Host (NachoTuesday): Good morning, everyone, and welcome to another Nacho Tuesday! Today, I have Adam from Chore joining us. Without further ado, we'd love it if you could introduce your company and what you do.

Adam (Chore): Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me, NachoTuesday. So, Chore provides back-office services for startups. Essentially, what that means is we pair you with a fractional Chief of Staff to run all of your HR, compliance, finance, and equity work. These are all the key things that you, as a founder, need to do that take a huge amount of time but aren't your superpower or core competency – we handle that for you. The goal is that we will save you 20 to 40 hours a month, or almost 500 hours a year, so you can get back to doing what you do best, which is presumably building your company and hitting major milestones because time is precious. You pay us, we give you more time. Yep.

Host (NachoTuesday): Yeah, that's a good point. There's an old adage that goes, "Work on the business, not in the business," right? You often find founders who are doing a lot of the busy work but failing to actually work on the core business model, scaling, or selling their product or service, which is far more important than some of the other tasks that temporary workers could handle. It truly angers me, NachoTuesday, when I see that situation. I come across founders like that all the time. So, to give a quick background, I'm a four-time founder. I've also invested in over 200 companies, so I guess some people define that as a super angel at this point. But the companies I invest in, and of course, a huge number of other startups I encounter, often have founders who say, "Well, I need to do this because I need to learn how to run my business." And I think, what are you talking about? Like, literally, do you think Elon Musk cares at all about what payroll system Tesla is running on or why the state of California is calling them about some random HR issue? No, he does not care. He cares about getting the next big car or the next rocket out for SpaceX. Forgetting Elon's politics for a second, as an entrepreneur, he is someone who is laser-focused, and that laser focus enables him to do things that people have trouble even understanding and believing, but that really make a difference in the companies he's built.

Host (NachoTuesday): Yeah.

Adam: Um, that's what every founder should aspire to. Anything that distracts you from your core competency, from your superpower, is chipping away, essentially a tax on your success.

Host: Yeah, 100%. I see that too. And, you know, Elon, you know, and other great entrepreneurs really just, uh, kind of, they get really good at setting the foundation and creating the processes and, uh, putting the core fundamentals in place, but then you hire other people to do that, do the work, right? I mean, Elon's not a rocket scientist, right? So, not, he learned, he learned a lot about it, right? He got, he went deep in the weeds and said, "I'm going to really understand this and then ask questions from first principles."

Adam: Yeah.

Host: But I don't think he probably ever spent any time, he probably just said, "Here are the cultural values at SpaceX, um, I'm going to hire someone to run my HR department, and they can go build everything else. They can make the choices." I'm sure it was like, "Be frugal, find the best payroll provider, do all these things like the law requires you to have a 401k, get a 401k," etc., etc., etc. I doubt he read any books about HR stuff or compliance or even finance or equity. He just said he hired someone smart and said, "Get it done, don't bother me ever again." And that's what every founder should aspire to. To reiterate the point, aspire to be exactly like that. I mean, forget the, once again, the weird things about Elon, but aspire to be that way. Aspire to be the person who is absolutely utterly focused. Like, no VC gives you money and then says, "Oh man, I'm going to, I'm so excited you're so great at doing the back office like chores." Like we're Chore, that's the name of our company. Like, no VC is ever going to give you money for that. The VC gives you money because you grow, because your product is freaking amazing.

Host: Yeah, growth and product, that is it.

Adam: So, every moment you spend on any other distraction is time wasted, and you are just ticking down the days when you run out of cash, and you will never get more because VCs care about, a VC is not going to care if it takes you six months to 2x your company. You will get more money than if it takes you 12 to 18 months to 2x your company because you were cheap.

Host: Yeah, that's a penny-wise, dollar-foolish kind of emotion.

Adam: Foolish, exactly right. Yeah.

Host: And so, I guess what got you to this point to start Chore? I mean, I would imagine you, as a multi-time founder, uh, you probably realized a lot of these problems yourselves, uh, yourself, and you, you realized you wanted to help other companies avoid kind of the pitfalls that, you know, maybe you learned, uh, maybe during your first, uh, your first startup.

Adam: Yeah, no, that's exactly it. So, so, um, actually about almost five years ago at this point, I, I started doing essentially Chief of Staff work, work, um, almost like a fractional Chief Operating Officer almost for some companies. Um, and I realized that there was this big opportunity in the market. Like, people needed help desperately, and smart founders were coming to me and saying, "Hey, can you run this stuff for me? I don't want to do it. I don't enjoy it. You seem to be pretty good at it." I had, I had to learn it because I was the one having to run those in my other startups. Um, so started a company called Abstract Ops actually at the time to go do this. Um, in Abstract Ops, we tried to automate all the, all back-office work. Turns out, everything in back office is an edge case. So if everything's an edge case, for everyone listening to this, you probably have some technical abilities. Um, edge cases are really difficult to automate. If everything's an edge case, humans are really good at edge cases. It's actually a really good human skill, not a good computer skill. That might change with AI, but we'll see. Um, and so I said, like, let's, so we ended up splitting up the company to what became Chore. So, I Chore, the whole idea is like, we once again, we will pair fractional Chiefs of Staff who we've trained, who were formerly, of course, working at former startups, things like that. They already have a lot of skills, but we train them on even more because there's so much we do. Um, and their job is to come in, essentially be that team for you. Um, in our, and, and if we do it right, we are faster at the work, we are better at the work because we're learning across all of our customers, right? Instead of one company and one founder learning how to do this on their own, essentially reinventing the wheel, which, yeah, by definition, reinventing the wheel is insanity.

Host: Yeah, why would you go do that as a business when people have already figured this stuff out?

Adam: Exactly. And yet, I talk to founders, once again, all day long, they're like, "Oh, like I need to go like figure out like, is Rippling or Gusto the best payroll provider for me?" Like, what are you doing? You're going to go talk to some salesperson, yeah, at Gusto and at Rippling, and they're both going to tell you their software is amazing. Yep. And they're going to tell you how great they are, how wonderful they are, they're going to tell you some different price points that you won't fully understand, and then you got to make a decision, and then you got to go set it up. Um, why, why would you? I've seen this across almost 500 companies. We have all this learning, we build up best practices, SOPs, checklists for everything to do, how to do it, when to do it, why would you reinvent that? Like, founders are in the business of reinventing the world and coming up with new ideas that have never existed before, but the fact that you as a founder think you need to reinvent this yourself, back-office work, give me a break.

Host: Yeah, a lot of people just get so stuck in the weeds, you know, miss the, missed the, uh, they can't see the forest for the trees and really focus on the things that really matter.

Adam: Correct. And, and this is, this is the problem a lot of founders have too. Doing back-office admin chores makes you feel like an entrepreneur, like your bus, makes you feel like you're getting things done. It's like, it's like a little, it's like, like the TikTok version of work. Um, it's like little mini dopamine hits, flicking through your phone, like, "Oh, like I managed to get payroll to run today. I did some good work. I'm a good founder now. Congratulations to me, pat myself on the back." Um, no, like that, but you got nothing done. Like, it was, it was empty calories. Um, you did nothing real, and, and that's where you should be spending your time. If you think you are a world-class founder and you convince VCs to give you money because you believe you are a world-class founder, and they believe it, now then be a world-class founder, which means doing the things that you are the one person in the entire planet who is better at doing than anyone else. Only do that, fractionalize and arguably outsource everything else.

Host: Yeah, that's such a great point. What, I guess what got you into entrepreneurship? Like, when did you get the itch, and how did you know that you wanted to go on this path?

Adam: Yeah, I mean, look, I'm, I, this was, I've been doing this for 15 years. Uh, it, it, um, actually, I guess in a sense longer than that almost, but I, but it just was always interesting to me. I mean, I was like that guy reading Wired Magazine every, like every time it came out. Like, I, like I've had a subscription probably like longer than anyone else I know to man. Um, but I just, I loved it. The tech stuff was interesting, and it seemed obvious to me at the time, and this was 15 plus years ago, that this, the world was changing because of tech. Everything was becoming digital, and so if I could be a part of that, that is, that excited me, that interested me, that being, being at the center of those, those that work, being a player in the arena, right? I'm not some, I'm not the most famous person, I haven't made the biggest impact in the world, but I'm doing my small part, being in that energized me. So that's, that's what got me started with it.

Host: Yeah, it feels like there's, yeah, there's a lot of purpose to it, right? It's not just like fitting in as a cog in the wheel and just kind of going with it, it's, uh, you know, solving real problems, right? And that's, that's where a lot of people, including myself included, really get my kicks from.

Adam: Yeah, and look, we get to test ourselves. I, I get to test myself every day against the best people, the most competitive. Um, every day it's a struggle, right? We're having this conversation, I don't convince every founder to use us. I, I pained when I don't, but that means every day I got to keep improving. How do I improve my message? How do I help it spread the message that says to people, you can and you should outsource. A company that has more people internally, yeah, is a company that will fail. That is a completely different mindset for people because usually people like, "Oh, well, how big's your company?" And the size of your team is a proxy for your success. That is no longer the case. The size of your team is actually inversely correlated with your success. The efficiency of the team is what matters. Efficiency, if you can build a company that is, is 10 people and doing a billion in revenue, heck yeah, like you've done it, you figured it out, you figured out the secret. In that secret, that work still needs to be done. The work we do still needs to happen, but that doesn't need to be a full-time person that you manage. Like, give me a break. You're going to recruit, hire, recruit, sorry, recruit, hire, manage, and train someone for a role you don't know how to do. That's the blind leading the blind, number one. Um, and, and now it's another person to manage. Like, give me a break. I, we have a fairly large team ourselves. I'm not super proud of that. It's more people to manage. Management is time-consuming, it's slow, people get sick, people have life issues. That's part of, that's part of working with a team, and there's beauty in that in its own way too. But I don't, I don't want as a founder, if I can outsource something and just say to a vendor, "Your job is, you promise me you're going to get X done, and if you don't do X, I can fire you. I don't need to manage you, I don't need to pay you severance," what a win.

Host: Yeah. So tell us, tell us more about the fractional roles. What are the opportunities there, both for the, uh, fractional team members and also for the companies themselves?

Adam: Yeah, I mean, it goes to the point that I was just making. So, fractional, fractional hiring in general, um, is, uh, is the way to get the talent you need when you need it without any overhead. Yeah. So, on a per-hour basis, obviously outsourcing something is almost always going to cost a little bit more than a full-time hire, but that presumes something critical. It presumes that you actually have enough work for a full-time hire to be busy all the time, which is actually pretty rare. Like, it is pretty rare to have a full-time hire, like, you are always busy, have so much work you're going to be busy the whole time. If that's the case, God bless, hire someone internally, good for you. But largely, that's not the case. So, I'll give you an example. We're building lots of products ourselves, but we need different product managers for the different types of work we're doing. Yeah. Um, that means we actually have fractional PMs, we fractional product managers. They come in for a specific product that they know well, they build that for us, and then they go off. So yes, on an hourly basis, I'm paying them more, but I don't need them for 40 hours a week.

Host: Right.

Adam: Like, I don't need that for four years even. Yeah, for, for years and, and equity and all these other things, I don't need that. Um, and I don't have to manage them, I don't have to do one-on-ones, I don't have to go through the whole hiring process, just say, "Look, your job is to do this project, time."

Host: And for a lot of them, they probably like the flexibility too, right? So they can, they can come and build something really cool, then go on to the next project and, and so forth, or maybe, maybe they're working on two projects at the same, at the same time. I, a lot of people, even people who are full-time, probably are working on part-time jobs and work. Um, but great. So why don't I just embrace that world and just say, "Look, your job is to be as efficient." I mean, the best thing with, uh, when you hire fractional work externally, like if you hire Chore, we are incentivized to do our work at the highest quality level because I don't want you to fire us. You get rid of our contract. We're a 30-day month-to-month contract, you can fire us anytime, so we're incentivized to do a really good job always. We're also incentivized to be really efficient because if we're lying about the time that we're doing, if we're making it up, um, to try to show off that we're really busy, you're going to get wise at some point and say, "Whoa, wait a second, you guys are not honest, and I don't want to work with you.