Adam S.

Chore

Chore exists to kill admin so founders can build their dreams. We are your fractional, expert, Chief of Staff to run your business operations. 

We are the end of admin. Hire Chore and join the future. 🚀

Founder & CEO

Entrepreneurial Excellence Podcast

The Entrepreneurial Excellence podcast is hosted by Adam Spector, 4x founder and investor in 150+ startups. Each weekly episode features some of the world's top founders and investors. Topics include:
- Top skills of the best entrepreneurs
- Biggest entrepreneurial mistakes
- Investing & Venture Capital
- Hiring, firing and team building

Podcast Host

The Autopilot Fund

The Autopilot Fund focuses on early-stage companies that serve and accelerate how companies operate. 

More about us: https://autopilot.fund/

Operations span various “departments”: could be in engineering, operations, sales, finance, product, customer success… the questions we ask ourselves are:

1. Is this a founding team so capable that others should be afraid to go against them?
2. Do they understand the problem better than anyone, and have special “founder-market” fit?
3. Will they rest until they have dragged the world kicking & screaming into their vision of the future?
4. Is the product “infrastructure” in a manner of speaking: structured data, deeply embedded, sticky?
5. Does the advent of AI exponentially increase or decrease their defensibility?

Our portfolio includes special companies such AngelList, Pulley, Puzzle, Levels, Disco, Parallel Bio, Trilobio, GC AI, Cytronic, Copilot, Levels, among many others. 

Smart founders focus. Bad founders distract themselves with all the small, non-product, non-customer work that can easily take up hours but not move your startup forward.

We are sector agnostic and focus mostly on early stage. Our thesis is simple: the best founders come from anywhere, with any background, working in any industry. Focus, joy, dogged determination, and deep knowledge about your product and how you're changing the world is what leads to success.

If you're interested in learning more, drop me a note on LinkedIn.

We believe in the broad-based investing approach to startups. To achieve the best returns, data supports investing in a wide array of startups and rarely following-on. We follow the data even if it's unsexy. Across our fund, we have invested in over 100 startups.

General Partner

Angel Investor

Angel Investor in ~100 startups. 14 unicorns, 8 of which I invested at seed. 

Some of my favorites: Datalogue (exit), August Smart Lock (exit), Diamond Foundry, Checkr, OrderAhead (exit), Classkick, Jet.com (exit), Ginkgo Bioworks (public), uBiome (failure), BetterUp, Human Interest, Relativity Space, PayJoy, Ambient.ai, Zoox (exit), Arka, Kush Marketplace, Shyp (failure), AcreTrader, Cleary, Begin, Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), Evenup, Attentive, Metaphor Data, Certn, Boom Supersonic, Otis, Jobox.ai, Mootral, Chia Network, Evernow, Contra, On Deck, Equi, Placer.ai, Vinovest, VoiceOps, Synex, Soot, Inversion Space, Blockfi (failure), Superplastic, Rarify, Airmeet, AtoB, Writer, All Blue Labs, Droneseed, Favor, Stashfin, Copilot Money, Sidebar, Function Health, Comprehensive, BetterBrain, HealthArc, Angelist, Tiny Health, Best Practicer (acquired), Release, Anduril, Puzzle, Ramp, Supliful, Parallel Bio, Wispr, OneImaging.

My preferred focus is on SaaS Enterprise businesses although fantastic, focused founders solving problems aligned with personal theses are always worth meeting. I invest largely at the earliest stages. I prefer to invest directly but also participate in syndicates. 

I'm still trying to comprehend how some of my failures have gone from the top of the heap to bankruptcy (I have thoughts). #startupinvesting #learning

Hustle Fund

Hustle Fund Scout

Community of Angel Investors learning from and teaching each other how to invest in and give back to the dynamic startup community we all love (and that is a constant source of inspiration). Added bonus thanks to the fantastic investment opportunities.

Angel Squad Member - OG Squad 1

Headline.vc

Venture Scout

Correlation Ventures

Network Advisor and Venture Scout for Correlation Ventures

Venture Scout & Network Advisor

PEF Community

World's largest (I believe) community of Post-Exit, building, learning, educating and ideating founders.

Member

On Deck

Fellow - On Deck Scale

Founder Institute

Mentor to early stage companies globally. Helping more founders make their dream and idea a reality!

Mentor

My life thesis: execution > strategy. Compounding FTW. I'm an optimistic skeptic. 

I enjoy pattern matching and read widely. The opportunity to learn every day is a gift. Time is precious. The ability to improve what and where I focus and delegate the rest is ideal. 

I [of course] love my family and friends. I believe I am a logical, thoughtful adult and therefore accept my choices. I am content and therefore I have won.

Founder and CEO @Chore. We are a founder's back-office (HR, finance, compliance, equity) operations team. Back-office operations are an undifferentiated tax on success. Focusing on your superpower enables success. Chore handles the rest (i.e. we specialize in ops so you never have to) so you can achieve your dreams. 

Host of the Entrepreneurial Excellence podcast. I dive deep with multi time founders about their key decisions, actions, hires, drivers and more that they use to achieve "excellence." 

General Partner at the Autopilot Fund. We invest in early stage startups. We love obsessed founders who have a history of breaking through walls. I have invested in over 200 startups across multiple funds. 14 are unicorns (8 from seed).

In previous lives, I founded 3 other companies, been a product leader on a big co API team, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Chief Operating Officer (COO), and do-it-all janitor. 

I enjoy building great teams, processes, and stories that unify a company around a shared mission. Helping others build successful businesses brings me joy. More successful startups = a better, more dynamic world.

People describe me as energetic, positive, creative, detailed and optimistic. I enjoy rational, logical, data driven debate built on mutual trust and respect. I'm not an engineer but people view me as "technical" and have built companies with the brightest PhDs and brilliant engineers. The best compliment I received was "you ask great questions."

Honesty, trust, fun, a sense of urgency and mission are what I look for in colleagues and places I work. Passion about my product, my company and my team is what drives me. I work hard and enjoy being surrounded by people who do the same. 

"Leave the world (and your business) better than when you arrived..."
"The greatest risk is not taking one!"

Always curious and learning. Follow my top reads: https://raindrop.io/Jammfam/adam-spectors-top-reads-37295659

The Autopilot Fund focuses on early-stage companies that serve and accelerate how companies operate. 

More about us: https://autopilot.fund/

Operations span various “departments”: could be in engineering, operations, sales, finance, product, customer success… the questions we ask ourselves are:

1. Is this a founding team so capable that others should be afraid to go against them?
2. Do they understand the problem better than anyone, and have special “founder-market” fit?
3. Will they rest until they have dragged the world kicking & screaming into their vision of the future?
4. Is the product “infrastructure” in a manner of speaking: structured data, deeply embedded, sticky?
5. Does the advent of AI exponentially increase or decrease their defensibility?

Our portfolio includes some pretty special companies like AngelList, Pulley, Puzzle, Levels, Disco, among others. 

Smart founders focus. Bad founders distract themselves with all the small, non-product, non-customer work that can easily take up hours but not move your startup forward.

We are sector agnostic and focus mostly on early stage. Our thesis is simple: the best founders come from anywhere, with any background, working in any industry. Focus, joy, dogged determination, and deep knowledge about your product and how you're changing the world is what leads to success.

If you're interested in learning more, drop me a note on LinkedIn.

I'm very excited to announce that we’re launching something new at Chore 🚀
We're introducing the Chore Ops Dashboard. Your all-in-one headquarters or HR, finance, compliance and admin.
 
After years of watching founders waste hours inside spreadsheets, Slack threads, and payroll tools, I’ve realized the same thing again and again.
 
Practically every startup I’ve ever spoken to has struggled with internal visibility.
 
Product has Jira. Sales has CRMs. Marketing has dashboards.
 
But ops? Ops is everywhere.
 
Founders spend 10+ hours a week bouncing between tools, checking statuses, asking for updates, and fixing what shouldn’t have broken in the first place. That’s 10 hours not spent on product, fundraising, or hiring.
 
So, we decided to build something different. Something that brings clarity to the part of your business you’ve been forced to ignore.
 
This launch means a lot to me personally.
Because I’ve lived it and I know it. That sinking feeling when I realize I’m running a company I can’t fully see.
 
Ops shouldn’t feel like that. It should feel calm, measured, and predictable.
And with this new Operations HQ from Chore, you'll finally get there.
 
Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gF73Pane

CEO @Chore | Host @Entrepreneurial Excellence Podcast | GP @The Autopilot Fund | 4x founder & 200+ angel investor

The day I stopped calling it "back office" was, like, genuinely the day everything changed for me.

So I was talking to this founder, right, and he'd just closed a $5M round. Super smart guy, technical background, building in fintech, and we're having this great conversation about his product roadmap and growth plans. Then he says something that just, I don't know, it stuck with me.

He mentioned needing to hire someone to handle all the back office stuff now.

Back office. Like it's some dusty corner of the business you shove into a basement and forget about.

And that's when it hit me, you know, the language we use actually shapes how we think about things. And how we think about things determines what we build and how we prioritize our time. When you call it "back office," you're already losing. You're basically saying it's secondary. Less important. Something to minimize and grudgingly deal with when you absolutely have to.

But like, what if we're thinking about this completely wrong?

See, the best founders I know, and I've worked with hundreds at this point through Chore and as an angel investor, they don't think of operations as overhead. They think of it as leverage. 

So think about it this way. Your product is what you sell, obviously. Your team is who builds it. But your operations is what makes everything else actually possible.

Great operations isn't visible until it breaks. Then people often notice, right? The payroll that doesn't go through. The compliance deadline you miss and get fined for. The fundraise that gets derailed because your cap table is a complete mess and diligence takes forever.

But when it works? It's invisible infrastructure. The foundation that lets you move fast without everything falling apart behind you.

Your operations should be so good they're invisible. So reliable they're boring, honestly. So systematic that you rarely have to think about them because they just work. That's not back office. That's the invisible infrastructure that lets you actually build the future instead of constantly putting out fires.

You don’t need a Chief of Staff.
You need to stop saying yes to every task that lands in your inbox. Let me explain 👌🏻

A few years ago, I invested in a startup with a product that was just starting to click. Revenue was growing steadily and customers were sticky. Things were looking up, but the founder was drowning in ops.

I like to stay pretty close to my portfolio companies for times like this. Anyway, he messaged me one day and said: “I think I need a COO.”

After 30 minutes of talking, it was clear that he didn’t need a COO. What he needed was to say no more often. He needed tighter systems, not another senior hire.

I’ve seen this story dozens of times as a founder, investor, and now as CEO of Chore.
So when is the right time to bring in fractional help? Here’s what I’ve learned:

✅ When you should bring in fractional help:
You’re bleeding time, and it’s starting to hold back growth.
You’re ready to let go. You’re not secretly planning to micro-manage this person.

That’s when fractional help really unlocks you.
 
❌ When you shouldn’t:
You’re still figuring out your business model.
You’re not ready to delegate. You plan to micromanage this person.
You have no idea what to do with the time you'll get back.

If you're in this stage, the answer isn’t delegation, it’s discipline.

The best time to bring in help is when you're clear on what you don’t want to be doing anymore, and brave enough to hand it over.

That’s when the right fractional ops manager will give you hours back, and the leverage you need to show up better for your business.

If you’ve ever wished operations made sense at a glance, this is for you.

When you finally see everything in one view, something changes:
Your decisions get sharper ⚡️
Your team moves faster 💨

And operations stop being so chaotic.

That's the clarity that Chore gives you.

So I was helping a founder friend last week, and he couldn't find his AWS contract. Took him about ten minutes of digging through Gmail, Slack, Google Drive. Finally found it in a random email thread from three months ago.
I got me thinking about something we see all the time at Chore.
 
You know how you probably search for files every single day, right? Maybe it's that vendor agreement, or last month's P&L, or that contractor's W-9 form. Each search feels quick. Just a minute or two.
But here's what I realized when I actually did the math (and literally, the math is pretty simple):
 
If you spend just five minutes a day looking for documents across all your tools (and you definitely spend more than 5 minutes), that's about 25 minutes per week. Over a full year, that becomes 1,300 minutes. Which is more than 20 hours.
 
Now, I've been working with startups for about five years, and here's how I think about founder time: your opportunity cost is probably around $1,000 per hour when you factor in what you could be building, the deals you could be closing, or the fundraising calls you could've taken.
 
So those 20 hours become $20,000 in lost value. Every year. Just from hunting for files.
 
And look, this isn't because you're disorganized or anything like that. The problem is that your operational world is scattered everywhere. Your HR documents live in Gusto or Rippling. Financial records are stuck in QuickBooks. Contracts might be in DocuSign or HelloSign or just floating in email. Cap table and equity stuff is in Carta or Pulley. Compliance documentation could be literally anywhere.
 
Every one of these tools promises to be your "single source of truth." But you and I both know none of them actually talk to each other in any meaningful way.
 
We've built something at Chore to finally solve this. Our operations dashboard.
 
Not another tool to add to your stack, by the way. We connect to what you already have. QuickBooks, Gusto, Carta, whatever you're using. Pull it all into one view where you can see your cash balance, upcoming compliance deadlines, key documents, equity status, everything.
 
The thesis is simple. You as a founder should have all the key information at your fingertips without having to log into multiple places to get a good idea of how the business is running operationally.
 
The file search tax is real, and it's way more expensive than most founders realize.
 
What's your experience with this? I'm genuinely curious if other founders have noticed this pattern or if we're just seeing it because we're deep in the operations world every day.

⚠️ Operators & founders! This Thursday, we’re doing it again.
Chore's Operators Happy Hour is exactly where you need to be this Thursday.
 
Every month, we pull together the people who actually run companies. The ones fixing broken systems, scaling messy processes, and keeping the entire business glued together.
 
This week, we’re back in SF for another one. And if you’ve never been, here’s what to expect:
🍸 Zero fluff. Real conversations.
💬 Founders and operators swapping playbooks.
⚙️ Sharp, practical discussions about what’s working in AI, ops, hiring, and systems.
🤝 People you’ll want to follow up with the very next day!
 
Every edition so far has filled up, and I know this one will too. Plus I'm pretty excited to share something new with everyone at this edition.
 
📍 San Francisco
🗓 Thursday, November 20
🕔 6:30pm PT
🎟 Register → ﻿https://luma.com/it962c24
 
Let me know in the comments if you'll show up!

Open article: Operators Happy Hour by Chore: Foundersgiving – Setting Up for 2026 with AI Power · Luma by luma.com

Operators Happy Hour by Chore: Foundersgiving – Setting Up for 2026 with AI Power · Luma

What you can’t see, you can’t improve.
What you can’t measure, you can’t scale.
And for most founders, ops is still invisible.
 
But for ops? Chore is about to change that.

Thanksgiving is a great day to zoom out and reflect. As founders, we spend so much time in execution mode that we forget to acknowledge the people and moments that make the journey worth it.

So today, I’m grateful for:
- A family that supports the long hours and the big dreams.
- A team at Chore that turns my ambitious ideas into reality.
- The founders who trust with the deepest parts of their operations.
- My Entrepreneurial Excellence Podcast guests who openly share lessons and wisdom for other founders to learn from.
- The huge pumpkin pie I'm going to have at Thanksgiving dinner soon.
- And the many tiny moments that have made this year truly my best yet. 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone 🦃

When your product breaks, you know it immediately. Customers complain. Alerts go off. Revenue drops.
But when operations break? There are no alarms. Just slow leaks.
 
A late payroll here. A missed compliance renewal there. A forgotten 1099, a misclassified contractor, an invoice that never got paid.
 
It doesn’t even feel like an emergency, until it suddenly is.
 
Here’s the problem:
Product is tracked ✅
Engineering is tracked ✅
We use Linear, Jira, Notion, dashboards, metrics.
 
But ops?
Still managed through Slack messages, Google Sheets, and “someone’s got it covered.”
 
And that’s why it breaks.
 
Ops needs systems. Visibility. A way to measure progress and spot what’s falling behind. Just like every other part of the business.
 
Until if you figure that out as a startup, your ops will continue to break. At Chore, we're about to launch something to fix that.
 
Keep an eye out for an update 👀

Craig Goodwin 🔥

Bleach Cyber

Bleach is a cybersecurity platform designed specifically for startups and small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). It addresses the need for effective operational cybersecurity by leveraging existing technology investments to make it fast, easy, and affordable for any SMB to be secure and compliant. Through API integrations with various tools, the platform provides proactive recommendations in the form of "security opportunities" to reduce risk and meet compliance standards. It offers a range of security use cases and the ability to remediate discovered opportunities directly from the platform.

Co-Founder | Chief Executive Officer

The Golden Suite

Experts in automated and semi automated trading systems we believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to make more money using less time, unlocking true wealth that is the irreplaceable commodity of time.

Board Advisor

YL Ventures

YL Ventures (www.YLVentures.com) funds & supports brilliant Israeli tech entrepreneurs from seed to lead. Based in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, we manage $135 million across three funds focused on seed-stage, deep-technology B2B companies in the fields of cyber security, enterprise software and autonomous vehicle technologies. YL Ventures accelerates the evolution of portfolio companies via strategic advice and US-based operational execution.

Venture Advisor

Cyvatar.ai

Cyvatar is a technology-enabled cyber security as a service (CSaaS) provider disrupting a $150 billion industry by introducing and delivering smarter, measurable subscriptions to help you achieve compliance and security faster and more efficiently. 

We take on the heavy lifting without requiring you to invest in additional resources. That means our cyber avatars have installed, configured, assessed, and remediated your environment and are now maintaining it before you’ve completed most traditional POCs. We track your progress and provide monthly executive level reporting on achievement against industry-recognized benchmarks and best practices.

Co-Founder | Chief Operating Officer (COO & CPO)

Fujitsu

Fujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company, offering a full range of technology products, solutions and services. We use our experience and the power of ICT to shape the future of society with our customers. 159,000 Fujitsu people support customers in more than 100 countries.

At Fujitsu we can help you safeguard your organization against cyber crime and help strengthen your resilience against cyber attacks. After 40 years in the field of IT security, we believe that the answer lies in intelligence-led security. Our holistic approach to security works to identify, detect and protect our customers from security threats. Highly versatile, it gives organizations the ideal response to constantly shifting security challenges. Explore the resources on this site to learn more about intelligence-led cyber security, discover the latest insights from our security experts and explore our enterprise and cyber security portfolio.

Chief Trust & Risk Officer

Chief Information Security Officer (DTS)

CDK Global

CDK Global is transforming how cars, trucks and vehicles of all kinds are marketed, sold and serviced around the world.

Today CDK Global serves 26,000 car, truck, motorcycle, marine and heavy equipment dealerships in 100+ countries on six continents. (We haven't reached Antarctica yet, but perhaps in a few years.) You can count on us to deliver the technology and services that will help you drive your business on toward a brighter horizon.

Life and business are a journey. CDK Global is your technology partner for the future.

Vice President, Global Chief Security Officer (CSO) | Security Portfolio & Offerings

Chief Business Security Officer (CBSO)

Monster

Monster is the worldwide leader in successfully connecting people to job opportunities. From the web, to mobile to social, Monster helps companies find people with customized solutions using the world's most advanced technology to match the right person to the right job. With a local presence in 55 countries, Monster connects employers with quality job seekers at all levels, provides personalized career advice to consumers globally and delivers vast, highly targeted audiences to advertisers. At Monster, we’ve made it our mission to help employers find better candidates, and help job seekers find better opportunities. SeeMore™, 6Sense®, BeKnown™ and Career Ad Network® are just four examples of the innovative technologies Monster provides to help you Find Better.

Vice President, Global Information Security | Technology | Security Offerings

Working Links

Since 2000 Working Links have helped over  220,000 people to change their lives by supporting them into sustainable employment. We work in some of the most deprived areas of Great Britain to address the challenges faced by people who are long-term unemployed.

We are a public, private and voluntary company, bringing together private sector drive, public sector ethos and voluntary sector ethics.

Our public sector share is managed by the government’s Shareholder Executive on behalf of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Our private sector shareholders are Manpower and Capgemini, and our voluntary sector share is owned by Mission Australia.

Since 2006 our turnover has grown from £63m to £123m, and we now employ over 2,000 people.

Group Head of Technology | Architecture | Security Product Portfolio

Benefex

Benefex is an award winning employee benefits solution provider. The company works with its clients to design, implement, communicate and administer bespoke benefit packages that really add value. The business currently services and adminsters over 500 Reward and Benefit schemes internationally ranging from 10 to over 50,000 employees. In any given year, Benefex solutions touch over 1 million employees.

Chief Security Officer (CSO)

West Sussex County Council

The leadership and oversight of information assurance, setting high level strategy and policy, to ensure stakeholder confidence that risk to the integrity of information in storage and transit is managed pragmatically, appropriately and in a cost effective manner.
The management of, and provision of expert advice on, the selection, design, justification, implementation and operation of information security controls.Establishes and manages Information assurance strategy and policies

Security Portfolio Owner | Group Security Officer

🚀 2 x Startup Founder 🚀 | CEO @Bleachcyber | Entrepreneur | Advisor & Investor | Road Cyclist 🚴‍♂️ | Completed Linkedin (30,000+ Connections)🌎

A dynamic and entrepreneurial senior level product, technology and security leader, Craig is committed to creating pragmatic products and solutions that drive business outcomes. 

An executive level thought leader in Security Product, Cyber Security and technology with a unique blend of security, product management and business leadership expertise, spanning many sectors and business areas. A refreshing and entrepreneurial individual with a flair for designing and implementing products and strategic level improvements combining technology, people and policy to achieve tangible results.

An enigmatic and inspirational leader in the field, he is often called upon to represent his views in industry leading publications and through high profile speaking engagements.

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Adam S.

Craig Goodwin 🔥

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