John Gannon, Co-Founder of Going VC | How To Get A Job In Venture Capital

Welcome to Success Story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host, Scott DeClaire. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to start and scale a business. HubSpot podcast network hosts act as on-demand mentors for businesses, entrepreneurs start up scale ups through practical tips and inspirational stories. Listen, learn and grow with the HubSpot podcast network at HubSpot.com slash podcast network. Today, my guest is John Ganon. John is the founder of Going VC, which is a cohort-based educational program, as well as the VC careers newsletter, which is the single largest newsletter in existence that matches potential VC career opportunities and job opportunities with people that are looking for their next move or potentially looking to pivot careers or to start fresh by going into a VC job. He noticed a gap between the talent that wants to get into VC and the education surrounding how to actually navigate that process. John had several successful career positions before he started his own thing. He worked at Amazon, VM Turbo, VMware, Science, Fox Sports.com. He was an early stage VC himself at L Capital Partners before he built this incredible community focused on not only educating about VCs, but helping bridge that talent gap and helping people take the next step in their career. Some of the things we spoke about, how to get a job in venture capital, how do VCs make money tips for people that are looking to pivot in their career and to go into VC. We also spoke from the entrepreneurial perspective because he works with so many VCs, he's worked with startups, he's been a VC himself. What should entrepreneurs look for when aligning with a VC? What type of value ad does a VC bring to an entrepreneur outside of potentially just money? And then of course we spoke through his origin story and some of the things that I spoke about, how he basically built his career, built his side hustle that's now turned into a highly profitable business going VC and VC careers newsletter while he was actually still working. So VC lessons, entrepreneurial lessons for any entrepreneur, but also entrepreneurial lessons for somebody who's looking to start a side hustle, John has some great tips. So without further ado, this is John Ganon founder of going VC and the VC careers newsletter. Yeah, yeah, I've definitely spanned both VCs and startups and earlier Michael. So like you mentioned, early in my career, I worked for a company, this is back in 2003 actually is when I started with when there were about 300 people and I was a company called VMware and that was really my first pace of a true breakout category defining company and spent approximately four years there and it was just a complete rocket ship when a company is growing basically doubling year over year consistently. It is an amazing career growth experience because they're growing so fast that there's literally not enough people to do all the work to sort of keep the rocket ship moving up into the right. And so I had a great experience there and met a lot of folks who I continue to stay in touch with till this day. The other thing that it really helped me sort of do is when I later decided I wanted to move into the venture capital space after business school having been fortunate to be at a category creating category defining company that was something that was incredibly helpful to me when I was trying to convince venture capital firms that I was someone who could come in and actually add value to what they were doing on day one and be differentiated in terms of the types of investment opportunities and investment pieces that I bring to the table. And correct me if I'm wrong but your path is not a traditional path into venture capital because from what I understand you're going you're an analyst and then you progress from there right and you're just pure finance and they don't have careers in tech. So how did that how did you parlay that is that how it sort of progressed for you? Yeah I think it's over the recent years I think it's changed a bit I think what you said was absolutely true back when I was sort of getting started in the VC world around 2007 2008 where you definitely thought a lot more people coming up through sort of a finance background like you said what we're seeing now more so is that people are going out and getting operating experience adventure back startup maybe they're a VP of marketing or they're a product manager or they work in engineering or something like that and they take that experience from from the startup and basically then take those learnings and and apply them to to try and break in the venture capital sometimes it's because or it's through the fact that the company they worked for actually was invested by a bunch of venture invested in by a bunch of venture capital firm and so there's there's certainly a path to sort of connect with with the investors through those kinds of relationships but in this market as well just given the proliferation of capital right there's a lot of capital out there and just reading tech front every day or really anything in the news you can you can see that but there's been a proliferation of a VC firm of angel investors and and sort of hybrids in between and I think one of the things that I think people maybe don't know about trying to work their way into the venture capital industry is sure you can go to my blog and you can see we post maybe 200 new jobs a month in the VP space but for all of those jobs there's a whole set of opportunities that are actually completely off the radar with firms who just simply choose not to sort of share those opportunities publicly but end up hiring through their networks and referrals and things like that which has a variety of challenges as well especially when you look at VC in an industry where from a diversity inclusion perspective perspective has not done well all but but but there are you know multiple ways to sort of get involved and and one more piece of that which I think is really important and sort of ties into some of my work with going VC which is really a platform business where we have a cohort based education program but tied to that we also have an investment arm and we've gone out and we've invested now in close to 20 early stage companies and we've also built out through our community a scouting network where the people who are in the program if they choose to actually go out source companies do do diligence on those companies and going VC partners which is our investment arm will actually invest in in some of these these companies and so that's you know for me at least right clearly I didn't apply for that job it's something we just kind of created as part of of going VC and we see similar things now where you're seeing angel investors really kind of professionalized their work in a way where instead of writing 10 or 25k checks on a per deal basis they're actually rounding up maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars from people in their network and then as a single face to the entrepreneur writing a single check into their company but basically bringing along all this capital that they've in essence raised for on behalf of that entrepreneur so there's a lot of interesting things going on so let's so I want to go into some of those nuances of of the current state of venture capital the first I want to just understand because you've built out something very impressive forget the fact you have tons of learnings about venture capital investment I guess why did you even start this venture why did you start building this newsletter this cohort in this community because you had a successful career and just walk me through I guess the timeline a little bit because you said it started back in 2008 were you still actively part of L capital or another firm at the time or were you back into detect yeah happy to walk through the origin story for for me it really started in 2006 when I got that phone call from the director of admissions at Columbia Business School saying that I was accepted in that I was going to be enrolling in early 2007 and the reason that was important in the overall journey is because I don't remember sort of why I decided to do this but I decided to start blogging I think it was even that day about my business school experience and so during business school I was blogging frequently about specifically what I was like to go to Columbia about my specific program and as I did that I sort of enjoyed doing it but I also enjoyed getting feedback outreach from folks who would come to me either in person or email me and say hey I read your blog it's great I'm learning a lot about Columbia it's got great tips and and you know that really is is energizing to get that kind of feedback and so I knew what that felt like even though what I was writing was really for a very sort of specific and frankly quite small audience at the end of the day but I carried that with me when I graduated because I went through what everyone who's gone through a venture capital job search knows is an extremely long job search process so venture capital is not the type of industry where it's a three to six months third it's usually at least a year and maybe even even more a year and so I spent all my time in business school really trying to really trying to bring into the industry and through that process there wasn't actually a lot of information out there like there is today so again rewind like 12 13 years there were folks like Fred Wilson Bradsell who who were blogging then there were a few other folks but it wasn't to the degree today that we have where there's literally hundreds of thousands of VC blogs and a lot more transparency around this information so during that that journey and during that path and it is pretty lonely one in the sense that I could maybe count three or four other people in our school who actually wanted to go down that same path is when I got the job I actually said hey why don't I create a resource or free resource where I'll just take the stuff that helped me and I'll put it up there and I'll make it available for everyone to in essence see and look at and and learn from and and that's really where the blog started and then over the years I added the job posting I added the email newsletter which in retrospect was a mistake to not add that on day one definitely I think missed out on maybe an opportunity there but I'm definitely happy with with how things have certainly turned out over the years and in sort of how it's grown and there's kind of a community around it as well I think it's a great resource and I and I when I first sort of did a little bit more research into into what you do it was a little bit it was new to me I've never seen anything really like this and I'm not actively looking for a job in venture capital so probably if I did a little bit more research I could probably but you are still the first one that I've ever seen who has proactively been putting out newsletters and one not in the VC world and I guess it just never thought I never thought about it as something that had a huge community around it like you know I the first thing I mentioned was it's people coming from finance going into this career field so I'm obviously mistaken and I appreciate that you do this because I think that a lot of people can pass operators can possibly make jumps into venture capital and be a valuable asset for some of these firms trying to understand you know who's going to be successful who who isn't going to be successful and so on and so forth so there's a lot of value I think that this brings to the table for people that are working in early stage startup and trying to figure out what's another option or an alternative option for my career so I guess the question is you teach these things probably in the cohort in the newsletter but what are what are some tips for people that do want to get a job in venture capital what do they need to do because you mentioned it's not an easy process yeah so if you want to dig into a bit around how I just want to actually get a venture capital job one thing I like to to talk about is what I call the five-legged stool and the five-legged stool is really a way to think about like what are the what are the most important things to a VC because if you put yourself in their shoes you're going to be in a much better position to understand what they need what they want and how to add value to them and so in terms of what are those five legs what are those things that VC's care about so one of the most important things is deal flow so finding companies that are investible and and and ideally finding those companies before other people before it gets competitive so that's one aspect there's also for their existing portfolio companies another leg of the stool is in essence helping those existing companies go out and raise more money right so if I'm Cliner Perkins and I do a series A in a company that company's probably going to need a series B right and there's going to be an investor that that's going to sub write that series B and so being able to assist in terms of helping other companies that have already raised venture money kind of go to that next round is another important piece of the job of being a VC and if you can help with VC with that through your network that's another big value ad the third is around the investors in the venture capital fund themselves so they're called limited partners and so limited partners are could be high net worth individuals but if you look at like really big venture funds like the Sequoia's and the Cliner Perkins is they're getting their money from large endowment university endowment you know folks like the rocker faller foundation right like a lot of these really large long standing institutions are are ones that are investing in venture capital and so if you as a job seeker through your network of access to people in those world or high net worth individuals who are interested in investing in venture funds or in startups that can definitely be a value ad particularly for newer funds which are earlier on in their journey where they've not necessarily walked up the Princeton down to write them $20 million check but maybe they're raising a $5 million fund and so someone who can write 100 gay check is actually quite meaningful to them right so that's another area in terms of that and value hiring is another piece so if I'm a VC and I've got maybe I'm on the board of 670 companies one of the most important things that I'm trying to do is make sure that company is staffed properly has the best talent and although I'm not directly responsible for it my CEOs of those companies that I work with are going to kind of expect that I'm going to be sending them really high quality folks who could potentially become employees or executives at those companies and so if you can help with that three-year personal network that's another way you can add value to a to a VC straight away and then there's a kind of a fifth bucket which is around business development sales and M&A which is if you can help a VC's portfolio get in front of people who can buy their products buy their company or otherwise partner that's a big value ad as well so as a job seeker it's kind of up to you to like inventory your network and your skills and your interest and figure out out of those five legs you're not going to knock all of them out of the park but there's probably a couple that you would kind of grab it to or have a strengthen and those are the things that you'd want to lean on in terms of how you want to conduct your search and in sort of which firms you might want to approach with what kind of pitch and then how would you deliver value to them to really show them before you even have a job that you're someone who could actually do the job. Do you have examples of how somebody would would show value because it seems like for some jobs it seems like a simple project or something could show some sort of value to a hiring manager but for a venture capital firm would it be an introduction to somebody I guess it depends on what what value you bring to the table but it seems like it's a big ask before you even sit down with somebody to show value so you have an idea of how you could do that. So to make sure I understand the question you're asking how specifically can I candidate show value in one of those areas. Yeah sure so deal flow is a great one to talk about because it's one that's critical right to a VC they have to make new investments and so they need deal flow they need to be ideally getting to these companies before other folks do and so an example would be maybe you went to to school with a bunch of folks who out of that group there's a few who maybe they started their own businesses while they were in school or maybe they were just like insanely smart and they were the kind of people where you looked at and you said you know that person is they're gonna really do great things in their career so if you are in touch with those kinds of people from could be your childhood to be from your college experience could be people you've worked with previously kind of keeping tabs on what they're working on and if you see them working on a new thing that looks like something that could fit into the venture back start of space i.e a software company and internet company right those those types of things then if you're trying to build relationships with vcs those are the kind of folks where you want to try to be that connection basically between the people from your network and and the vcs because it's very compelling if you're you know starting to develop a relationship with a vcs to be able to come to them and say hi you know this is um i'd like to introduce you to my friend gent she started this amazing software company she was at the top of our class at Penn State and you know I really would highly recommend that you take a look at this company and and oh by the way they've already got some paying customers or you know whatever the case may be in terms of their status like that is a great way to both deepen a relationship with a vcs but also can give you a reason to get in touch with vcs as well um one of the things that i talk a lot about and we focus on our going vcs program is developing what we call an investment thesis and an investment thesis is really your sort of unique view on a certain sector or or market and by sort of a a well-defined view what i mean by that is having the ability to deep dive on that entire sector the companies that are in that sector both the big ones that are maybe public and also the smaller ones that are just getting funded and everyone in between and then having a really specific angle in terms of which types of companies in that sector you would invest in and why so as someone who's trying to get in touch with vcs or get them interested it's it's also quite compelling to to actually create uh almost in a written form uh pretty commonly you might see a 15 20 slide deck that really articulates that thesis and i've seen folks in our program create these investment uh thesis sort of document them and then share the amount of links in and i just emailed my list about this actually a couple of days ago uh there was a a team of folks who were in my going DC program two people um they they created investment thesis around ag tech uh they they posted it and the the post got over 30 i checked the other day got over 30 comments and over 100 reactions and even got an inbound at least one inbound and feeling one i know about there could be more from a vcs said hey i saw the investment thesis i'd love to talk to you right which is what you want but like that is going the other way where they're coming to you which is is obviously superior to you going and in sort of uh asking someone if they have any kind of opportunity very interesting um thank you for breaking that down so the one of the thing that i really wanted to unpack um because again if somebody isn't in this space they may not know how do vcs make money and and i got this i got this point i was reading your blog and i was learning about uh carry and i don't know much about carry so i'm curious about where the money comes from what are the expectations going into a career in venture capital are you expecting to you know make as much money as i'm assuming somebody would presume they would in venture capital which outside looking in it seems like they they all do quite well um or are the expectations a little bit out of touch with reality yeah for for a junior investment professional there's probably better ways you can make money so it definitely wouldn't say you you might do better as an investment banker in your really career than you would as a as a vc for the funds that are successful they are generating carried or carried interest like you said and in sort of the way at works at a high level is uh these these vcs right they they they have investors in their own fund right so let's say they go out and raise uh just to keep the numbers simple a uh a ten million dollar fund well the way carried interest works is if they invest that ten million and then they get back that ten million uh plus another ten million right so they they've basically doubled the doubled the money and i'm simplifying it but there's a little more than you want in here but this is basically how it works no that's so so that ten million in gain what the carried interest is is a piece of the game and typically with most venture firms that the that percentage is 20 percent so if we talk about ten million in gain 20 percent would be two million and if you're looking at early stage venture capital it it could be six seven eight ten years yes a company actually sells right and generates returns right while he's playing out so in terms of a way to say to get rich quick it's definitely not that because you need to have a fund that generating positive returns and and like i said it takes a long time for that to happen now for funds that are uh larger they uh it can be more financially lucrative um even without the carry from the perspective that if you look at a firm like a very large firm like uh say uh it's according their lifetime as a fund by the billion right and the other piece the VC comp is it comes out of the uh they call it a management fee which is like typically around two percent of the uh total amount of capital and it's uh it's taken out each year and it kind of trends down over time because the investment cycle sort of slows down as you deploy more of the capital but if you think about a firm that maybe has two or three funds running in parallel which you often see because a firm may raise a fund and then raise another one in two or three years those management fees kind of stack up and so salary wise it's a larger firm you could definitely expect to have a base salary uh that's uh you know that's a bit higher than at a firm that say maybe only has fifty million dollars in assets under management there's just not as much of that that two percent is just a lot a lot smaller is because you said there's a surplus of capital because we see we see so many companies being invested in is this um do you feel like the the uh the industry is is reaching a point where uh many of the investments will no longer see positive returns or fizzle out or flare out or die out and there's poor investments being made like one notable is uh we work and obviously that's a sort of like a Hollywood uh style investment that didn't didn't go so well so do you see more of these events happening or do you think it's a healthy market and the companies that are being invested in are going to yield the returns that are expected i just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode hub spot hub spots crm is the easiest tool you can ever find to align your team there are two features that you need in a crm that optimize every activity your team does it's the ability to communicate meaning chat email etc messaging as well as a unified system of record your company is going to use a crm to manage conversations with prospects and customers throughout all stages of the buyer journey and as your company grows these conversations get a little bit more difficult information make it lost communication may 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hub spots various price points and flexible pricing any company at any stage can take advantage of the various features that hub spot has to offer starting with free and allowing for more scalability and complexity as your organization grows learn how to scale your company without scaling complexity at hubspot.com all right let's get back to the show well with with so much capital going into the industry as of late you and i think this would be true even rewind four or five years ago like there's always going to be companies that that maybe shouldn't be funded but but someone's willing to fund them so they they raise money and many of those companies will will play them out but i think what's maybe more interesting is that valuation at the sort of the the price at which the companies are being invested in are universally off across the board so later stage companies pre IPO companies growth equity sort of stage companies those valuation you sort of started to go up i would say first in the last few years but now we're seeing a trickle-down where even companies at the seed and pre seed stage pre seed stage are seeing those valuations up i couldn't put you in exact percentage but they're definitely higher directionally than say three or four years ago and so what that means for the VCs is in some cases because they're not able to buy as much ownership in these companies for the same amount of capital the return profile is potentially going to be lower now VCs are his business so if they get if they invest in the next uber if they made a billion versus 900 million like you know if they sort of comes out on the wash and you know i don't think anyone's going to complain if they return you know 50 60 times the amount of capital in a fund to their investors which that would be a smash it by the way that those happen all the time no i know i know now what about what about for the investor though like flip the script so for the investor if if companies are being they have higher valuations um is there more pressure on the on the entrepreneurs excuse me is there more in press is there more pressure on the entrepreneur to perform to reach milestones quicker to raise their next series quicker is it is it almost detrimental on the on the health of a company to you know venture investors right they they they want companies to move as quickly as possible you know they they're they're they can't necessarily wait 20 years for them to be able to get returns right they they want to get returns as soon as possible and so there's there's that dynamic another dynamic is VCs you know they want to they want to see their companies frankly get get marked up by other firms and subsequent rounds and this can come into place especially with newer firms where maybe they're trying to establish a track record and so they're not going to have a company exit necessarily within two or three years but if they can show that there's been some markups of existing companies where they went on raised another round or the higher valuation um that that's a that's a positive for that that's firm and I think specifically in this market what we're definitely seeing is more preemptive financing's where you'll see a company maybe raise a seed round and then six months later they'll raise a series a opportunistically whereas normally you wouldn't go out and raise an eight six months after you raise your seed you probably take that seed a year or so and then go out and raise so I think that's a good example of sort of the uh the level of uh of profit I guess in the market and and would you recommend um again for entrepreneurs you we mentioned before how operators are moving into venture capital roles do you recommend that entrepreneurs find roles that prioritize operators on their team versus firms that don't I don't know if that's a fair question or firms exist that don't have operators I'm sure some do smaller ones um what's your opinion on that in terms of how to position yourself as an entrepreneur if you're looking to break into VC there's a couple of angles you could take and and you you would have to stuff it out based on the firm so there's some BC firms that very clearly you look at the staff it's all former operators right so those are definitely firms that that would probably look at your background as an entrepreneur and and that would resonate to a certain degree with them not like guarantee you would get a job or anything but but that would be almost like table stakes to even sort of get in the room with them but I think there's also an angle where you know I've seen firms where they have actually they they're sort of lifetime investors and were non operators but they saw value to bring an entrepreneur in to basically round them out because you do I don't think there's any world where that background is not valuable when it comes to investing like operating experience I think it's always it always helps that it probably sometimes can can create some challenges as well my overall it's in that positive so I think in those cases with firms who maybe don't have a strong operator to sort of position yourself as that you can sort of maybe fill that gap I don't know if I'd say it is bluntly but I think that might be more than an angle but you'd want to take no it's fair it's yeah no I that that was my I guess it was just wondering like wondering where you should end up as an entrepreneur what where can you provide the most value but also at the same time where where's the best environment for you that's also important if you're looking for career I was actually referring to as an entrepreneur trying to raise money but also in the in the sense of looking for a career option that also makes sense to me um one thing and I guess just I guess to to pick your brain on the on the current state of of investment explain to me something and I'm trying to understand is I'm trying to wrap my head around it so spacks so why are those more relevant now I know they've been around for a while what place do they have in venture capital I know that Chimath took I guess it was social capital he DeSofia holdings and they bought a 49% stake in Virgin Galactic Bill Ackman raised a four billion dollars back these are all obviously topical now what place do they have are they going to be relevant long term are they just a fad are these things that people should care and learn about just curious you know in fact that I'll admit I'm not an expert but I'll give you my quick take on it and folks can can can run with or not with fact it seems like it's a really another vehicle for a company it shareholders to an essence experience and exit right so there's there's facts there's obviously traditional ideas direct listing right secondary sales where you have companies just selling or people within companies selling shares on the private market so if another I guess tool in the toolkit in terms of getting liquidity for employees or existing investors so they're they're just another they're not they're another vehicle it's it's something that can be used but in terms of you know your expertise like if somebody's looking for a career these these have no bear these are just something else that you should understand as you start to venture out of this world is something that could be an option that you may have to you know I guess facilitate with an organization or a company you're trying to take public because that's obviously the end goal I'm assuming through the various rounds and then you have the end goal of actually IPO-ing or doing some sort of public listing yeah for VC job-seeker if you will you definitely want to understand facts you want to understand what what's sort of the major news around them in terms of are there some factories only then are tied to certain high-profile companies but it's probably not the thing you're going to run into day-to-day as a VC if you were going to put like on the priority list of like having great deal flow versus understanding facts like understands back wouldn't even be on the list frankly. Gotcha okay gotcha fair enough okay so that was pretty I appreciate that so we went we went pretty deep on on some advice for people looking to get into to VC and venture capital careers is there any other points that you wanted to bring up because I wanted to I want to just pull out some career lessons from you over your career that will be good for our audience but is there any other pointers tips for people that want to go into venture capital careers that we didn't touch on that I wasn't smart enough to ask you let me know happy to share one other thing that I think is super important when I actually think it really applies to all careers but it's particularly important and well networked industry like VC and startup which is going to your interviews whether they're formal or informal over eventually a couple of coffee because you can actually spend time with people in person again now is really coming with a prepared mind about how you can help that person and like having a couple specific ideas in mind and using the five-legged school framework that I talked about there's no reason that before you have that next interview or that next coffee meeting you couldn't take 15 or 20 minutes to think about that person that firm and then look into your LinkedIn your Rolex whatever you want to use to sort of track where you're connected to and come up with a couple of ideas for them and I do this myself I was meeting with the CEO of a company backed by NEA and in Benchmark enterprise software company and I was meeting with the CEO and before I met with him I went to their jobs page and I saw that they were hiring and then I went to him and say oh I saw your hiring for this position there's someone I know who could be great do you want to talk to them right and you're not going to hit it every time in terms of having an idea or a good idea but if you practice that over the course of the hundreds of thousands of meetings you're going to have over your career you start to kind of build a muffler on it and it's just an opportunity to really add value immediately to someone and really make a great first impression right BC is made a ton of people and it's hard to be someone who they they remember and doing things like that and hey help them remember and be if you get back in touch with them they're more likely to remember whatever the thing is that you suggested or that you help them with or that connection you made very good good advice and I think that is that's that's incredible just general career advice um you made a good point that in a in an industry that is as high network where they do see as many people as as they do because that's literally every single day is meetings with brand new people trying to pitch them on themselves and their product and their company um you have to show a little bit more you have to bring a little bit more to the table to stand out so that's very very good advice um okay so some lessons from your career uh i want to understand just a few items because you've had success in building your community your newsletter your cohort uh so as you've built this out what was the biggest challenge that you faced in building this out and how did you overcome it these things in terms of in the venture capital space over the course of my career these different programs courses the newsletter center is really time and how do you maximize your time so that you're able to work on those things you're able to get a reasonable amount of rest you're able to spend time with your family on married after kids so that's pretty important to me if you're working full-time somewhere and you're doing these other things right how do you balance it all and so one of i would say one of the best sort of career decisions i made and this was going on i want to say maybe seven years ago now is i hired a virtual assistant and i had them help me with everything from making appointments for me with a doctor to putting up content on my blog and it really taught me that you can get an incredible amount of leverage if you're willing to delegate even things that you might by default say oh i can just go do that myself like oh i can call the doctor myself or oh i can i can find a store that that sells that thing myself right but actually delegating it and being able to do that delegation in a way that is not dependent on time and what i mean by that is if on a Saturday i remember that next week i need to go and find a gluten-free birthday cake which is like a real thing that that's like i've had to do is being able to email someone say hey i need to find a gluten-free birthday cake and i need to be able to pick it up next week and and for them to go and do that legwork and that that's kind of a personal example and then on the side of the blog for example started within the last several years posting actual jobs to the blog originally just career advice and then i started posting jobs and i would not personally be able to post the 150 plus jobs that i post on a blog every month without help right it just wouldn't happen and so being able to really scale that by first working with a virtual assistant and now i work with a bunch of folks who are sort of part-time who work with me on that versus a virtual assistant who's been doing all manner of personal assisting and professional things so that is one thing i would say is you know anyone who just to keep it simple you know if you're making say 100k or more a year i would argue that you should have an assist. Yeah very good advice very good advice and actually you know that's the number one thing that i think that people who are just starting to do their own thing haven't acclimated to and really really gotten used to hiring somebody to do these small little things that you think you can do why can't i do them myself that's silly i'm not going to face somebody but the second you do that you realize the momentum of the thing you're building or the thing you're doing it just seems to take off like it's just it's incredible because then you realize like you said you said it perfectly the levers that you have very very very very smart advice and i i do think that you know if you are making over a hundred k there's better things that you can do with your time regardless of whether or not you have a side hustle um but at the end of the day i'm a big fan of building out your own personal brand obviously so i think that everybody should be focusing and trying to do that regardless but uh i'm very very smart um in okay i wanted to throw one more thing because i'm really passionate about this the topic and and i don't actually write or talk a lot about it just by virtue of like i focus a lot on on beefy stuff but in terms of building like like it may seem daunting to like oh i got time to go and like find this person and hire them and then i have to figure out what to give them right there's like five six seven steps and and you're not even going to get the step two before you're like this seems like too much i'm not going to do it right but you can really start to build that muscle by using task-based virtual assistant services or marketplaces so fiber is one where you can hire someone to do a very simple task for you could be proofry in a document it could be some basic internet research there's one i use fiber uh there's one i use called fancy hand which is like kind of a funny name but uh basically it's a task-based virtual assistant service i i'm going to be doing some travel soon and so literally last night i was pinging them with a bunch of requests kind of researching the place we're going and things we should do and where we should be and and and things like that and it's those are very low risk ways to like learn how to work with an assistant or someone who would have the same profile as an assistant and just like starting there and like kind of building that muscle and you'll have an aha moment when you do that like when you send someone a document to proofread and they find six things that you wouldn't have found and it made your work better it made your blog post better maybe it made the thing you're going to give your boss tomorrow better right like i just uh there's a lot of opportunity and i think venture backable type opportunities in and around that space not necessarily virtual assistant companies but i think there's a world where again there will be a lot of people who will have either dedicated or they'll be leveraging some of these per task type of services to kind of give them superpowers basically yeah to allow them to be 10x more productive in their day job or 10x more productive in terms of whatever business they might be building yeah no that's good i've never heard of fancy hands before i use upward myself five or i've used a lot i'm fancy hands i got to check that out that's a new one but hey the good advice um okay what would be one lesson that you could tell your younger self one lesson that i could tell my younger self would be that there's no such thing as a once in a lifetime opportunity so when i was younger i would often see some kind of a job and i say oh that that's that's a once in a lifetime opportunity and i think if you are focus on your career and kind of moving forward in it you'll you'll kind of i think learn this lesson on your own in that you'll you'll start to realize that there's no such thing there's just a lot of great opportunities if you are able to sort of be in the right place at the right time frankly but also in terms of just you know really trying to do sort of the best job that you can it sounds a little kind of trite but it's true and you know i think those things if you're doing those things and catch a few lucky breaks or meet sort of the right people along the way that you're going to see lots of things that seem like once in a lifetime opportunities so kind of nullifying the whole once in a lifetime opportunity yeah very good um what's uh who is one person that had a major impact on your life and what was that impact what did you learn from that person so the person that influenced me the most in terms of my career and sort of how I approach work is my dad so i remember growing up my dad uh my parents were divorced my dad had a day job but also he did a lot of work on side he did work on both he actually did work at the daycare center where i used to go to sort of defray the cost of of the daycare as well and i remember going with him like to the daycare center on weekend for him to do that work and i don't know for sure but i think that made a big impression on me in terms of you know really you know kind of working hard um providing and uh you know i think that's that really rub rubbed off on me for sure that that work ethics that he hadn't still has you know he's retired but he's still still working on both and and doing things like that so yeah i figured i'd have to say my dad good all right um no i appreciate that i appreciate the answer and and it is usually it always does the fall to a parent or somebody close in the family but it's always interesting some of the some of the lessons and some of the like the you know the the things that parents taught us or grandparents taught us that they really had no idea they were teaching us at the time it was just through like day-to-day actions that you sound like an incredible person offsetting the cost of daycare by working there that's that's that's uh that's hard that's that's uh that's uh that's uh that's a that's a hard working man good good honor um uh a recommendation for the audience uh for a book a podcast something that they should go check out um they can learn from the you obviously have enjoyed yeah in terms of uh book recommendation there's two books that i i think are excellent and one of them i actually gift pretty frequently to folks in going to be feared just other people who who work with me so the first book is called Million Dollar Consulting and it's by Alan White and he is a lifelong sort of solo practitioner management consultant and he's built a million at the point probably a lot more practice as a solo practitioner consulting which is pretty impressive and the book is just it's a great tutorial and how to be a professional how to self consultatively it's uh got some great stories in it it's it's an excellent book highly recommend it good and then there's a marketing author sort of guru type and i mean guru in in in a complimentary way it's not used in a complimentary way but but in this case it is is there's a uh uh Jay Abraham who has written a few books and the book that i felt was it's been really it's a book i actually go back to constantly i gift it and it has really unique perspectives like a lot of business books are kind of saying the same thing in my opinion uh for better for worse this is a book with a lot of unique ideas i've not seen anywhere else and it's called uh getting everything that you can with all that you got i think that's the title and have to go back on amazon it's a bit of a mouthful of the title but if you look up Jay Abraham on amazon you can find his book it's got a white cover black writing on it and it it's great and in one of the things he really pushes in that book calls it the strategy of preeminent and that is really a strategy where similar why i was talking about before where you're really trying to figure out how do i add value to this person that i'm trying to work for or this person that i want to partner with or this person that i want to sell to and really coming out of from a perspective of of helping them in in sort of thinking of them as you know as a as it is almost like a trust in friends what would a friend do to really help this person move forward with whatever they're trying to do he's got a lot of other interesting things around different revenue models business models and things like that that are pretty creative and interesting so yeah that's why i really like as well those are two books that have never been brought up on the show and i do i do know the book million dollar consulting um i don't i don't know the second one i'm gonna have to look it up i'm gonna have to listen back and get that title and and go pull it off amazon um but no this is a great recommendation thank you very much i appreciate it because a lot a lot of the books end up you know they end up being the same but those two brand new ones so i appreciate that a lot um okay uh last question before i get some socials and web from you um this is this is i guess the most important question in my opinion um what does success look like and mean to you success to me means having having much control over your time and how you spend it as possible it's it's not about the money per se it's really about on a given day am i working on the things that i want to work on and am i not working on the things that i don't want to work on am i able to spend time with the people i want to spend time with i'm able to have a a schedule where i can prioritize family over work and and and things like that i i think to me that is what what success is and i don't think i'm i'm there yet but i do certainly think that as someone who now is uh sort of early 40 you know i think i'm a lot further along than i was in my early 20 so i guess i'm making progress no it's very good good um and then obviously uh where do we connect with you your social your website where can people subscribe and go check out your newsletter yeah happy to share some of the socials and links and whatnot so twitter is john and gannon my blog is at johnganon blog.com which has a lot of these vc resources and then there's my going vc uh program and there's a lot of educational content there as well and that's at goingvc.com