a16z

When you are a young founder, fresh out of college, chances are you don't know a lot and you are not actually very good at many things. At his point, it makes a lot of sense to pick a consumer startup that has a lot of market risk, but low execution risk.

Market risk is the risk that nobody wants your product. However, if you can find something that users love, you just keep making more of it, and your chances of winning big are quite high. Thinks companies like Facebook or Snapchat.

Once you mature and gain skills, it makes sense to work on a startups with less market risk and more execution risk, a startup that you know people already want, but it is very hard to deliver correctly. With Atrium, for example, Justin knew that legal market was already huge, and it was also ripe for innovation.

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