One of the scenarios they describe - hiring documents - strikes me as a VERY limited value proposition. I can’t imagine someone paying a lawyer to review their hiring documents more than once. All of the associated documents (offer letter, non-disclosure, non-compete, assignment, stock options, etc.) are so easily automated with a basic eSignature tool like HelloSign. Our attorneys simply gave us template docs (billing very little time) and we’ve used them for dozens of employees and multiple due diligence processes. The actual ROI sounds minimal at best.
I can see this being more useful in a sales situation where you need to make concessions much more regularly and need flexibility in your legal documents. Depending on how hard Atrium is to configure, I suspect it could be a lower cost version of setting up Salesforce CPQ. However, you likely still want this process to be integrated into Salesforce at some point so you’ll have to do that separately still.
Also, the frequency of automating your financing docs is not very compelling. In my experience, your investors provide the term sheets and then you need to redline them back to them. The idea of scanning these types of documents to extract the meaningful data points is very cool (ie. Comparing valuations automatically across spreadsheets) but I would still say a manual review from an attorney is essential due to the risk/reward of missing some small item that isn’t conventional in a term sheet.
I’m curious if anyone here has used Atrium and has see a compelling ROI for your team?
I think "crashes" is a little bit sensationalist. They're down which is obviously not great but they're down by less than 10% at my time of writing. While it won't get as many upvotes this should probably be titled "Lyft IPO Poorly Received" or more literally, "Lyft Down 10% After IPO"*
Zoom charged us a fraction of what we paid other more traditional video conferencing companies (GoToMeeting, WebEx) and provided I think a better product in many regards. Not only that, they paid out our previous contract too (worth tens of thousands of dollars). At the time I thought either (a) they're losing tons of money to close deals and grow or (b) traditional video conferencing companies are built on infrastructure that was required 10 years ago but with modern advances in web technology they either didn't lower their operating costs by upgrading or did and just take more money off the top. Either way, they're overcharging. Based on Zoom's financials, I think it's the latter.
If I recall correctly, the founder of Zoom came from Cisco. This all strikes me as someone technical seeing all the waste at their existing job and trying to make change happen. Cisco couldn't see the forest for the trees and never took them up on their ideas. The employee believed there was a large enough technology gap so they left and totally undercut them by delivering the same (or better) product for a fraction of the cost.
Thanks! I also always felt like I was being ripped off by other companies too. The cost severely outweighed the value I received. With Zoom, I pay a lot for Zoom rooms but they are magical. Normal user accounts are affordable and they work. All in, I feel like I pay for the value I’m receiving and it feels like an equitable deal.
Ps. I swear this isn’t a Zoom ad. It’s like the cops - if I say it this has to be true?! That’s how this works, right?
1.25x? Aim to get accustomed to 2x+. So much time savings. I have a friend who’s blind and super proficient on his laptop using screen readers. He runs all the speech at 3x+. It sounds like gibberish to me, but he’s crazy productive. He inspired me to learn how to understand and follow significantly sped up audio. Saves so much time.
> Not only that, they paid out our previous contract too (worth tens of thousands of dollars).
I am curious, does that mean Zoom paid you guys for the losses incurred due to your original VC contract? If yes, that seems like an aggressive and maybe really loss making way to grow.
To answer your first point, you could argue that but the reality for Twitch is that they may not possess the bandwidth to build it themselves.
That's not to say that they aren't smart enough, or don't have the money, or don't possess some sort of hard skill or item that would let them do it. It's the nature of successful companies to focus on their core competencies and Twitch may consider it not worth the risk of distracting themselves. If it picks up traction, they will go to Revlo and look to invest/obtain warrants in the business. If it's even more successful, they'll try to acquire it and then they'll have the solution without all the risk.
This dynamic is played out in a lot of industries and is hardly a reason to not pursue this idea.
A practice we've implemented to manage this is tagging pull requests that have anything over 250 added (green) lines of code. Before anyone is willing to give you a code review, you have to justify why such a pull request requires so many lines, break it into multiple pull requests, or refactor your code. Often times, it makes review easier because the PR's are smaller and enforces a simple baseline that tells the programmer, your code is too big!
Maybe all diff views should show added lines in red and removed lines in green. If anything, it would help create awareness of the need for more compact systems.
This takes such a short-sighted, illogical view of the underlying mechanics that tax expenditures and tax breaks rely on.
In the case of SNAP, you are eligible for those benefits if you are below a certain % of the federal poverty limit (FPL) based on your household size. If you earn more than a certain amount, you no longer qualify because presumably you should be able to pay for food on your own. This very directly says, "We will give you something of monetary value, if you remain poor."
In the case of a tax break, like contributing to your HSA or IRA, you don't have to pay taxes on that income (or at least not now). You can contribute up to a certain amount each year but beyond that you no longer receive that benefit. This very directly says, "We will give something of monetary value, if you save money."
Both are using government funds to encourage behavior "We will give you something of monetary value, if you [perform some behavior]." I would suggest that the intended behavior is fundamentally different and is where the real difference in these two lie.
Perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions based on the tone of the article, but the author seems to indicate that both scenarios are equally problematic, when I think there is a very logical difference. Both achieve a similar short-term net output - $X in potential taxes not remaining in the government. The difference is about whether the $X creates long-term value that exceeds that value and she seems to gloss over that to drum up a controversial article.
Edit: I'm not suggesting that either breaks of expenses are inherently better than the other. For example, an earned income credit, to me, seems to encourage a behavior that would be in line with the motives behind a tax break. I just think this is a very short-sighted analysis of both ideas and serves only to create controversy.
This is what a PE (Private Equity) Firm basically does from my understanding.
They are a company, that buys, (hopefully) improves, and then sells companies. For example, a PE Firm might have some expertise in mining. They hear about a company that builds some sort of mining technology. They've done pretty well so far but they've really leveled out. The PE Firm decides to buy them, install a new CEO, revise some business practices to help cut costs, and now as the same business they bought but with a better bottom-line. They then sell it.
What you're describing is like an earlier stage PE firm.
That's what they are supposed to do. In practice many of them borrow a bunch of money on the acquired company's credit and funnel it to themselves before selling. It's kind of like the legal version of a "bust out" (as seen on "The Sopranos" and "Goodfellas" :)
Additionally, I don't like the percent increases on absolute numbers. I feel like some normalized data (either per capita, or per capita in specific metropolitan areas) would be very helpful.
Ie. Fake example, The crime in San Francisco shot up by 400% - woah! So much more crime. The population in San Francisco also shot up by 10,000%. Oh, so you're telling me that the ratio of criminals to non-criminals dropped by 95%?
Your cognitive bias is showing. Common sense should tell you that a 400% increase is outstripping population growth, but here are the numbers: US population went from 183M to 252M during that period.
I think the author's definition of homeless is a little bit facetious and it sounds like a humble brag. It's very different to be homeless because you ran your technology startup into the ground and another to be seriously challenged by your socioeconomic standing leading you from affordable housing, to a shelter, to the street, ad infinitum.
Yes, it is different. I think the author's intent is good (explaining that homelessness can happen to real people and trying to impart some of the psychological cost of being homeless). However the author clearly has more resources at his disposal than a "real" homeless person. For instance, it is unlikely that there was a danger that he would remain homeless. [Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to say that. Once you fall down hard enough it can be hard to get back up.]
That could have been played up more. Every year millions of Americans become homeless, many of them relatively short-term. Often they are not who we would necessarily think of as homeless people (children, people with jobs, etc). It has a high cost on our society yet is largely hidden from view.
IDK how small your company is but I HIGHLY recommend switching to JustWorks. We were able to remove a lot of duplicated services by just using them. It's got a brilliant interface and is super user friendly for our employees.
We simply didn't need the level of functionality required in other software applications, which were clearly built for small to medium sized companies with an actual HR department. We wanted to hire employees and contractors, manage their payroll, manage time off, and give employees other basic benefits, like Healthcare and transportation.
Only downside to JustWorks is that it costs more than Zenefits which is free. Can't speak to Gusto's capabilities and pricing though.
I can see this being more useful in a sales situation where you need to make concessions much more regularly and need flexibility in your legal documents. Depending on how hard Atrium is to configure, I suspect it could be a lower cost version of setting up Salesforce CPQ. However, you likely still want this process to be integrated into Salesforce at some point so you’ll have to do that separately still.
Also, the frequency of automating your financing docs is not very compelling. In my experience, your investors provide the term sheets and then you need to redline them back to them. The idea of scanning these types of documents to extract the meaningful data points is very cool (ie. Comparing valuations automatically across spreadsheets) but I would still say a manual review from an attorney is essential due to the risk/reward of missing some small item that isn’t conventional in a term sheet.
I’m curious if anyone here has used Atrium and has see a compelling ROI for your team?