I helped a CEO retire early. Then I realised how few founders ever get that.

I've been an executive assistant for most of my working life. I put myself through university as a student assistant to the Dean of the College of Education — coordinating international theses, handling foreign students, and sitting in on meetings I was almost certainly too young to be in. That was where I learned that someone else's calendar can be the most important thing in a room.

After I graduated I kept going, and kept getting promoted, until I was working at executive level. Then came a remote role at a finance company, supporting the CEO directly.

That job was not what "assistant" usually means. I ran recruitment. I built the training. I handled client management. I took on marketing. Piece by piece, I took enough off his desk that he was able to retire early — years earlier than he had planned.

That is what a great assistant actually does. Almost nobody buys one that way.

What I watched instead, over and over: founders spending their best hours on hiring and re-training. Juggling four platforms, paying for six tools, repeating themselves to three different people. Barely any time left for the creative work that was the reason they started a company in the first place. And every time an assistant left, all of it began again from zero — because everything that person had learned lived only in their head.

It's fixable. So we built Salva around two rules that most of this industry breaks.