Atomic

“As a business person, you have two fears in life as a niche player. You won't be successful with your investment, or you'll be too successful. If you're too successful, it becomes mainstream, and bigger guys can get into it and outprice you.”

“I think it's one of the few startup studios that has actually worked. You guys had hymns come out of it, which is like a breakout success public company.”

“We're, we actually try to keep a lot of our companies stealth because people have started to try to copy them. And by the time we announce them, they've usually raised pretty significant funding.”

“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 ideas. So think about things, get into a room, whiteboard, come up with solutions, and you're kind of coming up with…”

“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?”

“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.”

“And the thing that we did at Atomic is we only did one the first year, two the second, three the third, four the fourth. We really paced ourselves. And I think, you know, now we're at the point where we can do 10 or 12 a year.”

“The first check that we'll write to kind of get something going and do some initial research and homework is around a quarter million dollars, but it could range from a 100,000 to 400,000. And then if that goes well, we can write a check that's usually two mil…”

“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? And you cross it off the list. And if things keep getting crossed off that list, you probably shouldn't be do…”

“We were trying really, we tried a bunch of different price points in terms of like the monthly price for these sublingual drops, ranging from like 79 a month, all the way up to like two 50 a month, as these are our tests, you know, we're testing the pricing th…”

“Distribution's more important than ideas, and we only want to work on ideas that can achieve mass distribution, because our view is life is short, and, you know, up for us and our co-founders, we want to, you know, prize our time, and we only want to work on t…”

“A crazy idea that I had that I had us look into was what if you created autonomous fishing vessels that went out into the ocean and just fished 2407, even through inclement weather. And they have like crazy sonar and like computer vision underwater and they co…”

“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 accessible to everyone, that is a winning formula for…”

“If you take something that people consistently do, and they have to do, and they feel like they have to do it, but it takes a lot of steps and or time, and you dramatically simplify it, and you make it a lot faster to accomplish the same thing that they feel l…”

“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, if we…”

“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 ide…”

“I have noticed a pattern, which is that the smartest people I've met in the world fall into one of those two camps. They either want to be like singularly focused on one thing, almost to a fault, where they are so focused on it, and they just absolutely have t…”

“I do think probably you can do better by just focusing on one, like if you had one thing that was gonna go to the moon that you can probably do financially better, just going all in on that thing, at least in the short term. I don't know in the long term, beca…”

“We put maybe 50,000 dollars into it and we did zero to a million dollars in recurring revenue in five weeks. And this was a prototype we had built over two or three days on a weekend.”

“You know, we traditionally at Atomic will prototype anywhere from 20 to 25 companies per year, and we'll build three to four.”

“My favorite book is Creativity, Inc. It's a phenomenal book about the way in which Pixar structures its organization, its teams, to enable as much inspiration, as much creativity as possible, and essentially to destruct any bureaucracy and processes that might…”