Helping Entrepreneurs Realize their Start-up Dreams
Rohit Patel, CEO, Ataeum

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Technology Innovators Magazine Company: Ataeum

Website: www.ataeum.com

Management:  Rohit Patel, CEO

Founded Year: 2021

Headquarters: Menlo Park, California

Description: Ataeum is an online platform where aspiring entrepreneurs can come together and realize their startup dreams

Helping Entrepreneurs Realize their Start-up Dreams

A focused strategist with analytical and technical background, Rohit Patel is known in tech. He founded Ataeum, a platform for aspiring entrepreneurs to find co-founders and run startups in an automated, low-cost, seamless way. His undying love for entrepreneurship coupled with years of strategy and hands on technical experience has helped him carve a niche for himself. In an interview he speaks about his vision for Ataeum, current position of legal start-ups and the traits leaders should exhibit in an enterprising environment. Excerpts from an interview:


Conception of Ataeum

Rohit says that he had always wanted to be an entrepreneur. But like many others, he faced the dilemma of not wanting to quit a well-paying job. So, he started looking for ways to get started while working full time: “I was, after all, in the heart of Silicon Valley and surely there were options for aspiring entrepreneurs like me who wanted to do it part-time. I was wrong. The startup ecosystem was largely focused on people quitting their jobs and dedicating their 100% to the entrepreneurial pursuit.” He quicky points out that what he was really looking for was a simple solution where people could just come together and work on their ideas easily “It would be even more amazing if we didn’t have to worry too much about who owns what in the future company and someone just did the right thing by all of us. All we should be doing is working on building our awesome product.” That is when he conceptualized the vision for Ataeum, which wasn’t the original product he was planning to build. “I was going to build the startup that I had needed to build my startup. So, I set out to work on it, and enlisted some help. We are now a ragtag team of people trying to bring this nirvana to aspiring entrepreneurs. The hardest part of creating a startup is getting started.”

The Platform

Ataeum’s platform creates and manages a joint venture to enable entrepreneurs to run their startup in an effortless manner. In contrast to the usual startup founding, they needn’t have to worry about issues like incorporation, bylaws, stock options, state qualifications, bank accounts etc. “What we’ve done is really worked to minimize that risk for these start-ups in two ways- one by improving their chances of success, secondly and more importantly by essentially bringing down the cost of failure to near zero.”

Legal Startups – The Current Scenario

Noting that legal startups spring up not out of excitement but out of need, Rohit observes that one of the important things is to improve the comprehensibility of the services and the outcomes that are offered. “At Ataeum, we are still in the space that we are primarily a technology company bringing an opportunity to aspiring entrepreneurs and then solving the legal issues along the way that we know need to be addressed.” He also adds that technology has increased the expectation of the level of simplicity that automation should bring to their interactions. Hence the bar for what legal startups need to come with in terms of features or capabilities right out of the gate is high. “This definitely increases the requirement for tech investments for legal startups.”

Challenges Galore

Legal uncertainties around incorporation and ownership is one of the main challenges faced by the legal start up today. “Especially as co-founders start to work together and realize that they may be putting in a different mix of time, money, and energy in the startup than they originally envisioned, it becomes really challenging to have the right ownership structure that everyone feels happy about. This tends to materially affect the startups’ chances of success. This is even more true in the post-Covid situation world where there are a larger number of remote startups being formed.”

Leadership Traits

“It’s valuable to overcome the fear of the unknown and go ahead and do things.” Noting that it is important to take calculated risks and explore alternatives that others aren’t necessarily exploring because they come with too much uncertainty or too many variables, Rohit observes that uncertainty isn’t always a bad thing, it can be quite a blessing in disguise. Trust and being balanced in your approach are two more important factors, according to this entrepreneur.

A Word of Advice

“I think the most important thing is to internalize the fact that failure is part of the process. To realize that cases where success comes without failure are exceedingly rare. There just isn’t going to be any path to success without a few failures along the way.”

 

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