YouSaid · the spoken record

Jonathan Swanson

lines on the record: 47
first: 2025-12-04
most recent: 2025-12-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“See you all next time. Come to Foundry. University. Why don't you come? Okay. Oh, no. Yeah, you should come and talk. You're going to give a talk. That's what I'm going to get your time. Now you've briefed”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I take credit for the first. Take no credit for the second. I like it. I'll split the difference with you. It's just great to know you. For those of you who are our founders out there, if you want to have the relationship Jonathan and I have had for a decade, it's very simple. Go to founder.university in Japan, Saudi, or America. The sun never sets on the JKal Empire. I'm operating in three different time zones around the world now, Jonathan. I am scaling, thanks to my Athena assistance. I love you, brother.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's tell the truth. You could have done it without me, and you would have done it without me. Maybe not the first one. It may have been harder with the first one. I'll give you that.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make your life easy as a founder and reclaim your energy. Jonathan, it is such a privilege and honor for me to be the first investor in two extraordinary unicorns that you and your partners, Marco and the teams have built.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't have Athenawow.com is my VIP link. I'm going to keep it up for a little bit. Instead of getting two weeks free, you get four. It's the best deal in the world. And like I said, you get what you put in. If you're not willing to delegate and like put work into it, please don't do it. If you're on a budget, please don't do it. Go do Upwork, find websites, five or whatever you want. But this is the secret behind my productivity is my dual Athena 365 day coverage. Man, it is incredible for me. Listen, I do my Tahoe trip. I don't want to say this because I got to gatekeep it, but it's hard when you go certain time periods. When I go to Naseco for skiing, it's hard to get reservations. So what do I do? Six weeks out, I set up my reservations for the week I'm planning on going. When I go to Tahoe, same thing. I book these restaurants six weeks out. They know who I am, my theme assistants take time on the phone. I have a little script, yada, yada. It's Jason Kalkanis. It's coming in.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's like banana republics, and then the Philippines or India, they might be somewhere between, and they call them the emerging markets or frontier markets for the reason. You have to deal with this. And that's why Jonathan, actually having a partner like Jonathan and Athena makes a lot of sense because I don't want to deal with this stuff. I had to deal with that stuff.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we were doing Mahalo back in the day, and I was building a human powered search engine backed by Sequoia and Rule Off was my backer here, and it didn't work out. We were too early. And we also had Google search problems. But one of the things we experimented with was in the Philippines hiring people to help us build out these search pages, which like Wikipedia pages and comprehensive search. And we had this firm that we were experimenting with. We had 20 people on duty, and they were telling us this is what we pay the folks, and this is our cut, right? So we had this arrangement because we were wearing boots on the ground, we actually wound up sending Mike Rhodes, one of the great employees I had there to Manila to do the training. And shout out to Mike Rhodes. But that was after we had this problem, Jonathan. Some of the people on the team, because I had mentioned, I think on this very podcast that I was, what I was paying them and how great this like was.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can give an example of this because we are international, we have international partners had to lock down all of our data. I have operations just in the United States, but I also have operations in the Middle East and Japan. Each of these countries has different privacy regulations. So I needed to lock down all of our computers. It's a little draconian. Some people are like, oh my God, spyware on our computer. It's like, hey, we work at a finance company. This is just table stakes. We have to travel around the world. Our Athena assistants have to be in our notion. They have to be in our grammarly, our slack, our superhuman. So they also have to. So I talked to Jonathan. I think we sent our own laptop. So you gave them laptops and then we put our software on it. We locked down their computers because they have access. We can't have somebody submit a business plan to us or their financials or legal documents we need to review and sign and then have them get hacked. And if they do get hacked, God forbid, we need to have a way to trace that and figure out how big the hack was, et cetera. So you guys were able to.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So genius. Here's a question from one of our notes. The notes, just so you know, Jonathan are my true, true fans. They are the notification gang. So we call them Nodi gang, N-O-T-I, because they have the notifications turned on, and they're the first to come to the live feed. So Nodi Gang member Pilgs, P-I-L-G-S, says, hey team, does Athena work with medical space? How do they handle EMRs and other hepatite systems? And he's on every day. So shout out to PILGs.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which I think is where they're at is hey, an alarm goes off, there's motion. What type of motion is it? So my security systems tell me what type of motion it is. Oh, that's your gardener. I have the facial recognition for the gardener. I don't get an alert for that. But if it's an unknown and this literally happened, a new gardener was sent. I got an alert. Oh, new gardener. Great.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wake us up. Interestingly, we have a company we invested in Deep Sentinel. What they do is they have cameras everywhere that are two-way cameras. They built this hardware. Jonathan, you're going to think this is hilarious, but they had the insight you had, which is their, hey, there's people around the globe who are looking for work and this is work you're probably not going to get an American to do, especially now when we have 4% unemployment. I mean, everybody wants to argue about this, but we still don't have a lot of people. So here's this security camera. If somebody's in front of it, it does a motion detection that red light starts going in a circle as you see on the screen here. Then the microphone turns on. Somebody, a remote security agent, I'm not sure where they use them, starts talking to them and says, hey, you're trespassing a person in the black hoodie. Now, I don't know if they're using US or not, but in the beginning, maybe they were using people in the Philippines. But anyway, the concept is somebody could be doing this remote. It turns out most people don't need an on-prem security guard, and the on-prem security guard falls asleep, plays candy.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have an Athenian assistant watching the baby in the crab is this, or if you were worried about your kid, this is an idea you came up with. It's creepy but brilliant.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is super important to have a playbook and a checklist. This is why I always, every single person who comes to work for me, I make them read the checklist manifesto because Jack Dorsey had read in, I don't know, some interview with him or heard him on a podcast and he talked about this book and how he gives it to everybody at Square or Twitter. And it turns out like checklists really reduce mistakes. We had a mistake today with a company we were syndicating and we skipped a part of the checklist and it's like, you know, if you make a checklist for your Athena assistants, for your researchers, analysts, yourself, the chances of you making a mistake in highly repetitive tasks goes down in a massive way.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, don't give me AI slop. Not for me. Maybe somebody else likes to have a bunch of flowery language wrapped around what they're doing. Not for me. Don't ever do it again. I don't want AI slop. I want crisp bullet points. But this is like, you have to be willing to say, I want crisp bullet points. I want to train my Athenas and to do it the way I want to do it, yada, yada, yada.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What your That's where it kind of unlocked for me. And this constant feedback is the key piece today, my Athena assistants, one of them said like there was just like weird sentence in the summary. I like them to give a summary of my calendar every morning, every day, check it, look for duplicates, look for issues, make sure the link to the location I'm going works on Google Maps because sometimes people invite me to something, they put in a weird address. I'm traveling in Singapore. You click on it, it doesn't work. And then I'm like, okay, I don't know where I'm going. So they click on that ahead of time. They check it in Uber. They make sure Uber is working in that country. There's a lot of little details. I've given them. But they put in like a sentence that was written by AI. And I said, what's this? And they said, well, I put my, I started putting my communication to you in ChatGPT. I said, please don't do that. I would rather have like a mistake in your grammar. You can fix the grammar, but don't have it give me a sentence like, if you have time between these two meetings, you can use it to catch up.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Less competition for dollars, less people involved, more people involved for the right reasons, less people involved for the wrong reasons on both sides of the table. If people are not willing to do an onboarding for superhuman, the email product, which is now includes CODA, includes Grammarly, and I'm obviously an investor now in that larger company because they got acquired and they rebranded as superhuman, which is wild. He would just say, you know, if you're not willing to do a 30-minute onboarding and learn the quick keys and have us show you how to use it, you're not going to get value from it. So I don't want to take a dollar a day from you. It's just that easy.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Raoul over at Superhuman, who, when I was doing Open Angel for him, I did reportive. So he was part of that first cohort of just brilliant founders when the industry was probably 10% of the size it is now. So it was much easier to find a great investment because there just weren't that many founders and there just weren't that many investors. It was like a more boutique industry less competition.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then make sure you don't sell it to the wrong people so you're fine tuning don't sell Athena assistants to people who can't afford it. Don't sell it to people who are bad at delegating and who are controlled freaks and will never change.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's extremely tight. Andy Ratcliffe, who's been on the program Well Front founding partner at Sequoia, Grey Firm, he talks about this nostril pulling as like people are calling your office and telling you, I want to Athena assistants, I need them to work this, I need them by this date, and then I'm doing six more here. In other words, your sales team goes from founder-led sales where Jonathan is like explaining to me the concept and where brainstorming had to onboard people, whatever. And that's founder-led sales, right? It's really hard. It's arduous. It's like product discovery mixed in with sales. Then you hire a sales team, you try to replicate that. You try to make it in a process, right? So you have product market fit, but the sales team's then saying like, I sold these people, but these people won't budge. So you kind of have semi-product market fit. Then at a certain point, you have a salesperson, it's scaling. So you like this week in startups and our ads or founder university. We have product market fit. We know we do. So it's okay. Can we scale it, not break?”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great idea When you look at your 10 plus years building startups, and we had a great question come in from the audience about product market fit, techno chief 2000, watching the live stream youtube.com, search for this week in startups and put on the, after you subscribe, put on the bell and you'll get an alert when we go live. Techno chief asks, how do you know an idea has real market pull versus founder delusion? When should a founder pivot? When should they double down? It's a very open-ended sort of question here because you have micro pivots, mini pivots, all kinds of interesting things that occur. So tell me about your experience with that.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at $36,000 a year, which is one fifth the price in San Francisco and one-third the price in any other city for this level of executive sport or half, you can be inefficient with it and not feel guilty. I think that's like one of the things, and you can experiment with it, yeah?”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To build grit together and then get through the other side. My daughter now can play pickleball and she knows how to score and it took seven, eight times, but really worked out. They did all that for me. They coordinated it all. They gave me four choices for each one. And it was arduous. And then I tried to get an archery folks to come to the ranch and set up an archery. They got me all these quotes, whatever. It was just like too hard to do. Nobody wanted to do it. But then we found eventually like other activities. Another way to say it is it would not have happened without the Athena assistant.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredible. Oh my God. So they could go interview people, get that video, save it, clip it, and just have it prepped for a videographer or documentarian. Oh my God, so genius. I mean, the possibilities are endless. It's really cool. We'll say the other thing that's worked out really well for me is I wanted to do an activity with my 15-year-old. And so I said, hey, set up pickleball for 10 weeks in a row with instructor. Then I want to do like archery or I want to do, I just rattled off ideas with my daughter. One of them was like rock climbing. So we came up with like four or five concepts that are hard activities to learn. You know, like there's some activities. Like if you want to play, I don't know, checkers, you can just start playing. But there are some that are hard for the first two days, like skiing, golf, rock climbing, pickleball. You got to learn the rules. It's just like you suffer for two to five sessions and then you actually start to enjoy it. So this was a concept I had to build grit in my daughters and to have an experience where”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sponsors, and here's my new director of sales Ricky, who's unbelievable. Go into Pipe Drive and see if we've talked to that customer, when's the last time we talk to them and put into the Slack room, hey, these are seven advertisers on these other podcasts, and here's the last time we talk to them. That's a backstop for Ricky and I and for the sales team to know if we're missing and we don't, you know, I don't want highly paid salespeople six-figure people listening to other podcasts and timestamping and doing that work. This has been unbelievable for the sales team. And so when you are not utilizing your Athena assistant, Jonathan, you can give them backstop projects. And they do it. Well, of course, you say, of course, I didn't figure this out for six months.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing. If you're going to be an entrepreneur, you got to be prepared for these kind of things. I have two Athena assistants. And what I did was I said, let's have them every Saturday and Sunday. They said, hey, JK, you don't need people on Saturday and Sunday. I said, I have a plan. Number one, I can afford it. I can afford to build out this infrastructure 365 days a year. So I'm going to try. Athena was like, okay, we'll roll with it. Then I said, here are two or three things you can do when these are big data projects. One of them was to take every episode of this week in startups and chunks and put it into a Google notebook LLM, take all of my hits on CNBC and the press, every podcast I've ever appeared on, and put them into different notebook LLMs to make LLMs of my appearances so that producers can say, hey, what does JCL said about Apple over the years on CNBC? And they can pull it up. I never had that ability, but they also empowered that. And then on the weekends, I say, hey, can you look at the top 100 podcasts, use this tool, descript, or whatever tool you want to use, whatever to, and just go through.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was insane Launch is a fast growing organization. We've got more than a dozen employees working with me here in Austin and another dozen spread out all over the world. But there's so many moving parts when it comes to hiring and managing employees. There's the onboarding, of course payroll. You got to pay them. And listen, I've got all these podcasts to do. I don't have time for payroll benefits, HR taxes, answering questions, nor do I want to hire a full-time person and then have them do five hours of work a week. No, I have the perfect partner, Gusto. They're the all-in-one payroll and benefit product that's built just for your small business. Easy to use. It's incredibly fast to get started. And it's designed specifically with remote offices in mind. And Gusto is not just giving you helpful tools. They're going that extra mile to keep your workers happy and keep everything running smoothly. And they're now offering level funded health plans to keep your insurance costs down and on-demand pay to help workers get access to their cash faster.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's smart. You know, when you're an entrepreneur and you get product market fit, you can break it, right? You can build the skyscraper too fast, right? When you start doing that and you don't have a strong foundation, bad things happen, you probably experienced this, yeah, Jonathan.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he got one. So the two of us then talked about it and we got rid of, I guess Chris on your team was like, hey, can you stop talking about Athena for three months? We ran out of inventory. We have no more assistance left.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a crazy moment because Jonathan said, I also want to make you like an ambassador, you know, an influencer for the company. And I said, well, I've never done that before, but let me think about it. And so we did a deal. And when you hear me talk about Athena all the time, I always use my Athena wow to get like a free couple of weeks. So if you go to AthenaWow.com, you get a couple of free weeks. But the reason I did that was I wanted to see if, you know, the podcast both all in and this week in startups would that be able to kind of move the needle. Sure enough, when I mentioned it on all-in, my best each month was like, tell me about this Athena thing. I need an assistant. He was going through the same pain and suffering I was, which was, I can't like just hiring people in the valleys. You hire somebody for an extraordinary salute and they hate you for it because they have to drive an hour because they can't afford to live in Atherton or Palo Alto or San Mateo or San Francisco.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, realized this is like unlock number three, perhaps, is this group of individuals will embrace AI tools faster than my American employees in eighty percent of the cases. They are AI first. I don't know if this is part of the training program, but I told them get the comment browser from Perplexity. Why? Because it's a gentic and you can do things like, and I gave them the prompt that I had made into a shortcut, which is please visit monocle.com, condonest traveler.com, eater, michelin guide, and give me the consensus amongst those websites for the best restaurants, for the best hotels, and put them into a table and give me the link to it. Then they started doing that, which meant they started on second base with their resource. They weren't manually researching. So maybe you could talk about how do you train Athena assistants and select them. Both of those things seem to be kind of important.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“be two hundred NVL seven two on Crusoe Cloud pending availability, okay? That's CRUSOE dot AI slash build to apply and get those hundred thousand dollars in credits.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Launching a new company is all about finding your first customers and then just learning how to solve their problems. And that is going to put you on a relentless pace. And that means you're going to be releasing new products and features. Hopefully at a brisk pace or better. But my lord, the complexities of working with AI, it's going to slow your developers down. You're going to have to install new GPU drivers. They're going to be provisioning clusters, all of this detail-oriented, labor-intensive work can distract you from working on the thing that you're building, your product. But now there's Crusoe. They are the AI factory that worries about your back end so you can focus on your code and their hardware has been designed specifically for AI development so they're going to make sure that your models run with unparalleled performance every time head to cruso.ai slash build to apply and receive one hundred thousand dollars in credits for virtualized NVIDIA.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I cancel those to be good to the restaurant. It was unbelievable of an unlock. Now, if I had asked, I would have been embarrassed to ask an American to do this because I would seem to be...”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they're so stoked to make you happy as an Athena assistant that when I ask them, get me, this is a stupid thing, but I'm a foodie. People know that I talk about it. When I went to Mexico City recently, I said, here are my subscriptions, monocle.com, Kanye Nestraveler, Eater. These are the publications I like to look for for hotels. I like design hotels, restaurants. I like high. I like low. I like the low street food, like the best stuff that Anthony Bourdain might go after. And then the high end. It's kind of like an Anthea Bourdain strategy. Putting all that aside. I said, I'm going to Mexico City. I want a high and a low. I want a 5.30 and a 730 reservation. Book it, research it from these places, rank it, tell me which ones have. Michelin stars, tell me which ones are in Yelp, tell me the rating here. This is like two or three days of work, maybe, two days of work. And then book 10 reservations. So I don't have to even think about.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably well, you bring this up when I was doing Mahalo, when you were doing thumbtack, we were all experimenting with the Philippines and other locations where information workers were doing really well. I've stacked two of them, and I can tell you there are things that I do that are 75K to 150K positions that I've been able to train them to do. One of them is to sort inbound and tag inbound applications from founders like ThumTech was and Jonathan and Marco were at one point applying. And they are able to tag and say this company has product velocity. This company has technical co-founder. This has a developer. They've worked together before. They're able to like do that organization layer. The reason this is important for me is there are jobs that that group of people are willing to do in the Philippines or whatever location it is that I found Americans just don't want to do. And what happens at work is when somebody doesn't want to do something, they'll do everything else and put that last, even though it might be first on your list as the CEO.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I want you to be my first investor because it got lucky the first time. I need that lucky JCAL first investment, which when I say my heart filled, it was like bubbling up with joy because Jonathan sat across from me at a Greek restaurant as a meeting octopus and said, you know, having you as our first investor, we always thought was like the magic luck charm. So would you do that for me again for Athena? And I was like, would I be the first investor again for an incredibly successful entrepreneur with his best idea ever? Yes, here's a million dollars. Please, Lord, that's why we have this incredibly loyal, great relationship. And you hear me talk about Athena because it's one of the great transformative products like Thumbtalk was, I have two. And what's really amazing about it is I had given up on the concept of an EA. Two is 55K or 72K. But you remove all the recruiting and training part. You do get what you put out. They're not in person, so they're not getting coffee for the person. So you're not getting that.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have two, and what I decided to do in this grand experiment, and to give people a background on this, they're $3,000 a month, Athena trains them. Athena matches them if it's not a fit, they replace them. So I'll tell you my experience previously in the valley, an EA is 100 to 150,000 dollars a year. Most people do not want to be in that position for more than one year, six months, 18 months. They see it as like, I'm going to be an EA for a venture capitalist, a CEO, an executive, and I'm going to use it as a springboard. And therefore, you're spending more time replacing your previous EA than you are with an EA. So they'll stay for 12 months and you spend another six months finding one. You find that one. Turns out they're not great. You overpaid them. You got to fire them. It then has people throw up their hands and say, I'm not going to have any A, which is what most founders do. And this is why when you pitch me the concept of Athena, I said, are you raising? And you said from you.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get your company set up the right way. Let's shift to two years ago. You texted me like just coming out of the pandemic. He said, Hey, can we get something to eat? Jonathan, you know, you were the first investor in Thumbdack. I want to talk to you about my new project. And I said, immediately, like, yes, let's do it. Yeah, take us back to that dinner and what you build with Athena.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unpack that. How so? What was your experience directly with rule off the team at Sequoia, whatever, in terms of expanding the”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And really interestingly, it was one of my first five Sequoia Scout investments. I'm here at Sequoia today where Rulef created the Scouts program, both of them. And they used the Scouts program to explicitly come up with an early warning signal for quality startups, and they wound up doing your series B.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember that really shitty office you had. And it was like a dumpy kitchen and we were in the kitchen at like two awkwardly sized tables that didn't balance properly. It was proper startup. Proper startup.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Past people would then go to your house to give you a quote and then rob your house, you know, and you might do something stupid like, oh, the gatecoat's one, two, three, four. Go ahead and come on in. You had a verified ID. Somebody uploaded their driver's license, or somebody you verified their mailing address by sending a postcard to them. This was like mind-blowing stuff at the time. Maybe talk a little bit about that, and then we'll get into Athena. I mean,”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredible. Really simple idea. I remember a lot of those early investments, Jonathan, they inform what I do when we have scaled the firm to a hundred investments a year, 150 investments a year. And one of them was product velocity or people who are really good at design. And I don't know if it was you or Marco or who on the team was the standard bearer of design and of product velocity. But when I saw those two things with your firm specifically and then later with Calm and later with Superhuman and later with Robin Hood, something clicked in my mind, things are not designed well, or UX is not magical UXer experience doesn't happen by accident. It happens because somebody deliberately made it so. And I'm thinking about the first version of Thumbtack. And when people were using Craigslist, somebody had the insight, well, what if somebody from Craigslist comes and robs your house, which was a thing in the...”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct, which was. Well, I just had this. I was talking to Ruloff at the time and Michael Moritz and the team at Scoat where I'm actually today because we just had our accelerator class graduate and I didn't have an accelerator back then, but I just did the very simple thing, which was tell us your idea. And then here are actual real angel investors, not lawyers, accountants, recruiters trying to sell you something. And you don't need to pay me. Why don't you need to pay me? It's just burgers and beers would do it at somebody's house. We'll have the angels pay because they're rich. The end full stop. And so very proud of all the work you did at Thumbtack. Tremendous success that company's become. The original idea a marketplace for services, but it was like a directory a bit more. The first version was like a Yelp directory just of services, correct? And then it went to this cost per lead, hey, tell us what you're trying to accomplish, fill out a dossier of, hey, I want to paint my house or I want to paint the cabinets in the kitchen, et cetera. And then you could get really customized quotes. Yeah? Exactly.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazing. It's really interesting what small acts can do in your life. Like at that time, there was no angelist. And I just had lunch with Naval recently. We were reminiscing about, my Lord, how far the industry has come. But at that time, angels, there were like maybe a dozen in each of the major cities, a half dozen in New York, a half dozen in LA, two dozen in San Francisco. And it was really hard to figure out who they were, but they were charging founders Alex $5,000 to go to Koretsu Forum and these other things. Oh, that's right.”
2025-12-04 · This Week in Startups · Getting past the "Cardinal Sins of Delegating" with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source