The Best Businesses are *Not* Sexy with Adam Spector of Levy

You're telling people like, our company's doing great, our website looks amazing, we're growing really fast. All the, you know, BS you tell your investors. And then behind the scenes, let's be honest, you're an entrepreneur. Everything's on fire.

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Hey everyone, I'm here with Adam Spector. He is the founder of Levy. He started 4 companies, Abstract Ops, uh, Virtue, and LiftIgniter. Um, and you also have your own podcast, the Entrepreneurial Excellence Podcast. That's my speech impediment coming out, and now I'm doing a podcast. So this is wonderful for childhood me. How are you doing, Adam?

I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me.

It's good to have you. So we've run similar companies in the past. So Levy and Support Ninja are kind of a little bit hand in hand, right? We're looking at how do you leverage and how do you buy back your time? How did you get back on that, that kick? Did you have an EA and, uh, you just kind of fell in love with this idea of, of scaling and, and hiring people to do some things possibly better than you, um, could in that specific area? How did you, how did you get into this space?

Yeah, so I actually got into the space mostly because I realized there was a, a kind of unique need. And I just started noticing all these companies I had the real pleasure of investing in and privilege of investing in, and the companies I'd started, I was always the business guy dealing with all this back office work. And it felt every single time I was reinventing the wheel, yet it wasn't different for any company. It wasn't as if my SaaS company versus my machine learning company versus all these ones were all that different. They basically had the same problems and I had to rebuild a whole playbook. How do I do hiring? How do I do offboarding, onboarding, compliance, equity, all these different pieces? And the idea of recreating that wheel felt totally insane, especially my time. You only have 24 hours a day. And of course, a good amount of that you need to sleep and eat and do other things with life. And then you have to think through as a founder, is my time better spent doing back office work to run the business, which isn't differentiating? It's not why I'm going to get my next high valuation and markup in my next round of fundraising. Is it working, building product and delighting my customers? Is it going to market or other things? And in the end, when you break that apart, to me, someone needs to solve this. It's not sexy. I call Levy, we're like the plumbers of businesses. It, it's get, it gets really nasty when your plumbing breaks and everything stops, right? And you gotta call a plumber ASAP. It's kind of the same thing with Levy. And I was like, we need to solve this. It's not sexy, but it needs to be done.

I've heard that, like it not being a sexy industry because essentially it's outsourcing and it's, to your point, plumbing and back office support. I talked to some other entrepreneurs and, oh, you're the outsourcing guy. I'm like, yeah. And they're like, that's such a sexy business. And I'm like, that's not what I heard. To their point, they probably see this as an international company most of the time, right? And you're, you're working with a bunch of really cool people and you're building these remote teams. And so they had a different point of view than I did. I thought it was funny that what I thought was originally an uncool niche space is now something that people are actually looking at and they're thinking it's a cool business.

Putting myself in their shoes without knowing, of course, who they are. What I find most cool about any business is the companies that can scale and grow and build something successful. That is to me the most sexy thing. I actually don't care almost what industry you're in, and it might seem sexy on the surface. What's sexy is building a business that grows and succeeds and creates real delight for your customers. Why do you become an entrepreneur? You become an entrepreneur because you want to solve a need that exists in the market and that you think will make the lives of other people better. And whatever the space is, in some ways it doesn't matter. It could be a restaurant. People need another pizza place. Maybe that's what you think is gonna change the world in its own small way, which is great. Building that into a success means you've solved the problem. That's winning. The exciting part that creates real value. And so who cares if it's because you're doing the hard stuff sitting in a windowless conference room in the Philippines? You've solved for a real need.

There is a little bit of an adrenaline rush, right? Whenever you're like, oh, I solved that problem. And then you move over to the next one and you're like, I solved that problem, right? And then whenever the The problems feel overwhelming. That's whenever you have a bad day and, oh geez, I don't know how to move forward. I'm usually worried whenever I don't know what the next move is. And so if I always know what the next move is, then usually I'm, I'm all right because I'm able to make 5% improvement on each department month over month. That adds up to a snowball that adds up to a bigger company. That, that's, that's what flow feels like for me. Do you get a rush whenever you, you're solving problems inside your company and you're, oh, I made this department just a smidge better?

I do. And I actually talk about this with my team on a regular basis. is the idea of, hey, like how, how do we plan for a long-term successful future and how do we realize every day we're compounding? I, I, I'm a huge believer in just the idea of compounding in, in every single step we take forward and we're building on top of it. We're getting stronger. It doesn't happen overnight. Right. We all like to see these overnight successes and there's big stories about Facebook and how they took off, but like the truth is most of them are, are a little bit like SpaceX or Tesla or something where it's, man, they almost died. And a million little improvements every single day to get there. That's what a real business is about. And that is, that, that's fun and sexy, even if you can't see it immediately.

We were talking about the cost of having a wrong hire and how detrimental that is. Um, but I view compounding almost on the other side of it where I made a right hire and over time I build up the right people in the right seat. And then you have this amazing community of people that you've hired over time and I'm able to progress. And that's something that's like a unique differentiator in the right moat is, is really like one person can be a game changer to, to your org.

How did you grow the business and get that excitement in knowing what you're gonna do each day? Was it just your willingness to put one step in front of the next? I don't have the answers, but I'm gonna figure it out. 'Cause you kept, you kept it going for a long time with Support Ninja to get to, to, to an exit. What were the steps to get yourself through those tough times, the difficult moments where you didn't know the answer?

The main thing is that you have to run the business like you're going to be running it forever, right? You can't go in with the mindset that this is going to end. And so the main thing is like, how do you want to be spending your time? What type of problems do you want to be solving? Which type of people do you want to be solving those problems with? And for me, that's how I get good days is I, I get a little bit of an adrenaline kick whenever I see the right people in the right seat interacting in really cool ways I never thought and making stuff that I never thought could be possible, let alone something I could do on my own. And so, um, I think that's why I focus so much on incremental improvement, right? Is like, how do I make this 5% better? And, um, I think you probably get a little bit of that whenever you're helping companies with their back office support, right? You're helping them with that incremental improvement.

It's actually our mission in many ways. Um, we think the world is a better place when there are more successful entrepreneurs because all those entrepreneurs are trying to solve a problem. So the more of them that we can help and get out there to do that with, Is a win for society. And we are part of that journey. And frankly, I think a pretty big way, but it's

pretty special. I mean, they're inviting you to help them scale the backend of their company. So you get to see them in a very unique way and you get to help out with something that's pretty, pretty important, pretty key. How is Levy going so far? You guys have been growing for the past couple of years. What are some things that are on the horizon that you're excited about?

People actually let us see their real vulnerable side. You're telling people our company's doing great, our website looks amazing, we're growing really fast, all the, you know, BS you tell your investors. And then behind the scenes, like, let's be honest, you're an entrepreneur, like everything's on fire. And we see that. We're here to tame that fire and get things under control. We can't guarantee you're gonna have a great product. We can't guarantee you're gonna go to market the right way. But man, we can guarantee that you're gonna make sure your team's gonna get paid on time. You're not going to have major fines when you get your next fundraise. You're going to be in really good shape for that. And you can go on to the next stage and save yourself a ton of money on lawyers, if nothing else. Um, so, but anyways, um, to answer the question, yeah, no, like Levy, Levy is kind of an interesting story. So, um, we've actually only been around for about a year and a half. Um, and we, uh, we spun out in a sense, not legally spun out, but spun out of my last company called Abstract Ops. AbstractOps was started with the explicit goal of automating back office tasks. No one had ever done it before. It was difficult to do. It's still difficult to do. We, while we raised about $10 million for AbstractOps, it turns out certainly when the markets start getting bad, which they were into the spring of 2022 or so, people are not that willing to fund businesses that look a lot like services companies. I could argue for a bunch of reasons that's probably wrong and they're making a mistake, but I understand why VCs at least don't want to do that. It was hard for us to raise. And we said, okay, we have a business that a software business that's going okay, but we might need to make some changes there. And we have the services business that's sort of a break-even business right now. We haven't invested in it in a big way. We did it for other reasons why we had that. And so we essentially decided to split up the company. In October of 2022 was the official sort of first day of Levy. We were 7 people with a break-even business. We're now a year and a half later, about 30 people. We want it to be more profitable, but it's grown pretty well from that point forward. So it's, so it's far to go, but it's gone decently.

There's not a lot of people that have spun out a business of an existing business. You have to figure out like which assets are on which side of the fence. How did you negotiate that?

Really good question. And you're right, it's very rare. I think our investors say, I think we're the only ones that have, they've seen it happen successfully. And actually I'll add, by the way, my co-founder, even though we had a lot of contentious negotiations, 'cause of course I didn't want them to, so they own a small portion of Levy. Right. My last company, because we essentially took all their contracts. That was the trade-off. It was contentious, of course, negotiations about how much they should own, things like that. But to his credit and mine, of course, too, it takes two to tango. We both came at it from a perspective of we're playing long-term games. And our perspective is I'm okay with maybe giving up a little bit here or there on the margins to preserve a relationship and keep this going for the long term because our joint success is more important than A slightly better win on a slightly higher ownership perspective. And we actually had a fund together. We've increased doing that fund. So we have our own VC fund together. We invest together all the time. We talk on Slack multiple times a week still, um, all those sorts of things. But it really was coming from that perspective of we're playing long-term games and our goal is to do work together and build things that are wonderful for the long term, not for some small short-term gain. Life isn't about that. Yeah.

If you don't mind, Adam, give a high-level timeline of the 4 companies that you started and what was the outcome. And if you feel comfortable sharing some of the numbers as far as like, uh, employees or revenue size that you guys were able to scale to, um, that stuff is really helpful, if not completely understand.

My journey started when I came out to Silicon Valley in 2010. I always wanted to be here. I found it fascinating and I just wanted to be in the tech space. Like I, you could plot me even today in Hollywood. And famous people would walk by me and I'd have no idea who they are at all. But if I saw like Elon Musk or I saw Jeff Bezos or, um, Sergey Brin or people like that, I'd be like, holy shit, like you are the rock star that I look up to. Um, and I wanted to be in Silicon Valley. So I, I got lucky enough to, I was working at a tech company in DC, which is where I'm from. I just finished my JD/MBA, worked on the strategy team, won a bunch of awards there. It was all going great. Um, and I could have stayed a long time, but I actually will never forget I remember asking the HR team, I was like, hey, look, how do I get to my manager's position? She was a senior manager and I knew it would take some time, but they basically were like, it's gonna take about 20 years. And then I was like, I was like, and you're like, okay, thanks. Yeah. I'm like, okay. So, and I literally actually even, even called 'em out. I was like, so wait, I was at a tech company in DC, but it wasn't the place for me. And, and actually another big point I had there too, you know, this is gonna get to your question specifically, but I sat down with a, a founder of a Sequoia-backed company in DC, which is pretty rare back then and still today. And that founder, I asked him, I got lucky enough to get the intro to him and I, and he basically, he gave me really good advice, which obviously has stuck with me today. He said, look, if you want to be in politics, stay in DC. This is the place for politics. Be here. This, you're going to play, play at the highest levels with the best. Test yourself against them. If you want to be in finance, go to New York, go play in finance world and go against the best there. If you want to be in media, go to LA, go do that with the best there. But if you want to be in tech, go to the Bay Area. He, so he's a tech founder in DC and he's like, go to the Bay Area, be in tech there. Um, and so that was the advice I took. I said, okay, I can't stay at my current job. This doesn't make sense for me long-term. I'm gonna head west. So I did.

How long have you been in CF or SF?

How long? 14 years. 14 years in, in San Francisco the whole time. So my first job was actually in Mountain View, but I was a young guy and I wanted to be in San Francisco where the fun stuff was happening. So I, um, I took Caltrain. I wasn't, it wasn't at Google, so I was taking Caltrain. Uh, which is the, for those who don't know, the train down from, from San Francisco or up and down the, the kind of, um, the 101 down to Mountain View. And I'd take another train to the office and I'd walk to the office and I'd get there and be there all day. And it was awesome. It was a company called Clearwell Systems. 18 months later, it got acquired for almost $400 million, obviously because of my work. No, I'm joking. I remember that my pay from that, from my equity that I owned was like enough for a small car. And I was like, Holy shit, this is amazing. This is like what I'm here for and this is what it's about. And we built something really cool and I was a small little part of that, but that's amazing. Um, and, and so we got, got acquired. I needed to stick around and, and do work for that, for the acquiring company, which was Symantec. Um, and then started my first company.

That's fantastic. And a lot of employees don't get to see, um, an exit happen. I'm in Dallas, so I guess that means I should get into like oil rigs, um, and stuff like that, or—

Probably you're not and you've done fine without that. But yeah, I would argue like if you wanna be in tech, like I think that's still the case today. If you want to be, certainly if you want to be in AI, San Francisco is a place to be. The ecosystem pushes people to learn more, talk more, interact. You can do things that you can't do when you're located elsewhere.

I had a moment when I was in San Francisco, I was waiting for a train or something like that to pick me up from the airport. And someone was, here's my tech company, here's my card. And that moment just kind of sticks with me. I'm like, where, where else would you find that, that kind of experience? Hey, podcast listeners, we are currently looking for sponsors for this podcast. If you guys are looking to connect with other business owners that are scaling and growing their company and you guys are interested in a spot on this podcast, we're looking for you. So reach out to connortomkeys.com or operatorequity.com and we're glad to help set you guys up with a spot on this podcast. All right. Cheers. Back to the pod. Adam, tell me about— you started your first company. What was that like? What was the company? What did it do?

So this was the Early days of what was called collaborative consumption. It was basically the sharing economy, and it was like I'm gonna share. I have all these tools in my shed, and I can share them with someone else and rent them out. And then that became I'm gonna rent out my car and maybe drive my car around à la Uber. And actually, funny story there: I was at a Fleet Week event at an entrepreneur's house over in the Marina, which is the other side of San Francisco. This guy was there in. He lived on the side of the city where I was on, and so he offered to gimme a ride back and we talked about his company, which happened to be Uber. He was the, I think, CEO of Uber at the time. Gave me a ride back. Years later, I was like, oh my God, I should have, I clearly should have just like stopped what I was doing immediately and jumped ship and joined him on this crazy idea of building Uber. But that was the early days of the sharing economy. Lyft was getting started. I sat down with Logan Green and, and his co-founder, blanking, um, uh, uh, John Zimmer. For a coffee and talking about how they would use my company. So I started this company saying, how do we verify that we know who you are? How can I trust Connor? That's one of those questions. Like back then, people thought it was crazy. You, you're gonna get in some random person's car.

Yeah. And there's like safety risk involved.

Um, you're getting in a random cab driver's car. Like, well, it's very, you know, they did background checks or something like, I don't know what people's excuses were. It was insane. And so we were trying to build a company that would use essentially data exhaust which you could get off of these social networks like Facebook and other places to say, Connor worked at these companies. I know Connor went to this school, essentially an alternative background check. And so that was Virtue.us. So we were Virtuous. Um, and that was the, that was the idea.

That's an awesome idea. And I think most people know Checkr, or maybe they do, or maybe they don't, but that's a really big company and it went through Y Combinator and they do the background checks for Uber and Lyft.

Virtue, we had real trouble selling the virtual background checks in a sense. So based on your data exhaust, we had a cool algorithm. It worked, but we just had trouble getting that really sold. We actually started doing background checks, actually started to get real traction in the business. It was going well, things were happening, and we ended up running outta steam. We almost sold the company and we missed out on probably a good amount of money because of it and why we didn't sell it. But we ran outta steam is what it came down to. And so we shut the company down, but 4 months later. I, I happened to be, in a sense, participating in some of the, the YC Demo Day stuff. Checkr showed up and I was like, holy shit, yes, this is exactly right. I wish I had been doing that because we basically were building that. But I was in the seed round from Demo Day at YC in Checkr, Checkr's round. So, um, you know, I, I saw my own company.

You got back into it in a way, right?

Yeah. But because I knew it, I was like, yes, this is going to be a big industry that needs to be disrupted. I knew that I had that special insight. And I was able then to invest in, once again, I'd rather be the founder, but it's still not bad to be an early seed investor in a very big, successful company at this point.

That's a great place to be in. And Support Ninja powered Checker back in the day and still does. And they're one of the oldest clients. And so processing those background checks and making sure that everyone is like, um, kind of meeting the requirements. Do you feel like you possibly went a little niche and you were focusing on like, what is this thing that no one else has? It's this, this like other information that's coming off these data platforms. When, if you had gone for the simpler answer of just making background checks a little bit more approachable for companies, then maybe it would have been a different story.

Now, with that said, we didn't know what we didn't know at the time, to be clear, right? I had no idea what it was. This seemed like a need. So the market had to pull us there. The question then became, do we have the energy and time? And I remember my co-founder at the time, and he was an early Google guy. amazing engineer, he was, I'm not excited about doing background checks. Like, that's not sexy.

You know what gets me fired up in the morning? Background checks.

And that was the problem. It, it, it didn't get him excited. And so it wasn't something he wanted to go build out. And that, that led to a point where we didn't have the steam to keep going and doing it.

Were you guys both in the same place as far as being mentally burnt out or was it more on one side?

Not burned out per se, but we were both, do we want to keep pushing this? Are we going to be able to raise for this? What does this look like as the next iteration? So we started actually having conversations about selling the company. We had a, um, in sort of acquihire, not full offer, but close to that, um, with Okta at the time, um, which has of course become a big business. And we sat down with their CEO, all these other things, like they were trying to court us. In another same conversation with my co-founder at the time, he basically was like, if, if we could all, like if we do the alternative, like if we just say we're going to shut the company down and we're going to go work and do other things. Would Okta be the place we decide to apply to and go work? And we decided no. And I think that was a huge mistake. And actually what I tell people nowadays, I say, you know what, even if the company isn't the place you want to go work, go get that exit. I don't care if it's a massive exit.

Oh yeah, 100%.

Go, go get that first one.

It feels completely different. You approach business completely different.

But we didn't know that. Yeah. I was a foolish young first-time founder. I had no idea. And, and so we missed out on that and, and obviously not only would've turned out to be very lucrative because I think their stock was like $2 a share at the time, and I don't know what they're at right now. Let's call it $200 or something a share after a bunch of splits, many, many, many splits. It would've been lucrative financially. It just would've been really good for growth. I'm not complaining. I've done well.

But yeah, we learned from that experience and there's probably a direct line from that one to your next one, and then it continues to where you are now. So it's hard to regret something that kind of leads to where You're happy with the outcome. We built an omnichannel kind of like backend that collects stuff from like the web app and SMS and all these different things before Zendesk was a thing. And we weren't sure how to use this technology. We weren't able to find product market fit and we were struggling on making margin on top of other services and APIs that weren't making margin. And it's, oh, if I could go back and do that again, like I would do things differently or I would, I would be able to sell it more effectively, but you don't even know that selling's an option. Like you're just kind of like, at least for me. Yeah. I was like, oh, you have to be at a pretty big company to have interest. I didn't even know what the process looked like. Like there's no like a pamphlet that people give you saying, hey, this is something that you should really read before you start this startup. You just see it Shark Tank and you're like, I need to be pitching. I need to raise money. I need to do some of these things that might have the same impact as just having another entrepreneur that's gone through it and tell you like, hey, this is, this is roughly the entrepreneur, uh, lifecycle. Of starting business and selling business.

On that note, I think what I, I didn't do enough of, I should have asked a lot more people for advice and really try to sit down and get that advice. And nowadays you can of course go and find lots of podcasts like this one to have that conversation and learn about it and just do some searches to find your answers. But just really spending some time, you're talking about the fate of your company in, in, in a sense, the, the next big steps in your career, having those discussions and having someone who just said no, like, You have an opportunity to go sell to a fast-growing company. Who cares what they're doing? Go sell, get that job. Even if you leave a day after you get the acquihire and you lose out on the equity you were supposed to get, so what? Like you've still done it. You've still done it. And that's the stepping stone to the next thing.

So you didn't sell. What was the next thing?

We shut it down.

Did you, uh, go straight into finding a 9 to 5 job or did you, uh, did you have a list of ideas that you were pretty excited about?

I didn't have a list of ideas. It's one of those things where when you're working really hard to build a successful company and you have people you have to let go and all that other stuff, it's draining. It's tough. And so I needed a little bit of a break, but somewhat thereafter ended up becoming COO of a friend's company that was growing pretty well. It was a hardware company. During that process, I actually told him at the time, this isn't a full-time thing for me, but I'll come in and help you out for a few years, for a few months. During that, I started getting more into the idea, like machine learning was just starting, like in a, in a funny way. I, I was really, really early to that, that space. And, and, you know, another thing, like, had I stuck with it, I would be an AI guy today, and that's what I would be known for. Um, and, you know, have a company that's worth many billions of dollars or something. Uh, but, but anyways, but so like really early days, I actually got introduced to an engineer who was one of the main guys who wrote the early Google YouTube algorithms for personalization. And YouTube was really, from what I understand, I think still today, I think it's still true and accurate. Um, really with the first large time where machine learning was put to bear on a large dataset for real-time personalization. So many people even today probably don't fully realize when you turn on YouTube, that page loads and it is fully personalized for you. It is going to be different for what Connor sees, what Adam sees, completely different. And it's loading in real time, right? It seems like it's immediate to you. They're actually milliseconds that are happening behind the scenes. They're deciding what are the hottest videos, what's most relevant to Connor right now, what's exciting, what's going to get him to click, what's going to get him to stick around. All these decisions about what shows up on that page, where you're located, what are you at home, are you on your phone, all these things are, and it's happening in milliseconds behind the scenes with a massive machine learning model to decide what to show you. And this guy was building that out. He decided to leave Google to go build a company. He just finished Y Combinator. I, and was like, he needed, like, I need someone on the business side. And so I came in as a co-founder to go build all that out. That was a company called LiftIgniter.

So you ran that company for 3, 4 years?

I think it was about 3 years. I was on the board then for a while thereafter. Uh, and, and to be clear, he, he was a CEO, so I was just co-founder. So I think we, we co-ran it in a sense. Um,

right.

Uh, and then we, um, built it out and, and it ended up getting sold to a company called Maven. Uh, sort of a, a marketing company.

How did that exit happen? So you're, you're building this company and you're scaling it. Um, did they approach you or did you run a full process?

The company was not taking off the way we expected or wanted. And so the process being run and, you know, seeing if there are buyers out there, the technology is really powerful. We, we're getting clear lift. I will say, I think today I, I tell people when I still hear people try to build the same thing, like, oh, we're gonna personalize every website out there. And I was like, Well, how are you gonna charge for that? Because the real challenge that happened in that space was attribution. So attribute, and what I mean by that basically is if, if you land on my consumer goods, direct-to-consumer product website, right? And so I have shoes on my website or something and I personalize exactly the right shoe you're gonna see and you, you go purchase that shoe. Did you purchase that shoe because my personalization was so good or because the rest of the marketing team did great work to get you to show up at the website in the first place?

This is almost like another version of the first company. Whenever you were looking at Optimizely, essentially does A/B testing and they very, they mess around with very basic changes to the website. You're doing a more advanced version of that. And like, if you can point to like A/B tests saying like, hey, hyper-personalized is this, and your base model is doing this, and that's that delta is where we're providing value. Optimizely used to be a relatively affordable subscription, but I feel like you almost leapfrogged again. Yeah. Where you're like, we're going to build this nice tech essentially.

We did. And that was the idea. And it's funny you mentioned Optimizely. We actually had a conversation with them about them acquiring us as well. And, um, because it was the, it was the right sort of thesis now, but I think the challenge they had was very similar to ours, which was how do you really prove you're providing that much of an uplift in value? And then are, is it just someone's believing that you're providing that uplift? Where does that fit in the stack? How do you sell that the right way? And it really led to its own set of challenges. But so Maven realized they needed some sort of solution in that space for sort of a lot of the multimodal and multivariate testing and optimizations. And it was a decent fit for the team. And they hired pretty much the large majority of the team on to join them as well. And at that point, I mean, it wasn't that big at that point. I think we only had about 10 or 15 total people on the team, mostly engineers. great engineers. So it was a good enough of an exit. Well,

that's awesome. How did that change your life?

Not very much. Um, and, and, and I mean that in a good way. I mean that in a good way, right? So maybe unlike a lot of founders, and you certainly speak to a lot of them, I tend to be someone who's pretty content and satisfied in some ways with things. Like I'm, I'm, I wanna learn every day and I'm changing and growing every day. Things are good. Not in the sense I don't wanna make change and I don't wanna keep pushing myself. I have a house in San Francisco where my family can live. That, that is already, I've, that, that changed my life in that sense.

Mm-hmm.

And that's like a big win. Um, but beyond that, I don't need a lot more. I like to walk, I bike everywhere. Like I don't, I don't care about, I wanna get rid of things. I don't wanna buy a lot more things. Um, what's fun for me is like the opportunity to go speak to people like you and learn from you. That's cool. And that doesn't cost that much money beyond us being willing to spend some time together.

Yeah. And there's something special about having that pressure off, I'm sure. Like once you, you have that experience. You're able to kind of let your mind roam and if you think it's exciting, if you want to have a conversation with another entrepreneur, you have time to do that. I think I had my head down so much running my company that I didn't spend as much time outside of it as I probably should have. Do you feel that way?

I do. And certainly I do now. I mean, I have 2 young kids and I think that actually it's basically, this is a thesis of mine and we can talk about it a bit, but it's basically we as people, forget entrepreneurs, We only have time in our lives to do 2 things really well at any given moment. You can, you can choose 2 things and that's it. Everything else falls by the wayside to, to a large extent. And so I've consciously made a decision that I'm going to focus on work and building my company. I owe it to my team. I owe it to my customers. I owe it to myself. I have things I still wanna do. I have things I believe I can get done. And then my family. And those are the 2 things I spend a lot of time on, which means though, I don't have time for hobbies. I get my workout in by literally biking my kids to school every day. And that's like my workout, which is sort of a joke of a workout, but it's a workout, something I get outside. Um, but I don't have time, you know, I, I've, I've great friends, but I don't have a lot of time to see them. And those are just things you decide to give up. So yeah, I can't, I wish I had more time for other things, but I made a conscious decision that I want to be excellent as a CEO and running a company. And I want to be excellent as

Hey, podcast listeners. 8 years ago, I started a company called Support Ninja. It's an international hiring, training, managing outsourcing company to help you find the best talent anywhere. If you guys are interested in hiring international talent, check out supportninja.com. Cheers. Whenever you started Levy, in some ways it's your first bootstrapped company. How is that different than being VC backed?

The biggest probably difference Is I really feel like I can take the long-term perspective on things, which in a VC-backed space, you can't. You're making your timeframe is 18 months, if not less, maybe 12 months before you start your next fundraise. So you're on a, just a different accelerated timeline. So you're hiring people who are here for the long term, hopefully, who are excited to build something really big, who recognize that it's going to take a bit of time. Um, which means, you know, you might hire people who are less mercenary. There are a lot of people in the startup tech world. Yeah. Who are pretty mercenary. They're going to go to the hottest company. They're going to jump in for 12 months. And if it's not crushing it, they're going to jump right out. And those people, they can get the job done and you're going to pay them a lot of money for it. We don't have that sort of people at Levy because in the end you join us because you were energized by our mission, our vision. And I would argue by the fact that you probably will make as much, if not more at Levy than you would at one of those startups, because unlike them, you'll be out of a job in 12 months because they overpaid you and they're trying to grow too fast. 'Cause that's what their VCs need them to do. You'll get paid less with us, but we'll be around for long-term. So you're probably net will be the same and we have a much higher chance of our equity having value. Um, that's true. Will, will it be multi-billion dollar value? I don't, I don't know. It could be. I mean, there's that chance exists, but at least it has some value. Unlike 90% of startups, which they'll give you equity and it's gonna go to zero. The chance of it going to zero is 90% 'cause 90% will fail.

It's a long-term company. You're working with people. You can have a long-term relationship with companies. I mean, like the average Um, like you probably have relationships that will span 3, 5, 6+ years, the longer that you run this business.

One of our customers who's been with us for, for about 3 years recently churned. The reason they churned was they actually hired their internal person they were working with from us. They hired that person to go do a lot of the operations for them internally. And we have a clause in our contract that protects us from some of that. And financially it's okay. And what I don't get when it, with these companies is like, Our mission is to remove, uh, I utterly want to destroy the job of internal operations. Sorry to all the people that are out there who are internal operators. Like you are overhead and costs for your companies. You're not part of the core business for what they're doing. You're not the product team. You're not the go-to-market team. My job is to build a company that can come in there, do this job faster, better, and cheaper than you ever can.

Let's talk about this a little bit because we both work in different outsourcing companies and we both had like that clause, right? What we do is we work with these teams and we work with these people and we provide value in this way. But to my knowledge, there is not an outsourcing company out there where they bake into the model that, hey, we will be your launchpad. Like we will help you get set up. But I don't know of any company that's like, we will help you transition and build an outsourcing arm for yourself. That's not something that I've ever seen before. And I don't know, like maybe it doesn't make sense. We had 14 different departments that were running and executing these plays, right? Yeah. But on the other hand, if you're looking at how do you remove barriers to, uh, possibly that, that sale, I think it's an interesting idea that after 2 or 3 years, like what does that transition plan look like?

If, if that happens, I, I get it. I understand it. At the same time, as an entrepreneur, it angers me because what it means is we have not proven we, there's value above and beyond that individual. And that means our product isn't good enough. To improve it every day to the point where there are things you only can get from us. You will not be able to get it anywhere else. And that becomes a moat that will hopefully keep people through their entire journey. Maybe I'm being overly ambitious. I want to serve every company up to the Fortune 500 should be using Levy someday because it also doesn't make sense for them to have. When you look at, I don't know, uh, uh, uh, Ford or GM or IBM or whatever, they have 10% of their people are dedicated. To back office tasks. Why? That's not their core competency. It's insane that they are doing it that way.

One of the things I wanted to ask you about is that we were talking about the future of work and we were talking about optimism and pessimism. And you said that you were pessimistic on the short term and optimistic in the long term. What, what are your thoughts?

Here's the thing that I see happening in the market overall. Um, one, we are more and more, thanks to COVID to some extent, but overall just trends. We're moving into more of a globalized world. So if you believe in meritocracy, which is one of the core values that Levy has, and I believe in, which that almost by default, if you go from first principles, means you can hire the best people anywhere in the world and you should. In fact, you financially should hire the best people anywhere in the world. So right there and then that means the people who are in the US who are paid a lot of money for their roles need to be being thoughtful. Well, how am I significantly by a large margin better than other people around the world who have access to all the same data, all the same knowledge, all the same training. And in many cases, decent enough infrastructure, at least when you're talking about a strong internet connection, which is all you need nowadays. That democratization of knowledge and skillset is amazing. And it's wonderful for businesses. It'll probably be disinflationary when it comes to costs that you charge. Other businesses, and that's probably a net good. It's not great for American employees and white collar employees specifically. So that's going to be a real disruption and that's just globalization. Then you layer on top the fact that you have a massive change in AI where AI is going to come for even those, those lower cost jobs. And that's another functional jump in cost savings. So US to international is a functional jump. International to AI is another functional jump. And suddenly you have massive upheaval and AI is moving so fast. I love learning. So for me, like every day I get to learn something new about this new AI thing. I want to test, I want to try that. I want to try that. That's really cool. But that is, that makes me a pessimist for the short-term white-collar workers who are either not willing, not able, not even fully understanding that they need to reskill themselves every single day. to remain relevant. And even then it might not be enough. And that is worrisome for all of them, myself included, like all of us. Um, what are, what are the jobs going to be? And then the long-term optimism though is I also think AI is going to lead us to a world where we're a true world of abundance where you don't have to work if you don't want to, everything will be available.

There's that presidential candidate, Andrew Yang. Uh, like when was that? 4, 8 years ago? I mean, that was, uh, Yeah, he was talking about universal basic income and now he's looking pretty good.

That's probably where this all heads at some point. People will need some level of support. The cost to enable that support will be relatively low. And the people who want to work will find ways to work. And it will unleash though a huge amount of human creativity, human optionality, which could be wonderful in a lot of ways, right? There's a lot of people who are in jobs they don't enjoy. So this will free them up to choose the jobs they want to do when they want to do them.

There's gonna be a little bit of a shock to the system as far as our economy, and then a little bit of a shock to the system for us. Evolutionarily speaking, we're not used to being inundated with so much information and it's a little, it's a little shocking. And so there's gonna be a little bit of a transition period and those that ride the wave are gonna be well off. And we just need to be cognizant of the impact that maybe not everyone can transition and maybe they might need a little bit of help. So. It's going to be interesting to see how things work out in a bit.

I hope our infrastructure systems and world can be set up in a way to handle that. I don't know if it is set up to that because it just, the government always moves much more slowly compared to everything else.

Yeah. If you're asking Facebook how they make money, then, uh, you're, you're in a rough, you're in a rough spot.

Exactly. So that's where we're at. And that's a, and that's, that's a real problem given how fast this is all happening. And that's where, so that's where I'm a pessimist. In the near-term future, the next, let's say, 10 years, which is not really that much time in the grand scheme of things. If we get through the next 10 years mostly intact, um, then yeah, like I'm a super optimist because the world will be abundant. AI is going to unlock so many things that is science fiction today in dramatically changing the way we live, view the world, things we can do. So I'm excited, but it's going to be a rough period.

Adam, on your end, You have Levy, but you also invest in a ton of companies. What are some of the ones that you're super excited about if you want to give them a plug or talk about why they're so cool?

A company called BetterUp. It's their executive coaching for everybody. They had real trouble raising money, but Alexei, their CEO, was like, this needs to happen. Why is it called executive coaching when, which implies of course it's just coaching for executives? That sounds insane. If it's valuable for executives to get coaching, how do we make it valuable for everybody to get coaching.

Yeah.

Um, to the point where, by the way, like all of our, our sort of core delivery people on our team, we call them operations partners. We get them executive coaching from BetterUp at Levy today and they've crushed it, but, and they've worked really hard and built a ton of stuff and it's so impressive. Uh, and like another one, um, Human Interest, uh, a 401 company. The whole thesis, how do we dramatically lower the cost of 401s? These are companies that made investments a long time ago. Um, on the more recent front, uh, there's a, a company called Puzzle. Um, uh, they are redoing, um, kind of what it means to, it's the next generation QuickBooks in some ways, and just doing really cool things there. Uh, and then, so there's companies like that, that, that just get me excited. Um, and of course you never know who's gonna be successful, who's not. Mm-hmm. Um, I don't know. Those are, those are some of them.

Your journey is a little unique in that you had a product and then you spun out a services business. I've seen a lot of services business try to spin up a product and that's, that's usually pretty hard. Like depending on who your technical partner is, it's very hard for a services business to be like, okay, I'm going to go into Figma and start working in wireframes, start figuring out what the user experience is going to be like. That's a, Takes a different, almost like muscle to do.

But actually, I'm curious, were there things that support Ninja? Okay, how do we either automate or increase our margin profile of various product lines? Some of that must have been like some, maybe not a product directly that you'd push out to customers, but some sort of automation on the backend or something. Or was it not, we're going to just train our people really well and hire really well and market really well. And that leads to a successful business.

It definitely starts out with the latter, right? You're just like, hey, like we need to make outsourcing approachable. How do you do that? You. Um, make the profiles, like you do a certain level of due diligence and you systematize that and you process that and you, you create a product, right? And then, but now with the recent changes, every single customer that goes in, we do a process map. Like we outline like, here's their user journey. And we have a team that's dedicated at looking at what does that backend process look like and what are the different ways that we can help? And we include automation and AI into everything. that we do for the client, like right out of the gate. And so you have these bigger players like Teleperformance and Accenture, um, that are just kind of leveraging manpower in bulk to do some of these tasks. And we're kind of nipping at their heels in a way. And in a way, we're also kind of limiting our revenue, uh, potential by being the player that's willing to provide that service right out of the gate. So that's something that we definitely had to implement over the past 3 years and And it's a little bit different from the original model.

Do you find that AI is changing your business significantly? Is that like something that's going to be more and more part of what you offer? And does it, does it reduce the need for, for people?

It's definitely something that we offer, but because we offer it out of the gate, we're factoring that in. And then there's still room for people involved in that process. Right. And so, uh, we had this product called Sidekick, which is essentially just like, um, we're looking at different types of tasks and different types of processes and we're providing recommendations and we're trying to make things faster. And, um, that's definitely something that's, that's helpful. So whenever we're looking at AI, if we don't factor it in, someone else will. How do you make that person like a command center? And then how do you upskill them? And even if they leave Support Ninja and they go off to another job, they're, they have a skillset that's pretty valuable. And that's where I think globalization gets pretty exciting is you find these super creative people that are working in different countries and seeing them come together and build Their skillset is pretty, pretty cool. We had like a hackathon, I think 2 or 3 weeks ago, right? Where they're all, um, which is kind of cool to see inside a company, but seeing people lock, lock each other inside a room and, and work on different ideas and get excited is almost like you're spinning up entrepreneurs inside a company and they're probably going to start a company at some point. That's pretty cool to see.

I think we're gonna move into a world where Everyone is an entrepreneur to some extent. I mean, like, because what's going to— the change, excuse me, the change in, uh, the number of jobs, like normal standard big company white collar jobs, because of that change that I just sort of, we talked about, um, people will be forced to become entrepreneurs, but it also, the cost to become an entrepreneur drops significantly. So you can hire Levy and hire Support Ninja. You suddenly, it's a company of one person and all these other tools are out there to support you in your mission and journey. Um, and that in some ways once again can be very freeing for a lot of people. Um, albeit scary, but I hope there are more entrepreneurs out there.

Let's take some trends. So like how long a person works inside a company, like it used to be 40 years to get a watch, right? But now it's like 1 or 2 years and that's shrinking, right? And so that's kind of lending itself towards Like you're acting as a company with your own skillset and you're, there's more flexibility for you to move over to a different job. Right. So that's pretty entrepreneurial. Um, and then like the lack of friction to spin up a good looking website with good content and good copy and be able to have access to automation tools that, um, like would have been shocking if you were to look like 10 or 20 years ago. I mean, these things make it very approachable. That if you're enterprising and you're excited about learning a bunch of stuff, you can just pick an industry and really hone in, find your niche, launch a product, and do so pretty quickly. So I'm looking, I'm, I'm looking forward to this. I think this should be, this should be fun to see.

One of the key themes sort of for your podcast itself though, it's like, what does that success look like? What does one think about over time as you have different exits and things like that? And I would say, kind of, you know, think about that for my own self is look, in the end, you have to come up to things with a level of optimism and excitement and energy. That's what gets me up every day. It's like, man, there's so much to read. There's so much to do. I wish I had more time in the day. So how do I optimize that? But then you go from that and how do I optimize it? How do I become more healthy? How do I sleep better? How do I wake up every day, bring my best self to everything I'm doing? Because that gives me more time to learn and more opportunity to learn. How do I keep leveling that up? Part of the journey and the excitement part, I'm trying every day and doing my best. It leads to a level of, of at least for me, happiness, contentedness that is hopefully a lifelong game. And I can look back when I'm, I, it's a different discussion now, but I, but my goal is to live to, you know, 100, 120, but like get to that point and look back and say, you know what, I did it, man. And I learned a lot. I tried so many different things. I had so many cool experiences. Yeah. And most important, I made the logical choices that made sense for me in my life. I took control of those choices and didn't let those choices take control of me. And that's, that hopefully would be the big win that I'm shooting for.

Adam, that's awesome. Adam, where should people go to find you?

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Uh, um, you can certainly find me on Twitter or X. I kind of always call it Twitter just because I'm a former employee of that, of Twitter. So to me, it will always be Twitter. Um, I think it's @aspect00, @aspect00. Um, you can certainly find us at Levy. So levy.company, so C-O-M-P-A-N-Y is our website. Please learn about us more there. I'm very active on LinkedIn at Adam Spector 2, I believe is my, my unfortunate, I wanted to get, you know, Adam Spector 1 or just without the 2, but, um, uh, it's okay being number 2 as well. I don't mind that. Um, if everyone can win. So it's fine. Um, but certainly on LinkedIn as well, uh, and, and pretty active with posting a bunch of videos and, and hopefully giving back to folks too, right? This is, I learned from you, you learned from me. Um, and so many people have been generous with their time and energy as I've built my career and I, and I hope I can get back the same way.

And you also have your podcast, right? So we have to—

Yeah. Entrepreneurial Excellence. Yes. Everyone should check on Entrepreneurial Excellence. Bit of a tongue twister on purpose, but hopefully memorable. But learn, learn what it means to be an excellent entrepreneur. No one's fully cracked the code, but there are a lot of people who are really good, such as yourself, Connor. So,

um, it's great to have you.

Yeah. Thank you.

That wraps up today's episode. For more inspiring stories and valuable lessons from successful entrepreneurs, be sure to listen and subscribe wherever you get podcasts. Thanks for listening. Until next time, keep pushing boundaries and writing your next chapter.