Why is time more valuable than cash after raising VC?

Adam Spector (00:03.66) Yeah. So, so Jason, was just, you know, mentioning how, one of the key like pet peeves of mine as maybe like, look, as a four time founder, investor in 200 plus company is the, the, if there's anything that I've learned, and also this happens to you start getting a little bit older in life is you start realizing like your time is so, so, so precious in, in how you allocate that time in where you decide to spend it in who you decide to spend it with is maybe the most important decision you will make in your entire life. So literally. I've decided to spend this hour with you right now, Jason. I'm never going to get this time back. So I hope it is worthwhile, but I'm never going to get this time back. Right. And so that has to be good investment of my time and hopefully a high ROI for either me personally or for my business or anything else. and if it's not, I should just say no and not do it. And what, what pisses me off is I come across a huge number of founders in my day to day work. Right. So I I'm the CEO and founder of chore. We do back ops operations for startups. We essentially take on all the annoying, almost like admin that you need to do to run your business. You have to do HR. You have to do compliance. You have to do finance. You have to do equity. You have to do that stuff, but it is not your core competency as a business. It is not why you exist. It is not why you started your company. if it is why you started your company, then you should be competing with me, which is cool. Like we should do that then. But like, if it's not, then why the heck are you spending any time in this? And so. what I was ranting about, you when we started to kick this off was I actually talked to a founder today, but it happens all the time. He's like, look, I'm a first time founder. I just feel like I need to understand and learn this stuff. And I was like, that is why you're going to fail. I mean, I kind of just called him out. I'm kind of just like, like, if you think that is a good use of your time in that you think you need to learn, like I use the example of, you know, love him or hate him. Like Elon Musk is an amazing entrepreneur. And I was like, do you think Elon Musk? is spending any time figuring out what payroll provider to use or how it should be run or if they negotiated a good deal. I think he would probably fire the head of HR if the head of HR came to them like from Tesla and was like, so Elon, which payroll provider should be used? He'd like, get out of my face. Like, I want to make sure I want to build a better battery for the car so our customers will be happy. I couldn't care less about what payroll provider we use so long as it is low cost and it gets our team paid on time. That's the rule. Go figure the rest out. Adam Spector (02:27.938) And this founder is like, no, just feel like I need to learn this stuff. I'm like, all right, cool. But like your superpower is AI. This guy is an AI founder. Your superpower is an AI and AI is changing so fast every day. And you think you need to figure out what payroll provider is better and how to set it up. I go on and on, but like to me that is a guaranteed way to fail if you believe that is a core thing that you should be focused on. Jason Kirby (02:50.056) Well, I think that's a great introduction to, uh, no, I loved it. And that's why I want to go straight in and I want to hit on this a little bit because there's, definitely, there are some things to know how they work as a founder, but do you have to be an expert at them? Do you have to spend hours doing the work to figure it out? No. And that, I think that's, I'd be curious, like with the founder, if this was a pattern or if it was like one particular thing, like payroll, yeah. Adam Spector (02:51.982) Sorry, sorry for the rant. Jason Kirby (03:19.016) like it's a commodity. There's no. Adam Spector (03:20.92) So I would actually even disagree with you a little bit on the statement you made there, Jason, which is like, I don't actually think you need to figure out a large majority of these things as a founder. I think as a founder, your only job is to set the course of your company. And that means you need to set expectations and goals. And so you say, my goal for my HR team, if we're gonna stay on that topic for a sec, my goal in the HR team is when people are, we hire people really well, we do great hiring, we find great people. We get them onboarded quickly. We make sure they get paid on time. And we don't spend too much money doing it, right? We don't have like the gold plated platinum plan. Those are the things that I would set up for my team. And then my job is to make sure I hire the experts, either internally or as outsource experts to go get that done. I don't care about the details. I don't need to know the details. It does not matter to me. And the same thing applies to your marketing team, your sales team, your product team. your engineering team, right? you know, same thing, like, actually, this founder, I even asked him, was like, well, who's running your engineering? He's like, well, it's my co-founder. like, so do you need to know the details? What are you doing? He's like, no, I trust him. I'm like, well, why don't you hire someone that you do trust for all your back office operations? And just let it get done. Like, just, you don't need to know the details. You just need to know it's happening. And that's what good founders do. They set the guidelines, the principles and the rules for how their business needs to be run. And then they get out of the way. They need to keep people accountable and hold them accountable and that's it. So I keep going but like I don't think you need to know the details. You just need to set the rules. Jason Kirby (04:56.05) So you have a unique insight because you've backed over 200 plus founders as an angel investor. And I'm curious to kind of see like what drew you to that conclusion. I imagine you're seeing certain behaviors across all your investments over a decade and looking at various different founders work out and create a unicorn versus those that don't. What would you say are some of the attributes that you've recognized across all those investments that kind of adhere to that thesis? Adam Spector (05:25.538) Yeah, absolutely. And in, I'll say I've learned, I've also had this honed in a little bit more because I also run something called the entrepreneurial excellence podcast. So I speak with a lot of these founders in the one answer. One word answer to your question is obsession. So the most successful founders are the ones who are utterly obsessed with the problem they are solving to the detriment of everything else. So, so going back to this founder, this example, he he's building an AI company, this founder, and yet. He's worrying about what payroll provider to use or what equity platform to use and how to set it up properly and all these things. That guy isn't obsessed. I'm sorry. He's not an obsessed founder. He will get $0 from using investment. I'm not at all interested. He's not, it's not worth my time. He's going to fail. Um, now he might come back to second time founder. He was like, look, I'm a first time founder. just feel I need to learn this stuff. Cool. Second time founder come back. This is why second time founders are more successful. They realize like there's a lot of things that they can just set, set off to the side. and not care about. It needs to be run. They need to set it up. need to make sure it's done. But they can just ignore it to the detriment or not the detriment to the focus and obsession of what they care about. So those are the most successful investments I've made. The founder is utterly obsessed with their product and what they're building and everything else is secondary. Jason Kirby (06:50.342) When it comes to seeing that obsession and looking at, you see the consistency in terms of first time founder versus second time founder with that particular trait or is it a kind of crapshooter? It's not necessarily as clear. Adam Spector (07:04.566) It's easy to say it's first time versus second time founder. It's actually not quite that clear though. It actually really comes down to... sounds bad, kind of the intelligence of the founder, and I think their ability to think from first principles. And so if they say to themselves, what do I care about? What is my superpower? And how do I enhance that every day? That is where they will be successful. And sometimes I come up, we have many customers and many investments of mine who are first time founders, and they're incredibly successful. Although I will say many of the unicorn investments that I've made, The large majority of those are the second time or multi-time founders, oddly. But we've met many customers who are very successful first time founders and they just realize like, this isn't work I should be doing. Jason Kirby (07:57.2) No, it's valid. And yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't say it's odd that your second time founders have better outcomes because they did have those learnings early on and they had to kind of grind and suck it up and kind of eat dirt for, for quite some time to figure it out and not have the outcome maybe that they were hoping for, or maybe have a decent outcome and then come out better, bigger next time. Adam Spector (08:13.678) But I will say what, what, what shocks me still a little bit is the proliferation of knowledge, right? Podcasts like your own. There's so much knowledge out there, right? This guy literally had a phone call with me, not saying like I'm someone so special, but like I'm gonna phone call. Sit there and ask me questions. If nothing else, but all right, cool. We're not a fit for you. We don't want to pay for your product. Awesome. Ask me a ton of questions or here's my advice. You're getting it for free. Here's my advice. Like don't use us, but like just don't. Don't waste your time on these things. And yet he just doesn't care. And this is where it shocked me. like there's so many things I don't know about. I will try to go get, learn about them. I'll use AI to go learn a little bit. And then I will try to go hire an expert and I can go tell that expert, here are the goals that I expect. Here's the outcome that I'm looking for. Can you hit it? If the expert says yes, we will pay them for that outcome. And if they don't hit it, we fire them. And it's very straightforward. is a clear business transaction. I don't need to hire someone to do it. It's a win-win. It's you know, I, it's funny, I keep going, but you get the point. Jason Kirby (09:13.928) Do you think there's anything from the standpoint of like abundance mindset versus scarcity mindset with those types of founders? Adam Spector (09:25.39) Great question. I'm a huge believer in to me that I don't think people, it's maybe a little bit different perspective in the world. But yes, that is as an early stage founder, you tend to be very cautious with your cash, understandably, right? You have very little cash, you're very frugal. It's like sort of the ramen founder, you're just like eating ramen every day, making no money, trying to like scrounge whatever money, dollars you can for everything. Cool. you should be super cheap and you probably should only be doing like you have your laptop, you have an internet connection, you have like enough money to pay for like AI credits or something, right? Like, cool, that's it. Go crush, get that done. The moment you raise money though, you need to switch from a scarcity mindset on cash to an abundance mindset on cash and then move from a scarcity mindset on or an abundance mindset on your time, right? So when you're a founder, two founders, No money, but you have lots of time and you're just working, you know, seven days a week, 90, 100 hours per week just to get it done early on. You have all the time in the world, essentially. The moment you take venture dollars, the moment that happens, you need to switch that mindset to say, I'm no longer, I don't have a scarcity of cash. I have a scarcity of time. And that is the big switch that most founders fail to make. The reason they Well, the reason that becomes really dangerous in that mindset is because you know this well. Uh, VCs give you cash and now you have a 12 to eight, you have an 18 month runway before you need to go raise your next round of funding on average. You have 18 months. Let's really say that's 12 months because you need to start raising money six months before you run out of cash. So if you have 12 months a year to go hit your key metrics before you can get more cash. No VC is ever going to say, congratulations, you are so freaking cheap that you saved an extra 40 or a hundred K or whatever, but you didn't hit any of your milestones. don't care. On the other hand, a VC will say, my God, you crushed your growth metrics and you hit those numbers. You blew past our expectations in 12 months. You will get unlimited amounts of cash and you can keep your business going. So many founders failed to make that switch mentally from, from once again, scarcity to cash abundance. Adam Spector (11:49.962) in time abundance to time scarcity. The moment you get funding, you are time scarce, which means you need to delegate and outsource everything that is not critical to your business. Jason Kirby (12:01.542) I think that's a valuable lesson for a lot of founders to realize because I see a lot fail to make that transition of like not ramping up the hiring, bringing on the talent and growing as fast as possible because that's the cost, that's the game you play when you take venture money. And a lot of founders don't take that into consideration. Adam Spector (12:21.934) The reason they don't, I like, I get it. Like, it's easy to feel like you're doing your job well by being really frugal. Like, it's sort of this easy thing to control is like how much money you're spending. It's much easier to control your cash outflows than whether you get new customers or your product may hit the next milestone. So it feels like you're doing your job well. But once again, no VC cares. They do not care that you optimize your cash spend so you can live super cheaply. Like, literally, If I make an investment in the founders like I'm go up to Hawaii and but I'm gonna crush and get you great and I'm gonna grow 10 acts in the next six months while living on the beach in Hawaii. I beg dude props if you figured out your solution to get it done and that is the way you're gonna go make it happen. I literally don't care. Go spend go live at the four seasons in Hawaii and get it but go crush dope. Jason Kirby (13:15.784) So let's talk about your background as you know, as you're an entrepreneur, obviously made tons of investments as an angel, but you've also built and sold companies. So let's give the audience a little bit of background on your entrepreneurial journey, building and scaling companies. Adam Spector (13:30.446) Yeah, I mean, like, the short version is I actually started from my first business back in high school. I and sort of do it and sell stuff to my friends in my high school, and then grew from there to have a sort of standard path. After that, I was sort of the good first son went to Vanderbilt undergrad went to grad school for JDMDA thought I was gonna be a lawyer like my dad realized really quickly had no interest in being a lawyer, got a got a job and strategy at kind of a cool midsize tech company in DC. And I remember the thinking I was like, you know, I was like the guy who's reading wired before it was like cool to do like I still get the paper version of wired. You know, this has probably been like, I know one of the rare people who gets it the paper version. I've been probably a subscriber probably one of their longest ever subscribers. But I was like, you know, DC is not the center of the tech space and Jason Kirby (14:14.856) still do it. Adam Spector (14:29.28) If you want to be at the top of your, your chosen profession, in, think you have the ego, essentially you have the ego to believe you could be one of the people at the top of your profession. you need to go put yourself in a place where you can be a part of that. And I learned that lesson, and by the way, this was an original idea. I sat down with a founder back by Sequoia, Sequoia back founder in DC, which is pretty rare at the time and it's still pretty rare. I was in Washington, DC, which is where I was from. sat down with him, got intro'd to him. And he said this, made, look, look, if you want to be in politics, stay in DC. If you want to go to finance, go to New York. If you want to be in media, go to LA. If you want to be in tech, go to the Bay Area. He's like, great, gonna go do that. Got a job working for a tech startup out here. And the rest is history. The company got acquired for 400 million. I made like some, I was like, made a bunch of money in my stock equity grant. I was like, oh my God, welcome to Silicon Valley. This is freaking amazing. This is what you expect. Jason Kirby (15:24.58) Hahaha Adam Spector (15:26.804) And a year after we did the acquisition, I my first company and now on number four, almost like four and half really, but like number four officially. Jason Kirby (15:36.934) Did you raise venture for any of your past companies? Adam Spector (15:38.828) Yeah, so the first three were all venture backed. I think at this point raised 30 40 million total in venture dollars, not quite at your level, but a decent amount. And then also, but my current company Chor, we actually decided to be bootstrapped. And so it's a bit of a different perspective on things in different take happy to go into why we did it this way and what we might do later on. it's been a different journey in different ways. Jason Kirby (16:07.868) Yeah, so let's dive into that, like launching Chor and choosing to bootstrap. What was the methodology behind that? Adam Spector (16:15.374) It was necessity. Invention is the mother of all necessities. Necessity is the mother of all invention, The thesis behind it was, so the short history essentially is so, 2020, right before the pandemic, I was a co-founder of a company called Abstract Ops. Our thesis, we were going to do abstract way operations so founders could get back to doing what they do great, which is building a company. Jason Kirby (16:22.247) You Adam Spector (16:44.738) You don't need to reinvent the wheel. By definition, reinventing the wheel is completely idiotic. So why would you reinvent the wheel of figuring out how to run your operations when it's already been solved? It's the same thing of why are you going to go reinvent bookkeeping or reinvent law as your own startup? You're just going to outsource it to experts who already know how to do it. No one had done this for operations. We raised about $10 million top tier VCs, all that other good stuff. In 2022, so two years later, we went to do our series A, we had to write metrics for it. 2022 was not a good year to fundraise. It was a bad time. Early 2022, on top of it, a lot of our revenue was services-based revenue. We had a services arm. Most startups are sort of the joke, right? It looks like it's tech, but behind the scenes, it's like all these people who are actually pressing all the buttons. We were more honest about it, frankly. And VCs were like, hey, it looks like you're services. Jason Kirby (17:34.49) it. Adam Spector (17:42.382) Uh, and, um, we made the really tough decision. said, look, if we want to save abstract ops, we need to cut off the services from it and make it much more of a tech based company. Um, and so we had the opportunity decision made to make that choice. And it was sort of like, Hey, look, I have this opportunity to go take the services base or a small little services based business we had split it off. Um, and see what that's like. I built three other companies that are venture back before that. Can I build a services company? What does this mean? What does this look like? Where does that go? I still very much believe in the vision, vision and mission of what we were trying to accomplish, which is that every single business in the world deserves world-class operation help because so many fail because they get that stuff wrong. Or it's just like this tax on their business. You shouldn't have to pay it. Just outsource it to people who can do a great job. And sure, there's money to it, but like, once again, your time is worth way more than your money. And so that was the genesis of what was Levee at the time we named it Levee to start with in sort of October 2022. And then two years later, we renamed ourselves to Chor. Jason Kirby (18:50.994) So basically, AbstractOps was the original company. so did that continue to go off on the tech side and then Leve was the service side? Adam Spector (18:52.43) specifically for access to our resources. Adam Spector (19:02.616) essentially, they actually pivoted. So they are now more state registrations and really focused on the state registration side of things. So for every founder, you need to register in every state where you have an employee. And then if you're doing business in that state, you also need to do some registration work. So really annoying, really convoluted state systems are of course not, not known for being technically advanced. So you need to handle that it just needs to be maintained and dealt with if you want to pay payroll in those states as an example. So they went off and became a company that does that. Jason Kirby (19:13.329) Hmm. Adam Spector (19:32.334) And we kept doing the service side of things. But to finish answering your previous question, you can't raise money for a services company in 2022. Now, the funny thing is the world has changed a lot in the past two years. And I probably have VC reach out once a month, at least, to put money into us. And it gets them even more energized when I say, we're not interested in taking cash. exactly. So yeah, so After Effects is still doing their thing. I'm still an equity holder in them. Jason Kirby (19:53.256) Yeah, no thanks. Adam Spector (20:01.55) We split off, it wasn't a spin out legally, we're a separate entity, but they essentially assigned all of their customers and revenue that they had with those customers to us. And we've been able to grow from a team of seven people to over 40 today. Jason Kirby (20:17.704) Nice. And kind of what's been the experience for you from bootstra, I'm sorry, venture-back lifestyle of hyperscale, know, hit these metrics to kind of more of a service business where it's about more linear growth. Adam Spector (20:33.442) It's to me been, it's different, but also not that different. Maybe because I've been in startup so long, I feel this constant sense of urgency to move faster and get things done. And that's no different than it would be where I at a venture backed startup. On the other hand, we're kind of building a new industry. Like this is the idea that you can outsource, right? So going back to this, where we started, this founder was like, I was like, I asked this founder, was like, Hey, look, Are you outsourcing your legal work to your lawyers? Like, do you have a lawyer right now? And he's like, yeah, of course. Like, why wouldn't, of course I have a lawyer. I was like, okay, you could do your own legal work. Why aren't you doing your own legal work if you think you need to be the expert on all these things? So to him, it was like obvious. Of course I'm going to outsource it to my lawyers. Of course I'm going to get a bookkeeper. But yet he thinks he needs to do his own operations. To me, that is where we have a lot of education to do. And unfortunately, education is slow and it's long. And therefore being a bootstrap company gives us the time to hit those metrics without feeling like I need to report to a board every quarter that's making that thing. Why haven't you accomplished this and really put on that pressure? Even though I still feel that pressure every day. Jason Kirby (21:48.688) And you also mentioned about going from levy to chore. And I want to talk about the rebrand because a lot of companies have to face this at some point. I've done it twice, I think two, three times, you know, in the past. And I'm just curious, like, you know, what was the instigator? What led you to, you know, have to go through that process and what was that process like? Adam Spector (22:01.614) Bye bye. Adam Spector (22:11.458) Yeah, we, we did trademark issue. So trademark issue came up. I thought and still think we would have won the trademark issue, but, you we were looking at spending, we'd already, we spent a bunch of money on legal fees to start fighting some of the early stuff, thought we'd get to a negotiated settlement. the other party was not interested sort of shockingly. I'm not still not sure to this day why they wanted to spend as much money on legal, legal as they did. but nevertheless, They were not interested. And so we got to kind of a point with my lawyers where sort of go no go, we we in for another are we in for like 20 to 100 K in legal fees? Or, you know, yes, we built for two years built a really good brand and brand name, and we're building this up. Or do I make the tough decision as the founder to say, No, we need to move on, and maybe make a change. And I like to think I should be proud of the fact that I said, you know what, like, I'm not willing to spend all that money on legal fees. It's money lost. Our name is good, but it was sort of meaningless. Can we come up with something better? And so once we made that decision, we did and moved quickly and got what I think is a really good new brand name out there. Like who's going to name their company Chor? The company that does all the admin for you, like does all the chores. So like that's. Jason Kirby (23:32.368) All the George, yeah, all the B2B George. Adam Spector (23:35.128) That's company and hope we never are forgotten and that helps us with this educational journey. So in a weird way, I think it's almost a blessing in disguise as frustrating and annoying as it was. It was a blessing in disguise. Jason Kirby (23:46.502) Yeah, no, it's sometimes it's trademark issues. Sometimes it's, you know, just missing the mark with the brand name in the beginning and having to reposition or having to open up. Like I've had some brands where they kind of pigeonhole themselves to a market based on their brand and have to kind of go with a broader, broader scope brand. that was my experience. And, So it's interesting to hear when it comes to like, all right, 2200K in legal cause versus, what was it? Rebrand package. Do you guys do it all in house? Do you guys bring it in like an outside agency or anything? Adam Spector (24:19.958) Yeah, I mean, to keep with the theme of outsource, essentially the most important parts of your business, except for the ones that are truly core. Of course we use outside experts. I'd be crazy not to. We're going to put all this money into something. I never want to do this ever again. So yeah, we use outside experts to make sure we checked our trademark. We use outside experts to help us with the design. We use outside expert to help us figure out brand name. We went through a huge branding and naming exercise. And I interviewed 20 different branding agencies. for it to make sure we found the right person to help go through this process with us. So yes, we did all of that. I think we did it for an incredibly low amount. think we spent overall all in, including the new domain, including the website. We maybe spent about 15,000 total. So very, very, I think compared to, I know of lots of other companies that spend 50 to 100K at least. So I feel really good about the price we got to get it done and the quality that we achieved with it. Like I get compliments all the time about our website and the brand and everything else. So I think we did a great job for a low price and we use experts to get it done. I mean, like we have an internal team that helped manage it and we set expectations for our vendors, but we didn't do a large majority of the work ourselves, except then the launch when we did the full brand relaunch, that was all our own team and we crushed it. I mean, don't know how many. number of impressions we got on social media, but it was a huge, huge number. And we did a lot of work there, and that was an internal task on that. Jason Kirby (25:50.344) No, it's good to know. And I appreciate you sharing that story and being candid there. with kind of your, yeah, we've talked a lot about kind of outsourcing ops. You talked about payroll as an example, but like, what are some of the things that you guys are actually taking over for, from like a founder perspective, having built multiple companies and just kind of having my playbook of the past and just running that playbook? Um, you know, what are the actual things that you guys are taking over from founders? Adam Spector (26:18.286) Yeah, good question. with Chor, at a high level, in a sense, you're almost hiring a fractional chief of staff. So most companies don't need a full-time chief of staff. And if you do, they're very expensive. A really good chief of staff is very expensive. And a good chief of staff won't want to do a lot of the day-to-day admin. They want to do strategic work, big picture stuff, which is great. That's what you should be paying them big dollars to go do, to really make massive differences for your business. We take on all the nitty gritty in between work. So everything HR, onboarding to offboarding teammates, all the small things, running your payroll, issues that might come up, you name it, run all of that. Compliance, all the things around compliance, so the state registration stuff. We use our partner abstract ops to go do the compliance, but we manage them. That's another vendor that needs to be managed. There's the back and forth that happens with that vendor about what to do. We build a full diligence folder for our customers. Jason Kirby (27:05.234) Yes. Adam Spector (27:15.502) I'm sure you know this yourself, Jason, like when you have to go find a file, you're like, what did it say? it in my Gmail? Is it in Google drive? Where is it stored? Oh, and then I'm doing a fundraise. And so now I need to like spend $20,000 my lawyers to build a diligence folder. No, just have it all ready to go from day one. Like we literally would build a full diligence folder, fully renamed every document listed. You can easily find it ready to go. Um, well, manage checking all of your mail, right? Like you probably have a stack of mail sitting next to you your house. Like, I don't want to open it right now. exactly. Jason Kirby (27:46.888) As I look at the mirror. Adam Spector (27:49.834) Exactly. So as a founder, I don't want to open any of this mail. Like literally, we have lots of mail that comes in as a business. My team opened it. We get it virtually. They open it, they look at it, they take action on it. I never even have to think about it. Like it doesn't even rise to my level to have a discussion in most cases. So it's compliance, finance, we're not bookkeepers and accountants, but we partner with them. And we're the main point of contact. also know this bookkeepers love to ping the CEO of like, Hey, what's this bill for? What's this charge for? Jason Kirby (28:19.75) Yeah, every month I get to go into the Excel sheet and it's like, are these 13 things that we can't figure out? Adam Spector (28:26.382) Right. What if you had someone who would do all that for you and be that point person and get that done? We also do accounts payable and accounts receivable. So those are things that once again, you need to pay your vendors, you need to charge bill your customers, bookkeepers don't do that work. Usually we do. The last one is equity. We will run your equity for you. So it is highway robbery. No offense to all the lawyers who are listening to this. It's highway robbery when a first year loss associate is your manager of your CARTA account. Like give me a break. mean, like I went to law school myself. I did not go to law school to do spreadsheets and manage like equity for startup. It's not legal work. Ninety- nine percent of equity is not legal work. Why are you paying a first year law associate 500 bucks an hour to hit their billables for the year? That's insane. So we do all that too. And it's also all tied together from my perspective. If you hired a new person, you got to them to payroll and you need to issue with them equity. So those two all are tied. Jason Kirby (29:28.626) You know, it's, great that you bring this up because I feel like I could see why founders maybe get hung up. I'm like, no, I want you to learn, or I feel like, it's not that much work. The problem is mind share and like, what's consuming your mind as a founder of that little thing. Like, yeah, I got to pay these people. I got to do that thing. And like, wait, we had that one billing issue and never really figured it out. I got to, got to go deal with that. And then it's like, just, but the problem is you never do it, but it's still in your mind. Adam Spector (29:58.19) and Jason Kirby (29:58.658) And it sure, it only really takes an hour if you're really going to like go and do that one task might only take an hour, but most founders procrastinate it because it's not core. It's not their priority, but it has to get done. And they know it doesn't take that much time, but it's just that might they probably spend four times as much time having it interrupt their day. Then they do actually getting it done or just handing it off and having it be someone else's priority where they don't even have to think about it. Adam Spector (30:24.238) I mean, it's the opportunity cost of your time. It's the context switching. then you have to make the, and then it's like what, Friday night you're gonna go spend time figuring out like this payroll issue when Gusto and Rippling support is closed. And now you have to be like, crap, I now need to do this Monday morning when they're open again. Like give me a break. What if I can just hit forward? I get this email from them saying something's wrong with your payroll. Hit forward to my team, take care of it. Let me know when it's done. Jason Kirby (30:53.761) And what size of companies do you see yourselves kind of like being a best use case for? Adam Spector (30:59.63) Yeah, so we are sort of ICP in a sense is anywhere from five to about 75 FTEs. So full-time equivalence all over the world. You know, most companies have to have raised or are making at least like 500K plus a year, right? mean, like if you're below that, you're probably still figuring out product market fit and you should spend your money and time on that. Great. Go do that. The moment that you start getting above that number and you have at least 500K in funding, your VCs are saying, hey, you need to move fast here. Start using us. Like that is the time to start using us. We will get you. mean, we have 60 plus testimonials on our website. I asked every single one of our customers, how much time do think we've saved you? Invariably, they say five to 10 hours a week. So 20 to 40 hours a month, which is about 500 hours a year. So that's three months extra of time. So as a founder, if I can get an extra, I don't know what, 20%, 30 % of time just to focus on building my product and get customers. Oh my God. Oh, and then on top of it, we're going to help you do some other stuff financially. We're going to get you 150K extra in cash that you never speaking of this founder I spoke to this morning. Again, he literally told me the bank he has his money and I won't call it out here. They make no interest in the bank account. I'm like, okay, do you know that? He doesn't know. And he doesn't have the time. He also doesn't have the time to move it over because if you move it, you got to switch where your payroll is getting taken out of it. So it's, it is a process to do it, which is why these banks make this money. Jason Kirby (32:10.568) Yeah. Jason Kirby (32:17.82) Yeah, it sucks. Adam Spector (32:24.686) But if you have a million dollars in a checking account that pays you zero interest, you're essentially effectively paying that bank 40K a year for their bank. Whereas you can move it to another bank that will pay you 4 % APY, that's 40K in free money to you as a business. But you might not know it or you might not want to deal with the hassle of it. I know. So what we try to tell people, we're going to give you extra hours a year. in 150k in cash to not have this be a problem in your mind. Some people get it. Some people want to be sovereign and waste their time and have their company fail. Jason Kirby (33:05.644) That was just like, you're off the cliff. If you don't do it, you're off the cliff. Adam Spector (33:08.268) You probably are off a cliff. It is what it is. You probably are. You don't need to use us. If you want to go hire a full-time person to go do it, you can do that too. I tend to believe the more people you have to hire and manage, the harder your life is. But hire someone or use us, just don't do it yourself. Life is too short. Jason Kirby (33:33.032) No, I've run across that myself. So I have a real estate portfolio that I run and run Thunder full time. I just like, I get texts in the middle of the night, like, oh, this cannot be dealing with these issues. So I finally got an assistant that just full time runs that business for me now. And it's just like the mind share out of my brain of just like, I get like a debrief, or maybe there's like this one thing of like, oh, should we do that or this? Okay, sure, it's a quick answer. But I didn't have to do any of the research, didn't have to call anyone or contact anyone. I'm like, oh, thank God. And especially, know, as a father with a three-year-old and a new child on the way, probably in the next 48 hours. I was like, oh, my wife could call me at any moment. Adam Spector (34:15.822) Congratulations. Jason Kirby (34:23.782) But yeah, the tie and mask bag really kind of nails it. And think that's something that a lot of founders don't realize. And I think you also mentioned you have kids, correct? Adam Spector (34:32.322) Yeah, I have two kids. have a three-year-old and a six-year-old. Jason Kirby (34:36.732) So, you you get the importance of time and availability and being able to not be up at nine o'clock or, know, like on a Friday night doing ops. Adam Spector (34:47.416) Correct. mean, what would I rather like this is is yes, mean founders anybody really but but where and how you spend your time is so critical. And so like, look, I could be doing ops work, right, you know, at 7pm on a Friday or spending time with my kids. I will not remember the ops work that I did that Friday night. I might remember the time I spent with my kids and I know they will really remember it. And so that is hugely valuable to me. But also it means that when I can go do work. I'm to go focus in on the things where I can make a massive difference and that my future teammates, employees, and if we ever go raise money, my future investors will care about that, man, you did some really cool work, Adam, to go hit these key numbers and key metrics or being on this podcast. Well, I'm able to be on this podcast because I have other people who helping me out with my business right now. If I didn't and I had to run every single aspect myself, I wouldn't have time to go help. Yeah, first of all, shoot myself, but like second of all, I wouldn't have time for it. So it is a critical thing to figure out how and where you spend your time in being really thoughtful about those decisions. Jason Kirby (36:00.332) And you, know, one, you're running chore, but you're also prolific investor. I'm curious, like walk us through kind of how you split up your time when it comes to analyzing deal flow and say, you know, running chore and things of that sort, like, then ultimately like picking companies to back. Like, how do you kind of balance it? Adam Spector (36:21.986) So it's a funny question since that I had a call earlier today, I'm going to a conference in Nashville for Vanderbilt where I went to undergrad. And so the question sparked an idea in my mind, which is like, I actually kind of have always been this way where I want to double dip on things. And what I mean by that is basically I want to get sort of a two for one special always. It always feels good to do that. In college I did that, I did two majors and a minor when I graduated. I two majors and a minor. have people like your spray choice, my God, wow, that's impressive. No, it wasn't. I just took all the courses that gave me double credit for everything. like, Mike, got every course, it gave me credit for one major and another at the same time. And I was really thoughtful about doing that. I mean, I was able to pull it off and not have to work any harder. I don't think maybe maybe other people thought so, but I don't think a lot harder than anyone else. And it's sort of the same thing that I do with with my life and work now. So for investing, like, chore, we work with early stage startups. That means I get to talk to all these startups every day. And guess what? I'm talking to them not about whether they should actually invest in them, but what their business is doing. How good are they doing? What are they raising next? What are they excited about? It's not a pitch. It's a conversation between two founders. So that's awesome. So then I can already make a switch. So once I'm using the same guy as an example from earlier today, like there's no chance in hell I'd ever give him any money. Um, like it wasn't a pitch either, right? He wasn't trying to pitch me, but like Jason Kirby (37:47.513) this episode. Adam Spector (37:48.718) Yeah, zero chance. He may or may not. I hope he does. I hope he'll learn from it. We left on a good note, of course, and being a little bit too harsh, but he should. That's a lot of how I make my investing decisions, but I'm also able to do both. And even the same thing with family stuff. I pay extra and have a smaller house to live in the middle of San Francisco. Guess what? That means I don't have a commute. If I need to go to meeting, Most of my in-person meetings are a few blocks away from my house walking. or I get on my bike to go to have those meetings. I don't need to get on an airplane very often because 99 % of founders ended up making it to San Francisco at some point. so I don't need to travel. So I've done a lot of things to optimize how I, how I can spend my life and make sure the people and the things that matter the most are getting the large majority of my focus to the detriment of other things. Right? I don't have a lot of hobbies. I don't have a lot of friends that I spend a lot of time with right now. So there are trade-offs, absolutely. Jason Kirby (38:51.176) I think that's warranted. think anyone that's high performing, there's always the things that kind of get left behind are not as much of a priority, but you you get to pick your lane. Like for me, hobbies, not really, you know, it works the hobby. My family's a hobby. Those things bring me joy and I love spending time on those two things more than anything. So I don't think it's a loss, but you know, from other people or maybe society's perception of what a person should or should not do, maybe, but. Adam Spector (39:11.734) Exactly. Jason Kirby (39:20.616) That's the beauty of today's society. You kind of get to do whatever you want and chart your own path. So, yeah, I was looking you up and saw also you're involved with the autopilot fund. So I'm seeing a general theme of efficiency and operations and things of that sort. And so what's that experience like for you, not just making your own individual investments, but also participating in a fund? Adam Spector (39:25.518) correct. Adam Spector (39:45.56) Yeah, so the autopilot fund is actually my third fund. The other ones are not really publicized or public, but it's my third fund. And the idea of course, with that is like, Hey, like we want to have dry powder to invest in the best companies. And actually put that together with my former co-founder. So when we split up abstract ops, we both like to do investing. We both enjoyed doing it. And it was a tough time. Like, don't get me wrong. Like we, we had a sort of a co-founder split. Like it's a tough discussion to say like, we need to split the company up. We need kind of shut down a lot of the money we're spending. need to fire a lot of people and make a bunch of changes. Like that is a tough decision. But to his credit, he and I, I like to think both really played long-term games. And so we had already had a fund at that point and we wanted to keep it going. And so we did, it was the autopilot fund. And so we do investments together, mostly focused on sort of underlying data sets or for AI, but we, lot of general things too. And it's really like, does a company meet our standards in what we're looking for? Is the founder targeting market that makes sense? Do they have the right level of energy for what they're focused on? Do they have an obsession for why they're focused on it? And those are the sorts of things that get us excited and move the needle. And we like to think we'll have great returns for our LPs. Jason Kirby (41:07.474) So I was gonna ask, is it just you and your partner or do you guys raise your outside money from LPs and you have that kind of fiduciary responsibility to those LPs as well? Adam Spector (41:16.102) Yes, we have and we do. that brings its own level of responsibility, but it's good in its own way. I mean, I said, think for them, and this is where I started. When I started investing, was, I started my first investments for 2011. So that's a year after I moved to San Francisco. And the lesson learned was basically there are so many opportunities out here and so many people don't have access to them. And so essentially I could arbitrage the fact that like I was going to events ever. I didn't have kids. So I would go to events like every single night and meet people and shake hands and get to know founders. And you could sit down with people and have a coffee with them in a one-on-one conversation and say, why are you building what you're building? What excites you? It may be an example of that briefly of this obsession. One of my better investments is a bunch we can talk about, but one company called Human Interest. So they're a 401k company. Human Interest, I sat down with Roger Lee, the founder, at a coffee shop, and he was telling me about his idea. We met at some other startup event. We sat down for coffee. And he was like, yeah, I took the, I don't know if it's the Series 7 or whatever, but it's some major finance test you need to take to be registered to sell 401Ks, essentially, or to be a 401K broker. And you have to do it in every state that you want to offer your product. And he was like, Oh yeah, I've taken seven, like seven different ones in several different states I passed. And I was like, Oh my God, like that's these tests are tests that people fail a lot of the time. You're also running another company at this point. I think he maybe still not fully left his other company and you've taken this test to pass it and are building this new company and just got into YC. Talk about obsession. Jason Kirby (43:00.316) Yeah. That's clear. What are some of the other companies that you're kind of proud of in terms of your investment track record and kind of what made them stand out in those early days? Adam Spector (43:11.086) Yeah, I mean, one interesting one is company called Diamond Foundry. They're doing some really cool stuff. They were kind of the first synthetic diamond company out there, and are building a ton of really cool stuff even today. Not as publicly well publicly known, but I their founder was someone who had built a solar company got killed by the Chinese, because Chinese kind of flooded the market with solar. But he really knew his stuff was really smart. was an incredible, incredible just like founder and focus and he had a really clear vision. for where some of this stuff could go. And it was very exciting. So that's an example. Another one's better up. Alexi, the founder, couldn't raise. mean, like, we were, I think, like, the second check-in. And to me, though, Alexi was so focused. And even more important, the idea was really clear to me. Right? When someone says to you, there's executive coaching for executives, why isn't there coaching for everyone else? Like, if executives think that coaching is worthwhile for them, wouldn't it be worthwhile for everyone else? Yeah, like in retrospect, of course, it seems obvious there's lots of companies that do this now. But at the time, it was really revolutionary. And they had to figure out how to make that viable from an expense perspective for everyone else. There's a company called Even Up, a legal company. Checker is another one, background checks. On and on and on. Jason Kirby (44:15.43) Yeah. Adam Spector (44:33.666) that just made sense at the time, even if they seemed kind of crazy to most people. To me, was like, yeah, this is a no-brainer and pretty obvious. Jason Kirby (44:43.186) It's lot of fun, especially being kind of the thick of it out in San Francisco and kind of feeding off that energy and getting access to those opportunities. If that's the place you want to be and those are the opportunities you want to create for yourself, like San Francisco, it sounds like it's back. Actually, yeah, let's ask. How is San Francisco right now? Is the news covering it appropriately? Adam Spector (45:03.982) No, mean, the news is meant to shock everyone and get get interest, right? The news, the news is not actually to tell you the facts. The news is to tell you what will get you to watch their more their TV programming and watch advertising. I think San Francisco, look, they're parts of Francisco that are challenged. They've always been challenged. They maybe always will be. I hope not, but maybe always will be challenged. That is unfortunate. That is in some touristy areas. So people see it a lot. But guess what? The neighborhoods are crushing it. They're a ton of fun. The food's amazing. This is the center of AI, which, depending on your perspective on things, AI is the future on almost every single product vertical out there. It is. So if that's true, then wouldn't you rather be around? I I go walking in my neighborhood, and you walk by all these people having walking meetings. And I'm pretty sure almost all of them are from major AI companies. That's all happening. Jason Kirby (45:43.08) Hard to disagree with that statement, I feel. Adam Spector (45:59.34) And it's all here. And then you add on top just for my own biases. Like I've been here 15 years, but like the weather's perfect in my mind. I bike everywhere. I walk everywhere. I have great food. yeah, it's expensive, but that's cause a lot of people want to be here because it's, can bike to the beach. I can drive to the mountains. I can go up to wine country and I, I go on and on, but, it's, to me, a wonderful place to be. feel really privileged and lucky that I'm able to. be a member of this community. Jason Kirby (46:31.464) It's great to finally hear some positive words about San Francisco. Unfortunately, every time I was going really like heavily in like 2018 to 2020, it was, it was not great because I was going to the tourist. I was like always in the thick of the tourist areas. I was like, woof. Yeah. Adam Spector (46:42.786) Yeah. Correct. That's the problem. Don't don't say the Tenderloin kind of probably avoid Union Square a little bit, which is close to the Tenderloin. That sort of area where a lot of the hotels are, unfortunately, it's it's been an issue, but it's been an issue for 30, 40, 50 years. And yeah, but it's it's very shocking. When you come here and you see that in every city has places like that. They just are usually in the outskirts of the city. For historical reasons, it's just in the middle of San Francisco. Jason Kirby (46:50.61) Yeah, that's where I was at with him. Yeah, exactly. Jason Kirby (46:57.192) Yeah, it's been a long time, yeah. Adam Spector (47:12.616) and it gives San Francisco a bad name because people, gets put in people's faces and they're not used to it. So, correct. And I don't live near it. I don't see it. And you kind of get used to it, unfortunately. Jason Kirby (47:20.704) Yeah, LA and San Diego are not far off. Yeah, very similar, but, Jason Kirby (47:30.906) No, that's Adam, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show and just talking about how founders should be prioritizing their time. And I appreciate you sharing more about chore for founders that might be interested in chore, just your background. What would be the best way for people to learn more? Adam Spector (47:46.03) Yeah, go to higher tour.com to reach out, learn more about what we're building. Feel free to follow me or get in touch on LinkedIn. I think it's Adam Spector too. LinkedIn, but you'll find me to Adam Spector on LinkedIn. Pretty prolific out there. So easy to find and follow some of the content. We try to produce really high quality stuff to help founders be more successful since in the end, if every founder can be a success, like a rising tide does lift all boats in the more successful startups in the world. the more successful the entire world will be, which is a win for all of us. Jason Kirby (48:19.048) I agree and actually I wanna end with one more question. Adam Spector (48:22.414) Please. Jason Kirby (48:24.392) If someone's going to try to get you to take a look at their deck and try to win you over in terms of investment, how would they get your attention? Adam Spector (48:32.066) Hmm. I do sometimes appreciate really well crafted intro emails, but those are tough because I get a lot of emails, so I don't always see them. I think probably the way to get my attention is be willing to have a conversation with one of my teammates first because now a lot of the stuff that comes in cold outbound, I send it over to one of my teammates and you have to be super, super open to that. So blow away my partner and teammates about why you think we should chat. And if you blow them away, you're good at pitching and good at storytelling, which is a critical skill for founders, then yeah, I look forward to having a chat with you. Even better, if you want to become a customer, I am open to all of my customers to always chat. are always, I'm a resource for all of my customers. So if you really want to have a longer chat with me, become a customer. I'll talk to you all day long. Jason Kirby (49:10.065) Ha ha ha. Jason Kirby (49:16.296) Great great lead in Jason Kirby (49:21.89) And thanks so much for being on the show. I look forward to getting this out to our audience. Adam Spector (49:25.474) My pleasure, Jason. Thanks for having me.