Venture & AI · San Diego · 2026
PJ · SideGuy Solutions
Encinitas, CA · Made this for you
Your portfolio ships AI. Their own back-office still runs on Notion and duct tape.
⛰ Apex doctrine: SideGuy is the AI Translation Layer for Small Operators →TL;DR: Your portfolio ships AI. Their own back — direct read from a single operator. Below: the actual answer (no fluff), what most articles miss, and the path forward — including when to skip the rest of the read and just text PJ at 858-461-8054.
Helped people with this exact issue recently · single operator · no funnel
Peer energy, Alex — two people who live in AI every day. Not pitching the fund. Pitching the founders you already back.
Why this lands for Hack VC companies
- Seed/Series A AI teams obsess over model quality — their CRM, billing, and onboarding are still manual
- Every hour a founder spends on ops is an hour not spent on distribution or research
- Hiring an ops person at $120K+ is the wrong move pre-product-market-fit
- A fractional automation partner at $100/hr fills the gap until they're ready for an internal hire
The shift you're seeing daily
- AI-native founders ship product in weeks, but bleed time on Stripe → HubSpot → Slack plumbing
- Claude + n8n + Zapier finally make real internal automation cheap enough for a 5-person team
- The ops gap is the #1 complaint from early-stage AI CEOs in portfolio syncs
Where SideGuy fits
- Workflow automation builds — agents, integrations, internal tools that actually work
- $100/hr, no retainer, no minimums — portfolio-friendly math
- Ships in days not quarters; hands off clean so you're never a dependency
$2.3B
Hack VC AUM deployed into AI + crypto infra
40%
of early-stage founder time still spent on non-product ops
5 days
typical SideGuy turnaround, seed → shipped automation
PJ · SideGuy Solutions
Alex — I'm not pitching Hack VC. I want to be the name you drop when a portfolio CEO says "our ops are a mess." I build the automations their engineers don't have cycles for, at rates that don't burn runway.
When to text PJ about Your portfolio ships AI. Their own back
Yes — text now
- You've read 2-3 articles, still don't know what to do
- About to spend $500+ on a tool / contractor / build
- Want a 30-second sanity check from someone not selling you
- Local to North County San Diego (faster routing depth)
No — figure it out
- You haven't tried the obvious built-in fix yet
- Looking for a free template you can DIY in 10 min
- Just casually browsing, no real decision pending
- Need a service we don't actually route (we'll say so)
Alex — 15 min, peer to peer?
If even one Hack VC founder is hand-pasting data between tools right now, this conversation pays for itself.
