Atomic

Jack Abraham grew up watching his father, ComScore founder Alon Cohen, build a company from nothing. At age 12, Jack joined ComScore as a software engineer and watched his father grow the company to billions in value before taking it public. This early exposure to entrepreneurship—and meaningful equity upside—created a deep belief in the power of entrepreneurship and the importance of time allocation.

After ComScore went public, Jack started companies at age 15. His first major success came with Milo, which he sold to eBay at age 24 for $75 million. Rather than coast, Jack stayed at eBay for two years and became obsessed with building multiple products simultaneously. He rallied his team to resist cubicles, led a famous "hacker house" trip to Sydney where his team built the entire eBay feed (used by 130 million people) in two weeks, and generally proved himself as both entrepreneur and operator within a large organization.

When Jack left eBay, he had 250 ideas for his next company. Rather than pursue all of them at once (a trap many startup studios fall into), he founded Atomic with extreme discipline: one company the first year, two the second, three the third, four the fourth. This pacing protected the core advantage of startups—desperation and focus.

Unlike traditional idea labs that brainstorm solutions to hypothetical problems, Atomic operated on a "problem first" philosophy. Jack and his team observed real pain points in their own lives and across portfolio companies. When they identified a problem, they built the product, deployed it internally to test it, and only released it to the world once proven. This eliminated the "sitcom startup idea" trap.

Jack funded the first year of Atomic with his own capital (roughly $1-1.5M). Only once he was convinced the model worked did he raise his first fund—a $10M vehicle backed by Mark Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Chris Dixon, David Sacks, and other Silicon Valley architects. This forced skin-in-the-game alignment.

Atomic's companies benefited from built-in customer access. Because Jack and his team operated across dozens of companies in healthcare, PropTech, FinTech, education, and AI, they could dogfood new products within their own portfolio. This reduced customer acquisition risk dramatically.

Atomic also maintained strict financial discipline. Each new company received an initial check of $100-400K (averaging $1.5M) to research and validate the idea. If traction emerged, Atomic would write a second check ($1-4M), then a third ($3-8M). But crucially, companies had a deadline: roughly nine months to raise their own Series A or be deemed a bust. This created the desperation that makes startups succeed.

Atomic's biggest success was Hymns (later Hims & Hers), a direct-to-consumer telemedicine company. The problem was obvious: going to the doctor was a 14-step process (scheduling, waiting, prescribing, pharmacy, etc.). Telemedicine compressed it to five minutes on a phone. The company is now public and highly valued.

Other major wins included Bungalow (co-living), Homebound (construction marketplace), and Replicant (AI for call centers). Many more companies stayed stealth until announcing significant funding rounds, because Jack found that revealing Atomic's playbook led competitors to copy.

But not everything worked. Jack shared the example of sublingual immunotherapy for allergies—a dramatically better alternative to weekly allergy shots. The problem was real (allergists had misaligned incentives to push expensive shots), the solution was proven (Jack himself used it successfully), but the unit economics didn't work. The customer acquisition cost was too high relative to lifetime value, even at price points ranging from $79-250/month. After extensive iteration, Jack shelved it. Similarly, autonomous fishing vessels using self-driving car technology seemed promising until fishing quota regulations and industry capture made the business model impossible.

These failures led Jack to adopt a distribution-first philosophy: "Distribution is more important than ideas." He only pursues ideas that can achieve mass distribution, achieve a customer payback period of under three months, and maintain a lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio of 5:1 or better.

Atomic has now launched dozens of companies across multiple funds. The studio maintains a master list of 600+ potential ideas in an Evernote document, but only launches 10-12 per year. This discipline—born from watching startups fail through shiny object syndrome—is core to Atomic's model.

Jack's broader philosophy centers on the "power law of time." He learned from Mark Andreessen a story about Peter Thiel: all of Thiel's effort—Stanford, law school, hedge fund, PayPal—led to one hour with Mark Zuckerberg that was worth more than everything else combined. Jack now engineers his calendar ruthlessly, asking of every meeting: "If I hadn't done this, would anything have changed?" If the answer is no, he removes it.

This thinking extends to Atomic's portfolio. The studio stays stealth with most companies until they've proven major traction and raised significant funding. By then, imitators trying to copy Atomic's playbook are already 12-18 months behind. Atomic continues to identify patterns for great companies: democratizing what rich people have (Uber for private drivers, DoorDash for private chefs, Airbnb for second homes), and simplifying arduous, multi-step processes that people feel forced to do.