It is a bit of a long story, but maybe can be helpful to someone out there considering what to do with his or her life, so will write it out here:
About 2 years ago I realized that as an investor (partner at YC) I had stopped learning. I felt like what I was doing was helpful to some startups, but personally I didn't feel growth any more; being an investor felt to me like being retired. That's not to say that YC isn't hugely impactful (it is), but rather that the cadence didn't really fit my personality any longer: I wanted a shorter feedback cycle around trying something and seeing results. When you are an investor the feedback cycle between trying something (investing in a startup) and seeing results (M&A, IPO, success) can be many years.
In a chance encounter I met the author of Essentialism, which basically is a book about saying no to things. It made me really try to distill down what I liked doing on a day-to-day basis, and I came up with these 3 things: 1) learning about how tech can affect and interact with new industries, 2) trying things and seeing numbers go up as a result, 3) mentoring people over extended periods of time. I decided I wanted to do something that maximized my ability to do those three things on a daily basis.
At first I thought about raising a VC fund, but then realized that wouldn't be much different from YC. Then I thought about incubating 4 or 5 startups at once and finding someone else to be CEO of each. I realized while that would be interesting and minimize personal stress, it wouldn't maximize my growth opportunity to see even later stages of company development. Ultimately I decided the most personal growth maximizing thing to do (that would enable me to focus on the three above things) would be to just start a single company and swing for the fences (try to make it as big as possible).
At the same time, I had been fascinated by the legal innovator's paradox: the fact that there is an intrinsic disincentive to innovate when you don't capture the gains of increased productivity, which is true in an hourly billing model. I also thought lots of the things we had done at YC around building software could be applied in the legal market, and it seemed like a huge one, which incidentally I had experienced my entire career as a founder. After months of research, it seemed like a meaty enough opportunity that really solved a problem of my own, and I decided this would be my one "swing for the fences" company.
Lots of people have asked before so will repeat here: I'm 100% on Atrium now full time as CEO and not doing any other things.
>At the same time, I had been fascinated by the legal innovator's paradox: the fact that there is an intrinsic disincentive to innovate when you don't capture the gains of increased productivity, which is true in an hourly billing model.
@justin - I’d love to hear your thoughts here regarding how you are tackling this. From Atrium.co your pricing appears to be a mix of subscription and fixed prices. Presumably the trade-offs for any one lawyer to switch to fix cost is insufficiently lare, but if you create a company with scale than at the aggregate level the value capture across enough clients is large enough. Is that right?
About 2 years ago I realized that as an investor (partner at YC) I had stopped learning. I felt like what I was doing was helpful to some startups, but personally I didn't feel growth any more; being an investor felt to me like being retired. That's not to say that YC isn't hugely impactful (it is), but rather that the cadence didn't really fit my personality any longer: I wanted a shorter feedback cycle around trying something and seeing results. When you are an investor the feedback cycle between trying something (investing in a startup) and seeing results (M&A, IPO, success) can be many years.
In a chance encounter I met the author of Essentialism, which basically is a book about saying no to things. It made me really try to distill down what I liked doing on a day-to-day basis, and I came up with these 3 things: 1) learning about how tech can affect and interact with new industries, 2) trying things and seeing numbers go up as a result, 3) mentoring people over extended periods of time. I decided I wanted to do something that maximized my ability to do those three things on a daily basis.
At first I thought about raising a VC fund, but then realized that wouldn't be much different from YC. Then I thought about incubating 4 or 5 startups at once and finding someone else to be CEO of each. I realized while that would be interesting and minimize personal stress, it wouldn't maximize my growth opportunity to see even later stages of company development. Ultimately I decided the most personal growth maximizing thing to do (that would enable me to focus on the three above things) would be to just start a single company and swing for the fences (try to make it as big as possible).
At the same time, I had been fascinated by the legal innovator's paradox: the fact that there is an intrinsic disincentive to innovate when you don't capture the gains of increased productivity, which is true in an hourly billing model. I also thought lots of the things we had done at YC around building software could be applied in the legal market, and it seemed like a huge one, which incidentally I had experienced my entire career as a founder. After months of research, it seemed like a meaty enough opportunity that really solved a problem of my own, and I decided this would be my one "swing for the fences" company.
Lots of people have asked before so will repeat here: I'm 100% on Atrium now full time as CEO and not doing any other things.