NachoTips: Adam Spector, CEO of Chore, Shares Common Startup Pitfalls to Avoid

26 Mar 2025 · 1 min

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1:11

In this interview segment, Adam Spector explains how, after years of founding startups, he transitioned into a fractional chief‑of‑staff/COO role, launching a service company called Abstract Ops. He discovered a market need for founders who dislike or lack expertise in back‑office operations. Abstract Ops attempted to automate back‑office tasks, but Spector found that back‑office work is riddled with edge cases that are hard to automate, making human judgment essential. The conversation highlights a common startup pitfall: over‑reliance on automation for complex operational work and the value of experienced human operators in navigating edge cases.

Exactly right.
Yeah. And so I guess what got you to this point to start Shore? I mean, I would imagine you as a multi-time founder, you probably realized a lot of these problems yourself and you realized you wanted to help other companies avoid kind of the pitfalls that maybe you learned maybe during your first startup.
Yeah, no, that's exactly it. So actually about almost 5 years ago at this point, I started doing essentially chief of staff work, almost like a fractional chief operating officer almost for some companies. And I realized that there was this big opportunity in the market. Like people needed help desperately and smart founders were coming to me and saying, hey, can you run this stuff for me? I don't wanna do it. I don't enjoy it. You seem to be pretty good at it. I had to learn it cuz I was the one having to run those in my other startups. So started a company called Abstract Ops actually at the time to go do this. And Abstract Ops, we tried to automate all the back office work. Turns out everything in back office is an edge case. So if everything's edge case, for everyone listening to this, you probably have some technical abilities. Edge cases are really difficult to automate if everything's an edge case. Humans are really good at edge cases. It's actually a really good human skill, not a good computer skill.