch of different price points in terms of like the monthly price for these sublingual drops. Ranging from like seventy nine a month all the way up to like two fifty a month. 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. Um, 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 three 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 this. So That's why I've adopted this.

Philosophy um Which is exactly what you said, which is distribution's more important than ideas. And we only want to work on ideas. that can achieve mass distribution. 'Cause our view is life is short.

And you know Uh for us and our co founders. We wanna 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. Um, so we we try to validate that as much as possible up front. What are some other ones that you've done that maybe could have worked, um but just missed the mark. You you have a different I different bullet here that you can do if you if it's hard to think of that, which is patterns for great company ideas and it says three ideas to talk about. So I'm curious about those. Yeah. Oh I'm gonna throw out another one. That was like a crazier idea that we we looked into.

that I'm just gonna put out there as a crazy idea. Maybe someone on this podcast will do it. I still think it's a good idea. Um But There are some problems with it, so I'll I'll disclose it.

So You know, there's all this technology, computer vision, etc. that's been developed for autonomous vehicles. So cars, self driving cars. So cars, they drive around. There's a lot of Issues right, like you've got stop signs, you've got stop lights, you've got Gotta be able to identify colors. There's people coming, there's bikes, there's all the stuff in the environment that you you know, there's

It's two D, but it's also three D. You go up, you go down, there's weather, there's all of the stuff. So we were trying to think What are some interesting, you know? ways that this technology could potentially be applied. And you know, a crazy idea that I had that I I had us look into. Was what if you created autonomous fishing vessels?

that went out into the ocean and just fished twenty four seven. even through inclement weather and they had like crazy sonar and like computer vision underwater. And they could find the fish and they just, you know, automatically did all of that. And you know, we looked into it and

You know, it's it's still such interesting technology. I hope someone does build it. But that there's some structural issues with it around fishing quotas and the industry industry capture of that industry that we could get into at another time. Um that kind of make it a little bit difficult, but that's another

I DM. Um But anyway, yeah, I I'm happy we can discuss that more. I'm happy to progress into the patterns behind Yeah, go to go to go go to the patterns. I I'd be curious. To what those are.

Cool Sounds good. Um Yeah, so some patterns that

I think are kind of tried and true. That are really interesting to To think about. One pattern is If you take things that

rich people have access to or rich companies have access to. And you figure out how to democratize them. So you make them more accessible, distributable, cheaper, and accessible to everyone. That is a winning formula for creating a really good company. And part of the reason for that.

From a phil philosophical perspective, this is actually something I learned from Mark Andreessen. He has this belief that Human desire is infinite. Which is an interesting concept. And if you believe that, then people with a lot of resources and companies with a lot of resources are willing to spend

On the outer limit. Of human desire. So they're poking around, they're figuring out all of these things of what's the next thing on the human desire bubble. That could be discovered. And they might discover something.

And if something there really takes hold That you can then take and give to everyone. Everyone might want that and it it might be ready for everyone. Like what Like Uber was Uber was a classic example of this, right? People had private drivers. Now everybody can push a button and have a private driver driver pick'em up.

Yeah. private driver, um with Uber. private chef with door dash private shopper with instacart. Those are all, you know, really good examples.

You could even argue, you know, second home. Airbnb. It's kinda like having access to a second home. Much in a much cheaper way. And so what 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. Whether some other What are some other examples in there that that m you know? Haven't looked into it, but might 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

Ninety nine percent versus the one percent, 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 ninety nine percent, what the one percent 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're 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's a are you gonna 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. Um 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. Sean? No. So I I bet you have, Jack, right?

At a par? Yeah. At a par, sorry. And so Apar 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 kinda 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 w what you Jack, what's it have that's more robust, do 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 And then 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 of

It could disrupt that. So w I work with some of these folks and they send me like The jankiest stuff ever. And they're logging So like Morgan Stanley, the login to like look at your investments, it's

horrible. And I was like, you guys, this is just h absolutely awful. Like I'm just using spreadsheet on my own. This is really bad. you know, I've heard of this at a part thing and they're like, Well, you know, you can't use that unless you're worth five hundred million dollars or like a billion dollars. It's it's really, really expensive. Like it's crazy high. And I'm like, Are you kidding me? Just like give me a minute. Dot com login or something, and you guys like become the admin and just like let's share this. You can just tell me because this is dog shit. And so I think that um

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 are ri can be quite challenging because they're very old school and they're very conservative. But uh that the I was bringing this up to ask you if that's a space that wa 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 ya. 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. Lot of room for improvement. Cool. So that's that's one uh pattern for great ideas. So what are the what are the wealthy companies that people have that can be democratized? And uh and other if w 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 and more available to them. That's a that's an amazing one. I think there's tons of great ideas there. Uh what's another what's another framework or or sort of pattern you've seen for great ideas? Yeah, so one that I think is is pretty interesting. That's also I would put in like the tried and true bucket. is if you take something

The People Consistently do And they have to do and they feel like they have to do it. But it takes a lot of steps and or time.

And you dramatically simplify it. And you make it a lot faster to accomplish the same thing that they feel like they have to do. So Some good examples of this would be For example, booking online travel.

You know, it used to be so hard to do, you'd have to go to so many different sites The kayak founders had the vision of let's just pull it all into kayak.com. You go to one site, you see it all in one place. They they made it really easy. That's a business opportunity. Is that right? That's a business opportunity. I mean you just watch for that. If if you ever see that. people are doing a lot of research, there yeah, tons of tabs open, it's really arduous, that that's an opportunity. Um another example of that

that we we kind of found with hims and hers and other telemedicine companies that we we've started. Is going to the doctor's office. Іно people нет, готи доктор'зос. Стас. 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 big process. And as a result, the next generation kind of doesn't even really engage with the healthcare system. You know, close to nine out of ten 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 five minute process where you can do it on your phone. and go through and get treated for whatever condition that you have.

Um 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. Open Door came along.

And sad. Hm. 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 You guys are doing that now with open store, right? Uh which I gotta say is it is a truly great idea. I remember when I first scored it, I texted my friend and I said Uh I I didn't even say how great this idea is. I just only said, Why are we not doing this? Uh, because I was like, This is that good of an idea. Selling your company, selling your E commerce store in this case.

Um Takes so much Effort, so much work. And the data's all there, right? Like I'm assuming I don't actually know how it works, I'm assuming it's sort of like clear bank or whatever, where you can plug into their Shopify, you can plug into their Facebook ad account, you can plug into their bank or whatever.

And and with those you know three sources of data, you can get a Basically like a a health score and a value of of this of this of the shop and make him an offer. And they don't have to go to most of them don't even know like at least with a house It's painful, but you kinda know what you're supposed to do to do it. Yeah. Nine out of ten 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 what whose door do I knock on, what do I need to have ready? And so therefore I just

I'm just not gonna do it. And um and it's like the open door thing where not everybody's gonna do this, but Sure, if open door captures, I'm I don't know what they modeled out, but you know, one percent, three percent, five percent of all house sales, like multi billion 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 can copy you but uh 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 company. 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 Uh you know, anyone who joins that team, it's such an um unbelievable team. I think it's gonna create this Almost. Miami Mafia, so to speak, around here of amazing people. I think it's a an exceptional opportunity and

scaling really quickly. Um 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 can we just tell me what your idea is and we'll partner with you. Or you you know, you said something like that. I don't know if it was exactly that. What attributes What 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 our 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. Um 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 three things they want to get done by the end of the day, and they get them done, and they knock down walls and And they're creative, they have a lot of raw intelligence. They inspire other people, they can hire, they're charismatic. Um Yeah, it depends on the idea, right? Like

Some ideas that are more technically oriented. Obviously you're looking for a slightly different Profile. Um 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. Um 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

ten, twelve, fifteen ideas over the next three to nine 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 uh the one of the biggest differences between Sean and I, although we're very similar in a lot of p ways, he tends to do many different things and he he likes doing many things at one time. I I'm always Teasing him and I and jokingly criticizing him, I'm like

only do one thing. If you only do one thing you're gonna be it you're gonna succeed more. And he's like, Well, no, but I I like this and it's working. And he's right, it is working for him. You have b both started one company, or you know, Milo was like your baby, or I imagine when you're running that, that was like your only focus. Now your focus is on launching ten companies a year, although You know, you hire people to help you.

uh make it happen. So I guess your baby's kinda atomic, but Do you think that starting multiple companies. is gonna 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 to 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. to 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, um 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 I that's not really a You know, what drove the decision making or kinda how I think about it. Well, what 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 th the listeners, there's a c company called Rocket Internet based in Germany started by these three crazy, crazy brothers. And their whole shtick was basically copy Silicon Valley companies, but do it in Africa, Asia, and and other places where that thing didn't exist. So Airbnb and

Europe. Or Amazon and Thailand, or whatever it is, Zappos and uh Nigeria. Um and they Created a c few companies that were Fucking huge.

And they did it so th but they the 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 change their button size on the top right from this to this. Do it. Do 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'cause they kind of installed someone who Yeah, they're just hired guns. They would just hire bankers and say just spend more money than this other company. Exactly. And uh you know, missionaries often outlast mercenaries and

You have to longevity is one of the key factors you need to to to to win. Right. Let's talk about work to some extent, but it's just different. Let's do a couple of minutes real quick on crypto. So great. On a scale of one 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 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 and uh Ponzi scheme. So like where where do you stand?

Yeah, good question. I mean I think crypto is real and it's here to stay. Um I think the question is What are the fundamental like real innovations in crypto? The things that are gonna 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 Yeah, 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 main net that had like fifty to a hundred 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? 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 macro economist and you were like wow, what does the world look like ten or twenty years from now if this really catches on? The big critique what 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 gotta 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 stable coins. You can earn twenty percent interest with Anchor. You can borrow against that and then

There's a way to earn thirty percent interest, and there's this whole ecosystem. Of basically ways to make crypto productive in a decentrallized way. within the crypto ecosystem. That I think is really interesting and I don't know if 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 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. Cryptocurrency.

Called Iron Fish. And it's basically this genius. I can vouch for her, she's a genius, um. And She

Basically created What I what I think is the first true cash on the internet. So the whole idea of crypto was. It's gonna 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 gonna be public and replicated across the internet forever. And everybody's gonna 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 figure it out.

How to make it. 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. 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. Um, 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. Um But if I had more time, I'd be interested in learning more about it. Yeah, I kinda that's why 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 of the network, so like, you know, you're you're still you, you're still, you know, sharp.

But you're twenty one, twenty two, twenty three years old. Where do you think you would go work? What would you work on? Hm. That's an interesting question. Yeah.

Hm. I might consider Working on You know, web three and crypto specifically Figuring out how to use crypto to build new networks.

that can be built that are totally decentralized. 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. Uh What's valuable. At the core. And I don't think web three is

I think it's still early. There's like ten million sort of users out there of this stuff. There's, you know. Four and a half billion people on the internet, so it still has a long way 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's 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 I mean I could talk to you for another few hours. I've I've got so many more questions. Hopefully you can come back and do this again. Um of course, we'd love to. Thanks for having me. This this is badass. Um

I'm I pay attention to everything you guys do. Well on an atomic I w I'm always looking at your job page to see like what are they w who are they hiring for now and what are they gonna launch now and trying to figure out if I could kind of like reverse engineer and see everything and say you have good taste, dude. You uh you you invested in or co incubated uh a company with my cousin. I don't know if you know that. Uh Rohan Pur which one? Rohan Puri. He uh sort of stable now. Uh that's my kind of 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 us. 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? Yeah, subscribe to your newsletter, uh buy your OnlyFans. What do you want'em to do? Ha ha ha. Not on OnlyFans.

Uh but you can you can follow yeah, uh you can follow me on Twitter. I'm just Jack. At Jack Abraham or you know, you can find me on LinkedIn. And or Yeah, 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'll Love co founding companies with diverse people of all sorts of backgrounds. We're agnostic to location. can be from anywhere. And we wanna 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. Um We'll uh we'll be sharing uh a bunch of your links. I'm so excited you came on here.

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