February 3, 2023

Episode 172: Paul Anthony, Founder & CEO of OpStart

Paul Anthony is the founder and CEO of OpStart, a full-stack accounting and finance solution for startups. Founded in 2020, OpStart currently serves over 60 venture-backed startups and recently raised a $2M seed round.

Paul is also a co-founder and board member of Puente, a non-profit tech company that powers data-driven community development in nine countries. His prior experience includes stints as a VC at Adams Street Partners and investment banker at William Blair.

Paul lives in his hometown of South Bend Indiana with his fiance, Morgan. He holds a finance degree from Notre Dame.

Julian: Hi everyone. Thank youso much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have PaulAnthony founder and CEO of OpStart, a Fullstack accounting and finance solutionfor startups. Paul, I'm so excited to chat with you and, and get to know you a littlebit more, not only as a startup founder, but also you're in by into otherstartups as, as that's kind of your main clientele, your main services.

This podcast is about building companiesand, and the different challenges they face. So I'm really excited to, to seekind of your perspective and your lens throughout this process. Before we getinto oper, what were you doing before you started the company?  

Paul: Yeah, thanks forhaving me, Julian. I'm excited to be here and ready for the conversation.

Before OP start, I started my career infinance. I was initially in investment banking focused on software companies.Then moved into VC where I was with the later stage fund leading kind of seriesB through D rounds. And after that I took my first leap into the founder spaceand was a co-founder in cfo.

Of a tech nonprofit called Puente, whichis based outta the Dominican Republic. And my experiences really in those lasttwo jobs in particular, are what led me to start OpStart.  

Julian: Yeah. The DominicanRepublic. What, what lend, what landed you there from, I think Chicago yearever for, and then now you're in Indiana.

What? What were you doing atDominican?  

Paul: So one of my roommatesfrom college and best friends did the Peace Corps out of college, and, uh, wewere on very different tracks. So with me working in finance and him being inthe Peace Corps, so it was always fun to stay in touch and kind of comparenotes, but I ended up visiting him a couple times, really loving the work he wasable to accomplish down.

And as his time in the Peace Corps woundto a close, he had a really great idea. For a technology solution that couldallow international development to function more smoothly and efficiently andbe more locally led instead of driven by donors and funders. So we, I moveddown there to join him and start that organization and we built it up into avery good organization that's still doing awesome work.

We are, our tech is used to powerinternational development in nine different countries and we do a lot of stuffourselves in the DR that I'm very proud of as.

Julian: Yeah, it's incredibleto, to see the, the whole, well, also, it's just incredible to see thatstartups have a place everywhere. And as long as you find a problem and can usetechnology to offer a solution for whatever reason, it, it's really agnostic towhere you are in terms of the location.

Um, What's interesting to me is I've hada lot of founders who come from a finance and and investment bankingbackground, and having that kind of, I think, deep insight into the mechanicsof what makes successful startups successful. And in your opinion and throughyour experience, what advantages do you think you took away from that fr fromthat prior work experience, but also what in your, your opinion, makes startupssuccess?

Paul: Hmm. Okay. Secondone's a really loaded question. I'll start with the first one. So what I tookaway from investment banking, I think if I had to summarize it in, in sort ofone sentence, it would be what it looks like to really be kind of an A player.Yeah. There are a lot of jobs and roles that you can get out of college thatare much, I would say probably easier, softer entry points into the workingworld.

And in investment banking, you reallyare in a extremely type. No excuses, no mistakes, environment for better andfor worse. It's a job that a lot of people hate, so I'm not trying to defy itby any means, but if you are looking to move on to become a founder or do otherthings in your career, it can be nice to have that foundation of what a pluswork looks like and set that right expectation for yourself from early on inyour career.

Julian: Yeah. And what's thata worth look like and, and if you, yeah, obvious, it's a loaded question, butwhat are some few examples that I guess you would try to, to, I guess, and inyour company,  

Paul: Sure. Well, I mean,the examples that are top of mind for me are a lot of things that still relateto what we do. Mm-hmm.

That I think about sort of in, in ourinstance, and really for any business, the way you communicate with customersis really important. The, you should have for any materials you're deliveringfor customers or what solution you're building for them should be really high.Getting a, getting things 90% right when you're in school, gets you an A minus.

And then when. In the working world, ifyou're starting your career investment banking, it gets you fired. So justcarrying on that mentality to say like, I know that this is hard. It's supposedto be hard, but we have to move ourselves to the standard of perfection. Is issomething that I think I've taken from it.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Anddescribe the inspiration behind OpStart. And of course, I think a lot offounders who listen to the podcast know that when you're building and whenyou're solving a problem, you, you, you tend to think about the accounting and,and, and the financial component and operation component as kind of anafterthought.

Like, oh, well I guess I have all theseassets and material, and now I've tried to find it organized. But what inspiredyou to kind of take it from more practical and systematic?  

Paul: Yeah. Afterthought is,is is a good word. We call it a necessary evil. Sometimes like no one wants tostart a business so that they can keep their books and file their taxes.

You just have to do it in order to, todo this thing you actually wanted to do when you set out to start it. Yeah. Theinspiration behind it for me was really twofold. It started when I was in theVC world. And as an associate in, in that capacity, my role involved getting alot of data from companies. So first, during the diligence process, trackingdown all the data, we would need to check our boxes from an accounting andlegal standpoint, calculate the metrics that we cared about from a morestrategic standpoint to look at the health of the business.

A lot of times I found that foundersjust didn't have the data we need or couldn't produce it in a consistent enoughand clean enough format. Yeah. And there were deals that I specificallyremember that we had to pass on that would've ended up being very good deals,but we passed on them because we couldn't get enough data to get comfortableand, and that ultimately, I think it was the right decision even though itended up being the wrong one.

From financial standpoint. Once we wouldinvest in companies, I was the person that was in charge of bothering foundersonce a quarter to ask them for updated metrics. Unlike. Net burn and maybe oneother thing, and there were simple requests, but it took a very long time toturn around. It would often involve popping on late at night.

And it was a bad use of time for me andespecially for the founders that we backed. So I always felt like there had tobe a cleaner way and that there was clearly some noise behind the scenes that,that I couldn't really appreciate as a non founder and someone who wasn't inthe trenches with. After, after that, when I went and was the co-founder andCFO at Puente, I, I kind of gained a new appreciation for those problems that Isaw more downstream.

As an investor, you really have to be sodisciplined and organized from day one in order to produce good clean data thatinvestors will require 1, 2, 3 years down the road, which is difficult whenyou're trying to wear all the hats that the founder has to wear. And on top ofthat, there's, there was this whole other side.

Running a finance function that I reallyhad no appreciation for, which is the compliance elements of it where you haveto figure out which taxes apply to your business, and that's not astraightforward answer in many cases. Yeah. You have to figure out how you'regonna file those taxes, who you could pay and do it.

What a good market price for that wouldbe. You have to figure out whether you could pay people as employees orcontractors. If you're hiring someone in a new state in today's remote worworld, right? You have to figure out how to file the right forms with thatstate. In order to remain compliant and have that person on payroll.

You have to reconcile your books thatare very regular cadence, once a week, once a month, something like that.Otherwise, it's gonna be really burden. You have to figure out the rightsoftware to select for all this stuff. It's, it's this really niche guardedarea of expertise. Yeah, that both founders just.

Grit their teeth and try and citethrough in their first few months and first few years in some cases. And wethink that that's kind of stupid, right? Yeah. Because when you're an earlystage company, and, and I think any angel or pre-seed investor will tell youthis, you're not betting on the horse as much as anything else.

You're taking a founder who you think isreally good at solving a specific problem and betting that they can use theirtime to solve that problem, or at least create meaningful progress in order toget to that next round. So if you're wasting five hours a week, 10 hours amonth, more than that, whatever it is on trying to solve these back officeniche, accounting, finance, tax type of issue, that's all time that could begoing towards more important work, and that's really valuable.

Assets being wasted through the lens ofyour startup.  

Julian: Yeah. It's sointeresting because a lot of founders talk about this fundraising process andthe due diligence as well, and it seems as though your numbers don't have tolook perfect or maybe not even like good, but they have to have some kind ofstory behind it.

Yeah. And from what you're saying is alot of, a lot of founders may not have, have that, or, or it's a, a difficultprocess to get any clarity into that. How much, in your opinion, are foundersleaving on leaving on the table in terms of the amount of funding they couldget or the, the, the, the backers that they have who don't wanna work withthem? How much do you think of being left on the table?  

Paul: Oh, it's, it's reallyincalculable. It's very hard. I say, yeah, I, I think the common things of whereyou see people leaving a lot of money on the table, the obvious ones arethings. A lot of startups don't realize that they qualify for r d tax credits,right?

Yes. And those on average for customersthat we work with is about 50,000 a year in savings for them. A lot ofcompanies just forget and leave on the table, right. There are the other thingswe catch where it's like, Hey, you've been paying this vendor twice of what itwhat it says in your contract, or Yeah, you didn't make a payment on your creditcard cuz you just weren't monitoring it and now you're incurring interest onthat.

Yeah. So those are the littleoperational things you catch. But I think the point that you were getting to,which is the bigger one, is those things are easy enough to quantify the thingthat is impossible to quantify. If I had been keeping track of my financialsmore closely and keeping them in a more clean format, would I have had theability to close my round sooner?

To close it at a higher valuation torealize that I'm not on track to hit my milestone and make adjustments soonerso that I don't have to raise like an extension round and can still manage toget to my Series A instead. That type of stuff is remarkably important. You'dbe shocked at how often the simple blocking and tackling of back officeexecution allowed you to optimize decision making on fundraiser.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. It's sofascinating. It is just time and time again. I hear this reoccurring theme of,and especially with multi boundaries about setting up the foundation of thecompany is that much more important, especially not only with fundraising, butwith, with actually measuring outcomes and making adjustments about strategiesand things like that.

When you're building an accounting and,and financial software, who are the different partners that you have to,whether collaborate with or reach out to, and, and how do you attract thosepartners to help? Keep you in, in compliance, keep you with understanding the,the regulatory, uh, requirement. Sure. What is that process like in terms ofgaining that, I guess, advisory pool that founders may not know of and, andmade a little bit of a, a piece of advice to help kind of move that processalong?

Paul: So there are a couplethings that come to mind here that are relevant to Med Jim. I'll start withsome things that are specifically relevant to Astar in this industry that we'replaying in, and then some more broad stuff that might be applicable to anyfounder. Historically, if you look at the, if you look at financial andaccounting software programs, and I'll say accounting software in particular, alot of people have built solutions that are supposed to be targeted at foundersand ended up having to sell them to accounting.

So QuickBooks, probably the number oneexample that people can think of. QuickBooks is initially built as a way forsmall business owners to easily keep track of their own books. It has theguardrails of making sure you follow accounting rules. Yeah, well, with thesimplicity of just choosing a category for your expense.

Great idea. In theory, in practice,founders didn't want to learn how to do their own books, right? Yeah. I didn'twant to figure this out on their own. And there's still way too much they canscrew up. QuickBooks ended up being a tool that you would provide to youraccountant, your bookkeeper, Dan. They would manage it on your behalf.

Right. Started off targeting founders.Ended up selling through accountants as the main users. Bot Keep is a reallygood example of this. That's a more kind of current startup, right? I thinktheir series Beer C range based outta Massachusetts, really good company. Theybuilt a algorithmic robotic bookkeeping platform essentially, that they thoughtthey could sell directly to founders as a way to cheaply keep your booksconcile.

In reality, just having the algorithmthat gets the work done wasn't enough because founders wanted the ability toask questions and say, Hey, why did my expenses jump so much in this category?This, yeah, why did my revenue drop last month? I don't remember losing anycustomers. There's always questions that you need to ask.

There's always information that analgorithm can't pick up. And when you talk earlier about sort of telling thestory behind the numbers, anything you do that's purely software is not gonnabe able to tell that story, at least to this day. So we built this, yeah, webuilt OpStart intentionally from day one to be a combination of software andhumans.

We call it a function as a service.Instead of software as a service, where you get a best in class software suiteto manage your accounting, tax, finance needs. You also get a controller who'sdedicated to your account, who's gonna keep your books, who's gonna be able toanswer questions for you, who's going to be able to dig into topics likefiguring out if this tax filing is applicable for you.

Or not, and we've found that foundersare much more interested in a solution that takes the problem off their plateand solves it for them outright, then Sumia makes it marginally easy for themto do it themselves. Right, right. Yeah. Well, I was gonna say, taking it Iguess more broadly into what, what partners are important for us and how wethink about engaging those partners and our space, the, the accounting financeback office world is pretty fragmented with a lot of different.

Software platforms that you need. Youneed a different piece of software to keep your books, to handle your payroll,to pay your bills, to manage credit card spend, so on and so forth. And thereare also different providers involved. So you might have some outsourced HRfunction. You might have a C P A who does taxes, you might have a fractional CF O.

We're trying to consolidate that as muchof a one stop shop as we can possibly. But it's helpful for everyone in thatspace to maintain good relationships with one another cuz you can't doeverything perfectly. So in our case, we have partners on the HR side, on thefractional CFO side. We partner with some software providers we think reallyhighly of is one I'll mention that you should look at if you aren't aware ofthem.

But all of those companies help usensure that we're doing the best job possible and also send us customerreferral.  

Julian: Yeah. How important isit in, in regards to the, your product and what you're building to stay kind ofin, in a, in a tight relationship with your customers? How much are youlearning from them day to day, and what are the questions you're asking tobuild a better solution for them?

Paul: Yeah, I mean it's,it's of the utmost importance for us. Yeah, I think everything we've done fromday one has been extremely customer driven. When we started the company, reallywe did pretty much everything manually, and I did most of it myself in order topick up sort of really what it's like to be in the weeds with all thesedifferent companies.

I had done it with Point A, my laststartup rep and Ben and that person in the weeds, but that's just one datapoint, and I needed to get a lot. After we had done that for maybe six months,we felt like we had a pretty good playbook in place, and we started to firm upour processes around things, make them more standard, and then layer intechnology to automate as much of it as we could.

Make it very visible, make it verydynamic. But all of it is driven by, um, the questions that customers ask us,the requests that their investors have come, diligence time, the, the mistakesthat you make along the way. You just have to learn from every one of thosethings and make sure you're trying to figure out how to solve it movingforward.

Julian: Yeah, I'm, I'm socurious because you come, you come from the VC world and, and the investmentworld. Would you say that that helped you when you were raising your, yourround of funding and, and how, um, how, how better off do you think you wereopposed to the average founder in TER in terms of raising money?

Paul: I definitely thinkthere are advantages to it. Sure. Especially having been in VC or on theinvestment banking side where your sell side, right. You're pitching companiesas m and a targets. You understand? A little I, I think I have a goodunderstanding of what investors are looking for and why. Right.

Yeah. I remember what we had to look atfor diligence as a VC firm. So now as a founder, I'm sort of front runningthat. Thinking about what VCs are going to ask about and question us on beforeI get to the meetings, and that ensures that you're not really caughtflatfooted as much and that you have good answers for, for everything, even ifit's not necessarily a strength of the company.

Julian: Yeah, yeah. Tell us alittle bit about the, the traction with Absar. How exciting are, was the recentgrowth that you've had, what you said about this year, how many people are, areusing the platform and, and how many do you expect to get to by the end?  

Paul: Yeah, so we are justover two years old now. We kinda went live with our first customers in Januaryof 2021.

We have a little over 70 activecustomers on board. Those are all startups ranging from pre-seed through SeriesC, who pay us a monthly flat fee to manage their books and some other backoffice operations around that. Yeah. From a sort of traction standpoint, beyondthat, we've, we. Over 150% last year.

We're hoping to beat that this year. Weraised a, a seed round at the Endos last year, which is gonna allow us toinvest a little bit more in the growth side and in the product side so we cancontinue to operate more efficiently and enhance our margins and, uh, to growmore intentionally.  

Julian: Yeah, I'm alwayscurious, talk to founders about kind of their price instruction and how theyfigured out how to charge their clients in the relationship to have with them.

What, what made you decide to go througha monthly kind of subscription model versus a one-time fee or something kind ofin between? That was it from your customer's request? Was it something thatwould keep the business operating? What made you, what did you consider goingthrough that process? And then what ultimately helped you decide to have, say,a monthly subscription?

Paul: Yeah, no, greatquestion. And I think in our case, there are some factors that make it a littlebit more unique than other kind of flat SaaS companies because there's thathuman service component to it. Yeah. But from day one, we knew we wanted togenerate monthly recurring subscription revenue. Mm-hmm. , I had done somefreelance work as a fractional C F O for startups in the past.

and that project-based work can bepretty high margin, but it's totally unpredictable and it's tough to build abusiness around that. You don't really know how many people you can afford tohire and what your PNLs gonna look like next quarter or next month. As aninvestor. Previously, I understood the value of having a really recurring,predictable revenue base and not having to cut out and rewind your book ofbusiness every year.

Yeah. So that was something that I feltwas I. Early on and we always knew we wanted to have a monthly subscriptionmodel for what we were providing and focus more on that than any short termproject work that might be available to us. Yeah. But in terms of pricing, Imean we definitely made mistakes early on and I think are still underoptimizedto what we could be doing.

Our first customers, we tried to justset a flat price with kind of no, no frills or caveats or considerations ontopic. Sure. Which, which is great from a customer stand. The problem is wehave a human service component to what we do. So if you happen to work with acompany that sort of underestimates how much help they need or, and it's notalways intentional, it can just be they think it's simpler than it really is,whatever it is.

We were running into instances where wewould lose money on a good portion of our customers and then we'd have to go tothem and ask them to double or triple their monthly price with us. And the onlyjustification was like, well, hey, we're, we're just, we're losing money. Yougotta do it. Or otherwise we're dumping you as a.

And that didn't seem like a very cleanway to do it. So what we ended up layering in is somewhat of like a retainercomponent to our fees. Sure. Where for your monthly price, you get a maximumnumber at support hours from our team. If you end up needing more support thanthat, that's great. That happens if it's fundraise time, if it's tax season,whatever it is, there are instances where you're gonna want us to do more, andyou're okay paying for that without renegotiating your monthly plan, but wejust need to charge you some excess fees per hour if you happen to need moresupport than usual in a given month.

Julian: Yeah, it, it's thatconversation. I, I've made a mistake as well, and it's really just theexpectation setting. People understand if they use more, they have to pay more,but if it's not clear, it's, it's a little bit more of a, a difficultconversation or a little bit more of a challenge to communicate the, theincrease, the value that you're having to offer them with the services and thehuman components.

So yeah, I definitely made that mistakeourselves. Thinking about OpStart, what are some of the biggest challenges thatit faces?  

Paul: So today our maingoals for this year are developing more of a tech-centric user experience. Sokeeping humans at the core of what we do because it's so important forproviding clients with that peace of mind, but allowing those humans to be alittle bit less involved than they are today, where you can do more of the workyourself and still feel fully informed and empowered without actually requiringas much time from our.

So that's, that's definitely a keything. I mentioned that from a growth standpoint, we're trying to grow moreintentionally and predictably. We had a, a great benefit of getting through ourfirst two years as a company investing in growth. Almost all of our businesscame from inbound referrals because, Our customers and the investors who backedthem and others in our space just thought we did good work and were comfortablerecommending us to their friends, fellow founders, other portfolio companies,so on and so forth.

But that, that's really unpredictablegrowth. We didn't know month to month whether we would get no referrals or 10referrals, and we have to hire people in order to support our customers. So weneed to grow more predictably in order to hire at the right time. Alongsidethat, we just want to grow faster.

Yeah. Right. So for all those reasons,we are excited. Yeah. To invest a little bit more in growth. We want to keepretaining our people and giving them long-term career paths here that keep themhappy. We want to keep validating our unit economics and scaling our revenue alot faster than our expenses. So it's gonna be a big year.

Julian: Internal referralnetwork in that whole kind of engine or machine. It's a, it's very challenging,you know, it, it's, it seems like you do good work, you have a goodrelationship, and then you get request and you maybe get a new partner. Butwhat, I guess, what in your opinion, needs to happen for your client to trustand refer people to you and the new business to you?

Because it sounds easy, but it'sactually way more difficult.  

Paul: Absolutely. What, whathas been helpful for you to, actually, I don't think I have the code cracked onthis, but the pieces of the, the things I've learned that I think are mostimportant here are, number one, you have to give yourself a lot of that batbecause there's not a formulaic way to determine whether someone's going to bea really good referral for you or not.

What I've found is that it generally comesdown to, yeah, a combination of their circumstances and their personality. Sosome people are just naturally very connective. They want to. People in theirnetwork, they want to be the one who refers a solution to you that solves aproblem for you, and it makes them feel good about themselves.

So they will actively refer anythingthey feel good about. Right. It's like it's the Yelp, reviewings, yeah. Of ofthe business world, if you will. Right. They really care about giving theirfeedback and passing it on. Yeah. If you can sign people like that and keepthem happy, then. Very meaningful for you for what we do, right?

Yeah. That means that if you happen tofind a VC who's really passionate about this solution and who has a bigportfolio of companies that are in our kind of target customer size range, thenthat's a really good referral channel for us. But if you look across all theVCs, we have relationships with 90 plus percent of them just aren't hands on onenough.

Involved enough to where they reallycare about recommending this much. Yeah, they might recommend it once or twiceif a company asks them for advice, but it's the 10% of people who are willingto just email their portfolio companies and say, I really think you should lookinto this. This is a great solution.

Let me know if you need any moredetails. Those are the ones that drive the volume for us more so than the other90% that just kind of have us in their Rolodex. Same thing for customers. Yeah,like we, we tried financial incentives and are still, they're still activewith. VCs and customers for us where, you know, if you're a customer, you getsome discount on your next bill.

When you refer us a new customer andthat person, the new customer is gonna get some discount as well. Mm-hmm. forVCs, they don't care as much about getting the financial incentive themselves,so it's just a bigger discount to any portfolio companies. They refer to us. Wegenerally found that those were impactful to a pretty small degree.

They may have nudged a couple people togive referrals that wouldn't have otherwise done it. It's a good excuse to geton people's radars, but ultimately it doesn't help you figure out whethersomeone is gonna be that type of prolific active connector who really drives aton of volume for you. And I think that's true for pretty much any startup.

Yeah. Some of the accounting softwarepro providers that we partner with for they'll, they'll tell us, right? Likeit, it's just so hard to find a like-minded firm who really gets what we'redoing and wants to promote it. And we say the same thing back to them, right,because not. Companies are created equal when it comes to being referralchannels.

People just have a natural gene for it,or they don't.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ifeverything goes well, what's the long-term vision for the OpStart?  

Paul: Um, you know, thelong-term reason why we started this and what we're hoping to accomplish withit is we have a vision of making entrepreneurship easier for everyone.

So I mentioned early on that I thinkwhat we do is really a natural, there, it's a necessary. If we can remove thatnecessary evil for every founder and small business owner in the United States,I think you can. A lot more people that feel comfortable starting companiesthat don't run outta steam early on because they make mistakes on this front ordon't have the capacity to handle it.

And people that make progress morequickly cuz they're not wasting so much of time on this. Yeah. So it's a grandvision, but I really love to be the go-to solution. Yeah. That is, it's likegetting a bank account when you start a company or filing your articles ofincorporation. Yeah. Bring on Op Star and you can go straight to buildingproduct and talking to customers.

Doing that more fun, strategic stuffwhile we take care of all that necessary evil that's involved.

Julian: Yeah. Here's somelightning questions coming at you, which I always like to, it's, uh, introducethese to founders, but here's a few for you. What's, what's particularly hardabout your job?  

Paul: What's particularlyhard about my job? Um, at the, at the building culture with a remote team.So,  

Julian: yeah. Yeah. How do youdo that? What, what, what mechanics are, or what do you schedule events? Do youhave reoccurring value sessions? What do you do in particular that you thinkis, is, is keeping you and maintaining the culture?  

Paul: You know, what we'vedone is, is mostly a combination of recurring touchpoints with different groupson the team so that you do feel involved and connected to everyone you'reworking with, even if you're not really on a project with.

Combine that with, uh, I think it reallycomes down to hiring as much as anything else. Yeah. If you can hire people whoyou think get along with everybody else on the team, then that culture candevelop organically. Um, and we did that in large part by, we partnered with acompany called The Mom Project for our hires.

Um, their talent pool included a lot ofstay-at-home moms with accounting backgrounds who wanted to do, you know,part-time work while their kids were at school basically, or something to thateffect. I'm oversimplify. Yeah. But as a result of partnering with them, youknow, a lot of our accounting team exhibits some of the same characteristics assome of the same life experiences.

Yeah. And they all get along and reallyform wonderful friendships that, uh, that's nothing I did made that possible.But, um, you know, if you hire people with the culture in mind, then you don'thave to think as much about it once they're on board.  

Julian: Yeah. If you had moretime to allocate into one particular part of the business or your life, whatwould you want more time to, to do?

Paul: Uh, business wise? Iwould love to be able to just create an extra two hours a day where I canpurely kind of pursue long-term strategic projects and, you know, go throughbrainstorming to prototyping and yeah. And be able to sketch out what's worthtime and what's. Because I don't have that time. It soaks up too much energyfrom our team and, uh, I think it would be something I'd love to make moreprogress on, on my own.

Yeah.

Julian: Yeah. What if youweren't working OnStar? What would you be working on?

Paul: I think I'd, it, it'sreally hard to say right now. I love what I do so much. I love working with allthese different types of founders. I have a skillset in this realm that, that'suseful to them. Um, I'd probably be doing something that. Being an advisor orresource for founders and investors, um, which, which is really what I'm doingnow.

So I

Julian: guess hard to say.Yeah. If it, whether it's early in your career or now, what books or peoplehave influenced you the most?  

Paul: Wow. Um, greatquestion. So, you know, people wise, I can think of the managers I had earlierin my career and different things that I picked from them. You know, there wasa one of.

Direct bosses at my first job ever wasas good of a lead by example guy as I've ever worked with. Where there wasnothing that he would ask you to do that he wasn't willing to do himself andsit with you and do in the trenches. And I try to carry that mentality now to,yeah, everybody I work with at OpStart right.

And then, you know, thinking through my,my second boss in in VC was much better. Clearly outlining, here are our goals.Here are how we're gonna know whether we met them or not. And I'll help youbrainstorm sort of good ways to think about metrics to get there. But it wasmuch more strategic high level.

Just here's the mission, here's howwe're gonna know if it's working or not. And I think you need to kind ofcombine both things in order to be a great manager when you're building anearly startup.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah, it'samazing to hear and, and it's so exciting to hear not only the progress, butalso the maturity that, that your company has.

And, and obviously it's from experience,it's from your, your background and also it, it's awesome to hear the level ofservice that you're offering other companies, and it, it don't look like it'scohort of companies that you're working with in terms of your clients. Aregonna be that much more prepared for their growth and their scaling.

I know we're coming close to the end ofthe episode here. It's always like to give our founders a chance to give usyour plugs, let us know where we can sign Appstar, LinkedIn, Twitter, where wecan find you, where we're gonna be involved, where even we can use the productor be a fan of it.  

Paul: Yeah. So our websiteis opstart.co.

We're gonna have a fully revampedwebsite coming out in a month or so. So stay tuned. Quiet on, but feel free tocheck out what we have now. In the meantime, you can fill out the contact formon their website and it's gonna hit my inbox and I will personally respond toyou and, and let you know if we can be helpful.

Um, if you wanna, you know, cut half theitems off your to-do list as a founder, that's a great first step. We are onLinkedIn, Twitter, all of the socials. Um, typically if you look up OP start orappstar growth, you can find us there. Um, I'm personally on, on those networksas well. Yeah, just my name, Paul Anthony.

It's a good, uh, good thing to search tofind me there. And, uh, love to connect with anyone else who's kind of in thisbroader industry and working through similar problems.

Julian: Amazing. Paul, it wasamazing to have you on this show. I really hope you enjoyed yourself, and thankyou again for joining us.  

Paul: Thank you very much. Ienjoyed it too, Julian. Appreciate you having me on.

Julian: Of course.

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