Atomic Business is a self-paced program to realize your ideas through customer development. This is professional freedom. N̶o̶w̶ ̶a̶c̶c̶e̶p̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶p̶p̶l̶i̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶S̶p̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶2̶0̶2̶1̶. [FULL]

The tendency that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer hasn’t changed much since the phrase was coined in the early 1800s.

In 1970, Milton Friedman famously argued that the social responsibility of business is to increase profits.

…[T]here is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.

While there has been a lot of hemming and hawing since then, not much has changed. In “Companies Should Maximize Shareholder Welfare Not Market Value”, a paper by Oliver Hart of Harvard University and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, they propose that firms should expand their scope of responsibility to “maximise shareholders’ welfare” not just value, and that shareholders should have greater involvement in decision-making through voting. However, in a response article, the Economist was quick to point out how shareholders are usually considered “dumb money” incapable of understanding the complexity of business.

At the end of 2019, millionaires around the world – which number exactly 1% of the adult population – accounted for 43.4% of global net worth. In contrast, the 54% of adults with wealth below USD 10,000 together mustered less than 2% of global wealth (source: credit suisse).

No one is coming to save us.

Why not you? Break free with Professional Freedom.

Creating more professional resonance is a lot like falling in love. When you know, you know. Getting there is a lot like dating. There’s no one path, but a lot of dead ends. Once you’re there, getting there doesn’t begin to describe it. There’s a there there for sure, but it’s more like a dance than a place.

Professional Freedom is a relationship between people and you. It’s not all of you (and not all about you), but it’s definitely part of you. It’s authentic and dynamic. It involves money, but isn’t all about money. It’s not the end, really more like a beginning. It’s an iterative process. What’s important is that it’s a path worth pursuing which is why it’s so important you’re here.

Atomic Business Course

Atomic Business is the 28 days between you and professional freedom. You won’t just learn, you’ll know in your bones the direction and concrete steps to make a life not just a living. What this course contains is a set of metaphors designed to program your mind to pattern match your own life with a forward trajectory of creative possibilities.

I helped businesses express themselves through products for over 10 years before realizing, “wait a hot second, why don’t we, the so-called consumers, drive all this economic growth? Why don’t we help each other become the architects of the manufactured world we live in?” I’ve taken everything I’ve learned from business innovation and how to launch successful products and translated it actions individuals can take to move ideas from their heads, to prototypes, all the way through products in people’s lives.

PART I: THEORY

Chapter 0: What are we even doing
Chapter 1: Professional freedom
Chapter 3: The Squiggle (zig zag)

Part II: Practice

Chapter 4: Golden mirrors
Chapter 2: Receiving from the source
Chapter 3: Self engine optimization
Chapter 4: The double diamond
Chapter 5: Energy leeches
Chapter 6: Mountains and pebbles
Chapter 7: Play testing

Your Instructor

Benjamin Gadbaw

I’ve led R&D for new products that have created more than $100M in ARR for some of the world’s most well known fortune 100s (Amazon) and international corporations (Omron). I’ve mentored founders at incubators (Techstars) and invested in startups that grew in value from millions to billions (OpenDoor). I’ve taught design, research, and innovation at universities (Harvard, NYU, and Cornell). And I’ve been published in books on the topic including Becoming a Design Entrepreneur by Stephen Heller and Validating Product Ideas by Tomer Sharon. I hold an M.F.A. in Interaction Design from the School of Visual Arts in New York and a B.S. in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology from Emory University.