Zone of Genius, AI Scaling & Investing in 200 Startups | Adam Spector (#61)

Exit Algorithms. Scale smarter, sell stronger.

Welcome to Exit Algorithms, the podcast where we decode what it really takes to unlock growth, streamline operations, and prepare your business for a high-value exit. I'm your host, Pete Vera, and today I'm excited to bring on Adam Spector. He's a 4-time founder with multiple exits, has invested in over 100 startups, hosted over 100 episodes of his podcast Entrepreneurial Excellence, and is the CEO of Chor, a back-office operations service. Adam, super excited to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Pete, great to be here. I'm actually invested in over 200 companies, but beyond that, it was spot on.

Yeah, I'd love to hear your background. Do you mind sharing for listeners? I know there's a lot that you've done so far in your career. Really impressive.

Yeah, I mean, look, the high level in a sense career-wise, look, a lot of people say, oh wow, you have such an impressive background in everything else. And what I try to tell people all the time is a career is all about compounding largely. And so if you stick in a similar industry and build your connections and your work, and you just put your head down and do good work every single time, you will end up with a good resume, hopefully an impressive one actually, because you've stuck with it and you become really good at what you do, and people wanna refer you, and you get better and better, and you get new roles from that and everything else. And so for me, I mean, I've been in the tech space since 2010, Actually, really before that, so 2008, when I graduated my graduate school, I had a J.D. and an M.B.A., I went and worked in essentially business development, working sort of BD and M&A, looking to buy their companies as part of a small M&A team internally at a sort of mid-sized publicly traded sort of tech-ish company, based in D.C. though. And I kind of knew, like, if you want to be in the tech space, and you want to work with the best, you need to move west, and you need to be, frankly, in San Francisco at this point in time, and I would say that to everybody nowadays, and you see that in San Francisco. I've lived here for now 16 years. It's pretty clear that the place to be, if you are determined to be a builder at the top of your game in the tech space, you should be in the Bay Area. Now, it's different for every industry, right? So there might be other, if you wanna be in finance, you should really be in New York. If you wanna be in politics, D.C.'s the place to be. But the point being, if you wanna be great in your field, you should be around the other people who are also great in your field, and you should test yourself against them, right? If you have a high amount of confidence in yourself, right, let's call it maybe an ego, right? I have some sort of ego. I hope it's not terrible and too annoying to my family, friends, and everybody else, but like, I have an ego. I wanted to be in a place where I was gonna test myself against the best, and so that was 16 years of compounding work to get to where I am, and to founding Chore about 3 and a half years ago to automate the back office work, because I know all these founders, I've been a founder multiple times, and everyone has the same pain. I wanna go focus on what I care about the most and what I do great at, right? Could be I'm building the next cool AI thing, whatever it is, And yet now I need to go spend all this time figuring out how to run payroll, and do compliance work, and finance. What a terrible use of my time, and time is the only resource you really have that you can control in life, and make the decision of where to spend your time. So if you're spending it on other work that's irrelevant to your company, you'll never get that time back, and your company will likely fail.

Yeah. Oh, love it. Yeah, great premise for a business, you know, a problem that a lot of small businesses have.

That's what you want to build a business around, something that everyone has, that problem. Now I will say it's not easy, right? There's no guarantees. Just because everyone has a problem, the other problem is that a lot of people are cheap and they don't value their time properly. And so they think, oh, I can do this, I can figure it out. And I'm like, you can, but it's sort of the same thing as figuring out, you can go figure out how to do sales, or you can go figure out how to go build a technical product. Yes, you can do all of those things nowadays. Like, there's nothing with AI as your kind of copilot and right there with you. There's nothing in the world you can't do, honestly. Like, I really believe everyone, if you put your mind to it, can do anything nowadays. Like, we all have a superpower. However, should you be doing it, right? There's areas you are hopefully great at. Yeah. And to focus on things you're great at, which is presumably what's gonna make your business Differentiate, and succeed. Delegate and hand off everything else.

Yeah, no, smart. Yeah, like your zone of genius, right?

Zone of genius is a great way of putting it, yep, yep. Folks, look, this is, your zone of genius is the only thing where you should be spending time. Like, I don't know, like, what's the point of life? Like, are you gonna look back on your deathbed and tell your, you know, hopefully your kids or family, friends who are all surrounding you when you're dying, and be like, oh man, I'm so happy I spent that time figuring out why payroll was broken. Like, give me a break. No, of course you're not gonna say that. Like, you're gonna say, I changed the world because I built this amazing product that saved millions of lives, or made my company and my team millions of dollars. Whatever it is, like, that's what you're gonna be proud of. But guess what? You will never be able to have that story if you're wasting your time doing things that are not in your zone of genius. Hmm. Life is too short. Like, you know, another really simple example for people, like, my company's called Chor. We do the chores, in a sense, the operational chores for companies. There are other household chores that I don't like to do. Like, I don't like vacuuming and mopping my floor. I don't like doing my laundry. So guess what? I have people come and clean my house on a not super regular basis. Like, I'm not maybe that wealthy, but like, they still, I have people come and clean my house. I'm willing to pay someone else to come clean my house. I take my clothes to a local laundromat where they wash and fold my clothes, including my kids' clothes, right? I could do that, I have a washer and dryer in my house, but those are chores to me, and the time I get by outsourcing that work is so much more valuable. I get to spend it with my kids, I get to spend it on podcasts with folks like you, I get to do work with my team to build Chor into a great company. The ROI in that time is so much higher than me mopping my floor and vacuuming. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Oh, definitely. I love that perspective. Yeah, I was listening to Alex Hormozi talk about kind of this concept and of just like getting your dollar value per— for your hour, you know, and is it really worth your time to be spending, yeah, like chores is an example, or making food, right? Like, it financially doesn't make sense either.

Once again, the thing you need to be thinking about is everyone you spend time with, everything you do. So Naval Ravikant, who, for those in Silicon Valley, he's the founder of AngelList, incredibly famous founder, investor, you name it. He said that he views his time as being worth $2,000 an hour. Now, he maybe couldn't get $2,000 an hour for his time, although he probably could, 'cause he's pretty amazing, so he probably could, but most of us can't. But you still should say, you know what, my time is worth $2,000 an hour. Therefore, if I'm gonna spend an hour with someone, it has to be worth $2,000, and if it's not worth $2,000, I'm gonna go spend that time on other activities that I think are. And that's just the heuristic you should use. To make your decision. So I'll give you a little example from today for me. I had a call on my calendar right before this, actually not right before this, one before this, and I emailed the founder, I said, hey, why are we having this call? I don't understand why we're having it. He wrote back, oh, it's like, it's so your sales team can learn about our new product features. I was like, well cool, you didn't actually invite the salespeople from what I can see from the invite. Number one, issue number one. Number two, do I need to be there? Can you just send me the document async about what the new features are that I should read about? So, they sent me the doc, I read it in 2 minutes, I logged into their site, looked at it for another 3 minutes, I spent 5 minutes looking at it, I now have all the information I need. In those 5 minutes, if I were on a call, that would've been 5 minutes of like intros and shooting the shit, and I'm like—

Yeah.

The founder's a good dude, like I like him, but I don't need to spend the time on that. Like, if you wanna meet up in person and have a real, in real life chat, I'm happy to do that. That's a different, better use of time, I think. But I just said no. I was like, is this useful? Because I have other things I need to focus on right now for my company and for other things. So that's what I spent my time on.

So let's backtrack a little bit. Before, before Chor, you've built several successful businesses. Do you mind sharing some of those growth stage problems that you had to solve? Like, how did you decide when to scale, when to add more employees, et cetera, and ultimately build it into the successful businesses that they became?

Well, look, the thing is, there's no easy, simple answer. I wish there was some simple, this is how you go do it. The simple fact is, like, well, a few things. One, I think most founders spend too little time on marketing early on. Like, you should be spending a lot of time early on marketing, go-to-market, figuring that out, getting that right. So as an example, I talked with a company recently who's selling part of their business, which I know you focus on a bunch too, but so they're selling part of their business, and they basically said like, hey, like, we never quite figured out go-to-market. Like, they have a good business, they've never figured it out. And they're like, look, we're so impressed by you, Adam, like, you have it so figured out, like, you're so good at it. And I was like, oh man, like, I appreciate that, but I have so far to go. Yeah. But what they also said, like, look, we're technologists, and that's what they focus on, building tech stuff, and not the go-to-market. But like, I don't think, you can't have great tech without also having good go-to-market. It's sort of the old saying, like, if a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, does it make a noise? Like, it's the same thing, like, you can't go build, you can have the best technology in the world, but if no one knows it exists, who cares? Mm-hmm. Right, like, you need distribution. Now, to be clear, to answer your question, that doesn't mean it's easy at all. Like, doing good go-to-market is always a combination, even in today's world of AI, of great social media presence is a big key thing nowadays. But that can be like LinkedIn. If your buyers are B2B buyers, LinkedIn might be great. But Meta can also work, so Instagram, Facebook can also work well. TikTok can be good. You need to be great at SEO and geo, which are basically like Google Ads, or kind of optimizing your website so people can find you when they search for your topics. Google Ads, also another key part. How do you do outreach directly? So, you know, for us at Shore, as an example, we're fully revamping our entire go-to-market right now. Mm-hmm. So literally everything from how leads come in to who's doing that work specifically, to how much automation do we have in place, and trying to build a fully automated system that can kind of manage all these pieces. So really thinking through all the different elements. So I don't have a one single statement for you, Pete, that's like, this is, do this and you'll be successful. Like, in the end, you just need to be in a market where you have buyers. Like, can you convince 5 of your friends to go use your product? If you're building your product in a space that you know well, because you're an expert at it, you should have 5 people who are like, yep, you are solving a problem I absolutely have, and therefore I'm gonna go buy this product, and I will pay you money for it. If you can't do that, you shouldn't build your product. So with Choro, I'll give you an example, right? I've been in the tech space for 16 years, so when I need to go get customers, I can go just in my own network, just by cold messaging people, not even cold, like messaging warm people that I know well, and be like, this is my problem, here's how I think I wanna solve it, would you buy it? And if they say yes, and then they actually give me money to buy it, right, don't just say yes, you actually have to have them give you money, then you have something that you can build marketing around to sell to other people who don't have that warm connection to you. Mm. And then you can start marketing. But until then, I don't know, don't just build a product 'cause like, the world needs this, but you can't convince your friends to go buy it, and if you don't have friends in the space you're building it in, then you shouldn't be building that product in that space.

That's a great litmus test right there. When you eventually build your company up to a point where you feel it's time to exit, Were there any things you wish you would have done differently now looking back?

Yeah, I mean, I think probably the biggest one always is really get to know your competitors well. The competitors are the most likely buyers of your business, and therefore you should get to know them and make sure they know you, and be in a relationship with them essentially. Like, it can be friendly, right? They can be like, hey, like, I just wanna go grab a coffee and talk about our shared problems. Or challenges that we have. What do you like in this business? What don't you like? What do you see that works well? And share ideas. Like, in the end, people are way too careful about like, I want to— I need to be secretive and keep my information close to my chest because I don't want everyone to copy what I'm doing. Look, if you're talking to the CEO of some competitor, the likelihood of them copying you is pretty slim. It's just— it's slim. You know, you give them some information. They're not likely to copy you. They got— they have a million other problems on their plate right now. So like, just don't, don't worry about it. Go have that coffee meeting, get to know them, build a relationship, maybe have them as a mentor, right? If someone's a lot older than you, have them as a mentor. We've been in this space for 3 and a half years as Chor and about 2 and a half years as a different company. And I'm shocked by how many people keep trying to do the same idea but never get in touch. And I'm like, either they didn't do their own research about us existing, which is insane. Like, that is literally— you failed as a founder if you didn't do your own research, or you just were too scared to reach out. Just reach out, be like, hey dude, like, what's this? What's— what do you think the pros and cons of this space? You can say— you can discount everything I say, but you should build that relationship. And once again, I'm shocked people don't do it.

How was your sale process? Did you have a representative? Or did you do that strategy, at least on the last exit?

No, did not. Did not do a very good job with that strategy. Really worked with bankers, and you get a banker involved, and they take a percentage, and they kind of market you, and all these steps. It's kind of annoying. I generally recommend people nowadays, it depends, once again, it depends on the size of your deal, of course, but a lot of brokers will want money up front. $50 grand or something upfront to kind of prepare things. I think that's BS. I don't think you need that, and you can even do the deal yourself if you know the people in your space, so you don't even need bankers involved. But if you want bankers involved to really get a wide spread and help you, 'cause you haven't done that work to know your competitors, yeah, get a banker, interview a bunch, see what you like, right? If you're gonna get in bed with someone, make sure they're actually really good. Yeah. and understand your business and seem to really care, or get a personal reference that say, hey, these guys are great, and then start working with them and getting the information you need.

We can talk a little bit more about Shore. I did a fair amount of research myself, but for listeners that haven't heard, you know, all the products Shore offers, do you mind kind of giving a high-level, you know, what type of businesses also does it Can it work with—

We are essentially a fractional chief of staff. So imagine having a chief of staff who would do all the annoying chores that you don't wanna do. End of story, that's what we do. We take care of all of it. Um, the thing is, once again, founders have a terrible tendency to wanna hire people on their team full-time. Like, well, I want a full-time person because they can do X better than an outsourced person can. I think that is completely backwards. You generally don't wanna have internal people full-time. Because you have to recruit, hire, train, manage them, all that stuff. Whereas if you hire outsourced firms, they will do the work, and yes, you'll pay them more than you would pay internally, for sure, right? You may pay 20, 30, 40, 50% more to an outsourced firm to help go do the job, but you're only paying them for exactly what they're gonna do. Whereas what people don't think about, like, well, I can hire an internal person for $50 an hour, Working direct for me, $50 an hour. You're gonna be $100 an hour to hire you. Yes, that's true, but you're only paying us for 20 hours of work. You're paying the full-time person for, you know, 160 hours of work. Hmm. So the net-net is actually they're way more expensive. Oh, and by the way, you also have to spend all this time recruiting for this person, and it might be for a role you don't even know how to do. Right, imagine if you're the most technical founder in the world and you're recruiting for a salesperson. Do you have any idea how to recruit a salesperson? No. So you're probably gonna fail on that front. Then you need to manage them and train them. Well, good luck with that, also a role you don't know how to do, so it's the blind leading the blind. That's insane. And so the same thesis applies to Chor. Why would you as a founder do the work yourself, right, speaking of like your zone of genius, why would you do the work of operations yourself? Or why would you hire someone internal to do it? Terrible ideas. Hire experts who know what they're doing, who get it done, and by the way, if we don't get it done, you can fire us. Our contracts are month to month. So just fire us, you don't owe me severance, no hard feelings, I don't take equity, just fire us. And look, we are incentivized, we are super aligned, right? The problem with full-time employees in many cases, They think they get the offer, oh, I got a job offer from this company, now I'm like, I'm good to go. And some of them immediately start slacking off. Like, they shouldn't, but like, a lot of people do. They don't really work, they're not working hardcore all the time. They're slacking off, they're doing other things, like, we have life things come up, I get it. But like, when I hire a vendor, I don't care about all the life things that are happening in your world. It's irrelevant to me. I've hired you to do a job. So you need to figure out how to do that job. So once again, as an example with Chore, we always have extra capacity, because things do happen in life, right? Things happen, like people get sick, their families get sick. Mm-hmm. So we have extra capacity on our team, and yes, you are paying a premium for Chore, for us to have capacity so that your operations never stop. When your ops person from Chore gets sick, we back them up and we backfill, and you're paying for that insurance. So what we do, to answer your question maybe specifically, all of HR, from recruiting support all the way through onboarding, offboarding, you name it. We do compliance, so managing all the state registrations, all the annoying stuff from states, benefits, all of that good stuff. Finance, accounts payable, accounts receivable, bookkeeping, taxes, and then for a lot of startups, they have equity to manage too. So we'll do all their equity work instead of them wasting money on lawyers.

Nice, got it. Um, how— I'm curious, how are you leveraging AI in, in your business or even in your, you know, your day-to-day life as well?

Yeah, I mean, look, in business, here's, here's another key part about why you want to hire experts at what they do. Um, if you have your own internal operations team, you were— you're that, and you'll probably have one person doing ops, maybe, or maybe it's you as the founder. You are never gonna build a ton of automations to run operations well. Why would you? They take time to build systems that work really great. It's the same thing as saying like, people used to build their own servers in their garage, and now they outsource it to AWS. Why do you do that? Because AWS is way better. You pay AWS a premium to run your server, but you only need a fraction of that server. You don't need a full server. It's also though better technology, they're gonna build all these new technologies on top, better security. All these other things that you just will never have, even if you have a full-time person focused on making your server the best in the world. Same thing with Tor. And so like for AI, it's the same thing. We're building new AI things for how we classify your documents, how we answer your questions, how we automate different workflows every day. That's what— that is what we think about. So our goal is that our product will continuously get better. Right. Our fractional chief of staff that you're hiring from Chore will be better and better at their job for less and less money as well. Right. Because you won't need as much of their time because they're faster with AI than you would ever be otherwise. So that's sort of how it's working with Chore. And we have a ton of cool things coming this year, too. And it's just getting faster and faster. And it's essentially like, how do you make the product more delightful for customers while also lowering the price, which is in some ways makes it more delightful, right? If you get— if you get More of something that's better for a lower price, it tends to lead to greater delight.

Yeah.

And in my personal life, to answer that question, um, man, I mean, I like, I've tried OpenClaw, uh, I have a bunch of automations that are running on a pretty regular basis. I do a lot of health. I have a whole health dashboard with all my blood markers and everything else, and, and by, by, you know, information about my health, um, a ton of things like that to track everything. And I mean, I'm, I'm in AI or asking questions to AI multiple times a day, every single day. I probably live in San Francisco. I'm probably in the top percentage of users in a sense and how I use it. But there are people who are multiple times better than I am. And it's actually a pet peeve of mine and pain point that I don't have enough time right now to get into it, which is a terrible excuse. But it's like, I don't know, I work until I have 2 kids and I work until 10:30 every night. And so like, it's pretty hard to like get extra time for tinkering, but I still try to find time. Like I've set aside time on the weekend to be like, I need to get better at using this because if I don't, like I'm already behind and I will fall, I fall further behind every single day.

That's a funny perspective cuz it, it depends on who you, who you compare yourself to, right? Well, right.

Once again, like I, I know for a lot of people in the world, they don't use AI at all. Or maybe they installed ChatGPT and they have like one question they ask it. Other people are asking questions all day long. Other people are actually building things with it. Their entire company is built off of vibe coding. It varies in a ton of different ways. But for me personally, like, I need— I want to get better at it. And I think if you have an expectation of being a successful business in the long term, and by long term I mean like the next 5 years at most, you need to be relatively AI native. And if not, your business will almost certainly fail. I mean, even like a bakery, like some of their bakery's work should be AI-focused, right? To automatically reorder on a flour or something, right? Should be AI-tracked. And who knows, new recipes, what are people buying, the analysis of like what kind of pies or cakes are people buying, what are new flavors that are trending, all of that should be like, this is like an AI product we should go build. Those would be things you could just go sell to a bakery, be like, hey, let's do automatic tracking of inventory of what people are buying and what the trends are in your local neighborhood. Try and coming out with a new thing and you can keep staying up to date on, on all that. You probably can make more money as a bakery.

I like what you said too. It requires tinkering. It requires like constant, it requires a lot of work and it's like a tool that you, it takes time to learn.

It, it does, but not even that much time. Like just start asking it, like literally just go ask AI. I wanna go build an application for a bakery to track inventory, know what people are purchasing, and know what's trending either nationally or in the local area, and then help me come up with new recipes that fit with those local trends. Just go ask Claude Code how to go build that, or just even ask Claude to start with.

Yeah.

And then see what happens. You'd be shocked by what it can already do.

It's not just for tech businesses either.

It's every business. If you once again are not asking questions about how to do these different things, how to build it out, what it should look like, you're falling behind. And to be clear, you don't need to build it all. Like, we— I have a great developer we work with in Uruguay who's great, very affordable. They help me build things out. We do have our own internal team as well, but like, we can hire great people all over the world who build good stuff on a regular basis for a very fair price. You just need to have the idea and then go get it built. And like, don't be scared to spend the money to go get it built.

Yeah, great advice. Has it affected you as you grow and scale Chore and, you know, get more employees? Has it allowed your team to You know, expand operations without hiring new employees? Or how has it affected that front on your business?

I wouldn't, I wouldn't say AI has directly impacted the hiring fewer people side of the equation yet. But I'm very sure that is coming, and that is one of our theses for this year, is that we essentially want to remain flat overall in the team size, especially in the US, because US employees are expensive. Stay essentially flat on that side of things, um, and do a lot more with AI. We have tech, but we're also a services business, right? So we need to essentially— traditional services businesses, they scale with more employees, more customers, more employees, kind of goes 1-to-1 ratio. Um, our goal is essentially to keep the total number of teammates flat this year while still doubling the business. Hmm. So that's kind of where we're headed, that's what we're targeting. It's not easy, of course, not only on the staying efficient front, but like also just growth overall and making sure we can grow. Now, I will say, in case any of my teammates are listening to this, we have no plans on firing people either, right? What we're instead doing is just saying we're going to hire fewer people and we're going to make do with the people we have. And you need to be able to— you have to be okay with this world. Like, this is change for people. And change is tough. Change is scary sometimes. But if you think, I mean, I like to think we are a better employer than most in saying, hey, we wanna help you change, we will give you all the tools to change. But yes, the expectations are also going to change, and you need to be willing to embrace that change to stay relevant. And if you're not, then that's fine, then it's not a fit with us at Shore long-term. The people who are willing to say, oh, this is cool, I'll embrace this and move forward, are the ones who will succeed with us long term and will always have a job.

If you're someone who likes to be efficient with their work, I feel like you might be self-motivated to try to figure out how you can use AI to make your job faster and more efficient, right?

So, yes, that's how most people should be. I will say I find that to be a lot less of the case than one would hope and imagine. I think a lot of people want it to be spoon-fed to them of like, this is how to use this tool, this is what you do. Very few people actually step up and take the initiative to go figure it out themselves. And people, by the way, that have at Chor, I put into a lot of new positions. I will very quickly say, great, thank you for stepping up. Let's, let's move you into a new role, give you more responsibility, but also increase your compensation because of it. Um, because you're willing to ask questions and think through this, how to use AI. A lot of people aren't that way, and I think we hire a lot of smart, proactive people at Shore. But even then, I think for a lot of them it feels difficult, time-consuming. They don't have the time for it. I don't have the time for it all the time either. But also, I don't think most people are working 60 or 70-hour work weeks like I am. So like, I think you have time. It's just a question of where you decide to spend that time. If you're spending that time watching Netflix with like your spouse, That's important maybe for your relationship, but like, it might not be great for your career, which, if your career falls apart, that also might not be good for your relationship. So like, you gotta think through what are the trade-offs you're making in life.

I'd be remiss if I didn't ask, you know, you've invested in 200 companies now, or more than. I'd love to hear your investment philosophy. How do you pick which businesses How do you pick businesses to put your money in?

A combination of things. So at the early stage, it's mostly founders who I've gotten to know really well, and I think, wow, like, what they're doing is amazing, and I believe in them, and I've seen how fast they move, and the questions they ask, and how they innovate, and how they think through things. That is what I find fascinating and impressive, and usually those are the right bets. But I definitely made plenty, plenty, plenty of mistakes. At the later stage, it's more, hey, like, does this seem like this is a company that is doing something that makes sense? It's obviously at a much higher price, but it's also somewhat de-risked at that later stage. But even later stage today, I mean, like, gosh, you could have invested. I was— the first invite I got to invest in Anthropic was at a $5 billion valuation. So I didn't invest. I passed. I was like, that's crazy. That price is so high. Like, I mean, who knew, right? It's over— it would have 20x'd basically from now. Like, it's insane. Those are the sort of returns no one expected. I mean, AI's changed what it means to do late-stage investing. Even if you invested in Anthropic earlier this year, like not that long ago, like February, you would have invested at a $350 billion valuation or so. It's now trading at over $1 trillion in the private markets. Wow. So like, essentially a 3x return in a few months, on paper, of course. But like, it's, the numbers are kind of crazy, but later stage stuff, it's like, hey, does this business make sense? There are now some great funds that are out, so you could do things like, USVC just recently publicly announced what they're doing. They're from AngelList, they're a really cool thing. where you can essentially buy late-stage deals, and they have no fees. It's a great setup. And I put money in that too, by the way, myself. So, you know, once again, obviously not financial advice for any of this, but like, I think that's a good bet if you don't know what deal to pick, and I don't always know by a long shot. Just do something broad-based, just the same way you might buy the S&P 500.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Unless you know the person that's running the company, right?

Yeah, unless you have some special in. I mean, look, investing is all about essentially data arbitrage, right? What data do I have that you don't have? In the private markets, I can do that all day long. Like public markets, they're not supposed to talk about like what's happening in their business, so you don't know the de— you know, until they publicly announce their information, you don't really know. Now there's lots of companies that try to study public companies and figure out like, you know, they fly drones over Tesla's lots and factories to see how many cars Tesla's building to try to estimate Is Tesla going to have a good month or a good quarter or a bad quarter? You can do that, of course, because that data is sort of quasi-public, but not really. But I can't afford to go have drones flying over Tesla's headquarters all the time to make an investment decision. But I can sit down and have conversations with a lot of really cool founders and get to know them and what they're building and why and why they're passionate about it. And when I do that, that's how you really start to get an idea of where the companies are going and if that's going to be big. Is sort of the next wave. Like, okay, why is this something you really want to solve, and why are you good at solving this? Or are you just freaking hacky and will figure it out, and just you're a hard worker and you don't care? Like, there are people who are just like, they will work so hard, the rest doesn't matter.

Yeah, sound advice. Wow, thank you, Adam. It's been an incredible conversation. I know we're coming up close here on time. I always leave the guests with one— if they could leave one tip for listeners on how to grow and scale their company, what would it be?

Be obsessed and work really hard. That's literally how growth happens. Like, there is no silver bullet, but you just need to be in front of all the people in your space. You need to be willing to travel all the time. Be on calls all the time. Be in all the forums. Do all the discussions. If you are willing to work that hard, you will find success. Most people are not willing to work that hard.

Yeah, love it. If listeners got as much value as I did, where can they learn, find out, learn more about you and Chore?

Absolutely. It's hirechore.com. So H-I-R-E, like hire. Chore, C-H-O-R-E dot com. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I'm on X, A-Spec Zero Zero, all over the place. So relatively easy to find. Get in touch. Happy to chat more and provide whatever advice I can. But in the end, like, go ask AI before you ask me. And then if you've done your research, I'm happy to talk through a little bit more. Pete, thanks for having me.

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