4 to 80 Growth

A story about how Justin Kan grew his legal startup Atrium from inception to significant scale in one year.

"To date, Atrium has done over $500 million in new primary financings for clients. We have over 240 clients here in Silicon Valley and around the country. We scaled from a team of 4 people to 80 people in this last year.

We've done some things okay, but there's still a lot to do - all I see is problems and there's a long road ahead. One thing I should say is no matter who you are, it never gets easier. If you feel stressed out, if you feel like you're struggling with your startup, you should just know that I'm feeling the same pain somewhere in the world. I'm probably banging my head against the table in San Francisco on something that's not scaling exactly right. I thought it would be easier this time - that was my mistake.

When we started off, I wondered if anyone would hire a startup law firm. Lots of people said nobody would ever trust their sensitive legal work to a new startup that's unproven. So we ended up hiring top talent and leveraging their credibility. We hired Augie Rayko, a partner from Orrick's emerging companies VC practice, as my co-founder. After that, Augie broke the dam and we were able to hire talented attorneys from top firms in Silicon Valley. When we went to founders, we could legitimately say we could offer the same level of service as other firms, but with fixed pricing, improved quality, faster response times, and lower costs through our technology."