10 months ago we shut down Atrium after raising $75m in venture capital. Anyone hearing that knows I made tons of mistakes along the way. Someone asked me today what my biggest lessons learned were. Here they are:
Start with the mission
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It is very hard to write the mission after the fact. You should start with a clear reason to exist and filter early hires for believers.
Start remote. SFBA is over for startups: the cost of housing and rent gives you much worse operating leverage. Many talented people choose jobs they want to be flexible re: location. Remote is better at this time in the market.
I wrote that before COVID, now it's extra true.
There is no skipping of the R&D phase of a company - if you try to skip this you miss the part where you are forced to develop something differentiated. Very hard to solve this with money.
Don’t build a services company. It’s more work to manage everyone and the reward isn’t there at the end of the day.