One of the hardest parts about starting up any company or new idea from scratch is having to go from 0 to 1 in every category of work at once. Since I still primarily work by myself, this means needing to have a much tighter and more controlled grip on how I spend my time each week. (I wasn't joking when I said in this podcast that I basically take on a different functional role every day of the week right now.)

But some areas are more natural for me than others. There are two main areas of work that are decidedly not my sweet spot area of expertise: Software engineering, and business operations (ie: finance, legal, etc.).

I've tried over the years to learn both areas of work on my own (ie: taking finance classes after work, or enrolling in self-paced coding programs), but nothing really stuck. Unfortunately for me, I find it really hard to learn something unless I have a direct application for that skill almost immediately.

So over the past few months I've finally been doing the really painfully tedious thing (for me, at least) and getting a bunch of document work in order from a better operational point of view. The bad news is, I still find all of this (ie: incorporation documents, legal terms of service, and contracts) horribly tedious. But the good news is that it's easier than ever to get a baseline established.

With anything legal or finance, I do find it helpful to have a three-part review process for important docs:

• A helpful starting framework or template

• An AI-enabled review of the document or material (write down questions you have)

• A final human expert review of your final product (and answers to your questions)

This has generally been my process for learning anything new with AI, but it's been particularly helpful in these areas.

Here are a few helpful document libraries that helped me get set up:

Cooley Go Document Library

This is one of those document libraries where, if you know, you know. A GC friend of mine first turned me onto the templates here, and while I didn't ultimately using this document set myself (I got what I needed with another pretty easy, plug-and-play tool, Clerky), I did spend an entire day in March reading through all of these basic incorporation documents, clause by clause, with my AI reading sidekick by my side.

It's really helpful to know the general content of what's included in certain document sets, and the nice thing about AI is that it helps you interrogate every last bit so you can start to form your own opinions.

Generate and Download Legal Documents | Cooley GO

Let us simplify the paperwork for you. Cooley GO Docs will generate important legal documents.

https://www.cooleygo.com

Builder Blueprints

This is a new, open source document library created by ex/ante with support from the Ford Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation. It includes responsible starter frameworks for many of the common documents that U.S. based founders need to support their early work (ie: privacy policies and terms of service), as well as some basic software and SaaS agreements.

Since I recently launched an app in TestFlight that's targeting parents and young kids, I wanted to make sure to put in the work to get a privacy policy and terms of service in good shape from the start. I started with these templates, and then layered in (with AI's help) a lot of additional details about my use of AI and protections around working with kid user data. After I took one hard edit through, I got help from actual lawyers to really clean them up, which is what's on my website today.

Document Library - Builder Blueprints

Businesses that meet one of the following criteria are required to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) - "Have a gross annual revenue of over $25 million; Buy, sell, or share the personal information of 100,000 or more California residents or households; or.

https://www.builder-blueprints.com

Quickbooks Document Templates

On the finance front, I spent two hours with a fellow founder friend of mine who kindly walked me through her whole workflow around managing her business operations with Quickbooks. One nice thing in any small business is that no one needs to reinvent finance, so I've found a lot of these "plug and play" templates to be a pretty good start for now.

This is another example of how you can save yourself a little time by taking advantage of the collective baseline of knowledge from day one. (I'll also add that one nice thing about using one highly context-dependent AI tool like ChatGPT for nearly everything about a company is that AI's first "best guess" about your business expense categories and operations is pretty spot on to your actual activities.)

35+ Free Invoice Templates to Download [2025] | QuickBooks

Download free custom invoice templates from QuickBooks to get paid faster. We offer blank small business invoice templates as well as templates by industry.

https://quickbooks.intuit.com

All the Knowledge that Came Before

One of the incredible things available to anyone building something today is the literal world of knowledge accessible and available on the Internet. While we hear a lot more about people using AI and large language models to reinvent entire form factors or new platforms with instant scale and distributions, there's a quiet sub current of builders just slowly (but surely) getting smarter in a much more pointed and strategic way. The more useful data and templates I feed my own AIs about business building best practices, the better my entire AI setup can be at advising me going forward.

That's a pretty powerful thing. While it's never going to get me to being in the top 1% of experts in one of these domain areas outside of my core skillet, it's enabling me to do something even more powerful: Keep moving.