Incubators and Startup Studios: In Conversation with Jack Abraham

Incubators and Startup Studios: In Conversation with Jack Abraham
Auren Hoffman
4
minutes
reading time
Published on
May 17, 2023
May 17, 2023
Incubators and Startup Studios: In Conversation with Jack Abraham

Jack Abraham runs the kind of company that every founder dreams about: an idea machine. 

Jack is the founder and CEO of Atomic, a startup studio behind some wildly successful companies including Hims & Hers, Openstore, and Bungalow. Before starting Atomic, Jack dropped out of Wharton to found Milo, which sold to eBay for $75 million when he was 24 years old. 

Jack went on to be Head of Local at eBay and in 2012, he founded Atomic, inventing the studio fund model and kicking off a decade-long journey of founding companies. In fact, Atomic just launched their $320 million Fund IV. On World of DaaS, Jack shares insights from 10 years of founding and scaling companies across industries.

We break down Jack’s “0-to-1” process and discuss how he identifies the ideas worth investing in and tests them for scalability. Jack and I also do a full tear-down of the studio/incubator model and its history, going all the way back to Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan. We look at which studios and which studio-founded companies (like Uber, Twitter, and Moderna) have been most successful. 

Atomic & Studio Success

While there have been lots of startup studios over the years, few have been as focused, effective and long-lived as Atomic. Jack credits Atomic’s success to “passing the marshmallow test” and focusing on quality over quantity. He enforced a hard limit of founding just one company in 2012 and two the year after that. From there, Atomic scaled up to a team of 75 people founding upwards of a dozen companies per year— but only after they had the bandwidth to execute at a high quality.

Jack and Atomic have redefined the game in creating and scaling successful businesses through the studio fund model. This episode offers a rare chance to delve into the mind of a true innovator and see behind the scenes of a startup studio operating at the top of the game. 

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World of DaaS is brought to you by Flex Capital. For more episodes, visit World of DaaS on YouTube.

You can find me on Twitter at @auren and Jack Abraham on Twitter at @jackabraham.

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