[birken]

I think it is a doubled edged sword. It was an audacious idea that made a lot of sense, and the fact that the founder could raise a lot of money based on name alone probably helped make the gamble on the audacious idea possible. If the startup could have reached escape velocity and be passed off to somebody else then I think you have the best of all worlds. Serial entrepreneur can shift to something else while the successful startup they helped create goes off on its own.

But I do agree with the second point, which is when the founder isn't going to have that "do or die" mentality and the startup starts to sputter, then it's straight into zombie land. Reading the blog post on the company website it sounds that this is basically a corporate structure for Justin Kan to give people advice on how to fundraise and build their companies, which might be a useful service but obviously not a growth startup.

[staticautomatic]

"It was an audacious idea that made a lot of sense"

I've spent my whole career in the legal field and built a number of legal tech automation tools with varying degrees of sophistication and commercial success, and I genuinely have no idea how he thought Atrium was going to work.

From the outside, the only audacious thing I see is that Atrium tried to do something that's famously impossible to do.

[tempsy]

I’m convinced serial founders develop blindspots because you end up surrounding yourself with transactional relationships where no one is incentivized to give you tough feedback about anything anymore because they don’t want to get cut from your circle if they need you in the future, so you just get a lot of vague positive feedback about everything you do, even if someone you ask for feedback from doesn’t actually think it’s a very good idea.

[jimmydddd]

I'm an attorney in the Tech field. Most of my income comes from working with large established companies, or very well-funded startups. As for small unfunded startups, from my experience, it's a lot of fun to work with them, but it's hard to pay the bills that way. So, it might be good to work for a company like them if you're a developer, but not if you're a lawyer.

[Digory]

Based on the pivot language in the release, I suspect they ran smack-dab into the ethics rules.

Lawyers can't directly solicit funding and M&A deals. Whatever a "Fundraise Concierge" is, it can cold call founders all day long.

Wouldn't be surprised to hear they're ramping up direct sales.

[staticautomatic]

All things considered, I would be surprised if that contributed meaningfully to any of this.

[ghego1]

This