Justin Kan Profile picture
Jan 6, 2021 16 tweets 2 min read Read on X
10 months ago we shut down Atrium after raising $75m in venture capital. Anyone hearing that knows I made tons of mistakes along the way. Someone asked me today what my biggest lessons learned were. Here they are:
Start with the mission
.

It is very hard to write the mission after the fact. You should start with a clear reason to exist and filter early hires for believers.
Start remote. SFBA is over for startups: the cost of housing and rent gives you much worse operating leverage. Many talented people choose jobs they want to be flexible re: location. Remote is better at this time in the market.

I wrote that before COVID, now it's extra true.
There is no skipping of the R&D phase of a company - if you try to skip this you miss the part where you are forced to develop something differentiated. Very hard to solve this with money.
Don’t build a services company. It’s more work to manage everyone and the reward isn’t there at the end of the day.
Only work on things where you have intrinsic motivation. If you don’t, you’ll lose motivation when times are hard or your own goals change.
The more people you have, the harder it is to bubble up feedback or turn the ship. The emperor has no clothes effect is real.
Adding more money to a situation of lack of product market fit rarely works.
CEOs can’t delegate getting in the trenches in the beginning.
We should have moved more quickly to a flat rate hourly model and iterated the business model. We didn't do enough turns of business model iteration quickly enough.
Ability to frame strategy and communicate it is rare and requires experience.
Should have asked “who are we building for?” much more specifically and ruthlessly iterated for them.
Create market situations wherever possible and avoid “fake markets” where it seems like a market but isn’t. I.e. you employ someone and they kind of have to use your software -- this is a fake market.
Build in a space where the iteration time of your product can be very fast.
The culture is set early and very hard to change.
You can read more in this AMA I dropped on Reddit today: reddit.com/r/IAmA/comment…

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More from @justinkan

Nov 16, 2022
I’ve worked on social products for a long time, and even seen some successes! Here’s why I think the take that Elon is crashing and burning Twitter into the ground is overrated, and Twitter is likely to survive just fine (and potentially thrive!)
Users are unlikely to flee the platform. There’s lots of talk from the blue check set about quitting Twitter and going to Mastodon or some other bullshit but in practice it never happens. Most users just don’t care about Twitter company drama.
When Uber and United had extremely bad press cycles and user backlash there was no lasting usage hits to their businesses. Unlike those businesses, Twitter not only has a brand but also has a strong network effect.
Read 13 tweets
Nov 1, 2022
At @fractalwagmi, our North Star has always been to be the best friend possible to web3 games. To do that, we’ve always said we need to go to wherever games want to be.

Today, we’re announcing we are bringing all our products (Launchpad, Marketplace, Tournaments) to Ethereum.
Web3 will be the mechanic through which games create open economies. This is good for studios, who will be able to participate in a new business model; for players, who will own their digital items; & for 3rd parties, who can create apps that interact with these digital items.
But in order to build a web3 game, game studios need to make a difficult choice around which chain to support. Games can go multichain, but this is expensive and a large technical undertaking.

Fractal’s new APIs will help game devs go multi-chain without the technical headaches.
Read 6 tweets
Aug 16, 2022
Am I an asshole?
Can someone use DALL-E to make me a green newborn corgi photo?
Read 4 tweets
Jul 11, 2022
Simple case for why web3 could be an important new business model in for games:
Open economic platforms that foster an ecosystem of businesses are larger and more durable than closed ones, where value is primarily created and owned by a single party. Think free market countries (USA) vs centrally planned ones (USSR, Cuba).
In tech, there are lots of examples of open or partially open platforms. The biggest companies in tech have been powered by creating these platforms: Amazon Marketplace, Google and Apple’s mobile app stores, Facebook’s original platform.
Read 14 tweets
Jun 15, 2022
Get these 3 weekly meetings if you are a founder:

- With a mentor
- With a therapist / coach
- With a personal trainer
Your mentor should be 5-10 years ahead of you and did exactly what you are doing right now.

Don’t get a mentor who’s same age or younger than you.
Your therapist/coach needs to understand your job as a founder.

The goal is to understand your inner psychology through the lens of people management, feedback, work and goal prioritization.
Read 4 tweets
May 25, 2022
The life of a startup founder is glamorized, but behind the scenes, things can be a complete mess.

The real story is a combination of the two with ups and downs that no one else will tell you about.

This is why I’m super excited to share my latest project - Build: Fractal.
When people ask me for advice, they usually ask me about Twitch.

From how we made tough choices, how we raised money, how we got users, and the list goes on and on.
A lot of people make content about that including myself to tell you these learnings

But what if I showed you?
Read 6 tweets

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