Jack Abraham, founder and CEO of the Atomic startup studio, joins Sam and Shaan to discuss how great business ideas actually get generated — through observing problems rather than brainstorming — and lays out three proven patterns for finding them. The conversation covers Jack’s origin story from coding at his dad’s company (Comscore) at age 12, to selling Milo to eBay at 24, to building Atomic into one of the few startup studios that actually works, launching companies like Hims and Bungalow. Jack also shares Peter Thiel’s “power law time” insight, honorable-mention ideas that didn’t pan out (sublingual allergy immunotherapy, autonomous fishing vessels), and his current thinking on crypto.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, founder of Milk Road), Jack Abraham (guest, founder/CEO of Atomic startup studio)
Cold Open and Introductions [00:00:00]
Sam: This was like a hit podcast — we’re growing, we’re doing good. And yet, Shaan, your microphone is the most hood-rat thing I’ve seen. What is that? Is it like balanced in there?
Shaan: Yeah, so there’s some way this is supposed to sit, and then there’s the way it actually sits. Don’t mess with success — it’s our good luck charm.
Sam: Jack, we’re recording now. I think someone sent your team a little description of 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?
Jack: Yeah, I listened to a few of your podcasts. I think it’s great content. Shaan and I go way back — we used to know each other back in San Francisco in the early days when tech was getting going there.
Sam: Winter San Francisco, yeah — when tech was in San Francisco. Excited to have you on. Thanks for being here. How did you guys know each other?
Shaan: I was going to ask you this. I didn’t know how much you remembered. I remember pretty vividly — at that time I was running Monkey Inferno, which was an idea lab, a sort of startup studio. I don’t know how we got connected, but Jack came by the office and I remember sitting in this conference room. He was thinking about launching his own personal incubator, idea factory — whatever you want to call these things. What do you call it, Jack?
Jack: We go with “startup studio,” given that the industry seems to have gone with that.
Shaan: And I remember before the meeting I googled, “okay, who’s this guy?” And then I saw — wow, this guy’s done all this stuff. He had built Milo, he sold it to eBay, and this was not his first rodeo. In the meeting, I remember you had really good questions. A lot of people like the idea of a startup studio — it sounds fun, you get to sit around all day thinking of ideas and building them, and if something hits, hooray. But you had actually put a lot of thought into it. You asked a bunch of questions, and I remember thinking, hey, I’ve been doing this for a few years, I could share some insights. But every time I’d say something, you were already two steps ahead. I remember walking away thinking, okay, I think this is one of the few startup studios that might actually work.
Shaan: And I think it has. It’s one of the few startup studios that has actually worked. You guys had Hims come out of it, which is like a breakout success, now a public company. What are some of the other companies that have come out of Atomic that are big?
Jack: Yeah, so we’ve created a ton of different companies. Bungalow has been doing incredibly well — we just announced a huge raise for that company. Homebound, which is kind of revolutionizing construction with a marketplace dynamic. Replicant, which is using AI to transform call centers. Radiant, which is cloud software for screens for B2B applications. We touch all sorts of industries. We have now actually a few dozen companies that we’ve started.
A lot of our companies are doing really well. We actually try to keep a lot of them in stealth because people have started trying to copy them, and by the time we announce them, they’ve usually raised pretty significant funding. So a lot of them are under wraps. But we tend to do a lot in healthcare and telemedicine, prop tech, fintech, education, AI, and marketplaces.
How Atomic Generates Ideas: Problem-First, Not Brainstorming [00:05:30]
Sam: What is the idea generation process? Because you’re right — you do stay in stealth for a while. It feels like when you come out to market, the company already has traction, and then you announce a big raise. But what that means is that people are willing to copy you. Like, if Jack’s doing it, it’s probably a good market and a good idea — let’s just use that and skip a bunch of potential points of failure.
I feel like everybody thinks they’re a good idea person. You actually seem to be a good idea person. So where does that come from? What’s the process for ideas? You have 600 of them in an Evernote doc.
Jack: Yeah, 600. So there are a lot of ideas. Okay, multi-part question. The first part is where good ideas come from, and I have a view on this that’s a little contrarian.
A lot of times, if you’re incubating companies, the temptation is to brainstorm — think about things, get in a room, whiteboard, come up with solutions. And you end up with these contrived solutions to problems that may or may not exist. That’s kind of a problem.
What we do at Atomic is we don’t have brainstorming sessions. We’ve been in business for over a decade and we’ve never had a brainstorming session on ideas — which is kind of crazy. What we do instead is observe problems in the world. Problems that we have personally. Problems on our team. Problems in our portfolio that our companies have, that then create enterprise companies. In that case, we observe the problems, we see a pattern, we actually build a product to solve it, we deploy it across our portfolio, we have built-in customers, we dog-food it, we make sure it works — and then once we know it works, we release it to the world.
It’s really a problem-first mentality. That’s what makes us stand out and a little bit different from others who’ve attempted this.
In terms of the 600 ideas — our view of the world is that it’s fundamentally very broken. There’s a lot of stuff that could be improved. That doesn’t mean everything’s broken-broken. It just means there’s an opportunity in many facets of life and many parts of the economy to up-level things. This could be going to the doctor’s office, commuting to work, interacting with a company, running a sales team — you just observe all these things and think, wow, that seems a little broken, there’s probably a better way. And I just got in the habit of writing those down. Now that list has grown to over 600, and that’s a seed we use to start companies out of at Atomic.
Jack’s Origin Story: Comscore, Milo, eBay [00:11:00]
Sam: I have a whole bunch of questions. I told you I watched a lot of your interviews so I understand a little about your process, and I want to ask you about that. But before you did this — you’re 35 now?
Jack: I’m 35 now.
Sam: So before you were doing Atomic, your first big win was Milo. You sold that for about $75 million at 24. Right?
Jack: Yep.
Sam: Shaan, do you know who his dad is?
Shaan: I do — Comscore.
Sam: Yeah, so I didn’t know that until I was doing research because we had met, and I just thought, oh, he’s kind of a whiz kid. And I love the backstory behind every whiz kid — I think there’s always some unique childhood where you get exposed to something. So, Jack, your dad started Comscore. Is that right? And you were working there like at age 12 or something crazy?
Jack: Yeah, I had an interesting childhood where I got exposed to entrepreneurship at a young age. My dad was an immigrant — he came to the US literally without a dollar to his name. He was born in Lebanon, went to college in France studying science, engineering, and math, came to the US for a PhD in math at MIT, and literally didn’t have a dollar to his name. He slept on a concrete basement floor at MIT in a sleeping bag. I was born while he was there in Boston.
He took math and applied it to business. He actually invented these really cool new forms of marketing that at the time were revolutionary. He won international marketing awards, got promoted in the company he joined, eventually became president of it, and then decided to become an entrepreneur.
Can you imagine? He was basically born at the bottom of the third world, rose to the top of the first world, started a company, sold it — and then when I was 12 or 13 he said, “Jack, I’m going to start a company that’s going to measure everything everyone does on the internet. Do you want to join it?” And I joined as the third person as a software engineer. I learned how to write code.
Sam: Did he give you equity?
Jack: He was like, “Do you want cash or equity?” I said equity — I don’t want cash, give me equity. I took the equity, and it ended up working out. Also, child labor laws meant he couldn’t pay me cash, so I had to get the equity. At its peak it was worth like $6 billion or something. He grew it on his own, took it public, it did really well. Two or three years after it went public he decided he didn’t want to be a public company CEO and got off, started doing investing and being on boards. But I got to see that grow from just an idea in my parents’ sitting room to a thousand-plus person company to a public company. I just got hooked. I started starting companies at age 15 and I’ve just been hooked ever since.
Sam: How old were you when it went public?
Jack: That’s a good question. I was in college, so I was probably like 19 or 20 or something.
Sam: So he gave you shares when you were 13. When you were 20, what did they end up being worth? Were you like the richest 20-year-old? This podcast is called My First Million — you might have been the youngest person to make your first million.
Jack: My dad is a very fair person, and that would have been nepotism to give me an unfair amount of shares. He gave me what I deserved — which was a 12 or 13-year-old that didn’t know how to code, basically paid the equivalent of close to minimum wage in shares. Which is kind of what I deserved, right? But it ended up being worth a lot of money. And yeah, it was a good taste of equity.
Sam: And you start Milo — it was acquired for $75 million, right? So you’re 24. Correct. Massive success. Milo ends up becoming a pretty big deal, like a main part of eBay. You work on a bunch of big parts at eBay, you become this big shot. So you got acquired by… actually, I’ll let you tell it.
Jack: Okay, well — I got acquired, and you know, going from a little startup to a 2,000-person company… Sam just got acquired too, his company just got acquired by HubSpot. How many people does HubSpot have?
Sam: Probably three thousand.
Jack: And I know the default path for entrepreneurs — I talked to a bunch of them during the acquisition process. “What’s the next year of my life going to look like? What’s your advice?” And I got a whole range of opinions. The common default path was: look, somebody who’s a true entrepreneur at heart is going to find it hard to be in a big company for a long time. You could either not play the game — kind of coast, do your own thing, maybe build a couple interesting products while you’re there and bounce whenever you’re ready. Or you try to play the game, climb the ladder, and figure out what that looks like. It’s a different game than the startup game. You’re not zero-to-one, you’re in the one-to-N phase. It’s all about managing a large organization.
Most entrepreneurs go the first route. But it seems like you actually kicked ass at eBay. I remember reading some article where you were basically like a VP, the MVP — the guy helping turn this thing around.
Jack: Yeah, is that true? Okay, well. First of all, it’s definitely true. That story wasn’t told while I was at eBay, partially because I don’t like that much attention and I don’t claim credit for things while I’m there. I was just catching up with a reporter I liked and I told him the story, and he was like, “This is amazing — why hasn’t anyone written about this?” It ended up getting written up, and eventually the story got told.
But yeah, I’m a pretty impact-motivated person overall. I’d heard all these stories about founder friends who had sold their companies and languished. They kind of lost their mojo. They became almost robotic. I thought, life’s short — let me figure out how to use this experience for the good of the company and for me. I’m proud of what I built, I want to see it succeed.
There are some funny stories about things we did while we were at eBay to maintain our culture. At one point I rallied the troops — they tried to put us in cubicles, and I had the whole company rise up and rip down the cubicles and throw them on the front lawn. We almost got in trouble and kicked off campus.
But I basically took the approach of: what’s the worst 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.
What’s a great thing I can do? Well, there are a bunch of products 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 to put together multiple teams under me and try my hand at building multiple products at once? I convinced the CEO to let me do that and give me a shot.
The majority of what we built was hitting, and a lot of it was driving press cycles and the stock price. The biggest thing I did — I convinced the CEO 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 a hacker house, and we built the entire thing in two weeks. There’s actually a story written about this online. It ended up becoming the feed and the homepage of eBay, and 130 million people were using it nine months later as the primary discovery mechanism on the site.
Startup Studio Traps and How Atomic Avoids Them [00:22:00]
Shaan: After eBay, you started a couple things before Atomic, right? Those feel like footnotes in your story — but when I researched them, they were actually really successful. A couple of software companies?
Jack: Yeah, started a bunch of software companies that are still successful. They’re kind of part of Atomic — everything’s been folded into one umbrella at one point or another.
The other thing I’d say — and Shaan, I don’t know if you remember when we talked about startup studios about this — but one trap you can have is when you have hundreds of ideas, the temptation is to try them all. What we did at Atomic is we only did one the first year, two or three the third, four the fourth. We really paced ourselves. Now we’re at the point where we can do 10 or 12 a year. But that pacing was a big part of the process.
Shaan: Right. I remember three of those traps and I want to say them because there’s probably somebody listening who’d be curious.
The first was exactly what you said: focus. The theme is that startup studios have a bunch of advantages, but you don’t want to lose the natural advantages that startups have — desperation and focus. Shiny object syndrome is a real trap. You can whiteboard ideas, take one that sounds semi-plausible — Paul Graham calls these “sitcom startup ideas” — you come up with a manufactured story for a pitch, like a sitcom premise. And then when one idea hits a rough patch, that shiny unproven object over there starts to look easier. You either intentionally or unintentionally start shifting your focus away from the hard thing you should be pushing through.
The second was desperation. You had said something smart — we’re going to fund the team for nine months, and their job is to raise a Series A in that time. That’s great, because otherwise things can just languish forever in an incubator. The people working on a project need to either prove their case or it’s a bust. Having a do-or-die moment — you either prove it or you didn’t.
The third was: we’re going to focus on B2B initially, not consumer stuff, because we know pain points we’ve had as entrepreneurs or that our companies have. We can scratch our own itch rather than try to make the next hit social network.
Sam: Although Hims was a consumer company, so you know…
Shaan: Yeah, well — that was a hair loss company.
Sam: He was about to skip that one over and then he had to let it go.
Jack: You know, a VC I really respect told me: the way you make money in the venture business is B2B — those are your singles and doubles. Consumer is your home runs, lightning in the bottle. Plan your portfolio accordingly.
Sam: Who said that?
Jack: I think it was one of the managing partners from General Catalyst, if I remember correctly. They’re great — we do some work with them.
And you know, since then B2B has actually been able to become home runs too, right? The valuations on some of these B2B companies are absolutely astronomical.
But the great thing about B2B is you can talk to the customer and trust what they say — which is not necessarily true for consumer. With consumers, you almost have to read between the lines. You can’t trust what they say; you have to trust what they do. You have to run them through the product, look at the data. What they do is actually usually different from what they say. Part of that is consumers don’t know in their mind what they need.
Jack: To address your other point, Shaan — the nine months and having companies raise on their own — that’s a purposeful element we designed into Atomic. We designed Atomic to be uncomfortable at the Atomic level so that companies are pushed out and people are pushed out. There’s not this effect where people just stay in the incubator forever. That’s dangerous.
Sam: Is it nine months and $300,000? Or $250,000?
Jack: We have multiple stages of investment. The first check to get something going and do some initial research is around a quarter million dollars — but it could range from $100K to $400K. If that goes well, we can write a check that’s usually $2 million, but could be $1 to $4 million. From there we can write a check of $3 to $8 million — sometimes with other VCs, sometimes on our own. Depends on circumstances, the needs of the company, what we need to hit the next set of milestones.
In our first fund it was smaller, so we only did the early rounds — which is what Shaan is describing. As it’s gotten bigger, we’re able to get the companies further along, which is why we can keep them stealth longer. When they come out, they usually announce really big rounds.
Sam: When you were starting this, how much of your own money did you put up? Were you like, 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?
Jack: My general philosophy is: you shouldn’t sell what you wouldn’t also buy. I wanted to prove to myself this would work before raising outside capital. So the first year or so of Atomic, I did it with my own capital — roughly on the order of what you described. Then once I was convinced this is working, this model is going to work, we raised our first fund.
Our first fund was roughly a $10 million vehicle, primarily individuals. We had some great founders and venture capitalists involved — Mark Andreessen, Idan Senkied, Peter Thiel, people like that — who helped us a lot in the early days and helped us prove out the model. Since then we’ve raised much, much larger funds.
Lessons from Andreessen, Thiel, and the Power Law of Time [00:33:00]
Sam: You have a couple of things on the agenda I want to know about. One is: you’ve had Andreessen, Chris Dixon, David Sacks, Peter Thiel, and Josh Kushner back your fund. What have you learned from some of these guys that’s not common sense? Like, what’s actually stuck with you?
Jack: Well, Josh Kushner is also fantastic — he almost has a model like yours, right? He also starts companies.
Wow, those are great people. The first thing I’d say — and this is a general thing — is that there are some amazing people out in the world, and I’m surprised how many people don’t just approach them and ask for advice and mentorship. That was a major way I learned throughout my career. I’m so grateful to have had those people in my life.
Going through some of them: one of the things I learned from Mark Andreessen was actually a really interesting story about Peter Thiel that led to a really big insight — one that’s driven a lot of my decision making since then.
This is the concept that time exists on a massive power law basis. Mark was telling me this: Peter was talking to Mark and he said, “You know, I worked so hard my whole life to get into Stanford. I really worked hard in high school — the extracurriculars, everything. I finally got into Stanford. I crushed it at Stanford. I tried to get the best grades. I did really well to get into Stanford Law School. Got into Stanford Law School, did really well there — because I wanted to get into the best law firm. I got into the best law firm. While I was there, 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 run PayPal. I ran it, it went public, merged with eBay. It led me to start Clarium Capital, this hedge fund I’d wanted to do for a long time.”
“All of this effort, all of this time, all of this energy — everything I had done up until this point — 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.”
That is a crazy, mind-blowing fact. There could be an hour that comes in your life that is worth more than the cumulative sum of everything else you’ve done — all the time, all the effort, all the energy. And I think that can be true for everyone. So looking out for those power law time moments — those power hours — can be so important. How do you put yourself in positions where you can discover those opportunities? How do you engineer your calendar so you can create those moments for yourself?
Sam: What’s an example of that for you? Is there something that stands out as your version of that hour with Zuck?
Jack: That’s a really interesting question. This is something I adopted from Jeff Bezos. One of the things he does — and I modified it slightly — is you take a look at your prior week and how all your time was spent. You look at your calendar, each block, each half hour or hour. And you basically ask: “For all of these things I did last week, what are the things where if I hadn’t done this, nothing would have changed?” You cross those off the list. If things keep getting crossed off, you probably shouldn’t be doing them. Find a way to get out of those meetings, replace yourself, maybe hire someone to take those kinds of meetings for you.
Then you really circle the things that mattered. You can certainly have a power hour within a week, within a month, within a year. Really training your mind toward what those things are and circling them — having that pattern recognition — can make a lot of sense.
Sam: I like that. I used to have a job that was kind of shitty. It paid really well, but I just didn’t like it. And I remember talking to my friend there. He was like, “Why don’t you like it? It’s an easy job, we’re making great money, they respect 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 you boil that down — if I don’t do anything this hour, nothing’s going to change.
We called it the Jenga Law. In a tower of Jenga blocks, if you remove some blocks, the tower is totally fine. Other blocks are the key linchpins, and at some point, if you remove too many, the whole tower falls. You don’t want to remove those anchors. But there are plenty of useless blocks that, if you take them out, you make space — and something interesting can happen.
So I started doing that. First with one hour a day — from 1 PM to 2 PM, I’d do nothing. Not to be lazy, just to test what happens. Then of course, nothing happened. Nobody noticed. Office Space moment. Then I took a half day off. Nothing happened. Then I just stopped coming in for like two weeks. By the fourth week, they were like, “Hey, what the heck — where are you? These things are behind.”
Sam: What job was this?
Sam: It was a job I had in Australia after my first company got acqui-hired. I was working for this thing. It was again a nice place, but it really taught me that one thing that matters to me is that my hours matter. I want my hours to matter. That doesn’t mean I want to work super hard. But when I do do something, I want it to matter.
And I started doing what you’re doing — recognizing that it’s not linear. Every hour is not equal. We get trained that way: Monday through Friday, nine to five, there’s this assumption that Monday equals Thursday, that the first hour of the eight-hour day equals the fourth. But they’re definitely not equal in productivity or importance.
Jack: Yeah, absolutely. That’s absolutely right.
Distribution Over Ideas: How Atomic Vets Concepts [00:41:00]
Sam: I want to ask you about very specific ideas. On the Pomp podcast you said something I entirely agree with, which is distribution over ideas. You look at how to get early customers, whether it can actually scale. Some of the ways you do that: you look at the payback period — you try to get that as low as possible. So if I acquire a customer, how long does it take to get my money back? You said best-in-class is three months. You also said LTV-to-CAC best-in-class is five — meaning you acquire a customer for a dollar, they’re worth five dollars to you.
You also said you have very strict standards for launching companies. You have 600 ideas, you can now launch up to 10, and that’s many years into this. So what I want to talk about is: what ideas didn’t cross that threshold, but in your head you think it could have — or if the right person does this, it definitely could work? What are some ideas that keep you up at night?
Jack: Good question. Honorable mentions. Let me think through that.
Sam: Take out your Evernote and just scroll.
Jack: Yeah, click share and add samparr.com. Okay, well, I’ll give you some examples.
Honorable Mention #1: Sublingual Allergy Immunotherapy [00:44:30]
Jack: So one example. We got this new office in Letterman at the Presidio — for those who don’t know, it’s kind of like a national park in San Francisco, lots of trees around. And I was just a mess in this office. I was sneezing, feeling awful, horrible allergies every day. I couldn’t get rid of them.
It took me three or four months to get an appointment at an allergist. Was it mold or something?
Sam: Was it mold or something?
Jack: I had no idea. I thought, what could this be — obviously something new about this environment. So I went, got tested, and of all the possible things I could be allergic to, it was the one tree growing outside the window of my new office that I could not move — protected by the city.
Anyway, I had to deal with it. And in the process — what are your options for 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, they take a lot of time. Or you can do something called sublingual immunotherapy — basically you put allergens in increasing quantities under your tongue. Same mechanism as the shots, just different delivery. Both ways get allergens into your bloodstream so your immune system gets used to them.
I said, I want to do the one under your tongue. You can do it at home, it’s a drop a day in the morning — that seems a lot easier. I did it, and it completely cured me of my allergies. I thought, this is amazing. Why doesn’t everybody have this? Why are all these kids getting allergy shots?
And then you look at the structure — it’s really messed up. Allergists get paid for giving allergy shots. That’s why there are so many allergy shots. You go to the allergist, they bill your insurance for every visit. Versus every sublingual drop you do at home — they’re not getting paid.
That’s normally the perfect setup for creating a company, right? Misaligned incentive — let’s go disrupt this. Lots of people suffering, huge pain point, people really hate their allergies.
So we went, found a compounding pharmacy, figured out the supply chain — this is actually pretty difficult to source and get right, treating all these different allergies, figuring out how to do it via telemedicine. And we tested it.
And the economics just don’t work. The methods were too expensive.
Sam: What were some of the numbers? Do you remember?
Jack: We tried a bunch of different price points — ranging from about $79 a month all the way up to $250 a month. Obviously you get a gross margin depending on the price. And then there’s the CAC to acquire the customer. The problem was just that the CAC was really really high. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s a new thing customers don’t know about, they need to be educated, or they’re skeptical, or it’s hard to sell over the internet. But we’re really good at producing low CAC, we’re really good at scaling things, and we just couldn’t figure out how to get the CAC low on this.
The other way that can work is if churn is really low and you get payments for a long time — it takes about a year to three years to fully cure someone. But even that didn’t make the math work.
And that’s the kind of thing where you can be an entrepreneur and believe the world should be this way — and I still believe that. But you’ll be knocking your head against a brick wall forever. There are other problems where you can solve the same pain points and actually scale. So that’s why I’ve adopted this philosophy: distribution is more important than ideas. We only want to work on ideas that can achieve mass distribution. Life is short, and we want our work to matter.
Honorable Mention #2: Autonomous Fishing Vessels [00:51:00]
Jack: Okay, I’ll throw out another one — a crazier idea that maybe someone on this podcast will do. I still think it’s a good idea, but I’ll disclose the problems with it.
There’s all this technology — computer vision, etc. — that’s been developed for autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars have to deal with stop signs, stoplights, colors, people, bikes, the 3D environment, weather, all of it. So we were thinking: what are some interesting ways this technology could potentially be applied?
A crazy idea I had: what if you created autonomous fishing vessels that went out into the ocean and fished 24/7? Even through inclement weather. They’d have crazy sonar and underwater computer vision, they could find fish, automatically handle everything. We looked into it — still such interesting technology, I hope someone builds it. But there are some structural issues around fishing quotas and industry capture that make it a little bit difficult.
Sam: Anyway, yeah — let’s go to the patterns. I’d be curious what those are.
Jack: Sounds good.
Pattern 1: Democratize What the Wealthy Already Have [00:53:00]
Jack: So some patterns I think are tried and true. One pattern: if you take things that rich people have access to, or rich companies have access to, and you figure out how to democratize them — make them more accessible, distributable, cheaper, available to everyone — that is a winning formula for a really good company.
From a philosophical perspective, this is actually something I learned from Mark Andreessen. He has this belief that human desire is infinite. If you believe that, then people with a lot of resources are willing to spend on the outer limit of human desire — they’re poking around, figuring out the next thing on the human desire frontier. They might discover something, and if it takes hold, that’s something you can then take and give to everyone. Everyone might want it.
Uber is a classic example. People had private drivers. Now everybody can push a button and have a private driver pick them up.
Shaan: Private driver with Uber, private chef with DoorDash, private shopper with Instacart. You could even argue second home with Airbnb.
Jack: Exactly. So what’s an idea in that space? What are some other things that very wealthy people or wealthy companies have that the rest of us don’t?
Shaan: It seems like there’s a renaissance happening in fintech, partially because the wealthy have always had access to financial planning, financial resources, access to the markets — the whole 99% versus 1% thing. If you can give the 99% what the 1% has access to in terms of generating wealth, I think that’s really interesting. I think there are a lot of interesting startup ideas there. We’re starting one or two that we think can help empower people in that area.
Sam: Are you going to do anything in the wealth advisor space?
Jack: We are doing things tangentially there. I think there’s probably a lot more to do. Wealth advisory is a compounded issue — even when the wealthy have access to wealth advisory, it’s not great.
Sam: Have you heard of Addepar? Jack, right?
Jack: Addepar, yeah. Started by Joe Lonsdale, I think.
Sam: I only know the Wikipedia version, but it’s kind of like Mint.com but for really wealthy people. Like, billionaire-wealthy people. What does it have that’s more robust?
Jack: Basically, it has tracking of everything — every fund everywhere in the world, every wealth manager, all of your assets. They tend to work more with wealth managers than individuals. Joe and that company have a big vision for where it can go.
Sam: I work with some of these folks and they send me the jankiest stuff ever. Like, Morgan Stanley — the login to look at your investments is horrible. I’m just using spreadsheets on my own. I’ve heard of Addepar, and they told me you can’t use it unless you’re worth $500 million or a billion dollars — it’s really really expensive. I’m like, are you kidding me? Just give me a Mint.com login and become the admin and let’s share it.
So I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff in that space. But selling to those people can be challenging because they’re very old school and very conservative.
I’m trying to get something out of you because I know you’re being cryptic — you like to stay stealth. Is the wealth space something that’s interesting to you lately?
Jack: I think it’s a really interesting space. I would encourage people to look into it. There’s a lot that can be done there. There’s pretty universal dissatisfaction in that space, a lot of room for improvement.
Sam: Cool. So that’s pattern one: what wealthy people or companies have can be democratized. Other people would want it if you make it accessible, cheaper, and more available. Tons of great ideas there. What’s the next pattern?
Pattern 2: Dramatically Simplify What People Have to Do [01:02:00]
Jack: So pattern two: if you take something people consistently have to do, something they feel like they have to do but it takes a lot of steps and a lot of time, and you dramatically simplify it and make it a lot faster to accomplish the same thing — that’s a winning formula.
Some good examples: booking online travel. It used to be so hard — you’d have to go to so many different sites. The Kayak founders had the vision of pulling it all into one place. You go to one site, you see it all, it’s really easy.
Shaan: We’ve said this once — anytime someone has 14 tabs open to do one task, that’s a business opportunity.
Jack: Yes. You just watch for that. If people are doing a lot of research, tons of tabs open, really arduous — that’s an opportunity.
Another example: what we found with Hims, Hers, and other telemedicine companies we’ve started. Going to the doctor’s office — think of that process. You call the doctor’s office. You schedule an appointment. You put it on your calendar. You go to the waiting room. You sit there. You get prescribed something. You go to Walgreens. You wait in line for half an hour. You go around the store. You go home. This is a huge process. As a result, the next generation kind of doesn’t even engage with the healthcare system. Close to nine out of ten of them don’t even know who their doctor is or haven’t gone.
Telemedicine takes that process and makes it a five-minute process on your phone. You get treated for whatever condition you have.
Another interesting example: selling your house. People need to sell their house, and it’s a really hard, arduous process fraught with anxiety. Opendoor came along and said, “Come to this website, tell us what your house is, and we’ll make you an offer to buy it right now.” Not everyone has to do that, not everyone does — but enough people do that it created a really, really big company.
Sam: And you guys are doing that now with Open Store, right? Which I gotta say is a truly great idea. I remember when I first heard about it, I texted my friend and I didn’t even say how great the idea was — I just said, “Why are we not doing this?” Like, that good of an idea.
Selling your company, selling your e-commerce store — it takes so much effort and so much work. But the data is all there. I’m assuming it’s kind of like Clear Bank or whatever — you plug into Shopify, plug into your Facebook ad account, plug into your bank account. With those three data sources you get basically a health score and a value for the shop, and they make you an offer. Most people with an e-commerce store don’t even know what you’d do if you wanted to sell. Nine out of ten friends I’ve talked to who have one don’t know whose door to knock on or what to have ready. So they just don’t do it.
And like the Opendoor thing — not everybody’s gonna do this, but if Open Store captures even one, three, or five percent of all e-commerce store sales? Multi-billion dollar company. Same thing.
I was so bullish that I was like, what am I doing with my life that I’m not doing this idea? This makes total sense.
Jack: Oh man — thanks for saying that. Don’t worry, I’m not worried you’re going to copy me. Keith and I are having a ton of fun building out that company here in Miami. We have an amazing data science team, we’re hiring really aggressively. Anyone who joins that team — it’s such an unbelievable team. I think it’s going to create almost a Miami mafia of amazing people. It’s an exceptional opportunity. Scaling really quickly. That’s been a lot of fun. Thanks for saying that.
What Attributes Would Get Jack to Co-Found with You [01:11:00]
Sam: On another pod you said something like you have this list of ideas, but every once in a while you’ll meet someone so amazing that you say, “Well, what’s your idea? Let’s just partner with you.” What attributes would a person have to have for you to say that to them?
Jack: We’re totally open — the ideas don’t necessarily have to come from us. If people want to bring their ideas and co-found companies with us, we just ask that they be baked off in a process and that the data wins. We’re such big believers in distribution over ideas that as long as we test the idea and the distribution is great, fantastic, let’s do it together.
As for attributes: we really like people that are tenacious. They just wake up in the morning wanting to play offense. They have three things they want to get done by the end of the day, and they get them done. They knock down walls. They’re creative. They have a lot of raw intelligence. They inspire other people. They can hire. They’re charismatic. And it depends on the idea — a more technically oriented idea, you’re looking for a slightly different profile versus one that’s more sales- or product-oriented.
But sometimes you meet someone and there’s just a really strong connection. You have these high-bandwidth conversations, you’re feeling great about everything, and we’ll just say, “We want to work with you. We’re totally agnostic to the idea. Come in, let’s look at 10 to 15 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’ve met some cool people and we’ve had fun, and you’re on to your next thing, and we’d love to be as supportive as we can.”
One Thing vs. Many Things: Founder Archetypes [01:13:30]
Sam: One of the biggest differences between Shaan and me — although we’re very similar in a lot of ways — is he tends to do many different things at once. I’m always teasing him and jokingly criticizing him: “Only do one thing. If you only do one thing, you’re going to succeed more.” And he’s like, “Well, no, but I like this and it’s working.” And he’s right — it is working for him.
You’ve both started one company — Milo was like your baby, one focus — and now your focus is on launching 10 companies a year, though you hire people to make it happen. Do you think starting multiple companies is going to be a bigger wealth creator for you than if you’d just done one major thing, only focused on one software company?
Jack: Before I answer that, just one comment: I’ve noticed a pattern. The smartest people I’ve met in the world fall into one of two camps. They either want to be singularly focused on one thing, almost to a fault — so focused they have to crush it. That’s one archetype of success, and it works really well. Some people are super successful that way.
Other people — and I put myself more in this camp — just get energy from working on a lot of things with a lot of different people. It’s how their brain works. They have to work across a lot of different things. Part of it is also what you enjoy and what makes you happy.
When I thought about doing Atomic, it actually wasn’t a wealth-building exercise. It was really: is it possible to build a company that builds companies? Nobody’s really figured out how to do that at scale before. How could you do that? Is that the most interesting and impactful problem in the world to work on? I believed it was, at that time. Would it be fun? Would I get to work with really great people on really great problems? The answer was yes. So I decided to do it.
Can it be very lucrative? I do think you can probably do better financially by just focusing on one thing. If you had one thing that was going to go to the moon, you can probably do better financially going all in — at least in the short term. In the long term, I don’t know, because if you build a company that builds companies, what’s the value of that? It’s like asking a genie for unlimited wishes.
But that’s not really what drove the decision making or how I think about it.
Sam: You said it’s not been done before. I mean — Rocket Internet?
Jack: Maybe. I don’t know where they were at the time. Rocket Internet, for those listening: based in Germany, started by three brothers. Their whole thing was basically copying Silicon Valley companies and doing it in Africa, Asia, and other places where that thing didn’t exist yet. Airbnb in Europe, Amazon in Thailand, Zappos in Nigeria. They created a few companies that were huge. But the whole thing was copying — to the point where they had this chief scientist who would send out emails like, “Pinterest changed their button size on the top right from X to Y. Do it.”
Sam: Have you ever thought about doing that strategy — instead of invention, just copy?
Jack: It’s just not our style. It’s a very different style. First of all, the kind of talent you can work with and motivate to just copy other people’s ideas is very different from the kinds of people we’re able to attract at Atomic. It’s more of a mercenary approach than a mission-driven approach. We pride ourselves in being innovative and original. That’s not in our ethos.
And I don’t think just copying other people’s ideas is as valuable — I don’t think it works as well anyway. But it’s also just far less interesting to me.
Shaan: It seems like the ideas that worked well for them were the ones where there was a local network effect in the US that hadn’t gone to Europe yet. But there were a lot of companies they copied where they struggled because they’d just install hired guns. They’d hire bankers and say just spend more money than this other company.
Jack: Exactly. And you know, missionaries often outlast mercenaries. Longevity is one of the key factors to win.
Crypto: What’s Real and What Isn’t [01:22:00]
Sam: Let’s do a couple of minutes on crypto. On a scale of one to chugging the Kool-Aid, where are you at? Personally investing in it, what do you think is exciting or completely overrated?
Jack: Good question. I think crypto is real and it’s here to stay. The question is: what are the fundamental real innovations in crypto — the things that are going to be around — and what is manipulation and pump-and-dump? There’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes on these chat groups and forums, and this is stuff that in a normal market would probably result in jail time. It’s happening somewhat regularly in this market. My big concern is: there’s a lot of enthusiasm, it is real, but knowing what is real and what isn’t real is really difficult.
Sam: So what’s real to you?
Jack: One indicator I look for: where are developers going? This is also true with companies and platforms — app stores, enterprise tools. Where the developers go usually works and is a good place to invest. On that thesis, I think Ethereum is a great place. Solana seems to have a lot of developer interest.
One I was kind of early involved in and helped get off the ground is one called Terra and Luna. They just launched a new mainnet that had like 50 to 100 apps just launched that are super interesting. They’re solving a different problem than a lot of other people in crypto.
If you were a macro economist and you were going to knock crypto, the big critique would be: if this is digital gold, imagine what would happen to the world if everyone just held gold and nobody put money in a bank. There’d be no jobs, no economy. People put money in banks, banks lend that money to companies and people, that money gets spent, it creates jobs, those people spend the money, and it goes through the economy — that domino effect is really important for the whole system to work. In crypto, someone puts it in crypto and it stops. It doesn’t keep traveling through the economy. It’s not a productive asset.
For decentralized crypto to work and scale in the world, that’s got to be fixed somehow. The Terra and Luna people are very attuned to this problem. Instead of just focusing on purely technical things like NFTs or new apps or smart contracts, they’re thinking about: how can you lend crypto? How can you borrow against crypto? How can you invest in stocks directly with their stablecoins? You can earn 20% interest with Anchor, borrow against that, earn 30% interest — there’s this whole ecosystem of ways to make crypto productive in a decentralized way. I think that’s really interesting. Really smart team. I don’t know of too many other people working on that.
Jack: The other one I’d call out — I was an early investor, it hasn’t launched yet, but if there’s anyone out there who knows how to mine, I would say mine this cryptocurrency. It’s called Iron Fish. It’s basically this genius — I can vouch for her, she’s a genius — and she created what I think is the first true cash on the internet.
The whole idea of crypto was it’s going to be cash on the internet — untraceable, I give this to you, nobody knows, just like physical cash. In reality, when we make a transaction with Bitcoin, it’s public forever. This record is going to be public and replicated across the internet forever. Everyone is going to know about it.
You had coins like Zcash and Monero that were created to address this, but it turns out those actually can be decrypted. She’s the first person who really figured out how to make truly anonymized crypto. It’s called Iron Fish. I think it’s a really exciting project. I don’t think it’s tradable on exchanges yet, but I think it’s mineable and will probably be tradable at some point.
Sam: Do you use DeFi? Are you an actual participant and user of DeFi?
Jack: Not too much, per se. I’m more of a set-and-forget, buy-and-hold, long-term patient type of person. I’m not actively yield-farming or anything like that. But if I had more time I’d be interested in learning more.
If Jack Were 22 Again: Where He’d Go [01:28:00]
Sam: That’s what I wanted to leave it with — if you weren’t doing all the stuff you’re doing now, and I took away the reputation and the network, and you’re still you — still sharp — but you’re 21, 22, 23 years old. Where do you think you would go? What would you work on?
Jack: Hmm. That’s an interesting question. I might consider working on Web3 and crypto specifically — figuring out how to use crypto to build new networks that are totally decentralized. Like social networks, marketplaces, other types of networks.
What the internet taught us is that networks are what’s valuable at the core. I don’t think Web3 is done — it’s still early. There are like 10 million users of this stuff, and there are four and a half billion people on the internet. 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. There are some people working on it, but there are probably still some really interesting opportunities out there.
Closing [01:30:00]
Shaan: Well, this is awesome, man. I could talk to you for another few hours. I’ve got so many more questions. Hopefully you can come back and do this again.
Jack: Of course — we’d love to. Thanks for having me. This is badass.
Sam: I pay attention to everything you guys do at Atomic. I’m always looking at your job page to see who you’re hiring for and what you’re going to launch next, trying to reverse-engineer it. You have good taste, dude. You invested in or co-incubated a company with my cousin — do you know that?
Shaan: Which one?
Sam: Rohan Puri.
Shaan: Yeah, he’s super smart.
Jack: He’s great.
Sam: Well, thank you for doing this. This is badass.
Jack: Of course — thanks for having me. Excited to have this published.
Sam: Awesome talking to you. If people want to find you, where do they follow you?
Jack: You can follow me on Twitter — I’m just @jackjackabrahams — or you can find me on LinkedIn. Or just go to atomic.vc, our website. You can actually apply there for a program we have called the Future Founders Program. We’d love to co-found companies with people — we’re looking for diverse people from all sorts of backgrounds, agnostic to location, anywhere in the world. We want to start a lot of great companies. It’d be an honor to maybe start a company with someone listening to this. That would be great.
Sam: Well, this is awesome. Thank you very much.