Simplify Your Startup Operations for 2026 Success with Adam Spector

Hello everyone, I hope you're having an awesome day. My name is Daniel, I'm a part of the Founder Institute marketing team, and today we are here with a super exciting event, uh, which will be all about building your 2026 startup operations plan. This is oftentimes, especially when you're in the earliest stage of building your startup, that gets, uh, overlooked. And in reality, when you are actually building it, you realize that most of what you do is in one way or another operations. And today, the person we have here with us is a friend of FYI. He is a multiple times founder. He has raised a bunch of money and he's just someone with a ton of insight. And I'm really, really excited to have Adam here with us. And before I introduce Adam, let him take over the stage and give his presentation. I want to give a couple of things that everyone should remember. If you do have a question for Adam and I, please drop it in the chat here. I see that we already have a ton of people who have joined us from all across the world, so that's always super exciting. We always get a very international crowd at these events, and I think that's also pretty significant because then the interest to build really great startups is a pretty global phenomena. So anyways, if you do have questions, drop them in the chat. Adam will give his presentation and then I'll join Adam back on stage so that we can go through all your questions. Please do be mindful of not sharing a ton of external links, whether it's LinkedIn or a link to your own business or startup, because people are trying to engage with one another and people do want to try to get their questions in. Adam.

Thank you so much. Great to be here. So as mentioned, so a little bit about me and my background. I'm a 4-time founder. Let's see if this gets a little bit less fuzzy out. I'm a 4-time founder. I'm based in San Francisco, so I've been out here 15 years, founded 4 different companies, worked at a few different startups as well, including kind of a big startup, the performance artist formerly known as Twitter. Um, I worked there in product and, um, I've had the privilege of investing in over 200 startups as well. So I've been a pretty serious angel investor. I've also had a few different funds on top of that. So I've seen a lot of different things from that perspective. And then the final perspective that might be valuable, um, or last two, I guess, that are, that are valuable is one, I'm the host of a podcast called the Entrepreneurial Excellence Podcast. Uh, we focus on what mean— it means to be an excellent and amazing entrepreneur, uh, not just tech entrepreneur, but entrepreneur in general. Um, and then the final and maybe most important part of my day-to-day life is I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Chore, C-H-O-R-E, or you can find our domain at hirechore.com. And we do the chores. We do the stuff that you don't want to do, but is necessary to build a successful business. So what does that mean specifically? Well, my view is there are 3 key parts to any successful business. Part 1 is you have to have a great product, right? Simple, straightforward. Got to have a great product. Part 2, uh, you need to be able to sell that product. So convince people to hand you money for that product, or let's say your consumer app, hand you their time in exchange for your product. Um, and then number 3, you need to kind of run the company. You need to do the operations for the company. And to do those operations well requires either a lot of your time or figuring out how to outsource it and hand it off to experts. I'm very biased in the belief that every successful company hands off operations to others so they can focus on what they do best. And that's what we do at Shore. We essentially are a fractional chief of staff company to take this on. We're not going to talk about Shore during the presentation, but the presentation is focused on How to Make Sure You Set Up Your Operations for Success in the New Year, which is informed from Chor's work with over 500 companies at this point running their operations. And as a few of our customers independently have said, Chor is like a cheat code for your startup. So we'll talk deeply about that. But if there are questions throughout, I know we'll do lots of Q&A at the end. Happy to talk through growth, go-to-market, fundraising, co-founders. Employees, hiring, you name it, really any topic, I've probably seen it all. And I hope this is helpful for everybody. The world is a better place when there are more success— successful entrepreneurs. So I hope I can help you all get there. So let me share my screen. Here we go. And we'll share. This should work. Hopefully everyone can see that. There we go. I assume everyone can see it. Ping me if you cannot. So, you know, as I mentioned, right, you don't want to go into the new year fighting fires. You want to start the new year— imagine lots of people like to do a New Year's resolution. I kind of recommend— I don't love New Year's resolutions, but I sort of recommend that idea for people who also want to start their companies on the right foot. If you come into the new year with lots of baggage and debt and no clear plan for how you want to be better in the new year, you're not going to have a great 2026. You're just not going to— you're not starting the new year in the right way. And it's the same thing. It's individually, personally, or with your company is you want to get those things started the right way and come in with a clean, clear slate. Have all issues taken care of and get started, uh, in a fresh way. Um, otherwise things compound. And when things compound— compounding can be very powerful when it comes to investing. It kind of sucks when it comes to, uh, operations because you have taxes, compliance, filings, and those things start literally compounding because you will get more taxes and filings. And I will say, I know we have a global audience, which I love, My company is a fully global company, but this is mostly focused for US operations, although many of the key themes are relevant to anyone building a company anywhere in the world. So the real cost of operational disorder, um, is it's a hidden tax on your growth. Uh, if you're a founder like me, you probably end up having lots of mail sitting around your desk. I actually don't have any. I'm clean and ready to go for the year. Um, also it's because, uh, we have a virtual mailbox for my company, Chor, and we recommend this for all of our startups. Um, you get a virtual mailbox, don't have mail come to your house, apartment, whatever. Um, have it go to a virtual mailbox. One, because you just don't want to get the mail and it just piles up, right? It's not your highest priority to open business mail, but two, you don't want to sit there and be taking photos with your phone of the mail. Instead, you want to start, uh, taking that mail and having it be a PDF. So it's electronic. We live in— we're all digital here, right? We're on a digital webinar right now. We live in a digital world. So the idea that you have analog paper that you are taking photos of to make it digital and keep a record of is crazy, which of course means most people don't do it. And when you don't do it, it gets lost. You forget about things you need to take care of. Uh, and then once again, this tax starts kind of building up. Um, so I recommend everyone get a digital mailbox. And then when you have the digital mailbox, you also start getting good at organizing your files. Here's a simple fact. If you're spending 1 or 2 minutes every day looking for a file that you have trouble finding, right? Cuz you're like, oh, did I save it? Is it in my email inbox? Like Gmail? Is it in Google Drive? Uh, is it in my e-signature solution like DocuSign? You don't remember where that file is, but you need it for something, right? You gotta— how much am I paying this new person I just hired, right? What's their offer letter? Uh, how much did I make an offer to them for? If you're trying to find that information and you waste 1 or 2 minutes a day looking for it, that time across a whole year is close to 20 hours of lost time and lost productivity a year. And that's one small example. So that's my point of how these things compound. It might seem like a teeny tiny amount. In the moment in time, but long-term it starts compounding and becoming incredibly painful to you. And here's the secret truth that I've learned across all the startups I've worked on and invested in. The founders who are the most successful are the ones who are most focused, right? They're the most focused on getting the key things done that dramatically move the business forward in a fast way. What does that mean? Well, you as a founder, it means you are focused on using your core strength, your superpower to build the business. If you were spending your time figuring out where a document is located or how to run payroll, you are slowly dying as a business and you will fail. That is a core belief of mine. The most— so, so maybe give an example of this to make it super clear. We all know who Elon Musk is. Outside of his politics, I think we can probably all agree he's one of the world's best entrepreneurs. Um, do you think he has conversations with the head of HR at SpaceX or Tesla? Probably in general, my answer is probably no. He probably never talks to them. But do you think if they came into the room with Elon and said, hey Elon, I want you to help me choose between payroll system A or payroll system B, Elon would probably fire them. He's like, I'm trying to get to Mars and make humanity a multi-planet species. And you're asking me what payroll system we should use? I have no idea. I don't care. I need to build product. You have to have the same maniacal, maniacal, sorry, maniacal focus as a founder to be successful. That means anything operationally related that is not literally operations, like build your rocket, let's say, you should hand off. And get off your plate and set yourself up for success in the new year. Um, otherwise you will fail. So when you think through what it actually takes to get yourself ready for the end of the year, um, there's about 30 hours of work required, at least in 4 core critical areas. So HR, compliance, finance, and equity are kind of the 4 back office operational domains that you need to be good at. You need to have it like buttoned up, um, to make sure you're ready to go for the new year. And there's 35+ subtasks that we have in a list, and I'll show everybody the list at a high level, um, to make sure you're ready to go. Uh, to give you just one another example of this in equity, as an example, people don't think about this, but if you are behind the times in issuing equity to your team and, um, and then you get a new fundraising round, And you forgot to issue equity to the previous people, you will end up, uh, require— you will end up needing to have back— not backdating your backdate, but you're essentially gonna have to issue more equity to all these people who forgot to issue that equity to. So the fact you're out of date, essentially out of compliance, is going to cost you more equity and more money overall. Um, so it becomes very expensive. For you as a company. Um, so we'll go through some of those things. I said, I'll show you some of these pieces, what it looks like. Um, but the first area, as I mentioned, uh, is human resources. So literally things like your W-2 payroll. Um, you need to do end of year payroll right now. So there's basically 2 payroll runs left in the US this year. Most companies do it twice a month. Um, and so there's 2 payroll runs left, probably the 15th and like the 30th or so. I don't know if, let's see, looking at December, probably the 31st, we'll run on the 31st cuz it's a Wednesday this year. Um, and those are the last two payroll runs. You need to make sure everyone is paid out, W-2 is correct. You're going to do a payroll report. You're going to audit those different things. You're going to audit your PTO and other expenses. Have people taking their PTO? Do you have to pay out paid time off? Um, what documents are missing, right? Do you have all your key documents for next year? If you plan on doing a fundraise in Q1 or Q2, do you have critical documentation? Um, the last thing I'd want, and I've seen this happen, is someone is excited, there's VCs who are circling, want to put money in, and then you can't find key documentation that basically says you're, let's say, a real business in Delaware, like a Delaware-registered C-Corp. Uh, now your fundraise gets put on hold, then the markets change and now you can't raise.

Bummer.

Like, that's a real problem. Uh, why would you, why wouldn't you want to get ahead of that? Because I guarantee, here's the thing, if you're going to fundraise or you're going to get acquired, There will be an audit. They will do due diligence on all of your files and make sure you have that information. Um, you could be organized from the get-go. And as I mentioned, like that will just save you time no matter what, because you won't be searching for files you, you need. Um, and when you go do that fundraise, you'll have everything already. Your VCs will say, oh my God, you are an organized, fantastic company. This is the type of founder I wanna invest in cuz you're on top of things. Or you look bad and you might not be able to raise, as I mentioned, or you end up spending $20,000 on lawyers to go fix all this stuff up and you spend a week or two of your time finding every single file, rushing around while you're also trying to fundraise and keep your business going and keep the numbers going up and up and up. Um, so those are the sorts of things that are critical when it comes to documentation. Benefits, as I mentioned, you can do a 401(k) review. Make sure contributions are done. Um, open enrollment for healthcare might already be complete for most people, but you wanna make sure that is done. Um, and then maybe update employee handbook as well. Um, and make sure you're staying current on state compliance laws. Uh, there's 50 different states in the US and, and while it is generally easier to do business in the United States because it's sort of one big, um, marketplace, there are still 50 states with different laws. That you need to follow and pay attention to when it comes to taxes, uh, paying your team and things like that. So I'll pause there really briefly, by the way, just to see if there's questions specifically about HR that I can answer. Any that have come up? I can keep, I'll keep going and we can ask stuff at the end. So the next key area, uh, finance. So you, every company should have a bookkeeper. The moment you have raised money or have some money in the bank, you should make sure you know what your books look like. It is pretty cheap to get your books done nowadays. As an example, at Chor, we offer bookkeeping starting at, I think it's $249 a month. Um, and then if you're using some of the core Chor services, it's actually even lower than that. Um, but for $249, yes, that's an expense. And I know in a lot of places in the world, that's not zero by a long shot. Um, but you should know what your books look like. So as an example, for us as a business at Shore, I'm reviewing with our bookkeepers and our own bookkeeping team in this case. Um, what do our books look like? How are we going to end the year? Um, what does that mean for bonuses? What does that mean for where we will end up as a business? Uh, what does it mean with sort of investments we can complete next year? Those are the sort of key questions that we were trying to ask ourselves and figure out. Um, and so I'd make sure my books are done and taken care of. Um, it helps you understand and get yourself ready for tax preparation. So taxes in the US are, uh, due in April. And that means you need to be ready. You can get extended. And frankly, I recommend most people do extensions, but you still need to have an accountant help take care of that and make sure you know what sort of payments you still might need to make. Even if you extend, you have to do prepayments, um, and you start getting ready. Another big one that people overlook is you have to do 1099s. So for all the contractors, at least US-based contractors you've hired, will have to file a 1099. Um, it is time-consuming to do 1099s for all those people. Um, so I would, uh, be very thoughtful about getting that done. Your bookkeepers can sometimes do it for you, or there are different services out there that can help you. And then the final part that I'd make sure you have in place and ready to go is your accounts payable and accounts receivable system. Accounts payable, for those who don't know, means essentially you're paying your vendors on time. The worst thing in my mind to be is a vendor of a product. So Shore, we're a vendor of back office products and services, and we have people who vend to us and pay. Like we have lawyers we hire and other different people in groups and products. And I want to make sure we pay our vendors on time, mostly because I view it as bad karma if we don't, right? If we don't pay our vendors on time, how can I expect our customers to pay us on time? Um, which then leads to the next part, accounts receivable. So accounts receivable, AR, is making sure you get paid. Um, you'd be shocked by how many companies are really bad at this. They're moving so fast, they're selling contracts, they're, they're, they're getting tons of new customers. It's awesome. But then they end up having major issues because they are unable to actually collect. They forget to send out the invoices, they forget to collect, and then they have to go 6 months later, oh my God, I forgot to, you know, 6 months later you're having a bit of a trouble with the client. They're a little bit customer, they're a little bit unhappy. Maybe things aren't going as well as you had hoped and you just realized you forgot to bill them. And now you can send them a note, be like, hey, so like forgot to send this out to you. Doesn't make us look good as a business either, because, you know, if we're unable to manage— remember, like, get paid— can you really trust their product? But hey, we, we need to get paid. Sorry, things aren't going well, but like contractually you owe this to us. And then what? Like, that is a— that is not a good place to be. I would not be in that position. Um, by the way, we have customers— we actually have a recent customer like this. Luckily their product's great, so their customers are super happy. but we've uncovered for them hundreds of thousands of dollars of unpaid customer invoices. Think about that again. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of unpaid invoices. They're moving really quickly. They have plenty of cash in the bank, so this isn't going to make or break them, thankfully, but that is a huge loss. That's just cash that they should have collected. They could have been earning interest on and they never had it. So I would just make sure financials are in excellent shape. It's relatively low cost to do this the right way. And if you don't do it the right way, you will once again really, really screw yourself in 2026. If you plan on fundraising or growing in any way, you need to make sure your finances are in order. The last sort of side note that I would mention for people on finance is find yourself a bank account. Um, for all the US-based companies, there's lots of bank accounts, um, that offer high-yield interest, high yield in the checking. So you should be getting 3.5% or more. In your checking account, which by the way, like if you have $1 million in a bank account at 3.5%, that's $35,000 free money. Um, so make sure you have a good bank account and you're not just letting it sit in a 0% interest account. Any questions about finance before I move on? Alrighty. So. Uh, we already talked about this, so probably go through this somewhat fast, but the mail pile, right? Compliance just builds up. Um, why would you do this to yourself? Why do you want to be opening mail at, you know, 9:00 PM on a Friday night when you either should be spending time with your family or figuring out the next big strategic, strategic shift for your company to grow? Um, don't do it. Get a virtual mailbox, as I mentioned. Organize your files. We do this for all of our customers. We actually have an automated system that does the full classification and building of that sort of, uh, file vault or, um, uh, diligence folder for people. But you don't want to be in this position. I wouldn't do it. Um, you don't want to have fines that are outstanding. Those can actually, once again, literally hurt your ability to sell or, um, get funding. So don't do it. Cap table. There's a ton of things here that are important. But if you're giving equity to your team, you want to make sure you've audited all of your existing equity, right? So that means reviewing all issued stock options, SAFEs, everything else. Make sure you don't have discrepancies. If you have money, if you have equity you've promised to issue, issue it. Get it out of the way before you do your next 409A. Make sure your cap table actually reflects reality. Is it accurate? Is it real? Is it realistic? Do people on the team have the equity they need? As I mentioned, file those board grants and option grants. Your team earned it, number one, and two, you just don't want that stuff outstanding because you can run into major issues as you grow. And then file key forms such as Form 3921, um, in properly disclosing anyone who owns over 5%. Um, and then finally figure out who's managing or owning equity in the new year. Who's taking care of this for you? Is it you? Is that a good use of your time? Should you be spending time on it? I once again, uh, would not. Any questions about equity? Okay. Um, so once again, this all compounds, right? The, the, you know, one contract missed, it's a small inconvenience. And I made this mistake myself too. My email got way buried. I wasn't doing a good job with my email. A customer wanted to get started with us. I missed it for 2 weeks. Now they're probably delayed at least 30 days and maybe they're not going to move forward with us. My fault. I— it pains me to this day. When that happens. And that's my own fault. And I need to be way more organized. And luckily, I'm doing a lot to make sure this year I'm in that way. When you have slippage occurs, my trigger state finds payroll hiccups. Gosh, like, if you're asking your team to work crazy hours to build out this new product, and then payroll doesn't run, and they can't afford to get food for their family the next day or week, That's a real problem too. Um, or other issues. So another issue that we found for just ourselves, as an example, we used, or used now, I guess past tense, a special service to pay out our team overseas, which was faster and lower cost for the team. So we were helping them have more take-home pay. Um, but we started to be worried about the viability of the company we were doing it through. And so we had to make a switch last week to a more stable company that costs more money. Um, and the, uh, that was thankfully our team taking care of it and we didn't have any hiccups. So people had a little bit less take-home, but we didn't lose a lot, a lot of money with a company that maybe wasn't going to stick around. Um, and then once I mentioned, like, you need to make sure your books are in shape, clean financials and everything else. So momentum doesn't stop once you start really wanting to move fast. So action plan, don't wait until the end of the year. December tends to be a little bit slower, especially like as we get closer to Christmas and New Year's. Use that time to just tackle all the tasks to get this done and like make sure you're set up for success. Like if there's one thing I can really just say, get it done. Um, drop me a note if you have questions, happy to answer high-level basic questions, obviously happy to help out as well at Chor. This is literally what we do every day. I personally don't think any founder should become an expert at back office work unless it's your core competency and what you do, which is like our whole thesis as a company. Um, and so just hire experts, outsource it. Yes, we cost a little bit more than hiring a full-time person, but the value of hiring an expert is so much lower than the cost of your time. It makes so much sense to do it. And this is with everything, right? It's not just back office. It's like hire an expert engineer instead of a full-time person. They'll be faster and better. And if they don't get it done, you can fire them without any severance or worries. Same thing with marketing. Like there's so many things you outsource to other people. Why would you build back office stuff yourself in-house? It makes no sense to me. Make sure you're building systems as well. Build sustainable processes now so that you will— your future you can move fast and run quickly when the opportunity arises. So kind of end this and then I'll share the actual checklist we use and you guys can see that real briefly, but, um, tackle the checklist now, think through all the key things you need to get done to have that solid foundation around HR, finance, compliance, and equity. Get it done, take care of it and make sure you are set up for success because guess what? Competition is moving so much faster nowadays. Customers are impatient, as they should be. They have high expectations and you don't have forever runway. So if you think you are saving yourself money because you're being cheap about how you do operations work and doing it all yourself or ignoring it, frankly, you are making a terrible CEO trade-off decision that will absolutely fail you in the long term. So get your operations in order. so you can soar to sort of that, that money moon in a sense. Um, and here's, here's our, our end of the year checklist at a high level. Um, we track everything. We run this whole thing for our customers, but, you know, here's an example of, uh, you know, W-2 payroll tasks that we do. And there's detailed answers and discussions about each one of these that we have for our own team about what to do. Um, 401(k), there's a ton of stuff related to 401(k)s, uh, to do. As well. And so there's sort of nonstop items in here that need to be reviewed. Finance, as I mentioned, I mean, there's like, you know, 1099s, there's like these are subtasks, right? And it's a lot of work to do this. We run through this entire checklist for every single one of our customers. Equity as well. And you kind of keep going through all these, these pieces as well. So Um, that is the high level. What questions can I answer? Come back to this, um, and maybe I stop my screen share, answer questions.

Awesome, thank you so much, uh, Adam, for the super great presentation and especially for that checklist. I know we have a ton of people here who are probably taking notes, uh, but folks, you don't have to because we will be sending over a recording in the next 48 hours. and we have a ton of questions, Adam, um, and a ton of variety as well. We have everything from like equity to actual operations. So let's kick things off here first, right? You've been a builder for a while, uh, you know, now you're helping startups get their, uh, operations in order. So my first question to you is, when you were building, right, what were those early operational mistakes that you were making that maybe you shouldn't have going into 2026? Uh, I know you did touch upon a couple of things. Maybe if you'd like to zoom in on that a little bit.

I mean, I think some of the biggest ones is just wasting time, um, in the wrong places. And so what I mean by that basically is you don't want to waste time overthinking things like payroll. Who, you know, it pains me when a founder tells me, hey, I'm gonna go in and try to figure out what payroll system I should use. And they're like, well, I'm looking at Deal, Rippling, Gusto. And I'm like, how are you going to choose? You have, you know, you're some AI expert. Let's pretend you're an AI expert as a founder. And now you're going to tell me that you, you're going to go talk to a salesperson at each one of those companies. So that's at least 30 minutes of your time. There's an hour and a half for 3 companies wasted. Then you're going to evaluate those and you're going to negotiate for a discount. On top of it. So now it's probably another hour on evaluation plus trying to negotiate for a discount. You're 2.5 hours plus in, um, and then you're going to try to make the best decision and you have no idea what you're doing. You've never run payroll in your life, right? You came from some big company, let's say, and you never had payroll to deal with and you're like, I need to go build my AI product, but now I'm trying to figure out payroll. Like, give me a break. And then on top of it, you now need to go get it set up. You need to actually set up the payroll system and run it. And so I don't know, you're probably talking a full day of time you've lost. You can never get that time back. That is what the founders don't understand. You're never going to get that time back. So how could you have just said, you know what, I don't care. I read, I did an AI analysis, asked AI to analyze the best payroll system for me and my situation. I asked it to find the best deal. I clicked go and I set it up. Now I still, as you know, I think people should outsource all that work and have someone else set it up as well. But if you wanna do it yourself, just try to do it fast. Do not agonize over it. Do not think about, overthink it, just move quickly. Startup success is predicated largely on the speed at which you can achieve things. And if you're wasting time on all these back office tasks, it is going to make you fail. So that's, that's my probably biggest bit of advice.

And this is something that we say at Epi as well. Um, one of the biggest advantages that you have over your competitors, especially the really big ones as a startup, is the speed at which you actually execute, right? So like Adam said, if you're spending like too much time in your operations overthinking things, like you're losing out on that advantage. So yeah, I thought that was great. So Adam, we have a lot of questions here to go through. So I wanna start off with this one that came in from Amir Khan from Uzbekistan. He asked, how do you prioritize which tasks are more important for a startup?

Great question. The prioritization, I would, I would look at what is required maybe to start with, right? So things that are required, you have to do 1099s for everyone, all of your US contractors. You're going to have to file those no matter what. You need to get those done. They need those for their own taxes. That is due, I think, like, let's call it like the 7th or 10th within the first like week or two. Of the new year. So you should be very focused on, on that. Make sure that's done. Find a service to do it if you need to. The problem for a lot of people is, let's say you've paid a contractor. Let's say I'm your contractor. You paid me partially via your bank account and then partially via your payroll system. I need a 1099 that covers all payments through the entire year, right? It's not just depending on what system, it's for the entire year. So now I need to do some math. I need to go figure out, well, how much did I pay Adam in my bank and how much did I pay him in my payroll system? And then what is the total for the year? And that is what the 1099 filing is going to be about. And so that is where I would, uh, that takes time. And so I would deal with that first. So 1099 is a big one. The other ones are just making sure systems are in place. I would clean up my documents. Like it's not going to be your most fun task to invest a little bit of time cleaning up your documents and getting everything in a folder that's searchable with the right names and everything else. I spend a little bit of time doing that. It's one of those things where people— we all put off making those investments, right? It's sort of— I look at it sort of like working out. People don't like to work out all the time. Like, oh, it's tiring. I don't want to put 5 or 10 minutes. I don't have 10 minutes to do a workout, 15 minutes to work out, whatever it is. And yet it makes you feel better over time and healthier, and you'll have a longer, healthier life. And frankly, it'd be better for your team if you're in good shape, right? And you're feeling healthy. It's the same thing with your business. So I get my documents in order, right? If your documents are a mess, once again, all that time you're going to waste looking for files, trying to find things. Why would you do that to yourself? So yeah, make the investment upfront in cleaning that stuff up. And then I go from there. I'd make sure your books are in order. Finance is relatively easy. Hire a bookkeeper. Just say, I need help. I wouldn't spend a lot of time overthinking it either. Just find a bookkeeper who's not crazy overpriced. Once again, we do this ourselves. Happy to offer it to you guys, but like, in the end, just find a bookkeeper, get it done. Make sure you understand what your finances look like. I've seen a company where they thought they had a bookkeeper. Bookkeeper wasn't doing any work for them. Um, next thing they knew, they ran out, like literally they had to shut the company. There were 30 people at the company. Turns out they were broke. They had no idea. Company shut down a day later. Yeah, you don't want that to happen. They had a successful business too, and they just were poorly planned and not paying close enough attention to their finances. So one of those small, simple things— I check my finances for Chor probably once a week, if not a little bit less than that. But like, I have another teammate who oversees it a little bit more now for us. Um, but we track it pretty frequently. I look at our bank account at least once a week and know exactly how much cash we have on, on hand and what that looks like for us. So yeah, those are some of the high-level things.

And Adam, you mentioned, uh, you mentioned AI a couple of times while you were, uh, you know, talking about operations. I think because you have so many AI tools available, right? Uh, there's this perception that, oh, you can get a lot of your operations done with AI, but I think the reality is that you really can't. So Adam, maybe if you could explain what are those things that you can actually do with AI and then what are a couple of things that you definitely need to focus more on and you probably need to do it yourself or get someone to do it for you.

Totally. Great question. So I'll use maybe two analogies to answer the question. The first one is how many people here have used an AI to go shopping for them and purchase something this holiday season? You know, my guess is no one. Um, you maybe have tried and it probably broke. So if AI can't shop for you to purchase, I don't know, name, name, whatever small simple thing that you want to purchase it for you, and it can't do that for you, can AI run your operations? Like, give me a break. Like, it's a joke when people say that to me. I think it's hilarious. Like, oh, AI's gonna do it. It's gonna be automated. It's easy. It's not easy. It can't be automated. I spent $10 million of VC money trying to build an automated system to do back office work previously. This was before AI. Admittedly, but, um, it's not there yet. Like, it, it essentially doesn't— it basically cannot shop for you. So if you think it's going to be able to call up the state of California, have a conversation with some person in California about why California thinks you owe them $10,000, but in reality you don't, good luck. I wish you a ton of luck. Let me know when you build the system and we will, we will purchase the system from you. We'll be your first customer. I will raise my hand and buy it from you. It doesn't exist. We look at this all the time. I'm looking forward to a day when AI can do a lot of this and it slowly is chipping away, right? We're using AI more and more. So we have an AI, um, basically like AI copilot for operations that we built at Shore. Super smart. It's called Ollie. There's more on our website about it. Um, and it automates a lot of things. It takes care of a lot of the knowledge piece about operations. AI does a great job with the knowledge. The problem with operations, it's not just knowledge, it's knowledge plus action. And so you need to be able to take that, take that knowledge and then take action with that knowledge. And that's really where the challenge lies. And you need today, you simply need people to take that action. It can be you as a founder, if you think that is a good use for your time, or you can outsource it to someone else. Um, but either way it needs to get done. So that's sort of analogy number one. Analogy number two is, um, How many of you are building your own servers in your garage right now versus how many of you are using AWS or GCS? Right. I assume everyone's using AWS or something like it. Cause why the heck would you ever build a server in your garage anymore? That's been solved. Why do you think you need to become a server expert and figure out how to do this? Yeah. Maybe, maybe if you know how to use a server 100% of the time and maybe that's your company. Sure. Everyone else. You don't even think about it. It's just abstracted away by AWS. So why would you spend time trying to do it? Like, yeah, you pay AWS a fee. It's probably a little bit more expensive than if you built your own server that you're utilizing 100% of the time, but they're so much better at it. They have all, they know all the security things. They can take care of it for you. Like just, just don't do it. Um, so hopefully that answers the question a little bit about AI and building.

Yeah. And I think with generally with operations, there's also like some level of friction, especially when you're dealing with people. Right. And I think like, I don't know if AI can handle that yet. Right. So I think that's something that everyone needs to be mindful of as well.

Yeah. I mean, you're still, we're dealing with, we're dealing with like literally states. Has anyone looked at a state website or your government, whatever country you live in, your government's website? How up to date are those websites? How long do you have to sit on hold to try to talk to someone who's using some antiquated system? I wish it was better. I wish our governments were way more efficient and effective, but they simply aren't. And so if you think AI is going to navigate that, you are, once again, I'll be the first one to sign up for the product that solves it. Please let me know.

Yeah, I'll be the second. But we did have Odey ask whether the things that you're talking about, they're whether or not you can apply them across the world. I think, Ade, to answer your question, you can. There's things related to compliance and laws that are more specific to the US because Shore is based out of the US, but I think like the principles of what Adam is talking about, they're pretty universal. Anyways, so moving on, we have a really great question here from Tishana. Tishana asks, how do you know when to flip from do-it-yourself to hiring people to get a system, right? I think there are like two layers here.

Yeah, great question. Look, first and foremost, you should have a system almost from day one. So any task you're doing on a regular basis, you should be writing it down and building out the checklist for how to do it. So as you saw, I showed we, we have checklists for everything at Shore. We have detailed checklists for how to do essentially every single task that we do. Not all of them, we're trying to get better at doing it for all of them, but all the major ones. Um, cause we built it, we've seen it over 500 different companies. We've probably seen 98% of the things that every startup's gonna see all the time. We've almost certainly seen it. So I build checklists from day one, record it. How do I do this? What are the steps? How do I run payroll? It might not be the right way that you're running payroll, but it might be good enough. And so you can hand it off to someone at some point. Um, I tend to think once a company hits some level of product market fit, which has a different definition all the time, but like, let's pretend you hit some version of product market fit, PMF. Is when you should start handing things off. You as a founder, once again, why did you decide to bet on yourself to build your company? Hopefully because you're one of the world's best at that work. And so if you decided to bet on yourself to get X, Y, or Z product into the market, the moment you can hand off some of this work to others, the better. Um, I'll give you an example of this as well. I met a founder. This is probably 6 to 12 months ago, who— he worked at McKinsey. He was a former, like, senior, senior person at McKinsey. So really smart guy, one of the best consulting firms in the world. He'd been working on a startup for 6 years. He finally felt like he was ready to do a Series A, and he wanted my advice on that. And one of the funny things he told me is like, I was like, well, how are you? Who's taking care of all your back office? We had a conversation about back office work, understandably. And he said, oh, I've been, I've been doing all my own books myself the whole time. And I literally, I was like, why? What are, what are you doing for yourself? It took you 6 years to get to a point you think you're ready for Series A. You will never get funding. Like, I didn't say it quite like that to him, cause I was trying to be nice, but the truth is he will never get funding. I would never fund a company that took them 6 years to get to a Series A. And that founder who thought he was being so frugal and smart by saving $250 a month doing bookkeeping himself, he's like, well, it didn't take me that long every month.

Okay.

It took you an hour a month. I don't care how long it took you to do it. You weren't spending it building your product. It took you 6 years to get your product to market and get to a Series A milestone. That's a joke. You are, you are not a successful, fast-moving founder if you think that is the right way to go. Um, if he thinks his time is worth— I don't care where you live in the world, you should view your time as being worth $1,000 to $2,000 an hour, right? It doesn't matter if you can charge that money for at that time, you should use that as the heuristic or requirement to decide whether you're gonna do the work. So every task that comes up, you should say, is this worth $2,000 to do this work? If the answer is no, then hand it off to someone else. Basically, the only thing that should be a yes are things like, I can't outsource doing this webinar to my team and I shouldn't. There should be something that me as the founder should be doing this type of stuff. This is what we do as a company. So I should be doing this. This is a really good use of my time. However, there's a million things that are happening right now in my company that I'm not doing because other people are better at them than I am, and it's not worth my time to do those. So I use that number to focus where I'm going to do that work. And so, um, and by the way, I got that number from Naval Ravikant, for those who don't know, probably one of the best kind of investors and founders in the world. Um, he uses that same requirement. If it's not worth $2,000 an hour to him, he I'm just going to say no and not do it. Just end of story. Not interested, not going to focus on it. So, um, that would be my goal for you is I would just say, focus deeply on what is the areas you can make the biggest, greatest impact because it is related to your core competency and skillset. Everything else, either delegate it or ignore it. Of course, if you ignore it, it's at your own peril because at some point back office stuff is going to come up and bite you.

Awesome. Okay, so we have a kind of a more specific question right here from Annie, and they're a first-time founder. They'll be focusing on raising their pre-seed in the coming year. They have a team of 3, they have a CMO and a CTO. What are some operational tasks that they should delegate away so that they can spend spend all their time on fundraising so that they can, you know, hit their next milestone?

Yeah, I mean, sort of the key ones are bookkeeping would probably be the number one. Once you get at least a little bit of money in the bank, get a bookkeeper, have that taken care of. It starts like $250, maybe you can get it a little bit lower, but like $250 a month in the US for bookkeeping. You certainly, certainly should never be your own lawyer. Although I also don't think people get all excited like, oh, I have some big name law firm, right? Wilson Sonsini or Cooley or something as my lawyer. I'm like, oh my God, I'm gonna roll my eyes. Like, who cares? Like literally they're going to just charge you $500 to $1,000 an hour for their time for the same sort of basic work that they can do for everybody else. I wouldn't even ponder that. So you get a lawyer, you should have a lawyer in place, find a low cost lawyer, or just get your main documents in order. Like there's, there's tools like Clerky, or Stripe Atlas that can help you get started pretty easily. Start with those and get some templates that I think either Kuli or Auric has like a good list of templates that they prebuilt, pre-vetted that are really good. Use those. I'd go sign up for something like Puli, maybe Carta, but probably Puli as an equity tool. Fidelity is also really good. I think they're— when you're really small, they're basically free. Just so you can organize your equity from day one. Um, and then I'd find a payroll system there. I mean, I think like I'm gonna get these numbers wrong, but I mean, there's something like $50 a month and like $6 per person per month as well. So if you have 3 people, you're $18, you know, $70 or so a month and you can manage payroll. Everything's being tracked properly from day one. You start, start on January 1st, have it all tracked properly. Why not? And these costs add up. But once again, to reiterate this point that I keep making, hopefully, um, the cost of a bookkeeper plus a good payroll system plus a good equity system, you know, you're probably talking $500 a month or less. And yeah, that's not zero. And like, that's real money, but the cost of not doing this stuff well is actually far greater than the base dollar cost you're paying out to have these tools in place. From the start.

And because we had any, they have a team already, right? But we do have a ton of founders who are right at the start of their journey and they're thinking about building out their teams. Adam, as someone who has built out startups and someone who lives and breathes operations, what are some key hires that a founder should be thinking about, especially in year 1?

So this answer is changing over time, given AI actually, in how we're moving into a world where you can be— well, AI plus just virtual and how everyone can be more and more effective and efficient. So back in the day, people used to say, well, I need to hire a chief of staff and an HR person and all this other stuff. No, you don't need to hire any of that today. I would literally only hire core people who just get the job done for you as a business overall. So I would say, okay, well, if my skill set is in sales, you go to market, let's say that I need a co-founder who's great at the engineering side and can own that, like, and I can really trust that person to build out the engineering piece and hire the right people, grow the team, understand the product. And I would just focus on that. So an example is people talk more and more and actually examples like this exist already of companies that are going to be worth $1 billion and have like one employee. We're not quite there with one employee, but we're pretty close, right? If you think about some of the ventures the Kardashians have done, I think like Skims and companies like that, I think there are literally like 10 people total at the company. At Skims, you essentially have an amazing marketer and like a Kardashian, right? They have hundreds of millions of people following them on social media. They can market it all day long and then they outsource everything else. Manufacturing is outsourced. Marketing is outsourced. Um, shipping is outsourced. Every other piece is outsourced. That is the company of the future. You should literally only hire people who you need for specific things at a specific time point. Another example I'll give you from our own selves. Um, so we don't have product people at Shore. Uh, in fact, we don't even have engineers at Shore. Um, everything is outsourced on that front. So, uh, Like we built lots of product. We hire product people for specific tasks at specific time points for specific deliverables. If they don't hit those deliverables, we don't pay their contract out. Understandably, they're in agreement with that. Um, and of course they do, we pay them and they get it done. Now, yes, the per hour rate we are paying them is more than if we had paid them full-time. However, I don't need them full-time and I want to get a different product person for different products. Because not every product person is going to be great at building every product. Same thing with engineering. We have different engineering teams who are helping build out the AI products we have. I mean, the dashboard that we have in those different pieces, because they all have different skill sets and they're good at different things. And once again, if they don't get it done, that's on them. Or if they're having HR issues because their team's getting sick or the people they hired aren't working out, well, not my problem. I don't care. They are contracted to get it done. So that founder then in the end has to figure out how to get it done, even if they have to fire the whole team and still work all the time to get it done for me. By the way, same thing for us, for our clients, right? If our people aren't working out, that work in the end comes back up to me at some point. I will go do all the operations for our customers to make sure they are taken care of because that is our promise to them. Our promise is we have great systems in place. We hire great people and we are always there to get it done for you to own the whole back office work. and if we don't, then once again, we lose that customer. They can fire us. Our contracts are month to month. Um, and so long-winded way of saying, I would not hire full-time people at all if you can help yourself. Just, just like, just don't do it. Hire only people who are utterly critical, who you know are gonna be 100% focused and use 100% of their time. Building things that are utterly critical for your business. Outsource everything else until you are 100% sure you need that full-time person. And maybe not even at 100%, 150% sure you need that full-time person.

And just the last bit on hiring, uh, there's always this option to hire somebody overseas, especially if you're based out of the US or Canada or even Europe, right? So how would you kind of evaluate that decision, right? Because obviously there's a disadvantage of somebody who understands your business from the US perspective, right? And at the same time, there's also the advantage of having someone for like a fraction of the cost somewhere else, right?

So totally. I mean, so, so the short answer is I would still hire a company that can do this stuff well for low cost. So the whole thesis of Tore, we have people all over the world. We essentially amortize the cost of people all over the world to offer what we do for a very, very low price. Um, so we already do that. Basically, I would not, as a founder, attempt to figure out if I can hire some random operations person in some random location. It's the same as trying to choose, uh, the right payroll system. How are you qualified to hire those people? I mean, I can tell you from doing this myself, it's really hard to hire operations people. Um, but the same thing goes for engineers or salespeople or you name it. It's really hard to hire well. So I would only— I would just rather hire an organization that once again, they charge, sure, there's overhead, you're paying for all these other things, but their job is to get great people. I wouldn't go to Upwork and try to hire some people there. I would just hire— literally some company says, hey, I can run your operations for you. Okay, what is your— what are your contract terms? What does success look like? And if you don't get it done, I'm going to fire you. Awesome. A company should hopefully say, yep, I'm super into that. No problem. We'll do a great job. Um, so that's what I would do every single time for all these tasks. Hire a firm, they claim success, awesome. If they don't get it done, fire them. End of story.

Okay. So we had this question here from Molly and Molly asks, how early is it? So sorry, how early is too early to start outsourcing?

Uh, I mean, literally I would start almost on day one. You know, if you have a company and you want to put a website up, I wouldn't build it myself. I mean, maybe it's really easy to build a website nowadays, so maybe you would. But like, if I can find someone, in that case I might go to Upwork or something. I can find someone for $250 or $500 to go build me a basic website that's going to look decent. I can give them my high-level requirements using AI. I know they can do it quickly and they'll put something together quickly for me. That $500 that I'd spent on them putting a website up for me that looks decent and they can mess with it and make it look great, hopefully. That's, that's an extra 3 or 4 hours of my time probably that I would have spent figuring out myself. I would have had to like, what's the right tool? What are the best website building tools? I don't, I don't know right now. I have to go research what are the best website building tools? What are all the best, like, how do I go? Then I have to figure out how to use these tools and I might never need to use it again. So I would literally start outsourcing on day one. Um, and yes, once again, these things cost money, but the, the key driver of success, right? We're all founders here on this call. If you haven't noticed that the only companies getting funded today are growing at like 1,000% a year, then you are blind. Those companies growing at 1,000% a year because they're freaking amazing at what they do. Their product is something that everyone wants to have, and they're great at it. So if you weren't spending all of your time doing that and you're trying to fiddle around with like build a website on the cheap, and you're not willing to spend $500 to get that done, once again, you're already in failure mode and you just don't know it.

Okay, so taking the discussion from, uh, operations to equity, because you talked about, uh, the maintaining your cap table. So we had a ton of people ask questions are related to equity. So to kick things off, right, if you are an early stage startup, should you be offering equity as, you know, as a part of your hiring plan, right? And then we have a couple of other questions related to equity that we'll kind of get into one after another.

So yes, I'm a big believer in offering equity to everybody. I think it's important for people to feel like they're bought into the business and the high-level long-term success of what you're doing. And if you crush it, and do fantastic as a company, what a win to feel like you made some of your teammates millionaires. Okay, you gave away some of it, so maybe that's some money that you could have had in your pocket, but you might not have been successful without those people. So like, I would be generous, um, number one. Number two, you have to remember most people are on at least a 4-year vesting schedule. Um, that's 4 years. If that person is still with you in 4 years, then you'll be ecstatic for the equity they have. And if they're not with you in 4 years, then okay, who cares? Then so what? You gave away a lot less equity than you initially thought. Um, what I do recommend, however, is anyone who has over, um, let's call it 5%, it's sort of 1 to 5% in that range, you start putting on multi-year, uh, or sort of two different vesting schedules. So if someone's a co-founder, as an example, I actually recommend that they have a three-vest or three-grant schedule. So I'll try to explain quickly what I mean. Um, normally people have a 1-year cliff with a 4-year vesting schedule. The problem is if it's a co-founder and let's say they have 50% of the company, um, that means they're vesting a lot of company every single year. And the truth is like a lot of co-founders don't work out for the whole time at a company. They hopefully do, but they, they don't always. Um, when that happens and you have someone who isn't working out as a co-founder, but they own so much of the company, they essentially have a rifle gun pointed at you. And so when you go to do the next fundraise, they can essentially force you to pay them a bunch of money, uh, to get them out. That sucks. And that is a huge cost overhang for you as a business. Um, so instead what I recommend is you give them 3 grants and same for you. You should do the same thing for yourself as a founder. So what that looks like is, uh, you have 3 grants, divide them up by 3 equally. So So, you know, 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. Each grant has a 4-year vesting schedule, but they start a year apart. So grant 1 starts day 1 with a 1-year cliff, standard, and it's 4 years. Grant 2 starts the first day of date of year 2, and that's the next 1/3. It starts vesting right away. There's no cliff or anything else. So each month you vest, uh, uh, 140 ETH. Of that new grant. Um, and then year 3, the beginning of year 3, your third grant starts. So by year 3, all 3 of your grants are all vesting. So you have a nice standard distribution curve. And by year 3, all 3 of your grants are vesting. And by year 3, your company's either crushing it and taking off, and you know you have an amazing co-founder, or at that point you'll figure out you don't, and you can then, you can get rid of that co-founder without having a massive equity overhang. So for anyone who has a significant portion of equity, especially in the early days, I would put them on either a 3-year grant once again for a co-founder or 2 grants or sorry, 2 grants, not a 3-year grant, 4-year grant, but like 3 grants or 2 grants for, uh, someone who's just sort of part of the founding team between 1 to 10%. So I know that was kind of quick, but hopefully that was clear.

Okay. So, uh, we have so many more questions to get to, but, uh, unfortunately we are very close to the hour mark. So Adam, just the final question here, and it's about equity. How do you determine how much equity to offer when you're hiring super early on, right? Like, what's that split between like more salary, more equity, especially when you don't have like a ton of resources?

Yeah, I mean, look, equity, equity can be in place of cash, clearly, it sort of uses cash in a sense. I would be fairly generous, But of course it depends on the role, the person, what level of seniority they're at, how much you expect them to do, right? Are you going to have to be overseeing them all the time? Are they going to be able to run things on their own? Are they in charge of all the work on their own? Um, and that's, so that's what I would look at a lot. What is their seniority level? Um, how much can they do without my oversight? Uh, and then decide. And in the early days, like I would assume everybody is like the first, at least 5 hires, maybe even first 10 are part of that founding team for you and be pretty generous with equity given their role. Overall, right? And so probably between 1 to 3% for most of those people early on. And once again, they're on a 4 to 5-year sort of double grant in many cases. And if they crush it, you'll be ecstatic.

Awesome. Adam, thank you so much for taking out the time to do this. Clearly from the number of questions that we have, people loved it. A ton of great questions, a lot of really great engagement. We have, you know, a ton of people giving you props as well for your insight. So yeah, thank you so much for doing this. Folks, if you do want to attend another Founder Institute event, head over to fi.co/events. We have another really cool event coming up on the 10th, our Founder Showcase, where you'll get to hear Jenny Fielding gave her keynote and some pitches from really great startups from the Founder Institute network. Yeah, that is all there is for us today. Do stick around for the networking. Adam, thank you so much for taking out the time to do this. Any final words before we close things out here?

No, thank you so much for the time. I hope every founder sees success. That's why we, that's why I do what I do. It's why we do what we do at Shore. In general is I want everyone to be successful. So please just be thoughtful about how you spend your time. It is the most precious resource you have, so use it to go build something that is going to change the world and outsourcing— either outsource or ignore at your peril the rest. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there, but you can also listen to my podcast Entrepreneurial Excellence. And then if I can be specific help with operations overall, feel free to drop me a note at Adam@HireChore. And just let me know where you heard of me so my EA doesn't just archive the message and things like that. So thank you all so much. Have a fantastic day, have a successful end of the year, and I hope you go crush 2026.

Awesome. Have a great day, everyone.