Latest / Exit Algorithms / Zone of Genius, AI Scaling & Investing in 200 Startups | Adam Spector (#61)

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Zone of Genius, AI Scaling & Investing in 200 Startups | Adam Spector (#61) · Exit Algorithms

• Pete Vera: Welcome to Exit Algorithms, the podcast where we decode what it really takes to unlock growth, streamline operations, and prepare your business for a high value exit. I'm your host, Pete Vera, and today I'm excited to bring on Adam Spector. He's a four-time founder with multiple exits, has invested in over a hundred startups, hosted over a hundred episodes of his podcast, Entrepreneurial Excellence, and is the CEO of Chor. a back office operations service. Adam, super excited to have you here. Welcome to the show. Adam Spector: Pete, great to be here. I'm actually investing in over 200 companies. But beyond that, let's spot on. Pete Vera: 200, my mistake, yeah. ⁓ I always use a little, you know, some AI research. I I fact check, but you know. Adam Spector: We're still not quite at the point where you can fully trust AI. mean, people are out sourcing lots of thinking to AI, which is a little bit problematic. We're gonna get to a world of Wall-E where we're all just waiting for the AI to do everything for us at all times, kind of turning off our minds in those cases. But yeah, you can't trust it fully and everything else, but all good. Pete Vera: Yeah, no, the case in point right here. Yeah, I'd love to hear your background. Do you mind sharing for listeners? I know there's a lot that you've done so far in your career. Really impressive. I'd love to maybe just a high level and how you ended up at Chor. Adam Spector: Yeah, I mean, look, the high level in sense career wise, look, a lot of people say, ⁓ wow, you have such an impressive background in everything else. And what I try to tell people all the time is a career is all about compounding, largely. And so if you stick in a similar industry and build your connections and your work and you just put your head down and do good work every single time, you will end up with a good. Hopefully an impressive one, actually, because you've stuck with it you become really good at what you do and people want to refer you and you get better and better and you get new roles from that and everything else. And so for me, I I've been in the tech space since 2010. I'm actually really before that. So 2008, when I graduated my graduate school, had a JD and an MBA. I went and worked in essentially business development, working, BD, in M &A looking to buy their company as part of a small M &A team internally at a sort of mid-sized publicly traded sort of tech-ish company based in DC though. And I kind of knew like if you want to be in the tech space and you want to work with the best, you need to move west. And you need to be frankly in San Francisco at this point in time. And I would say that to everybody nowadays. And you see that in San Francisco. I've lived here for now 16 years. It's pretty clear that the place to be, if you are determined to be a builder at the top of your game in the tech space, you should be in the Bay Area. Now, it's different for every industry, right? So there might be other, if you want to be in finance, you should really be in New York. If you want to be in politics, DC is the place to be. But the point being, if you want to be great in your field, you should be around the other people who are also great in your field. And you should test yourself against them. If you have a high amount of confidence in yourself, let's call it maybe an ego. I have some sort of ego. I hope it's not terrible and too annoying to my family, friends, and everybody else, but I have an ego. I wanted to be in a place where I was going to test myself against the best. was 16 years of compounding work to get to where I am and to founding Chor about three and a half years ago to automate the back office work because I know all these founders. I've been a founder multiple times and everyone has the same pain. I want to go focus on what I care about the most and what I do great at, right? Could be I'm building the next cool AI thing, whatever it is. And yet now I need to go spend all this time figuring out like how to run payroll and do compliance work and finance. What a terrible use of my time and time is the only like only resource you really have that you can control in life and make the decision of where to spend your time. So if you're spending it on other work that's irrelevant to your company, you'll never get that time back and your company will likely fail. Pete Vera: Yeah, I love it. Yeah, great premise for a business, a problem that a lot of small businesses have. Adam Spector: That's what you want to build a business around something that everyone has, that problem. Now, I will say it's not easy, right? There's no guarantees. Just because everyone has the problem. The other problem is that a lot of people are cheap and they don't value their time properly. And so they think, ⁓ I can do this. I can figure it out. And I'm like, you can. But it's sort of the same thing as figuring out, you can go figure out how to do sales or you can go figure out how to go build a technical product. Yes, you can do all of those things nowadays. Like there's nothing with AI as your kind of co-pilot and right there with you. There's nothing in the world you can't do. Honestly, like I really believe everyone, you put your mind to it, can do anything nowadays. We all have the superpower. However, should you be doing it? Right? There's areas you are hopefully great at and to focus on things you're great at, which is presumably what's going to make your business differentiate and succeed. Delegating handoff everything else. Pete Vera: ⁓ smart. Yeah, like your zone of genius, right? Adam Spector: Zone of genius is a great way putting it. folks, like, this is, your zone of genius is the only thing where you should be spending time. Like, I don't know, like, what's the point of life? Like, are you gonna look back on your deathbed and tell your, you know, hopefully your kids or family friends who are all surrounding you when you're dying and be like, ⁓ man, I'm so happy I spent that time figuring out why payroll was broken. Like give me a break. No, of course you're not going to say that. Like you're going to say, I changed the world because I built this amazing product that saved millions of lives or made my company and my team millions of dollars, whatever it is. Like that's what you're going to be proud of. But guess what? You will never be able to have that story if you're wasting your time doing things that are not in your zone of genius. Life is too short. Pete Vera: Hmm. Adam Spector: Another really simple example for people, my company is called Chor. We do the chores, in a sense, the operational chores for companies. There are other household chores that I don't like to do. I don't like vacuuming and mopping my floor. I don't like doing my laundry. So guess what? I have people come and clean my house on a not super regular basis. Not maybe that wealthy, but people come and clean my house. I'm willing to pay someone else to come clean my house. I take my clothes to a local laundromat where they wash and fold my clothes, including my kids clothes, right? I could do that. I have a washer and dryer in my house. But those are chores to me in the time I get. by outsourcing that work is so much more valuable. I get to spend it with my kids. I get to spend it on podcasts with folks like you. I get to do work with my team to build chore into a great company. The ROI in that time is so much higher than me mopping my floor in vacuuming. Pete Vera: Mm-hmm. Yeah. ⁓ definitely. I love that perspective. Yeah, I was listening to Alex or Mozi talk about kind of this concept and of just like getting your figuring out what you the dollar value per for your hour You know, and is it really worth your time? To be spending yeah, like chores is an example or making food right like It financially doesn't make sense either, for a lot of people. Adam Spector: No, mean, this is once again the thing you need to be thinking about is the everyone you spend time with, everything you do. So Nival Rabakhan, who for those in Silicon Valley, he's the founder of AngelList, incredibly famous founder, investor, you name it. He said that he views his time as being worth $2,000 an hour. Now, he maybe couldn't get $2,000 an hour for his time, although he probably could because he's pretty amazing. So he probably could, but most of us can't. But you still should say, you know what, my time ship is worth $2,000 an hour. Therefore, if I'm going to spend an hour with someone, it has to be worth $2,000. And if it's not worth $2,000, I'm going to go spend that time at other activities that I think are. And that's just the heuristic you should use to make your decision. So I'll give you a little example from today for me. I had to call my calendar right before this. Actually, right before this, the one before this. And. I emailed the founder, said, hey, why are we having this call? I don't understand why we're having it. He went back, so your sales team can learn about our new product features. I was like, well, cool, you didn't actually invite the salespeople from what I can see from the invite. Number one, issue number one. Number two, do I need to be there? Can you just send me the doc minute async about what the new features are that I should read about? So they sent me the doc. I read it in two minutes. I will log into their site, looked at it for another three minutes. I spent five minutes looking at it. I now have all the information I need. In those five minutes, if I were on a call that would have been five minutes of like intros and shooting this shit. And I'm like, the founder is a good dude. Like I like him, but I don't need to spend the time on that. Like if you want to meet up in person and have a real in real life chat, I'm happy to do that. That's a different, better use of time, I think. But I just said, no, I thought it was like, is this useful? Because I have other things I need to focus on right now for my company and for other things. So that's what I spend my time on. Pete Vera: Yeah. No, it makes, makes a ton of sense. Yeah. And a great, great premise for your business. ⁓ so let's backtrack a little bit before, before chore, ⁓ you've built several successful businesses. ⁓ do you mind sharing some of those growth stage, you know, problems that you had to solve? ⁓ like how did you decide when to, when to scale, when to add more employees, et cetera? ⁓ and ultimately build it into the successful businesses that they became. Adam Spector: Well, look, the thing is that there is no easy, simple answer, I wish. There was some simple, he said, this is how you go do it. The simple fact is like, well, a few things. One, I think most founders spend too little time on marketing early on. Like you should be spending a lot of time early on marketing, go to market, figuring that out, getting that right. So as an example, I talked with a company recently who's selling part of their business, which I know you focus on a bunch too, but so they are selling part of their business and. They basically said, hey, we never quite figured out go to market. They have a good business, they've never figured it out. And they're like, look, we're so impressed by you, Adam. You have it so figured out, you're so good at it. And I was like, ⁓ man, I appreciate that, but I have so far to go. But. What they also said, look, we're technologists. And that's where they focus on building tech stuff and not the go to market. But I don't think you can't have great tech without also having good go to market. It's sort of the old saying, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise? It's the same thing. You can't go build. You can have the best technology in the world. But if no one knows it exists, who cares? You need distribution. Pete Vera: Mm. Adam Spector: To be clear, once you go back to the point or answer your question, that doesn't mean it's easy at all. Like, doing good go to market is always a combination, even in today's world of AI of. Great social media presence is a big key thing nowadays, but that can be like LinkedIn. doesn't, it's not, doesn't mean like you're on like TikTok or something. If you're buyers or B2B buyers, LinkedIn might be great, but meta can also work. So Instagram, Facebook can also work well. ⁓ TikTok can be good. You need to be great at SEO and geo, which are basically like Google ads or kind of optimizing your website so people can find you when they search for your topics. Google ads, also another key part. How do you do outreach directly? So, you know, for us at Shores, for we're fully revamping our entire go-to-market right now. So literally everything from how leads come in to who's doing that work specifically, ⁓ to how much automation do we have in place in trying to build and trying to build a fully automated system that can kind of manage all these pieces. So really thinking through all the different elements. so I don't have a... ⁓ Pete Vera: Mm. Adam Spector: a one single statement for you, Pete, that's like, this is do this and you'll be successful. Like in the end, you just need to be in a market where you have buyers. Like, can you convince one person even, actually maybe we'll end on this piece. Got me on a little bit of a rant, but like, if you can, if you can convince, like forget marketing to some extent, can you convince five of your friends to go use your product? Or people in the space that you're, presumably if you're building your product in a space that you know well, because you're, you're an expert at it. Pete Vera: you Mm. That's a good rant. Adam Spector: You should have five people who are like, yep, you were solving a problem I absolutely have. And therefore I'm going to go buy this product and I will pay you money for it. If you can't do that, you shouldn't build your product. So with Chor, I'll give you an example, right? I've been in the tech space for 16 years. So when I need to go get customers, I can go just in my own network, just by cold messaging, not even cold, like messaging warm people that I know well and be like, this is my problem. here's how think I want to solve it. Would you buy it? And if they say yes, and then they actually give me money to buy it, right? Don't just say yes. You have to have them give you money. Then you have something that you then you can build marketing around to sell to other people who don't have that warm connection to you. And then you can start marketing. But until then, I don't know, don't don't just build a product is like I this the world needs this, but you can't convince your friends to go buy it. And if you don't have friends in the space you're building it in, then you shouldn't be building that product in that space. Pete Vera: Mmm. Yeah, oh, that's great. Yeah, it's a great litmus test right there. Awesome. I appreciate that insight. Okay, and then when you eventually build your company up to a point where you feel it's time to exit. I'd love to hear, you know, having several successful exits yourself. Were there any things you wish you would have done differently now looking back? Adam Spector: Yeah, I mean, think probably the biggest one always is really get to know your competitors well. The competitors are the most likely buyers of your business and therefore you should get to know them and make sure they know you. and be in a relationship with them essentially. It can be friendly, right? They can be like, hey, I just want to grab a coffee and talk about our shared problems or challenges that we have. What do you like in this business? What don't you like? What do you see that works well? And share ideas. In the end, people are way too careful about, I need to be secretive and keep my information close to my chest because I don't want everyone to copy what I'm doing. Look, if you're talking to CEO of some competitor, the likelihood of them copying you is pretty slim. It's slim. you you give them some information. They're not likely to copy you. have a million other problems on their plate right now. just don't worry about it. Go have that coffee meeting. Get to know them. Build a relationship. Maybe have them as a mentor, right? If someone's a lot older than you, have them as a mentor. I've been shocked by ⁓ how Chor has been in this industry now for maybe one of the older companies in our space to some extent. Not to say there's a lot. We've been in this space for 3 and 1 years as Chor and about 2 and 1 years as a different company. We kind of changed the name of Spun. out of before that. So, know, six and a half years or so. ⁓ And I'm shocked by how many people keep trying to do the same idea but never get in touch. And I'm like, either they didn't do their own research about us existing, which is insane. Like, that is, literally you failed as a founder if you didn't do your own research. Or you just were too scared to reach out. Just reach out and be like, hey, dude, like, what's this? What do you think the pros and cons of this space? You can discount everything I say, but you should build that relationship. And once again, I'm shocked people don't do it. Pete Vera: Yeah, that's a great tip. ⁓ So how was your sale process? Did you have a representative? ⁓ Or did you do that strategy, at least on the last exit of Talk to Competitors? Adam Spector: No, did not. Did not do a very good job with that strategy. Really worked with ⁓ bankers and you get a banker involved and they take a percentage and they kind of market you and all these steps. It's kind of annoying. I generally recommend people nowadays, depends on the size of your deal of course, but a lot of brokers will want money upfront, 50 grand or something upfront to kind of prepare things. I think that's BS. I don't think you need that. And you can even do the deal yourself if you know the people in your space. You don't even need bankers involved. But if you want bankers involved to really get a wide spread and help you because you haven't done that work to know your competitors, yeah, get a banker, interview a bunch, see what you like. If you're going to get in bed with someone, make sure they're actually really good and understand your business and seem to really care. Or get a personal reference and say, hey, these guys are great. And then. then start working with them and getting the information you need. Pete Vera: Yeah, good advice. Thanks. Yeah, so, and we can talk a little bit more about Chor. I did a fair amount of research myself, but for listeners that haven't heard all the products Chor offers, do you mind kind of giving a high level, what type of businesses also does it, can it work with? seems like, yeah, go for it. Adam Spector: Yeah, no, obviously not. I always have to talk about chores. ⁓ The, the, hello, Frosh, right? We are essentially a fractional chief of staff. So imagine having a chief of staff to go do all the annoying chores that you don't want to do. End of story, that's what we do. We take care of all of it. ⁓ What that means though, is you're getting someone who you don't have to, the thing is once again, founders have a terrible tendency to want to hire people. Pete Vera: Yeah. Adam Spector: on their team full time. Like, well, I want a full time person because they can do X better than an outsource person can. I think that is completely backwards. You generally don't want to have internal people full time because you have to recruit, hire, train, manage them, all that stuff. Whereas if you hire outsource firms, they will do the work. And yes, you'll pay them more than you would pay internally for sure, right? You may pay 20, 30, 40, 50 % more to an outsource firm. to help go do the job, but you're only paying them for exactly what they're gonna do. Whereas what people don't think about, they're like, well, I can hire a community employee. I'd say, I can hire an intern person for $50 an hour, working direct for me, 50 bucks an hour. You're gonna be $100 an hour to hire you. Yes, that's true, but you're only paying us for 20 hours of work. You're paying the full-time person for, you know, 160 hours of work. So the net net is actually they're way more expensive. ⁓ and by the way, you also have to spend all the time recruiting for this person and it might be for a role you don't even know how to do. Right, imagine if you're the most technical founder in the world and you're recruiting for a salesperson. Do you have any idea how to recruit a salesperson? No. So you're probably gonna fail on that front. Then you need to manage them and train them. Well, good luck with that. Also a role you don't know how to do. So it's the blind leading the blind. That's insane. And so the same thesis applies to chore. Why would you as a founder do the work yourself? Right? Speaking of like your zone of genius, why would you do the work of operations yourself? Or why would you hire someone internal to do it? Terrible ideas. Hire experts who know what they're doing, who get it done. And by the way, if we don't get it done, you can fire us. Our contracts are month to month. So just fired. You don't owe me severance. No hard feelings. You I don't take equity. Just fire us. And look, we are incentivized. We are super aligned. The problem with full-time employees in many cases, they think they get the offer. ⁓ I got a job offer from this company. Now I'm like, I'm good to go. And some of them immediately start slacking off. Like they shouldn't, but like a lot of people do. They don't really work. They're not working hardcore all the time. They're slacking off. They're doing other things. Like we have life things come up. I get it. But like when I hire a vendor, I don't care about all the life things that are happening in your world. It's irrelevant to me. I've hired you to do a job. So you need to figure out how to do that job. So once again, as an example with chore, we always have extra capacity because things do happen in life, right? Things happen. I'd like people get sick. Their families get sick. So we have extra capacity on our team. And yes, you were paying a premium for chore for us to have capacity so that your operations never stop. When your ops person from Chor gets sick, we back them up and we backfill. And you're paying for that insurance. And that's something that, so what we do, to answer your question specifically, all of HR, from recruiting support all the way through onboarding, offboarding, you name it, we do compliance. So managing all the state registrations, all the annoying stuff from states, benefits, all of that good stuff. ⁓ finance, accounts payable, accounts receivable, bookkeeping, taxes. And then for a lot of startups, they have equity to manage too. So we'll do all of their equity work instead of them wasting money on lawyers. Pete Vera: Nice, got it. Like ⁓ HR as a service kind of, that's awesome. Yeah, with some extras. Yeah, that's a really, really awesome idea. ⁓ I'm curious, how are you leveraging AI in your business or even in your day-to-day life as well? Adam Spector: Yes, largely. With a few more things thrown in. Yeah, I mean, look, in business, here's another key part about why you want to hire experts at what they do. ⁓ If you have your own internal operations team, you'll probably have one person doing ops, or maybe two as the founder. You were never going to build a ton of automations to run operations well. Why would you? They take time to build systems that work really great. ⁓ It's the same thing as saying, like, people used to build their own servers in their garage. And now they outsource it to AWS. Why do you do that? Because AWS is way better. You pay AWS a premium to run your server, but you only need a fraction of that server. You don't need a full server. It's also about better technology. They're going to build all these new technologies on top, better security, all these other things that you just will never have. Even if you have a full-time person focused on making your server the best in the world. Same thing with Chora. ⁓ For AI, it's the same thing. We're building new AI things for how we classify your documents, how we answer your questions, how we automate different workflows. Every day, that is what we think about. Our goal is that our product will continuously get better. Our fractional chief of staff that you're hiring from Chore, we better and better at their job for less and less money as well because you won't need as much of their time because they're faster with AI than you would ever be otherwise. That's sort of how it's working with Shorin. We have a ton of cool things coming this year too. And it's just getting faster and faster. And it's essentially like, how do you make the product more delightful for customers while also lowering the price, which is in some ways makes it more delightful, right? If you get more of something that's better for a lower price, tends to lead to greater delight. And in my personal life, to answer that question, man, I mean, I've tried to open claw. I have a bunch of automations that are running on a pretty regular basis. I do a lot of health. I have a whole health dashboard with all my blood markers and everything else and information about my health, a ton of things like that to track everything. And I mean, I'm in AI or asking questions to AI multiple times a day, every single day. With that said, I'm... I don't know, I'm, because I probably live in San Francisco, I'm probably in the top percentage of users in a sense, in how I use it. But there are people who are multiple times better than I am. And it's actually a pet peeve of mine and pain point that I don't have enough time right now to get into it, which is a terrible excuse, but it's like. I don't know, work until I have two kids and I work until 10.30 every night until like it's pretty hard to like get extra time for tinkering. But I still try to find time. Like I've set aside time of the weekend to be like, I need to get better at using this because if I don't like I'm already behind and I will fall, I fall further behind every single day. Pete Vera: Yeah, ⁓ that's funny. Yeah, it's a funny perspective because it depends on who you compare yourself to, right? Adam Spector: Well, once again, I know for a lot of people in the world, they don't use AI at all. Or maybe they installed Chat-Tipity and they have one question, they ask it. ⁓ Other people are asking questions all day long. Other people are actually building things with it. Other people have built full, or their entire company is built off of vibe coding. ⁓ It varies in a ton of different ways. But. For me personally, I want to get better at it. And I think if you have an expectation of being a successful business in the long term, and by long term I mean the next five years at most, you need to be relatively AI native. And if not... your business will almost certainly fail. mean, even like a bakery, some bakeries work should be AI focused, right? To automatically reorder on a flour or something, right? Should be AI tracked. And who knows, new recipes, what are people buying? The analysis of like, what kind of pies or cakes are people buying? What are new flavors that are trending? All of that should be like, this is like an AI product we should go build. Like, those would be things you could just go sell to a bakery, be like, hey, let's do auto tracking of inventory of what people are buying and what the trends are in your local neighborhood, try and coming out with a new thing and you can keep staying up to date on all that, you probably can make more money as a bakery. Pete Vera: Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I definitely agree. And I like what you said too. It requires tinkering. requires like constant, it requires a lot of work and it's like a tool that takes time to learn. Adam Spector: It does, but not even that much time. Like just start asking it. Like literally just go ask AI. Be like, I want to go build like, let's just use, I want to go build a application for a bakery to track inventory, know what people are purchasing and know what's trending in either nationally or in the local area. And then help me come up with new recipes that fit with those local trends. Just go ask Clod Code how to go build that. or just even ask Claude to start with, and then see what happens. You'd be shocked by what he can already do. Pete Vera: Yeah, ⁓ definitely agree. And that's another good point too. It's not just for tech businesses either. Adam Spector: to every business. If you, once again, are not asking questions about how to do these different things, how to build it out, what it should look like, you're falling behind. And be clear, you don't need to build at all. I have a great developer we work with in Uruguay who's great, very affordable. They help me build things out. We do have our own internal team as well, but we can hire great people all over the world who build good stuff on a regular basis for a very fair price. You just need to have the idea and then go get it built. And don't be scared to spend the money to go get it built. Pete Vera: Yeah, great advice. Has it affected you as you grow and scale, sure, get more employees? Has it allowed your team to expand operations without hiring new employees? Or how has it affected that on your business? Adam Spector: I wouldn't say AI has directly impacted the hiring fewer people side of the equation yet, but I'm very sure that is coming and that is one of our theses for this year, is that we essentially want to remain flat overall in the team size, ⁓ especially in the US, because US employees are expensive, stay essentially flat on that side of things, and do a more with AI. So if we're not, if we have to keep our businesses, look, we have tech, but we're also a services business, right? So we need to essentially, traditional services businesses, they scale with more employees, more customers, more employees. Kind of goes one to one ratio. ⁓ Our goal is essentially to keep the total number of teammates flat this year while still doubling the business. So that's kind of what we're headed. That's what we're targeting. Pete Vera: Mm. Adam Spector: ⁓ It's not easy, of course, not only on the staying efficient front, but also just growth overall ⁓ and making sure we can grow. Your point about how do you grow? That's work we all need to do for sure. But ⁓ that's absolutely the plan. Now, I will say in case any of my teammates are listening to this, we've no plans on firing people either. What we're instead doing is just saying we're going to hire fewer people and we're going to make do with the people we have. You have to be OK with this world. This is change for people. And change is tough. Change is scary sometimes. But if you think, I I like to think we are a better employer than most in saying, hey, we want to help you change. We will give you all the tools to change. But yes, the expectations are also going to change. And you need to be willing to embrace that change to stay relevant. And if you're not, then that's fine. Then it's not a fit with us. It's sure long term. The people who are willing to say, ⁓ this is cool, I'll embrace this and move forward, are the ones who will succeed with us long term. And we'll always have a job. Pete Vera: Yeah. Yeah. Great point. I think that's, that's perfectly fair too. And if you're someone who likes to be efficient with their work, I feel like, you know, you might be self-motivated to try to figure out how you can use AI to make your job faster and more efficient, right? Adam Spector: So yes, that's how most people should be. I will say I find that to be a lot less of the case than one would hope and imagine. I think a lot of people want it to be spoon-fed to them of like, this is how do you use this tool? This is what you do. Very few people actually step up and take the initiative to go figure it out themselves. And the people, by the way, that have it at Chore, I put into a lot of new positions. I will very quickly say, great. Thank you for stepping up. Let's move you into a new role, give you more responsibility, but also increase your compensation because of it. because you're willing to ask questions and think through this how to use AI. A lot of people aren't that way. And I think we hire a lot of smart, proactive people at Chore, but even then, I think for a lot of them it feels difficult, time consuming, they don't have the time for it. And let's kind of get it. Like I just told you, I don't have the time for it all the time either. But also, I don't think most people are working 60 or 70 hour work weeks like I am. So I think you have time. It's just a question of where you decide to spend that time. If you're spending that time watching Netflix with your spouse, that's important maybe for your relationship. But it might not be great for your career, which if your career falls apart, that also might not be good for your relationship. So you've got to think through what are the trade-offs you're making in life. Pete Vera: Yeah, good advice. Awesome. I want to do, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask, you you've invested in 200 companies now or more than. I'd love to hear your investment philosophy. How do you pick which businesses to put your money in? Adam Spector: A combination of things. So at the early stage, it's mostly founders who I've gotten to know really well. And I think, wow, like what they're doing is amazing. And I believe in them and I've seen how fast they move and the questions they ask and how they innovate and how they think through things. ⁓ That is what I find fascinating and impressive. And usually those are the right bets. ⁓ but I definitely made plenty, plenty, plenty of mistakes. ⁓ at the later stage, it's more, like, does this seem like this is a company that is doing something that makes sense? It's obviously at a much higher price, but it's also somewhat de-risked at that later stage. ⁓ but even later stage today, I mean, like, gosh, you could have invested. I was the first invite I got to invest in Anthropic was at a 5 billion valuation. So I didn't invest. passed. I was like, that's crazy. That price is so high. Like. I mean, who knew, right? It would have 20x basically from now. It's insane. Those are the sort of returns no one expected. mean, the AIs change what it means to do late stage investing. Even if you invested in an anthropic. Earlier this year, not that long ago, like February, you would have invested at a $350 billion valuation or so. It's now trading at over a trillion dollars in the private markets. So essentially a 3X return in a few months on paper, of course. the numbers are kind of crazy. But later stage stuff, it's like, hey, does this business make sense? But for most people, what I'd recommend actually is buying, there are now some great funds that are out. So you do things like a USBC just recently publicly announced what they're doing. They're from AngelList. They're a really cool thing where you can essentially buy late stage deals and they have no fees. It's a great setup. I put money in that too, the way, myself. So one's going to have to see not financial advice for any of this, like. I think that's a good bet. you don't know what deal to pick, and I don't always know by a long shot, just do something broad-based, just same way you might buy the S &P 500. Pete Vera: Yeah. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. ⁓ Unless you know the person that's running the company, right? Adam Spector: Yeah, unless you have some special in. mean, look, investing is all about essentially data arbitrage. Like, what data do I have that you don't have? In the private markets, I can do that all day long. Like, markets, they're not supposed to talk about, like, what's happening in their business. So you don't know until they publicly announce their information. You don't really know. Now there's lots of companies that try to study public companies and figure out like, you know, they fly drones over Tesla's lots in the factories, so need cars Tesla's building to try to estimate is Tesla going to have a good month or a good quarter or a bad quarter. You can do that, of course, because that data is sort of quasi public, but not really. But I can't afford to go have drones flying over Tesla's headquarters all the time to make an investment decision. But I can sit down and have conversations with a lot of really cool founders and get to know them and what they're building and why and why they're passionate about it. And when I do that, that's how you really start to get an idea of where the companies are going and if that's gonna be big ⁓ is sort of the next week. Like, okay, why is this something you really wanna solve and why are you good at solving this? Or are you just freaking hacky and will figure it out and just you're a hard worker and you don't care? Like, there are people who are just like, they will work so hard, the rest doesn't matter. Pete Vera: Yeah. Sound advice. Wow. Thank you, Adam. It's been an incredible conversation. I know we're coming up close here on time. I always leave the guests with one, if they could leave one tip for listeners on how to grow and scale their company, what would it be? Adam Spector: Be obsessed and work really hard. ⁓ That's literally how growth happens. Like there is no silver bullet, but you just need to be in front of all the people in your space. You need to be willing to travel all the time, be on calls all the time, be in all the forums, do all the discussions. If you are willing to work that hard, you will find success. Most people are not willing to work that hard. Pete Vera: Yeah, way to end the show today. Man, I love this conversation, Adam. ⁓ If listeners got as much value as I did, where can they learn, find out, learn more about you and chore? Adam Spector: Absolutely, it's hirechore.com. So H-I-R-E, like hire, chore, C-H-O-R-E.com. So hirechore.com, it's a way. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I believe it's AdamSpector, maybe AdamSpector2 ⁓ as my LinkedIn profile, but just type in my name, you'll find me. ⁓ I'm on X. Apex zero zero, ⁓ all over the place. So relatively easy to find. Get in touch, happy to chat more and provide whatever advice I can. But in the end, like go ask AI before you ask me. And then if you've done your research, I'm happy to talk with you a little bit more. Pete Vera: Awesome. I'll leave that in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on today. It was great talking to you. Adam Spector: I'm Absolutely Pete, thanks for having me.