◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek September 23, 2019THE BOTTOM LINE Airbnb looks just about ready to go public,
except for the pesky matter of its intense conflicts with the city
where it plans to list.23AD: PHOTOGRAPH BY FLO NGALA FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK. KAN: PHOTOGRAPH BY KELSEY MCCLELLAN FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK
36, married, and no longer drinking. “He would
have thought it was super lame.”
Lamer than reality TV, perhaps, but maybe a
much better business. Atrium has raised about
$75 million from investors to rent lawyers to start-
ups the way WeWork rents them desks. On Sept. 16,
Atrium announced that it’s begun offering startups
a “membership” rather than the usual pay-by-the-
hour service. For $500 a month, clients get access
to a corporate lawyer—Atrium has its own legal
team, hired from the big firms and matching their
standardized salaries—free initial consultations on
new projects, and a software platform that auto-
mates simple tasks such as drafting an offer letter
or a nondisclosure agreement.
The subscription includes an hour of lawyering
for “general” advice. A deluxe tier, costing $1,500,
comes with an additional hour and includes routine
legal work on hiring, contracts, and board meetings.
Work on major projects is available for flat fees that
are generally cheaper than what a typical firm would
charge, according to clients who’ve been using an
early version of Atrium’s services. Lawyering for an
early round of venture funding known as a Series A
starts at $30,000; if the deal gets more complicated,
and thus more expensive than the quoted price,
Atrium, not the client, eats the difference.
That makes Kan’s venture, which has yet to turn
a profit, riskier as a business than a traditionalWhen Silicon Valley companies go looking for legal
counsel, they generally choose from a short list of
well-respected partnerships. There’s 99-year-old
Cooley LLP, 58-year-old Wilson Sonsini Goodrich
& Rosati, and 24-year-old Gunderson Dettmer. All
are run by graduates of prestigious law schools
who have decades of experience at big firms. Then
there’s 2-year-old startup Atrium, whose chief exec-
utive officer, Justin Kan, has no formal legal training
but once starred in an online reality show.
Wearing a baseball cap with a camera attached to
it, Kan filmed himself 24/7 for a few months in 2007,
writing code, drinking beer with his friends, and
sleeping. The show, Justin.TV, eventually morphed
into a video game streaming service, Twitch, which
sold itself to Amazon.com Inc. for $1 billion, vault-
ing Kan into the tech-bro pantheon. “Sometimes I
wonder, What would the Justin of 10 years ago have
thought of the Justin of today?” says Kan, who’s now● Twitch co-founder Justin Kan has raised
$75 million for his attorney-rental company▲ Kanof Airbnb listings off the market. But such a move
would at least legitimize its market in New York and
soothe investors worried about greater upheaval.
Airbnb made mistakes in New York, underesti-
mating the city’s affordable-housing crisis as well as
Ward, says Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist and
former political strategist who’s advised startups
including Uber Technologies Inc. (Tusk also ran the
2009 mayoral campaign of Michael Bloomberg, the
owner of Bloomberg Businessweek’s parent company,
Bloomberg LP.) “This issue festered and festered and
has gotten to a point now that Airbnb has lost all
political leverage,” he says. “Can you ring the bell
in a city where you’re not legal? It would be pretty
damn awkward.” �Olivia CarvilleThen They
Came for
The Lawyers