I think anyone considering a job at a company founded by a serial entrepreneur should heed this as a warning.
These founder raise pre product market fit because they can, and often raise too much money. Having too much money when you don’t really have a viable product that people want can easily turn your company into a zombie, where people are just sort of going through the motions because there’s nothing else to do but chug along.
I’ve seen it many times. Some end up eventually finding the market after a few pivots but it’s really not a fun place to be as an employee with little decision making power. And the founders are usually wealthy enough at that point independent of the success of this current company that it isn’t “do or die” for them which creates another layer of zombie-esque behavior.
I had the opportunity to interview with Atrium over a year ago. It was very clear that they weren't doing well. Their founding team had opposing ideas about how to do things. Their CTO was fired very early on. Clearly, it hasn't worked out smoothly. To me, it looks like they just rode on the wave of eager investors.
I've seen the issue with wealthy enough employees at all the startups I've been at too. Once you get people who no longer feel a certain hunger, they lose ambition and direction quickly. I've seen it happen as startups go from mildly successful to unicorn. Where the founders were able to cash out enough to buy a house in the bay, they suddenly were way less eager about being acquired or IPOing. And I've seen it with people who are on the tail end of their careers, exiting one startup with a very sizeable amount to enter another. The hunger is gone for them, they're just coasting, and they don't seem to have any real reason to even be working beyond avoiding boredom in retirement.
And the worst part is that it feels like these types of people are way too well represented at the top of the hierarchy. The part of the hierarchy where these attitudes matter the most!
I disagree with this, like anything else it’s going to depend on the person. It’s really hard to generalize when it comes to people’s ambitions.
There are so many examples of serial entrepreneurs doing it over and over. Likewise of employees of startups going on to do even better in the next startup they join.
Serial entrepreneurs do get to raise more money, markets reward success, and I am with you that it’s not always deservingly. I also think many startups can and do pivot and serial founders aren’t more likely to pivot than the non serial kind.
I would bet on Justin Khan finding a way to success, much more so than not.
I started at a place that was mid pivot but hadn't made it too official yet. I thought I'd be working on their namesake product, which required a depth of knowledge that I'd been getting pretty close to, but apparently it wasn't selling well. So I worked on an embedded app while a bunch of people worked on something else. It was hard work, the manager was frustrating, but it was very rewarding and the most resource constrained code I'd ever managed to get to work. I didn't quite recognize how much fun I was having until after it was over.
Still not sure if it was a good thing that I didn't know, because I probably would have quit at the end of the beginning of the recession. I'll never know if finding a new job would have been any less stressful than staying, but I'm still feeling the effects of that period.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
These founder raise pre product market fit because they can, and often raise too much money. Having too much money when you don’t really have a viable product that people want can easily turn your company into a zombie, where people are just sort of going through the motions because there’s nothing else to do but chug along.
I’ve seen it many times. Some end up eventually finding the market after a few pivots but it’s really not a fun place to be as an employee with little decision making power. And the founders are usually wealthy enough at that point independent of the success of this current company that it isn’t “do or die” for them which creates another layer of zombie-esque behavior.