Your Time Is Worth $2,000 an Hour — Adam Spector on Building Chore | Ep. 65

There's all these things, and like, why would you spend time on that? Like, Elon Musk is clearly world-class at some things. Um, and then to say to him, hey Elon, go figure out why payroll didn't run yesterday for your, your Tesla employees, right? Like, you laugh because it's, it's ridiculous. He's trying to go figure out how to get rockets to Mars or something. So why should some entrepreneur, because their business is only 5 people or 20 people, why should they be spending their time figuring out those pieces?

Hi, and welcome back to Founder Real Talk. I am your host, Josh Broward. CEO of Wisdom Partners. And we are here because being a founder is hard and it doesn't help us to only tell the victory lap stories. We need to hear the whole struggle from people who have been there and done that and are there and are doing that. And so today our guest is Adam Spector. He's a 4-time startup founder and active angel investor, and he was Before we started the call, he was just saying it's still hard on the 4th time, still making mistakes on the 4th time. So I'm excited to talk to him. And his 4th company is Chor. It is a platform that combines AI with human operators to manage HR, finance, and compliance for startups. So, Adam, without further ado, thanks for being here.

Josh, thanks for having me. And yeah, being a startup founder, being a founder of any sort, I didn't— tech startup, Business startup, you name it. Being an entrepreneur in general is a tough road, but also an incredibly fulfilling one.

Yeah, I talk to people who are not founders and they don't understand why it's so addictive because it's so like they hear— they don't understand why it's so hard. But then when they hear why it's so hard, they're like, why do you do this?

But what I would say to those people, I would say right back, How happy are you in your current job? Are you enjoying your current job?

Yeah.

And they might say, no, not really. Like a lot of people, unfortunately, a lot of people complain about their current jobs. Maybe it's a time-worn thing to complain about your job no matter what. But if you don't love your current job, why not take the opportunity to go try to do something on your own? If you think, if you get frustrated by the way that the company that you work for is being run, Or how things are being done, then I suggest everyone should take 2 options. One, hopefully talk to the company where you work and say, hey, can I help improve it? And that's number one, people should try to improve it from within. If you have leadership at your company that is unwilling to listen to you and unwilling to hear your suggestions, then go start your own and prove how they were wrong and why they're better and why you can do it better. Most people don't take that jump. They just want to complain and not actually make things for the better, and they won't take their own, their own leap to do a startup because it is really hard.

Yeah. So tell us about Chor, and I know you guys run the back office for startups, but help us understand a little more clearly what problem you're really trying to solve.

Yeah, it's pretty simple. Look, the, the, there are 3 core parts to a business. One, you have to have a great product, of course. Like, if you don't have a good product, Everything else is off the table. Um, 2, you need to be able to sell that product. So if you have a great product, but no one knows it exists, or they can't buy it, it also doesn't matter. So let's assume you get number 1 and number 2 somewhat correct, right? Never, never perfect, right? It's, it's always a work in progress to build a great product. It's always a work in progress to get sales going. But assuming you have 1 and 2 working somewhat, you then have this 3rd part, which is like run the business. You need to actually Pay your team. You need to do legal compliance matters. You need to deal with finance issues. And to me, when you have a founder who theoretically is world-class at something, so if you're a founder or an aspiring founder and you think, I want to go build a company, right? I want to take that risk. I hope you're doing it because you believe you are world-class and better than anyone else at that thing. And if that's true, Then like you should spend all of your time doing that thing. That means you shouldn't spend time figuring out how to run bookkeeping. You shouldn't spend time trying to decide, should I use payroll processor A or B, and then set it up and figure out these issues with compensation or issues with healthcare coverage and benefits. There's all these things and like, why would you spend time on that? Like, you know, it's sort of like saying, you know, using Elon Musk as an example from an entrepreneur perspective, like, Elon Musk is clearly world-class at some things. Um, and then to say to him, hey Elon, go figure out why payroll didn't run yesterday for your, your Tesla employees, right? Like you laugh cuz it's, it's ridiculous. It's like a ridiculous thing to tell Elon to go figure that out when it's like, no, he's trying to go figure out how to get rockets to Mars or something. Like, why would he waste any of his time understanding the payroll system? All he cares about is that payroll runs, my team gets paid, they can get back to doing their job. So why should some entrepreneur, because their business is only 5 people or 20 people, why should they be spending their time figuring out those pieces? So long answer, the short version of it basically is like, that's what Tore does. We are your fractional human resources team, your fractional chief of staff, your fractional finance team to do all of that work so you can get back to doing what you presumably love and are world-class at doing.

That's pretty cool. It's making me think of 2, uh, 2 things I read in, in entrepreneurship books. Uh, one is, uh, I'm sure you're familiar with the, the old Traction book, uh, the EOS system. I think it was Gino Wickes, uh, who said nobody starts a business because they want to run a business. So like, to me, I'm just like, oh yeah, that's another way to say what Adam just said.

Yeah. Much, much more pithy and short version of it. But yeah, but, but once again, like, that's exactly it. Like people don't realize the moment you get started with your business and it starts getting traction. You are going to be bombarded with admin tasks and suddenly you are taken away from the thing that you love. And a traditional example of this is sort of the proverbial pie baker. I love making pies and I'm world-class making pies and people line up down the street to buy my pies. But the moment that starts happening, I need to find a way to expand. I need to hire people to help sell the pies and help me produce the pies because they can't produce enough for all those people down the street. So next thing you know, I'm managing a whole team and I have no experience doing that.

Mm-hmm.

And what do I love doing? I love making pies and coming up with new recipes. And very quickly you realize you're not good at hiring a team, you're not good at managing them, you're not good at the admin, but you're the only one who can quote unquote do it because you're the boss. Guess what? Your business is likely to fail because you're not good at that and you've taken your eye off the ball for what you are good at. So like, why, why should that be the case? Why should you have all these thousands and millions of founders who their businesses die because they're not doing the piece they love?

Yeah, that's what you're describing is something we say pretty often. Building a good technology is not the same thing as building a good business.

Yeah. And but a good business requires all those pieces working together. And, you know, you need to find either delegated outsourced team or build an internal team or something to get it done right. Because if you don't, your business will still fail.

Yeah. The other thing I'm— that you're making me think of is from Dan. Yeah. I have the book right over here. Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time.

Yeah. Great book too.

Yeah. And I, you know, one of the— for those who don't know, one of the core principles of the book is figure out the stuff that drains you, but doesn't specifically add money to the business, and then basically either quit doing it or outsource it. And so what I'm hearing you say is, this is an area that drains a lot of entrepreneurs, and this is a system to outsource it as a package.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, I'm biased to our name, but like, this stuff is a chore. What are chores? Chores are things you have to do, but you do not enjoy doing them. Um, that is what this mostly is like. And to be clear, if you love running payroll, And if you love figuring out how to go do these things, then like, first of all, you're in the wrong business. You shouldn't be building whatever your other business is. Go build a competitor to Chor. Like, cool, go build a competitor to us if that's what you love doing. But if you don't, why are you spending time doing it? Number one. Number two, um, I find there are way too many founders who are penny-wise and pound-foolish. So to Dan's point of buy back your time, he says essentially you need to spend money, buy things, or essentially people or tools, that automate things you don't like doing so you can have more time for the things that you're great at. Um, that requires you being willing to spend money. And, uh, you know, an example there is I came across a founder, one that I use this example all the time, cuz it still shocks me. Guy, guy worked at McKinsey, super talented, right? Great background, every good school, you name it. But his company had not reached their Series A metrics to go do a fundraise in 6 years. They're still alive, but like hadn't reached it. And he was like, yeah, but we're getting close finally. Like we're almost there, we're ready to get going. And then we talked about bookkeeping and he's like, oh, I've been doing my own bookkeeping for these past 6 years. And I was like, he's like, I was like, why though? You know, like he's like, oh, I know how to do it. It's not that hard. It probably takes me 30 minutes a month to do, no problem. I'm like, yeah, dude, but it takes, it's like $250 to outsource bookkeeping to a third party to go run it. And if you take those 30 minutes and multiply that by per month over 6 years, you might've been, you know, that compounds. So you might've been like an extra year or 2 ahead of where you should be, where you are currently. You would've raised your Series A, you would be moving so much faster. You saved such a small amount of money compared to the value of your time. Like at $250,000, sorry, like I go on and on, but that company's gonna fail. He's not moving fast enough. He's not delegating and outsourcing things just 'cause he can be cheap about it and knows how to do it. Does not mean you should.

Yeah. Or there's a, there's a drag on productivity. It has a drag. Context switching may not fail. But the other thing I would say is, seriously, it's probably not 30 minutes. It's probably more like 3 or 4 hours. It just feels like 30 minutes because you do it 20 minutes at a time.

Correct. Really well said. And that's exactly right, Josh. And, and, and then you add in context switching. So if you have to go back and forth between, okay, oh man, there's like, I got a notification from New York that I have a weird issue with my payroll or with my books. Now you have to go figure it out, and that distracts you from all the— I'd rather— so with Chore, I literally, I don't look at any— anything comes into my inbox that relates to anything that running the company, not strategically, but the day-to-day sort of chore, back office work, I send it over to my internal Chore team. Literally, we of course use Chore at Chore, And I just say, go figure it out. Let me know if you need my input, but like, figure it out. I like, so it takes me 2 seconds instead of me going down a rabbit hole and being distracted from like me trying to figure out product or go to market or the things that like only I can do or be on podcasts. I can't outsource being on podcasts to other people and I shouldn't, but I can outsource and delegate away the operations and admin.

So let's, let's get real nitty gritty on this. You know, one of the, one of the principles from Buy Back Your Time is you should outsource anything in that, in those sort of draining quadrants that is, that you can pay for with less than 1/4 of your, the hourly rate that your work is worth. But how are founders like, How are founders supposed to value their work? And B, how do— when is the right time to start working with someone like Chor? You know, is it post-funding? Is it post a certain round of funding? At what point does it make sense? Because at the beginning, you can buy back your time. You can say that till you're blue in the face, but if you don't have money, you can't buy— you can't buy— you don't have anything to buy it back with.

So— Totally true. And, and so yes, like for us, there's obviously a cutoff. Like we, we say folks like, hey, look, if you don't, haven't raised at least $500,000 or have at least $500K in revenue, we're probably not a fit for you. Like you haven't really figured your business out yet. Um, so all good. Don't, don't work with us. We're here when you're ready, number one. So number two, to your question about the value of your time, this is where founders notoriously get this wrong. And it, it also angers me. Um, founders think they can work harder than anyone else. And their time isn't all that valuable. I would argue, and more eloquently Naval Ravikant has argued, that he views his time as being worth at least $2,000 an hour. Now, that doesn't mean Naval can go charge $2,000 an hour. It doesn't mean I can charge $2,000 an hour for my time, but I try to use that as a heuristic to decide when and where I will spend my time. And if it doesn't reach that $2,000 level, I don't know if I should do it. Like, I actually had a call right before this that I almost canceled, and I should have canceled it because I was like, this isn't going to be a sale for us. I don't think I'm going to learn a lot from this guy. Maybe I'll learn something, which is why I took it, but I shouldn't have. I should have just said like, hey, like, it's not going to be a fit. I made a mistake. Shouldn't be on my calendar. And like, just say no. There's too many other higher leverage things that I should be doing because I need to buy back that time because there are more important things. People forget, and maybe it's something just because I'm getting older, I think about this more, but like, I'm not going to get more time back. Like this hour we're spending together right now, Josh, I will never get it back. So I hope it's high ROI because if it's not, I've lost that hour and I'm never, I'm never going to get that back. And so there are other things I maybe could have done instead.

Yeah, that's, that's good. And I, I, let's, let's hope it Let's hope it pays off.

I'm sure. I'm sure.

All right. So as you think about Chore specifically over the past year or so, what's a win for the team that you're just really proud of?

I mean, a few different wins. There's always a ton of different wins. I mean, like one, one big thing for us is like, look, we've been profitable basically every single day since we almost since we started. That's not easy to do for business. And we're about— we're coming up on our 4-year anniversary in October. So one, I'm really proud of that. Like we were bootstrapped. So my first 3 companies, were venture-backed, Chorus bootstrapped. It's hard to build a company like that. And the fact we've done that and created a, I think, really good culture for almost 50 people on the team today, um, is, is it something I'm really proud of? Like, we gainfully employ a lot of people. We, everyone is remote. We are flexible about schedules. We're flexible at how they do things. That's something I'm really proud of. I'm really proud of the fact that we have customers. We have, I don't know, 100+ video testimonials on our website. We have customers who utterly love us. We're not perfect every time, and we get them get every customer right, but we try really hard and we make a massive difference in their startups and in their business. And so those are things that, that at a high level, those things I'm proud of. Other ones like we did, I guess it was about a year ago, we changed our name to Chore. We didn't used to be called Chore, so we changed our name. Um, that was a really big move to do that. That was huge. Um, we've launched a few different AI products. That was huge. And we have some really cool things coming down the pipe as well.

Thanks.

Yeah.

But as we talked about earlier, it's not all, uh, success stories and trophies and blue ribbons. I, I know you, uh, as a founder, uh, you've gotten your shins kicked or your teeth kicked, uh, multiple times. What is something that you have learned from struggle or failure Just in the past year.

What have I learned? I mean, it's always the same lesson, I suppose. And the lesson is, like, you just have to get back up and start the next day the same way. So, you know, for me, as an example, yesterday we launched a new compensation package for our team on Monday. Change is always tough for people. I honestly, like, no matter how— I thought we presented it in a very clear way. We thought about it a ton of times to make sure it was really good. Even then people are like, oh my God. And to be clear, by the way, this basically like doubles, at a minimum doubles some of their compensation and like, or compensation potential and could even be like, it's a, I think a very positive change and really high value, but yet people are very sort of frustrated by it. And maybe I failed then in how I communicated it. Maybe that could have been better. And then, you know, it's just like one thing after the next. And then like a bunch of other things happened and like, people are frustrated. Like, oh my gosh. And there's some other thing, then I'm dealing with some like other things. And it's like one thing after the next. And it's like, you know what? I'm gonna do as best I can. I'm gonna go to bed tonight, get up the next day and go back at it again and keep every day, just put one foot after the next, keep chipping away, keep building a great business. And look, the people who get it and wanna be a part of what we're building and be, look, change is inevitable. So If you're cool with change, you should— well, I mean, sorry, let's talk about change after that. Point is, like, what did I learn? You need to get up every day and start the new day fresh and say, I'm still here because I want to build new things. I want to learn new things. And that's why I'm doing what I do.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my mentors, Ron, and he's president of a university and I, I would, as a young professional, I was like, how, like, I feel overwhelmed with the amount of work I have and I feel like I can't get done everything I need to do. Surely you must feel even more overwhelmed and, and like you're just drowning in tasks. How do you handle that? He said, well, Josh, at the end of the day, whether or not I got all of my things crossed off on my list, You know, and, you know, sometimes I didn't get anything crossed off because it was just one emergency after another. I close my appointment calendar, you know, which dates him a little bit, and I say, that was a good day's work, but tomorrow I'll have another.

Yeah, I think I love that. And that is, I think that's, I feel very much the same way. I try to just shut it off and say, I'm gonna go to sleep, sleep well, and there will be new things to deal with. Today, and that's just the way it will be every single time, and that's okay. And I think that's the right— it's a really good perspective and one that everyone should take into account. Like, it's very easy to get frustrated by things and let it sit with you and have anxiety about it or whatever. And I don't know, I just don't have that anymore. You know, if we do all the things that I think are right and try to treat people the way that the respect and dignity that they deserve. I can still improve every day, but we'll do our best and move on.

Specific tactical question. Are your workdays shorter now on your 4th startup than they were on your first or second?

Yes and no. It's a really good question. I think I work smarter than I ever have, but I don't necessarily think I work less, with a big caveat there that we should talk about because it's sort of interesting. So what I mean is, I have probably averaged about a 10-hour day, 6 days a week for the past 20 years, almost basically since I started my career. But how I do that and what I get done has really changed and improved over time to the point where I just went, I just got back from a very long trip to Europe. I was still working the whole time that I was there, but because I didn't have calls on my calendar, I mostly blocked out almost all calls. I was able to get my work done really quickly on a regular basis, and that was awesome. Like, that was amazing. I was like, wait a second, I've actually like delegated. I've done a really good job and like buy back your time where I've essentially delegated all the things away and only the very most important things are showing up in my inbox and I can deal with all of them right now very quickly. And I was like shocked. It's sort of funny being back and like, oh wait, I have a ton of meetings back on my calendar and now the days are like really full again. But even that, I'm trying to get off my calendar. So the short answer is like, I've gotten better, but I still work really hard because at this point it's just become a normal muscle where it's like, yeah, every day is what it is. And I just, I boom, get up, get going, get it started. And so it's different than when I was in my 20s, but not less.

Yeah. Thanks for sharing. What's the biggest challenge you're trying to solve right now for Chor?

The biggest challenge, and we've been almost forever been trying to solve this, and I think someday we'll crack it, is how to automate as much of the back office work as possible to increase delight for our customers while increasing our capacity to take on those customers. So essentially like our ability to scale. So look, we are a services business, but We're building product to automate a lot of the work that we do. There will be, in very short order, a combination of AI essentially with humans doing that work together. That means that the humans need to level up what they do. If humans are still copying and pasting data a year from now, we've utterly failed. So our biggest challenge is how do we get people to be great at delegating, at handing things off, not just to other humans who might be in lower-cost locations, but also to AI. How do you get great at that? And if you can get great at that, you can start scaling and really doing this in a really margin-efficient way. But that's tough. Like, there's a reason why basically— I mean, you have to remember, payroll is basically done the same way it was done 400 years ago with the rise of like the East India Company, like the first modern corporation. Like, sure, back then it was some dude with a ledger who was like handing out cash, but it's not that different today. Today it's like, Oh, it's an online payroll system that does some of these things automatically, but it's still like, how much did you work? Did you work this time period? If yes, get paid. And a human still is involved in that process. That's crazy. Like, that's crazy that it's still the system that, like, yeah, sure, we use computers, but it's not that different than it was 400 years ago. How do we, how do we really modify that and change it and bring back office work Um,

okay, different question. How have you evolved in, as a leader in the 4 years that you've been running Chor?

I think I've evolved in at least attempting to be, to get a lot more feedback from people before we launch things. I think previously there was at least a part of me that's like, hey, look, this is the right decision. We're trying to move quickly. I don't want to waste time and go slower. So let's get these out the door. And I feel comfortable that I'm right. And so trying to get more buy-in from a lot more people before we launch things has been part of what we've attempted to do. So not perfectly, like even this new competition thing we launched, like we got feedback from a lot of people, but probably not quite as much as we wanted. But we were also up against a timeline to get it done and things got a little bit slower at the very end. It was over the holiday, like right before July 4th weekend. So it got slower and I'm like, look, we need to launch this cuz we had an all-hand team call. on Monday this week. It's like I wanted to launch it then because that's the right time to launch it because this new compensation plan goes into effect for Q3. So it's like we need to launch it. But generally speaking, trying to get more buy-in and feedback on big changes so that people feel energized by where things are going and understand instead of feeling like, oh, this has just been handed to me. But I still have a long way to go. It's not perfect.

How are you investing in your own Development as a leader?

So I've had various executive coaches over my time. I currently have an executive coach. He and I talk, it's all async actually. So we have async conversations regularly, and we talk through all these things. And so that's my biggest investment, I would say. I try to read a bunch of different business books like Traction or Buy Back Your Time, or a big one, by the way, you should read this, E-Myth Revisited as well, is a really good one about this exact problem we're talking about, about like you build a business and next thing, you know, because you're excited about, making pies, and next thing you know, you're deep in the weeds and your company fails. But I try to read business books like that on a semi-regular basis too. And so those books plus my coach hopefully help me improve, and then trying to use AI as sort of a secondary coach as well. Like, obviously, like, our new compensation plan, I ran it through AI, like, I don't know, a dozen-plus times to come up with, like, the final-ish version that we've launched.

Okay. And yeah, I think probably that's all the questions I have for you, but I, I wanna carry on our new tradition and give you space to ask some questions of me. And I, I know we kind of, for the, for the audience, I kind of stopped him before we pressed record. I was like, well, wait, wait, that's a great question for the end. So.

The, the, the question we got into talking about, right, Josh, was around Good judgment, and what does that actually even mean? And so the question sort of for you is, you guys are training or helping people with good judgment as a founder. What does that mean? Like, I don't even know if I have good judgment. I think I do. I think everyone probably thinks they have good judgment, but what does that actually mean? And how do you train that versus having 20 years of work experience to like hopefully improve your judgment?

Yeah, yeah, well, first let me, Let me address one thing you said. Everybody thinks they have good judgment. I was, I was talking with this, talking about this with a client last night, uh, this, 'cause this is a new idea for us saying that the, the core work we do is help founders improve their judgment or develop good judgment. And he said, yeah, I don't know if that'll sell because everybody already thinks they, they're smart enough.

Well, that's, that's what, that's why, that's what I'm saying. So tell me why I'm wrong. It's—

Yeah. Yeah.

Obviously, people, you almost by definition have to have a good opinion of yourself. I'm sure not everyone does. There's lots of people who have psychological things where they don't believe that, but you almost, especially if you're a founder, you have to have a semi-high opinion of yourself. You have to believe you're really good at something. So you by default start with the, like, I'm good.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's mostly true. I think maybe the next point to address is you said, what even is good judgment? So before we can talk about how to develop it, that's probably a good place to start. I think good judgment is— it's holistically— well, it's holistic. It involves the individual, like your personal self and your psychology, your personal context, It's business, so there's tactics and strategy involved. It's both short-term and long-term. So it's, it's making good judgment is making a decision that considers all of those factors, disentangles what needs to be disentangled, and makes a decision for that's good for you, good for me, good for the company. In the Both preferably in both the short term and long term. And if you have to make choices, you're wise about how you prioritize one over the other.

What is wise and how do you decide what to prioritize? Right. There's so many new decisions every single day. And I was saying, was it wise of me to take the call right before this podcast? Should I have said no to it? I probably should have, but I didn't. Was that wise of me? I don't know. I justified it. I thought I could learn something from the person, so I took the call.

Yeah. Well, as you're noting, it's with a lot of this, it's not, it's not black and white, which is why it's often important to have somebody outside your system to help you develop good judgment because the way that we think about ourselves and our businesses gets really cloudy and entangled and hard. It's hard to pull the threads apart.

Of course,

I— one way that we describe what we do is we say we work at the intersection of the business and the personal. It's never just business and it's never just personal, or rarely, but like it's always a little bit of both.

Well, right. I mean, that's for everybody, right? I mean, everyone brings at least some part of their home life into I mean, we, we have a decently sized team and like, I don't know, every week someone has something, they're sick, family member got sick, you know, family member's sick, vacation, whatever it is. There's— humans are messy,

right?

And there's always something happening.

And that, I think that in some ways that's a feature, not a bug. And it— so good judgment and wisdom is able to Think about all of that. And so just for example, with a found— for a founder, I was talking with a client last week and we were talking about identity and how do you separate your identity as a person from the success of your company that you founded. And really important to do because if you don't separate them, then every part of every decision in the company, every project, every program, Feels like I am at stake here. Like if this fails, I fail. And if you are able to create a healthy separation, you can hold stuff more loosely, which actually helps you manage it better. It's, it's kind of like, I use the analogy of a professional baseball hitter. You'll see them, like if sometimes people They're trying too hard and they like tighten up on the bat and it, it just messes up the swing. Like they want it so bad, they're, they're not good at it anymore. And, but a good hitter will like, they'll go through routines and like loosen up their body and hold the bat differently. And they have all these different routines so they don't hold it too loosely. So it's smooth. And I think that happens for us on a— Psychological, emotional level in business. We have to hold it loosely and not feel like our core is at stake in this.

Mm-hmm.

And so that enables us to, for example, with the thing yesterday for you, okay, we launched this thing I'm really proud of and people don't understand and they're mad and whatever. Okay. This is not an attack on me. This is just a thing we need to work through.

Yeah, correct. And that's— yes. And being able to— so essentially, are you claiming that good judgment comes from being able to separate the personal and the kind of personal emotions from the, like, business decision itself?

I'm not sure you can fully separate it, but I think it is being able to make sense of it. Yeah, there definitely is some separation, but I think it, but you know what, I don't remember who said this, but somebody used an old, old kind of cheesy saying, wherever you go, there you are. It's like, like whatever it is you're doing as a leader, it's actually you as a human and everything that makes you up doing that as a leader. And so there's no way to really separate fully the business and the personal. And so that means, yeah, we have to get our personal house in order and our personal, like our inside in order so that externally we can be more effective. And they both play against each other, play against and with each other. I don't know. Does that, do you feel like I answered the question of, I guess so far we're just Talking about what is good judgment.

Yeah, I mean, it helps answer the question, certainly. And I think for founders being able to separate it, but I still, I don't know, it hasn't solved like how to do that separation, right? That's still the hard part is it makes sense in theory, but for a lot of people, it's really hard to shut things off, right? If you're in it all day long, man, it's really hard to shut that off. Like, you know, the health advice would be you got to shut your computer off at least 30 minutes before you go to bed and then like read something different or do something and like All these things. A lot of people don't. A lot of people go to bed like looking at their phones. Yeah. And that, I don't care if you're looking at Instagram or you're looking at your email, like both are going to be stressful.

Yeah, you're right. And we haven't really talked about how to develop it. I'll give you, I'll give you a long short answer because it's a, it's a, there's a lot to it. This is actually kind of what I did my dissertation on for my PhD is the internal character development of leaders. And I, what I've, at least in the group that I studied, there were 4 commonalities of what the process is for them and what contributes to it. The process is typically internal grounding, like being deeply rooted as an individual, then emotional intelligence. So you understand your own emotions because you're deeply rooted and that enables you to understand other people's emotions and, and regulate your own and respond appropriately to theirs. And then that leads to actual healthier leadership.

Isn't that— out of curiosity, though, like, isn't that difficult for a lot— like, the whole thing for a lot of founders, and this is sort of a different discussion, but a lot of founders have a high level of anxiety or challenges almost by default. Like, that's part of why you become a really good founder. Like, I don't think anyone would say that Elon Musk is like, a stable person. He's an amazing entrepreneur, but like he's dealing with some real personal demons that he's fighting in that even though he's the world's richest man, he clearly has not overcome. But yet those demons have also made him great. And so he's not, you know, like, I think, yes, for a healthier lifestyle, you need to be a little bit more stable. I think I'm very stable, but that might also cap my ability to be a world-class or world-changing entrepreneur. And I personally wonder about that all the time.

Yeah, it's a great question. And it's one of the first questions that I get when I talk about this. I think, take Elon Musk, for example, or other outrageously successful entrepreneurs. And I wonder if they succeeded not because of their demons, but in spite of them. And, and what would their, what would their lives and their businesses be like if they had better, better control over, uh, better self-awareness and better control over how they engage with others?

So I agree. I have a question for you though there on that. Like, that's a really interesting point, but I think I agree Elon probably succeeded, you know, in spite of his demons. And I think there's a lot of people who would have actually, like the large majority of people who have demons similar to Elon Musk fail, right? In big ways. Like they're not, you're not reading about them 'cause they might be in jail or a lot of other things. But there's that small percentage who instead take those demons and funnel them into really good activities that enable them to be successful. And you need those outliers. But yes, so I don't know. And the founders you're working with all have those sort of set of demons and they've obviously found a way to funnel that into valuable work. Um, but so it's in spite of, but also part of who they are. Like, I don't know, it's very difficult to separate probably. And if you separate it out, do they still become the same founder they would've been?

Yeah, it's a, you know, it's, it's not, it's not a simple issue. Um, the, the last part of the question I think is how do we develop this? So that's the, the process. Becoming grounded, becoming more emotionally intelligent, then you become a better leader. What we found in terms of how you develop it is content. You mentioned reading books, like content that shifts your paradigm, reflection on experience, not just experience, but deep reflection on experience, and sustained intimate community.

That just sounds like advice for healthy living. In general.

It is, but for leaders, they need a particular kind of sustained intimate community.

Like what?

What is that? They need to have people that get what their leadership experience is. Like a founder typically needs somebody who knows what it's like to be a founder as a coach or a thought partner. And often they also need another group of leaders in a similar context. So whether that's Being a pastor or a professor or a doctor, they need people who get the struggle and who can engage with them from a point of similarity, not from like across the world.

Where do they find that community?

It is rare for people to find it without paying for it. And what I mean is you often have to, A, pay for a coach because you need The intensity that comes with a professional relationship. And many times people have, they start to have the kind of community with peers, like peer groups, but unless people are paying for it, uh, with, and that means having a paid facilitator and a structure, the organic nature falls apart. You can't maintain it usually over time, uh, because people are busy. No, it's nobody's job to make sure the group gets together. It's nobody's job to make sure one person doesn't dominate the group. And

by the way, I have a, I have a sort of CEO group that we meet once a month. We used to have it facilitated by sort of a coach, and now we actually just run it ourselves. But we try to do that once a month and we can— it is kind of like talking through all the things.

Sometimes when you get a paid person who starts it and everybody becomes sort of trained in how to do it, You don't have to have that. My co-founder Charles, his group has been meeting for 10 years. And like 5 years ago, they stopped having a facilitator. But they still fly in from wherever they are to meet once a month. But usually you have to have somebody who's a professional to help you get it started and set, set the culture within the group.

Totally agree.

Well, that's, uh, I, you know, We— I love the question. Thank you for sharing it. And thank you so much for your time today, Adam. I really appreciate it.

Josh, it's always a pleasure. Good chatting. Thanks for having me on.