The Mindset of Successful Entrepreneurs (ft. Adam Spector)

Like, how often have you been obsessed with something for 10, 15 years and just all you can think about every night is that thing? And the answer might be never. It's rare to feel that obsession. But those are the founders who are most successful, who are utterly obsessed with solving that problem. And that's what they think and dream about and can do it day after day after day after day. And it is fun. It's not work. It is fun to them.

We are live. Another week of the Cronos Group Podcast. I've been practicing that voice for a little bit. So

nice.

Welcome back everyone. We've got a lot of great conversations to have. Jerry, it's been an interesting week. I feel like, I mean, for all of us, it's just a lot of hard situations, not as well as like hard in life, but just hard overall with just getting deals done, getting things moving. And there just seems to be a lot of just hiccups and casual moments where it seems like it could be easy, but it's never that easy.

Yeah, that's the thing about Business. I love when the influencers always talk about how simple things are, and you watch it in a quick 1, 3, 5, 10, 20-minute clip, and you think what you're watching, oh, I could do that, that looks easy. It's like rebuilding a car or remodeling a house, you know. You watch these shows and you're like, hell, how, how hard can it be? Check that dude out, right? He did it over 3 episodes, and him and the wife went to lunch and Everything seems to work out just fine. And then I don't know how many times I've given the advice to people, do not— whatever you do, do not remodel a house. Don't do it unless you absolutely have to, until you know what you're doing, until you got a good idea about how it works. Just understand it's going to cost you twice as much as you think it is, and there's going to be things that are hidden. And it's one thing to watch it on television. Again, always back to what I always talk about where, you know, the guys make motorcycles and people throw wrenches at each other and there's yelling and screaming. That's not real world. And so For me this week, I've got a bunch of real estate deals that I am working on, one in particular that just continues to be a pain in my— a thorn in my side. And with all of my experience and all of the times that I have done this over the last 30 years, I continue to get my butt kicked trying to get this closed. So that's what Matt's talking about. But more specifically, I want to talk about, uh, in the few minutes we have before we bring our first guest on, is health. So Matt has been going to the gym. Steve has been going to the gym for a long time. Not that Matt hasn't gone to the gym, but Matt is back in the fold working on his health. I've been working on my health. I told Steve today in a chat that I'm down 8 pounds in 17 days. That's 1,800 calories a day of meat and protein, baby. Uh, and I'm going for a huge loss, keeping all of the muscle that I have. I'm eating a massive amount of protein every day to do it. And, at day 17, I feel powerful. I've talked about this all the time, and I want to talk about this more. And, y'all can get more and more of this if y'all go over to the Kronos Group School page, where we are going to be doing in-depth on all of these things relative to health, business success, whatever it is that you might be interested in. And, so many of us need to be more interested in our health. We need to spend more time on our health. And, I can absolutely tell you that— Everything else is downstream of your health. And there is very few people who are going to listen to this who are going to say, you know what, I'm in good enough shape. We all know that's not reality. So whether you're 25 years old, 45, or 65, what we're talking about here is going to resonate. So for myself at 57, never been healthier, on my way to 225. That's about 20-odd pounds from where I am now. And I've given myself a date, a very aggressive date of April 19th. And

that's Destin. Destin time, baby.

Destin, baby. Destin, Florida. If you live in Tennessee, if you live in Alabama, if you live kind of in the South generally, everyone knows about Destin, Florida. That is the place on the Panhandle to go. We have been, I don't know, dozens of times. We absolutely love it. So I'm looking for the beach body by the 18th of April. But Matt, in the few minutes we got before the guest gets here, you you specifically have gotten started?

It's been an interesting journey. It was one of those things that I used to work out a lot, and if anyone has watched any of these episodes, there's a lot of stories of me living with Jerry years ago, and I was in peak performance when I was living with Jerry.

Rocked up is the word you're looking for.

Yeah, I had a, had a lot of, uh, good nutrition, working out every day. And then as normal people would say, you just get busy, which is not an excuse, but it was something that I just didn't even think about. And now building out the Cronus Group, it's become more of a front of the mind thought rather than the back of the mind thought. My health was always on the back burner. It was more of like, hey, I'm gonna put in hours. I'm gonna put in a lot of work into this business. We're gonna do great things. But in order to build a business successfully, you have to have a certain level of health about you to keep going further. And a lot of business owners might say, hey, I was running on fumes. I was eating Taco Bell at midnight. I was barely even going to the gym. But hey, the business is successful. How long will that last? Because the thing is, if you're trying to do that, And you're putting in that kind of routine, which is a bad routine to begin with, you're not gonna last long. And if it's one of those things, it comes back to like your mentality, your nutrition, your overall health, and how you feel when you enter a room. And I think that's one of the things that, Jerry, that when we've been talking about doing in-person workshops, we've been talking about doing a lot more in-person experiences. I wanna feel like when I walk into a room, It's not that I need to be noticed, but I feel confident walking into that room and I don't even have to say a word. And so many people might say, well, what do you mean? Like you should have a confidence already in your head. Well, yeah, but that's not reflected until they see me walk into the room and they have a certain presence about that person. Similar to Jerry walking in at your size and you commanding that authority. without being arrogant or proud. It's more of just that, that, that presence that you put out in front of you by just walking in the room, being fit, being in health, good health, and being in good business. And that's where you're like, hey, this is a triple, triple thing that's like the triple play is what I call it, where it's like health, fitness, and overall just business.

There's no, There's no substance. I mean, perception is reality when you walk in that room and you want people to notice you and go, oh. And one of the— and absolutely, if you are 350 pounds and you walk in and you got a marshmallow hanging off of your beard, people are going to look at you like a 350-pound guy with a marshmallow hanging off your beard. Now, you might be the smartest guy in the world, you might be the richest guy in the room, you cannot buy yourself that sort of respect. So you want to start the day With that. You want to start the meeting with that, the introductions, whatever you're— the networking that you're doing, you want to start from that perspective. So anybody tells you differently is making an excuse because they don't want to put in the work. The reality is you can still be successful by being healthy or without being healthy, but it makes it a lot easier. And this is one of those tricks over the years that I know work, because if you've got a barrel chest, if you've got a tapered waist, if If you've got shoulders that are wide, if the t— if the shirt you're wearing fits and isn't bought to cover something up, you're going to make a different impression on those that you're trying to form a relationship with, or you're trying to make a sale to, you're trying to make— turn them into a customer. 100%, because that perception is reality in that moment. So it's a hack, and it's a hack both for success at home. It's a hack a hack for success in business, and it certainly is a hack for success in a room where you're trying to get noticed and trying to get noticed via making a sale or networking as opposed to, you know, a popularity contest.

Yeah, a lot of it has to do with just the internal state too, because I'd fallen off the wagon a little bit as far as working out. Kept the eating decent, uh, don't have too much terrible ground to make up on that. But I've noticed as I've gotten more consistent last 2 weeks, uh, really diligent, blocked it out of my calendar Instead of just looking for space to open up, but it's a dedicated part of my day that how I, how I—

Yeah, how I feel walking out there.

Yeah, how I feel. I get a little choked up about it, but how I feel walking, but how I feel walking out of the gym, I mean, is whether it— the presence is 100%, how you carry yourself walking in, but you do that too in the way that you feel about yourself. There's a confidence, shoulders are back, chest is up, you're walking taller, making eye contact with people. And I think part of it, a lot of people want to get in shape, want to get healthy, you know, but a lot of it has to do with how you feel about yourself doing it. And then that is what's projected and creates that presence Matt was talking about when you walk in there. It just, it does change your state of mind. Jerry, you talked to me earlier about how once you got your diet dialed in, how it just changed your thinking, how you were working on things, how it increased your focus. Because you'll keep it to a degree. You want to do it. You get healthy. You say, okay, I'm going to start doing this. Going to do this. And when you don't do that, in the back of your mind, you didn't keep your word to yourself. And you know that. You might never meant that to a human being, but you know in your own integrity, your character of who you are, I'm not keeping my word to myself, yet I want other people to keep their word with me and have that transaction. And it's incongruent with our thinking. And so I think a lot of it, that's a good word for it, is it creates congruency with everything you're trying to do in the outside world, everything you're trying to accomplish, everything you gotta go. You have to have that internal congruency of I keep my promises myself. And I think when you start doing that—

I agree.

Yeah, when you start doing that—

We got our guest on the line with us. Let's do this. Let's add him. Let him in, Matt, and we will See how he's doing. Adam, how you doing, my friend?

I'm doing great. How are you guys?

We're doing great. We are live. Uh, we were just talking about health, so before we even introduce you, we know anything about you, we're going to bring you in and let you give your 2 cents on it. We are big advocates for being healthy, and we find that success— everything seems to be downstream of health. It's, it's hard enough making a living, it's hard enough being successful, it's hard enough just in life generally. It's made easier— doesn't make it easy, but it's made easier What's your take on that?

It's hard to disagree with that, Jerry. It's definitely hard to say no to that part. I do think though a lot of people are really bad about optimizing that part. It sounds good when everyone says you need to be healthy. It's a lot harder to build healthy habits and keep them up on a regular basis. I personally have done a ton of things to optimize my health. I mean, if we want to go really deep, I can tell you about the 30 different supplements I take, how I've optimized my sleep, working out, all those things. But I think for a lot of people, those are really difficult to do. And yet, to me, everything else in life is almost downstream of your health. And actually, I'll add one more thing to maybe make this clearer. So a friend of mine just recently said this when I actually had a small health scare. He said, you know, when you're healthy, you have 1,000 different problems. And when you're sick, you only have one problem. And it really put it into perspective just how incredibly important health is.

That's fantastic. Let's get into that a little bit more. Let me introduce you to the folks. Number one, we've got Steve and Matt Floyd here, both of us, all 3 of us Do this thing together on Thursday night. So I just want to say welcome, Adam. We appreciate you having you here. And let me introduce you to everybody. We've got Adam Spector with us. To all the listeners, let me tell you about it. 4 companies invested in over 200 startups, 14 of those turned into unicorns. And he also runs his latest venture, Chor, which helps founders— I didn't know exactly how to phrase this, Adam, and you can clean it up for me— get the operational garbage off their plate so they can actually go out and build something. You can fix that better than I. probably said that. Looking forward to hearing what Chor is all about, obviously, but I also want to dig into, uh, Adam's experience investing in that many companies. Because you hear words like angel investor— most of the listeners, uh, are entrepreneurs or on the outside looking in, and so you hear terms like angel investor get thrown around, seed rounds, unicorns. Most people don't even know— they got a sense of what that means. It's not— not the vast majority of the small business community is made up, uh, you know, where they— where they enter business, uh, through these— through ways. And so I want to take a few minutes to explain all of that and let you tell us from your perspective in plain English what that is, how it works, and how somebody even gets into that world. More importantly, after that many investments and that many conversations you've had with all of these founders, Adam, I think that— I'm sure you've probably seen some patterns— what works, what fails, what separates people who break through from the ones who stall. So my goal today, hopefully at the end of this podcast, is that the listeners and us will walk away with something practical, something they can lift, or something they can, they can use, a shift maybe in how they think, a mistake to avoid, some piece, some nugget that they can take with them as they go on trying to become successful themselves. And in particularly in this very, very, very difficult world of entrepreneurship that we're all trying to achieve. So with that said, Adam, appreciate you coming on. Thank you, sir.

Absolutely. No pressure, Jerry. I'll do my best. Everyone walks away with something. I will say you forgot maybe the most important thing, given that you're a Tennessean. I also went to Vanderbilt for undergrad. So, um, lots of, lots of time spent, uh, down in the South.

All right. So you're ahead of the— okay. All right. We already like you. So, um, with all of that intro, uh, let's just kind of keep it basic to start. Undergrad at Vanderbilt, kind of give us that background that brought you to the point before you jumped into business. Where'd you grow up? That sort of thing. Get familiarized with us, with you.

Absolutely.

Familiarize us with you, if you would, please.

I grew up just outside the Washington, D.C. area. Dad's a lawyer, my mom's an artist. I actually went to boarding school for high school in New Jersey. So actually, people have a negative connotation of boarding school. It was sort of one of those really good boarding schools where it's almost like college in some ways. So I was really lucky to go there. Applied early decision to Vanderbilt. It was my top choice school. I really wanted to go. People didn't really know what Vanderbilt was at the time. It was sort of this school down in the South and not what Most of the kids did from my preppy little boarding school did, wanted to go south. And I then ended up getting a grad degree. I got a JD and MBA from University of Miami down in Florida. And I always wanted to be out west. So one of the key lessons that I learned early, relatively early on, actually this is after graduate school, it's not that early I suppose, is you want to surround who you surround yourself with. And this maybe goes to your point about health as well. Who you surround yourself with is who you end up becoming like and who you basically, who you become. In many cases. And one of the best pieces of advice that I received when I was thinking about what do I really want to do now that I'm finished with graduate school, where do I want to go? And I got great advice from actually a founder who happened to be in DC at the time. I mean, he essentially said, look, if you want to do politics, go to DC. Like, you know, you can do local politics, all that stuff, but like big, big politics are Washington, DC. You want to do finance, go to New York. You want to do media, go to LA. And if you want to do tech, you go to San Francisco. You get out to where the big boys are playing and make that happen. And you want to put yourself with those other people to compete against them. And that competition pushes you to be better than you would've been otherwise. I had always wanted to be in tech. It just sounded interesting. I was that weirdo reading Wired magazine in my dorm room, front cover to back. By the way, I still receive the paper version of Wired magazine. It's the only magazine I still receive in paper form. Literally read it every day, or at least till it was done. It just, I wanted to be part of tech. Like tech was building the future, it felt like, and I wanted to be a part of that. And so after grad school, after spending 2 years back in DC, I was lucky enough to get a great job out in the San Francisco Bay Area. They literally, they move fast. I literally, they interviewed me over the phone. I was sitting in my car out in the parking lot for the company I was at interviewing on the phone. They're like, great, fly out here. Got on a plane, I don't know, a week later, flew out, interviewed. The next day I was walking onto the flight to go back to DC. My then future boss called me up, said, by the time you land back in DC, you're gonna have a job offer in your inbox. Let's get you out here next week. And that was that. 16 years later, 4 companies later and all the other good stuff, I'm glad I made it out west.

So you had a sense of that early on that this is what you wanted to do and that's why you headed west.

Yeah, I mean, look, I was probably a standard kid. Like, I enjoyed playing video games. I enjoyed messing around on that stuff. And I was like, this is really cool. The funny thing for me is I actually enjoyed reading about the video games more than playing them, learning about how they were made, what was happening with business behind it. Like, I actually always wanted to work at Microsoft. Like, that might not sound like that interesting to people, but I was like, I really want to go. I never, by the way, worked at Microsoft, but that was like my dream job.

What was the type of games that you were really interested in?

I mean, I was playing Halo. This dates me certainly, but I was playing Halo 1 networked in my dorm sophomore year because you could only do it on a single network. It wasn't external, so only on a single network. But on the dorm room, it was all one network. So we would literally have our dorm rooms open. Everyone would be screaming, rocket RPGs going against the Jeeps and stuff. It was a ton of fun, but stuff like that. But even before that, back in high school, I was doing other ones that were like— God, I forgot the names of some of the ones back then. But yeah. It was a bunch of fun.

Yeah. That's when local play was a thing compared to network play now, which is with the whole world. So that was when you could play with your, play with your boys in the, in the, in the halls and be able to like create some real, uh, mischief within those, uh, those games.

Yeah. And I was like doing GoldenEye even back further back, like GoldenEye with your buddies, all that other stuff on the N64. Anyway, so all, all, all good games. And it's funny, I don't have any time at all to play video. I've literally, I have a PlayStation 4 and an Xbox One. I haven't turned them on in like 7 years. I have 2 young kids and I work 6 days a week. Haven't touched

them.

It saddens me a little bit. I do miss it.

Yeah, it's like a nostalgia feel and you have it there. But like you said, being in entrepreneurship, I don't have time working a full-time job doing this. Like you said, it's just, it becomes one of those things where it's more of just a memory. But you appreciate it rather than you still like indulge in it at this time. So,

correct. Yeah, exactly right.

I played video games when I was a kid and then I grew up.

You're missing out, Jerry. There's a lot of, a lot of adults who play a ton of video games nowadays. And I said I would if I had time. I do miss it, but there's also so many other things for my time right now. Like I need to be— I got my company to run, investments I'm making, 2 young kids. I want to be spending all my time right now vibe coding AI apps. Like, that's what I need to be spending my time doing. So in a sense, I'm with you, Jerry, but I do think we're both missing out on not having time to actually play because there are a ton of great games out there nowadays.

Yeah, I think that I'm somewhat tongue-in-cheek saying that, but I spend a lot of time talking to young guys, you know, in their mid-20s, early 30s, and I'm always advocating, you know, what's my secret to success? Go have kids. So that's the jumping off starting point. And so the thing I hate to see is, I don't have time for X, Y, and Z. How much time do you do spending playing video games? There's always this idea that there's not enough time to do. I have a full-time job. How am I supposed to go start my side hustle or become an entrepreneur and do these other things? I'm like, well, you got all these other hours. And when you break it down, there's always time in there for them video games. So that's kind of my— I don't have any— I have no issue one way or the other with video games other than when you are chasing after something that you want. you're going to have to sacrifice somewhere. And for a lot of young guys in particular, that seems to be— the video games seem to be the holdup there.

Yeah, no, and Jerry, look, on that front, I'm 100% with you. Look, in the end, there are no excuses, certainly in Silicon Valley. But in general, like, if you work hard, you can be successful at anything, not just in Silicon Valley, anywhere.

Yeah.

But you don't have 24 hours in a day. Everyone has to sleep, you got to eat, you got to do a bunch of other things. So you need to make sacrifices in some places. And so for me, that I became— I don't have time for video games anymore. And I'm a little bit sad. But my kids are a lot more fun. And I love building companies, and I love learning new things. And so I'm gonna spend whatever free time I have reading a ton of articles and books and learning about stuff and then creating things.

Let's talk about that. So how old are you when you got that job in the parking lot? What was your age there?

I was probably 29.

29 at

the time. About right. 29, 28, 29.

Okay, so let's talk about— let's define some of these terms. Again, on this podcast, I always try to You know, depending on— we talk to so many different people and there's so much jargon and, you know, I'm in real estate and all different sorts of things, and there's all kinds of words. And I— you use them so much that I want to make sure that everybody understands them and not take that for granted. And so, uh, you hear terms like angel investor get thrown around, unicorn and seed rounds, and you can kind of figure out what that is. But give us that first deal type of thing, maybe, if you could, Adam, the just details. What is that? What does that really mean? What are we talking about?

Yeah, I mean, so look, the way venture capital, which is sort of the funding that comes for startups, right? There's all different kinds of funding. You get bank funding, all things like that. But with startups, you get what's called venture capital. And venture capital is essentially funding that comes in early on, on a very speculative bet. You're making a bet on something. Usually, you know, you get a bank loan to start a restaurant or do things that are very clear and obvious and you can build a financial model for. For a tech startup, it's a very unknown future. It's essentially 2 co-founders trying to go build a company with an idea that they think they are better than anyone else in the world at doing, and no one else has built that before, which is a crazy idea. You have to have a massive hubris and a huge ego to think you can go start something that no one else has built before, and it's going to be massively successful. But let's pretend you have the intelligence and the ego to go do that. Take both of those 2 things, then you go talk, then you're like, but I need money to go do it. I can't hire expensive engineers. I can't get tons of credits for my AI agents and servers and everything else without some money. So then you go talk to investors. Your first investors usually should be your friends and family, the people who know you the best, who say, yeah, Adam is actually really good at these things. I believe that he will work harder than anyone else and has the talent to go pull this off. So you get money from your friends and family and they believe in you. Then once that gets going, you then go get, and go get angels. And angels are kind of what they sound like. They're an angel. They're someone who is, they're not God, right? Let's call a venture capitalist maybe God. An angel is a little bit like an angel. They are someone who's going to look over your shoulder, be there for help, but they might write a $1,000 check or a $50,000 check, whereas a venture capitalist might write a million-dollar check. And so you go to angels to get your earliest rounds going. And then being an angel investor has a lot of upside, but a lot of risk, because when you're investing with someone, it's just an idea and you don't really know where things are going. And like, it is a long journey before someone gets to an exit and takes off in many more rounds of funding. And you're waiting 10 years, 12 years to get a return on your investment. But if you do, it can be a massive return and it can, can be life-changing. And so that's the The upsides of it, and that's what an angel is though. It's essentially someone to help you get a little bit of that funding to get going and then to help you take off.

And then the huge upside, like you said, 10, 12 years later, that's where you then are talking about a unicorn.

Yeah, exactly. Though not even all unicorns necessarily mean you get a massive payoff. But yeah, I mean, there are— I'll give you an example from my own portfolio. I have a company we invested in, a few different ones, but one of them, This is actually a very good example. I won't say the name of it, but we invested when they were a $5 million valuation. And to be clear, these valuations when a company's starting are essentially made up, right? Right. It's like, I'm a smart founder. I think my company's worth $5 million. It's complete BS. It's just what they think the market can afford, what they can do based on their idea and the team that they put together. So they say, we're worth $5 million. I put money in. I knew the founder, got to know them well. I liked what they were doing. I thought it was really unique and special. About 10 years later, They hit an $8 billion valuation. So from $5 million valuation to $8 billion valuation. On paper, that investment has multiplied many, many, many times over into a massive sum. However, they have not exited. And now with the rise of AI, I think they're in a lot of trouble. So I bet that valuation is now maybe closer to a billion. Still would be a great exit, but might be closer to a billion than $8 billion. And still, who knows, given AI is destroying so many different industries, who knows what it will turn out to be? So it's a roller coaster, and I definitely don't rely on the angel investments I've made to pay any of the bills, but they would be gravy on top if they turn out that way. In worst-case scenario, I've had a great opportunity to work with a ton of amazing founders and be a part of people thinking about the future every day.

So out of all of those investments that you have made, 200 of them along those lines, Uh, what is your failure rate? I want people to have some sense of, I mean, you lose a whole lot more than you win in this game.

You, you, you, on the total numbers of investments, you absolutely do lose a whole lot more, right? So you should assume in the, the early tech startup ecosystem, um, 90+% of your investments, or let me rephrase that, 90+% of your, of early stage startups will fail. It is even once again, if you have the talent, the work ethic, everything else, you still have a 90% chance you're going to fail. It is, it is really hard to build a successful business of any sort, to be clear, let alone a tech startup doing something that no one's seen in the world before. As an investor, you hope your hit rate is slightly better than that, that you do a little bit better than a 90% loss. But even if you have a 90% loss, all that you need is that one that's going to pay off everything. So that example of that one company, or actually, I'll use another example of a company. So the one company I just mentioned, we'll just keep using that example. On paper, we've been able to sell when they hit their highest valuation number. That would have paid off all the investments that I'd made and all the money that I lost the entire time, that whole way. That was my son. She said she'll take 5 minutes, right, Max? She'll be back. Sorry, he's home from school early today and I'm helping out with some stuff.

No, brother, do your thing. We are 1,000% pro-family here.

No argument here from us.

Appreciate that. Hopefully it's going to work out okay and he won't need me, but thank you for that. Anyways, so that example, that would've paid off everything, all the investments I made, all the losses, everything else. Because once again, if you think about it, you put $25K into a company and it turns into millions of dollars. You can lose a lot of $25,000 investments if you get a payback of a few million dollars on top. Although once again, to be clear, that company still hasn't exited. The losses are real and the money gets put up front and I still haven't seen a return.

Yeah. Uh,

yeah, it takes, it, it takes, uh, big balls, it is to say. But go ahead, Steve. Sorry, I walked on.

Yeah. Hey, Adam, after, um, watching, you know, 200 founders up close, what separates that 1% of people that really make it?

Yeah, look, part— look, I'll give you an answer that's not great. Part of it's luck a little bit. Like, you can have the most talent in the world and still luck, but the ones who really make it are the ones who are most obsessed. So we didn't even mention this, Jerry, when you did my intro. I also have a podcast called the Entrepreneurial Excellence Podcast. And so I've interviewed about 200 entrepreneurs about what makes for great entrepreneurs. So, Steve, to your question, probably one unifying line that I have across the best ones is a level of obsession and sort of slight chip on their shoulder that you can't replicate. They're so obsessed with solving the problem. So even using that example that I was giving you about this company, that founder was pissed because he basically had a breakup with his former co-founder for something else, had some issues with Y Combinator. He was angry. He was like, I'm going to prove them wrong. And then on top of it, he had a really personal reason for wanting to solve the problem he's solving. And so he knew it really well. And so this combination of anger, basically to prove them all wrong, and deep knowledge and obsession to solve that. Because, I mean, think about for all of us, I don't know you guys, right? But how often have you been obsessed with something for 10, 15 years and just all you can think about every night is that thing? And the answer might be never. It's rare to feel that obsession. But those are the founders who are most successful, who are utterly obsessed with solving that problem. And that's what they think and dream about and can do it day after day after day after day. And it is fun. It's not work. It is fun to them.

Yeah. Your son there, that is my— my first son was born when I was 28 years old. And you and I have very different backgrounds. I come from— I'm a street kid living with hookers and heroin addicts when I was 17 years old. 28, I started my own business because my son was born. In one second, my son wasn't born, as we all know, my wife is pregnant. The next second, my son is born and my entire world changed. And all I wanted to go do from that day forward, then I had another daughter, or I had a daughter 2 years later and another son 2 years later. is really just split an atom, man, just destroy the earth. All I could think about, and I went into entrepreneurship, I didn't even know what any of these terms meant, but I knew that my children were going to have a better life than I did. And that drove me in a way that, I mean, it was just maniacal. I mean, I was already competitive and had all of those pieces to it, played sports and did all of those things. But I mean, it really just drove me nuts on a daily basis. I've gone on to do almost half a billion dollars in revenue across a dozen companies. But I was driven every day, not for me necessarily, or what I did. I've never made a dollar doing anything that I loved. Every dollar I made was to make sure that I made profit so that I could go shower that on the people that I loved. So in a way, I was driven for something, just not the thing that I was doing.

And Jerry, actually, question for you, right? So why do you think you had that drive, right? So most people don't have that level of drive, like maybe not out of obsession, but you had that drive. What, what do you think gave you that drive? Whereas the average quote unquote person doesn't have that level of drive? Why were you different with that drive? Because everyone wants to say, I want to go make money for my family and do good things. What made you different?

So I, I mean, I'm 7 of 9 kids. I'm number 7. My mother had 6 kids when she was 23 years old. So she had a 0-year-old and a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 that she brought home, 6 kids, 5 and under. My dad was gone half of the time. My mother didn't have a dishwasher, didn't have, you know, a laundry— you know, had to go to the laundromat. Cloth diapers and 3, 4 kids at a time. Slept every other day for 10 years. Never complained one time. I grew up in abject poverty. I've been— I'm blind in one eye at 14 years old. My older sister died on her 21st birthday, 6 months before I went blind at 14 years old. I've been beaten within an inch of my life more times than I can count. I've been stabbed. I've been shot at. I've been in 1,000 fights living with hookers and heroin addicts. Like I said, at 17 in a $25 a week flop house. Got my first job at 11 years old, but I had— I was the oldest of the second kids. So 7 years later, I came along. So my mother had those 6 kids, and all them kids, you know, got pregnant as teenagers, and they went to jail. And I didn't avoid a lot of those things. I avoided the pregnancy. I got in trouble, but I just got to watch them. And in watching them, I was like, that's not what I want to do. And I was obsessed with sports. So I got a job as an 11-year-old, paid taxes, 1980, as an 11-year-old. I've never not paid taxes since. Uh, and so for me, food, because I stole food as a kid to eat, went hand in hand with work because they gave me a club sandwich at the end of the day with all the fries stacked in the middle. I'd have worked all day washing dishes in the back of this really busy restaurant on a Saturday for the sandwich, right, is where I was. And so, uh, that— I've always been driven that way. Really, probably I was doing, you know, making $50,000 a year running a company for a lady in the transportation industry and didn't really have any sense. It was more money than I ever thought I would make. And then my son was born. And my son was born. I was like, I'm an idiot. I got— I remember sitting at a desk. I got a pro forma come across my desk. Somebody wanted to finance me to go start a transportation company. I didn't know what I was looking at. I'd never seen a P&L or a balance sheet. I didn't know, have any idea what a prospectus looked like. And I had this epiphany at 28, right after my son was born, said, shut up and listen. Literally in the back of my head, it told me, so you don't shut up and listen, you're going to be doing the same thing when you're 50 that you're doing right now. Well, that was absolutely prophetic. So I got rid of all of my friends. I got rid of everybody I had grown up with. Legitimately, Adam, all I did was play sports, eat while playing sports, watching sports, arguing about sports, drinking while playing and arguing and eating and playing sports. And so I got rid of all those people that I grew up with, and I surrounded myself— in a basketball league, I met an architect, and then I met an accountant, and then I met an attorney. And I searched out for the people that were more educated than I am, that knew more things than I did, on purpose. And then I just shut up and listened. Started my first company at 28. It failed. Started my second one at 29. I did $4 million the first year, $8 million the second, $12 million the third, $14 million the fourth. These are $7 average ticket prices. And from then on, it just went crazy and it just took off. But again, all of that was because I had the humility because my son was born and I got married and my son was born and then my daughter and then another son. And at that point, I'm a caveman and I go out of that cave every day. I say this all the time, to knock a pterodactyl over the head. I don't care what's going to jump on me. I don't care what's going to grab me out of the grass. And if I come home wounded, they're eating and I can't wait to get up tomorrow morning and go do it again.

Yeah. No, I freaking, I love everything about that. Like, it's an amazing story. And like, and, and like, it goes, it goes back to the point I was making originally, right? Which is you got to surround yourself with the right people. So the people you surround yourself with are the people you end up learning from and you end up being like. And I would implore your listeners, if they want to do what you've done, Jerry, or even— I feel weird saying this, but even what I've done, like, you surround yourself with the right people. You go to the places where you can meet those people and surround yourself with those folks. And that leads to the outcomes you want and you should expect in life if you want to have it. It is there for the taking, right? You, much more from what I hear from you, it's like this wasn't handed to you. You had You— this was not the path that was destined for you in any way. You made that proactive choice to go make this happen for your family. And that is an amazing thing. But it's a choice every single person can make. At least every American, we're very lucky to live here. Every American can go make this choice if they want to, but many don't.

And here's the key thing too, Adam, for me, like I said, that just to dovetail on that, from my perspective, I never made a single dime doing anything I loved. I worked passionately, I figured out things that I'm good at that I can sell at a profit, and then I work passionately to make sure I extract as much of that profit as I can. I risk what I need to, I sacrifice as I need to, but then I, I go and follow the things that I'm passionate about. And I think that many times, for me anyway, in my experience, people get sidetracked trying to do the things they love. It's already hard enough to be an entrepreneur. Go find something you can do profitably and sell it would be my add-on to what you said. I don't know if you agree with that or not.

No, I mean, I definitely agree. The thing is everyone will say, well, I don't know what would be profitable. I don't know what I'm going to love. And it's like, I'll give you just one simple example. This is not something you'd probably build a business around, but like, I've gotten an obsession lately and it's truthfully a distraction of like, what's the best browser to use for my computer? Because I want to make my whole process more efficient and effective. I probably know more about browsers than most people do at all. I could probably build a small little advisory business of like setting up people's browsers. Like that could be a small business. I'm not going to go do that. I have other things I can make more money on. But like I went, I got obsessed with that and I went deep on it. And yeah, like you can make money doing anything if you are passionate enough about it. Not passionate enough, but like you're curious. Curiosity is sort of the biggest thing.

I was about to say a little bit of curiosity, a little bit of driven. It's like that driven personality to be able to say, hey, I actually want to do something with this beyond just enjoying it as a hobby. Because I think that's where a lot of people get stuck, where they like to say, I enjoy doing these things, but you're saying it's like, it's not work, it's fun because that's what you enjoy doing and that's what you can build a business from. And I, I believe that there's a lot of people that will get stuck and hung up in the hobby phase and say, oh, well, I can't make money doing that. To your point, Adam, You can make money literally doing anything if you have an obsession and a drive to share that with the world. And I, there's so many times across social media, you'll see someone with a great idea. They'll talk about it or they'll talk about it with their friends at a bar on a Friday night, but then it's all talk. There's no work. There's no execution. Right. And so to your point, like with browsers, you became obsessed And the top 1% of companies working in corporations that I've worked a part of, those people that are at the very top have an obsession, not an arrogance, not a dog-eat-dog. They have an obsession with making whatever is in front of them the best in the world. And that's what separates, I feel like, them from the rest of the herd.

Yeah, I totally agree.

Adam,

it's

With your talk about obsession and the ability to just be completely consumed, but on the other side of that, yet they, at what point is there a breaking point? So is this something where you can talk, you've talked to so many founders, is, is, can you spot resilience early in somebody that's wanting to go down this path?

Great question, Steve. A little bit, um, in a sense that you can look at someone's background and history and see like, have they, do they have the stamina Essentially, right? The Olympics just finished. So do you have the stamina to keep going long term and make something really happen? You can kind of look at, you know, what have they done successfully in the past? How have they won awards? They've done different things. It doesn't necessarily need to be in the industry they're trying to build in, but have they done things where they show that level of stamina? And then, so that's number one, but a two part of it just comes down to this part of the luck part, or not luck for them, but like as an investor. Some people just have it, some people don't. And so to be clear, like, I'm a good founder, but I know I can outwork most people, right? Like, I've built the muscle memory and the habit essentially at this point of working 6 days a week. That is not hard for me. It's just part of what I normally do. And I'm like, I'm not bummed. You know, it's funny, people are like, oh man, it's Friday. Like, let's be excited. I'm like, no, like, Friday sucks. Like, I'm excited for Monday because like Monday's filled with possibility and options. Like, there's so much to get done. And I'm excited by that Friday. I'm actually disappointed in myself cuz I'm like, oh man, there's so much more still to do and I didn't get to all of it, but I'm gonna do more on the weekend and it's fine because it's like, that's been my constant for the past, like pretty much at least 16 years, if not 18 years since I've really been working.

Oh, that's good. And with that, you know, when talking about the resilience, you'd have to think of the other side as far as how far would you go too far? So would you say that burnout is more of a personality issue if somebody pushes 'em that far, personality issue, or is it more of a systems issue?

It's an interesting question. Like, I think burnout is a little bit more of a personality to some extent. I don't really think— burnout is in your head largely, or you have a system that's— yeah, I mean, like, it's— Burnout is in your head. Thank you, Jerry. Right answer. But I think generally burnout's in your head. You can let yourself get burned out, but if you set up the right systems for yourself, you're not going to burn out. So like, for me, I've set up my life in a way that I am hyper-optimized for almost everything that I do. And so it is nearly impossible for me to burn out. Now, like that means some things like I don't, I don't pull all-nighters. I've done that and that was not successful for me. So I'm pretty disciplined about when I go to bed. I'm disciplined about when I get up. I'm disciplined about what I eat. I'm disciplined about when I drink or if I even drink. Like I have optimized those things. So for me, working 6 days a week is not a problem because I have created a system so I won't reach burnout. Um, but it doesn't— I don't need to overwork myself. And the other key thing, we should actually have some conversations about this. I think really successful people find ways to delegate a lot too. And so you only do the things that bring you energy, right? I'm the only person from Chor who can be here on this call with you. I can't delegate this. There's a lot of other things that I don't need to be doing that most founders and leaders and people think they should do. I mean, even a personal example, I'll give you another one. A lot of people do their own laundry, right? And my wife used to do a lot of the laundry for us and she got all angry about it and was like, I don't like doing laundry. And I was like, well, I don't, I don't like doing my laundry. I don't want to do my laundry. I was like, there's no obligation for you just because you're my wife to do my laundry. I was like, why don't we take it to the laundromat? There's a wash and fold place 3 blocks away from my house. I walk my laundry there and my kids' laundry. My wife still likes to do her own laundry, so God bless her, she can. Um, but I don't want to do laundry. So guess what? I outsource it. I pay someone else to wash my clothes and fold them, and then I'm good. And that is a great use of money for me because it is one less task that I don't enjoy. Some people enjoy it. It's soothing to them, but for me, it's not. And I can do other things that I enjoy more.

It's one of those things I'm going to 100% back you up on that. I remember very clearly, I was about year 2 or 3. I'm doing $10 million a year in this startup. I have no idea what I'm doing. And my assistant came to me who was kind of working as the accountant too, and she's like, and I'm filling out my checkbook. She's like, what in the hell are you doing? I said, I'm paying my bills. And she's like, no, no, no, give me all of that. And I didn't— look, I'm a poor kid from the street. I can pay my bills. She's like, no, no, no, you're more important. I can't do what you can do, but I can do what you're doing right now. And so she taught me that lesson. That's how I learned that lesson. And that has stuck with me. I was 30 years old when I learned that lesson. And it's stuck with me ever since. That's a great piece of advice. There's a lot of things you have to do. in that startup, but find those things that you don't have to do and let somebody else do them for you. And it may be something as personal as pay your bills or do your laundry.

Oh, you're lying. Preach, Jerry. That is exactly— I hope you gave that assistant like a raise or bonus or something.

That's the best advice ever. She's still with me.

Even more.

30 years later.

Yeah, that is amazing. And she's a smart, smart woman. Like, that is exactly right, though, is people are pennywise and pound-foolish. And they think that they need to do a lot of these things on their own. And that yes, you might save a little bit of money, right? Like if you had not given that to your assistant or not had an assistant in the first place, Jerry, you could have kept doing that yourself. You would've saved a little bit of money, but she's right. Your time is so much more valuable in other places. And not just maybe for your businesses, your time is more valuable for spending it with your family and your kids. And there's so, there's so many other places to spend that time that, by the way, to go back to Steve's point about burnout. That's how you don't burn out, is by spending your time wisely. If you want to waste your time, you're going to burn out because you're doing things that aren't of high value and you don't like doing them. So yeah, then I would burn out if that was the case, but I delegate away those things I don't like and I can spend it on stuff I love or the people I love.

You mentioned health. And so we started the podcast by talking about— we were talking about it when you came on. It's a big point for all of us. And so When you're talking about burnout, you talked about health. When you talk about resiliency, you talked about health. So let's go ahead, just in a, in a few words, since we've already covered this though, again, in that context, 6 hours, 7, or 6 days a week, 7 days a week, whatever it takes. I'm a huge, you gotta work, fellas, get it done, whatever it is, however many hours it is, while you can have a lifestyle at home. I've done it. I've been married 30 years. I have 3 kids that live within, you know, 2 minutes of me. I've done all of those things. And so I speak from what I talk about. But health has been a critical, critical part in doing that mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, across the board. Health for me has just been critical. So if you could talk about that in the context of resiliency and burnout and mentally, how do you keep yourself sharp? What does that play in that for you?

Yeah, I mean, look, the, the, for me, every single day is about how can I show up best for my family, my team, my company, my friends? And so, I want to do the things that I can to optimize for that outcome is showing up the best for them. That obviously starts with a few key things. What are the inputs you're putting into your body? Now, that's things like your food that you're eating, right? So, I could choose to go eat a lot of fried food or fast food or eat something healthier. That doesn't have to be expensive either, right? You can eat an apple and almond butter or something, right? It doesn't have to be— Mm-hmm. But, once again, I've gone really deep. It's an example there even on that front. I've researched all the types of almonds that are out there, the highest quality ones. I make my own almond butter in a special certain way. I'm a founder, I guess. I have these obsessions, so I want to go deep on things and get the best version of all of these things in making my own stuff. So, eating healthy, the inputs you put in. Then, the other part is the air you breathe. So, we all should have air filters in our houses. So, I live in San Francisco. The air quality is really good here. I still have air filters in my house because in your house there's bad air quality. Even if you keep the windows closed all winter long, air quality is going to get bad. You should have air filters in most of your rooms. You can test for those things. The water you drink, so I have water filters. Water is good. We have really good water in San Francisco. I still have a water filter for my water. These are all small things. Then, of course, sleeping-wise, optimize your sleep. So, make sure— this may sound silly, I feel better when I get 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep. I can do with less, but I generally feel better when I'm getting that much and I feel like I'm more on top of it. I started getting a little bit less sleep and I was like, I don't know, is it supplements I'm taking? Is it something else? I don't know. And then actually, it was funny, we went for the holidays to my in-laws who live in— actually, by the way, who live in Nashville, Jerry. So, we were there over Christmas and then went to my parents' place who live in Florida for New Year's. And so, I was sleeping on the guest bedroom beds that they had and I was like, Man, I'm sleeping great. I'm sleeping better than normal than I was at home. So, what's up? So, we got home and I was like, it's time to get a new mattress. Boom, got my extra 30 minutes. So now, I'm back to getting a full amount of sleep. And I have an Eight Sleep on top of that, an Eight Sleep cover, which is great as well. It's expensive but I think well worth it. If you haven't learned about Eight Sleep, it essentially heats and cools your bed, different sides for you and your spouse, optimizes it all night long. And then once again, then testing all these supplements on top of it. And then finally, I work from home because I don't want to travel a ton. So, I work from home. My whole company's remote because I think that's right. We can have a whole conversation about building companies that way. I'm a big believer in it. But, fully remote company, work from home so I don't have a commute. That also helps with health. And then, on top of it, I bike my kids to school every day. So, if I don't have time for a full workout, I get to bike every day. And once again, I'm lucky enough to live in a place like San Francisco where you can bike pretty much every day. But, I bike my kids. So, I'm getting I don't know, 4.5 miles, 5 miles of biking every day. And it's an electric bike, but I keep it essentially at zero and get a workout in because I work from home. I don't care. No one cares if I smell.

So, right, right, right.

It's all good.

And what part in that health does kids play?

I mean, kids, look, they keep, they keep you young and keep you happy. Um, they're tiring. Like, I have once again less time for a lot of other things. But, um, I think from an emotional standpoint, it gives you a whole different level of perspective of the next generation. And I think something that people generally fail to do is to think through not just the next generation in front of them, but thousands of future generations down the road. So I feel like I have an obligation for how I live my life today to not only think about my kids or my grandkids, who I'll hopefully be alive for as well, but like the generations to come, thousands of generations in the future. And as a hopefully rational, thoughtful adult, I should be considering my actions and how that impacts them too. And so all of those things play into— I mean, going back to the health part, it's like, I want to, I want to be healthy and do the right things for my family and friends and everything else, but also do the right things for all the future generations to come.

Yeah, no, that's, that's a really good point because I think nutrition and health plays so much in the role of being successful. And we were actually talking about that earlier, Jerry and I were, right before you jumped on, was That there's a drive that you can only push so far. And part of that burnout I feel is also a physical thing where you're just not healthy. And if you're trying to put every ounce of every hour into the business and you're not taking care of yourself, well, how long is that stint going to go? It's just like running a race. You're not going to get very far if you're not in a running race shape. And I think Based off of that and the nutrition and the fitness, going back over to pivoting back to the business side, was there anything that you've ever passed on, something that later exploded and you were like, I was that close?

Oh yeah, no, I mean, there have been a huge number of deals that I passed on that have exploded. I mean, I'll give you one that's sort of more recent that I did a much later stage investment in recently, but Anthropic, right? So Claude is the builder of Anthropic.

Uh-huh.

I had an opportunity to invest in them. It felt like late stage at the time when they were a $5 billion valuation. I had an opportunity to invest. I thought that was insane because I hadn't changed my mental model for how much these companies could be worth. Even though to me, I've been thinking about AI stuff for a really long time and I'm happy to talk about that stuff too. I didn't really believe in it and didn't know. I could have invested at a $5 billion valuation. I just recently invested at the $350 billion valuation. I think they'll be a trillion-dollar company, so I still think that's a great bet. And look, I'm lucky enough because I have access before the general public market does when they go public, probably this year. I want to be clear, I have no knowledge if that's actually going to happen, but that's what the news reports are. But yeah, dude, Matt, I missed out. I absolutely missed it and I shouldn't have. I saw it, I saw the email, thought about it, thought the valuation was crazy at $5 billion. Who freaking knew? And I should have known. Once again, like, I kick myself because I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time.

Let me— to that, and Anthropic and AI generally, here's my question for that. I always say, Adam, I don't have heroes necessarily. So there's, there's no, you know, I, I don't care about celebrities. I wouldn't cross the street for an autograph other than Vin Scully as a Dodger fan. But if somebody asked me if I was forced to do one thing, I said that I would probably on my own dime fly to the other side of the planet to have an hour lunch with Elon Musk, right? This guy from a business perspective. And so from your perspective, give us your opinion on Elon because we're on the outside looking in, right? You're right there in the belly of the beast. How does, how does, you know, your community view somebody like that? That again, there's a word for it, a unicorn right there.

Oh, a massive unicorn. And by the way, just to say, on your point about meeting celebrities, I used to say the same thing, Jerry. So I was like, if you went, if I went to LA, I would have no idea who any of the people, the famous people are. I would have zero idea. But when I came to San Francisco, when I interviewed out here for the first time, I was awestruck. I'm like, I'm driving down the 101, which is the main highway here. I'm like, Google's that way and Apple's that way. I was like, this is freaking so cool. Um, but I had— I don't know who celebrities are. I couldn't care less. Um, but Elon, I've actually had a— I met him one time. Uh, I met him one time. I was sort of friends with one of his baby mamas, as an example. Like, these are weird connections you have when you're in Silicon Valley. But to answer your question Specifically, I think a lot of people out here have very mixed views on him. So on one hand, the political side of Elon is almost unfortunate because I think it messes up the amazing things that he's done. But as an entrepreneur, Elon is someone we all should look up to. I don't know if you would look up to him as a family man or a lot of other things, but as an entrepreneur, Elon is bar none the best one out there. If you want to know what obsessed— I use this example a lot with my customers. Look, so my company, Chur, we do back office services for startups. We run HR, finance, compliance, equity, all the annoying things that founders should spend zero time on. They should outsource it and delegate it just like the laundry example I gave. I use the example, I tell founders, look, you're doing this work right now. You want to build a company like Elon. You want to build a SpaceX company or a Tesla-type company, right? They're all like, yeah, of course. That's why I'm in this game. I'm like, so if the head of HR from SpaceX walks into a room with Elon and says, hey Elon, like, should we use payroll processor A or payroll processor B? What do you think Elon's going to say? He's going to say, you're freaking fired. I'm trying to get to freaking Mars and you're asking me what payroll processor to use? Like, get the heck out of my face. I have no time for stupid questions like this. Like, figure it out, make a decision and get on with it. And that's what great founders do. And so no, I think Elon as a founder is, we should emulate him every single day. Like, that is true obsession. in true focus all day long.

Yeah, I agree. In particular, from a business perspective, it's just, it's just, I've never seen any. I'm 57 years old. I've been in business, like I said, since my 20s. I've never seen anything like it. And it's just, it's fascinating to me. Let's talk about Shore, the whole reason you're here. I, in researching you and going to the website and doing my background, I thought to myself, this is too good to be true. That was just, I'm just being honest. That was, you know, having ran companies my whole life. I love it. I'm like, this is just too good to be true. So let's talk about Shore. Tell us what it is. And like so many, I mean, I'm running 3 companies as we speak today, so there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there. It seems too good to be true, and I don't mean that sarcastically. Give me the sale on it. Tell us what it's all about.

I'll be happy to. And then, Jerry, you got to tell me though, honestly, if you're sold on it, and then you can tell me if this makes sense. Because look, the general thesis, right, is pretty simple. Companies are great at hopefully one thing. That's why they can sell their product and make money out of it profitably, because they're great at something. Everything else is overhead. Any time you spend focusing on that overhead— so to the point about Elon Musk and the head of HR, any second that Elon Musk is spending talking to that head of HR, or in most small business owner cases, recruiting a head of HR, hiring that head of HR, or being that HR person yourself, every second you spend is time wasted. on what you do great, or to Steve's point earlier, other ways to burn out because you're like, I don't, I don't care. You didn't start your company to deal with HR problems or finance problems or compliance problems. That's not why you started your business. And then next thing you know, and this happens over and over again, I don't know if you've ever read the E-Myth book, E-Myth Revisited.

No.

You should. It's a great book. But the short version, Jerry, is basically like they use an example of someone who started a pie shop. Right? This person makes the best pies in the world. They love making pies. It's what they love. So they open a pie shop, lines out the door. They're ecstatic. But now they got to hire some person to help them with making the pies. Now they got to figure out payroll. Next thing you know, they're managing a whole team. They're not making pies anymore at all, and they are drowning in admin. And then a year or two later, the company fails because they're not— they were never good at managing a group of people and dealing with the admin. They're great at making pies. So the whole reason Chor exists is to let that type of founder of any type go, go focus on making your pies, go do what makes you great and hand off all the admin to people who are actually great at it, who know what they're doing, love what, love doing this work. You might view it as a chore. We, we would say we love these chores and let us handle it. And so you, you, you outsource it and delegate it to experts and move on. And maybe one other quick example, Jerry, you and I remember, I'm sure the days where like, people were building servers in their garage, right? If you wanted to start an internet company, you had a server in your garage. That is nothing. You don't do that anymore, right? Even though your company runs on the internet, like every company today runs on the internet, you don't have a server in your garage. You outsource it to AWS, even though it is critical to your business. So to me, it is utterly insane. And why? And by the way, maybe the answer, why wouldn't you go build that server? Because it's time-consuming. It takes a lot of expertise to build that server. You're not the expert. You're not the expert at security around it. All these other things that like, it takes deep expertise to run a server. And you know, if your garage floods, your server breaks down and now you're in trouble. Like you don't want that. It's the same thing with back office work. Why should any company ever be an expert at back office work? Why should that be an area that you, Jerry, as a founder should know how to hire the right head of HR or choose the right payroll system? Why? Your life is too short. Your time is too valuable. So delegate it to experts. And that's what, that's what Tore does.

Yeah, it's, uh, that's, that's one of those— it's hard to imagine that not being in-house. But here's what I'll give you. Uh, we ran— I ran a big transportation company, and, uh, we had our own internalized systems, ones that we had built. Everything ran on our own racks, right? I spent, yeah, I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, millions of dollars on that. That inside-the-house technology. So when it came time to upload it, I was 4 or 5 years behind that. 100%. Like, just in the last 3, 4 years did we go entirely to the cloud, simply because I was, you know, I liked the security of having it there, notwithstanding all of the things that you just said about the downsides to having it. But again, I was slow to get there. So I'm, I'm trying to give it that same mental lesson, trying to learn that lesson as I hear you saying that, because it's hard for me to imagine Not having— I mean, I get accounting, you know, some of the billing, some of the things are more easier. But when it comes in particular to administration, hiring, firing employees, things of that nature, I struggle with that one. That's tough for me to see how that would work outside of my building.

So, and that's what a lot of founders struggle with. And what I would say basically is it's still run on your platforms. You're just hiring another team to go run most of those things for you. So another example would be, God forbid you have someone on— if your head of HR who's running your payroll gets hit by a bus, what happens then? Who's going to take over from them? The same way, using that server analogy, when your server gets— a flood hits your server, who's going to take care of it? And there's no redundancy. For most companies, there is no such thing as redundancy.

Right.

Or it's the founder who's the redundant person. That doesn't happen with Chor. We literally had a teammate who got hit by a bus. No joke. Got hit by a bus. He is okay, thankfully. Um, he obviously was in the hospital immediately thereafter. His clients didn't miss a beat. Their operations kept running because we backfilled him immediately. We have all the systems in place to track what's happening, when it's happening, how it's happening. And so our team jumped right in and took back over.

Hmm.

That, that doesn't happen with you, of your own internal team, and it's not your core expertise. So you're never in, in your company too, Jerry. You're not going to build levels of expertise. around this stuff. They're just trying to keep their head above water. They're not going to build— we are literally at Tor building systems for this, for how to run, how to run HR, onboarding, offboarding. We have a 75-step checklist for onboarding. No company is going to build that out.

And I will not argue with you there. In fact, that's something that you learn. It's the hardest part of business is the administration, from my perspective. The operations, I find— look, everything's hard, so we want to make it in context here. But if you're doing something operationally, in my case, say a transportation company, I'm building houses, I'm doing a development, It's all of the back office stuff that is the hardest part to do. The actual physical work, dispatching it, building it, you know, making sure it gets there on time, arranging architects, all of whatever it is, that's the easy stuff. The back office stuff when you're building a company for sure is the hardest part. At least that's been my experience, and I hate every second of it. I'm a 30,000-foot view guy, and you need to be an on-the-ground detail guy to do the kind of work you're talking about, particularly at scale.

Yeah, so, and that's sure. So that is, that is the idea is no company— I mean, we have companies up to 150 people. No company should be doing this internally. But to be clear, when you get to that scale, you should have a head of HR, you should have a CFO, but you don't need all the junior people, right? A lot of time you hire a head of HR and they're like, I'm going to be your head of HR, but I need to hire someone junior to run payroll. I'm not going to go muck around in those systems and deal with the real weeds. I'm like, why, why would you want more overhead? To be clear, like, I mean, there's a great post I can share with you later, Jerry, that someone wrote about hiring. In the post, the general thesis was don't hire. Literally say no to hiring as much as you can. Too many people say, well, I have this pain, I'm going to go hire another person.

No,

no, no, no, no. Hiring another person is going to increase your pain. You think they will suddenly take on all this work. They will almost certainly increase your pain and cost you more than you imagine. If you're really lucky, they will work out. Yeah. But you should assume they will not work out and it'll just be more painful than otherwise. Um, and that's— you just don't hire, just don't, don't hire, hire contractors.

And this is where I dovetail nicely from what you just said. The Kronos Group, which is the newest company that we just started, is a peer-to-peer group to work with entrepreneurs, 7 and 8-figure entrepreneurs. And a lot of times you need somebody from the outside, outside that's not in there in the business dealing with that problem that you're going, I'll just hire somebody for it. to tell you, no, man, don't do it. Find yourself somebody from the outside that can give you some of that advice because that can be a costly problem, number one, and usually there's an easier fix, but the pressure of the issue at the moment causes you to do something that you maybe should not otherwise do. That's why it's always good to have an outside set of eyes.

Correct. And you need somebody who can tell you those things and be like, hey, look, think deeply about this. Don't hire. Hire contractors until you are 100% sure you know exactly what they're full— if you want to bring in a full-time hire, be very certain, know exactly what they're going to do with all of their time, and that they're going to be world-class at doing that work. And the truth is, like, most people aren't world-class. And most of the time, you don't actually know what the person is going to do with all their time, in which case, hire a contractor who you say, your job is to get X done by Y timeframe. If you don't, I can fire you, no severance, you're done. And I'll find another contractor who do it better. So just—

On that, are you investing on this one? Or are you building this one?

Building this one, I mean, this is, this has been, this is a whole different story. I know we're getting close on time, but a different journey. I mean, uh, Shore itself, uh, my, we are sort of a spinoff of my previous company. That previous company raised $10 million from top-tier venture capitalists to automate back office work. Yeah. That was the entire thesis. Turns out all back office work is an edge case. Everything is different. Every company's different. Every bit of work is different. So you need people to be really good at that stuff. We had a small little services arm. We spun that off in 2022. That's what became Chor. We're fully bootstrapped. We're full. This is, this is my all-day-long, everyday job. All my investing is like a side gig where I get to speak and meet with founders all the time because it's what we do at Chor. It's just, I live in San Francisco. You just, they're all, you just, you throw a stone and you hit a founder, right?

You're gonna hit one.

So, but you get your opportunity to invest in cool companies that way. And so that's what I've just been I put myself in the right place, surrounded myself with the right people, and was lucky enough to be here for it.

No, that's awesome to hear. And I honestly, that chore, it's so funny how you break that down with just actually the company name and what a chore is for someone else is not a chore for you guys of being able to fulfill that for a business or for an entrepreneur. As we're getting close to time, and thank you again, Adam, for sharing all this information. Uh, we're gonna do what we call a speed round. So the first one, luck or skill?

Skill.

Okay. Founder or product?

Founder.

Hmm. Can you elaborate on that one? I just wanna know, 'cause I took a second to think about that one. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. I mean, look, in the, in the end, products change really quickly. You need a founder who's willing to, to move quickly, iterate as fast as they can. Pivot if they need to, make the right decision, hire the right people, have the right vision and mission. Founder is more important than the product.

There's no product without a founder.

Yep.

Yep,

exactly right. Comes first.

Perfect. All right. Growth or profitability?

Uh, I, I, I'm in Silicon Valley. You got to go with growth over profitability.

And I should say too, Matt, to that question, I wrote that question with that in mind because you come from a different world than most of us come, come from. So for the guy running his You know, mowing lawns in the neighborhood, profitability comes first. For you guys, it's a very different way to look at the business.

Yeah, correct. And nowadays, even in Silicon Valley, you do need to get to profitability fairly fast. But because of the way the world works here, you want to grow. You need to see if you can grow and build something that moves quickly enough and get that growth. And if you have that, you will almost certainly find a way to become profitable as well. It's not easy. It's not guaranteed. But if you have good growth, You'll either be able to raise more money or get to profitability. But growth is— look, and actually the other piece of it is the reason growth actually is important in many ways, and maybe more important than profitability, is about time. And man, if I'm doing something that doesn't grow, even if it's profitable, I don't know if I want to put my time into it long-term. I like growth. I want to put myself— I want to grow myself, my mental— I like to read things. I want to grow my mental energy and what I'm learning about in the world. I just think growth is more interesting, more fun. And if I'm doing something that is never going to grow and find it slightly profitable. I don't know, is that a good use of my life and my time in the world?

Yeah, no, that's really good. This one is more of a question. What's the most overrated startup buzzword right now?

I mean, AI, but also it's also— it's overrated, but it's also real in so many different ways. So it's both.

Yeah,

great answer.

No, that's true. What's, uh, one of the most underrated founder traits?

An underrated founder trait. Probably maybe one of the most underrated founder traits is— what's the right term for it? Just like longevity isn't quite it, but just sort of fortitude, like just sticking with things, just going at it. Like, do you have the tenacity to stick with it? I mean, kind of using different terms here, but like, can you stick with it?

That's good. Capital or discipline?

Discipline. I think you can get more capital always.

Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Good answers. I love those speed rounds, Adam. And I think, at least from my perspective, you nailed it. But I've done hundreds of these podcasts and we've been on a big tear lately. So I'm talking to a lot of founders, a lot of business owners, and the questions are roughly the same because I love to get the same reactions, in particular founder or product. And everybody says, Founder for the most part. So that's perfect. Uh, to everyone listening, if you're a founder, you got entrepreneur, you're working for somebody, maybe you're the CEO or you're, you're working for somebody's family, whatever it is, if you're running a business, you're buried under the admin, y'all got to go check out hirechoir.com. That is hirechoir.com. That is Adam's new company, as we heard him explain. I find it fascinating, in particular, like I said, relative to, you know, kind of having my own server farm. On property for all those years, and I finally got rid of that and all of the expense. And I don't know why I didn't do it quicker. So I'm going to try to apply that here and do a little bit more research on hirechore.com. And of course, if you're a seven or eight figure entrepreneur, I think you need to find yourself somebody from the outside looking in, as I said. And hopefully that will be us. Go check us out at thechronosgroup.org. That is K R O N O S thechronosgroup.org. Kronos, of course, was the god of time, something none of us have enough. of me, Adam, or Matt. Steve's internet was funky, so we lost him. Adam, we apologize for that. But any other way you want the guys to reach out to you, get a hold of you?

No, I'm very, very active on LinkedIn, so you can find me there. And just get in touch if I can be helpful. The world is a better place with more entrepreneurs. So if I can help make you a better entrepreneur and help your company last a lot longer, let me know.

Agreed. Fantastic. Adam, appreciate you coming on. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.