Founder’s Guide to Working with Filipino VAs

We wrote this guide to compliment Spencer’s popular “Founder’s Guide to Hiring an Operations Team in the Philippines.” It draws upon our personal experiences and insights gleaned from working with talented VAs (virtual assistants) over many years (shoutout to Angeli, Karyn, Rio, and Shang!) as well as observations from other founders who have successfully built remote teams in the Philippines.

  • Spencer & Rio

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Founder’s Guide to Personal Finance

I wrote this guide to help founders navigate the uncertainties of their financial lives. Your startup and its shares will certainty be worth unimaginably large amounts of money at some point but for now there are bills to pay and tricky situations to navigate.

See you at IPO!


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Traveler’s guide to vaccine-maxing

This guide is for a mainly US (possibly Canadian) audience who travels to much less developed countries in (generally) Africa, Asia, and South America and wants to save thousands of dollars by getting their travel vaccines at Costco’s Pharmacy.

You should start thinking about this at least a month (maybe two) before you leave. Time gives you the option to use the much cheaper Costco instead of a last-minute travel clinic that will charge you 10x. If you’re planning to travel many many months in advance your primary care physician could also help you get these shots closer to Costco’s pricing.


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Founder’s Guide to Credit Cards

I wrote this guide to help founders get the most from their business and personal spending. As a founder, money has always been tight, but setting up simple systems for my business and personal spending has allowed me to travel the world for free, reward employees, and reduce our company’s burn.

See you at the airport!


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We Probably Won't Fight Wars over Water

A cost of $1/m3 for seawater desalination and $0.6/m3 for brackish water would be feasible today. The costs will continue to decline in the future as technology progresses.

- A study from 2005. We've more than halved the cost of desalination since then.

Much has been said about how wars of the future will be fought over water. This is probably true, but the scope of the conflict seem like they will be considerably smaller.


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