"Hire Slow, Fire Fast": Hiring lessons from 4x founder Adam Spector, Founder & CEO @ Chore

Adam, welcome.

Thank you, Zahra. It's great to be here.

Yeah, I'd love to learn more about the latest with your, with your company. You've rebranded Levy to Chore. Can you tell us about your business? What kind of brought you around to updating the name and the new brand? Yeah, take it away.

Absolutely. So, so the, the whole thesis and kind of what we are at Chore is we're almost like a fractional chief of staff service, right? Which is part of why being on, on this podcast today. That's, that's what we do. The whole, the whole idea though started almost 5 years ago where I started a company called Abstract Ops. And the thesis of Abstract Ops was that we were going to automate back office work. It sort of said, hey, look, so I've been a multi-time founder. I'm personally a 4-time founder. I've invested in over 200 companies. And one of the key universal traits every one of these companies shared and still share, frankly, is that there's 3 parts to a successful business. Part one is great product. Like, you obviously have to have a delightful, amazing product. Part 2 is you need to be able to sell that product. So if, you know, sort of, if no one knows about your delightful product, no one can buy it. So you need to get out there, go-to-market, sales, marketing, all that other stuff. But then there's this 3rd piece called operations, and you're like, I need to run my business. Um, if I can't run it, I can't actually do the rest, right? If I don't know how to pay my team, well, my product will not work any longer. Um, and I won't be able to pay my salespeople, so I won't be able to get sales. So it's like, well, I need to combine all these pieces together and do this the right way. And so we tried to build this company called Abstract Ops to automate operations. The challenge that we found was frankly that everything in operations is an edge case. And guess what? Edge cases are terrible when it comes to building software. Essentially, software is really good about doing the same thing over and over again repeatedly, and it can scale nicely. But when everything's an edge case, Uh, you can't really build software for that. So we, we raised, we raised like $10 million for it, had amazing VCs, um, ended up having to essentially split the company in 2. And that is what became, uh, so Abstract Ops went in their own direction. They pivoted a little bit since then, uh, and then we became Levy. Um, and then Levy with Jess, as you mentioned, uh, 2 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago, uh, rebranded to Chore. And the, um, short reason for why we did that was initially we actually had a trademark issue. Um, so that was sort of the initial push. And then it got to a point as CEO and founder, I said, hey, does it make sense to continue to pay legal fees to try to fight this? Like, we'd already built a bunch of brand goodwill in the name Levy, but there's a lot of like mental energy for me as the founder. The, the mental energy that was going into that and just the frustration around any legal And then of course, legal fees itself. And I said, you know what, can I take all these legal fees that we've earmarked for this situation? And it's kind of uncapped. You don't know how far it's going to go. And can I just say screw it and I'm going to go turn that money around and invest it instead in a whole new name? And while I love the name Levy, I don't think it did a really good job explaining who we are and what we do. And so we found, we hired some great people, helped us come up with this great new name that I utterly love. Like, chore is something you're never going to forget. Like, we take— we are the end of admin. We take— we are chore. hirechore.com is our domain. Come to us to take care of all these things that are like a chore to founders. Um, you shouldn't be doing them. It's a bad use of your time. You should find someone to take care of it, ideally software, but that doesn't really exist, as I just said. So you need people to do this work for you and, and hand it off. And so that's where you get to the name, why we did the rebrand. Um, I'm glad we did. I think it was a blessing in disguise, frankly, that we had the trademark issue.

Yeah. And, and you'd be one of the most well-suited founders to actually pursue any kind of litigation there, right? Because you have a legal background, you have your JD. So that actually is an interesting segue into the next part of this conversation, understanding kind of what led you to law school. It seemed like you were on a totally different path and you, you stuck, you stuck with it for a couple of years. Um, you know, after you got your JD and In a few, um, you know, clerk role and a summer associate role, um, and then went into legal, uh, at Sprint. So just kind of want to hear the, the evolution of that origin and evolution.

Yeah, I mean, the, the, the short evolution, I mean, look, I was sort of the first, first child, standard thing, follow in the footsteps of my dad who was a lawyer. And that was sort of the initial push to go to law school. And I remember him saying even like, hey, you'd go to law school, you'll always have a job, which is maybe true still, but I'm not even convinced it really is actually true anymore. It was sort of in his generation. And I got an MBA at the same time. I just kind of hedged my bets a little bit and said, I'm going to get a JD and MBA. And so got both of those degrees, took the bar, all that other good stuff, thankfully passed the bar, then got a job using more of my MBA side of things, sort of doing strategy for a mid-sized sort of tech company, publicly traded company, but in the DC area, which is where I'm from. Started down that path and kind of never really looked back on the law from then on forward. I just sort of said, you know what, I— one of the key lessons I learned while I was doing a lot of these great summer legal internships that you mentioned that I had was I'd much rather be the client than be the lawyer doing the work for the client. Because I'll never forget a situation. I worked for a big law firm. We had a client who just kept making changes to their legal— their documents, like just small minor changes that were kind of stupid. And we would tell them they were stupid. Didn't matter though, right? The, the, the The client's the client. If a client wants that done, we were in client services, we would do what the client said. So we would advise them not to, and we would. So you're, you're up late at night like modifying where words are in a document because the client had stupid changes they wanted to put in place. And I was like, this sucks. I want to be that guy who's telling the lawyers what stupid changes to make instead of be doing what the, this random client's doing, even though it's a bad decision. And so that led me much more in the business path, and it's been that way. Ever since, I mean, what is that, like 15, 16 years now for me?

Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more about kind of the, the biggest career pivots? Because you went from law school to actually working in corporate law, uh, and then you ended up in business development and channel sales. And from then on, kind of held every, every role, right? COO, founder, CEO, board member, you name it, you've done it. So I'm just, Curious to hear like what was the motivation behind each of those pivots and kind of segues into different functional areas of, of the business and at different companies?

Yeah, I mean, to me, to me it always seems like there's a, a general thread that connects every, all of them, even if they might seem like they're sort of bouncing around. Um, and I think there's a danger for a lot of people that do bounce around too much careers. It's sort of a different topic, but I do think people have to be careful about bouncing too much. For me, I mean, the, the, the general path was, once again, I, I worked for this, so I got my JD MBA. Got a job working in sort of tech strategy type work, which was a good sort of post-MBA job, right? Kind of a traditional MBA post-MBA job. But what I learned from that is that I really wanted to be out west. So actually a lesson, a kind of history lesson that got history lesson. The lesson that I learned was I started talking to folks in the DC tech community, which was not very strong back then, and it's still not very strong, I don't think. And I got lucky enough to be introduced to a founder of a Sequoia-backed company in the DC area. I wish I could remember this person's name. Since really it's credit to them for this. Basically what he said to me, he said, hey, look, if you want to be in politics, stay in DC. Like that's the center of politics in the United States. So you want to kind of work with the best and connect with the best and be a part of that and challenge yourself against the best. If you want to be in finance, go to New York. Like that's the place to be. Go do finance, but do it in New York with the top tier people. And then if you want to be in sort of media, go to Hollywood, right? Be part of that Hollywood LA scene. And if you want to do tech, go to San Francisco, was his advice. Um, even though he was backed by top-tier VC firm in the DC area, he's like, go to San Francisco. And I said, you know what, I got to get out. I got to leave DC. Need to get out. I had a good job, doing well there. I won all these awards at the company. Um, but it was time to leave. So I started interviewing for jobs, and the job that I found was, you mentioned, like in business development. But it was a legal tech company. So the fact that I had a JD and, and had done some legal work as well, they really, really liked because it meant I could kind of speak to the lawyer's problem and speak to lawyers with a little bit more gravitas. Not like a ton, but a little bit more gravitas. And that was really, really valuable to them. So like, great, come on board. The company was awesome. Clearwell Systems. It got sold for $400+ million 18 months after I arrived. Not, not of course because I arrived, but 18 months later it did sell, and, um, and it was great. I was like, oh my God, welcome to Silicon Valley. Like, I got a nice, pretty significant for me, like a pretty, pretty significant bonus from exiting my, my equity, from selling my equity to the acquiring company. Um, that was awesome. Like, this is what this is about. They started something from scratch, these really smart founders built it into a real thing and sold for $400 million. I mean, that's a huge, huge win. Um, And it was a win for everyone on the team. So, and then one thing led to the next and I started, I stayed there for a little over a year, I think, or so at the acquiring company, then went from there, started my own company, and one thing grew from, everything grew from there.

Awesome. Awesome. So you've built a lot of teams throughout your career, and I kind of want to go back to that comment you just mentioned about people should be aware of jumping jobs, right? Um, looking like they're a job hopper potentially on their resume, um, or otherwise. So would love to just kind of get your, your insights on that and dig a little bit there. You know, what does that mean to you? Like when you see that kind of resume or, um, when you're considering candidates for your own company or for your past companies?

I worry about it a lot when I see people jumping around. Uh, the, the main reason why I worry about it is there's sort of 2 indications that come from that. Indication one is it implies like, are you actually— do you know what you really want as a person? And look, I get it. I mean, like, especially when you're younger, it's hard to know what you want. So I understand, I respect the fact that you're testing things out and trying new things. But as an employer, that's a hard pill to swallow. I don't know if I want to take on the burden of you figuring out life at my company while you're trying to do a job that we are paying you for. So I don't know if I want that burden, even if I respect it as an individual. Uh, so that's sort of issue number one. Issue number 2, it might imply that you've had trouble at these other jobs, right? You maybe are good about explaining, well, like, I left that company because it was a bad fit. Well, actually, were you kind of pushed out? Like, were you maybe fired? Because usually if you're really good at your job, companies will find a way to keep you there. They'll keep you engaged, they'll promote you, they'll pay you more, whatever it is to try to keep you around at least for a solid 2 or 3 years. You know, maybe at that point you, it's, you still might want to leave, But if you're leaving after 12, maybe even 18 months, it's a little concerning. You know, sometimes it's not a fit. That is true. But if you have a number of situations where it hasn't been a fit, it's more like, is that you or is it them? And it's probably more likely you in those scenarios. And so once again, that's a risk that you really have to take as an employer. Do you want that person who's had a lot of bad fits previously, even if other elements about them seem fantastic? So yeah, that's, those are the, those are my concerns when I see that.

Yeah. And I mean, as you know, we run a recruiting firm. We work with founders like you to place chiefs of staff. So we're running these recruiting processes ourselves, at least the front end. And it sometimes becomes hard to present a candidate that, uh, has, you know, 1 to 1.5 years in every, every single prior role. And although we might have already spoken to them and we think they're great, We might present them and they'll say, hey, you know, we wanna see people like with longer tenure in previous roles. And, you know, that's totally, that's totally valid. Um, so it gets hard for those candidates, even if they have maybe a valid reason, like I moved or, you know, and then my, there was RTO and I had to, you know, find another job or whatever the situation might be. It still is, you know, difficult to even, for their resume to stand out, to, to get on a phone with us. for us to say, okay, like we'll present you. Um, and so, yeah, it can, it can be challenging for candidates.

Yeah. Uh, for, for sure. And this is where, once again, I just try to remind people, it's like, you gotta be really careful about those things. Like, I get it. Like maybe you want more pay, maybe you want these other things, but, but people don't think about the long term from a career perspective. Look, once again, I get it. I mean, people can be short-term focused, understandably. But I actually ran the numbers once because we had a— we had a person on our team— not candidate, we had a person on our team leave, um, and he'd only been with us for maybe like 8 months, 9 months, and he got a, you know, significantly higher salary from another company as a startup. And I remember running the numbers, and I didn't— I wrote a whole post about it. I obviously did not mention this person's name but wrote a post about it, like the numbers on it. I'm like, okay, you go to a company that's going to pay you significantly more, right? So it seems amazing, But especially if they're a startup, you're like, I don't know if they're going to be in business, right? They probably mispriced you in how much they're paying, and they don't actually know your real value. Like, if, if you're really worth double than what we were paying you, and we, we've done a lot of our analysis pretty carefully, they might be overpaying you. And in, in number one, where the founder probably doesn't know what they're doing, which is its own set of issues as an employee to go to work for a founder who doesn't know what they're doing. And 3, they might run out of money. So if you run the numbers on those things, Okay, you get a job that's paying you almost double what we were paying you, but the company either goes out of business within 8 months or 12 months because they're running out of cash and they can't raise again, or the founder is so insane because they've never managed anyone before, you end up quitting in frustration, which once again looks terrible on your resume if you bounce around. And this person had bounced around a bit already when we brought them on board. What does that do for you? Like, the actual net-net, even if you made more cash for the short period of time, you your net-net versus staying with us and getting a much more steady guaranteed paycheck, basically the same, except you would have had a much longer tenure with us, and that looks way better for your long-term resume. So I don't know, I personally thought it was a really stupid decision on this person's fault. But, but I want to— I understand his short-term need is like, look, I got to pay for my family, this company's paying me more,

right?

Okay, cool. But like, you now have 2 things on your resume. I think his last company, he was there and he came like warmly, highly recommended by the last company. they were laying people off. So like kind of overlooked that he'd only been there for maybe 16 months, not even, maybe less. Uh, and then he was with us for like, once again, like 7, maybe 7. And I'm like, well, like you kind of have 2 short-term things. It's like, I hope it works out for you on this new role, but you gotta make a lot of money for you. Basically the net-net cost, the value you need to get above and beyond on salary to make all these short-term changes on your resume work out for you the long— over the long term. you have to be at this new company making that same salary for like 18 to 24 months, and then okay, yeah, that was a good decision. But

man,

that's also real risky.

Yeah, absolutely. What other kind of hiring axioms do you, do you believe in?

I mean, look, I think you need to make sure you're hiring people who are the right fit for the role, uh, at that time. That sort of number— well, actually, let me go back on a few things. Like, one, one is hiring the right people in the right role. Obviously, that sort of is a simple statement to make, but the ability and willingness to identify exactly what you're looking for and know what that role looks like. So I think a lot of people just hire like, oh, I wanna, I need to hire someone because I need help. Well, do you really? Like, what is the real help you really need? Like, it seems easy to say you need to hire someone. The problem is people rarely take into account all the costs that are involved with that hiring process. Because they think it's easy. Um, and so what I mean by that is like, if you don't— first and foremost, you need to understand what am I really hiring for? Like, what is the role I'm hiring for? What do I need that person to do? Like, what do I really need that person to do? And then does that require a full-time person who I'm making commitment to, and vice versa, for a long period of time? I tend to believe that certainly today maybe not historically, but certainly today, and very much so going into the future, you should be making minimal commitments to people in the long term. You should be hiring essentially contractors for every role until you really know you need someone full-time. So, so, you know, what I would mean as an example, and we should sort of talk about like chief of staff stuff, right? Chief of staff tends to be this like catch-all role. It's like, okay, I need help. Well, what do you really need help in? Do you— and do you need that person to be a really senior, very expensive person to do this sort of help that you need? Like, what is the real help that you need? What does it look like? How many hours? And then do the math on that. Okay, well, how much time is this person going to spend doing this work? And what do I want to put into it? Well, okay, you know this better than I do, but hiring is what I'm gonna— let's say I gotta review a bunch of resumes. Well, first I need to hire a recruiter to do that. So I gotta interview a bunch of recruiters, find a great one like you. Okay, great. Now I find a recruiter. Now the recruiter's gonna send me, gonna spend a bunch of time with me talking about like, what am I looking for, um, specifically for the role? Then you're gonna send me a bunch of resumes to review. Then I'm gonna interview a lot of people. Then, and then a bunch of other people on my team might interview the people who are my top candidates. Um, I might need to create a hiring exercise for this person, which even is even harder for a role that like, I don't know how to do. So if I'm hiring a chief of staff, I'm hiring this person cuz I don't know how to do this role. In most cases. I haven't been a chief of staff before. It's another thing if you're hiring other engineers and you can run engineering tests. Different story for a lot of other roles. So now I'm what, 15, 20, 30, 40 hours in to trying to find the right person, and then I bring this person on board. Then I make an offer, hire this person, pay them lots of money, lots of equity, all these other things. And there's what, 50% chance They don't work out. Maybe hopefully better than that. Maybe you have a 20, only 25% chance they fail, which is sort of the average. And now all— so, but then let's— before we get to the failure part, I sort of skipped ahead. Sorry, you got me a little bit on this high horse, but like we skip ahead. Like you have to— now you have to— so you do the hiring for the person. You now need to do some training for the person. And guess what? You need to manage the person. So training and managing a person is also very time-consuming. I mean, the, the— I have a lot of direct reports who report to me, and, and it takes a lot of time and effort to be a good manager to them. And I hope I'm a good manager to them, but that's not free. It's not like, oh, they're sitting here doing lots of work and it takes so much off my plate. They take some stuff off my plate, but they also require ongoing maintenance and work to do that. And all the other people you hire have to do the same things. And so There's a huge cost to hiring a full-time person once again, and then getting to the end part where they might fail. In fact, there's a decent chance they will fail. Even worse for roles you don't know how to do, right? It's the blind leading the blind. So like, good luck that they're gonna go crush it.

And yeah, one of the, one of the craziest stats, um, that I've read is from Topgrading. If you ever read that article, I've heard of it.

I've not read it.

Um, we're running, we're, we're using that, um, in our process and You know, the, the average like talent density at the A-player level at any organization across any industry is 25%. So the likelihood is that 75% of people on your team are B and C players.

Mm-hmm.

That is just facts. And, and it is really painful, right? It's really painful for executive team members who are A-players. It's painful for other employees who are A-players because B-players bring them down, right? Um, and maybe someone's actually an A player, but they're, you know, a B player because they have a poor manager or they're not in the right function or the right role. Um, and they'll perform better if you, if they, if you move them around. But, um, who's doing all that, right? Who's, who's thinking about all that at early stage? And back to your, to your point about understanding who do I need in the chief of staff role? Um, you know, when I, when I get on calls with founders where it's like the, the first call is really like a Almost like a consultation. Like we're, we're spending most of the time talking about them versus like the process that we run and our results and placements and things like that. So I'm just trying to un— like understand what's in their head and figure out like what stage are they at? Like, do they know about the role, like the chief of staff role? How much do they know? How much do they know about like who they need? And sometimes, you know, it can be pretty nebulous. And so I'll say, hey, like I think the best thing you should do is Sit down in front of a piece of paper, you know, and, and just write down in terms of stream of consciousness what you need. Like, what are the things that are currently falling through the cracks? What would you love to get to but can't even think about because of everything that's on your plate? What would you wanna delegate? And again, to your point, you know, which things, um, do you have to actually run as a, as a founder? And what can you hand off to somebody who's, who's highly capable and is mostly self-directed? Um, the, the point of a chief of staff is like, hopefully you get somebody in the seat who doesn't need a ton of handholding. And so that's why people tend to gravitate towards this more senior kind of director-level chief of staff who's kind of been around the block a little bit versus someone, you know, right outta school or right outta consulting even.

Yep. Which makes sense. And that's, that's, The right sort of, I think, chief of staff to hire is somebody who can get in there and do that work and really sort of lead things in a lot of good ways. There can be a lot of value in that. The challenge that I see though is I've also come across a lot of people who want to hire a chief of staff, but what they really want is someone to take care of a lot of the underlying admin stuff. And when I hear that, it obviously frustrates me because one, that's where we really play, right? Like, so in a sense, like, we're, we're more partners than competitors because you're hiring people at the higher level where You do need that. There are certain like really high-quality talent that you should have for a great chief of staff. But when people tell me, oh, like I'm gonna hire a full-time person to, to go, to go take care of like the underlying admin day-to-day to like run the business, like, so let me get this straight. You're gonna pay someone $200K a year. You're gonna go through all the process of hiring them, pay Zahara lots of money to help you find someone amazing, and you're now gonna go ask them, you know, they're, you know, Bain or McKinsey consulting, top-tier talent, all these other things. Then you say, hey, can you go figure out how to like make sure payroll runs on Friday afternoon? They can do that, but man, that is a lot of money to spend for someone.

You don't want to do it though.

Of course you don't want to do it. They want to come in and like run the strategy, figure out how we keep the company moving forward in all these different ways. Um, why would you waste money and time on them reinventing the wheel on things that are critical? Once again, I love this stuff, but not what it— not what a top-tier chief of staff should be spending their time on.

Yeah, exactly. I actually just had a conversation like this with, with a founder earlier. I'm gonna have to connect you two because they're a potential Chor customer. But, you know, they said, hey, we're looking for 2 chiefs of staff, one reporting to the, to the COO and then one reporting to the founder. I was like, great, can you tell me more about the latter? Because I didn't really hear much about, about that role on the last call. And this person said, You know, well, the founder's looking for somebody to do more like admin. And I said, no, do not hire a chief of staff to do admin. 'Cause, 'cause as I learned more, they said, but they also want them to do the strategy stuff. And I said, no, no, no, do not waste your time even going down that path. Like, these are not the same people. Get a really strong EA or like an ops associate, someone junior who can get, you know, leveled up over time. Yeah. Let's say for For the admin work, or I'm going to recommend Chore. Um,

hirechore.com, and that's exactly it.

Exactly.

That's where people should be. That's— that is a split that should occur. You need someone to keep the trains running on time, absolutely. But that is— but that's what we do. Like, we'll keep the trains running. You need someone different who can be like, let's build the trains, let's build the rail cars, let's build the, the, the tracks. That's like, in a sense, like, to use that— break that analogy a little bit, but like That's what a good chief of staff is going to do. It's like, I want tracks to go in this direction and this direction. Let's create great OKRs and keep the team on track. Let's make sure product is happening. I'm going to dive into this big major thing that only we can do as a company versus once again, like the work we do at Shore, it's very much about your like HR, finance, compliance, equity type work, which is once again critical, but this is non-differentiated work. that we can specialize in. Whereas to me, and this is a huge pet peeve of mine, companies should be laser-focused on their core competencies and that's it. Everything that distracts them from their key areas of success otherwise is literally that, it's a distraction. Yeah. And a distraction is essentially like an anchor or a tax on your business slowing you down. And so you need to remove all those taxes. Like, you know, people love to obviously say like, I wanna reduce my tax burden. Well, great, you should absolutely do that. Legally, of course, reduce your tax burden. But yet they don't think about that when it comes to running their business. How do I reduce my business tax burden? Which means handing off and delegating everything to high-quality, lower-cost individuals who I don't need to pay. I can test them out, I can fire them quickly. I don't need to pay severance, I don't need to give them equity. They're coming in to do a specific job and they have to crush it at that job or I can fire them. Whereas Most people that you bring on board for chief of staff roles, certainly, but, but many other roles, if you hire them full-time, yes, they are expected to get that job done. But now it's like, well, we might have to give them 3 months to train and ramp up. And, you know, we need to see if they really can get it done and all these other things. Whereas when you hire a contractor, they're expected to go crush it tomorrow. I mean, like using you as an example, right? If I hired you as a recruiter for a chief of staff, you're like, hey Adam, no problem, I'm gonna do great for you, but like you need to gimme 3 months and pay me a lot of money for the next 3 months before I'm gonna be ready to give you, put a few good potential candidates in front of you. I'd be like, no, like that's not how it works.

Like, you're the expert.

I want you to gimme people tomorrow.

I mean, I know there are recruiters who, who work like that where you, you know, you have to pay 'em like $100K upfront to start a, you know, C-level search and, you know, it's gonna take some, take 6 months to fill the role. But yeah, that's not, that's not what we're doing. And I, I totally get it. What other like hiring mistakes have you made over the years?

Yeah, I'm sure I made, I made all of them. Um, but, uh, certainly a key one that we talk about a lot at, at, at Troy right now is the, the sort of standard axiom of hire slow, fire fast is always a good one. We've a very rigorous process around hiring. So we have a multi-step hiring process, including as an example, and I'm a big believer in this, we require everyone who even applies to us You have to fill out a detailed form to apply. So

what's that form?

It, it basically is all these different questions, right? Like, what are big mistakes that you've seen? What are things that you love about the company you were at? Obviously, like, why are you leaving? A bunch of questions that we've researched in depth that we think are really relevant to hiring for that certain role. Obviously, they're a little bit different per role, but a lot of companies just put up a job on, you know, Indeed or LinkedIn and like, hey, here's the hiring invite and like press or apply. press apply and you're good. No, no, no. With us, you have to fill out this form and it's, it's long. If you do it right, it might take you 20 minutes. I mean, it's not like that long, but it's

a good filter though.

That's, that's why we have it. It's a really good filter. And even once we have people apply, you can very quickly tell people who are thoughtful and have taken time and effort versus people who write like one word or a short sentence. And that's another filter. And so it saves us a lot of time upfront because we're essentially doing pre-filtering. But then we, so we have this whole process. We have a number of things that we do, but even then we make mistakes. Um, and what we're trying to get better at is saying, okay, within a certain period of time, once we know someone's not working out, you can usually tell. And so let's just move on quickly. The danger, and then we've once again talked about this as a team internally, the danger becomes almost like a sunk cost fallacy. You're like, well, I put all this effort into hiring this person. I really want to make them work out. And so now you're spending like all this time to try to get someone over the line who you thought you were hiring who was already good, right? Like you might have recognized that they needed some training, but not lots of extra training, right? Like on basic things you thought they already knew how to do, or that they should have been able to pick up quickly because you thought they were good in the role. And so the extra energy and effort that you have to put in becomes its own weight in dragging you down for that person. And so it's just so much better to move on quickly. When you realize, when you get that gut feeling this person just isn't working, make the tough call, move on, and then you can go back to starting to hire a replacement ASAP instead of just dragging it on. Because it's incredibly rare once you get that idea that someone's not working, it's very rare to turn that around. Like, that's not going to change. So just stop waiting.

Yep. How many hours would you say collectively are you spending with a given candidate in a hiring process before you make the decision to extend an offer? And the reason why I ask that is because my theory is that you need a minimum of 4 hours, not including an onsite, to actually get into nuanced conversations, be able to ask enough questions that are probing, that go a couple layers deeper than you would in those initial chats. And also to have enough kind of time in between steps. I don't necessarily believe that a really fast process is best. We're talking like if your process takes a week, that's probably too short, right? Uh, it's probably too short because you're not going to be able to spend hours and hours with a candidate in a week. And, uh, but you know, anything more than 4 weeks is probably too long. If they're entering, you know, your process and then 4 weeks later, they still don't know if there's an offer. Yeah. on hand or not, then it's probably too long. But yeah, my theory is that you need, you need to hit that 4-hour threshold to even like really start understanding a candidate.

I think that's right. I was actually, when you first asked, in my head I was sort of thinking it's about 5 hours that we spend with a person. Look, it depends on the role, right? So if you're hiring sort of more junior, you probably can spend a little bit less time. Um, internally more senior, you might want to spend a little bit more. But overall, although even frankly, in some ways for all those roles, I would say almost try to find a way to do a test together. before you actually make an offer. So like, hey, can we do a project together and work together a bit? But to answer the question specifically, you know, I think through our process, I think we have— there's first-level review just to see if we're gonna— like, if they make it past the first review of that application. That probably takes not that long for our recruiter, our internal recruiter who handles it. Let's say that's 5 minutes right there at least. Um, plus there's some maintenance that goes on. Actually, yesterday I spent a lot of my time, which is another pet peeve, because speaking of my— I was a little frustrated at the team. We— the job roles were all messed up. It hadn't been updated properly. were not listed the right way. There were a bunch of things that were just broken. I was like, I just need to fix this, which I really— I, I like to let people run their own things, and I got fairly frustrated. But those things take maintenance, right? You can't just put up a, a job role and not maintain it for 6 months. Like, it needs to be updated, um, and managed. So it might be 5 minutes for that review, but then you still need to maintain that application. So let's call it 10 maybe minutes total per, per application. Then we do a first interview with the person, then we do a second interview plus like a, a work test. I think that's about an hour that we do that, um, on that front. Then there's a third interview with another person on the team, um, and then there's an interview with me and then sometimes a fifth. Um, and we score everybody. Yeah. Everyone gets a score. We have a set list of questions that we've created for every single interview so that everyone's doing different questions at every step in the process. There's a scoring for each person that they've put in. Then we'll look at the total score. We'll then talk about it as a team and then make an offer. So When you add that all up, it, it comes out to probably be in the 4 to 5 hour range. But one thing, like, that's almost the easy part. Like the harder part is then you bring someone on board, you now need to go through the whole onboarding process. You need to make sure they get trained. Can they take on work pretty quickly? All those sorts of things. 'Cause those are costs we have to bear that people do a terrible job metricing and tracking.

I hear you. What are hallmarks of the strongest candidates that you've ever interviewed and ended up hiring? And I'm asking this from the perspective of putting technical analytical skills And ability aside, you know, kind of like the softer side of the candidate or their story that really made the difference.

Yeah. I mean, I think probably, probably the biggest ones, I think through some of the different people that we've hired who've been really good, probably the biggest one is for us to some extent, uh, a level of maturity and experience. So for better or worse, we tend not to hire junior people anymore. Going back to maybe where we started the conversation, I'm not willing to let you figure out life on our dime. Like we have a business to run. I have people who need to get paid. We're not a charity, so I'm all for people figuring out life, but just not going to happen with us. So away from hiring junior people and just say, hey, look, we're going to hire senior people who know what they're doing, know what they're about, why they're doing things. Not in every case. Once again, like there's a few exceptions that we'll make. So that's one is that part. I think another key quality that we look for is, you know, I'm trying to think through like the key things here. It's sort of like longevity to some extent in the role is another part of it. And then depending on what we're looking for, we're saying, hey, like What's that person's sort of ceiling, right? Do they have a high ceiling or a low ceiling? Or maybe you could also think of it as like, well, like, okay, if we're looking for someone to just get the job done, I don't care if they have like a super high ceiling, but can they come in, do a great job, be a fantastic teammate? Um, so we sort of have a, so that's another key part. If we're looking for more, then like, I want them to have a really high ceiling. And then I might recognize like, they might only be here for 18 months because they're like really ambitious, but I'm okay with that. Although once again, it depends very much in the role. We've leaned more towards making sure everyone we hire knows that we're trying to hire for the long term, right? You need to be here for the long term and a part of this company for the long term. And that's what we hire for, because that to me is more important. Like the willingness and ability to be here for the long term is more important than the short-term gains in sort of the, what that says about you as a quality individual. Whereas like you want to be part of what we're building versus it being this transactional thing. Well, like, what, what are you going to do for me for the next 12 months? Um, is an important quality we try to look for. So,

yeah, absolutely. And on a, on a tactical level, you know, what I've seen very strong candidates do is they go in extremely prepared to their interviews. So they've usually done a ton of research. They might've even done like backchannel references already on, on the founder or even reached out to, like connected with on LinkedIn and, you know, reached out to people on the team, asked for coffee chats. And these are, I'm talking about candidates that are just like top tier. It doesn't mean that like when, if you do that, you're gonna end up getting hired, but it really puts you like a cut above if it's a competitive field. Uh, you don't obviously know who the other candidates are, but those kind of things really stand out. Sending thank you notes after meeting with anyone on the team. Basically how hard they lean into the overall process. And I've dubbed this like the space between, so like the space between interviews, like what's the candidate doing then? Like, are they making good use of their time? Are they leaning in really hard to the process and the people and, and, um, relying on us as well? Because we log all those kinds of activities and we'll share that with our client and, and give them those insights. Like, hey, like, this is what we've seen the best people do. You like this person, you know, this is how they're showing up from our perspective. So, you know, we're gonna champion that candidate for sure.

Yeah, it's a, Really good point. I was smiling because we just had a situation where, so we're using a recruiting firm to help us hire a potentially new salesperson. And so I tell every single candidate at the end of our call, every, I interview everyone at the company. I tell every single candidate, I give 'em kind of this speech that I'll give you, which is basically like, look, great interview. Thanks for joining. Your time is precious. My time's precious. I want you to think deeply about whether working at Shore is right for you. Like, is this the right fit? Because I want you to make a long-term commitment. You're gonna be spending a lot of your time with us. Do you want to be a part of what we're building and where we're going? Um, do you want to work for a company that I'm the CEO of, for better or worse? Like, do you want to be a part of that? Think deeply about that question and let me know what you want to do as a next step. Before we'll tell you anything on the next step, I want you to think about it. So send me an email later today, tomorrow, this weekend, whatever works, about what you want to do as next step. I've— and I'll tell people, I'm like, I will take no offense if you tell me you're not interested. Like, that's great if you prefer that. Right. I've never had anyone say that. I think they're mostly impressed by me even saying that. That sort of, that speech, but it's true. And anyways, the point that I was going to make is, so this recruiting firm, I told the candidate that the salesperson sent me this email. Uh, he did send me a good email, you know, waited 24 hours, totally fine. Sent me an email, asked some good questions in it. I wrote back with the answers and then never heard from him again. And I literally was like, I told my go-to-market lead, I was like, hey, like this guy, we're just not going to be able to move him forward. We liked him, but like He asked some good questions. I would presume he'd have a follow-up based on my answers, and I haven't heard from him at all. And then it took like a week, and the recruiting firm started reaching out like, hey, like, what's the next step? Blah blah. I'm like, they're like, well, he's been following up with us, but you haven't heard. He hasn't— we told him not to reach out to you directly. And I'm like, I was actually pretty pissed. I'm like, basically told the recruiting firm, you guys completely messed this up process. Like, the whole point was that like, he's a salesperson. I want to see it's he— like, he should be following up aggressively, like not in a nice way. You had to be thoughtful. Like, you're not supposed to be blocking him. I already told him he should establish a direct connection with me. We emailed back and forth, but I never heard from him again. And so like, that's a huge mistake. And to your point about like him, he should have found a way around that. From what they're claiming at the recruiting firm, that like he's been following up with them nonstop and they've sort of blocked him because that's their quote unquote process. And I'm like, I don't, I don't know. I could go on. I was, I was pretty frustrated. I told them basically, I was like, I need a discount if you want to keep working together, because this is ridiculous.

I—

Well, it's a waste of my time. Like, if that's how it's going to be, like, don't waste my time either. Like, I'm actually just more annoyed with my time. And they're like dozens of email, they have like 3 people involved. And I'm like, I don't need 3 people involved in all these middlemen or women in the process. Like, we're gonna hire a candidate. You're not gonna be part of this person doing well at my company. Why are you involved? Like you made the intro, you found the person. Thank you. Get outta the way. No offense to recruiters, but like—

Yeah, no, I, oh no, none taken. None taken. Um, yeah, I think that the more rapport that can be built is ideal in a process. So actually, like, I think, I think a recruiter's goal should be to support that because you want that gap to get smaller between the founder and let's call it chief of staff, right? Because that's what I'm, I'm familiar with. That, and I, I actually, I liken it to dating. It's the best metaphor out there, I think, for just hiring in general, but particularly for the chief of staff role, because you're gonna be like this the entire time. The spark has to be there from the beginning and it has to just like carry all the way through and just the excitement just has to continue building like exponentially throughout the process. And the best candidate, you know, there's no question marks around the person. It's just, you just know. Right. You just know every step of the way, you know, they have strong signals in their, in their background. They show up, they did their research, they're following up, they kill the case study. That's a, that's a big one too.

How deeply do you get involved? I mean, on that note, to turn around back on you, like to your point, it's like dating and what I keep thinking about this situation that I just mentioned, it's like dating, but it feels like there's a chaperone involved and, and that really bothers me. Like I'm, I'm, I'm an adult. I don't need a chaperone involved in my dating situation.

Yeah.

So like, I want you to be there to help things along, maybe do back channels, push things here and there.

Yeah.

But like not to block communications. Like to me that just seems insane. But like, what do you, what do you recommend for how to make that work?

Yeah. Um, sometimes candidates will BCC us or CC us on communications, which is fine. We don't ask to be copied. We actually like debrief with candidates after every touchpoint with Anyone on our, on, uh, our client's team. And so the reason why we're doing that is not to chaperone or like find out what was discussed or really anything like that. It's just getting an understanding from the candidate, you know, what do you think about this opportunity? What do you feel about it? What do you feel about this person? You know, what do you feel about the company? And kind of getting into like the guts of it, understanding their motivations, you know, why this is like number one or not. Like if it's not their number one opportunity. Why not? Like, we wanna know that so that we can play all of that back to our client. Because if our client really likes that candidate and they wanna move forward in the process, then we wanna arm them with the information so that they can be proactive about answering that candidate's questions on the next call.

Mm-hmm.

Right? Or maybe they'll say, hey, like, can we, can we double-click on the equity range again? Or they might be starting to think about benefits already if they're kind of like mid-late stage in the process, like, okay, if a candidate's asking about what the breakdown of benefits are, like what are the plans and that kind of information, then they're already, or like start date, even if they start volunteering that kind of information, then they're very close to basically like accepting an offer if they were to extend one. Like we pretty much know that it'll be a yes from them. So yeah, we do all that to kind of like support the process, not get in between or done any communications or anything like that. Um, so really I think the goal is to be collaborative, not controlling.

Yeah, which is the right, the right way that it should be is, uh, so yeah, I'm, I need to write them back and figure out what to do on the next steps there. But, um, a frustrating scenario.

You know, one thing that you mentioned earlier was that, you know, obviously you've, you've invested in a couple hundred startups and I noticed, um, on your LinkedIn page that you said, I'm still trying to comprehend how some of my failures have gone from the top of the heap to bankruptcy. I have some thoughts. So I'm curious to know, obviously maybe hiring, you know, plays a big part in that, but curious to hear what, what your thoughts are there.

Yeah, I mean, I think probably the main one to some extent is probably that there's one specific example that I, that I think about a bunch, and this is a company that from, they raised I think within like after maybe 2 months after we, we were some of the first investors at like a $5 million valuation, super early company, everything else. Within like 6 months they were like worth $100 million. Within another 6 months they were worth like $250 million valuation. Like just utter, just skyrocketed, crushed it, had all the right elements going on. The reason they failed though is a combination of 2 things, and this is where I think a lot of issues do occur. Issue number one was that the founder ego got in the way. So when you see your company grow that fast from a valuation standpoint, and you suddenly see like your equity stake be worth, I don't know, $20, $30, $40, $50 million, and you're coming from, you know, you're a ramen-eating founder, and you're now like, oh my God, like my theoretical net worth is $50 million, I must be a freaking genius. Like the ego element of that means you have real trouble taking advice and listening. And, and, and you have to have a certain self-awareness as a really good founder to recognize that, no, like, yeah, like you, you, you hit on something really lucky, like well done. And you are, you are grabbed that the right way. You're doing a lot of the right things for sure. But like, don't let it get in the way because your ego could easily be burst if you're not careful. Um, and you need to still listen to a lot of advice. Number 2, which kind of goes to the advice part, is when companies have a— when you're growing that fast and you have a poor, bad advisors, a board of advisors, that can lead to some of that bad advice. And you need someone who's strong. So if you look, VCs like to say, we are super founder-friendly, we're going to be super supportive of the founder. Well, guess what? If you have a founder who is ego-tripping and thinks they are God's gift to this startup world and they are always right because their just valuation just keeps going up and to the right and everything is freaking awesome and they are crushing it in everything they're doing, the board should be willing to step in and say, hey, like, there's some things you should think about or slow down. And that's hard, one, because boards, especially VC boards, are not always equipped to do that because they want it to go as fast. They want it to either be a massive growth or a flameout, right? VCs wanted binary outcome— zero or billion or bust. And that's what they want. So you have to have a good mixture of those things and really get some smart advisors around you to hold you in check as a founder. And, and so that's where a lot of those problems have occurred, is ego combined with bad advice. Or maybe it was— maybe you couldn't hear the advice in general, or the advice just wasn't thinking about it. I mean, once again, the same company that, that really comes to mind here, the board let the founder kind of do everything until suddenly it was too late and they were out of cash. investment goes to zero.

Yeah. Let's pull on one more thread here before we wrap. Um, what were the most humbling moments for you as a founder?

I mean, lots. So many in many ways. I mean, there's so many humbling moments. Certainly shutting down a company is a humbling moment. That's probably— that's one of the main ones when you have to shut down a company and be like, we failed, we didn't get it right, what did I do wrong? Like, the amount of times you just think over and over, what did I do wrong? What did I miss? did I— where could I have done better? Um, I let down my team. I let down my investors who backed me. Um, and, and especially if it's like friends and family, like you're letting down people who really— who, who invested because they love you, not because they have any idea if your idea is good or anything else. They did it just because they care. Um, that's really hard. So that was one of the most disappointing moments is, is when I had to shut down my, um, first company. Uh, it was tough. I think we did the right way. We gave money back to investors. We let everybody get fairly— you know, some of these companies let stay around for forever and don't actually do it the right way and then it messes up your taxes. Like, at least like everyone could write it off in their taxes, other things like that, because you do it the right way. Uh, another is I've kind of been quasi like fired by my co-founders twice, and like that's been tough. One time was a scenario where it was like either we keep growing and building it, and that was like me who was going to go make that happen, or try to have an exit, but I probably wasn't the right person to help make that exit occur. And you needed my co-founder to go do that because he had sort of the right technical background that looked— well, an acquirer would want his technical background more than they'd want my business background. And the board made a tough call and it was very, very humbling and frustrating because I was pretty frustrated with my co-founder and didn't think he was stepping up in the right ways to— we were sort of in this position because of him. And then to basically be told by the board that like, you're not the right person to lead us forward. Continue going on, even though they were aware of the things that my co-founder was doing, which was tough because you pour so much blood, sweat, and tears into things. And then the other time that occurred was much more amicable in many ways, but it was still a tough discussion. It was still my co-founder had to kind of come to that decision. And that's, by the way, where this situation I'm talking about is what led to the existence of Chor, where my co-founder, to his credit, really, Came to the realization. So we tried to raise— so for this company called Abstract Ops, we tried to raise our Series A. We had a lot of the right metrics, but it was a really bad time to raise money for every company. And a lot of our revenue was services revenue. And so he had to make a tough decision. It's like, we can't afford to continue to keep doing these services that we're doing essentially at a loss leader, as a loss leader for our product. We can't continue to keep doing that. And like have a chance of, of making this business work because we weren't seeing the growth we needed to have. Um, so he had to make a tough decision to like split things apart and sort of said like, hey, look, I, you know, like we can't afford to keep you. And even himself, like he's gone on and done other things too. I can split off this company, you have a nice services business here, and you can kind of try to go see what you want to make with this, or like, or we got to kind of just call it. Um, and that was really tough to hear even though he was right, and I was obviously part of like us coming to those conclusions. It's still like he had to make that call as CEO, and that was difficult. In all those situations, it leads to new opportunities. So if you do it the right way. So my former co-founder and I, in that, the company I just described, we have a VC fund together. So we do investing all the time. We talk nonstop still. And it led me to, to building Chore, right? We started Chore. So like, I, I got the assets from Abstract Ops to start Chore. We had a number of good customers. We had some revenue and it was like 7 people, myself included. And so it was 7 people, me, and I was like, okay, like we have this company. I needed to go give a pretty big loan to the company to make payroll, to keep it going. And that was 2 and a half years ago. And from 7 people, we're a little over 40 people today and profitable and growing. But like—

That's awesome.

But, and that was an opportunity for me to go make that happen, but it wasn't anything guaranteed. But it was a pretty cool opportunity to, to even go do that. 'Cause most people, if you start a services business, you kind of gotta start from scratch.

Yeah.

Cross your fingers. It's just you. I get to start with a little bit of kind of a leg up, which is really a blessing in many cases. Um, yeah. So, but those were, those were very humbling experiences.

Yeah. I appreciate you sharing so vulnerably. Um, what a, what an awesome story. Yeah. Any, any parting thoughts on Chor or anything? Uh, top of mind that you wanna leave with listeners?

You know, the main one basically is your time is incredibly precious. So be very thoughtful about who you're spending it with and where you're spending it, um, and what sort of work. And, and to me, all what that means very specifically is spend it only on the number one or 2 problems that you have. Outsource and delegate everything else. Um, which once again means don't hire full-time people until you are 100% sure you need that role. And a deep clarity on what that role means. Um, and this goes for everything. I mean, like, once again, using— certainly we talked about chief of staff a bunch and how you can hire a chore, right? Hireachore.com to go do a lot of the operations back office work. Um, you still very much might need and want a fantastic full-time chief of staff, but you probably don't need all of that right off the bat. But another example might be like, we have a part-time product person at Shore. Uh, he's awesome, but we don't need to hire him full-time. So we save a bunch of money that way, and I don't have someone I need to manage. He has to hit specific deliverables and that's it. Don't have to manage him, don't have to do one-on-ones. Yeah. Um, and he hits his deliverables and we pay him a little bit more than we'd probably pay him if he were full-time. But that assumes he was working full-time. That assumes he would come in full-time and we'd have a full-time role for him to do and we'd be able to use all of his free hours. I don't think we do, and I don't think most companies do for most roles. So that'd be my parting words. Be thoughtful about where you spend your time and who you spend it with. So Zahara, I appreciate you spending some time with me, uh, as well.

Likewise. Thanks, Adam. It's been great having you on.

Absolutely.