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Marc Andreessen answers questions from Stripe Atlas founders
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- devmunchies 9y agoWe were excited about Atlas and just applied two days ago and got rejected this morning. We have sales ready to get going but now have to legitimize the old-fashioned way. With the "network" of venture capitalist firms and startup incubators able to give you an instant invite to Atlas, it felt like it's made for them (the venture firms) and not the businesses.
- no1youknowz 9y agoWhat's your route to "legitimize the old-fashioned way". Is it a case of incorporating the C-Corp and calling up Silicon Valley Bank yourself?
- devmunchies 9y agoYes but I'm not knowledgeable about how to incorporate so I have a lawyer friend who's gonna help. Atlas was mainly for convenience and the free AWS credits.
- contingencies 9y agoSo what's your business?
- devmunchies 9y agoWell I didn't think this was a place to market myself and it's not incorporated or anything so there isn't any benefit to share yet, is there? EDIT: shared below
- saimiam 9y agoI'd take the opposite approach if anyone ever asked me what my business was - every interaction is an opportunity to refine and tighten the elevator pitch. Just do it and ask forgiveness if someone moans about being OT.
- devmunchies 9y ago> an opportunity to refine and tighten the elevator pitch Thats a great insight, thank you. I'll just drop the website (work in progress). Gamma Fi: https://gammafi.com https://gammafi.com
- blizkreeg 9y agohow long have you been working on it? have you shown it to any potential customers yet?
- devmunchies 9y agoI've been working on it since December. We've been showing it some people in relevant positions and getting feedback. I literally threw up a website to sign up for Atlas so it wasn't meant to be marketable just yet
- thefalcon 9y agoIMO the first thing that you should have on your website is an e-mail collection mechanism. I want to sign up to know when you have a product because this looks promising.
- devmunchies 9y agodamn, I have a hard timeline to get launched in August but will try to throw something up soon because you are right.
- mattm 9y agoWhen do you think you'll have a working demo? Would love to show this to someone on my team.
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoThat's interesting; I have an Atlas invite that I'm about to use but I do not have a workable business...yet. I didn't even realized they "rejected" people, I thought it was more of a waiting list type of thing.
- devmunchies 9y agoWith all of the venture firms in the "network" I'm wondering if there is anything suspect with incorporating through them (ie. Equity percentages) but I'm probably just being paranoid. Feel free to share any detail after you use your invite. EDIT: was being paranoid. retracted
- eropple 9y agoI looked at Atlas this week, in large part because I have a healthy respect for 'patio11, but waiting to be approved when I can just file in Delaware with somebody like HBS and have it done in three days didn't really make sense to me right now. ($5K in AWS credits would be awesome--for some ventures I've done. This one, meh, whatever.)
- patio11 9y agoThis goes for anyone on HN -- feel free to email me directly. I'm (my HN username)@stripe.com I'm happy to expedite things if e.g. they're time sensitive for you.
- eropple 9y agoRight on--cool that you're doing that. My stuff already turned around, but I'll give it another look next time around if need be.
- chasely 9y agoThanks Patrick; this is the first time I've heard of Atlas and it looks like a great service. Is there a floor of what you expect from applicants, i.e., is a website showing some viable product required before an applicant would be considered competitive?
- patio11 9y agoIt's not a competition. Investors have some limited pool of capital or bandwidth and want to conserve it for the companies they think are most likely to be successful. We are not constrained in this fashion. We need to know what the business intends to actually do, mostly for compliance reasons. A working website or prototype we could look at makes this easier, but we know there are a lot of ways early stage startups get to market. We can be flexible -- if you don't have a website but do have a deck, we can evaluate that. We (and our partners) have a notion of what companies are a good fit for Atlas, and it's not quite as broad as "every business we could legally transact with." It's described in more detail in the FAQ, but broadly speaking we're looking for businesses that are intrinsically international and/or ambitious and technology-enabled. The world needs more hair salons, too, but we'd probably not work with a hair salon at the current moment in time. We're not confident that the thing we are building is appropriate to their needs yet, and want to stay focused while making something for our core audience.
- patio11 9y agoHiya, I'm Patrick and I work on Atlas. I'm sorry about that -- that rejection appears to have been a mistake; I'll fix it for you (check your inbox in a few minutes, please) and look into fixing the underlying cause more broadly.
- devmunchies 9y agoThanks, Patrick! You've made a fan out of me.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- b_emery 9y agoWe call this "what do nerds do on nights and weekends". This is the single most reliable source of new ideas in our industry that will ultimately be adopted much more broadly. Right now we see huge nerd night and weekend energy in areas like cryptocurrency, biohacking, quantified self, synthetic biology, virtual reality, drones, and self-driving cars (!!). Anyone car to expand on this list? I'd include applied ML perhaps, and IoT hacks.
- lowglow 9y agoIf you're into what nerds are doing on their weekends[0], we get together and hack/show/chat about stuff every Sunday at Noisebridge. A lot of cool stuff happening there from crypto/bots/bio/ai/vr and beyond. We also live stream the event so it's easy to keep up and participate. [0] https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Hack_Days https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Hack_Days
- stevenj 9y agoI thought several of the questions asked were unique and interesting. It would have been nice to hear Marc answer them in more detail.
- bedros 9y ago"And so if a founder can’t navigate a network into a VC firm, it is unlikely that founder has the skills to navigate the other networks required to succeed in building a company" So, as someone who's working on a startup at seed stage, outside silicon valley (Socal), what Marc is saying does not make any sense; networking requires time, and time is very valuable especially at seed stage; I would rather work on developing the product and refine it for market fit, rather trying to spend precious time on meeting with people to expand my network.
- gumby 9y agoIf you don't know how to program it's pretty hard to do a job that requires programming. Likewise if your job requires networking skills and and appropriate existing network, it's pretty hard to do your job if you don't have those things.
- tonystubblebine 9y agoThis reminds me of a story I tell about fundraising. It goes toward this question of time. The way I raised my first money was I invited Evan Williams (Twitter) to coffee. He said yes. I told him my concept but didn't show a demo because I didn't really have one. He liked the idea and offered to put in some money. Magic, right? Money just grows on trees and anyone can get funded here in Silicon Valley. But the better questions is: how did I get that coffee with Evan Williams. To me, it started in 1996 when I decided to get a computer science degree. That took four years. Then I took a sort of crummy job but impressed someone there who helped me get a job at O'Reilly where I impressed someone who introduced me to Evan Williams as someone he might want to hire. That took five years. Then Ev did hire me and I did good work. Then Ev went off to Twitter and I cut my teeth doing a terrible job as a founder of something I bootstrapped. That took five years. So really, it was 15 years to develop a network and trust where I could invite someone to coffee and get funded. Yes, some people do this faster than I did. But I often see this real resistance to the idea of taking the time to improve your qualifications as a founder. Networking is obviously one of those.
- tedmiston 9y agoJoining an accelerator is a way to break into that network while focusing on your business. Depending on the accelerator this provides a pre-vetting too (your startup was picked as one out of thousands or more for a reason).
- ropman76 9y ago"And so if a founder can’t navigate a network into a VC firm, it is unlikely that founder has the skills to navigate the other networks required to succeed in building a company." At what point does it make more sense to use your networking skills to acquire more customers than use those same networking skills to acquire VC dollars?
- gumby 9y agoAsk question the opposite way: at what point is getting an investment going to exceed the rate at which you acquire customers and revenue compared to doing it without the investment? Your default plan should be no investment if possible.
- crispytx 9y agoWhat an elitist comment. I'm sure they'll get burned eventually with that kind of attitude.
- morgante 9y agoA strong network is generally fairly adaptable. The work goes into building the network, not tapping it. Once you have the network in place, you can just as easily tap it to find a VC as to find customers. (Of course, this is assuming that your customers are generally in overlapping industries/areas, which isn't always true.)
- devdad 9y agoCan someone living in the US care to expand on this? "...which is also when many VCs get back from their August vacations (sad but true!)." What is sad here? Being Swede,my initial reaction was "ok, late summer vacation".
- tedmiston 9y agoA month long vacation is a luxury most don't have here.
- patio11 9y agoThe VC industry is somewhat unique in the US in that it takes a long, almost-industry-wide vacation at a time of year when other American professionals do not have a coordinated vacation. People who have to interface with the industry (like e.g. founders) are occasionally annoyed at what is, from their perspective, an unannounced total work stoppage. It is useful background knowledge here that American professionals culturally expect less vacation total than European professionals do (the norm is ~2 weeks) and expect it to be largely non-contiguous with the exception of the end-of-the-year holiday season.
- antaviana 9y agoIs this because American people genuinely think that 2 weeks a year for vacation is good enough, because of a culture of ambition, or simply because of the grip of employers is too strong to take the risk of asking for longer vacations (i.e. very cheap to fire people compared to other countries)?
- emmett 9y agoIt's just a cultural norm. There are strong economic and political and historical reasons why the cultural norm exists, but the fish doesn't see the water. From the point of view of an American, it's just "normal".
- devmunchies 9y ago
- thefalcon 9y agoListing influential books: "The Baroque Cycle—a work of rigorously researched historical fiction with only the slightest overlay of science fiction—tells the story of the emergence of the modern world and its systems (democracy, the scientific method, financial markets, etc.) in a way that is wholly fresh. These novels make me think about what a Neal Stephenson of 2300 may write about our times and us." That last sentence is fascinating to me, and I think telling about what helps a Marc Andreessen stand out as a person.
- everydaypanos 9y ago"Can we help you start your company? Join Stripe Atlas" This made me think all the interview was an ad for Stripe Atlas. Marketing ploy to lure you into the culture(we help you make the company + tell you all the inside secrets for the second step - funding). Irony is, we have applied to Stripe Atlas for a "Delaware" company as they say, and it got rejected like in a few hours. So IDK for whom this is actually intended.
- icebraining 9y agoThis made me think all the interview was an ad for Stripe Atlas. Marketing ploy to lure you into the culture(we help you make the company + tell you all the inside secrets for the second step - funding). Of course it's an ad (or more specifically, "content marketing"). That's generally what company blogs are for.
- chx 9y agoI am not terribly impressed by Marc Andreessen since he invested and advocated for uBeam, Soylent and claimed sleep is overrated. Laws of physics apply to wireless chargers and biology applies to human bodies. This all has a whiff of anti science and that is a stench you don't want around a technology evangelist, frankly.