Wes Kao - Marketing Executive, Entrepreneur, and Advisor | Persuasive Communication

Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. HubSpot has been a huge supporter of the show. They have so many tools that can help your business. The one that I want to just mention today so you go check it out is their new AI chatbot. It's called campaign assistant and it's a totally free to use AI tool made for marketers and business leaders who spend hours a day on content creation. Campaign assistant will transform the way you build marketing campaigns at scale, craft personalized emails, ads and landing pages in a matter of minutes. Just pick the content type, add key selling points, and let AI take it from there. It works seamlessly with all of HubSpot's marketing and sales tools to scale your output across email, social, and more. So AI your way to your most effective campaigns yet at HubSpot.com slash campaign-assistant. Hey everyone, I'm WestKO. I am co-founder of Maven. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area about 45 minutes outside of the city and a middle child. I think I've always been pretty entrepreneurial. Growing up so close to Silicon Valley, so close to the startup ecosystem. This was the late 80s, early 90s where there wasn't even that much of a startup scene. But I think that spirit of innovation was always really present in when I was growing up. So I think one of my most formative experiences was when I was 16, I started a nonprofit cult packs of love where I donated backpacks and school supplies to foster kids, to family resource centers, to domestic violence centers, homeless shelters. And before then, I'd never really planned anything bigger than birthday party before. So when I had this grand vision of creating this nonprofit, I realized very soon that it was easier said than done. And at that point, I had already promised a few shelters that I would donate backpacks. And so that first year I was working on it, I couldn't secure any donations. I went around literally from sort of store to Walmart, Target, Walgreens, asking for donations for pencils, notebooks, backpacks, and all these store managers basically laughed and said, you're a kid trying to get free stuff. Like, don't think we're not onto you. And you know, it was rightfully so. Like, I didn't have any credibility. And I think the one smart thing that I did was that first year after I spent my own money to buy off these backpacks, because I felt really bad that I made this promise. I do it myself. Yeah, I just felt bad that like, you know, I made this promise. And so I bought all myself. What I did do that that was pretty clever was I called the local newspaper and I had them cover the story. And I ended up on the front page of the newspaper. And so the next year that I was fundraising, I took this paper, I bought like 100 copies. And I went around to every single store that I've rejected me and every single one of them ended up donating. So I basically did this for five years until I, you know, for a second year of college, ran this, ran this program and kind of worked my way up the ladder and, you know, traded up every single time. And eventually was talking to district managers to the corporate office at a lot of these retailers, getting donations directly from Jansport, shipping boxes of backpacks to my house, and donated over $40,000 worth of backpacks, starting this all from scratch. And so that was a really formative experience for me. And really, really influenced me to think about leadership and acting as a leader without authority, you know, without a title. How do you make an impact and make things happen, make change happen, even if no one has, you know, granted you this title, granted you this credibility, how can you get, how can you get going and start taking action and then snowball that action gradually, you know, to something bigger and bigger. And I think, I think what was interesting about all that too is that I thought that this, the approach that I had was something that I did because I was learning from trial and error, didn't really know any better, right, fell a lot learned, learned from making all these mistakes. And then, you know, kind of grew something bigger and bigger gradually. But in the last 15 years or so of working within companies, starting companies, you know, with Seth Godin first with all 10 BA, and then now with Gong Bionny, co-founder of Udemy, we started May then last year. It's actually surprisingly similar. Like it really is starting with an insight, figuring out what are the levers and assets that you have, what are the constraints that you're working within, how can you be creative and and and make something happen, built them that people want to engage with, want to participate in, have a story that inspires people. It's, I was surprised that the start journey is kind of that arc looks surprisingly similar. So when that arc that you discovered when you first built out this this nonprofit at 16 and how you leaned into this and you mentioned something, so acting like a founder without actually giving being given that title. So what you're saying is that that's actually a mindset that really lends cadence to a successful startup or a successful venture that you want to take on. So it's just leaning into that acting like a founder from day one and walk me through what that actually is. Is that getting over imposter syndrome? Is that is that just creating something? What is acting like a founder actually mean? Acting like a founder means taking extreme ownership and thinking about how you can take an idea from a nub of an idea to reality. I think founders are relentlessly resourceful. They have to turn a dream into something that is real, something that people can touch and feel and buy and you know, want to pay for. And that's something that you can do regardless of whether you're a founder or not. You know, I think I think that's a missed opportunity for a lot of people working within companies is that you think that, oh, well, I'm not a VP. I'm not a director of something. I'm not a people manager. So I couldn't possibly lead this thing. When in reality, your boss is waiting for you to step up and say, I want to lead this thing. And leading this thing doesn't mean having a grandiose idea and then asking five other people to start working on it and do it just to bring it to life. I have this idea called an end-to-end operator. And I think more and more are workplaces are trending towards needing end-to-end operators. And what that is is if you think about person A versus person B, person A, let's say is a traditional operator. So you might have an idea like, hey, boss, I want to start. I think our branch do videos on LinkedIn to post and grow as we're following. In order to do that, I need to find a operator who can write a script. I need to find a video editor who can splice some things together. I need to find a social media manager who understands social. So that's a person A. Convoluted requires a ton of people to help out. Contrast that with person B. Person B says the same thing. Boss, I have this idea that it's post videos only did to grow as social following. And I'm going to draft a quick script, film it on my iPhone, do some quick editing in iMovie, and then create a fake LinkedIn account so I can post it onto the actual feeds and you can see what it looks like if this were to show up in our customers feeds. And at that point, this is probably going to take two to three hours. I can do it all in a day. You can see if this is something that looks good and feels like it's worth doing and that we can go from there. So person B is an end-to-end operator who has the idea and then the skills motivation and resourcefulness to actually make it happen without making this huge fuss, without making this huge production where they need to loop in all these people. It becomes simply heavy. Your boss is going to say no to things that feel like a ton of work without clear upside. That is just fact. No one wants to commit to a slog if it's unclear. Is this something we even want to do? But if you can show that you yourself can whip something together in relatively decently high fidelity to show what your idea could look like, the world is going to open up for you and you're going to be able to do bigger and bigger projects from there. It might start with posting on LinkedIn and growing social. It might become owning all of social. It might become owning special projects. It can really grow. But you have to be willing to do both the strategy and the execution. And that's a very popular concept for an entrepreneur to think like that. But I think that giving the OK for an employee to think like that is really, that's an incredibly powerful thing. Because most employees, I think, and I'm just making gross, exaggerate assumptions here. I think most people think they fall into that category A. That A version of an operator and that's the confine that they have to stay within. Whereas that's really what that's not what's going to make you successful in your career. And that's really not what a company should even want. They should want that person that's used towards a B. Now, this is an interesting topic for somebody to, is this more a thing of somebody should find an organization that supports this earlier on in their career? Or is this something that you can unlock within your existing organization that you're already, you're already part of? I think the popular kind of first in seeing cancer for a lot of people is going to be A that you should find an org that supports this. I'm actually going to go with B, which is your existing organization is probably going to be really happy if you start doing this. So of course, obviously you can't be an organization where bureaucracy runs so thick and so deep that they don't want people to do anything fine. But I think that it's an excuse that a lot of us make that, oh, my boss wouldn't like that. My boss is just going to tell me no or you know, it's going to be too too long of a process. I think that that's an excuse that that people make. And if we put that excuse aside and and bring the responsibility back to ourselves on how can I convince the people around me that this is a good idea? How can I sell this idea so that they see the benefit to them and to the organization and do our bottom line? So when you when you realize that that's your responsibility that people don't owe you caring about your ideas or listening at all, then you have a higher bar for yourself. And now the problem becomes not I'm going to move around and line that no one's listening to me and it becomes what can I do to better convince you? I think that posture is so much more rewarding. It's so much more filling. It's a lot more fun for, you know, for whoever's working in the company, you know, it's not just for the company. It's actually more fun for you. And I think this shift in mentality means that you're going to be a lot more creative. I think that people are inherently creative, inherently resourceful. So if you change the mental model and your own posture, you know, I don't need to give you more tools to be creative. You already know what to do. It's just that you think you can't do it right now. But if I said actually you can and if you start thinking about how can I convince my boss and make it seem like a win that my boss is going to look great that I'm going to do this, right? Then they're going to be a lot more willing to listen to you. So this is this is I love this and you came see this is what I want to unlock to because or unpacked because you came from like you're obviously very entrepreneurial by nature. Like you started something when you're 16 you grew it you you figured it out you made it work. So you jumping into a company you would be the ideal employee because you would probably maintain that mindset and you would have that creativity. And it's just who you are as a person. Now if I'm a founder and I'm trying to hire somebody and I want to hire somebody that's like you or I want to enable somebody to be like you and to be creative. How do I how do I unlock that in somebody because I think that's the secret that can make an early stage startup exponentially success actually exponentially more successful than if you just hire people that stay within these like you know these very these very restrictive guidelines for the company. If you can hire somebody who can challenge you who can think outside the box who can be creative that's really who I think you need to hire in a startup environment to be successful because you're not going to be able to do everything yourself you're not going to be able to figure out everything yourself and you have to hire people that are better at the things they do than you but also challenge and bring new ideas to the table that's one of the most powerful things that you can unlock in the first few hires. So as a founder how do I get people like you in my company or how do I unlock that mindset in somebody that I hire. Yeah that's a really big question and something that we're dealing with now at Maven. So we're about 20 people and hiring for entrepreneurial doers is really really important. I call them either entrepreneurial doers or strategic doers. Right I don't want just strategists. We're going to think all day and analyze all day. I need people who are also going to do and that mix is it's definitely out there. It can be hard to find and I think training that spirit within your team is super important. I have a concept that I call rigorous thinking and it's the opposite of lazy thinking. Lazy thinking is basically assuming that you're going to put something out there, people are just going to want to buy it, people are going to sign up, people are going to attend, people are going to download without thinking about why and the steps, the logical steps that you're going to take to incentivize your audience. It's making decisions without really thinking clearly about what each step entails. I got this idea from that South Park episode where one character says like I have this idea, step one, the idea, step two, question mark, step three profit. We all laugh at that but I think a lot of us when we propose ideas to our bosses it's like okay here's this great idea and then all of a sudden it's going to work. So rigorous thinking is the opposite. Rigor's thinking is having a systematic way to make decisions that are defensible where you can explain your thought process in rationale where you're thinking about second or third order effects. What are the implications of this down the line? If we pull up into the 30,000 for view, how does this impact other parts of business? How does this impact our own business? Two years from now, what is the level of effort it takes to do this? What's the upside and the payoff? So it's thinking thoroughly about how do we vet this idea to make sure that it's worth doing the first place? And ironically a lot of people will say oh, Wes, well that takes too long. Like needing to think about all these things takes long. Well, doing it and then it exploding and you need to clear up the mess. Also takes a long time right at the end. And so you actually save time by thinking a bit more up front rather than just jumping straight in and just starting to throw spaghetti on the wall. I actually think that this mentality of rigorous thinking actually allows you to experiment more and faster ironically. So this idea of rigorous thinking is something that I promote on our team at Naven. And it's something that I encourage managers to adopt because it really shifts, it really shifts your team members mindset and posture because usually if you're a manager, you want your team member to come to you with ideas. You want them to be more proactive, right? I've never met a manager who didn't want their people to be more proactive. And you know, but then your team is proactive. They come to you with idea and then you automatically give them a rest or you say no or you answer their question and send them off. And that doesn't breed a pattern of ownership. It doesn't make them think for themselves. It doesn't teach them to think for themselves. So with rigorous thinking, instead of answering a question that your team member might have and having them rely on you and kind of become dependent on you, you want to teach them to think for themselves. And an easy way to do that is to ask, well, how would you solve this? Or what would you do? Right? And then pausing and letting them think and propose an idea to you. And then you can follow up with a list of questions that promote more rigorous thinking on any areas and gaps that they might have missed so that they can again think for themselves and then come up with an idea that they can then show to you. And the benefit of this is you move from this relationship of dependency of your team constantly needing to require you to think for them and you to tell them what to do, to them learning to think for themselves and being a lot more self-sufficient. And then also you're not having to be the bad guy. Right? Like it's not great to be the bad guy always saying no to different ideas. If I can ask you a question and have you realize that, hey, I need to think about this a little bit more that this idea is not quite as as rigorous as I thought it was, that's great. Then I don't have to tell you know, you realize that you have a little bit more thinking to do and you can come back when you have something that you want to discuss that's in a better stage to discuss. Yeah. So you not only use this strategy because okay, so let me let me just unpack this. So this is something that you can use in the immediate short term when somebody comes to you with a problem and you let them solve this problem for themselves. You provide support, but still you're letting that person solve that problem for themselves. But then also have you seen this foster a culture of creativity once you start in the short term and letting them people solve those problems themselves in the long term. Now you see them coming up with more creative solutions without even going to you for that for that sign off or that okay. So now they're just proposing solutions without even having a problem. Is that what you're you're seeing at Maven when you adopt this this mindset or this this rigorous thinking I guess concept and you sort of let that permeate your whole organization? Yeah, absolutely. I think I think this is a part of culture. So the company culture, you know, there's the the written mission values, you know, innovation, growth, collaboration, it's all these written things, but a lot of culture is the unspoken rules of a place. And the things that get celebrated and the things that get poo pooed where you get a little fingerwag. And the things that you celebrate people will do more of. So if you are saying that you want your team to come up with more ideas and that everyone is an owner, ideas can come from anywhere. And then when ideas do come from anywhere, you say like, oh, sorry, like no, please go sit back down. People are not going to want to do more of that. Like we, we are, you know, pretty, I think people, people realize when they have a bad they get a bad reaction from something, right? Like a negative, a negative reaction, they're not going to want to do more of that if that's what you're giving them. So encouraging when people bring up ideas, when people are thinking what it's rigorously being willing to engage in that discussion and that debate of with that person as an equal, I think that that's so important. And it's helped Maven move really fast. I mean, we've only been around for a year. We've all already driven $2 million in core sales and we're pre-product. That means we haven't even released our product yet. And we've already started helping instructors create courses. We started building up the ecosystem, teaching people how to create courses. So more people are participating in this ecosystem. And I think the reason we were able to do that is because we have this culture of treating ideas as based on their merit. It doesn't matter if it came from a junior person, from a co-founder, from the CEO, from an engineer, from some other course team, from a designer. If the idea is good, it's good. And it doesn't matter if the idea comes from the CEO or the most junior member of the team, we are going to vet it thoroughly and we're going to poke holes and we're going to poke and prod. So just because you have a title does not mean that we automatically assume that you have thought about this. We are just as rigorous and just as lovingly critical of ideas from the supposed expert as we are from someone who is outside of the department that they're suggesting this idea. Very smart. I love that mindset. I want to talk about the inception of Maven because I think that's a very interesting to these are great cultural startup lessons but the inception of Maven and how you've built it, how it's grown so fast and where that idea even came from cohort-based learning, why cohort-based learning is potentially a better option for people to learn than maybe traditional education we talk about that as well. So let's keep going down your story. Let's keep going down your timeline and let's go into the origins of Maven and how that came about. Right before starting Maven, I was consulting. I was working directly with the different course creators to build their versions of the Alt MBA. So before that, I had started the Alt MBA with Seth Godin, built it to thousands of students around the world, 45 countries, 500 cities, and I did that for three years and then left to answer another nagging question that was in my mind which was, was there something about the Alt MBA that was specific to that space and time? Was there something in the water or something in the air that made this program work? Or was there something unique about this format of core-based learning? Back then, we hadn't even come up with the name for it yet, but this idea of live community-based learning that isn't just watching a bunch of videos sitting by yourself in your room, watching you to meet your skillshare videos but rather learning together with people over a course of two days or two weeks or two months, except period of time. Was there something about this format that could lend itself to other experts, other creators, other verticals, other industries? And so I left the Alt MBA and started working directly with different creators. I worked with Professor Scott Galloway from AnnoiU Stern, section four. He was one of my earliest clients and I worked with the founding team to design their sprint format for their course two weeks' sprints. I worked with co-founders of Morning Brew, Alex and Austin. I worked with David Prell from right of passage, Tiago Forte from Build a Second Brain. So these early adopters in online course creation and proved out that yes, there's a market for core-based courses. On the creator side, creators love teaching them. It's an amazing revenue stream. And on the student side, learners, learners love that these courses are a chance to meet other like-minded people to work on on a topic that they love. That's way more interactive than just watching videos. And I also realized a third thing, which is that even if you are a decently well-established creator or expert like Professor Galloway or the guy's at Morning Brew, it still takes a huge amount of effort to create a core-based course. It's a super labor-intensive process where you're cobbling together a bunch of tools, five to six different kinds of software you're using, Teachable, Kajabi, Podia, Slack, Circle, Heartbeachat, Luma, Email and stitching it all together. And every one of these steps, something could break, right? So like I've personally been trying to debug zaps that stop working all of a sudden. No idea why? Like, UTM links and just like so convoluted and creators, it's for creators, it's really not they're the best use of their skillset. It's not they like doing either, you know, messing with technical aspects. And so I saw this pattern come up over and over with every single creator that I worked with that everyone was, that had these like really janky setups and there wasn't anything better. So that kind of that planted the seed of, okay, there's there's got to be a better way. There's got to be some some way that we can make this, this process more seamless for creators. So last summer, Goggin, Bionni, reached out to me. We actually went to high school together, you know, going back to the very beginning of, of where I grew up in areas, so Goggin and I went to same high school, Mission San Jose high school in Fremont. And so we are, we already knew each other. We also went to college together, you see Berkeley. He was a year younger, so so we didn't know each other well, but we knew of each other. And I get an email from Goggin in my inbox and he says, hey, I was, I just came back from two years of traveling abroad after, after shutting down my last company and I'm starting about start. I'm thinking about starting a new company in the education space again. And I've been thinking about core based courses. Everyone I talked to said that I should talk to you. And I told them, I don't need an intro. I already know you. I'm just going to send, I'm just going to send us a note directly. So, so we hopped on a call and we started, you know, shooting, shooting the shit around, you know, different ideas, throwing in our ideas. And originally, he was giving me some advice about my consulting practice. I was giving him some advice about core based courses. And after, you know, two or three calls, we were like, should we just start this together? I mean, like, there's, there's some clear, there's some clear synergies here with with our skill sets and and and things that we're good at like doing and that would be valuable for the business. And, and so that kicked off us thinking seriously and vetting each other, right? So, so this idea of rigorous thinking was was really baked in from the beginning. We did the co founder dating questionnaire from first on capital. They have a great article, 50 questions to ask a future co founder. And we spent hours each week for a couple weeks going through these questions and really getting to know each other and and seeing if this would be a good fit. And, and I think that that up for investment has has completely paid off. It made both of us feel much more comfortable working with each other and going into this this co founder co founder relationship, which can be, you know, it's kind of like marriage in many ways. Like, you're you're attaching your hip to someone, you have to really trust them. And we had never worked with together before, right? So, it's not like we had worked together at a company or, you know, you know, we're a close classmate in school. And so doing this up front vetting, I think, was was really, really great for giving us both peace of mind knowing what we are getting into, knowing what baggage each person is bringing, what context each person is bringing. And, you know, so, so that was last, last fall about a year ago now. And since then, it's just been been a whirlwind. We got to building right away and started launching courses within a couple of months. We launched courses and started building even before we had the tech product ready. And I think this was amazing because it gave our engineering co founder, which we found a couple months later, some some leeway, some buffer. We bought some time for him and his team to build the product and add great features. Meanwhile, we were already starting to work with creators because of my experience building courses. So we were able to get started really quickly, hit the ground running. We actually only came up with a logo and a website two weeks ago, like maybe maybe even last week, like a year in to to the company 50 instructors and courses and creators later, two million dollars later, that's when we, you know, started a Twitter account and, you know, launched our website and came up with a logo. And so I think, I think we inverted a lot of the expectations that people have about starting company that like, you know, the first thing you need to do is, is come up with a great logo and your color palette and et cetera, et cetera. We kind of put that aside and said, how can we build and offer something of value to our customers as soon as possible so we can validate this idea. A quick break from this podcast to recommend another podcast, we have to check out. It's called the product boss is hosted by Jacqueline and Mina. It's part of the HubSpot podcast network. If you have a physical product, this podcast is hyper tailored to you. It's going to help you take your business to the next level. In a recent episode, for example, they spoke about the power of TikTok or product businesses and how to use it to drive sales. And as somebody who is a little new to TikTok, I really learned some great tips for creating content that actually converts viewers into customers. They have a workshop style format that makes it really easy to follow along to take your business to the next level. So if you sell physical products, subscribe to the product boss wherever you get your podcast to unlock social media, marketing and business strategies that create your dream business and then your dream life. And is that so I have a couple of questions to pull out of that. I want to go down the road of either the startup lessons and whatnot. And I think I want to unpack some of those and just some of that product led growth you just referred to and I guess product led launch for lack of better term, but also just to tee it up for cohort based learning. I just want to understand from your perspective and for people that are listening to this who don't know what cohort based learning is because that's going to that's what Maven is. What is it replacing? Is it replacing like MOOCs? Is it replacing university? What is who would benefit from this? And who have you found to be the target audience for a cohort based learning? Ron, core based courses are really simple. It's learning online with a group of people with a set start and end date. So you might do a course with 30 other people on UX design over a two week period. That's core based course. You might do a course with a thousand people section four with Professor Galloway has a thousand people in their course. But either way, there's a lot more interactivity. There's a lot more hands-on doing and it's not passively consuming content. You're not just reading by yourself, watching videos. You're actually putting the lessons that you learned into practice. So with this design course, for example, instead of reading about white space and color and balance and proportions, you're actually designing a flyer using these principles and then maybe sharing a figment link in Slack where the other classmates and your instructor can critique your design. And then everyone talks about it learns here's what this person dwells. Here's what you could fix. And it's much more about that hands-on doing. So with core based courses, what does it replace? I like thinking about learning experiences not necessarily as replacing something but adding another option for learners. So there are times when you might want something that's pre-recorded. You might want the flexibility to watch videos and and kind of get that information download from something, especially if you're a beginner. But then there are other times when you want to learn with a group of people and you want to actually put those lessons into practice and you want someone to keep your accountable. You want that community. And in that case, a core based course is an amazing option. Same with, you know, does do core based courses replace higher education? You know, I get that question a lot. And I don't think, especially in the short term, it's going to replace higher education. And higher education is, you know, less so for the information that you're learning, more so for the credential. You know, we still live in a society where a lot of jobs say four-year degree required, right? Like bachelor's degree required and it's kind of a gatekeeping tool to keep people out. And so I totally get if people still want to do college because like that makes sense. Like in our current society, I think more and more the beauty of the internet is that the internet allows you to show proof of work, proof points of your ability. So instead of saying I went to advertising school got, you know, I know what that is like an MFA or something. Whether it's masters of undergrad degree in advertising, if I post it in ad every day on Instagram, that's pretty cool. Like if a future employer sees thousands of, hundreds of ads that I've created or mocked up or, you know, edited, that's a great proof of work. I'd much rather hire someone who has proof of work with either podcasts that they've created, a blog that they've written, articles, Instagram, Twitter following that they've grown, all of this shows their ability to build and their ability to ship. Much more than, hey, I studied mass comm in college. So I think the beauty of the internet is that it does open up much more opportunities for people to show their work. And it also opens up opportunities for you to learn from amazing operators. So with co-op based courses, you know, instead of learning from a professor of product management who hasn't been in industry for 25 years, you can learn from Lenny Yorchitsky, who was an early product manager at Airbnb. Now makes a living writing his sub-stack newsletter. And he has a product management course on Maven. And you can learn directly from him on what it took to be a successful product manager for him and, and, you know, all the learnings that he's gathered along the way. So it's much more practical. It's much more concrete. It's much more relevant and timely. You know, instead of learning about investing from a professor, again, who, you know, is rooted in academia, you can learn from Lee Jin, who is a former VC at Andreessen Horowitz, who now has their own firm. She coined the term passion economy and is known for investing in passion economy companies, supporting passion economy founders. So if you're if you're a fellow VC and you want to get in the in the creator economy game and start investing in that kind of company, or if you're a founder of a creator economy type company, like Maven is, who better to learn from than someone like Lee, right? And so I think that the exciting thing about core base courses is that it provides opportunities to supplement your your learning and to allow working professionals to continue retooling, upskilling, and deepening their craft. From people who are actually doing it, that's actually bringing it full circle to actually the first point you made about that ideal employee, who is somebody who can execute. And if you want to be that ideal employee, if you want to be the employee, like, you know, of the future, who can be creative to take on challenges and to not just ideate on them, but to actually execute on them. Well, this is a great way to start turning yourself into one of those people because now you're learning people that have actually done those things. So if you want to, if you're a marketer, and you want to, for example, go back to your example to run videos on LinkedIn, well, maybe you should be learning from somebody who's actually executed on that successfully, so that you can now figure out step by step how to execute on that successfully and learn every single piece that could eventually allow you to do that and to even put it in front of a manager or a leader versus taking a more academic lens to that topic that you want to learn about. And then you're like learning theoretical about how to optimize for conversions or how to, you know, how to set up a campaign. Like, you can actually work with somebody who's done it before. And I think that that also, that the person who is that kind of employee who does take action and who does not just ID down things with builds, builds things, that could also be the ideal consumer of a cohort-based course. Realistically, that's, I'm just trying to think about like the personality that would also enjoy this and find it useful. It'd be somebody who is a doer who wants to learn the practical step by step. Yeah, absolutely. I think if you, if you want to sit back and, you know, kick your feet up, cross your arms and wait for someone to entertain you, a cohort-based course isn't right for you. If you're ready to dive in and do the work and you want to learn by doing hands-on, whether it's with exercises, projects, breakouts, shipping, actual copy that you're writing, that's, that's what a court-based course is great for. It provides that accountability. Exactly. Yeah, I was going to say because every, like, there's, so with the cohort-based course, excuse me, there's accountability for everything that you're putting out. And you have peers, you have your instructor and you're working one-on-one every step of the way, everything that you're learning. Everything, you have to ship things, you have to create things in a cohort-based course usually. And then that's part of the accountability piece, too. Yeah, I think the other part of accountability is that just by virtue of you having paid a premium for a course, you're way more likely to take it seriously. So I personally signed up for, you know, $10 or $15. You to me, courses. I think I have one on classical music appreciation and one on hand lettering calligraphy, where I watched maybe 15 minutes of the first lecture and then said, oh, I'm going to come back to this later. And five years later, it's still gathering digital dust. So, right? Like, that's, there's no accountability there. There's no, there's no skin off my back. If, if I don't go back, it's only, you know, $10, $15, whereas most court-based courses are in the several $100 range, or $1000 range. So if you're paying, let's say, $750 to learn this topic, there's a certain, there's, there's way more commitment on you, the learner. Even if, even if, you know, the instructor isn't bringing down your neck or coaches aren't bringing down your neck, it's, it's something that you already feel committed to. That's why you're even, even paying this amount and doing this course in the first place. So it's, it's kind of like a personal trainer at the gym, right? Like, theoretically, we could all work out in our living room from YouTube videos. Why don't we all do that? Because life gets in the way. We get distracted. No one's holding us accountable. No one notices if we don't do it, right? Whereas if, if I've paid a personal trainer, you know, 70 bucks an hour, 100 bucks an hour, you bet I'm going to show up. Yeah. Yeah. Smart. Okay. I want to, I want to pull out some, some of the lessons from you taking a maven to market. Because I know that you're like, you're a very strong marketer as well. So what were some of the lessons that you learned over your career when you actually launched maven? How you brought it to market? How you got your first 50 customers? What was that process like? I think we were really thoughtful from the beginning on how can we set up experiments to test what people want? And so early on when we were investing in fundraising or when you're fundraising, we prioritized investors who wanted to teach coer based courses. So we intentionally picked experts, operators, people with big social followings who were excited about teaching in the future. Because if this person is on our side, they're more likely to want to work with us. They're more likely to, you know, want to launch a course. And so we kind of, we kind of stack the deck in our favor. I'm a huge fan by the way of stacking the deck in your favor. I think that if someone random off the street has the equal likelihood of succeeding, starting the company that you're going to start, you probably shouldn't do that. You should do something where you have an unfair advantage. And so for us, dog and great relationships with with a lot of VCs, we both have Twitter followings and kind of had Twitter friends, if you will, that were excited about creating courses. And so prioritizing angel investors, we did a crowdfunding campaign too, prioritizing angel investors who were excited about creating courses, that meant that we had a whole base of people, even before we launched anything that were excited about building courses. So I think that was the first thing that we did right. The second was not not waiting for the product to be finished before starting to test the market and and test our offering. So early earlier you had mentioned product led growth. I think this is a better example of I'm trying to think of what a better term is. Yeah, it's not the right term. I just didn't know what to call it. Yeah, there's not really a great term for it. I'm thinking, you know, offering led growth or experiment led growth. But but basically we we started offering offering something to our target customers, our instructors, that we could build manually behind the scenes. So this idea of do on scalable things was very much applied here, where we were working directly with instructors were our first couple of courses to help them build the course and teach them one on one how to build the course and then to launch on the event. So we launched with pump and we pump the auto user crypto course. We had saw a whole of India CEO of Gumroad. We had Lee Jin, linear Chitsky launch courses. So this gave us this gave us a a start that was kind of starting off the bang and creating some some momentum and and excitement around the category around creating courses. And then once we did that, it wasn't super scalable because you know, we were helping these creators want to build courses. Yeah, it was me and my first tire literally building these courses. And we thought, well, how can we do this in a in a bit more of a scalable way? So not swing the pendulum to automating everything. I think that's that's a common mistake is people automating things too early before things are have proven good enough to even automate in the first place, right? And then then once you automate something that's a part just like running and it's easy to set in for yet it. So I'm a big promoter enough of not automating too early. So we we thought about well, you know, working one-on-one creators wasn't very scalable with two people. How do we how do we go kind of a couple steps or scalable? And so this is where the idea of the Maven course accelerator came up. And so the Maven course accelerator is a three-week course where I teach a group of instructors how to build core base courses. And over these couple of weeks, I teach everything end-to-end with how to build a curriculum, how to find course market fit, how to write your landing page, how to create interactive exercises so your students can learn by doing. And we curate the super instructors. And you know, we have one coming up at the end of this month with 130 instructors who are coming in. And there's time to build during this course. So by the end of the three weeks, you have a pilot and MVP of your course ready to ship. And so we're building up the supply side on Maven in this really thoughtful way where we're curating which instructors make sense to bring on in small batches, you know, 100, 120, 130 people. And then teaching them, we have coaches, we have myself teaching, we have guest lectures. So it's still it's there's still a lot of a lot of hands-on support, but it's more scalable. And so this has been a great way to expand who were able to work with. So now our team is is about 20 people. We have a bunch of people on this side on the product engineering side. I think we're we're doing a great job of serving instructors and being smart about where's our highest point of leverage instead of just hiring wildly and just you know, ramping up and and and opening up headcount everywhere we're being thoughtful about where can we add the most value to instructors? What are things where we might potentially outsource or partner or hire contractors? So for example, we're thinking about potentially offering services to some of our bigger instructors. And that might entail pairing them up with a course manager that we help them hire and we train an onward that person that persons on the instructors payroll, but we help find them, we help train them, we make sure that they have everything that they need so that they can best support an instructor. So those are some things that we're thinking about and exploring. Now those are all incredible things, but where do you where do you or how do you ideate on some of the more thoughtful points that you've just spoken about? Because it seems like you aren't following a playbook that I've seen before. I think you what you mentioned where you you know, you build things that don't scale and then you automate a lot of it is a general playbook that people do follow. So you're very thoughtful about how you built this company, how you're continuing to build it. So what is your process for ideating on next steps on what to make more scalable on what to not on how to maintain that quality versus how to make sure that my company still scales at a rate where my investors are going to get, you know, a positive ROI. So I'm just curious if you're thinking process because I find it incredible. I think it's very I think it's very powerful and it's something that if I don't even know if you can unpack it, if you can, that would be beneficial for early stage entrepreneurs. Yeah, it's funny that you asked that because I was just having this conversation with a team member today in Slack, like literally 30 minutes before popping on the table with you. I could say because it's because of how you think things through. It's just it's incredible and when you say it, it all makes sense. But if I was looking at a problem, I don't think I'd come to that same solution as you just did as how you're building up this company so thoughtfully. So I'm just curious how is it just innate? Is it something that you were always the way that you always thought through or is there an actual process that you you use? I think it goes back to the idea of rigorous thinking that we were talking about earlier. I have an article on this on my blog with a set of 20 or so questions that that managers can ask and that actually I ask myself all the time. So it's actually kind of a checklist myself too. I think I think one thing that is a mistake that a lot of team members make and I've seen it on my own team and sometimes in myself too is thinking about the level of effort that it takes to do something. And then saying like, oh, this is too much effort. Let's either automate it or hire people to do it or not do it. And I think that's a wrong way to look at it. The level of effort requires to do a certain project to launch a certain initiative to build something standalone doesn't mean anything. It's the upside that payoff that is associated with that that you really need to think about. So if you're saying to me, oh, you know, West, I don't think we should do that. That's a lot of work. I am not convinced. Like I don't care that it's a lot of work. Like that's what we're all here to do is to do the work. So that's not a compelling argument. But if you say that's a lot of work given the payoff, I think the payoff is really small. We're going to do all this work and we're only going to get this, you know, this upside. That is more compelling to me. But usually when you think about the payoff of some some idea, you might actually realize that, hey, this seems like kind of a slog to do. But this opens up a lot of GMV potential for us. Gross merchandise volume, a lot of revenue potential, right? A lot of a lot of opportunity to grow our market share or grow our mind share. And then the work might be worth it. So thinking about not just not just the cost, but also the upside. I think that framework, I was literally just talking about that to a team member earlier today. When we were talking about an idea and and they were kind of like, no, you know, it's a lot of work. I don't know if you should do it. Or or you know, so many people jump straight to wanting to automate that thing. Oh, it's a lot of work. Let's just either hire someone on upwork or fiber or freelancer or you know, try to solve with technology and and automate it. And a lot of times you think about it and you realize that that thing, like we shouldn't even be doing that. Like we don't even need to opt automated because we just shouldn't do it in the first place. Like there's literally a more elegant solution. Yeah. So I think thinking more deeply about what is the elegant solution here that is, you know, not over baking a problem, not making it too complicated, but but solving it neatly without fuss. I think challenging yourself to think about that. That's something that I challenge myself to think about all the time. And I usually find either a good solution to something from that. Or great rationale that leads to an awesome discussion. So you know, that discussion about the cost versus the upside, different team members could have different information, different data points that you might not have. So I might think that, hey, the cost here is is X. And I think the upside is Y. And I'm going to build that case and try to convince you that we should do it because this is the upside. But you might have a data point about, hey, actually one of your assumptions is faulty. And that leads to the upside actually being half of what we think it is. Do we still think that it's worth proceed? So we're I think the great thing is is being able to have these conversations in a logical way where you're unpacking an idea. And it's not just this fuzzy vague idea. You're actually laying out what your assumptions are. You're laying out what you think the costs are. What you think the upside is. And then everyone can have a well informed conversation about it and understand why we are doing this in the first place. And that concept of rigorous thinking is what unlocks that psychological safety and security in the team to allow them to have those conversations with you and challenge your points of view on things. That's what I'm that's what I'm reading between the lines on this. And that's really why you're able to to grow at the pace that you're at because you have this team that you're actually leveraging versus just a top down do this because I think it's the right thing to do. Very amazing. Okay. Okay. We've gone through a lot of stuff. I always want to to wrap these up with a couple rapid fire just to bring out some insights from your career. Was there any other things that we didn't go into that you wanted to speak about just touch on that you would help people listening to this would take away from the work you're doing or what they could experience if they come to maven. Yeah. I think two things. One is that we're hiring. So if a lot of what I talked about doesn't scare you away. I imagine it will scare some people away. But if this sounds actually exciting and invigorating for you, then come work with us because this is our culture. And the second thing is if you're thinking about creating a core base course, one common kind of point of of frustration or stress for a lot of first-time course creators is thinking that their course needs to be perfect right out of the eight. And they compare their first cohort of their course with someone's 50th. They look at the all-time BA or they look at you know David Pearl's course and they they get really intimidated. So the thing that I want to leave you all with is your first course doesn't have to be perfect. You're going to iterate on it. It's going to get better. So getting started and starting to take action and learn from that action and iterate is more important. So I wanted to put that out there too. No, that's good. That's good. And where do people connect with you? Websites, socials, all of that. So any links you want to you want to draw? Maven.com is our website at Maven HQ is our Twitter and I'm at West underscore K.O. Okay, perfect. All right. So we'll run through these rapid-fire because I want to be respectful your time too. So you can go on you can you can extrapolate or you can keep it as short and sweet as you'd like. So biggest challenge that you've had in your career. What was it? And how did you overcome it? Ooh, that's beefy. I want to do these, you know, one one word to answer questions, but I'll try to keep it maybe one sentence or a couple sentences. It's forcing you it's forcing you to think it's forcing you to think because I know that all these questions you could probably go a whole hour on each single one, but I think coming to terms with my own strengths and weaknesses and not beating myself up for things that I wasn't naturally good at and choosing instead to lean into my strengths. Good, very good. If you had to choose one person, of course, there's been many who's been impactful in your life, who was that and what did they teach you? I'm gonna choose fictional characters here. So Olivia Benson from Law and Order SVU. Absolutely love her. I feel like she leads with she's she's professional. So I'm getting over dry cough. I'm going to edit this part out. So Olivia Benson from Law and Order SVU. I absolutely love her. I think she's professional. She's direct. She makes hard decisions and she's really empathetic about it. So I think she's amazing. And the other person is how to get away with Murder, Annalise Keating, the main character there. She's just super fierce. So those two. I love it. I love that show. It's so good. It's a really good show. If you had to pick one source that you used to learn or grow, it could be podcast, audible, it could be even a person. We should go check out what would that be? It could be a book too. I forgot. I'm just subdautable for both. Right now I'm reading high output management from Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel. It's life changing. Like literally every sentence is changing my life as I read it. So I highly recommend it. That is incredible phrase that now I have to get that book of every sentence is life changing. I've never heard that's never been a recommendation on the show so far. So that's great. Okay, good. If you could tell your 20 year old self one thing, what would it be? I would tell 20 year old West to worry less. And last question, what does success mean to you? Success means being able to work on what you want to work on and areas that you're great at that add a lot of value.