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 some of everything else you've spent all the time all of the effort all of the energy that you've spent doing everything else i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days all on a grow 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 they're 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 term 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 listen to a few of your guys podcasts i think it's great great content sean and i kind of go way back yeah we used to know each other back in san francisco in the early days when tech was getting going there and in texas francisco yeah i went talk was san francisco and excited to be on thanks for having me how did you how'd did you guys know each other i was gonna ask you this i i didn't know how much you remember i remember pretty vividly i was at this time i was running monkey for which was an ideal lab or a sort of a startup up studio mh and 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 you know it's sort of like personal incubator idea factory whatever you wanna call these things what do you call by way you call it a a start studio get a start studio just given that the industry seems have gone with that and i remember before the meeting i like kinda googled was like a guy and then i saw oh wow this guys i 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 and in the meeting i remember you had like really good questions you had like because a lot of people like this idea of a start up 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 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 do this for a few years i could share a bunch of insights i've 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 it and i was i remember walking away be like okay i think this is one of the few starter studios that might actually work and i think it has done so i think it's one of the few starter studios that has actually worked you guys had him come out of it which is like a breakout success public company and and what what are the some of the other ones that have come out of atomic that are big i know there's was the there's some that have sort of spiked and i'm not sure where they're at now they didn't kinda go yeah full yeah like like hey we've we've created a ton of different companies bun has been doing incredibly well we just announced a huge raise for that company home bound which is kind of revolution construction and how that's done with a marketplace dynamic replica which is using ai to transform call centers gradient which is kind of cloud software for screens for b b applications so we kind of touch all sorts of industries we have now actually a few dozen companies that we 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 they announced 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 health care 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 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's that like 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 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 of good quality ideas a trying 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 so i think the first part of this is where do kind of get ideas come from and i have a view on this which is a little contra and actually i think where startup studios and incubator can fall apart which is a lot of times if you're inc incubator companies a temptation is to brainstorm on on ideas so think about things getting into a room whiteboard come up with solutions and you're kind of coming up with these con 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 deployed 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 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 is 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 of 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 atomic and i have a whole bunch of questions that i like i i 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 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 sam do you know who his dad is i do com score yeah so so i didn't know that till i was doing research because we had met i didn't i just thought oh it's kind of like a whiz kid and i love com score behind every wiz kid is some unique childhood i think where you get exposed to something so so jack your dad started com scores is that right with a ceo i i know if you still ceo and you were working there like at age twelve or something crazy is that right thanks yeah 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 he was born in lebanon and then he actually went to college in france studying science and engineering in math he came to the us phd and math at mit and he literally didn't have a dollar 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 a revolutionary he ended up winning these international marketing awards for them ended up getting promoted in the company that he joined it 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 start 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 wanna 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 well so he was like do you want cash or equity i said equity i don't want cash yes 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 at 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 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 i went public he decided i don't wanna be a public company ceo and he got off of that start doing investing and being on boards but i got to see that grow just from like an idea and 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 were you when you went when it went public 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 where you like the richest twenty year older the podcast is called my first million you might have been the youngest the youngest person to make your first million if if that math adds up you know my dad was a is a very fair person and that would have been ne to give me an unfair amount of share here number three he gave me what i deserved which i was a twelve or thirteen year old that didn't know how to code so i got basically paid the equivalent of like close to minimum wage and shares which is kind of what i deserve right 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 my low it it it's a it was it acquired for seventy five billion mh that right now so 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 a bunch of a big parts at ebay mh to become this kinda big shot you kinda decline this because in the last two years but basically me so i got acquired we got acquired by twitch so like you know go from a little startup up to okay it's a two thousand person company sam just got acquired that his company just got acquired by hubspot i don't know how many i many employees hubspot have probably three thousand i think three thousand 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 like alright 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 i of of sort of opinions but i would say the common the default path was sort of like look somebody who's was like you true entrepreneur at heart it's gonna be hard for you to be in a big company for a long time 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 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 we 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 lot large organization and i think most entrepreneurs go to 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 with the vp or something you were the the the mvp really you were like the the the guy was helping turn this thing around i think it was like part of a bigger story of hey ebay turning itself around but you seem to have done extremely well talk about that is that something where you oh what was your approach when you got acquire 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 the story and he was like this is amazing why has anyone written about because 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 they sell to the acquire and they lang 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'd 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 wanna 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've rallied the troops we have this house they've tried to put us in cubicle i have had the whole company rise up and go and rip down the cubicle 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 on 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 turned 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 months later 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 they're i feel like when i was researching your story they're kinda like footnotes like they're not like major parts and yeah i researched them they were really successful like a couple software companies right yeah started a 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 kinda of been folded into one umbrella at at 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 fifty potential ideas for my next company 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 but that was kind of part of that pacing process i i remember three of those traps i wanna say them because i'm sure there's somebody here listening who who who would be curious i remember one was exactly what you said which was focus so the the theme is basically startup studios are great they have a bunch of advantages but you don't wanna lose the natural advantages that startups have and so startups have desperation and focus this a two of 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 into whiteboard brainstorm that's kind of your job and then you take one of those ideas of sounds semi plausible and program i think ko calls sitcom startup up ideas it's like you come up with a a a a kind of a a manufactured story for a sitcom like oh giant and the girl fall in love in college and then you know their jobs take them 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 plateau or just things get challenging like every idea does well that shiny object over there is unproven that that one might be easier let's go and you either intentionally or un intentionally 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 when we've said for nine months you go then their job is to raise the series a in nine months and i was like that's great because if otherwise in an ideal lab these things can just lang forever you could just keep them is sort of this feeling that you know if if not this month the 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 sort of a deadline and a in 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 then third was you're like we're gonna focus on b initially and not consumer stuff because we know a bunch of pain points at we've had as entrepreneurs or our companies have and so we can kinda scratch your own itch and not try to make the next hit social network and frankly it's probably so much easier although him was a consumer company so you know you know but maybe who don't don't wanna pride but maybe you're scratching your own niche it's there too well you know if no well now just i a bunch of that i was a bunch of that i was a hair loss company i swab my hair as goes a hair loss he was a he he was about to jack was about to that one over and then he was like i kinda just you know the a vc told me who really respect that the way you make your money in the venture business is b to b 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 that's a good question i think it was one of the managing partners from general catalysts if i remember correctly and they're great we do some work with them they're pretty fantastic and you know since then b b has actually been able to become home runs right additionally right like the valuations on some of these b b companies is app absolutely astronomical but the great thing about doing b to b 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 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 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 again 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 nine months and three hundred thousand dollars is that right or two hundred and fifty thousand or something 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 that sometimes we do with other vcs sometimes we do on our own of depends on the circumstances depends on the needs of the company and what we need to get to the next set of milestones 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 self longer and now when they come out they usually have raised these really big rounds did you when when you when you were starting this how much of your own money did you put up to do this and where you're like alright 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 is 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 andre recent and i'd send kid and peter t and people like that that helped us a lot in the early days 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 wanna know the answer to and one is what you just said you've andrew brought back to your your fund kris and david sacks peter t mh and you said on here it says some of some 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 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 stuck with you and add josh kushner on there too because he interests me as well he which he almost has a model like yours yeah he also starts companies i love josh josh is fantastic 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's 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 you know i'd say maybe going going through some of them one of the things that i learned from mark and reason was actually a a really interesting story about peter t that led to a really really big insight that i had that has kind of driven a lot of my decision making since then which is this concept that time exists on this massive power law basis and 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 you know 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 extra extracurricular i finally got into stanford i got into stanford i crushed 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 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 hedge fund from there i met max le 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 of my life got me one hour with mark zuckerberg and that hour was worth more than the cumulative sum of all those other hours that i'd 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 some of everything else you've spent all 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 it's an interesting question what's an example of that for you do you have an hour do is there something that stands out to you that's like your version of that hour with z 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 asked 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 them 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 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 some of the hours you can certainly have that in a week right you can have that in a month you can have that in the year so really training your mind toward you know what those things are and circling them and having that pattern recognition can make a lot of sense i like that that's kind 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 mh and i remember talking to my friend there and i go oh he's like why why don't you like it like it's all like is it's an easy job we're making great money where 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'd boil that down so like if i don't do anything this hour definitely nothing's gonna change and we called it it's kinda like you said you you look at all those blocks and you sort of figure out blocks matter and we literally said the same thing and we called it the jen law which was you know in a tower of jen blocks if you remove some blocks the tower is totally fine and then other blocks are like the key lin bins and there's some some point we removed too many and the whole tower tips over and it falls and so you you you don't wanna 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 and 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 do nothing it wasn't to be lazy it was to test what happens and then of course nothing happened nobody your office space moment yeah exactly i took half a day off i was just gonna do nothing for the second half the day see what happens nothing happened then has just stopped 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 we noticed that these things were behind and what job was this it was a job i had in australia my after my first company kind of got like hired 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 yeah that doesn't mean i wanna work super hard but when i when i do do something i wanna 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 gonna work monday through friday nine to five if there's this assumption that monday equals thursday that you know the first hour of eight hour days 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 ideas so in the pump podcast basically you you said something i entirely agree with which is or i don't know if you set it or if it but it was discussed distribution over ideas so you look at you wanna know how do i get early customers and can this actually scale some of the ways that you do that as 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 you said the best in class is three months you also said that the lt to c best in class is five mh meaning you acquire customer for a dollar they're worth five dollars too you and you also said that you have a very at this point very strict standards 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 wanna 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 can you tell me some ideas that can you up in honorable mention good question that was a good question by the way let me let me think through that i mean they're there have been plenty plenty plenty over the years to think through i'm just trying to think through some worth calling got your evernote know and just scroll yeah i know i know click share and then add sam i'm at sam part yeah totally okay well i'll i'll give you some examples so one example is alright so talk about problem solution so we got this we got this new office in in letterman and the pre for those of you who don't know in san francisco that'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 and all because i'm like old or something well i have no idea i was like what could this be like obviously there's something new about this environment so i went to this hour just 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 as 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 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 sub immunotherapy so basically like there's two ways to get these all and increasing quantities into your immune system so that you you get used to them one is through an injection and others is by putting them under your tongue both ways they get into your bloodstream so i 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 in my allergies and i was like this is amazing why doesn't everybody have this lit 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 all get paid for giving these allergy shots that's why there's so many allergy shots you go to the all they bill your insurance so every visit you do they get paid versus every sub 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 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 by 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 all just 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 all of course don't want the revenue stream to be disrupted of 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 well i what about it didn't it work the the medications were too expensive just the unit economics clear we didn't we couldn't get the unit economics to don't 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 sub drops ranging from like seventy nine a month all the way up to like two fifty a month those 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 c to acquire the customer and the problem in this case was just the c 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 their skeptical hard to sell over the internet i'm not sure but the you know we're really good at producing low c we're really good at scaling things we just couldn't figure out how to get the c on this we did a lot of different iterations 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 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 just better in our view to work on this so that's why i've adopted this philosophy which is exactly what you said which is distribution is more important than ideas and we only wanna work on ideas that can achieve mass distribution because our view is life is short and you know for us and our c cofounder we wanna you know prize our time and we only wanna work on things that can reach a lot of customers whether they're consumers or businesses we wanted it to matter so we 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 mister mark you you have a different different bullet here that you can do if you if it's hard to think of which is patterns for great company ideas and essentially ideas to talk about so i'm curious about those yeah 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 but there are some problems with it so i'll i'll disclose it so you know there's all this technology computer vision etcetera that's been developed for autonomous vehicles so cars self driving cars so cars they drive and there's a lot of issues right like you've got stop signs you've got stoplight you've got gotta be able to identify colors there's people coming there's bikes there's all this stuff in the environment that you know you know there's it's two d but it's also three you go up you go down there's weather there's all of this stuff so we were trying to think what are some interesting you know ways of 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 have like crazy sonar and like computer vision underwater and they could find the fish and they just you know automatically did off 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 another time to kinda make it a little bit difficult but that's another idea but anyway yeah i i'm happy to we can discuss that more i'm happy to progress into the patterns behind yeah go go ahead go to the patterns i i'd be curious to what those are okay cool sounds good 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 democrat them so you make them more accessible 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 philosophical perspective this is actually something i learned from mark andre he has this belief that human desires 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 their 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 like uber was example uber was a classic example of this right people had drivers yeah now everybody can push a button and have a private driver driver pick them up yeah private driver with uber private chef with door dash private shopper with insta 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 right 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 what are some other or some other examples in there that that you know haven't looked into it but it 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 seemed 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 kinda 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 with 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 up ideas that are being formed there we're starting one or two that we think can help empower people in that area for example so that would be you know one example of of an area that are you gonna do anything in the wealth adviser space we are kind of tangent 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 have you heard of have you heard of ad par sean no so i i bet you have jack right ad par yeah ad par sorry and so ad par was started by joe lo i think right mh i only know like you know the wikipedia version but basically it's a it's kinda like mint dot com but for really wealthy people i actually but like billionaire wealthy people i actually don't know what features necessarily it has that something a little bit what what would 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 an in like a big vision for where that can go 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 yeah and they send me like the jan stuff ever and they're 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 add 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 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 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 your point about distribution i think selling to those people are can be quite challenging because they're very old school and they're very conservative but that the i was bringing this up to ask you if that's a space that what has been interesting to you lately because you know you're being a little cryptic because you like to be stealth but until you you go live but so i trying 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 pretty universal a lot of room for improvement cool that that's one pattern for great ideas so what are the what are the wealthy companies that people have that can be democrat and and other if 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 that's an amazing one i think there's tons of great ideas there what's another what's other the 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 that 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 dot com you go to one site you see it all in one place that they made it really easy in the case of tend once which was anytime there's somebody has fourteen tabs open to do this to do one task that's a business opportunity is that right that's a business opportunity yeah 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 ar that that's an opportunity another example of that that we we kinda found with him and hers and other telemedicine companies that we 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 health care system you know close to mind 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 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 ar process fraught with a lot of anxiety and things like that open door 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 you guys are doing that now with open store right which i gotta see is it is a truly great idea i remember when i first it i texted my friend and i said i i didn't even say how great this idea i just only said why are we not doing this because i was like this is that good of an idea selling your company selling your e commerce store in this case takes so much effort so much work and the data is all there right like i'm assuming i don't actually know how so 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 them an offer and they don't have to go 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 at nine out to ten friends i talked to who have a e commerce don't even know what you would do if you wanted to sell i don't even know what yeah what whose door do i knock on or what do i need to have ready and so therefore i just i'm just not gonna do it and and it's like the open door thing where not everybody's gonna do this but sure if open door captures 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 no worry if i can copy you but ethan and i are having a ton of fun tar of fun building out that company here in miami that's been a blast building a a great team a huge team and yeah it's off 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 you know anyone who joins that team it's such an an 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 so that's been a lot of fun thanks for saying that in another pod you've said something like you have the list of ideas but every once in 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 ideas and we'll partner with you or you know you said something like that i know if it is 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 wanna bring their ideas and c companies with us 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 is 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 ten they just wake up in the morning they wanna play offense they have three things they wanna 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 their charismatic 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 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 wanna work with you 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 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 he likes doing many things at one time i i'm always teasing him and and joking criticizing him and i'm like only do one thing if you only do one thing you're gonna be 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 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 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 kinda one major thing and you only focus on one let's say a software company or something like that 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 wanna be like singular 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 better 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 so when i thought about doing atomic it actually wasn't believe 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 of those questions was yes so i decided to do it 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 it you can probably do financially better just going all in on that thing at least in the short term 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 like it's like asking a genie for unlimited wishes right so but that's not really 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 maybe i don't know where they were at the time you know rocket internet for the listeners there's this company called rocket internet based in germany started by these three crazy crazy brothers and their whole stick was basically copy silicon valley companies to do it in africa asia and in other places where that thing didn't think so airbnb in europe or amazon and thailand or whatever to zappos in nigeria and they created a a few companies ever fucking huge and yeah they did it so the 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 but you can motivate to just copy other people's ideas i think it's very different then the kinds of people we're able to attract that atomic and work on our companies you know it's more of a mercenary probably then 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 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're just hired guns they they're just hired 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 to to to win right yeah let's talk about works to some extent but it's just different let's do a couple minutes real quick on crypto so great on a scale of one to chuck the ko aid where are you at with crypto just kinda personally investing in it and then what do you think is exciting or or completely overweight 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 po scheme so like where 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 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 pumping 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 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 sol alana seems to have a lot of developer interest i think there's a lot of other places you know one that i was kind of early involved in and help get off the ground was one called terra and luna that just launched and you name that 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 you but sorry go ahead good ahead so a lot of you know if you were to kind of not crypto you were like a macro economist and we're 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 into 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 att to this problem so instead of just focusing on purely technical things like you know n nxt 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 so 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 decentralized way within the crypto ecosystem that i think is really interesting and i don't know they're 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 and there's a project that hasn't launched yet but if there's anyone out there who knows how to mine i would say mine cryptocurrency it's called iron fish and it's basically there's a genius i can vouch for her she's ingenious 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 un trace 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 and it's an issue so you had you know coins like z cash and narrow that were created but it turns out those actually can be d decrypt and you can figure out where well that went so she's the first person that really figure it out how to make truly an crypto and it's called iron fish i think it's a really exciting project i don't think it's t on exchanges but i think it's mine and it'll probably be t at some point so those are some early ones that i think are exciting worth worth kind of looking into love it and and do you use like defy are you like an actual like participant or user of defy i don't use d five too much per s i'm more i do actually a little bit but i'm more of kind of like i said it and forget it by 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 att to but if i had more time i'd be interested in learning more about it yeah 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 that's an interesting question i might consider working on you know web three in crypto specifically figuring out how to use crypto to build new networks that can be built that are totally decentralized like social networks or or other types of networks 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 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 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 they're 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 i've got so many more questions hopefully you can come back and do this again of course we'd love to thanks for asking me this this is badass i pay attention to everything you guys do well on a topic i i'm looking at your job page to see like what are they who are they hiring for now what are they gonna launch now and trying to figure out if i could kinda like reverse engineer and see everything and so good taste dude you you you you're invested in are c a company with my cousin i don't know if you know that rohan oh which which one rohan per he he started to stay auto that's that's my company great rohan hans awesome yeah we love rohan yeah he's super smart yeah he's great well thank you for doing this this is badass this is awesome course thanks for having we're excited to publish this we're excited to make this happen it was awesome talking to you if people wanna get more where do they follow you find you yes subscribe to your newsletter by your only fans what do you want them to do not on only fans yeah but you can just follow it yet you can follow me on twitter i'm just jack at jack abraham or you know you can find me on linkedin and or you know we're just at atomic dot 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 c profound companies with people we love c founding companies with diverse people all sorts of backgrounds agnostic to location it 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 we'll we'll be sharing a bunch of your links because i'm so excited you came on here