Additions To Your Co-Founding Team
By Chester Ng
“The team you build is the company you build.”
– coined by Vinod, popularized by Keith, tweeted by everyone
The stereotypical tale of the startup founder hustling in the coffee shop, or slaving away in the garage, is glamorized and has become storybook. But what isn’t discussed as regularly is just how inefficient and lonely the experience can be — when an entrepreneur takes on the Herculean effort of creating a brand new business on their own. The 0-to-1 stage requires founders to wear dozens of hats and be a jack or jill of all trades, while true success is driven by mastering some. Countless amounts of time, energy, and capital are spent reinventing the wheel on every building block of company formation.
At Atomic, we take a different approach by deploying a dream co-founding team of experts and specialists to complement our co-founders and enable them to focus on what they do best. As we’ve scaled to creating a record 14 companies in the past 12 months, we’ve also scaled this team. Today, we’re excited to introduce a few new leaders and company builders.
Hadley Wilkins has joined to lead communications, partnering with our co-founders and companies on storytelling, brand building, and PR. Hadley has launched dozens of startups and worked with iconic brands and technology companies on marketing and communications. She most recently built and ran marketing at Redpoint Ventures, as well as helping fast-growing companies like Figma and Brandless.
Marian Pond is joining to lead executive talent, helping to build the right teams for the right ideas. Marian brings a wealth of experience in scaling exceptional leadership teams, which is so core to Atomic’s model, as well as building diverse communities of entrepreneurial talent. Marian most recently led talent at AllRaise, and previously ran the exec talent practices at Softbank Vision Fund and Lightspeed.
Ran Wei leads strategic finance at Atomic, working closely with our co-founders and CEOs on everything from capitalization strategy to financial modeling to fundraises to corporate development. Ran and his team bring growth-stage discipline and strategic vision to the earliest stage. Previously, Ran advised companies at Qatalyst, a leading tech-focused investment bank, where he worked on everything from $100M private fundraises to $48Bn cross-border M&A transactions.
Phil Liu has joined as a vice president to lead company creation in healthcare as we continue to broaden our aperture within one of the most important yet challenged industries. Phil is leading the charge on new projects ranging from medical devices to robotics to drug discovery to disease detection and treatment. Phil was previously a physician at Duke, consultant at McKinsey focused on biotech and medtech, and investor.
Sharon Winter has joined as a vice president focused on one of the most important pillars of 0-to-1 company creation, the product aspect of product-market fit. Sharon is a serial entrepreneur who has already built many products and companies in parallel, having started eight companies at a young age with two exits across multiple industries. She studied industrial and robotics design and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon before launching into her journey as a parallel entrepreneur.
We couldn’t be more excited to officially welcome Hadley, Marian, Ran, Phil, and Sharon to our growing team of over 50 builders and specialists in everything from design to engineering to marketing to recruiting to people operations to finance to accounting to legal to operations. Together, we strive to co-found and create the next generation of great companies with our co-founders. 2021 was a record year in many ways for Atomic, and we plan to continue to scale up our team to make 2022 even more of an even more impactful year.
