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Comment by justin | Hacker News Reader

I'm very thrilled to announce this round to the world today. I've always looked up to Marc Andreessen and A16Z, and it very exciting to be able to work with them. Fundraising is not a destination, but just a means to get there, and the team is happy to get back to work building Atrium to help fast growing startups with legal.

Also, super happy to be working with Michael Seibel again, who you all know is an amazing advocate for startups as CEO of YC.

Happy to answer any questions about what we are doing here!

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First, congrats on your funding! Exciting to see innovation in this space. Here are my questions -- feel free to answer just one:

1. Is the goal to remove the need for lawyers by letting software do the work, or to equip lawyers (and law firms) to perform their own work more efficiently (and potentially move away from the per-hour pricing model)?

2. I've reviewed probably 25 NDAs this year and they're all differently worded variations of the exact same concepts. I really just want software to tell me "hey, this is your standard NDA but this company took a more aggressive stance on this once piece." Is this part of what you're aiming for?

3. Reading contracts completely sucks. Any plans to make a UI that presents them in a more human-friendly way?

4. The back-and-forth on contracts completely sucks. Any plans to improve this?

IANAL, but it feels like so much of my time as a co-founder goes to managing legal matters, so I guess I'm excited for a better way.

1. The goal is to equip lawyers to be more efficient! We want to give them super powers.

2-4. Yes, eventually. The legal market is many different workflows and we are both tackle some of them but also make a platform that can be extensible so the marginal cost to do so goes down over time.

Check out incloudcounsel, they fit the bill for your requirements almost exactly.

Congrats, this seems like a much needed service (and thanks for all you do / have done for the startup community). Any plans to provide services to biopharma startups ($12B+ of VC investments into biopharma so far in 2018)?

Legal bills, especially IP, are one of if not the biggest expenses for biotech startups in the early days (in many months we spend more on IP than R&D), and IP is mission critical. It definitely feels like Russian roulette -- very hard to predict timing and magnitude of expenses. And it is hard to control expenses as well, bc of limited transparency

Communication is another big issue. For small teams that don't have in-house IP lawyers, or VCs with good relationships with IP lawyers, just translating emails from lawyers into actionable information can take up a lot of time, and we don't want to pay $600 for a phone call every time we want to clear something up

Eventually - but no plans in the short term (outside of being able to do normal corporate transactional work companies require, which Atrium does for some bio startups). The goal is to eventually be able to expand service offerings to many different practice areas of law.

Following up on email—Congratulations on the round!

My assumption and understanding is that Atrium's goal is to productize/commoditize full-service law, as opposed to the self-service offerings currently on the market courtesy of e.g. LegalZoom. Basically much more like OneMedical is to medicine rather than WebMD, though that comparison might not be entirely apt. Do you see Atrium targeting specific markets that self-service currently manages somewhat effectively, e.g. sole proprietorships and single-digit headcount startups? Or is it moreso geared to the entities which can foot the more traditional rates (even given that Atrium's pricing is intended to be predictable)?

Correct. We are targeted towards full service law firms and the clients that support them (i.e. big enterprises). No plans to do the same for individuals / SMBs (but I think that could be a good business opportunity for someone else!).

Hi Justin,

I noticed that you've scaled the business quite quickly since inception a year ago, growing to around 100 employees.

I see a lot of advice saying to keep growth to only ~2x FTEs per year to preserve culture. How do you reconcile that with your hyper-scale financing and hiring trajectory?

Thanks, really appreciate your thoughts.

It is definitely a risk. I think the first six months of the company we grew headcount probably too aggressively, and then the second six months of the company we did a lot of things to go back and fix some of the resulting cultural tensions (things like create company values collaboratively, figure out job roles better, etc). I'm pleased to say that we have made amazing progress there though (mostly due to the team, not me!).

Unlikely we grow beyond 2x headcount in the upcoming year.

why not grow organically? why give away a big chunk of the company early on?

In addition to what others have said, raising from quality investors is a positive signal to Atrium's potential customer base. It adds credibility and makes growth easier.

Smart fundraising adds value for everyone.

agree, but Justin is already credible enough, no?

This is a pretty different venture from the one that gave him his credibility.

Investors provide at least three separate things:

(1) Cash (2) Credibility (3) Operational help/advice

This feels like a bundle that might get redone.

Already venture capital unbundles cash from credibilty/endorsement. Angel investors provide both. A VC uses their own credibility to scout good investment opportunities, which then receive cash from limited partners. VCs often invest in their own funds, but just enough to make limited partners believe they have "skin in the game": the real thing they have on the line isn't capital, but their reputation as good deal-pickers, which let them raise funds later from their investors, limited partners.

I wonder if someday, there won't be a class of people who are pure reputational endorsers, who say "this company is going to do well", and that signal by itself is enough to attract a big amount of pure cash.

Maybe the "I like this" and the "I'm putting my money in this" have to be the same in order for others to believe the "endorser" has enough skin in the game.

I believe that being able to work with Marc Andresseen, Andrew Chen and the A16Z team can significantly positively impact the trajectory of the company!

One guess that I'd have is that a16z is looking for synergy. That means they're not really thinking of Atrium as an isolated home run investment. Instead, they're looking at them as solving a significant issue for the companies they invest in. If a16z sends a stream of business their way, they'd not only get the $65m, but a lot more in business. And from a16z's perspective, Atrium could solve a major headache/risk factor for early stage companies, so $65m is a small price to pay for all the returns they get from their other investments, even if Atrium never exits.

And if there is an exit, it's the best of both worlds.

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