Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 175 posts

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#31

Post by ttul »

spamcast wrote: post #29
ttul wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of software companies make a lot of money selling to lawyers. Clio ( https://www.clio.com/ ), for instance, is a SaaS that helps lawyers run their practices better. It doesn't try to replace lawyers; it just saves them time on the bullshit of running a firm. Kira ( https://kirasystems.com/ ) automates due diligence, which is a labor-intensive (and hence costly) process that nobody loves doing, but which does g…

clio is a good example.

Indeed, Clio is absolutely crushing it. They closed a monster $250M round last September - and this is a company headquartered in Vancouver, not San Francisco, so the bar for raising that kind of money is truly up there.

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#32

Post by m0zg »

berberous wrote: post #19
dustingetz wrote: post #16

what if a startup charged $300 per month for all you can eat email legal advice backed by a rich library of templates? they would instantly dominate and there are 6M small businesses in the USA alone

You get what you pay for. $300 is 20 minutes of a good lawyer’s time. The economics don’t work.

More like an hour of a good lawyer time. Mine charges $350/hr. But your point stands. I don't see how his work could be done with "templates". Most of the time I pay him for contract reviews.

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#33

Post by troydavis »

stingrae wrote: post #27
dustingetz wrote: post #16

what if a startup charged $300 per month for all you can eat email legal advice backed by a rich library of templates? they would instantly dominate and there are 6M small businesses in the USA alone

Isn't that LegalZoom?

Yup, it's pretty close: https://www.legalzoom.com/forms, https://www.legalzoom.com/attorneys/legal-documents-review.h...

RocketLawyer is even closer to that: https://www.rocketlawyer.com/legal-documents-forms.rl/

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#34

Post by prawn »

ttul wrote: post #30
prawn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you retain better rapport with the investors if you returned money and started something fresh rather than persisted when you were lacking conviction?

I don't think a guy like Justin lacks conviction. Justin.tv required huge conviction. If you don't recall, it was founded in 2007 -- just prior to the financial crisis -- with the unique idea of allowing people to live stream on the internet. Today, live streaming is just a feature of Instagram, Facebook, and other major services. But in 2007, it was revolutionary. Twitch was the breakthrough, but it took four years…

I meant conviction with regard to Atrium. Was responding to the idea that he could've stuck it out and burnt through the money persisting as opposed to something new.

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#35

Post by nharada »

gumby wrote: post #10
minimaxir wrote: post #2

This happened less than 2 months after a "pivot to tools": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22040238

Never really seen a "pivot to tools" work (after I tried it with one company, and it failed, I started noticing when others tried it too).

Why do you think it never pans out?

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#36

Post by coderintherye »

tempsy wrote: post #13
noway421 wrote: post #12

It sucks. Not even sure they should've called it so fast, why not keep going and try to figure it out till the money runs out. Investors would be OK with that. I wonder when Justin lost his conviction? I don't believe you can lose conviction in 2 month.

working at a zombie company that has no traction is not fun for anyone part of the “challenge” of being a famous founder is you can raise pre product. $75M seems insane for a company like that. Burn couldn’t have been that high, mostly rent and salaries, no heavy computation, etc.

They noted in the article they didn't spend all $75M and that they are returning some to investors. That was probably part of the decision to shut down quickly to get some money back to them.

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#37

Post by ska »

dustingetz wrote: post #16

what if a startup charged $300 per month for all you can eat email legal advice backed by a rich library of templates? they would instantly dominate and there are 6M small businesses in the USA alone

templates for common cases make a lot of sense, but $300/mo isn't going to get anywhere for "all you can eat".

$300 might cover a simple contract review, maybe by volume you can cut that in half - so if you are talking 1-2 "tickets" a month, maybe you are covered. Sounds risky to me in a back-of-envelope way.

Of course, a bunch of people are trying variations of this idea.

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#38

Post by m3kw9 »

nharada wrote: post #35
gumby wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never really seen a "pivot to tools" work (after I tried it with one company, and it failed, I started noticing when others tried it too).

Why do you think it never pans out?

Prob cuz you are doing less with the same customers

Re: Atrium shuts down, laying off 100

#40

Post by evanrich »

gumby wrote: post #10
minimaxir wrote: post #2

This happened less than 2 months after a "pivot to tools": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22040238

Never really seen a "pivot to tools" work (after I tried it with one company, and it failed, I started noticing when others tried it too).

Slack is an example
Post reply on HN