santojleo

I find it shocking the toilet hasn’t been reinvented.

FWIW - This was my product hunt review 3 months ago, after using them for about 4 months. Reads like a post mortem now.

All in all, I actually feel I overpaid for subpar legal services.

I will credit them with a smooth and enlightening (albeit overpriced) corporation formation, and maybe they are pearing down the product to just that - because that was the only thing that worked, IMO.

I felt as if they were taking advantage of early stage startups preparing to raise capital. You can’t bill their rates and then ghost them, those are precious dollars and precious time.

“I have been trying to cancel for over a week, and more of the same. NO ONE RESPONDS FOR WEEKS! These are ATTORNEYS! Waste of money.

I’ve dealt with many lawyers coming from my last startup which was in a highly regulated space.

Atrium is like an expensive legal zoom, but overpriced. Understand it’s cheaper to use a lawyer at any other law firm because your retainer is a deposit on future services.

With Atrium your paying $6k a year in subscription fees for “legal advice” which is otherwise baked into any other law firm, and they don’t provide much advice.

They really specialize in financing, using ycombinator docs. These docs are publicly available templates. All other services are limited to their “al la crate menu”... again all templates. It takes days to get a email back from them. It takes a week to get a call setup, if they have the time, and if they will even discuss the matter.

Litigation? Find someone else

Overseas? Find someone else

Doing something outside of California like an asset purchase? Find someone else

So you basically need other lawyers anyways if you use atrium, The rest of their menu is boiler employment agreements, NDAs, and terminations - all of which are 2x local rates.

They custom quote TOS and privacy policies - and again it’s all template based - and 2x local rates.

I asked them about the impact of California’s new AB5 and yep, ask someone else! Save your money - don’t buy the hype.

All your doing is helping VCs cover their recurring legal expenses by paying Atrium to overcharge you and build valuation based on their “tech” which is just a drop box and bad customer service, and no legal support.”

This is your opinion, and a bit insulting considering you have taken a broad brush stroke across a country of 300+ million people, including myself. Perhaps you should get off the twitter bubble and go get involved in your community.

A few issues with your argument:

1) "plenty of old men" is almost certainty referring to the common portrayal of "old white men" and more broadly speaking all White Americans.

Let's just pick this one apart. I cannot speak for all the various religions in the US and their relative charity work, but I know that every church I have ever been apart of has done a tremendous amount of charity work not just in their local community but across the globe, mainly in third world countries - of not "white people". I will make the responsible assumption that other religions do the same. Considering more than 40% of US citizens attend some religious congregation weekly, that means more than 150 million Americans are contributing physically, and likely economically, to global organizations that have shared culture and do "goodwill" in the US and abroad... most often for the "suffering", and a large % of this group of Americans are white, many of which are old - as it's well known that religious observation is significantly greater among pre-Millennial generations.

2) Speaking to the remaining 60% of the United States, more than 62 million Americans volunteer, it's growing every year, and more than half of American's contribute to charity. Again, even assuming 50% overlap with the active-observant religion 40% of the population, we can assume almost every American contributes to an organization either through labor or charity to help those who suffer, and the delta of those who are likely not contributing physically or economically are probably those receiving said charity, and not a huge swath of millions of racist anti-American "countrymen".

3) To your point about a "disconnected society of mostly old white men", I have lived in South Florida for most of my life, where there is a HUGE influx of immigrants and refugees such as Cubans, Haitians, Central Americans, and most recently South Americans, i.e. Venezuelans - where these communities often represent double digit % of the population, and majority of the population in certain large geographic areas. You cannot "drive around" without seeing a car displaying a flag of their country of origin. From the tone of your comment it sounds like YOU have a problem with that behavior? You are essentially calling them un-American.

Frankly speaking as someone who has gone to public school with the children of these people, most of which the children were born outside the US, many of which are "Dreamers" - I know many might "long for their homeland". I know many have immense pride of their heritage. But these people that I know most often have joined the military, police, or other government service - because that is more often then not a stable, often guaranteed, step up in society both economically and I believe from a respect perspective which by your argument they apparently still have to earn. I assume you do respect those vital national and local services, regardless of the "Americanism" of those carrying out the services.

4) American Culture is defined by "shared culture", it is unique compared to every other country in the world BECAUSE OF THAT, not in spite of that. It is constantly changing and evolving. And the fringe that you speak to is simply ignorant of that fluidity that makes this country so unique and grand. I won't make the assumption of generalizing you and putting you into that fringe, but you certainly are amplifying that group by accusing all others of being apart of it without any evidence or scientific fact.

I’ve contemplated a startup that eliminates “checking in” a doctors office using paper or worse, a shared tablet, via QR code to personal smart phone form. Have at it hackers.

I’m sorry, but there’s a lot of smart people here. Why is everyone assuming HTTPS means no one is snooping? I presume someone is snooping no matter what.

Crisis is the perfect word.

Will read more about your offering compared to others. Sounds like your ahead of the curve so to say!

I don’t have much input on the underserviced founder description. As someone in Florida where we literally 2-3 real VC’s, I consider our market underserviced regardless of race, gender, creed. But I understand and support helping any Founder, whatever the angle for identifying them.

Regarding your underlying criteria here: “We expect founders to find a way to build and launch a product, get some amount of revenue traction, and have a roadmap to build the company profitably without relying on too much additional outside capital.”

This resonates with me and I would like to provide some fruit for thought. I am actually in the process of launching a startup studio with the investment thesis of:

<$50k for startups with large TAM’s (>$b) that can get product market fit in less than 90-days of the first $1 invested, and that can generate +EBITA within 12-months of the first $1 invested for $1-3m Seed.

Here is feedback on my model and thesis. It may help you refine yours and if I can be

I am going the studio route because I believe you need distributed teams. (specifically senior management, dev (support), design (brand/product)) in order to gain economies of scale in order to build such disruptive ideas efficiently.

I call this concept a “Venture Lab” because unlike a studio I want outside founders to join with their ideas. So imagine an accelerator married with a studio.

Here are some things to consider when your focusing on profitable startup building:

Speed is the key. The longer it takes to build, the more burn. Hence my requirement of product market fit super fast. I define product market fit as the ability to generate revenue organically or through profitable customer acquisition models.

If your going to be profitable fast... you have to be lean. Many vc’s want “great teams”. Unless the team has wealthy parents or some other means, they need to get paid. Therefore using precious cash. It’s a conundrum.

Furthermore most founders have never spent tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that they are responsible for. It’s really different when your signing the check. If you can’t afford a great CFO who is doing a burn analysis and showing you your runway every few days you can quickly crash and burn. Your certainly not going to build a great product if your constantly running out of cash and fundraising (what I call “scrambling”).

So to recap: Speed > Lean > Cash/Resource/Time Management

Hence why I feel we (experienced distributed team called “the Lab”) have to be active in the venture building with the Founder.

The model has thousands of years of evidence of working: war fighting. Whenever you see numbers of soldiers deployed to a conflict, only 10% are actually war fighting. The rest are support, supply chain, logistics, etc. supporting the 10%. Same concept.

So the gist of my feedback is Don’t just write a check to underserviced founders, because their going to need a lot of support to: have a plan.

After reading comments on this thread I realize there’s some young potential founders following this. So I thought I’d offer my experience from 2018:

My background:

I spent 4 years building mailmyprescriptions.com into the lowest priced online pharmacy before half a dozen clones. In 2018 we were the highest ranked (trustpilot) and lowest priced. Read the reviews... literally saving lives and increasing quality of life. Do you know what $1-2k a year in savings is to a family with an income of $50-60k? We saved Americans over $10m last year. That’s more than what congress has done on drug prices in years.

I bootstrapped the company, and eventually raised $m’s on my own from FO’s and strategics - without a network (an achievement by itself) and this is when healthtech wasn’t sexy.

I also did this while starting a family and eventually got massive burn out. I left the company a few months ago.

Prior to that I bootstrapped in the ad space instead of going through college and taking on the debt.

So to conclude: no network, no degree, bootstrapped disruptive health startup while starting a family.

The nomination:

I got an email from them asking to fill out a survey and so I went through the process. (You can also self nominate - see end of comment)

If they consider you then you fill out a 10-min survey and they exchange some emails thereafter if you make the cut. There’s 3-4 rounds of cuts from what I recall. There are an equal number of questions about what you actually do as the “how popular are you” questions: who invested in you, how much, notable board members, press coverage, etc.

I knew based on those questions it was unlikely I would get on the list going into it.

I also gave pretty short answers ( I was more worried about >60 min hold times because we had just gotten product market fit) and probably shot myself in the foot.

Either way they emailed me and told me I didn’t make the last cut. I never looked at the list, and this thread just prompted me:

Most of the people on the list are doing some really incredible stuff, specifically actual scientists. Founders in under-serviced markets like Africa. Etc.

But there is a webmd clone that somehow raised $9m.

And one person on the list is an investment associate at a notable VC. With no notable investments.

If you look at each of these lists you’ll see the trend that if you have a notable VC Investment, and/or work for a notable company, and/or people from the same company keep getting on, then it becomes obvious that while there are some serious outliers on these lists: Forbes still has to serve the corporate interests and make sure some of their people are “on the list”.

I’ve been trying to mentor some young founders during my sabbatical and a few of them are convinced these lists will get them more business. They are spending more time on self nominating through their network than just asking for a check for the friends and family round!

They want to brag. It’s a problem with millennials and subsequent generations on social media. It’s FOMO. It’s social media envy.

Let me tell you something: You WONT.

You will get one linkedin bump with a few hundred views.

The next day you will wake up and be the same person you were the day before.

If you think it will help you raise money... the VCs know the list is rigged, they get 20-something associates on it every year, so what do they care?

They produce these lists every year with more and more categories - the value of the list has been diluted to oblivion.

Who’s made the list? Theranos CEO. WeWork CEO.

Time is money. If you (italic)get(/italic) nominated, cool go for it. If not: don’t waste your time.

After reading comments on this thread I realize there’s some young potential founders following this. So I thought I’d offer my experience from 2018:

My background:

I spent 4 years building mailmyprescriptions.com into the lowest priced online pharmacy before half a dozen clones. In 2018 we were the highest ranked (trustpilot) and lowest priced. Read the reviews... literally saving lives and increasing quality of life. Do you know what $1-2k a year in savings is to a family with an income of $50-60k? We saved Americans over $10m last year. That’s more than what congress has done on drug prices in years.

I bootstrapped the company, and eventually raised $m’s on my own from FO’s and strategics - without a network (an achievement by itself) and this is when healthtech wasn’t sexy.

I also did this while starting a family and eventually got massive burn out. I left the company a few months ago.

Prior to that I bootstrapped in the ad space instead of going through college and taking on the debt.

So to conclude: no network, no degree, bootstrapped disruptive health startup while starting a family.

The nomination:

I got an email from them asking to fill out a survey and so I went through the process. (You can also self nominate - see end of comment)

If they consider you then you fill out a 10-min survey and they exchange some emails thereafter if you make the cut. There’s 3-4 rounds of cuts from what I recall. There are an equal number of questions about what you actually do as the “how popular are you” questions: who invested in you, how much, notable board members, press coverage, etc.

I knew based on those questions it was unlikely I would get on the list going into it.

I also gave pretty short answers ( I was more worried about >60 min hold times because we had just gotten product market fit) and probably shot myself in the foot.

Either way they emailed me and told me I didn’t make the last cut. I never looked at the list, and this thread just prompted me:

Most of the people on the list are doing some really incredible stuff, specifically actual scientists. Founders in under-serviced markets like Africa. Etc.

But there is a webmd clone that somehow raised $9m.

And one person on the list is an investment associate at a notable VC. With no notable investments.

If you look at each of these lists you’ll see the trend that if you have a notable VC Investment, and/or work for a notable company, and/or people from the same company keep getting on, then it becomes obvious that while there are some serious outliers on these lists: Forbes still has to serve the corporate interests and make sure some of their people are “on the list”.

I’ve been trying to mentor some young founders during my sabbatical and a few of them are convinced these lists will get them more business. They are spending more time on self nominating through their network than just asking for a check for the friends and family round!

They want to brag. It’s a problem with millennials and subsequent generations on social media. It’s FOMO. It’s social media envy.

Let me tell you something: You WONT.

You will get one linkedin bump with a few hundred views.

The next day you will wake up and be the same person you were the day before.

If you think it will help you raise money... the VCs know the list is rigged, they get 20-something associates on it every year, so what do they care?

They produce these lists every year with more and more categories - the value of the list has been diluted to oblivion.

Who’s made the list? Theranos CEO. WeWork CEO.

Time is money. If you (italic)get(/italic) nominated, cool go for it. If not: don’t waste your time.

Go get product market fit! Generate EBITA! Build something awesome!