Co-founder of Twitch and Justin.tv explains why he is not building another B2C firm and went the B2B route for his next startup, Atrium
The biggest technology companies in the world are typically consumer internet companies, like Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook, so it's easy for new entrepreneurs to be attracted to B2C. Tweets: @hvpandya Tweets: Hardik Pandya / @hvpandya : 'It's a lot easier (and faster) to convince 1 person to pay you $1000 than to convince 1000 people to pay you $1.' Ever since I joined Google, I have been designing enterprise software. Here's a great summary of building for B2C vs B2B: http://www.atrium.co/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Justin Kan's path to this essay runs through his departure from Y Combinator and the launch of Atrium LTS, a software platform paired with a law firm serving 30 startups. After two consumer-scale hits in Justin.tv and Twitch, he is now arguing publicly against the instinct that made him famous — that the biggest companies are consumer companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook.
The market has already voted on the pivot: Atrium raised a $10.5M round led by General Catalyst with nearly 100 institutional and angel investors, validating the B2B legal-services bet months before Kan articulates the reasoning behind it.
First-order effects
- Kan's own capital-raising playbook changes immediately: instead of chasing mass adoption metrics, Atrium sells to a handful of startup clients at high contract values, echoing Hardik Pandya's framing that one customer paying $1,000 beats 1,000 paying $1.
Second-order effects
- Traditional startup-focused law firms now compete against a tech-enabled rival whose software platform, not billable hours, is the product — pressuring incumbents in the startup legal-services niche to justify their pricing model.
Third-order effects
- If serial consumer founders like Kan keep choosing B2B, the prestige hierarchy of entrepreneurship shifts: enterprise revenue per employee becomes the benchmark for a second-time founder's ambition rather than consumer network effects.
The trend: Proven consumer-internet founders are increasingly routing their next ventures into B2B, trading viral scale for concentrated, higher-value enterprise customers.