EP 218: Don't Hire

Adam Spector’s path has never been conventional, from leaving DC for boarding school to pivoting from law school into tech and startups. Now Founder & CEO of Chore, he shares how building companies, learning from early startup failures, and obsessing over AI shaped his belief that founders should rethink hiring entirely. His message is simple: don’t hire unless you absolutely have to.

Connect with host James Mackey on LinkedIn!

Intro (00:00)

Background (00:46)

Career (13:08)

TA (20:49)

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Transcript

Welcome And Why In-Person Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey, welcome to the show, everyone. Today we have Adam Spector with us. Adam is currently running uh Chor, founder and CEO. So, Adam, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

James, it's definitely a pleasure. Great to see you again.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Yeah, it's great. Great to see you. It was actually, it was nice. We got to um everybody tuning in, we were able to meet in person to go through the prep conversation. So that was pretty cool. We don't always don't always get to do that.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Yeah, no, it's rare and arguably um those sorts of in-person meetings are the most important ones we're all gonna have going forward in the world of AI. So um, I'm glad we were able to do it. And let's do it again when you either make it out to San Francisco, which is where I live, or if I make it when not if, but when I make it back to DC.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Yeah, uh definitely. If I remember correctly, you're from the DC area, right?

SPEAKER_00 0:44

I am, born and raised just outside in in a little place called Trevy Chase, Maryland.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Yeah, yeah. Were you there like throughout your entire childhood or did you Yeah, I was really lucky.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Um, my parents were able to create a pretty stable place for us, and my my brother and myself to grow up. Uh grew up in the same house, I guess, from almost the day I was born, maybe not quite that early, but maybe I was like a few years old. But from what I remember from my whole life, uh up through gosh, my parents sold that house sometime after I graduated college. So um for my whole life.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Yeah, yeah. What were you like as a kid?

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Um, I I think I like that question. Uh I I I bet I was a com I was kind of a combination of nerdy and dorky and kind of cool. So like it was a weird combo of like I was friends with all the cool kids who were doing all the partying and fun stuff, and I'd

Growing Up Curious And Reading Everything

SPEAKER_00 1:30

get invited to the parties and everything else. But I would also be the kid who would like be playing video games and reading a ton in those sorts of pizzas. So it was a sort of, I think a pretty good combo. I mean, I'd I I'm certainly happy with it. I don't, I don't mind where I ended up. Um, and I I never felt like anything was problematic.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

That's good. That's good. Yeah, you uh you're a big reader, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:51

I am. I I read a ton. Uh I track a large majority of pretty much everything I read and have for the past, I don't know, probably 20 years. Um, everything, not every article, but like every article I find interesting, I save it at the article. Um, I read on a Kindles, and I've been doing that literally since like the Kindle one almost. Um, and so like all my highlights and notes from all my books are stored, which by the way makes for a great fodder for AI to help understand yourself to some extent. But like, yeah, I know, reading a ton um on a wide variety of topics. Although I've actually did an analysis on this, and a lot of my topics are over the past three years to become more and more AI related.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Um not shocking to some extent, but it's like everybody's uh seems like everybody's obsession currently, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Correct, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

And we'll get more into that. It's interesting. We were, you know, during our prep, and then earlier before we hit record, we were talking through maybe some of the more influential uh chapters uh growing up for you that really shaped who you are today. And one of the first things you brought up is uh going to boarding school and high school. And I'm just curious to get a sense for how that possibly shaped the person you've become.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Yeah, look, I so I I was going to the same school in DC for had gone there for almost 10 years, um, from pre-kind kindergarten all the way through eighth grade. Um, and I had met some people who were going to boarding school. It was not a thing in DC. It probably still isn't a thing in DC, whereas in the Northeast, it's like a big lot of kids go to boarding school. Um, and my parents were like, hey, these schools are amazing. Yeah, you should think about going. And so we applied. Um, I only applied to four schools and got into two out of the four, and ended up being my parents like, look, you need to go for a year. It's an amazing opportunity. The school's amazing. And these in some of these boarding schools, for those who don't know, people

Boarding School And Learning Independence

SPEAKER_00 3:36

think of boarding school as like a remedial place that kids go because they're really bad or something. This is not that sort of boarding school. This is this school is one of the, it's called the Lawrenceville School. It's one of the top 10, probably high schools in the country. And my parents like, look, the the facilities they have, the resources they have, the opportunity for you is really big. You should go. Um, and and I remember like first being excited, and then I actually got in and realized, oh my God, I might leave all my friends who I'd been friends with for 10 years at that point. And I went and I'm so glad I went. In the end, what it did is it gave me a much wider perspective and lens on the world because the kids at Lawrenceville were from all over the world. Whereas the kids I was going to school with in DC were just from the DC area. Um in were pretty similar to me, right? The kids in DC were all pretty similar to me, versus the kids from at Lawrenceville were really from everywhere. And so that changed my perspective in a big way. I was lucky enough I was able to keep kind of my DC connects. I would come home for parties and do all that stuff. I'd but I would, but I'm a high school kid, right? I'm taking the train from basically Princeton slash like Trenton, New Jersey area down to DC to Union Station, and then taking the subway home to Chevy Chase, like by myself. That's kind of a big deal as like a 16-year-old to be doing that. And my parents, like, yeah, like if you want to come home, you can come home and just gotta figure it out and get it done. And and that all led to I think me having a higher level of certainly independence, but also being much more ready for college. Like most kids go to college and like I've never lived away from home in my life. And your parents drop you off and they're like, peace, I'm out. My my dad literally did that. He literally was like, dropped me off, he uh helped me unpack and he was like, I gotta go. My flights in a few in an hour, and took that rental car, drove right back to the airport and left. He's like, This is easy for you though, you've done this before. And he's right. I was like, Cool, just like another year of high school.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Oh, that's awesome. And you ended up going to uh Vanderbilt, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:24

I did, yeah, loved it. Early applied early decision. Um, it was a really good school at the time, but not very sexy for people in the Northeast. Um, and I was just, I don't know, I guess I've always been a little bit of a mildly contrarian thinker. But I was like, this school is great. Like it's what everything I wanted. There's a reason I applied early, like location is in the city, but had its own little campus. The education was great, um, great athletics, had like all the different pieces that I was like, this is the dope place to go. So I applied early. Lucky enough I got in. Um, but I mean, like, I was student body president when I was there, like all the other things, and it really just it gave me all the opportunities um to do more. So it was great.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

Yeah, you uh so you had double major and a minor. You studied uh philosophy.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

Minor

College Choices Then Law And MBA

SPEAKER_00 6:08

philosophy, minor, minor philosophy.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

So I dabble, I dabble in things when I can tell you some philosophical argument that I don't know that much about anymore.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Okay, got it. Yeah, that's cool. I love uh I love philosophy. So do you still read any philosophy or I don't really.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

I every once in a while I do, but but not a ton, um, unfortunately. I probably should get back into it. It's one of those things. Like when I have more time, I will do this.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. And so that you do did you you also went to law school, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:36

I did. I after so after I finished Bainer Belt. Um, actually, funny, I got an opportunity to stay in Nashville, and like there's some things that could have been really cool for me to do there. But I was like, I'm a good son, my dad's a lawyer, I'm gonna follow in his footsteps, the usual sort of thing. So follow in his footsteps. I went to law school. And I remember my dad saying, he's like, hey, look, when you get a law degree, you'll never be without a job. And so I give it felt like the right, smart thing to do. Um, but I wasn't that into law. Uh, and so I also got my MBA at the same time. So did a JD MBA combined. Um, and when I finished, I took the bar. I managed all four years of that. So combined, you know, combined degree was four years. If I did it separately, it would have been five. Um, and when I graduated, I took the Maryland bar, thankfully passed it and went straight into business actually. So I got a this is literally got a job um at a mid-sized sort of publicly traded tech company in the DC area right before the 2008 crash. And I got really lucky. I had a bunch of friends who didn't get jobs and it I think it kind of messed up their careers.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Yeah. Yeah. When did you decide you want to get into tech? Right. Because I know you so you start off as an attorney, but I wasn't practicing, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:45

So the department I went to law school because I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Right. You started like you said, so you thought you were gonna be an attorney, but during that time, had you already sort of decided, were you also considering getting into tech, or what was your Yeah, no, 100%.

SPEAKER_00 7:56

I mean, like I was a kid, like with my grandfather bought us the first computer I ever had. It was like I think a like HP 486 computer with the dial-up modem, like 288 baud dial-up modem. And we were, you know, getting online and and going on AOL and all these other things, and like very cool. And then I was that guy at boarding school reading Wired magazine all the time. I still get Wired Magazine as a paper copy to my house. I'm probably like the longest ever subscriber to it, but it's the only paper magazine I get nowadays. Um, but uh, but but yeah, I'd always wanted to be in tech, like just reading about those things. And like, you know, I graduate college and man, I kind of regret this. Like Vanderbilt was one of the first 20 schools to get Facebook. My senior year of my senior year of college. It was 2004, which kind of dates me, I suppose, but like senior year of college, um got got Facebook, and I remember reading about it. Like, this is like a bunch of like kids who dropped out of Harvard and rented a house in Silicon Valley and just started building this thing. Like, I know Mark Zuckerberg started it, of course, at Harvard, but like they moved to Silicon Valley and started going. And like I should have, I remember thinking at the time like I should like screw law school. I should just go out to Silicon Valley and get started. And I didn't, and I kind of regret that a little bit. Like, no, I don't have real regrets, I don't really believe in regrets, speaking of philosophical philosophy, but like, but I sort of regret that a little bit. Like, God, why wasn't I just gung-ho enough and just like what's the worst that could happen if I don't go to law school? I'd go back to law school. I should have just gone out of Silicon Valley and like just sat in front of their front porch and be like, I will do whatever you need me to do. Well, your building's freaking awesome. Let me get started. I've done fine, but like that would have been a different trajectory.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

All right. So when did you uh and so you decided uh you had a mentor, right? That gave you some advice that ultimately that's how you decided to move to uh to SF. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 9:46

Yes, meant mentor is a long strong term, but um when I when I was so after grad school, uh I you know this is after grad school, I um was uh dating someone seriously. She engaged at the time, um, and we uh called it off and I was working at this mid-sized tech company. Um and I had always I would have moved out to San Francisco right off the bat, except she was someone who was from the DC area, and I was from the DC area, so of course it made sense. We had family there to like move back to the DC area. But once we called things off, I was like, why am I still here? Like I've always wanted to be in Silicon Valley. That is the the people that I sort of worship, like most people worship like celebrities. Like, oh, I see Beyonce or or Taylor Swift or whatever, um,

The Push To Move To Silicon Valley

SPEAKER_00 10:33

and they would know who they are. I actually would know who Taylor Swift and Beyonce were, but like most people I really wouldn't. Like, truthfully, if I met most celebrities, but like I don't, you're just a random person. My celebrities were like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or like Jeff Bezos. Um, like truly, like my my goal was to go work at Microsoft. Like, I want to go work at Microsoft because I thought Microsoft and like Bill Gates were like the jam, which once again chose like how Dorky and Nerdia was, but like those companies are changing the world. I want to go there. Um, so anyways, called it off. Uh, and I wanted the I took the conversation with this sort of mentor, and I was like, he was like, Look, you have to make a choice in life. Like you you who you surround yourself with are the what you become to it to a large extent. Um, and this by the way, this this guy was he was a Sequoia-backed, so top-tier venture capital fund, sequoia-backed funder, founder, CEO, based in DC. Um, and he literally was like, Look, you if you want to be in tech, or sorry, if you want to be in politics, stay in DC. If you want to be in finance, go up to New York. If you want to be in media, go to LA. And if you want to be in tech, like go to San Francisco. And the reason is pretty simple. And I think this advice, by the way, still holds for most companies. And I know no offense to you being James, you know, you being in the DC area, but the the simple fact is like, yes, you can build amazing technology anywhere, right? All you need is a laptop and an internet connection, and you can be anywhere on the planet Earth and build great stuff. However, there's something to be said for the community that you surround yourself with, the questions they're asking, the discussions they're having, and essentially just even listening in, the osmosis effect of being part of that. And that's what he meant by going to San Francisco, right? If you want to be one of the best in the world, you need to compete with the best and be surrounded by the best and see what they're doing. And so I was like, Yeah, like this is already always something I wanted to do. So he kind of gave me permission. And I applied to some jobs, got flown out here by a company. Uh, they hired me literally, they made me an offer. They were like, by the time I so they flew me back, I was boarding the plane at San Francisco Airport, SFO International, um, to fly back to DC. And they were like, you will have an offer in your inbox by the time you land, right? We didn't have internet on the airplane at the time. We'll have what your offer in your inbox by the time you land. Offer was there. I don't even know if I negotiated it. And they're like, Can you be here next week to start? And I was like, I gotta give notice. Like, I want to drive across country. Like, that was one of my bucket list items, which I, by the way, have still never done, which is embarrassing. But like, they're like, We need you out here right now. I'm like, Well, welcome to Silicon Valley. Heck yeah. I'm flew out, found an apartment in like a day, went down to start my job.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

That's awesome. What company was this?

SPEAKER_00 13:12

It was called Clearwell Systems. So Clearwell, uh, they did like uh e-discovery. So helping, so it's kind of good with my legal background, helping companies um uh basically read through massive amounts of documents for lawsuits and things like that. And like I was in the business development teams, like partnership team. So I would go across the country and like go meet with these, there were these small companies that basically did this e-discovery work for law firms. And we would go meet with these companies, train them on how to use our software and get them encouraged and excited. So I like go in and like train them, get to know their teams, push them, all that other stuff. Um, it was fun and it was a great intro to things. And and then the company, by the way, got acquired after 18 months of me being there. Not not directly because of me, maybe indirectly in a small teeny part, but like they got acquired for 400 million. And I was like, heck yeah, like welcome to Silicon Valley. Like, I got paid a bunch of money for my equity. It was awesome.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

Yeah, that's awesome. And you so you stayed on post-acquisition, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:10

I did, yeah. I did stay on for about a year. So um kind of quasi golden handcuffs, needed to stay on for a year. Cool. Um, and left basically right at my year mark and started my first startup.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

What was your first startup?

SPEAKER_00 14:22

So we were doing uh it was called Virtue, and we were doing uh Virtue.us, so we were Virtuous. Um was the our our naming convention. Um, but the idea like this is also goes out so crazy when you're out in certain location. It was we were trying to be the trust layer for all the companies building what was called the collaborative sharing community, basically, where it was like, hey, like I want to I need a drill, I can share it with my neighbor, or and then it became it morphed into Uber and Lyft and all those companies. Because you remember, think back when people first started getting in someone's random car for Lyft, or really Lyft

First Startup Failure And The Okta Lesson

SPEAKER_00 15:03

started the idea, um, or going to rent out someone's extra bedroom for Airbnb. That scared a lot of people. Like it was scary. I still remember a conversation I had with my friend who lives in Iowa, and she was like, There's no chance I'm getting in some random stranger's car. And I was like, You did it all the time with a cab. It's some random stranger's car. Like, yeah, they're theoretically like governed by the cab company, but what do you really know? And of course, now we're getting in, now in San Francisco, we're getting in, you know, Waymo's that aren't driven by anybody. Um, but like the but so I saw this ride thing, this whole community rising up, and I was like, I'm gonna do a whole trust verification layer for this. Like, I literally got a ride across the city, not as an Uber ride, but like because I was at a party with him from the CEO, not Travis Klanick, but the CEO of Uber, who was before Travis kind of came back to become CEO. We were just at a party and he's like, Oh, I live on the other side of the city. I was like, I do too. So we got a ride, we rode together on that. And like, those are those weird connections that just happened in San Francisco.

SPEAKER_01 15:55

Yeah, that's awesome. So, what uh what ended up happening to your first company?

SPEAKER_00 16:00

Failed. Um shut down, yeah, shut down, failed. What happened? Um the the what happened is kind of interesting. Um, so we turns out people weren't really willing to pay to verify other people, at least not the way we were we were doing it. Um, I do think if we built it overseas, so because in the US you have social security numbers and you have other ways of like doing background checks, um, it wasn't as valuable in the US. Um, overseas, we might have been able to build a really cool company, but um, we're American, so we didn't really know that. Uh, and so what we did is we tried to pivot into actually background checks. And so moving away from like using social, we were using social data to gather, like where did you go to college? Are you verified with your college? Are you verified with your job trying to use that data? Um, and we pivoted into background checks, but it was a little bit too little, too late. So we had conversations with some folks to acquire us. Uh, one of them actually, the big lesson, the big mistake we made actually was we we had conversations with Okta to acquire us. And it was, it would have been like a aqua hire, right? It wasn't gonna be anything super special. The mistake we made, and this is where I was just not too junior and didn't have good advisors in a sense, is like we should have said yes to that deal. It would have screwed over over our investors, but we should we should have said yes. Um, the reason we should have said yes is because one, we didn't know where Okta was gonna go. And Okta's turned out to be a fantastic company, and we would have had really early equity. Like literally, I'm sitting down with the CEO of Okta for lunch to talk through the acquisition. Like that's how small they were at the time, right? And like they were gonna give us like good jobs with good equity, all that stuff. We should have said yes. One, because it would have been great from an equity financial standpoint, but who wouldn't who knew? Of course, you didn't really know that. Two, what people don't get is you want to say you had an acquisition. It would have been great for me to say, yeah, we got acquired by Okta. Like that would have been fucking huge. No one needs to know that I if I'd really hated it, I could have left the next day. Got acquired, start one day at work there, and then quit the next day. Could have done that. Um, and you still can say, Hey, yeah, we got acquired by Okta. That would have been awesome. We didn't, though, because we were like, uh, is that a cool company? Do we want to work there? Like, if we were applying for normal jobs, would that be our top choice? And we didn't know anything about it. And we didn't, so we said no. Um, and uh it was a failure on our part. So we shut the company down, gave money back to investors. So the right thing to do for investors, gave money back to them, and that was it.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

What'd you uh what would you say is like the top takeaway, other than the acquisition piece, which in you did that?

SPEAKER_00 18:21

Huge takeaway. The other top takeaway was um actually that you never know where things lead. So what I mean by that is because we had sort of pivoted into this background check and we were doing background checks, um, we had actually considered building a um automated background check system because the current systems currently sucked at the time. And we were literally doing it manually for custom. We were running with we had customers paying us revenue to do this work for them because it was so annoying. We thought about building an API for that and we just kind of ran out of steam to make that happen. Um, we should have fought through a little bit more. The reason we should have fought through is because about six months later, a company that people might have heard of called Checker came out. Checker does background checks, and Checker background checks has become, I don't know, they're probably worth many billions of dollars today. We were there before them, had the right idea, we're doing it. We some might not have been successful, but we were there before them. So, one push through if you have an idea that's working and people are actually paying you money for, like, don't give that up. Like, that is gold when people are willing, like the first idea that we had, people weren't giving us money for. We pivoted into a new idea. People are paying us money, not like hand over or fist, but they were paying us money for it. One, stick with it. That was a big lesson. Two, if don't build something from it. And what I mean by that is I was able to invest really early in Checker because I was like, that's gonna be a huge company because I literally tried to build that and I know there's a massive market. So I was a really early investor in Checker. So I got lucky, but I'm still an investor. I would have rather been the CEO of it. But those are lessons. So those are probably two lessons is one, take the exit. If you have an exit on the table, take it as a founder. You should do that. Um, and then two, use your knowledge about the industry to figure out how you can either invest or build something new thereafter.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

That's interesting. So I'm curious, like if that's like advice that you'd give across the board, like in terms of taking an exit. Because, like, for instance, um, like I'm I'm building June right now, which is an AI interviewer, like we're very early stage, but we have pilots coming up with like really big names, and we'll be making like some pretty cool announcements soons. But these are like very well-known tech companies that we have in our pipeline, and we've added probably 10 deals to our pipeline in the last month or so, five weeks, and so it's like it's one of those things it was moving really slow for about a year, and now like adoption of this tech is like out of nowhere exploding. And so there's like there's going to be, I think, a lot of opportunities for very early stage strategic like acquisitions. But it's like I kind of have mixed feelings uh about it. Like we could part of it feels like

When To Take An Early Exit

SPEAKER_01 20:50

the market's gonna be so saturated. A lot of these all-in-one products are gonna be offering this, we're gonna be coming up and competing against them, you know. Going to like a very early stage exit might make sense, but then it's also like, you know, I don't know if I'd really want to do something. I I would almost like to build the company, get it further along, have a bigger exit, you know what I mean, versus just getting us to, I don't know, maybe mid-six figures in ARR, hopefully, in the next few months. Like we're very early, right? But if you know that that's sort of like the uh something we're kind of thinking through, me and a co-founder are thinking through. It's like, do we want to just get into the six-figure ARR range and then basically sell to an all-in-one product that wants to add this, or do we just continue to push best in class, run solo and and maybe fundraise?

SPEAKER_00 21:37

You know, I mean, look, uh there's no easy answer to that, to be clear. And I think the market will dictate that for you to some extent. However, um, I think most companies look, it's a really hard and long road to build a successful company, right? You see these I I'm an investor in a company that you that you all should try called Whisperflow, if you haven't tried it. So it's basically a dictation app, it's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Check it out. Um look it up right now.

SPEAKER_00 22:01

But the crazy thing about them is you know, like you hear these stories and they're they're now raising at I just there was something not publicly announced. I don't know if it's even true. So it's not any no private data that I have, that they're raising a new round at almost a 2 billion valuation. That's crazy, right? So this is the founder. I've sat down with him for lunch, everything else. Like, I don't know, he probably owns 25% of the company, right? Let's even pretend it's 50%, right? If it's 50%, he's a billionaire. I mean, like, even if it's 25%, he's worth $500 million now. That's insane, right? And so people hear these stories and you're like, oh my God, like this is utterly crazy. On the other hand, very, very, very few companies pull it off. Um and their story is even indicative of that. Like they pivoted. So their original idea did not work. They pivoted into this and it utterly took off. So the market for them is dictated they should keep growing. But I think for most founders, unless you either pivot into something you find that it's growing really quickly, and it is just like obvious how good it is, and you I would I would try to sell if you have an opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 22:59

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. It's really interesting. I'll keep you posted.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

You should be using if you're not if you're not using a dictation app, you should be using your dictat a dictation app for literally, it's it's almost perfect. It will format the whole thing for you. I don't even read over most of the time what I say because it will automatically clean it all up and write it well.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

They're still uh a relatively small company from an employee perspective, too.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

They are, um, which also goes to show how crazy these businesses are now is you don't need a lot of people to build great companies. And that's another thing that we I talk about a ton with what we do at Chore. Like they still need someone to run back office operations and like they should be using us and all these other things. Actually, Whispers not, they should be, but um, but uh you don't want to hire lots of people, and that's also once again the the crazy world we're in is you can build these companies that are worth two billion dollars, and I don't know, I have 20 people on the team.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

Like, yeah, it's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

It is bonkers nowadays. And that's that's what people need to understand. Is like you can the ability to build something that grows massively is not hard. Well, it it's hard to, but it's hard to get that idea that people will uptake and be like, yeah, this is my dream come true.

unknown 24:06

Right.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

That's hard.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

Yeah, so tell us about chore. Like, so what are you what are you building now?

SPEAKER_00 24:11

Yeah, I mean, the whole thesis of chore is pretty simple. We do the back office chores. We we do we we do love the name, by the way. Thank you. Thank you. It's totally memorable. I'll you know, hold up my water bottle for the video viewers. Um those who are listening, it just says chore on it. It's a big big water bottle to get my my uh hydration in every day. But yeah, the idea, the idea is pretty simple. Like it is every company in the world has a standard problem called run your like back office operations, which is HR, human resources, finance compliance, and then for startups, equity. Every company has this problem. And yet usually what happens is the founders do that work themselves. And what I just don't understand is most founders I know hate doing chores. Like if someone said to them, you need to go do this chore, you'd be like, What are you talking about? Like, no, I'm gonna hand it off to someone else. I'm gonna delegate it. I'm gonna

Chore And Outsourcing Back Office Ops

SPEAKER_00 24:55

give, I don't want to go do this because I make so much more money by doing the things that I'm great at that I love doing. So that's what I'm gonna spend my time on. And then when they say, Oh, but you need to do, but back office, most founders are like, Well, I guess I have to do that myself. I have to go run HR myself. It's like, no, what are you talking about? Right. Like, James, you're world class of building hiring like workflows in in apps. Why spend any time on like HR specifically, right? Like that's not the kind of HR that you're good at, the hiring stuff. Like, why spend time on that? Or another example would be a simple one um to use real chores as an example. I don't know about you, but I don't like doing laundry. I don't like doing my laundry, I don't like folding my laundry. I find it to be a bad use of my time. Um, that's a chore to me. To be clear, my wife actually likes doing laundry. So for her, it's not, but she doesn't like doing anyone else's laundry but her own. I have two kids. So I guess what I do, and for most people, it just parents have to suck it up. They do their kids' laundry, or at some point your kids get old enough and they do their own laundry. I think that's silly. So my time is worth more either with my my my work or with my family than doing laundry. And so, guess what I do? I take it to a wash and fold place near my house and they do my laundry for me, and I pay them for the privilege. That is a good trade-off. Or another example that I would say some people don't love cooking, or you just don't have time for it sometimes. Like there's better things to do with your time than cooking a full nice meal every night. So, what do you do? You order a burrito, you order food out, you get it delivered to your house. It is way more money to order burrito delivery than to just order that just to open a can of beans, get a tortilla, and like some chicken. You can make your own burrito for cheap, but why do people order out? It tastes better. Someone else is doing the work, someone else is making the mess of all the pots and pans and everything else to do the work. All you have to do is unwrap something from silverfoil. I think the same thing applies to back office operations. It's insane that founders think they need to own the stuff themselves. So that's what we're building.

SPEAKER_01 26:43

So you work with a lot of early stage companies or what like what? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

Yep. Early stage founders. Uh to be clear, this problem exists with every SB in the world. And frankly, every mid-sized company. Like some of our customers are up to 200 people. Like they're not early stage startups, really. But yeah, I mean, this is a huge problem across the board where commercial, like, oh yeah, I'm doing this work myself. I didn't even know there was a solution.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

Got it. Yeah, that that's great. I'm assuming like you started what, three a few years ago, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:11

Torge weird. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

Okay. Oh, go ahead. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

Um, no, no, it's a weird company, and it's some good lessons too, I suppose. We spun out of, so my last company was a company called Abstract Ops. Uh, we started, we raised $10 million, top-tier investors with a very simple thesis. We are going to automate back office work, the stuff that I just talked to you about. We're going to automate the whole thing. And once we automate it, it's going to we'll revolutionize the world, right? And then no one has to do this work anymore. Uh, we had a small services team internally, right? This is a very standard for tech companies. Like, okay, like here's all this beautiful, amazing tech we're building. But until we get everything fully built out, we're gonna have a services team help us do the work. So we had our services team doing the work. Turned out two years in, we actually had a really good business. Like we had real revenue, things like that. It was like doing well, but the tech product wasn't really working. Um, and we were losing money on our services business because we weren't charging the right amount because chakra, we were underpricing, so we could get customers for it and we were subsidized by venture dollars. So, what did we do? We ended up uh deciding we had to split the company in two. So my co-founder took toward the tech company and pivoted that business. I took the services arm and created chore with it. So we already had some customers in business when we started and then have grown it pretty significantly since then.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

Yeah, that's great. That's awesome. Are you exclusively focused on the founder profile or do you see yourself expanding outside of that tech founder early stage?

SPEAKER_00 28:38

I've made some mistakes on that front. Yeah. I mean, like, look, I think we we've tried other verticals, but probably not in the way that really led to any success. So in the short term, we're trying to stay super focused on the founder vertical. The simple fact is most founders, not all of them, but most generally understand their time is valuable. Number one. Number two, they realize that they're probably world class at doing something, which is not back office work, right? If they were world class at doing back office work, I hope they start a competitor to chore. Like that's what you should do if that's your world-class skill set. And in most cases, they realize that time, once you get funding from VCs, you are on the clock, right? So we've, you know, I've done 200 plus investments as an angel investor. You're on the clock when you get money from a VC, like when you talk about fundraising for you, for you all, once you raise, you have 18 months to make it work or not work. That's it. So if you waste any of that, and investors give you the money not to save it in some bank account with low interest rates. They give you the money to invest it. And what does investing it mean? It means putting it in ways that help you grow the business. One of the key ways to grow the business is give yourself, because you have a superpower as a founder, give yourself those superpowers to grow the business as fast as you can. Um, which means delegating everything that's not your core product, including back office work. Right. Most founders understand that. So that's our target market right now. And once we conquer that, we're gonna conquer the world. Usual statement.

SPEAKER_01 30:02

Nice, nice. So, what's your obsession for 2026?

SPEAKER_00 30:05

My main obsession for 2026 is AI, um, understandably. Um, look, I live in San Francisco, I'm red pilled. I can talk all about the dangers and things that I see there right now. Um, but before before we get talking about the meta dangers, it's the answer, it's AI.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

So you said something interesting to me earlier. You said that uh basically companies that aren't focusing on transfer transforming their business to an AI native business in 2026 are gonna be out of business by the end of 2027.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:35

Right. So with your business, like what are like specifically, what are you doing?

SPEAKER_00 30:42

I mean, so we're a services business, right? And so people would say it's hard to AI that. Um, we're building a ton of things to automate the work that our team does,

Building An AI-Native Services Business

SPEAKER_00 30:49

how they do it, the data that they get, the steps they need to take to get that work done. We're tracking every single element to see if we can reduce time and cost and every aspect of that, um, leading to hopefully a doubling of output for the same amount of time a person's working. I'm not asking my team to work more hours, but I want them to work smarter hours overall. And so, because guess what? You can have AI do a lot of the different work. So the thing that a lot of people don't really realize for for most jobs, for better or worse, your job is like moving data from one place to the next. Like you're essentially copying data around, which is kind of crazy if you break it down into its component parts. Um, AI is really good at that and it's really fast. So, like if your job is moving data from place to place to place to place, why can't AI do a lot of that? And that's what we're focused on is getting rid of the mundane, boring copy-paste work and letting AI do that and then have the humans do the part that is actually difficult.

SPEAKER_01 31:46

So, like when you think about like implementing AI as a services company, are you gonna be leveraging agents and tools behind the scenes, or is this gonna be stuff you're actually implementing in your customers' environments?

SPEAKER_00 31:57

Um, agents and tools behind the scenes. And so, like, we'll have a full platform that people will be able to log into, use at some point, even hopefully like almost a SaaS product that customers can turn on to run their operations themselves and kind of call for human help when you need it. Because like the work we're doing is still you can't, to the best of my knowledge, I've never seen anyone actually really get something that can be fully automated end to end with AI in the back office. Like, once again, I spent $10 million of EC money trying to do this with like old tech. Yeah, and we're now being smart, we're using our own cash from our own money that we make because we're bootstrapped at chore. We're using our own cash to try to build the stuff ourselves today. Um, but it's hard and you still need people doing some of the work today. It's not, you're not, we're not at a point where you can be automate, automated all of it.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

Yeah, for sure. Got it. Yeah. And just to dial in on hiring, right? Because it's primarily our show is about talent acquisition, right? And a lot of talent acquisition leaders tuning in. So, you I mean, as a services company, you do a lot of hiring, right? And you do a lot of hiring with folks that are probably interacting directly with customers. And it's like you're like these are to some extent like what's driving revenue, truly, like directly. Um and so I'm just curious, like from a talent acquisition standpoint, like what is most important for your business? Like, what are you focused on when it comes to hiring and how you do it to ensure that your company can continue to be successful?

SPEAKER_00 33:16

So I'm gonna give you a macro answer to start. Um, and maybe not quite answer your question. So make sure you come back to that and push me on that. Um the macro answer is basically I think it's insane that companies want to hire

Why Adam Says Do Not Hire

SPEAKER_00 33:27

more people. Like, so so my macro answer is don't hire people. Don't hire more people. Um, the reason I'll actually pause there. What questions do you have about that?

SPEAKER_01 33:38

So uh I know this is the hiring show. No, I mean I get it. Like, I mean because well, I mean, I have an embedded recruiting and RPO firm, so it's um and and also June, the AI interviewer. It's like both essentially are helping companies limit the amount of W-2s that they hire, right? Like, so they can leverage uh Secure Vision's embedded RPO, get great senior recruiters or tech or process, delivery lead, everything without actually adding W-2 headcount, or they can optimize with AA AI with June, right? So that they get additional capacity back to their existing team. So it's we help I help companies essentially not hire W2, right?

SPEAKER_00 34:17

And let me so so I mean I'll tell you my thoughts on like why, right? So here's what people need to the old school mentality, always was like, hey, we have a task that needs to get done. I don't know how to do it. Let's hire someone to go do this for us. And you'd hire someone internally. Here's the problem. Like the stats, I wrote a post in this, but I'm still gonna butcher some of the stats. The stats for full-time employees freaking suck. Like, most employees are bad employees. And don't get me wrong, like, I love my team, I think they're great, but most employees are bad employees. So the fact is, like, something like 50% of your employees will fail within two years, just because like it didn't work out. They're not good, they don't get it done, they don't like it, whatever. Um, I think the other stat is like 50% of your employees at any given time are looking for other jobs. Maybe not actively, maybe passively, but they're like looking for their jobs. Um, something like 10 or 20% of them are like actively working against the company at any given moment. It's like, by the way, this is this all comes from a post about why AI is going to replace most workers. Because like most employees aren't good at like overall what they do. And yet people still think, and I come across founders all the time, they're like, well, I need to hire someone for this role. I actually talk to a company today and they're like, well, we're deciding like, do we keep using you guys or do we like hire internally? And like, why would you ever want to hire internally for this role? Yes, we are more expensive than a full-time person. So I get it, and we don't you don't get as many hours from us as a full-time person. So I understand that trade-off, but that's a this is a big company. It's not for smaller companies, it definitely doesn't make sense. But if you're like looking even one-to-one, sure. But guess what? You don't have to manage us. You don't have to recruit us at all. Like you don't have to spend all the time interviewing a dozen plus people to figure out what to hire for. Two, you don't mess up the hire. Because like if I'm a, you know, if I'm an AI expert and I'm now trying to hire a head of HR, I've never hired a head of HR in my entire life. How am I gonna be good at hiring for that role? Probably gonna fail because I've no as a blind leading the blind. I'm gonna mess it up. Then I have to onboard them, maybe train them a little bit. I'm gonna fail all of that. So these hires don't work out. Like they just like it literally the cost of a hire, if you actually look at the numbers, let's pretend a hire is 100K a year hire. The actual end-to-end cost for that person is double it. So like the numbers still pretty clearly, like it's about double the cost for that employee when you look at the all-in cost of like, once again, the time it takes to recruit, to onboard, to train, get them going, then to have them get sick, then they leave a year and a half in, then you're back to square one. All these costs add up versus hiring a vendor who say, get me this job, get this, do this job for me. If you do it, I'll keep paying you. And if you don't, I'll let you go and I'll find another vendor who says they can do it better. Okay, yeah, I'm paying the vendor a little bit more money, but the vendor's delivering me exactly what I want when I want it. And it's up to them to figure out how to hire, train, manage, get people. They will build the best tools for the work that they're doing. I don't have to worry about building, like, once again, you talk to some big AI company, and it's like, wait, you're trying to build your own AI HR workflows. Like, what are you talking about? You have a core product you're trying to build over here to get to market to your customers, and like you're gonna try to automate AI processes because you have clawed code. Like, what are you talking about? What a bad use of your time! Like, that's not your product. You can't sell that. You don't want to maintain it, anyways. So I keep ranting. The short and then the last piece, I guess, last piece I'll add is like speaking when you're going to fundraise, what do VCs care about? The new metric now is ARR, annual annual recurring revenue, current FTE. So full-time employee, right? Or full-time equivalent. If you have contractors, they're not considered an FTE. So you can have lots of contractors, and your numbers can look great who are flexible, fire them anytime. You don't owe me severance if you fire chore. Why would you ever hire people? Sorry, that's my rant. But like, I seriously, like the the answer should be for most people today. Either hire a contractor to do the work or try to build it with AI and automate it. The last resort is hiring a person.

SPEAKER_01 38:06

How do you ensure that you hire great people for your team?

SPEAKER_00 38:10

We, this goes to actually the point of why you should never try to hire people, at least for the type of work we do. But once again, I believe that's the case for many industries. Um, it's really hard. It's really hard to hire great people for the work that any company does. Um, I was talking to my executive coach this morning on this exact topic. He's like, he's working with a bunch of different companies. He said, It is so hard to hire good people. It's always been hard to hire good people. He actually thinks it's harder now, which I find I actually disagree. I think it's getting easier to hire good people because more and more people are unemployed and they're having trouble getting jobs. So it's actually easier to hire good people nowadays. Um, but how do you ensure it? We have a very detailed process we've we've updated over three and a half, almost four years. Where, like, so for us as an example, we have a whole hiring process. And to be clear, you can't just

Hiring Tests High Agency And Fast Firings

SPEAKER_00 38:57

apply on it. There's actually a bunch of embedded tests in the process, which people don't even know about. Like, I'll give you one example. Um, we have very specific instructions in the application of what to do. Like, literally, one of the, I think one of the things is like, please make sure you put in the subject line, you know, we love chore. That's not what it does, but I but let's pretend that's what it says, right? If you don't follow that instruction exactly, it means you're not detail-oriented. And it means you're not a fit for the job we need you to do here automatically.

SPEAKER_01 39:26

Because your your folks need to be incredibly detail-oriented. Correct.

SPEAKER_00 39:29

And so if you can't while you're applying for a job, if you can't get it right when you're applying for a job, which is like you're hopefully showing off the best if you're ever gonna be, you're definitely not gonna do it when you're here full time. And until we so we've created tests that you can't AI, you can't answer the AI like some AI exercise. It's literally various parts of the entire hiring process itself have been set up as a test.

SPEAKER_01 39:51

Yeah, for sure. How much do you focus on behavioral fit?

SPEAKER_00 39:55

Um, a decent amount, but be what it means to have a behavioral fit continues to change. So we're more and more focused on like, does someone have agency, like high agency individuals? Do they take action on our their behalf?

SPEAKER_01 40:06

Yeah, I guess it sounds like in a way that's that's behavioral, right? Like you try to have this profile of like, you know, like the type of person that's successful.

unknown 40:14

Correct.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

And we absolutely do. So that's a big focus for us right now. Um, but it's hard to find that in higher flat because everyone says, like, oh, look at all the things I've done in my past, and I take care of. And it's like, but we we try to look for that a lot. And if we don't find it pretty quickly, we also have gotten really good at letting people go.

SPEAKER_01 40:31

Yeah, you gotta let people go quickly.

SPEAKER_00 40:33

I mean, everyone says that, but it's harder, easier said than done. But I'll give you an example. I've we've kind of revamped our entire go-to-market team over the past two months. Um, and as part of that, let a lot of people go. And uh as a clear example, we've hired three salespeople, and I've let two of those three go within two weeks of them being here. And they were shocked. I'm like, I laid out pretty clear metrics for what we expected when we started. We all agreed on the metrics that you're targeting. You didn't ask me more questions. You just said, yep, we're things are great. Two weeks later, you didn't get it done. I don't have time to look over your shoulder every day. I need you to be self-driven. If you're not, it's not gonna work.

SPEAKER_01 41:12

Yeah, I mean, I I think um being able to quickly identify whether somebody's gonna work out or not is is incredibly important. And you need to know the role well enough and have clear enough uh performance standards to where you can identify it quickly.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

Like which is why you shouldn't hire people in your company. Because most founders, if you're a world-class founder, you're world-class at something. Like that's why you got funding, that's why you're doing what you're doing. You do not have knowledge. I'll just use operations because we know well, you know, you're a world-class recruiter, right, James? Like, you know how to run those businesses, what that looks like. But you have no context of what a world-class operator looks like. You don't know what a great person to run your operations is. You've never hired for those people, and maybe you have a little bit, but like you don't really know. You don't really know what the job looks like. So, how do you measure and metric outcomes for them? You don't know how to do it. And so you're gonna mess up that hire and it's gonna go bad. So just hire a contractor. Like, once again, like just don't hire people except in your core areas of expertise where you know you can hire well. Yeah, everybody else is a distraction.

SPEAKER_01 42:16

So when you look at the the future, right? I'm curious to to like just to kind of zoom out and kind of bend on a more like holistic note. Um, what do you really focus on over the next few years? Like, who do you want to become? Like, how do you want to continue to improve and grow?

SPEAKER_00 42:31

Yeah. Um, as an individual or a company?

SPEAKER_01 42:34

Yeah, I mean, just like wherever your head goes, like is totally fine. It could be more professional, personal. Just like what's the first thing that comes to mind when you think about what the next best version of yourself looks like?

SPEAKER_00 42:43

Well, look, so I mean maybe I should start by answering really quickly. Like, I'm I'm live in San Francisco, I'm kind of red pilled on like AI and where that's going. And like, look, I've I'm a short-term pessimist and long-term optimist when it comes to AI. I think we will end up in a world of massive abundance in the next like 10 or 15 years, but we're gonna go through a really rocky and scary period in the meantime. Um, and so what that means for me

Staying Human In An AI Future

SPEAKER_00 43:05

individually is I want to stay as close to the cutting edge as I can. But even that is not good enough. Like, I don't think anybody can stay up to date really on this because things are changing so fast. Um, so the best I can do is try to lead my life well, try to meet people like you in person, um, be a good father, parent, husband, all that stuff, friend. Um, and try to lead my company in a way that that I believe comports with my ethical beliefs and what the right things are to do. Um, and essentially I'm gonna try to be the best human that I can because AI is gonna be better at me in a lot of things that I used to get joy from. And that's a scary thing to say. Like the simple fact is like I've spent, I don't know, 16 years or something building my career, right? I'm essentially at like what people would view as like your peak of your career. Where it's like, I'm hopefully still like I'm mentally not in decline, right? You start going down, declining, probably over 50. Start like there's a lot of data that shows this. Like, no offense to 50 year olds, I'll be there soon. But like you start going negative declining, all these other things aren't happening. So, like, I'm at the peak of my career mental powers, my experiences, all these other things. I should be right at my peak. The simple fact, though, is like everything that was true for me being at my peak is essentially no longer true because of AI. And that's that's scary. Like that is that creates an unmooring feeling that I have. Like, I don't know where I should go. What I should do. How do I do this? So best I can do is try to try to be the best human I can be. And and and hope that means that um it keeps enabling me to live a better life and a good life. On the one life that I have. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:42

It's awesome, man. It's awesome. Well, Adam, look, I I really appreciate you coming on today. This has been a great episode. I I do uh very much so appreciate the advice uh that you've shared with us and your life experiences and how you think about building companies and investing and and not hiring and uh these types of things. So uh don't hire. Don't hire.

SPEAKER_00 45:02

I really like seriously. I'm sorry, I don't keep going on this. Don't hire. I'm just trying to end here, but like don't hire. The reason you should not hire, like, the the world's best companies are gonna be companies like one person. Be one founder in dozens or hundreds of uh vendors and contractors or agents doing the work. That is the future of business. If you hire, you are just slowing yourself down right now. So sorry. Continue on.

SPEAKER_01 45:23

Yeah, very cool. Well, yeah, thank you. It's been a lot of fun. We'll have to do it again sometime.

SPEAKER_00 45:27

Absolutely. Thank you for having me on. Of course.