Jeff Weinstein: commitment

Transcript context

…In 2016, a bunch of Stripes were traveling the world, Stripes is what we call teammates here, and they're just hearing stories from entrepreneurs around the world. And you would hear this unbelievable story from incredible entrepreneurs who have a laptop, which is that they'd have to fly to the United States on an airplane to make a US company in order to get access to use financial system, to raise money from US or global investors, often to take USD or to charge US customers. And you could have sat around and said, huh, is that illegal? They don't live in the US. Can they have a US company? Absolutely. The US loves this. It is incredibly encouraged for people from around the world to make a US company and many people do. Now, why did it require an airplane, right? And so you start to hear that kind of thing at a coffee shop amongst someone with a laptop who has access to the whole internet. And that is a burning problem. Right. That is not a tier three issue. I am not able to run my business without getting on an airplane should be sending alerts off in your whole psyche that you have discovered something important. And so I wasn't at Stripe at the time, but I'm very thankful that, I was running my own startup at the time. I was very thankful that the people at Stripe decided to try to tackle that problem. And so Atlas is a way to start a company in a few clicks, and we think that's an incredibly big deal because while there are smart humans across the whole planet, the opportunity that they have is not uniform. But it's a little strange because it's all the same MacBooks and it's a little strange because it's all the same IP addresses and we all have plenty of bandwidth and smarts. And so what can we do to dramatically lower the barrier to great people solving problems? And we've found over and over again that increasing the ease and simplicity and decreasing the cost and complexity tends to lead to just more of that thing. And we have a fundamental belief that there should be more startups and they're not finite. And that belief comes from both just a core hope because there are so many problems in the world that don't seem to be being solved fast enough by our current institutions and larger companies that we think will actually, we need entrepreneurial energy to tackle them. And then it's also comes from experience of seeing it happened. Instacart signed up for Stripe with a Gmail address and then Covid happened and they delivered critical food to everyone when people were reasonably not allowed to go to the grocery store easily. So you just don't know what the next Gmail address is going to do. And so in Atlas, we radically try to simplify the process of getting a company started and that mission has taken us to just solve more of the problem over time. the next Gmail address is going to do. And so in Atlas, we radically try to simplify the process of getting a company started and that mission has taken us to just solve more of the problem over time. And so over the last few years, for those who have either used Atlas or have started a company or maybe follow along on Twitter a bit, you might've seen just a progression of complexity that used to exist being automated. And so a big one that we did about a year ago was this 83(b) election, which is this absolutely Byzantine silliness system by which you have 30 calendar days to send a one-page document to the IRS that could radically change the economics of how you are incentivized as a founder. And this is not one of these greedy loophole. The IRS in the 1980s made this IRS rule in order to spur more entrepreneurship. They want this. And the only issue is they made it extremely difficult to accomplish. You have to send a snail mail in to an IRS address in a particular format, in a particular way with no verification that it happened at all. And if you do it 31 calendar days, there's no redo. Okay. Now again, if you're a product person, you hear the founders terrified all day long about this same issue, just alarm bells in your head whole time. And so I had experienced it for myself as a founder several times, and I also just heard story after story and I just put on my to-do list for the team, we are going to solve this 83(b) election thing. And there are very good reasons not to do it because it comes with potential huge liability. Don't want to screw it up, it's snail mail. You're really going to monetize this. It's a competitive advantage to do it. You can kind of argue yourself not to do it in a million ways. But again, back to the mission of just taking all of this complexity and turning into a single click. It was obvious to us and we got started on it. Infrastructurally, we've been automating these steps and when this podcast airs, I guess today, it will be true that when you go to start a company on Atlas, it will just be a single click. You go to type in your friend's names, what the name of the company will be, it'll tell you if it's available automatically or not. You can split the company up 50, 50 or whatever you want to do, fill out a few things and you click go and then like a burrito coming to you, like a pizza tracker, we will just handle all of the downstream activities that used to be, hey, remember to come back in and purchase your shares. Why am I purchasing my shares? I'm just getting started. Why am I writing a check for $10 and putting into a bank account that I can't even open yet? And then I have to wait for that to be done to get the 83(b) [inaudible 01:44:09]. All of those steps are now just handled in the background so that we can get you ready for business in a day or two. And so this is our vision. r that to be done to get the 83(b) [inaudible 01:44:09]. All of those steps are now just handled in the background so that we can get you ready for business in a day or two. And so this is our vision. So you can quit your job on a Sunday night, get the Sunday scaries, I'm done with this thing, and on Monday morning fill out this form and the next day be able to run a billion-dollar business because we will have automatically handled getting you access to banking systems, to payment systems, to handling all the equity paperwork, filing your 83(b) election where you can just shift from having worrying about the company starting process to just building and shipping. And you'll just get kind updates in the background. Cool, the IRS is giving you a tax ID. Cool, your 83(b) election is filed. Cool, all the founders have their equity and you're ready to go on the cap table. And we've done this by deeply integrating with the governments and deeply integrating with banking partners where we can get you access to the financial system before the IRS and the other governments come back with their sort of official yeses because we take care of the problem in the background by which we're faxing, phone calling, filling out forms on your behalf. And so we just want to take all that complexity and just erase it so that you get the same thing the YC group gets when they start, that checklist that they go through. We just have the robot do exactly the same thing. And so in some ways it is a really big deal in a big ship because it completely automates the company starting process. But in other ways it's an incredibly incremental step that it's taken us three years to get to where we had to systematically automate the internal steps, each one and now we've done the work to wrap it all up into one button. And you can just watch how your company's doing in the dashboard.…

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