How to Delegate Tasks and Remain Focused as a Startup Founder

Hello, hello everyone. I hope you're all having a great day. My name is Daniel. I'm a part of the FI marketing team and we're back again with a pretty, pretty stellar webinar for you guys. This time it's how to delegate tasks and remain focused as a startup founder. And with us we have Isaac and Monty, and I know I'm gonna butcher this and I talked to them about it, right? It's Catena, Katana. I'm so, so sorry if I got that name wrong again. But anyways, yeah, we have a great session lined up for you guys. Akshay, why don't you bring them back on? While Isaac and Monty join us, just a brief intro about Catena. It's a platform that helps you hire the best overseas talent for your startup. Yeah, so while Isaac and Monty join us, why don't you guys tell me in the chat where you guys are coming in from? Right, I'm based out of Pakistan. Let's see who we have here. Let us know in the chat wherever you're calling in from, sorry, joining us in from. We have Atlanta, we have Berlin, awesome. We have Florida, we have Chicago, Ottawa. We have a pretty international crowd basically, so that should be pretty awesome.

Yeah.

Awesome, awesome, cool. Pittsburgh, Seattle, awesome. Isaac, Monty, thank you for joining us today. Would you guys like to introduce yourselves?

Hey Daniel, thanks so much for bringing us on here. Hey everyone, I'm Isaac Asab, I'm based out of New York City. This is my business partner Monty.

Hey everyone, I'm Monty, I'm based out of New York as well.

Hope everyone's having a great day.

Yeah, awesome. So before we, you know, get into it, uh, I'd just like to let you guys know that after the event ends, we have a networking session. So the EFI team will be here, Isaac and Monty might be joining us as well, and you guys can also talk to, uh, one another too, right? Uh, so yeah, if you have any questions, we have a button, a Q&A button. Drop all your questions there. and I'll help Isaac and Monty go through them. Isaac and Monty, it's, uh, I'm just gonna let you guys, uh, take the stage.

Thanks so much, Daniel. Appreciate it. All right, guys, um, an absolute pleasure to be jumping on with you. Monty and I have been building Cadena now for over a year, though we've been hiring overseas for the past 4. Um, today we want to talk about how to delegate and focus as a founder. Crazy journey, as all of you know, starting a new venture. Definitely a lot of hardship and challenges. And, you know, one of the most spoken about challenges is around hiring, making sure you're able to delegate properly and grow your business. And so we thought of having this conversation after it was really the starting point of this business. Monty, if you want to jump into the next slide. So a little bit about us. We launched Cadena to hire and train EAs for over 70 executives and over 100 different candidates that we've had for our previous ventures. Most of our clients being YC-backed founders. A bit about myself, born in Venezuela, raised in Miami. I went to Babson for undergrad where I studied entrepreneurship and real estate. I spent the last 10 years building businesses in the real estate sector as well as the tech sector. Specifically for real estate, where I was fortunate enough to meet my business partner Monty. We started a great relationship and joined forces in building a great pipeline of candidates out of the Philippines where he's from. Monty, if you want to share a bit about yourself.

Yeah, so born and raised as well in the Philippines before coming to school in the US. I went to Wharton for my undergrad. Post that, I ended up founding a company called Ascend in Canada. We mainly help real estate developers scale out their property management software. And so help real estate developers with over 20,000 units. As part of that, ended up hiring multiple folks from back home in the Philippines. Post that, came back to the US, worked for an ABA therapy company where our entire back office operations were also based out of Manila. And now I run a seed stage fund, uh, where I met— which is really how we ended up starting with Katena was Isaac and I had already proven out that we could hire, um, massive teams based out of the Philippines where we could find people that were just super sharp, skilled generalists that could take on any type of operations roles, um, that anyone really that you would find maybe right out of college in the US could. And so from there we ended up starting to help out YC founders and at this point have helped mainly C to Series A founders as well as VCs hire just their main chief of staff/executive assistant type people.

Awesome. Let's run to the next slide. So in that, Monty and I realized that as early stage builders, we had a crazy amount of things we needed to get done and far too much of it you know, we just couldn't handle all of it really. So we started putting our heads together and thinking, how do we start delegating? Monty came with the idea early, early on to hire executive assistants for ourselves. He mentioned to me that he had access to a lot of friend groups and top university contacts in the Philippines where we could go out and hire phenomenal employees for fraction of American dollars, American salaries, but also be able to give some of these Filipino talent you know, 30% up to 2 times or 3 times the salary that they were making back home. And that's where we started. We quickly figured out that we needed to learn how to delegate well. And what we're gonna go over today, like why delegation matters, delegation hacks, why— what founders get wrong with hiring an assistant or hiring in general, how to hire the right assistant, the right operator, and best practices for onboarding those individuals to your business. Montse, you can hit it. So, you know, taking a step back, everyone here is starting their journey as an entrepreneur. Maybe it's not your first time, maybe it is, but what everyone can understand is that one of the biggest, you know, challenges we'll face is how to scale out your team. So if your business has already started to see some traction, if you have an idea and it's starting to go well, delegation's really your only path to viability because there's gonna be a lot of things that you're gonna have to get done. and you won't be able to do it alone. Uh, what's really important to remember is that sooner or later you will have to hire phenomenal talent if your business has legs. And so now is a great time to start figuring out how do I start flexing that muscle? How do I really learn how to delegate and hire? That way it doesn't have to get to the breaking point where the business is about to explode, you're completely burnt out, and you have absolutely no idea how to hire someone. So that's really why we're starting off here. So to get started, you know, I thought one of the things we do with most of the founders and executives that we work with is we run them through an activity. Feel free to do it or feel free to just listen in. But as a founder, you know, there's no— it's a no-brainer that delegation is a top priority. So in your average week, think about every single thing you do. Break down your weekly hours, right? What are the tasks that I'm spending my time doing? This is something that we do with all executives. It seems so basic, but nobody spends a lot of time really writing out where am I spending my time, how do I time audit on myself. So write out all of those tasks or start to write them out. To the right of those tasks, once you're done writing them out, think through how much time am I spending on this every week? What you'll start to notice is that a lot of the tasks that you're spending your time doing don't need to be handled by yourself. A lot of the things we start seeing from founders in general are outreach, rather, to venture funds or to early-stage, um, clients or discovery partners, email follow-ups, scheduling, managing personal life. What we tend to see is that founders and executives have on average 15 hours worth of work that they don't need to do themselves. As you start building your company, you have to be very mindful of your time, be very mindful of your energy levels. If you haven't already faced what the bottom feels like, it will come soon. And you really need to protect yourself from that energy to make sure that you are in the best mental and physical place you can be. And so if you've done this, if you're writing these activities as we speak, think about like, really, where am I spending my time? If you don't have 15 hours or 10 hours worth of work that you don't need to do yourself, then you've already mastered delegation likely, and this might not be the conversation for you. But we've spoken to executives from seed all the way through Series D and E and public companies, and every single person can go further in delegation. And so this is really something you want to think about. You'll notice repetitive work, research-based work, follow-up on outreach are the main areas here. Montu, you can go to the next slide. So now that you have this list of work that doesn't really need to be done by you, right, you have, let's say, we usually tell our executives, think, find the top 3 activities that are the most time-consuming They could write a step-by-step guide on how to get it done. So that's what Monty and I do for ourselves, and that's what we do for our clients. We figure out what are the areas that you could delegate, what are those workflows, how do we write a perfect standard operating procedure for them, and how do we use new tools like Loom to teach our employees how to do these tasks and have a resource to always come back and figure this is how Isaac does it. This is how I should do it. And so like regular standard operating procedures, we write it down in Notion, we write down every single step in getting something done, and we record Loom videos at the same time to show the individual, this is how you should do that task. What you start to build are not only the responsibilities, but the how-tos. And this is just a really great first leap in teaching your employees how to do the work that you don't need to be doing yourself anymore. Next slide, Monkey. Awesome. So what comes next? The second big activity that we advise our clients to do, and executives, is a personal user manual. Think about it. As you start hiring individuals, the most important thing is to make sure that they feel aligned to the vision of the company, that they want to build value for you, and for the venture, and they wanna align themselves with the growth of the company. The best way to do that is become personal, get a mutual understanding of each other, help build the relationship. And so a lot of this tends to be information like, what are my personal values? What are my cultural practices? And there's a lot of other activities that we can get into here, which kind of dive deeper into, Who you are, what are, what's your preferred method of scheduling? Do you have a preference in a tightly scheduled day or more flexible approach? What type of schedule do you find most conducive to your productivity and why? How do I view trust, working relationships, and why? Why do I require to earn my trust? What do you need to do to have me trust you as an individual? What actions can cause a team member to lose my trust? So while these might seem very deep, Monty and I have been able to hire tens and tens and tens of employees and within one week feel like we've known them for many years. And it's because we're able to dive deep into who we are, what are our beliefs, and how to work with us to our best capacity. Diving deeper, you can think through expectations when things go wrong, response to certain triggers, communication channels and guidance on how to follow up. And so these are just some of the ways that we help our clients really build that alignment with their new employees, their new assistants, or new operators as they try to scale out the business. It's really important to highlight you want to set timelines for responses for certain activities, right? You want to make sure that employee understands this is what I expect from you to reach back to XYZ. Be it a response to an email, be it a response to you individually on a report. And these are some of those activities that you start to build that really align you, especially if you're building a team remote, right? A lot of these things happen naturally in office, but as life evolves, remote work evolves, this is one of those activities that we find super important. Awesome. Next slide here, Martha. So what are some of the other things that we help our executives do? We train them and their assistants on email management. How do you start scoping out, how should we break down our inbox? One of the things that Monty and I both do is that we have our executive assistants manage our entire inbox into 3 different areas. FYI, which are basically, hey, these are emails that there's no follow-up item for me, Isaac, to handle. but my assistant just wants me to know this is the update. A specific secondary grouping, which is please handle, right? My assistant doesn't understand what this individual email's about. It's not a repetitive task, so they put it in this specific inbox for me to handle myself. And I have my assistant personally draft my responses to most of my inbox. And so she'll leave all of the emails that she's drafted in my voice directly in my inbox for me to review and send out. The second workflow, which I know Monty loves more than me, is voice dictation, right? You can speak 7 times faster than you can write. Monty and I early on built a Zap that allows us to voice record ourselves to certain activities and tasks we need done and Zap them directly into Asana. That way our assistants can handle whatever tasks we're asking them to do. Something that we help our clients with and they love. And the third thing is creating consistent reporting habits, right? What are those responsibilities this employee is handling? How should they report to you? How do you track their success? It's extremely important with any employee, but especially your assistant, for them to feel like they're doing the right things. You wanna make sure they stick with you long-term. And so you wanna give 'em that validation when they're doing things right and the assistance and the heads up, hey, this could be something that could be improved. And so setting up these reporting habits, be it one-on-one conversations, end-of-week reports, weekly OKR review, or important areas to make sure that you have a long fruitful relationship with your assistant. Next slide here. Awesome.

Thanks Isaac. So for the second part of this chat, we'd want to go through how to find sort of why people hire the wrong executive assistants, how to find them and how to onboard someone that can actually take on 10 to 15, even 20+ hours of your work every week. And so one of the things that we realize is most people think about hiring VAs in the wrong way because they think of hiring them from large American companies. And especially in the context of the Philippines, this is completely wrong. So we find engineers, consultants, and law school graduates as founders executive assistants for about $1,000 to $1,300 per month. And we tell our founders, you need to choose people like these as opposed to a career VA. Why? Because you want to find someone who has experience working with difficult ambiguous concepts and is likely to apply the same hustle, learning all the skills you need them to. So the best types of hires we find fall into the archetype of the sharp hungry generalist who serves more as a chief of staff to you as opposed to say like a classic executive assistant who you think maybe only can do scheduling or can only respond to emails once in a while. The talent that we recommend is like, think about this as someone who's maybe a new grad out of a high-end US university that can really do anything operations-wise that you ask them to, because they're just going to be able to learn really quickly. So these are, these are some examples of some of the folks that we've hired in the past. Like Jolene was an analyst at Bain, became a customer success manager for a startup at $6 an hour. Josh became a chief of staff for about $8.50 an hour. Hilda, she had a master's in counseling psychology and ended up becoming an operations coordinator for $7 an hour. So the thing that was common across all of these people were they were super sharp. They've written papers in chemical regions, built financial projections, and studied international law. And that means that they'll be able to take ambiguous projects that you give to them and proactively execute them, which is really what ends up resulting in time savings for you as opposed to having to tell them exactly what to do every single time. Now, now, now is the best time to hire EAs from the Philippines where most employers that we spoke to think that they'll find the best assistants or hires really from Upwork, Fiverr, or even job websites like onlinejobs.ph. In the context of the Philippines, this is wrong. So top graduates from back home, um, including say all my high school classmates, work for local companies versus in backend roles for bigger US corporations like Aetna, T-Mobile, or Cigna. So now, why would someone work for a local company even if they earn less money? Prestige plays a large part in the decision back home. So it's not prestigious to go to a top college and then work as an assistant for a US company. But COVID and remote work changed people's perspective over the past few years. So folks realized that they'd rather, one, be able to save 3 hours of commuting through traffic where traffic in Manila is terrible, it's worse than LA, get 30% higher pay, and then work directly for a successful startup founder. Over the past few months, a lot of folks have been forced to go back to in-person work and are now choosing to quit and go remote instead. They're still not working for bigger BPOs though, because they see this as less prestigious and know that with these BPOs, which are like business process outsourcers, meaning they'll hire a team of Filipinos or folks from India as well, manage them, and then lease out their time to larger companies. People, the top talent, still don't want to work for BPO type models because they know they're going to be stuck in the same backend role forever. The unlock that Isaac and I had was we started building relationships with top universities and pitch top graduates the idea of working with top founders like you guys instead. And people want to work directly with founders because then they know that there's a much higher chance of them being able to progress and to be able to learn from you guys. So given all of that and the big why now, how do you find them? So first hiring tip here is within the Philippines, you want to find university grads on Facebook. Facebook is still huge back home. You can, you can take a look at job groups like University of the Philippines Jobs and Internships, and I know this PDF is going to be shared out with all of you guys too, so you'll have access to direct links after. DLSU Jobs Internships too, and you can just post directly there like, hey, looking for a super sharp generalist XYZ, just post out your entire JD there as opposed to going on bigger websites like Indeed where you'll have to sort through a lot more noise. So some of the top universities that you want to take a look at in the Philippines when trying to find graduates are one, University of the Philippines Diliman. This university actually has a lower acceptance rate than UC Berkeley, because everyone in the country who gets in gets to study there for free. And it's a top university in the Philippines. And so anyone you get from here is generally very sharp and had to take a hard placement exam and pass it. De La Salle University, Ateneo de Manila, and University of Santo Tomás are some of the other ones that you want to be looking at to be able to figure out sort of higher correlation at least. Of folks who are going to be these sharp generalists. Hiring tip 2 is focus on poaching from top startups and local companies. So a lot of these startups are gonna be underpaying compared to what you can. They'll be paying around $3, $4 an hour. And so even you offering $8, $9 an hour is already double what they would be earning previously. Some examples of these top local companies are Procter Gamble, Nestlé, are the multinationals that a lot of folks want to go to. Universal Rubina Corporation and Unilab are local larger companies that a lot of top grads go to. And then Shopee and Medgrocer are some of the top startups. Shopee especially, we love finding folks from because they tend to have a very, very good screening process, very high brand recognition as well. But they underpaid versus a lot of the market. And so people here at Shopier are just very burnt out compared to other folks within this industry and generally are pretty open to working for other US companies. Third thing that we recommend is to set up proper tests where you can really test for 1, productivity, 2, ability to work with ambiguity, and 3, attention to detail. So what we do in our process, which we've found is highly effective is a 2-step process. So, and this of course is a very abridged version of what we run internally at Katena, but some things that you guys can do is one, start with a top grading interview. So top grading interview is a multiple, so it's you asking the candidates multiple questions with the expectation that you want to figure out the why and how of each candidate. So you'll be asking them sample questions like, tell me about a time you had to manage a complex project. Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager and pushed for your own opinion. And what you want to see here is how specific are these candidates able to be with their responses. The more specific, the better, because that actually means they probably were the ones that achieved the results. You want to ask them a lot of deeper dive questions like, okay, how did you do this? Why was this the goal that you set versus this other goal? And what you want to do here is be able to start getting an understanding of, in any situation you put them in, what are the driving factors and how do they think about problem solving through something? The second thing that you wanna do here then is run them through a trial project. So the project should mirror what they will do with you. So for example, as a founder focused in sales, you might want to have them find potential customers, get their email addresses, and then draft up sample cold emails to them. If you're a VC, maybe you want someone to go on Crunchbase, take a look at all different startups within a certain category, and then draft an outreach as well to them. Now you want to be intentionally ambiguous here because you wanna test whether your future assistant is proactive enough to one, learn about the space on their own, and two, know when they need to ask you questions. And this is one of the biggest things that we found is the difference between someone who's successful or not is the most successful hires, assistants especially, will know when to ask questions as opposed to others who end up just going through the process and then coming to you and having to churn all their work and redo it. Now, given those 3 tips, what are some best practices that we've found when onboarding folks after, let's say, after you've already hired someone? So the first one here is you need to be really aware of cultural best practices. So these were a lot of things I had to deal with myself when I moved from the Philippines to the US where Asian work norms are very different from North American or EU ones. We ended up interviewing over 40+ operators that we hired for US-based companies and asked them the best practices they wish their teams had told them about when they started. So these were all folks that we had placed into companies We created a guide on this, which you can actually find on our website. You can sign up to receive this. But the 3 biggest things that we found are number 1, being able to encourage pushback. So I'm gonna read word for word what a candidate said. It's, you're, so she mentioned you are free to give feedback without fear of retaliation. And that's huge back home at least is a lot of folks are taught that they can't really push back or even give feedback because if they do, then their managers get mad at them or will try to fire them. And so you want to model out this behavior for the first month. Anytime someone pushes back to you, asks you different questions, you wanna be able to use a lot of positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement in the culture or context of the Philippines also works much better than sort of getting mad at people, negative reinforcement, because then that just makes them communicate to you much less. And the second biggest thing really is like overcommunication. You want your person, especially when we're working remote, to be able to tell you like, hey, this is what I'm thinking of working on today. This is what I just got done, at least for the first part. So you can try and understand how well they do in terms of timelines and also in terms of prioritization. The third thing that you want them to know is letting them know it's okay to ask questions earlier on and even framing this as, telling them like, hey, if you don't understand something, one way that you can ask a question is do 10% of the project first, come to me with 10% of the project and ask me like, hey, does this look like the final output that you want to receive from me? That way you save your time and you save their time as well because you're both able to fully align much earlier on in the process. So that's a quick hack that Saves a lot of our executives a lot of time. Second thing for onboarding is making sure that everyone has North Star metrics. So you wanna identify North Star metrics that are most relevant to the team and then determine measurable metrics within a specific timeframe. So usually 1-month, 3-month, and 6-month goals for these hires and be able to tell them like, hey, we expect you to be able to get to this. And you need to be able to proactively ask questions to figure out how you get to this with us. Some examples of measurable metrics are after 1 month, for example, achieving certain levels of customer satisfaction, after 3 months, reducing customer churn rate, after 6 months, launching a new product service or surpassing quarterly sales targets. You wanna be very specific and measured with this and then be able to check in on whatever cadence you decide with your hires so that they know one, how to report things to you and two, also what timeline they need to get all of these done with. So those are our guides around onboarding and just wanna leave you guys with this, that opportunity isn't created equal across the world, but ambitious talent is. And that's something that I saw myself moving to the US from the Philippines and that we see day in, day out when we just get amazing testimonials kneels from our founders who end up hiring folks who are just super sharp and talented from back home in the Philippines, but don't have opportunities in our country to be able to really shine within the startup setting. Happy to answer any questions. And also leaving you guys with our emails down here. If you guys wanna just reach out to us at any point, very happy to chat about your current processes, think through how you can delegate much better. And also give any tips around hiring the best types of operators from abroad. Thank you guys.

Awesome, thank you Isaac, thank you Monty. I thought it was pretty great. I think you see all the emojis that you guys are getting at the bottom of your screen, the folks loved it.

Awesome, thanks so much for having us. It's always great to share the very hard lessons we've learned There's a saying in Spanish that goes, "A los coñazos," which is "through the hits." Yeah. So it's always great to share these, these learnings that we've gone through over the past couple years.

Awesome.

Happy to answer any questions.

Yeah, so we'll move on to questions, but before we move on to questions, we have this super quick poll that we want to ask you all, right? As a startup, and this is so that Monty and Isaac, they kind of get an idea, of, uh, let me know if you guys can see the poll though. Show on screen. Yeah, here we go, right? So as a startup founder, have you already made your first hire? Yes, no. What are we looking at, guys? You guys can vote on the screen, right? So we have a bit of a mix, a lot of solo founders it seems like, right? Right, okay. So at Founder Institute, what we do is we always encourage startup founders to delegate, right? The first thing that you should always do is kind of look for a co-founder because the startup journey, and you guys are also, as you know, as co-founders, you guys know this better than anybody else, that it's kind of a lonely journey. There's a lot of work to be done, and it's always good to have someone to share that burden with, right? So let's get started with the questions, right? So we have a good idea of where our audience is at in terms of hiring. We'll close this poll, right? So we had— I had a question that popped into my messages and it was this: when you hire from overseas, what tactics do you use to determine how much to pay them?

Yeah, I think, you know, salary has a lot to do with expectations in market. This is one where we're very fortunate to, like, be very tapped into our main market, and so we have a very good understanding of what current market rates go for. If you are not working with a specialized group like us, I would say you could, you know, one way you could learn is by hosting a good amount of interviews and kind of ranging out what people will pay, or what people expect to be paid, sorry. But it's, it's been through a lot of learning that we figured out what the right rate is. And our go-to strategy is to find the best operators and overpay them at at least a 30% rate to motivate them to make this shift. Mostly because if you're finding the right people, they're usually not looking for jobs remote online. Because you want to be finding the top 1 to 5% of talent, there's a lot of identifying the right individual and making sure you can convince them for the long-term opportunity they'll have with you.

Right, awesome. Monty, would you like to add anything to that?

Yeah, another thing you guys can do is go on, say, go on LinkedIn or Indeed or these other job boards and start seeing too, like, what are other employers posting out in the market. It's really that, plus at the end of each interview asking people like, hey, what were you paid in your last job? And then even if they blow it up by a little bit, after you go through enough conversations, you'll get enough of, uh, guidelines around how much the range is, right?

Awesome. So kind of sticking to the theme of paying, right? So we have this question from Nandish, what platforms would you recommend to keep track of, you know, for tax purposes? Let's say if you're hiring from the US or Canada.

Yeah, so in general we'd recommend, for us at least, we found using DEEL extremely helpful. They take care of a lot of the employer of record relationship when hiring. So they're really helpful when using, when hiring from Canada. And also from the Philippines. I've done that for my previous company 'cause we had a team both in Canada and the Philippines. One thing to think through when hiring from the Philippines especially is most people actually want to be hired as contractors as opposed to employees because then their take-home amount is much higher. So in the past I actually had a team of like 40 contractors, tried to bring them on as employees and they were like, "No, please, let's, like, I wanna stay as a contractor." And that way, like my all-in pay take-home can— will end up being much higher. So deal as a contractor is generally how a lot of our executives end up hiring their assistants.

Right. So kind of sticking to the theme of tools, right? You guys mentioned Loom for instructions. And are there any couple— are there any other tools that you would recommend as especially for somebody who's maybe hiring from overseas for the first time?

I think like general tech stack, you know, Notion, Slack, Gmail, Loom is a great way to share. Like this is a really easy way of doing this. You know, LastPass, sorry, LastPass, which is a password sharing tool that keeps you protected. Those are the main tech stacks we recommend.

Yeah, and then if you guys want to go a bit extra as well, you can always use remote device management software like Kanji. So if you have a team of contractors all using Macs, you can install Kanji. What that does is it allows you to be able to control their laptops remotely, be able to delete things. And so especially if you're worried about a lot of privacy or security, LastPass and then Kanji are two tools that a lot of our execs like to use as well.

Right, awesome. So, okay, so this kind of veers away from the executive assistant team we've had, but Adam wants to ask any resources you recommend from hiring overseas. You guys have talked about that, but more so any advice on hiring overseas software engineers, anything about that?

Manzi?

Yeah, so from our end actually, we focus purely on operations roles. We don't hire engineers. And so we're best suited to speak about how do I hire this extremely good SDRs, operations hires, and we never want to overextend, which is why we decided to just niche down into, hey, both Isaac and I have been head of operations for multiple companies and that's really where we know. Another company that we've heard is really good at hiring overseas software engineers that we partner up with is called Aloha. That's A-L-O-A. A.co. So they're a good resource to be able to check out for the engineering side of things.

Yeah, and if you, if you end up reaching out, let them know that Monty at Katena sent them out, they'll take care of you.

Awesome. So Adam, there you go, right? So I guess this is something a lot of people have been wondering, um, as a startup founder, right? At what stage do you begin searching for an EA? And how do you kind of determine like this is the right time to do that?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that in general you'll want to bring on an EA when you have enough work on your plate that you think that, wow, I really shouldn't be spending my time on this. If you're extremely early, like if you're only just ideating and you haven't had any market conversations, you don't really know what your idea is, yet. It might be a bit too soon. But alternatively, like, the way I think about it is hiring is very challenging, and EA will make your life in general a lot better. But starting to flex that hiring muscle through EA hiring earlier on before things get very hectic, that's probably your best bet. It's kind of like an exercise to start learning how to hire well. And so Monty and I have always been very, you know, efficiency-driven. We're always thinking about how do we keep our headspace only focused on what's most important. So we both hired EAs in our last ventures basically the day we started ventures because we knew there was going to be a lot of things that were going to be time-consuming, rather one-off or repetitive, that we don't need to handle ourselves.

All right, awesome. Monty, would you like to add to that?

I think all that, all that's great stuff from Isaac. Nothing else from my end.

Okay, awesome. So yeah, and this is, I think, something that's kind of obvious through your talk, right? Particularly because you guys focus on the Philippines a lot. A common question that kind of comes up, especially when people are hiring overseas, is, you know, will there be discrepancies or difficulties because of the written or spoken language. So anything that you guys would like to add over here?

Yeah, so from my end, one of the reasons we actually chose the Philippines is because everyone learns it at a much earlier stage. I was born and raised in the Philippines for the first 18 years of my life, and this is how I speak because throughout middle school, high school, English was the language of instruction. And within Asia, so the way to think about it too is within, there are a few countries where you can really get really sharp operators. You can go to LATAM, you can go to India, Pakistan, you can go to Southeast Asia. But really out of a lot of these countries, especially within Southeast Asia, the Philippines is the only country where English is the means of instruction. And we were actually a colony of the US for more than 40 years. Which a lot of people don't know, but because of that, a lot of us think in English. There is, of course, still a big discrepancy between general English as opposed to English from— with people from top universities where everyone's required to write papers and theses and everything in English, which is why we end up hiring and created very solid relationships with professors at these top universities that are on the deck. The other big thing to look out for here is a difference in terms of cultural context. So a lot of Language in the Philippines is gonna be way too formal when you start. So everyone's like, dear sir, dear ma'am. They're gonna say a lot of weirder things that you wouldn't say, especially because American language is a lot more casual. And so one thing that's what I would say is the biggest thing that you need to train out of folks when hiring from the Philippines is that over-formality. You need to be able to tell them like, hey, you just need to be able to be casual. One thing you can even do that we do with a lot of our assistants is have them go on GPT and put in what they're writing and say, rewrite this in an American voice for an American, like North American-based client. And then having them start pattern matching like, okay, this is the type of language that it's turning my language into. And after a month or so of doing this, you're gonna be able to get the casualness in the US language. But really if you look at the top percent of candidates from the Philippines, you already have that cultural context of, being an American colony, having grown up speaking English. And then at the top levels, these folks do have to have very solid written communication for a lot of their university-level academics. And so you're able to find people with pretty solid English, written and spoken. The other thing that you want to do though is here too is make sure that before hiring them, you put them through a series of trial projects and tests. Let's say if you need them to be writing emails out, then you want them to actually actually write a set of 5 to 10 emails for you and then start seeing is this something that is trainable or is it just so off for me? And that's what we do at Katana is we have a half-day live simulation with 7 exercises, each of these exercises testing out a different thing. Are you able to write really well? Are you able to speak really well on a video? Are you able to run research? Are you able to work with ambiguity if we give you a project where the instructions are wrong or the instructions are incomplete? So I think that's really the best way to really test things out and waste less time later on.

Right, awesome. I think that was a pretty detailed answer and I think there's like a fair bit of nuance when it comes to hiring from the overseas, from the overseas. and a lot of what you talked about addresses that because as a founder, right, there's like a ton of reservations you have about trusting people with your startup and kind of looking at a talent pool that's completely new to you. And while we, you know, while as we kind of get towards the end of our Q&A, I have this one last question for you, and this has kind of come up in our chat. But yeah, so I'll just post it here. Although it can be never foolproof, how do you determine you can trust someone enough with your confidential information?

Right. Yeah, it's a great question. I'm gonna let you take the reins, but I always find it interesting when people ask this. It's the same question, how do you trust any employee in general, right? That's my train of— like, my train of view. I think that what we've been able to do at Catena is find a really strong way to disqualify candidates that we don't think align to strong values. And so it's really about how good are you at figuring out if somebody's trustworthy, um, if it's somebody that you're hiring locally or if it's someone you're hiring remotely, um, it's all about that trust. And that's my perspective, Monty, curious if you have any other thoughts there.

Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing for me. It's like, it's the same thing as like, how do I trust this new grad from the US that I'm gonna hire that's not gonna be in the same city as me? Sure, maybe the laws apply more here. You can maybe try and sue someone. There's a higher likelihood if it really goes down to that. But I think in general, it's very much setting up, like there's two things. One, making sure within the interview process that you set up a very solid cultural interview. And make sure that you understand why do people do the things that they do and see if that's a fit with why you do the things that you do. And then secondly, also being very careful within the first few weeks. So always using LastPass, sharing out that LastPass key as opposed to sharing your exact password so you can change it anytime. And at the same time, you can always first spend the first month with someone without giving them a lot of more sensitive data. Maybe first month, two months, every— it really varies per person, but some of our execs will prefer to spend some time first on their own seeing how well someone works with them as a trial period before giving deeper access out.

Right. And I think this trust thing, it really goes back to like a cultural and like a value alignment, right? And This is what we kind of talk about when we, you know, when startup founders come to us looking for co-founders, like the first thing that needs to, you know, match perfectly is the values that you have and the cultural fit, right? So yeah, Isaac, Monty, thank you so much for joining us for this super, super informative session. Thank you for taking out the time to be here.

No, thank you guys for having us. Um, I mentioned I'll put out my email as well in the chat below. Um, please reach out whenever, we're super happy to chat with you guys, um, and then just give any tips.

Absolutely awesome. Yeah, so do you guys have any parting words? And while Isaac and Monty, you know, close things out, you guys want to— the audience, would you Let us know what you think about the session. Please use the emojis right at the bottom, right? Awesome. Yeah, getting a ton of love there. Isaac, Monty?

Thank you guys for having us. It's always great to share these learnings with everyone. You know, we built Katana to help phenomenal candidates abroad, where Monty, Philippines, where we've been hiring and had a lot of success, find phenomenal companies and leaders to work with. That's our goal at the end of the day. We want to remove the barriers that have impeded some of these phenomenal employees in the Philippines from making the most amount of money or working extremely well aligned with founders. And so while there are one or two ways Monty and I could change our business model to make more money for ourselves, at the core of our values and our business is to align phenomenal talent with phenomenal founders and incentivize them in the best way possible. So if we can help you, if you're looking for the best talent abroad, reach out, we're here for you. And if it's just to ask us questions or ask for some support in any way, we're also here for you.

Yeah, I just wanna reiterate that, yeah, my favorite line here is opportunity isn't very equal, but talent is. And yeah, we're grateful for the opportunity to be able to do direct placements. With you guys as opposed to most businesses which end up really doing a managed service model and taking a cut. We just want to be able to help these folks work directly with you so that they're fully aligned on growing with your company as you get much bigger. So appreciate you guys having us on, Daniel.

Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining us today. We'll be back with another super informative webinar next week. Check out our fi.co events page to stay updated. Have a great day, everyone.

Awesome. Thank you.

See you later. Thanks, everyone.