$75M legal startup Atrium shuts down, lays off 100

My first company @twitch sold for a billion dollars. My second one lost $75 million in 36 months. People love talking about success, but today I'm going to talk about failure. It's time to be honest about Atrium:

This was an incredibly difficult stretch. Every time something popped up on my calendar I knew it was someone telling me they were leaving the company. These conversations were crushing. All I could think about was finding a way to fix things. We kicked off some really cool product experimentation but we were a Series C company trying to do seed st... See more

But with a free tier to push the business, perhaps too many users were free and not enough were in the paying category. It seems that the writing might have been on the wall last June when the company announced it was laying off 14% of its workforce.

Sure, macroeconomic conditions change and the cost of capital underpins everything loss-making, high growth start-ups are valued on. It just feels a bit tough on founders like Teo, who now had to fire 44 people to fit a growth profile that, until two months ago, was likely the apple of her VC investor’s eye.