3 Patterns for Great Business Ideas with Jack Abraham, Founder, Managing Partner & CEO at Atomic

Jack Abraham

That there could be an hour that comes in your life that is worth more than the cumulative sum of everything else. You've spent all of the time, all of the effort, and all of the energy doing everything else.

Sam Parr

This is like a hit podcast. We're growing; we're doing good. Yet, Sean, your microphone is the most like hood rat thing I've seen. What is that? Is it like balanced in there?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so there's like, you know, there's some way that this is supposed to sit and then there's the way it actually sits. And, you know, don't mess with success; it's our good luck charm.

Sam Parr

So, Jack, we're recording now. I think you... someone, I don't know how much you looked into it, but someone sent your team a little update or a little description of what we do. 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 Abraham

Yeah, I listened to a few of your guys' podcasts. I think it's great, great content. Sean and I kind of go way back. We used to know each other back in San Francisco in the early days when tech was getting going there.

Shaan Puri

when tech was in san francisco

Jack Abraham

yeah when tech was in san francisco and excited to be on thanks for having me

Sam Parr

how did you how did you guys know each other

Shaan Puri

I was going to ask you this. I didn't know how much you remember, but I remember pretty vividly. At that time, I was running Monkey Inferno, which was an idea lab or a sort of startup studio. I don't know how we got connected, but Jack came by the office. I remember sitting in this conference room, and he was thinking about launching his own personal incubator, idea factory, or whatever you want to call these things. What do you call it, Jack? By the way, do you call it a startup studio?

Jack Abraham

we go with startup studio just given that the industry seems to have gone with that

Shaan Puri

And I remember before the meeting, I kind of Googled, "Okay, who's this guy?" Then I saw, "Oh wow, this guy's done all this stuff. He built Milo and sold it to eBay." This was not his first rodeo. In the meeting, I just remember you had really good questions. A lot of people like the idea of a startup studio; it sounds really fun. You get to sit around all day, just think of ideas, and build them. If something hits, you know, 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 a bunch of insights." I remember everything that I told you. I was like, "Hey, here's a common trap; avoid it and go this way." You were like, "Yeah, that's why we're doing it this way." You were sort of two steps ahead, I remember. I walked away thinking, "Okay, I think this is one of the few startup studios that might actually work." And I think it has. I think 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, a public company. What are some of the other ones that have come out of Atomic that are big? I know there are some that have sort of spiked, and I'm not sure where they're at now. They didn't kind of go full... yeah, long like Hampton.

Jack Abraham

We've created a ton of different companies. **Bungalow** has been doing incredibly well. We just announced a huge raise for that company. **Homebound** is kind of revolutionizing construction and how that's done with the marketplace dynamic. **Replicant** is using AI to transform call centers. **Radiant** is cloud software for screens for B2B applications. So, we kind of touch all sorts of industries. We now actually have a few dozen companies that we started.

Shaan Puri

right

Jack Abraham

So, we operate across everything, and a lot of our companies are doing really well. We actually try to keep many of our companies stealth because people have started to try to copy them. 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 **health care**, **telemedicine**, **proptech**, **fintech**, **education**, **AI**, and then **marketplaces**.

Shaan Puri

And what is the idea process? Because you're right, you do stay in stealth for a while. I think it feels like when you come out to market, the company has already gained a bunch of traction. You announce a big raise at that point. But what that means is that people are willing to copy you. If Jack's doing it as an idea, it's probably a good market and a good idea. Let's just say that if we use that and copy it, we're already skipping a bunch of potential points of failure. You know, I think 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? How are you coming up with such a high number of good quality ideas that turn into success?

Sam Parr

You have a list of 600 in an Evernote document. It's just an Evernote document, right?

Jack Abraham

yeah 600

Sam Parr

yeah so you have a lot

Jack Abraham

lot of ideas yeah yeah so okay multipart question so I think the first part of this is where do kind of good ideas come from and I have a view on this which is a little contrarian and actually I think where startup studios and incubators can fall apart which is a lot of times if you're incubating companies the temptation is to brainstorm on on ideas so think about things get into a room whiteboard come up with solutions and you're kind of coming up with these contrived solutions to problems that may or may not exist and that's kind of a problem you know versus what we do at atomic is we don't have brainstorming sessions so we've been in business for over a decade we've never had a brainstorming session on ideas which is kind of crazy right so what we do is we observe problems in the world that could be problems that we have personally problems on our team problems in our portfolio that our companies have that create enterprise companies and in that case we observe the problems we see a pattern we actually build the product to solve it we deploy it across our portfolio we have built in customers we we dog food it we make sure that it works within our portfolio and then once we know it works then we release it to the world but it's really a problem first kind of mentality and then solving the problem that I think makes us stand out and a little bit different from other people that have attempted this and I in terms of the 600 ideas and where they've come from it turns out our view of the world is like it's actually fundamentally very broken there's just a lot of stuff in the world that could be improved and that doesn't mean that everything's like broken broken right like it just means that there's there's an opportunity in many many facets of life and many parts of the economy to uplevel things and this could be in just like everyday parts of life this could be in going to the doctor's office this could be in commuting to work this could be in you know interacting with a company or running a sales team or you know something like that you just observe all of these things and think wow that doesn't seem you know that seems a little bit broken there there's probably a better way and then I just got in the habit of writing those down and now that list has grown to over 600 and that's a seed that we use to start companies out of at atomic

Sam Parr

And I have a whole bunch of questions. Like I was telling you, I watched a lot of your interviews, so I understand a little bit about your process, and I want to ask you about that. But before we do this, you're 30... are you 34 now?

Jack Abraham

I'm 35 now

Sam Parr

You're 35, so before you were doing Atomic, your first big win was Milo. You sold that for about $75,000,000 at 24, right?

Jack Abraham

yep

Sam Parr

stayed there at ebay

Shaan Puri

for 2 years sam do you know who his dad is

Sam Parr

I do comscore

Shaan Puri

yeah so so I didn't know that till I was doing research because we had met I I just thought oh he's kinda like a whiz kid

Sam Parr

and I love comscore

Shaan Puri

Behind every whiz kid is some unique childhood experience. I think where you get exposed to something... So, Jack, your dad started Comscore, is that right? Was he CEO? I don't know if he's still CEO. And you were working there at age 12 or something crazy, is that right?

Jack Abraham

Thanks! Yeah, I had an interesting childhood where I was exposed to entrepreneurship at a young age. My dad was an immigrant; he came to the U.S. literally without a dollar to his name from where he was born in Lebanon. He actually went to college in France, studying science, engineering, and math. He came to the U.S. to get his PhD in math at MIT, and he literally didn't have a dollar to his name. So, 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 all of these really cool new forms of marketing, which at the time were revolutionary. He ended up winning international marketing awards for them, got promoted in the company that he joined, and eventually became president of it. Then, he decided to become an entrepreneur. Can you imagine the world dream? I mean, he was basically born at the bottom of the third world, and he rose to the top of the first world. He 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 and make sense of it. Do you want to join it?" I joined it as a third person, as a software engineer, and I learned how to write code.

Sam Parr

did he give you equity

Jack Abraham

well so he was like do you want cash or equity I said equity I don't want cash

Sam Parr

nice

Jack Abraham

Give me equity. So, 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...

Sam Parr

was worth it like he took it public it was worth like 6,000,000,000 or something like that like many billions

Jack Abraham

Yeah, it ended up being worth **$1,000,000,000** at its peak. He basically grew it on his own, took it public, and it did really well. Then, you know, two or three years after it went public, he decided, "I don't want to be a public company CEO." He got off of that, started doing investing, and being on boards. But I got to see that grow just from an idea in my parents' sitting room to, you know, a **1,000+ person company** to a public company. I just got hooked. So, I started starting companies at age 15, and I've just been hooked. It's just been in my DNA ever since. Technology has been in my DNA.

Sam Parr

and were you when you went when I went public

Jack Abraham

That's a good question. I was in college, so I probably was like 19 or 20 or something like that.

Sam Parr

So, he gave you shares when you were 13. When you were 20, what did they end up becoming worth? Were you like the richest 20-year-old there is?

Shaan Puri

The podcast is called *My First Million*. You might have been the youngest person to make your first million, if that math adds up.

Jack Abraham

You know, my dad is a very fair person, and it would have been nepotism to give me an unfair amount of shares.

Sam Parr

number 3

Jack Abraham

He gave me what I deserved, which was as a 12 or 13-year-old who didn't know how to code. So, I got 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 it was great. Yeah, it was a good taste of equity.

Sam Parr

And you start with Milo. It was acquired for $75,000,000,000, is that right? Yeah, because you're 24, so 24, correct? Just 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 kind of big shot; you kind of climb the ladder.

Shaan Puri

About this, because in the last two years, basically, I got acquired. We got acquired by Twitch to, you know, go from a little startup to, okay, it's a 2,000-person company. Sam just got acquired; his company just got acquired by HubSpot. I don't know how many employees HubSpot has.

Sam Parr

probably 3,000 I think

Shaan Puri

3,000 employees. I know I would say the default path for entrepreneurs, and I know this because I talked to a bunch of them during the acquisition process, is like, "Alright, what's the next year of my life going to look like? What's your advice to me?" I got a whole range of opinions, but I would say the common default path is sort of like this: Look, if you're a true entrepreneur at heart, it's going to be hard for you to be in a big company for a long time. You could choose to either not play the game, kind of coast, and just do your own thing—maybe build a couple of interesting products while you're there—and then bounce whenever you're ready. Or, you could try to play the game. You could try to climb the ladder a bit and actually figure out what this looks like. It's a different game than the startup game; you're not going from 0 to 1, you're sort of in the 1 to end phase of things. It's all about the management of a large organization. I think most entrepreneurs go the first route that I just mentioned, but it seems like you actually kicked ass at eBay. I remember reading some article where you were basically like...

Sam Parr

like a vp or something

Shaan Puri

You were the MVP, really. You were like the guy who's helping turn this thing around. I think it was part of a bigger story of, "Hey, eBay is turning itself around." But you seem to have done extremely well. Talk about that. Is that something where you... what was your approach when you got acquired?

Sam Parr

because and is that true

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah how much of that story is true

Jack Abraham

Yeah, so you know, it's interesting. First of all, it's definitely true. It wasn't told when I was at eBay, partially because I don't like that much attention and I don't claim credit for a lot of things. While I was there, I was just catching up with a reporter that I liked, and I told him this story. 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 had just heard all these stories about founder friends that had sold their companies. They sell to the acquirer, and they languish. They actually kind of become depressed. They just lose their mojo. They're like, "What am I doing? What's my life becoming?" They almost become robotic. I was just like, "You know what? 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. Let's figure out how to do that. And I went and, you know, there are some funny stories about things that we did while we were at eBay to try to maintain our culture. We... at one...

Jack Abraham

I rallied the troops. We had this house, and they tried to put us in cubicles. I had the whole company rise up, go, and rip down the cubicles, throwing them on the front lawn. We almost got in trouble and kicked off campus, and all sorts of crazy stuff happened. But I basically took the approach of, "Look, what's the worst thing 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." And what's a great thing that I can do? Well, there are a bunch of products that eBay can build. I like building products. I'm an entrepreneur, and I haven't tried building multiple products at once. What if I use this time at eBay to try to put together multiple teams under me and try my hand at building multiple products at once? Let's see if I'm any good at that versus just working on one product. I convinced the CEO to let me do that and give me a shot at it. 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 was convince the CEO to do something on a Friday night. I convinced six people to cancel their next two weeks of flights, 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, and it ended up becoming the feed and the homepage of eBay. One hundred thirty million people were using it nine months later as the primary discovery mechanism on the site.

Sam Parr

And after that, you started a couple of things before Atomic, I think, right? And those things... they're, I feel like when I was researching your story, they're kind of like footnotes. They're not like major parts, and yet when I researched them, they were really successful. Like a couple of software companies, right?

Jack Abraham

Yeah, we've started a bunch of software companies that are still successful. They're kind of part of Atomic; it's how we consider them. Everything's kind of been folded into one umbrella at one point or another. The other thing that I would say is a lesson that we learned—Sean, I don't know if you remember when we talked about startup studios about this—but one trap you can have with startup studios is when you have hundreds of ideas. When I left eBay, I had 250 potential ideas for my next company. The temptation is to try them all. The thing that we did at Atomic is we only did one the first year, two the second, three the third, and four the fourth. We really paced ourselves. Now, we're at the point where we can do 10 or 12 a year, but that was part of that pacing process.

Shaan Puri

I remember 3 of those traps I wanna say them because I'm sure there's somebody out here listening who who who would be curious I remember one was exactly what you said which was focus so the theme is basically startup studios are great they have a bunch of advantages but you don't wanna lose the natural advantages that startups have and so startups have desperation and focus those are 2 of the core ingredients of a startup and I said you know shiny object syndrome is a trap when you have an idea lab you could do exactly what you said you could just go in a whiteboard brainstorm it that's kind of your job and then you take one of those ideas that sounds semi plausible and paul graham I think calls these sitcom startup ideas it's like you come up with a a a a kind of a a manufactured story for a sitcom like oh guy and a girl fall in love in college and then you know their jobs take them you know across the country they break up right like you you come up with these manufactured ideas and then the second thing is because you have multiple ideas going at once when you're doing at the beginning when you're doing one it starts to hit some rough patches or plateaus or just things get challenging like every idea does well that shiny object over there is unproven that that one might be easier let's just go and you either intentionally or unintentionally start to shift your focus away from the hard thing that you should really be pushing through and start just focusing on other shiny objects the second one was desperation you you had said something smart you you go we're gonna fund the team I think what you said for 9 months you go then their job is to raise the series a in 9 months and I was like that's great because if otherwise in an idealab these things can just languish forever you could just keep them in sort of this feeling that you know if if not this month the next month no problem and you're like the people working on this are only gonna work on this one project their project needs to raise money or sorry guys it's a bust and like of course you would probably recycle the best talent into the next idea but I like that having a sort of a deadline and a and a do or die moment of like you either proved your shit or you didn't that was the second second one I remember and the third was you're like we're gonna focus on b to b initially and not consumer stuff because we know a bunch of pain points that we've had as entrepreneurs or our companies have and so we can kind of scratch our own itch and not try to make the next hit social network

Sam Parr

and frankly it's probably so much easier

Shaan Puri

Although HIMSS was a consumer company, you know... I don't want to pry, but maybe you're scratching your own itch there too.

Jack Abraham

Well, you know... No, no, that was a bunch of... That was a hair loss company. I saw my hair, as you can see. It was a hair loss company.

Sam Parr

He was about to skip that one over, and then he was like, "I gotta trust him."

Jack Abraham

Let it go. You know, a VC told me, who I really respect, that the way you make your money in the venture business is B2B. Those are your singles and doubles, typically. Consumer can be your home runs; that can be your lightning in a bottle. You should plan your portfolio accordingly.

Sam Parr

who said that

Jack Abraham

That's a good question. 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 they're pretty fantastic. Since then, B2B has actually been able to become home runs. Additionally, the valuations on some of these B2B companies are absolutely astronomical. The great thing about doing B2B is you can talk to the customer and you can trust what they say. That is not necessarily true for consumers. You can talk to them, and you almost have to read between the lines with what they say. You can't trust what they say; you can trust what they do. You have to kind of run them through the product, look at the data, and see what they do. But what they do is usually different than what they say. What works is not always what they say is going to work. Part of that is that consumers don't know in their mind what they need. They can't dream it up. So, it's a very different practice creating consumer companies compared to B2B companies. But to address your other...

Jack Abraham

Sean, of the 9 months, and you know, having companies raise on their own, that is like a purposeful element that we designed into Atomic. We tried to design Atomic to be uncomfortable at the atomic level, so companies are pushed out and people are pushed out of Atomic. There's not this effect where people just stay in the incubator forever because it's dangerous to do that.

Sam Parr

is it 9 months $300,000 is that right or 250,000 or something

Jack Abraham

So, we have multiple stages of investment. The first check that we'll write to kind of get something going and do some initial research and homework is around **$1,000,000**, but it could range from **$100,000** to **$400,000**. If that goes well, we can write a check that's usually **$2,000,000**, but again, it could be **$1,000,000** to **$4,000,000**. From there, we can actually write a check that could be **$3,000,000** to **$8,000,000**. Sometimes we do this with other VCs, and sometimes we do it on our own. It kind of depends on the circumstances, the needs of the company, and what we need to get to the next set of milestones. But that's kind of how it works. Now, that's been evolving over our funds. In our first fund, it was smaller, so we obviously only did the early rounds, which is what Sean is describing. As it's gotten bigger, we're able to get the companies further, which is why we can keep them longer. Now, when they come out, they usually have raised these really big rounds.

Sam Parr

Did you, when you were starting this, how much of your own money did you put up to do this? Were you like, "Alright, you know, I made this much money. I'm willing to lose $1,000,000 over the next 2 years to see if I can make this work?"

Jack Abraham

Yeah, it's a good question. So, my general philosophy with things is you shouldn't sell what you wouldn't also buy. I wanted to prove to myself that this would work before raising outside capital. So, the first year or so of Atomic, I did it with my own capital, which was roughly on the order of what you described. Then, once I was convinced, "Okay, I think this is working. I think we can pull this off. I think this model is going to work," we raised our first fund. Our first fund was roughly a $10,000,000 vehicle that was primarily individuals. We had some great founders of venture capital firms involved, like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, and people like that who helped us a lot in the early days. That helped us prove out the model from there, and since then, we've raised much, much larger funds.

Shaan Puri

You have a couple of things on the agenda that I want to know the answer to. One is what you just said: you've Andreessen backed your fund with Chris Dixon, David Sachs, and Peter Thiel.

Jack Abraham

mhmm

Shaan Puri

And you said on here, it mentions some of the learnings from these pretty amazing people. These are some of the architects of the modern Silicon Valley, I guess. Do you have any fun stories, anecdotes, or lessons learned that are not just absolute common sense? You know, something we all already know. What have you learned from some of these guys that has stood out to you or stuck with you?

Sam Parr

And add in Josh Kushner on there too because he interests me as well. He almost has a model like yours.

Jack Abraham

yeah he also starts companies I love josh josh is fantastic wow well those are great people the first thing I'd say and you know this is just a general thing it's like there are some amazing people out in the world I'm surprised how many people don't approach them and just ask them for advice and mentorship and that's something that was a major way that I learned throughout my career and I'm so thankful to have had those people in my life and grateful for everything that I learned from them you know I'd say maybe going going through some of them one of the things that I learned from marc andreessen was actually a a really interesting story about peter thiel that led to a really really big insight that I had that has kind of driven a lot of my decision making since then which is this concept that time exists on this massive power law basis and you know they were having this conversation apparently mark was telling me where peter was talking to mark and he was talking about you know this big moment where he made this investment in mark zuckerberg and he made this investment in in facebook and you know he said you know listen mark I worked so hard my whole life to be able to get into stanford I really worked hard in in high school and I did this and I did that and all these extracurriculars I finally got into stanford I got into stanford I crushed it at stanford I tried to get you know the best grades while I was there I did really well to get into stanford law school I got into stanford law school I did really well while I was there I you know was really crushing it while I was there because I wanted to get into the best law firm I got into the best law firm while I was there you know 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 go run paypal I ran that it went public you know ended up being merging with ebay it led me to start clearing capital this hedge fund which was kind of a dream that I wanted to do for a long time all of this effort all of this time all of this energy everything that I had done up until this.

Jack Abraham

In my life, I got one hour with Mark Zuckerberg, and that hour was worth more than the cumulative sum of all those other hours that I had spent in my life. That is a crazy, mind-blowing fact if you think about it. There could be an hour that comes in your life that is worth more than the cumulative sum of everything else you've spent— all of the time, all of the effort, all of the energy that you've spent doing everything else. I think that can be true for everyone. So, looking out for those kinds of "power law" time moments or those "power hours" can be so important. I believe that they exist, and sometimes they're in plain sight. So, thinking about those critically, how do you put yourself in those positions where you can discover those kinds of opportunities? And how do you almost engineer your calendar so that you can create those opportunities for yourself? I think it's an interesting question.

Shaan Puri

What's an example of that for you? Do you have an hour? Is there something that stands out to you that's like your version of that hour with Zuck? How do you engineer it?

Jack Abraham

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So, this is something I've never met Jeff Bezos. I'm a huge fan of his. One of the things that he does, and that I think I adopted, is a really cool practice. You take a look at your prior week and how all of your time is spent. You look at your calendar, you look at each block, each half an hour, each hour, and you basically... I modified a little bit what he does. You ask the question: for all of these things that I did last week, what are the things where if I hadn't done this thing, nothing would have changed? You cross it off the list. If things keep getting crossed off that list, you probably shouldn't be doing them. You should probably find a way to get out of those kinds of meetings or replace yourself in those kinds of meetings, or hire someone perhaps to take those kinds of meetings for you because they're not as productive. Then, really circle the things that really, really mattered. You know, there could be within a week, if in a lifetime you can have an hour that's worth the cumulative sum of the hours, you can certainly have that in a week, right? You can have that in a month, you can have that in a year. So, really training your mind toward what those things are, circling them, and having that pattern recognition can make a lot of sense.

Shaan Puri

I like that. So, that's kind of... I used to have a job that was kind of a **shitty job**. It paid really well, but I just didn't like it.

Jack Abraham

mhmm

Shaan Puri

And I remember talking to my friend there. He asked, "Why don't you like it? It's all good. It's an easy job, we're making great money, and they really respect us. They like us. What's the problem?" I replied, "The problem is I feel like if I didn't come here today, nothing would change. And if I... you know, if I don't do anything this hour, definitely nothing's going to change." We called it the "Django Law." In a tower of Django blocks, if you remove some blocks, the tower's totally fine. But other blocks are like the key linchpins. If you remove too many, the whole tower tips over and falls. You don't want to remove those anchors, but there are plenty of useless blocks in there. If you take them out, you make space, and then something interesting can happen. So we started doing that. I first started with an hour. I said, "Okay, every day from 1 PM to 2 PM, I'm going to do nothing." It wasn't to be lazy; it was to test what happens. And then, of course, nothing happened. Nobody...

Sam Parr

noticed that your office space moment

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. I took half a day off. I'm just gonna do nothing for the second half of this day, see what happens. Nothing happened. I used to stop coming to work for like 2 weeks, right? And finally, by like the 4th week, it was like they... you know, they were like, "Hey, what the heck? Where are you? We noticed that these things were behind."

Sam Parr

and what job was this

Shaan Puri

It was a job I had in Australia. After my first company kind of got acquired, I was working for this thing. Yeah, it was a fun 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 something, I want it to matter. I started doing what you're doing, which is recognizing that it's not linear. Every hour is not equal. We kind of get trained this way, right? You're going to work Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. There's this assumption that Monday equals Thursday, that the first hour of an 8-hour day is the same as the fourth hour. But they're definitely not in terms of productivity or importance.

Jack Abraham

yeah yeah absolutely I think that that's absolutely right

Sam Parr

I want to ask you about very specific ideas. In the Pump podcast, you said something I entirely agree with, which is "distribution over ideas." You look at how to get early customers and whether this can actually scale. Some of the ways you do that is by looking at the payback. You try to see how low you can get that. For example, if I acquire a customer, how long does it take to get my money back? You mentioned that the best in class is 3 months. You also said that the lifetime value (LTV) to customer acquisition cost (CAC) best in class is 5.

Shaan Puri

meaning

Sam Parr

You acquire a customer for a dollar. They're worth $5 to you. You also mentioned that you have very strict standards for launching companies. You said you have 600 ideas, but you can launch up to 10 now, and that's many years into this. So, what I want to talk about is what ideas didn't cross this threshold, but in your head, you think they could have. If the right person does this, it definitely could work, or maybe it couldn't meet some of those benchmarks, but it's still pretty cool and pretty good. Can you tell me some ideas that come to mind?

Shaan Puri

give you up

Jack Abraham

at night

Shaan Puri

honorable mention

Jack Abraham

good question

Sam Parr

that was a good question by the way

Jack Abraham

Let me think through that. I mean, there have been plenty, plenty, plenty over the years to consider. I'm just trying to think through some worth calling out. Take out... take.

Shaan Puri

out your evernote and just scroll

Jack Abraham

yeah I know I know but you're planning to do it

Sam Parr

click share and then add [email protected]

Jack Abraham

Yeah, totally. Okay, well, I'll give you some examples. One example is, alright, so let's talk about problem and solution. We got this new office in Letterman and the Presidio. For those of you who don't know, in San Francisco, it's kind of like a park; there are a lot of trees around. We got this new office, and I was just a mess in this office. I was sneezing and feeling awful every day. I just had these horrible allergies, and I couldn't get rid of them. It took me 3 or 4 months to get an appointment at an allergist.

Sam Parr

was that like mold or something

Jack Abraham

Well, I had no idea. I was like, "What could this be?" Obviously, there was something new about this environment. So, I went to this allergist, and I got tested. Of all the possible things I could be allergic to, it was the one tree that was growing outside the window of my new office. I could not move; that tree was protected by the city. Anyway, I had to deal with it. In the process, you know, what are your options in terms of getting treated for allergies? Well, you can get allergy shots, which are painful. You have to go every week, and they have to be scheduled. They're expensive and take a lot of time. I don't want to be driving around the city getting these allergy shots every week. Or, you can do something called sublingual immunotherapy. Basically, there are two ways to get these allergens in increasing quantities into your immune system so that you get used to them. One is through an injection, and the other is by putting them under your tongue. Both ways, they get into your bloodstream. So, I said, "Well, I want to do this thing under your tongue." You can do it at home; it's a drop a day in the morning. That seems a lot easier. So, I did that, and it completely cured me of my allergies. I was like, "This is amazing! Why doesn't everybody have this?" Look at all these kids; they're going and getting these allergy shots. You go and you look, and structurally, it's really messed up because the allergists get paid for giving these allergy shots. That's why there are so many allergy shots. You go to the allergist, they bill your insurance, so every visit you do, they get paid. Versus every sublingual drop you do at home, they're not getting paid. So, that's actually, you know, normally the perfect setup for creating a company. It's like, "Okay, let's disrupt this." There's this misaligned incentive; let's go ahead and disrupt this. A lot of people are suffering huge pain.

Jack Abraham

People really, really hate their allergies. So, we went and found a compounded pharmacy. We discovered that the supply chain is actually pretty difficult to source and get right. We aimed to treat all these allergies and figure out how to do it via telemedicine. We tested it, but the economics just don't work. I think they should work; I believe it's dramatically better than getting shots at the allergist. I feel like I don't understand why this isn't the way everyone gets cured of their allergies. We attempted to make the world better by providing everyone with this method of curing their allergies, but we just weren't able to figure it out. Then, we tried selling it through doctors, but the allergists, of course, don't want their revenue stream disrupted by getting allergy shots. So, that's not going to work. Eventually, we said, "You know what? We have a lot of other problems to solve, and the opportunity cost is really high."

Sam Parr

what what about it didn't work the the medicines were too expensive

Jack Abraham

just the unit economics okay yeah we couldn't we couldn't get the unit economics to work

Sam Parr

do you remember how much like some what some of the numbers were

Jack Abraham

Well, let's see. We were trying... we tried a bunch of different price points for these sublingual drops, ranging from $79 a month all the way up to $2.50 a month. These are our tests, you know? We're testing the pricing, which obviously affects the gross margin depending on that price. Then, you know, there's a customer acquisition cost (CAC) to acquire the customer. The problem in this case was that the CAC was really, really high. I don't know if it's because it's a new thing, customers don't know about it, they need to be educated, or maybe they're skeptical. It's hard to sell over the internet; I'm not sure. But, you know, we're really good at producing low CACs and scaling things. We just couldn't figure out how to get the CAC low on this. We did a lot of different iterations. The other way that can work is if the churn is really low and you just get payments for a long time. This should take about a year to three years to fully cure, but it just didn't work out. The math didn't work out. And, you know, that's the kind of thing... the world should be that way. It should be that way. You can be an entrepreneur and believe that, and I still believe that, but you'll be knocking your head against a brick wall forever and get nowhere. There are other problems like that that you can solve that can become huge. It's just better, in our view, to work on this. So that's why I've adopted this philosophy, which is exactly what you said: distribution is more important than ideas. We only want to work on ideas that can achieve mass distribution because our view is life is short. For us and our co-founders, we want to prize our time and only work on things that can reach a lot of customers, whether they're consumers or businesses. We want it to matter, so we try to validate that as much as possible upfront.

Sam Parr

What are some other ones that you've done that maybe could have worked but just missed the mark?

Shaan Puri

You have a different bullet point here that you can use if it's hard to think of ideas. It discusses patterns for great company ideas and mentions three ideas to consider.

Jack Abraham

I'm curious about those ideas. I'll throw out another one that was a crazier idea we looked into. I'm just going to put it out there as a crazy idea; maybe someone on this podcast will do it. I still think it's a good idea, but there are some problems with it, so I'll disclose it. You know, there's all this technology—computer vision, etc.—that has been developed for autonomous vehicles, like self-driving cars. These cars drive around and face a lot of issues. You've got stop signs, stoplights, and they have to be able to identify colors. There are people coming, bikes, and all this stuff in the environment. It's 2D, but it's also 3D; you go up, you go down. There's weather and all of this stuff. So, we were trying to think of some interesting ways that this technology could potentially be applied. A crazy idea that I had us look into was: what if you created autonomous fishing vessels that went out into the ocean and just fished 24/7, even through inclement weather? They would have advanced sonar and computer vision underwater to find the fish, and they would automatically handle all of that. We looked into it, and it's still such interesting technology. I hope someone builds it, but there are some structural issues with it around fishing quotas and the industry's capture of that sector, which we could get into at another time. That kind of makes it a little bit difficult, but that's another idea. Anyway, I'm happy to discuss that more. I'm ready to progress into the patterns behind it.

Sam Parr

yeah go to go to the patterns I I'd be curious to what those are

Jack Abraham

Cool, sounds good. Yeah, so some patterns that I think are kind of tried and true and really interesting to think about. One pattern is if you take things that rich people have access to, or rich companies have access to, and you figure out how to democratize them. So, you make them more accessible, distributable, cheaper, and available to everyone. That is a winning formula for creating a really good company. Part of the reason for that, from a philosophical perspective, this is actually something I learned from Marc Andreessen. He has this belief that **human desire is infinite**, which is an interesting concept. If you believe that, then people with a lot of resources and companies with a lot of resources are willing to spend on the outer limit of human desire. So, they're poking around, figuring out all of these things about what's the next thing on the human desire bubble that could be discovered. They might discover something, and if something there really takes hold that you can then take and give to everyone, everyone might want that, and it might be ready for everyone.

Sam Parr

like what

Shaan Puri

Like Uber was a classic example of this, right? People had private drivers. Now, everybody can push a button and have a private driver pick them up.

Jack Abraham

Yeah, private driver with Uber, private chef with DoorDash, and private shopper with Instacart. Those are all really good examples. You could even argue, you know, second home Airbnb. It's kind of like having access to a second home, but in a much cheaper way.

Shaan Puri

And so, what's an idea in that space? What are some other things that you've seen that either very wealthy people or very wealthy companies have that the rest of us don't? What are some other examples in there that, you know, I haven't looked into, but might be interesting?

Jack Abraham

Well, I think that there seems to be some kind of a renaissance happening in fintech. Partially because the wealthy seem to have access to financial planning and resources around planning, as well as access to the markets. You know, there's this whole 99% versus the 1%, and people have kind of figured that out. I think that's why you're seeing this boom of new companies. If you can give the 99% what the 1% has access to, and the ability to generate wealth, I think that’s actually really interesting. There are a lot of interesting startup ideas that are being formed. We're starting one or two that we think can help empower people in that area. For example, that would be one example of an area that...

Sam Parr

are you gonna do anything in the wealth adviser space

Jack Abraham

We're kind of tangentially doing things there. I think that there's probably a lot more to do. You know, wealth advisory is a compounded issue where even the wealthy, when they have access to wealth advisory, it's not great.

Sam Parr

It's not great. Have you heard of Adpar, Sean? No? So, I bet you have, Jack, right?

Jack Abraham

adpar yeah

Sam Parr

Adpar, sorry. So, Adpar was started by Joe Lonsdale, I think, right? I only know the Wikipedia version, but basically, it's kind of like Mint.com but for really wealthy people. I actually mean billionaire wealthy people. I don't know what features necessarily it has that are a little bit more robust. What would you say, Jack? What does it have that's more robust? Do you know?

Jack Abraham

It basically 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 instead of individuals, but Joe in that company has a big vision for where that can go. You might be able to work with it as an individual now, but that's kind of along the lines that... so I could disrupt that.

Sam Parr

So, I work with some of these folks, and they send me like the jankiest stuff ever. Their login, for example, like Morgan Stanley's login to look at your investments, is horrible. I was like, "You guys, this is just absolutely awful." I'm just using spreadsheets on my own; this is really bad. You know, I've heard of this Adapar thing, and they're like, "Well, you can't use that unless you're worth $500 million or like $1 billion. It's really, really expensive; like it's crazy high." I'm like, "Are you kidding me? Just give me a Mint.com login or something, and you guys can become the admin. Let's share this." You could just tell me because this is dog shit. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in that space, but to go back to your point about distribution, I think selling to those people can be quite challenging because they're very old school and very conservative. But I was bringing this up to ask you if that's a space that has been interesting to you lately. I know you're being a little cryptic because you like to be stealth until you go live, but I was trying to get something out of you.

Jack Abraham

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting space. I would encourage people to look into it. I think that there is a lot that can be done there. I think there's dissatisfaction amongst everyone, basically, in that space. It's pretty universal. There's a lot of room for improvement.

Shaan Puri

Cool, so that's one pattern for great ideas. So, what are the wealthy companies that people have that can be democratized? If a few people have that desire and they've pushed it to that limit, other people would want it. If you can make it accessible, cheaper, and more available to them, that's an amazing opportunity. I think there's tons of great ideas there. What's another framework or sort of pattern you've seen for great ideas?

Jack Abraham

Yeah, so one that I think is pretty interesting, and I would put in the "tried and true" bucket, is if you take something that people consistently do and feel like they have to do, but it takes a lot of steps and/or time, and you dramatically simplify it. You make it a lot faster to accomplish the same thing that they feel like they have to do. Some good examples of this would be booking online travel. You know, it used to be so hard to do. You'd have to go to so many different sites. The Kayak founders had the vision of, "Let's just pull it all into Kayak.com." You go to one site, you see it all in one place. They made it really easy.

Shaan Puri

And in this case, which was anytime there's somebody who has 14 tabs open to do one task, that's a business opportunity. Is that right?

Jack Abraham

That's a business opportunity. Yeah, I mean, just watch for that. If you ever see that people are doing a lot of research, they have tons of tabs open... it's really arduous. That's an opportunity. Another example of that, which we kind of found with Hims and Hers and other telemedicine companies that we've started, is going to the doctor's office. You know, people need to go to the doctor's office. Think of that process: you're calling the doctor's office, you're scheduling an appointment, you're whipping out your calendar, you're putting it on your calendar, you're going to the waiting room, you're sitting there, you're getting prescribed something, you're going to Walgreens, you're waiting in line for half an hour, going around the store, and then going home. You know, this is a big process. As a result, the next generation kind of doesn't even really engage with the healthcare system. Close to 9 out of 10 of them don't even know who their doctor is or they haven't even gone. So, you know, telemedicine takes that process and makes it a 5-minute process where you can do it on your phone and get treated for whatever condition you have. I think another interesting example of that is selling your house. People need to sell their house, right? It's a really hard, long, arduous process fraught with a lot of anxiety and things like that. Opendoor came along and said, "Hey, come to this website, tell us what your house is, and we'll make you an offer to buy it. You can sell it right now." Not everyone has to do that, and not everyone does do that, but enough people do it that it created a really, really big company that's doing really well. So those are some interesting examples.

Shaan Puri

And you guys are doing that now with OpenStore, right? Which I gotta say is a truly great idea. I remember when I first...

Jack Abraham

started

Shaan Puri

I texted my friend and I said, "I didn't even say how great this idea is. I just only said, why are we not doing this?" Because I was like, this is that good of an idea. Selling your company, selling your e-commerce store in this case, takes so much effort and so much work. The data is all there, right? Like, I'm assuming—I don't actually know how it works—I'm assuming it's sort of like Clearbank or whatever, where you can plug into their Shopify, you can plug into their Facebook ad account, you can plug into their bank or whatever. With those three sources of data, you can get a basically like a health score and a value of this shop and make them an offer. Most of them don't even know. At least with a house, it's painful, but you kind of know what you're supposed to do to sell it. Yeah, 9 out of 10 friends I talk to who have an e-commerce store don't even know what you would do if you wanted to sell. They don't even know, "Whose door do I knock on? What do I need to have ready?" And so, therefore, they just think, "I'm just not gonna do it." It's like the Opendoor thing where not everybody's gonna do this, but sure, if Opendoor captures, I don't know what they modeled out, but you know, 1%, 3%, 5% of all house sales could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Same thing for open source, so I'm super, super bullish on this.

Shaan Puri

Where I was like why the what am I doing with my life that I'm not doing this idea this makes total sense

Jack Abraham

oh man well thanks for saying that don't worry

Shaan Puri

I'm not gonna copy you but keith

Jack Abraham

And I are having a ton of fun building out that company here in Miami. It's been a blast building a great team—a huge team. Yeah, it solves this pain in a market where it's really hard to sell your company. All you need to do is come to a website, we give you a price, and you can sell your company. It's really interesting. We have an amazing data science team, and we're hiring really aggressively. If anyone wants to join, you know, anyone who joins that team will be part of such an unbelievable group. I think it's going to create this almost "Miami Mafia," so to speak, around here of amazing people. I think it's an exceptional opportunity, and we're scaling really quickly. So that's been a lot of fun. Thanks for saying that.

Sam Parr

In another pod, you said something like you have this list of ideas. But every once in a while, you'll meet someone who's so amazing that you say to them, "Well, what's your idea? How can we partner with you?" You know, you said something like that. I don't know if it was exactly that. What attributes would a person have to have in order for you to say that to them?

Jack Abraham

Yeah, so we're open. You know, the ideas don't necessarily have to come from us. We're totally open if people want to bring their ideas and co-found companies with us. We just kind of ask that they be baked off in a process and that the data wins. We're just such big believers in this distribution over ideas thing that as long as we test our idea and the distribution's great, fantastic! Let's go, let's do it together. That sounds great. But otherwise, you know, we just ask that we do that kind of testing process that we like to do. Some of the attributes that we look for... you know, we really like people that are just tenacious. They 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, and they inspire other people. They can hire, they're charismatic. It depends on the idea, right? Some ideas that are more technically oriented obviously require a slightly different profile versus ideas that are maybe more sales or product-oriented. So we are a little bit founder, idea, or product fit as well. We do consider that. But yeah, those are some of the attributes that we look for in people. Sometimes you meet someone and there's just a really strong connection. You know, you have these high-bandwidth conversations, you're feeling great about everything, and we'll just say, "You know, we just want to work with you." We're totally agnostic to the idea. Come in and join us. Let's look at 10, 12, or 15 ideas over the next 3 to 9 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 know, you've met some cool people, and we've had fun along the way. And you know, you're on to your next thing, and we'd love to be as supportive as we can.

Sam Parr

I think one of the biggest differences between Sean and me, although we're very similar in a lot of ways, is that he tends to do many different things. He likes doing many things at one time. I am always teasing him and jokingly criticizing him, saying, "Only do one thing! If you only do one thing, you're going to succeed more." He's like, "Well, no, but I like this and it's working." And he's right; it is working for him. You have both started one company. Milo was like your baby, and I imagine when you were running that, it was your only focus. Now your focus is on launching ten companies a year, although you hire people to help you make it happen. So I guess your babies are kind of atomic. Do you think that starting multiple companies is going to be a bigger wealth creator for you than if you had just done one major thing and focused solely on that, let's say a software company or something like that?

Jack Abraham

It's an interesting question. Before I answer that, I have just one comment. I have 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, where they are so focused on it that they absolutely have to crush it. That's one archetype of success, and it works really well. Some people are super successful that way. Then, there are other people, and I put myself more in the camp of those who get energy from working on a lot of things with a lot of different people. It's how my brain works. I have to work across a lot of different things. Part of it is what you enjoy and what makes you happy. For me, it's inventing, the early stages, and thinking about what could come next. When I thought about doing Atomic, it actually wasn't, believe it or not, a wealth-building exercise. It was really about: 1. Is it possible to build a company that builds companies? Nobody's really figured out how to do that at scale before. 2. How could you do that? 3. 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? I thought the answers to those questions were yes, so I decided to do it. It can be very lucrative. I do think you could probably do better by just focusing on one thing. If you had one thing that was going to go to the moon, you could probably do financially better just going all in on that thing, at least in the short term. I don't know about the long term because, in the long term, if you build a company that builds companies, what's the value of that? I don't know.

Sam Parr

it's like it's like asking a genie for unlimited wishes

Jack Abraham

Right, so, that's not really, you know, what drove the decision-making or kind of how I think about it.

Sam Parr

Well, you said it's not been done before. I mean, maybe. I don't know where they were at the time. You know, Rocket Internet— for the listeners, there's a company called Rocket Internet based in Germany, started by these three crazy brothers. Their whole shtick was basically to copy Silicon Valley companies but do it in Africa, Asia, and other places where that thing didn't exist. For example, Airbnb in Europe, or Amazon in Thailand, or whatever it is—Zappos in Nigeria. They created a few companies that were huge, and they did it. But the whole thing was copying to the... They would have this chief scientist who would basically study, let's say, they're copying Pinterest. He would send out an email to the Pinterest of Africa and the Pinterest of Germany and be like, "Pinterest changed their button size on the top right from this to this. Do it." Have you ever thought about those guys? And have you ever thought of doing that strategy where instead of invention, let's copy?

Jack Abraham

Yeah, so it's just not our style. It's a very different style. First of all, I think the kind of talent you can work with—those you can motivate to just copy other people's ideas—is very different from the kinds of people we're able to attract at Atomic. We work on our companies with a more mercenary approach, probably, than a mission-driven one. We pride ourselves on everything we've done being innovative and original. We haven't been copying other people's ideas; it's not in our ethos to do that. The processes and how it operates are very different, and the culture is fundamentally different as a result. So, I do think you need to pick one of those two things. Would it be easier to build something that just copies other people's ideas? Yeah, it would be easier, but it probably wouldn't work as well. I don't think just copying other people's ideas is as valuable, and I don't think it would work as well anyway. But it's also just far less interesting to me. It seems like the ideas that worked well for them were the ones where there was a local network effect in the U.S. that hadn't gone to Europe yet. They did it in Europe before the U.S. company could go to Europe. However, there were a lot of companies that they copied that they had a hard time with because they kind of installed someone who...

Sam Parr

yeah they just hired guns they would just hire bankers and say just spend more money than this other company

Jack Abraham

exactly

Sam Parr

Yeah, you know, missionaries often outlast mercenaries. Longevity is one of the key factors you need to win.

Shaan Puri

right let's talk about it worked

Jack Abraham

to some extent but

Shaan Puri

It's just different. Let's do a couple of minutes real quick on crypto. Yep, so great. On a scale of 1 to "chugging the Kool-Aid," where are you at with crypto? Just kind of personally investing in it. What do you think is exciting or completely overrated? I don't know what your take is. It's pretty polarizing. People are usually very into it or think it's toxic and a Ponzi scheme. So, where do you stand?

Jack Abraham

Yeah, good question. I mean, I think crypto is real and it's here to stay. I think the question is: what are the fundamental, real innovations in crypto? What are the things that are going to be around? There’s a lot of manipulation. There’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that people don’t know about, like in these chat groups, apps, and forums with pump and dump schemes.

Sam Parr

yeah

Jack Abraham

Really bad. You know, this is stuff that people, like in a normal market, would probably go to jail for. Like, seriously, this is happening somewhat regularly in this market. So, it's a little concerning for the average person to know what is and what isn't real. That's my big concern with it. There are a lot of people rushing into it; there's a lot of enthusiasm. It is real, but knowing what is real and what isn't real, I think, is really difficult.

Shaan Puri

so what's real to you what do you think is real

Jack Abraham

So, to me, I think one indicator to look for is: where are developers signing up? This is also true for companies, by the way. Whenever there are platforms that are built—this is true for enterprise companies or app stores—where do the developers go? Where the developers go usually works and is a good place to invest. I think that's true of crypto as well. So, on that thesis, I think Ethereum is a great place to go. Solana seems to have a lot of developer interest. I think there are a lot of other places. One that I was kind of early involved in and helped get off the ground was 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 very interesting to me because they're solving a different problem than a lot of other people in crypto are solving fundamentally, which...

Sam Parr

is that mean you but sorry go ahead go ahead

Jack Abraham

so a lot of you know if you were to kind of knock crypto if you were like a macroeconomist and you were like wow what does the world look like 10 or 20 years from now if this really catches on the big critique what would be well if this is digital gold imagine what would have happened to the world if everyone just held gold and nobody put money into a bank there'd be no jobs there'd be no economy because people put money into the bank the bank lends out money to companies and to people that money gets spent it creates jobs those people spend the money and it goes through the economy and it just has this domino effect that's really important for the whole like system to work in crypto someone puts it in crypto and it stops and it doesn't keep traveling through the economy it's not a productive asset so you basically take a productive asset and you make it unproductive and I feel like for like decentralized crypto to work and scale in the world that's gotta be fixed somehow and the terra and luna people are very very attuned to this problem so instead of just focusing on purely technical things like you know nfts or you know new apps they can build or apis or smart contracts or things like that they're actually thinking about you know how can you lend crypto how can you borrow against crypto how can you invest in stocks you can invest in stocks directly with their stable coins you can earn 20% interest with anchor you can borrow against that and then there's a way to earn 30% interest and there's this whole ecosystem of basically ways to make crypto productive in a decentralized way within the crypto ecosystem that I think is really interesting and I don't know if they're really really good really smart team I don't know of too many other people that are working on that and then the other one that I would call out that I I was an early investor and is a project that 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 and it's basically there's a genius I can vouch for her she's a genius and she basically created what I what I think is the first true cash on the internet so the whole idea of crypto was it's gonna be cash on the internet it's untraceable I give this to you nobody knows just like with cash in reality what happens with bitcoin we make a transaction and it's public forever literally this this record is gonna be public and replicated across the internet forever and everybody's gonna know about it now people realize that and it's an issue so you had you know coins like zcash and monero that were created but it turns out those actually can be decrypted and you can figure out where well if that went so she's the first person that really figured out how to make truly anonymized crypto and it's called iron fish I think it's a really exciting project I don't think it's tradable on exchanges but I think it's mineable and it'll probably be tradable at some.

Jack Abraham

So those are some early ones that I think are exciting and worth looking into.

Shaan Puri

Do you use DeFi? Are you an actual participant or user of DeFi?

Jack Abraham

I don't use DeFi too much, per se. I do actually a little bit, but I'm more of a "set it and forget it," buy-and-hold, long-term, and patient type of person. So, I'm not actively doing it. I know there's a lot of stuff out there going on, like yield farming and things like that, which I'm not as attuned to. But if I had more time, I'd be interested in learning more about it.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, yeah, kinda. That's what I wanted to leave it with, which was: if you weren't doing all the stuff you're doing now and I took away the reputation of the network, so like, you know, you're still you, you're still sharp, but you're 21, 22, or 23 years old, where do you think you would go work? What would you work on?

Jack Abraham

That's an interesting question. I might consider working on, you know, Web 3 and crypto. Specifically, figuring out how to use crypto to build new networks that are totally decentralized.

Shaan Puri

like social networks or or other types of networks

Jack Abraham

They could be marketplaces; they could be social networks. But I think what the internet taught us is that networks are what's valuable at their core. I don't think Web 3 is fully realized yet. I think it's still early. There are about 10 million users out there for this stuff, while there are approximately 4.5 billion people on the internet. So, it still has a long way to grow. If you can build some of these early networks with network effects, you can probably create things that are really valuable. I know there are some people working on it, but there are probably still some really interesting opportunities out there.

Sam Parr

Well, this is awesome, man! I mean, 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 Abraham

of course would love to thanks for having me

Sam Parr

This is badass! I pay attention to everything you guys do well at Atomic. I'm always looking at your job page to see, like, who are they hiring for now? What are they going to launch next? I'm trying to figure out if I could kind of reverse engineer and see everything.

Shaan Puri

Good taste, dude! You invested in or co-incubated a company with my cousin. I don't know if you know that—Rohan. Oh, which one? Rohan Puri. He started Stable Auto, so that's my cousin.

Jack Abraham

he's great rohan's awesome yeah we love rohan

Shaan Puri

yeah he's super smart

Jack Abraham

yeah he's great

Sam Parr

well thank you for doing this this is badass this is awesome of

Jack Abraham

course thanks for having me

Sam Parr

we're excited to publish this we're excited to make this happen it was awesome talking to you

Shaan Puri

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Sam Parr

but you

Jack Abraham

Can you follow me on Twitter? I'm just @JackAbraham. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Our website is atomic.vc. You can actually apply on our website for a program we have called the **Future Founders Program**, where we'd love to co-found companies with people. We love co-founding companies with diverse individuals from all sorts of backgrounds. We're agnostic to location; it can be from anywhere. We want to start a lot of great companies, and it would be an honor to start, you know, maybe we can start a company with someone listening to this. That would be great!

Sam Parr

Well, this is awesome! Thank you very much. We'll be sharing a bunch of your links because I'm so excited that you came on here.