i. The hiring call
Q. How did you end up at Atlasware?
I'd been an EA for three years before Goldbar — a real one, not a clicks-for-hire VA. I'd run the office of a venture partner in Singapore. When I joined Goldbar's pool I think they had me down for "available in two weeks." It was four days.
James called me on a Tuesday. He didn't ask about software. He asked what I'd do if his calendar was full and his investor wanted a 30-minute call before Friday. I told him. He said "you're hired" before we hung up.
"He didn't ask about software. He asked what I'd do if his calendar was full and his investor wanted a 30-minute call before Friday."
Q. What did the first day look like?
Goldbar had already done the integration prep — they'd sat with James and mapped his stack. So on day one I had logins to everything, a shared Notion, his inbox forwarded with rules, and a one-pager called "How James Works" that the Goldbar team wrote from interviewing him.
I didn't spend day one asking questions. I spent it clearing 247 emails down to 38 and writing him a brief on what could wait until Monday.
ii. Week one
Q. You built three SOPs in the first week. He didn't ask for any of them.
Right. The thing nobody tells you about being an operator instead of an assistant — you don't wait. I noticed within two days that he was answering the same three categories of email himself: investor updates, candidate pings, and partnership intros. So I wrote the SOPs, drafted templates, and ran them past him.
By Friday he'd stopped touching all three.
"You don't wait. That's the whole job."
Q. What's the difference between that and what a VA would do?
A VA would have asked, "what should I do today?" The Goldbar training is built around that exact question. They drill it out of you. You don't ask what to do — you go find what needs doing and bring back a plan.
It's a small change in framing. It's the whole job.
iii. Working with Claude
Q. Tell me about the Claude training. Most assistants don't get that.
It's the part of Goldbar that's different. Every operator does a 40-hour Claude residency before they're placed. You learn to use it as a thinking partner, not a search bar. Drafting, summarizing long threads, pressure-testing decisions, building one-pagers.
I'd use Claude maybe a hundred times a day. Most of it is invisible to James — he just sees the output.
Q. Give me a concrete example.
His Monday brief. James used to spend two hours every Monday writing it himself — pulling from CRM, pipeline notes, his calendar, last week's metrics, and his head. Now I drop everything into a Claude project I built for him. It writes the first draft. I edit. He gets a finished doc by 7am.
Two hours of his time, every week, recovered. That's $400 worth of his time, every Monday, before lunch.
"I use Claude a hundred times a day. He never sees it. He just sees output."
iv. Ownership
Q. What's the hardest part of the job?
Telling James no. Goldbar trains for this too — you're not paid to agree. You're paid to think. The first time I told him "I don't think you should take that meeting," he laughed and said "you sound like my old chief of staff." I was three weeks in.
The cost of someone who never pushes back is enormous. Most founders have never had that, because they've only ever hired assistants who said yes.
Q. Have you ever been wrong?
Constantly. The difference is I'm wrong on the record, in writing, with a plan. He can disagree and we move. That's faster than someone who has no opinion.
v. Advice
Q. What do you tell founders who are considering hiring an EA for the first time?
Stop calling it an EA. The word makes you think small. You're not hiring someone to schedule lunches. You're hiring someone to take half your week back so you can spend it on the things only you can do.
If you can articulate what those things are, you'll be a good client. If you can't yet, that's the first SOP we'll build together.
"Stop calling it an EA. The word makes you think small."
Q. What's next for you?
More leverage. James is hiring a head of ops in Q3. I'll be running the search. I'll be running the interviews. I'll probably be running the offer letters too.
That's not the EA job. That's the operator job. There's a difference, and Goldbar built me for it.
Mara is Operator № 014 in the Goldbar pool. She was interviewed remotely from Manila in May 2026.
Interview lightly edited for length and clarity.