Atomic Capital's active collaboration playbook

Founders build companies. They take the risk when nothing exists and make something out of nothing. They toil in the trenches to make sure every small?detail is just right. They start a chain reaction that creates something new, big or small.?

We believe Investors, such as us, can but merely act as catalysts that accelerate the speed of how fast this chain reaction.?We like to actively collaborate with founders and believe it creates differentiated value?

1. Aligned incentives -??What creates value for the founders is also what also creates value for investors. i.e. nailing the problem you?are solving and capital efficient company scale up
2. Outside-in perspective - founders, esp at early-stages with limited leverage, can often get bogged down by day-to-day tasks and fire-fighting. An outside-in perspective helps identify and navigate blind-spots and prioritize the most important problems to solve first.?
3. Movement vs progress - often founding teams can end up working long hard hours but not necessarily on the most important problems. Putting in long-hours can easily be mistaken as moving in the right direction. However, that is not necessarily the case. A thought-partner can help you take a stepback and evaluate what you've really accomplished vs not.
4. Decisions compound - Startups rarely fail or succeed overnight. It is usually an amalgmation of multiple small day-to-day decisions that compound over time. It is important to have a sounding board for these small decisions vs someone you talk to once a quarter.?
5. Data and intuition - Founders, having spent multiple months and years, thinking about the unique problem they are trying to solve. Investors with their vast experience and perspective can bring data to help prioritize the most important things and validate the hypothesis that founders intuitively recognize.

Here is how we?deploy our active collaboration playbook

1. Frequent engagement - Every company is unique. Every problem is unique and pops up at varying times. Engaging with companies weekly/monthly, leads to identification of problems before they snowball into something big as well as ensure nimbleness in decision making.??
2. Prioritization - As companies scale, founders often carry over their hangover of 0 to 1 days of doing everything from CX calls to managing office infrastructure. However, at every stage, there are few problems that are bottlenecks to a company's growth. We help identify?those, so that founders can channel all their energies towards them, and delegate/deprioritize the other stuff.?
3. Accelerate execution - Frequent collaboration also shortens the feedback loop on various initiatives being implemented and improves the speed at which they get executed, speeding up overall progress.?
4. Bringing in best practices - Investors can bring in a lot of horizontal and functional learnings from across their portfolio which founders might otherwise take a long time to learn.??
5. Bringing in objectivity - Defining objective metrics and signals is important to gauge whether every solution being implemented and initiative being undertaken is in fact the right one. It also helps course-correct before it is too late and too much time and effort has already been invested.?
6. Culture building - As companies scale - founders can't be everywhere all at once. Culture becomes an important determinant of how individual?team members make decisions and react when no one is looking over their shoulder. We help institute a strong performance based culture?
7. Team building - We help founders think through the org they will need a year out from now, as that is how much time you need to put together a team of top talent. Founders can get caught up in their day-to-day and teams get built with ad hoc?incremental hirings.?
8. Shorten the experiment loop - we help companies shorten the loop for all new initiatives e.g. if a new product is launched, how much do you invest in improving it vs when do you shelve it??
9. Marrying economics with everything else - we bring an economic lense to various pet projects founders may be tempted to jump into but might actually be a distraction if not clearly defined and evaluated at the outset
10. Introductions to network - We have a network of experienced operators and partners, who can be help with bringing together their wealth of learnings and enable stronger decision making?

If you resonate with the above thoughts and are building something new, do reach out to us at [email protected] .