Hard Thing #7: The BS Umbrella

“By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work 12 hours a day.” —Robert Frost (allegedly)

I recently had a VC describe the Founder/CEO job to me as the “bullsh!t umbrella” - the job is to prevent the BS from reaching the rest of the team.

The team is precious - they are the biggest investment a Founder/CEO makes. The Founder/CEO wants to maximize the ROI of that investment. So they become a BS umbrella.

The team doesn’t need to deal with the fact that to sign your first lease, you need to have corporate liability insurance in place, and oh by the way, make sure the landlord is listed properly on all the forms. They just need to know where to show up on Monday.

The team doesn’t need to compare small business insurance options, fill out an employee census, or ensure appropriate accounting, they just need to know they have healthcare insurance the next time something happens so they can focus on work.

But how to most effectively diffuse the BS? Is there a class at Harvard Business School on setting up startup payroll systems? (As far as I can tell, the answer is no.) Do they hire a COO? Eventually (bless the day!). But that’s a luxury most early stage startups can’t afford.

When Renee and I started building transfyr.ai, we knew we’d have to deal with a lot of BS. But we were shocked that there wasn’t a well organized checklist of all the stuff we’d have to deal with so that we could handle it as efficiently as possible. So we made one.

Each time we stumbled across some new thing we had to deal with, we added it to the list. When we realized “whoops, we paid full price for something we shouldn’t have!”, we added a section on “deals.” When we spent a couple weeks testing out different CRM systems, we added a resource guide listing all the tools we heard about, saw recommended elsewhere, etc.

While there might be some value in other founders going through this journey alone, finding and fighting their own unique brand of BS, we generally believe that re-creating wheels is a waste of time if someone else can show you the design. So we’re happy to share our Zero to One (or Ten) Playbook.

Inside, you’ll find a checklist, organized by category and by date:

…and for almost every checklist item, a list of resources (definitely not fully exhaustive, but hopefully covers the basics - happy to add highly recommended options!), which you can see organized either alphabetically or by category.

We put some information on how much the tools cost and whether there are standard startup discount rates that you should make sure you get and added a ⭐ emoji for tools that either we used or have heard good things about (and are starting to add 🔻 emojis for things that have been a giant pain!).

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