The Unicorn Founder Who Delegated Everything.

Jonathan Swanson has built two rare successes: Thumbtack, the home-services marketplace, and Athena, the fast-growing platform that pairs ambitious people with world-class personal assistants. Today he runs a 4,000-person company, invests on the side, and raises four kids — all by designing his life around leverage. a16z General Partner, Erik Torenberg, sits down with Jonathan to unpack what that actually looks like. They discuss how elite assistant culture shaped his philosophy, why delegation is a skill most founders never truly learn, and how the combination of humans and AI is redefining personal productivity. Jonathan explains why he believes ambition grows with leverage, not the other way around, and breaks down how he delegates everything from scheduling to search processes to entire life systems. They also get into the future of work, the rise of machine-generated delegation, the expanding role of chiefs of staff, and how founders can design their time around the few things that matter most. It’s a conversation about work, life, and the systems that allow people to operate at scale. Timestamps: 0:00 – Introduction 0:44 – The power of delegation: from the White House to Thumbtack 02:13 – Human vs. AI assistants: the future of delegation 04:30 – Levels of delegation: from tasks to algorithms 06:31 – Principles of effective delegation 07:50 – Delegation & productivity hacks 09:46 – The future: machine-generated delegation 11:36 – Global talent & leveraging international teams 12:33 – Assistants and financial leverage 13:45 – Company culture across borders 15:18 – Assistants as accountability partners 16:52 – Coaching, feedback, and the human element 18:30 – Goal setting, time management, and prioritization 22:07 – Frameworks for founders: time, energy, and meetings 25:06 – The efficient path vs. the effect path 27:19 – Executive hiring: principles and pitfalls 29:19 – Reference check signals 32:09 – Principles for company transparency 35:55 – Cofounder relationships & company building 38:19 – Chief of staff vs. executive assistant 39:06 – Learning from high-performers: Lonsdale, Elon, Thiel, etc. 46:10 – Building your universe: org structures and talent networks 51:33 – Managing founder psychology & staying in the game 55:26 – Athena’s vision: human + AI assistants Resources: Follow Jonathan on X: https://twitter.com/swaaanson Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Find a16z on X: https://twitter.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711 Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures](http://a16z.com/disclosures.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Brian Johnson wants to break the chains of biology. I want to break the chains of time. We can always raise another round or do another trade, but you can't raise another decade.

• 0:09Erik Torenberg?

  You're running a massive company. You also do investing. You're also happy married with four kids. I know the way that you do it all is delegation. What is the secret that you've figured out?

• 0:18Speaker 00

  Cardinal sin of delegation is that it will be faster, better to do it myself. And the reason it's a blocker is because it's true. But the only way you get leverage is by going through that work. A couple of decades ago, you had to be Marc Andreessen or Vinod Khosla to have a half a dozen assistants, and that cost you half a million dollars. Now with a company like Athena, for 3,000 bucks a month, you can have your own assistant.

• 0:39Erik Torenberg?

  What have you learned in your extensive founder career?

• 0:44Speaker 02

  Most people think about delegation as a convenience. Jonathan Swanson thinks about it as a system for living and has built his career around a simple idea. If you don't have an assistant, you are the assistant. He scaled BumTack into one of the major home services marketplaces for the last decade. Now he's doing it again with Athena, the number one place to hire a personal assistant who can run your calendar, your operations, your home, and increasingly, your AI workflows. Jonathan is running a 4,000-person company while investing on the side and raising four kids. The through line is a very intentional philosophy of time. He believes most people underestimate how much ambition they unlock when they learn to delegate well. In this conversation, we talk about how elite assistant culture shaped him, what founders consistently get wrong about leverage,

• 1:28Speaker 02

  and why he thinks billions of people will soon be delegating to a mix of human and AI partners. We get into delegation frameworks, splitting work across multiple assistants, how chief of staffs fit in, and the mindset shift required to stop optimizing for speed today and start optimizing for compounding tomorrow. We hope you enjoy.

• 1:49Erik Torenberg?

  Jonathan, welcome to the podcast.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:51Erik Torenberg?

  So Jonathan, you're running a massive company, what, 4,000 employees?

• 1:55Speaker 00

  4,000.

• 1:56Erik Torenberg?

  4,000 employees. You also do investing. You're also happy marriage with four kids. How do you do it all? I know the way that you do it all is delegation. You have a chief of staff, a bunch of EAs. Why don't you talk about what is the secret that you've figured out that other people can learn from?

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so my origin story here is out of school, I worked the White House and I sat in the West Wing next to the President's executive assistants. And as you might imagine, the EAs in the West Wing were freaking good. And it set my bar super high for what this EA client partnership could look like. And when I moved to San Francisco to start Thumbtack, I said, okay, I'm not president, but what if I had a EA and support team that was as good as the President's? What could I accomplish? And so at Thumbtack, as we were scaling the business, I hired my first assistant in the Philippines, started helping me with basic stuff, inbox, calendar. And then we just got creative and we did more and more complex, interesting things, which we can talk about.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  And what I found was the more leverage I got, the more ambition I got, and it just compounded. And it started with one assistant, now I've got a half dozen and every assistant gives me more leverage to take on more things.

• 3:10Erik Torenberg?

  It's fascinating because some people say, hey, Bill Gates is so much richer than me, but he has the same phone that I have. Or I remember, maybe it was you, maybe it was someone else who was like, the President should have way better information than me. And yet they're like reading Politico too, like they're reading the same. And this is like another example of it, which is democratization, where a White House have amazing assistants, but thanks to Athena and technology, at some point, everyone will have a certain.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Exactly. A couple of decades ago, you had to be Marc Andreessen or Vern Odekostra to have a half dozen assistants, and that cost you half a million dollars. Now with a company like Athena, for 3,000 bucks a month, you can have your own assistant. And then with AI, yeah, it's going to become ubiquitous. There's going to be billions of people learning to delegate to a machine assistant. And as your budget increases, you might add a human or a chief of staff on top, but it's just kind of a ladder of leverage.

• 3:57Erik Torenberg?

  How should we think about what are the things that humans can do? Versus what are the things that AI can do? I remember my friend started Clara, you know, a decade ago, which is trying to be AI assistants. Effective, obviously, this well before a lot of the innovation. But what is the right way of thinking about sort of the human AI relationship?

• 4:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's a moving target, obviously. AI is going to get increasingly more capable. And our view is it's like self-driving cars where it's not self-driving overnight. It's you drive the Tesla at first, and then there's assisted steering and braking. Then over time, it becomes more autonomous. And the same thing is going to happen with assistants. My view here for founders is if you don't have an assistant, you are the assistant, and you don't want to be the assistant. And so no matter your budget, you should first start by learning to delegate. And if you only got 20 bucks a month, you start by delegating to ChatGPT. And prompt engineering is really just delegating. And if you become world-class at leveraging ChatGPT to brainstorm your goals, figure out how you can take the next step in the business.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Once you have the budget for a human assistant or a chief of staff, then you're prepared to go that next level. So you start 20 bucks a month. If you have budget, then you hire someone direct with a service like Athena. If you have enough money, you hire someone in person. That's six figures. And if you're a legendary budget, then you've got a suite of assistants and chief of staffs following you around.

• 5:17Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. So I've had an Ateea Yay for many years now, and she's absolutely amazing. And I use her for scheduling and typical assistant activities. But you have many assistants. Our friend Sam Korkos has a bunch of assistants as well. What else do people get leverage on or delegate that maybe is not obvious?

• 5:35Speaker 00

  So first, you start by taking the pain off of your life. So I never wait on hold. I never put my credit card in the internet. I would never fill out DMV forms, never do passport renewal. The world is full of all these annoyances. And so first, you take off these things that drain you, that don't give you leverage. Then, once you've done that, then the next thing is you raise your sights and you're like, what's a new business I could start? How can I scale my business faster? How can I spend more time with my family? What are the things I actually cared to do a lot more of?

• 6:05Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  And so I start with basic stuff, inbox, calendar, stuff that everyone does. But then I just start experimenting. And so during the scale up days of Thumbtack, when we're in a house, working all the time, I told Marnie, my assistant, I don't really have any friends outside of work. I was like, the only people I know are in this building. I need to make some friends. And so I told her, let's plan a founder dinner at my house every other week. And we did lots of things together back in the day. And that's how I made all my best friends. And I just walked home from work and Marnie had invited people, set up the chef and the bartender. And we walk in and we make new friends. And I met Catherine, my wife, through that.

• 6:42Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  And then Marnie's helping plan our wedding. And now Marnie helps us with our kids. And so I start small and then you just kind of compound these things.

• 6:50Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. But even in that example, say more about how did she know who to reach out to?

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the kind of entry level delegation is you delegate by task. You say, help me plan this dinner party. If you just say that, you're not going to get what you want. The more advanced way to delegate is called delegate by algorithm, where you actually export your own internal preferences as you delegate. So I would say, hey, when I plan dinner parties, I like to have six to eight people. I like people to have raised similar amounts of capital or be at similar stages or similar number of employees and literally write an algorithm for how you find the right people. And then you get feedback on whether it worked or not. And once the algorithm's fully exported from your head, then it's just rinse and repeat. And so engineers tend to be better at creating these kind of like SOPs or standard practices,

• 7:39Speaker 00

  but it's something that you can learn to do.

• 7:41Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. And so share more about, for people with multiple systems, how do you differentiate? Like, how do you sort of delegate across the team?

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, start with one.

• 7:49Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  And then like any team you specialize in. So I just had one that did everything as a generalist. And now a half dozen, which I know sounds crazy.

• 7:58Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  But each one specializes in different things. One is on work, one is on home, one is on kids, family, travel, finances.

• 8:05Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  And that specialization is helpful because the finance person is just thinking about balance sheet, you know, sending wires, all that sort of stuff. And then I have a chief of staff who sits on top, who distributes work.

• 8:17Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  Across all of them.

• 8:18Erik Torenberg?

  What are other principles, like I love this, delegate by algorithm, not by task. What are other principles or frameworks that are really important or non-obvious to get the most out of an assistant?

• 8:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, the cardinal sin of delegation is that it will be faster or better to do it myself.

• 8:34Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  That's the number one blocker for most people. And the reason it's a blocker is because it's true. It will actually be faster or better if you do it yourself that first time.

• 8:42Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  And it takes more effort to delegate, to teach someone how to do it. It might not be as fast or as good as you'd like it. But the only way you get leverage is by going through that work.

• 8:50Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  So you have to overcome that activation energy. The second mistake people make is they don't compound for the long term and they hire someone and then switch an assistant every six, 12 months. But it's the compounding that creates incredible leverage. I've been working with Marnie for a decade, like a little sister now, and she knows everything about me. So that's just kind of like common principles. In terms of the way to delegate, I think this is just tactical, the methods. The most common way people delegate is with your thumbs on your phone. That's the worst way, very slow. Better to use all 10 fingers at a computer, but that's actually pretty slow as well. The best way to really delegate is using your voice. And so voice, you can talk two to three times faster. You can do it on the go, you can do it on a date, between lunch, in the Uber.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Thumb tack during hyperscale times, I would walk between meetings. And between a meeting, I would be voice noting to an assistant. Here's the takeaways, pre-draft these five emails.

• 9:45Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Follow up with this person. And all my work from that meeting was actually delegated by the time I started the next meeting versus everything kind of accumulating. And then you get to the end of the day and you're like, I have a hundred things to do. And so learning to delegate by voice, if you look at all the super delegators at Athena, they are all just delegating by voice all day long.

• 10:05Erik Torenberg?

  Right. Yeah, it's fascinating. At some point, it's going to be, I don't even have to say it, I just think it.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  This is part of our vision, Athena, longer term, is you shouldn't have to actually vocalize it. And we've built an internal demo of this. It's not live for customers, but the way it works is we build something that watches your screen as you work and it screenshots the screen. And when it identifies things that you should be delegating to your assistant, it automatically adds it to your assistant's task list. Your assistant then says, oh, Eric would want my help with this, or maybe he'll do this one his own. And that creates the reinforcement learning effectively to tune the model, to pull things off of your screen. You don't have to vocalize. And so the person who built this internally, he's been using it, the majority of his delegations are now machine generated. He's not talking.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  He's just working and the machine is magically pulling tasks and putting it on his assistant's plate. It'll take a while to bring that to market and fruition, but that's the future.

• 11:04Erik Torenberg?

  Relatedly, there should also be a version where it's like you see in Slack that it's someone's birthday or someone has a baby or something and it suggests, hey, do you want to get this person this specific gift or something?

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think this is a place where we're thinking a lot about the human-machine merger and how we get the best of both. And that's really the vision of Athena is like the best human assistant, the best AI wrapped into one combined product that's seamless. And humans obviously have human touch and good UX, but what machines can do is remember everything and be super proactive. So it can look through every email, every calendar and remind you to do things that you would not have thought to do.

• 11:43Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. One thing you've always been fascinated about is sort of international labor, some call it labor arbitrage. What is the right way of thinking about what people in, say, the Philippines can do or can't do versus assistants in the US? Like, because obviously there's a huge cost savings. What are stuff that you keep in that cost savings or stuff that you don't keep? What's the right way of thinking?

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, America's strength is entrepreneurship, capital, innovation, technology, and

• 12:10Speaker 00

  The more you can leverage someone to do back office tasks, the more you can spend on technology, product, etc. So I think the thing Athena focuses on is executive assistants, someone who can do all of this admin. But people are using global talent for all sorts of things, for legal, medical, all the above.

• 12:29Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. So on the finance thing, I'm curious, because I don't leverage mine there. What are the ways that people could get leverage from this? Because are you, are you still interfacing with, with the accountants? Or are they, yeah, what is the right way of thinking about?

• 12:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the first thing I'd recommend if you're getting an assistant is to have them help you save money. If you have a big budget, not a big deal, but the first project can be, hey, help pay for your salary by looking through all my subscriptions, finding things to say, save me money, find me refunds. So that's just kind of like a cost-saving bucket. Then there's admin, paying bills. And then there's coordination, which is what you're talking about, basically being a PM. So coordinating, you know, the tax attorney asks for something from the accountant and there's a bunch of docs and it's just moving paperwork between

• 13:15Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  systems at enough scale and complexity, that becomes effectively a full-time job. And obviously you need someone you truly trust to go deep with. And we kind of recommend that you build this trust over time. And, you know, you give email and calendar access at first and bank account later. But as you earn that trust, then the more access you give effectively, the more leverage you get.

• 13:39Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. The, um, yes, really interesting. And in terms of, um, say more about what it's been like to scale this company where you have, and you know, you dealt with this thumb tech too, a little bit in terms of just workforces in different areas and how you think about culture between them and, um, yeah, kind of what are the, the challenges or what's really important to get right?

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we we look for cultures that have a strong affinity to American culture. You know, Philippines has a long history with America. They like know American pop culture and sports better than I do.

• 14:16Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  And then they have a very strong work ethic and it's a caretaking culture. So there's lots of nurses and one of the reasons we picked it for assistants is being an executive assistant is really taking care of someone.

• 14:32Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  It's like their full time job is to make your life better, is to take things off your plate, to help you be successful. And I think one of the barriers for some people to get an assistant is it feels indulgent.

• 14:48Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  It's like, do I, should I really have someone who's just taking care of me? But the way I flip that around is you not delegating, you not giving leverage is holding you back. But it's actually preventing you from creating a job for someone who's excited to help you.

• 15:02Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  And for the people on our team, like they could have worked with the CEO, they could see behind this exciting startup that is a totally different life than they live. And for them, that is a cool, exciting, life changing thing.

• 15:14Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. One thing that I think people should be using assistants more for is is not only delegation, but also accountability. Of like, hey, you want to be, you know, exercising this amount, or you want to be spending your time doing X, Y, Z, or you want to make sure you, you know, you go to your appointments or something.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Do we have some clients who actually exercise live with their assistants for this reason? Like, they both have a fitness goal, and so they pull up videos at a set time and they work out together.

• 15:42Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  And that's the place where human accountability is a little more powerful than machine accountability. Chat GPT actually has a feature now where it will automatically ping you on things. So if you can't afford assistant, you just tell Chat GPT, here's my top five goals. Ask me how I'm doing every day, log my results and give me feedback. You can get that for 20 bucks a month. I've done similar versions of this with human assistants. I think we may have done this in the past where I'm like, hey, I want to work out, meditate, eat clean. Send me a ping on WhatsApp every day and I'll just reply yes, no, yes, no, whether I did it. And then at the end of each week, send me a scorecard and compare me to Eric or Catherine and we can have a little competition with it.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  And yeah, helping you, helping you hit your goals is exactly what they should be doing.

• 16:29Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. And then the other thing I think is a, an interesting opportunity to get more leverage because these people are also, you know, um, not just Operation Savvy, but also, you know, pretty, you know, uh, intuitive, you know, they go into caring fields. And so there's also like opportunities for coaching too, or like, you know, they're the people that have most context on you and they can give feedback on how you're engaging or like, you know, they can tell you, hey, you're tired today, you know?

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was my first observation when I was in the West Wing. The assistants who sat next to the president were insane. They were so good. They went on to become like elected to Congress and amazing people. But at the end of the day, the president and his advisors would have been meeting with senators and all these people and they would finish the meeting, they would lean back and they would have the assistant come over and they'd just be like, what's going on? And it was, it was more than just accomplishing things. This was their closest confidant who saw behind the scenes on everything. They knew the good and the bad. They know they'd gotten kicked in the nuts a couple of times that day from different things and they're there for them.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  And I think that human element is going to remain important for a long time, no matter how good AI gets and it's something you should lean into. We have clients who tell us that, yeah, like going through a divorce or a depression and like my assistants like they're for me in a way that others aren't. And like, I can't tell my company or my team about some of these things, but this is the person that's like on the inside with you.

• 18:04Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, totally. Really lately, one of the things you've had really interesting insights on over the years is how to spend time, to think about time management, not only in terms of ways to get more of it via delegating, but also, you know, how to prioritize and. You know, I've learned this from you, but you think about goals on a sort of, you know, annual, quarterly, you know, like on different increments. Well, maybe we could start with LBD and how you think about goal setting in general, and then we can, you know, get a bit deeper.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  I mean, my wife Catherine and I, who we met as friends, you know, developed this friendship over one of these entrepreneurship dinners. We read this book called How You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen. And basically, he told the story of how, how a business school professor, kids come back at reunions and they're Fortune 500 CEOs, super rich, and their lives are in shambles, they're divorced, have all these problems. The kids don't talk to them, going to jail. And he's like, the rigor they apply to their businesses, the quarterly reviews, the metrics, were completely absent from their life. And his point was, how do you want to measure your life? And Catherine and I read this book and we were just friends at the time,

• 19:19Speaker 00

  but we're both like, I want to be on your life board, directors, let's freaking do that. And so we just started a tradition a decade ago. Every quarter, we get together, we fill out a survey in our relationship, strengths and weaknesses, kind of squat analysis, geeky stuff. And then we talk about like, what can we improve? What can we do better? And like anything, if you, the more you invest, the better it gets.

• 19:41Erik Torenberg?

  Totally. And yeah, I think that's a key point because some people are turned off by sort of like quantification. Like they want their relationship to be placed like, you know, relaxed, to turn off or something. And I think it's less that you have to like, you know, quantify every element of it and more just that you want to prior, you don't want to let the lack of quantification mean that you're not prioritizing it. And so this is just an exercise to make sure that you're actually just like keeping accountable to how you want to be.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's be purposeful, get the thing you want. If you're a geek like us and you measure it and you track everything.

• 20:13Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  And if you just want to go have like a date and drink wine and talk about your relationship, that works too. I think it's just the people prioritize fitness or their work, but they never think about how do I prioritize my relationship? Like, what's the, what's the fitness or the workout or the yoga equivalent for my relationship?

• 20:37Erik Torenberg?

  Having been in many goal-setting sessions with you, one of the things I think that you intuitively understand or have learned and are often instilling in others is this idea of prioritization. Like, when people say goals, they say a lot of goals, and they don't sort of think about, hey, what is the one that makes everything else much easier? And, you know, what is the one thing that if we did would be a great year, a great quarter, or whatever it is?

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Who sets too many goals?

• 21:04Erik Torenberg?

  Me a little bit. But, yeah.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think my view is there's a power law in everything, and power law in business, power law in venture, power law in your life. And there's typically one thing every month or quarter that if you accomplish is worth more than everything else combined. And figuring out what that one thing is is what you should do. Figure that thing out and then go all in on that. And not to say that having other goals isn't worthwhile, but if you haven't identified the one thing and gone all in to make that happen, then I think it's not optimized. I think it's also easier to kind of procrastinate on the most important thing in your life by having a long list. And you do a bunch of different things, but there's that one thing.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  It's find your partner, it's start the business, it's fix my health, that really is more foundational than everything else.

• 22:00Erik Torenberg?

  So to that end, I'm curious if you could share more, you know, frameworks or principles you live by in terms of time? Like, for example, I believe you put, you try to stack meetings in, you know, in a day or in as few days as possible or something. What are certain sort of frameworks that are important for you in terms of time, energy?

• 22:18Speaker 00

  I mean, high level, is it Brian Johnson wants to break the chains of biology or longevity? I want to break the chains of time. And, you know, the question I ask myself is like, What's the most valuable asset in the world? It's not gold or Bitcoin or Nvidia clusters. It's time. We can always raise another round or do another trade, but you can't raise another decade. And so if time is the primary asset and it's more foundational than everything else, we should focus on owning that and controlling it. And so for different, this means different things for different people. If you're in hardcore scale mode, that may mean half hour meetings for 14 hours a day where you are just grinding out interviews and doing things that only you can do as a founder.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Or it may mean clearing your schedule and having time to dream about the future of the product or big deals. And I think you just have to know what stage of the business you're in and then design your calendar purposefully around that. And if you look back on the last month and the calendar does not reflect your highest goals, then you're not doing it right.

• 23:25Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, I remember Keith Reboi shared with me this idea of like, at the end of every week, do a calendar audit of the past week. Like, what are the meetings you had that you wish you wouldn't have? And then just look at the next one.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  I mean, this is a place, you know, Athena Systems can do this proactively for you, but there's a place that AI is obviously going to automate and it will be very powerful. Or it's at the end of each week, it just tells you, here's what you prioritized. Are those actually your goals?

• 23:47Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  If not, then next week, we should adjust those things.

• 23:50Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. I'm curious for your interpretation of meetings. Some people are like, you know, I want to have as few meetings as possible. It means not the most efficient. I'd rather do everything async.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:59Erik Torenberg?

  What is your kind of sort of thinking between async and synchronous?

• 24:03Speaker 00

  I mean, Naval has a good line that's like, a phone call is better than a meeting. A voice note is better than a call. A text is better than a voice note. I think in general, that's true. And there's this.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  It's almost like a generational thing where I feel like you're in this a little bit of like, there's a reluctance to call people on the phone and it's just, we do everything text and email. But calling people is super effective. It's really high bandwidth. You can figure shit out in five minutes. And so I personally try to minimize meetings and then do more picking up the phone and talking to someone for five minutes. When I'm in more chairman mode, then I prioritize as few meetings as possible and voice notes. And I, what I request is voice notes out and text message back because listening to voice notes is slow.

• 24:58Erik Torenberg?

  It's assault as Mark and Tracy. Yeah.

• 25:03Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, it is interesting. One of my favorite self-help books is the Seven Effective Habits of How It Affects People. And one of their, you know, principles, maxims is this idea of like efficiency with, when it comes to achieving, you know, tasks or accomplishing tasks, but effectiveness when it comes to people. And, and so, you know, the efficient path might not be the effective path because you might, you sort of save some time on the front end, but you might accrue sort of a debt on the, on the back end.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:32Erik Torenberg?

  And, um, yeah, it might be efficient to just send a text or something, but you know, keeping the dynamic. Yeah, phone calls are obviously underrated and.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true. Remote cultures too, like remote cultures build up debt of just the lack of bandwidth. And so if you are in a remote culture, you should get together every couple of months for a few days in person.

• 25:54Erik Torenberg?

  How do you think about how, when founders are asking for advice, like how should I spend time? Like what's most important, like what frameworks are helpful for founders about thinking about? Obviously there's a million things they could be doing. There's not enough time in the day for, you know, even a fraction of them. What are the most important ways to get right, whether it's your time at Thumbtack?

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Like it's build your product, it's these customers, raise capital, build your team. And when founders ask me like how to leverage an assistant, what should I be doing? The way I turn around is like, what's your top two goals for the month? If it's recruiting, you have to be closing candidates, but you don't need to be sourcing all of the emails. You could pull up a voice note and say, here's a template I want you to reach out to. Here's, let me go through my contacts. Here's 20 people, send an outreach email, asking them for suggestions for this role. You know, if your goal is to raise capital, your assistant could help project manage the process of all of that. And so, you know, step one is you set your goals and then you break them down into subtasks.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  And your assistant won't be able to run the fundraise, but can run components of it. And your job is just to decompose things into the smallest part that you can hand off.

• 27:04Erik Torenberg?

  Maybe you should have some sort of like forward deployed, you know, sort of thing of it's, it's not just the assistant, but it's also someone that helps you like really get the most leverage out of it and watches, you know, your, your activity.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  And one of our learnings from this business, when we first started it, we were like, we're just gonna hire the best assistants, match them with clients and boom, amazing. But we matched the first five assistants and every single client said the same thing. How do I delegate calendar? How do I delegate inbox? And so it became clear, we need to invest more in actually teaching the clients how to delegate, because that is as much of a constraint as the assistants. And we've got a few thousand assistants and clients. And if you look at the best performing assistants at Athena, they work for the best delegators. It's not a coincidence. The reason they're the best is because someone has figured out how to export their ideas, decompose projects, create SOPs in a way that helps the assistant fly.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  And the more mediocre delegators struggle with that and need more training.

• 28:04Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. One, one thing that you've been phenomenal at is whether it's some tech or is hiring executives. What do you think that you do differently? Or what are the principles or frameworks that really guide your sort of exec hiring process?

• 28:18Speaker 00

  I mean, one thing that is obvious as you hire execs is the more senior they go, the better they are at interviewing, almost by definition. And so when you get to C-suite, they all are really good at interviewing. And so you actually have to discard the interview more, the more senior they go. And so I

• 28:37Speaker 00

  I use references much more the higher you go. And then the other thing that I think is interesting that people should do more of is I just ask people for their 360 reviews. Like at their last company, 10 people wrote reviews of them that are honest about their strengths and weaknesses. And I just asked to see it and I say, hey, I'll share you, share mine, you show me yours. I actually think this would be a cool kind of reference startup where you could like ping the LM about someone versus pinging their references. So I try to get to more ground truth on the person versus the UX of interview is just gonna be pretty good when you get to the senior level.

• 29:16Erik Torenberg?

  What's most important in when you're, when you're doing reference checks? What are you really, what's the way to get the most signal out of them?

• 29:23Speaker 00

  I mean, what I often tell people is, hey, I'm probably gonna hire this person. And now tell me all the things you don't like about them or things that they could be better at. Cause you know, people are so biased to just tell you all the good things. You have to get them to, to see it as a safe place to share strengths and weaknesses. And yeah, just do enough references until they start to sound the same. And once they start to sound the same, then you've got a signal.

• 29:48Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. Well, one question I like to ask is what skill sets would be really important to compliment this person with? It was another way of just saying, what are they bad?

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:55Erik Torenberg?

  Like, you know, what's really important? Or one of my favorite questions is if this didn't work out in six months or a year, you know, why would that be?

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I mean, the best way to source talent is hire an executive recently is just ask the people that you respect the most. They have the highest standards. Who's the best person? So like, here's the three people who have the highest standards in this role. I asked them for the two or three best people and I go to try to hire one of them. And that is the like speed, rapid way to hire an exec. You know, using an exec recruiter, you spend three months, you get all this cold leads, but going through a network of. High bar people is super efficient.

• 30:32Erik Torenberg?

  There's some maxim that almost like half of executives, you know, don't work out within like, uh, you know, 12 to 24 month.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Checks out.

• 30:39Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. Why is that?

• 30:41Speaker 00

  I think it's this, it's difficult to judge. The interview process is not representative of the work they're doing. And that's ultimately what's broken about interviewing is interviewing should be someone doing the work they're gonna do. I think like Weebly back in the day would actually have execs come work for two weeks to trial before they ever hired. It's difficult to pull off because people have other jobs, but I do think something like that makes a lot of sense. Your interview process is just kind of irrelevant compared to what the work they're doing in lots of cases.

• 31:15Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, and Keith has this maxim that that's like, um, you're not gonna get 100% hiring in the same way. You're not gonna get 100% investing. And if, you know, like, you also want to avoid the, you know, of not the trap of not taking enough risk or moving too slow.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, and as long as you cut your losses quickly, it's okay. It's if you like, don't cut losses, then you compound a hole and that's where it's painful. The other thing I'd say is more useful for basically all interview process is project based work.

• 31:43Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  So it's just like, you know, hiring a C suite for one part of the team. I just tell them what the pain points in the org are and what I want to fix. And I'm like, come up with a plan. How would you fix this?

• 31:55Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Like, if you, we hire you, you're then gonna do it.

• 31:57Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  And that's where a practical work is more useful.

• 32:01Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, that's really interesting. What, um, going back to other sort of founder principles, what is your stance on transparency with the company? Like, what's information that's helpful? Maybe going back to Thumtag days, what's helpful for the, the company to employees to know? Or like, what are principles, like, that guide, you know, how much you share?

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, default transparency is obviously the best, but there's obviously some lines. Like, there's, uh, And at Thumbtack, there was a moment, you may remember this, a decade ago, where I woke up and I had a message from someone in our team in the Philippines and it said, "Thumbtack does not exist on the internet." I was like, "What?" And I went to Google, "You type in Thumbtack and nothing shows up." And we basically received the death penalty from Google. There was a misunderstanding, they thought we'd done something wrong, but they like eliminated us from the internet. And so, our traffic went to zero and our revenue went to zero. And I remember waking up and like, I go to the office and there's a class of 25 new Thumbtackers,

• 33:03Speaker 00

  who it's their first day and supposed to do the onboarding with them. There's a journalist like walking around outside trying to get a quote. And you know, that's one of those times where you can't share everything. And so, you want to ultimately be transparent. But if I just walked into a new class and say, "Hey, the business might be dead," it's not going to work. And so, you have to kind of get a handle of the situation. You know, the people who need to know it, know it. And then, once there's a plan and a solution in place, then the whole company is told.

• 33:34Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, that makes sense. At Thumbtack, you were a non-CEO co-founder and you lasted, you know, a decade or almost a decade, and you're still on the board, of course. I feel like it's pretty rare, when I think about co-founding teams, that it feels like the non-CEO, especially if not a CTO, usually doesn't last, you know, over five years or something. I'm curious, what's really important to get right in co-founder relationships? Or how you think about advising, you know, companies you invest in?

• 34:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I heard Sir Michael at Sequoia say something that was like, "There's only one founder."

• 34:10Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  And it was at, he said it at a founder event. And I was like, "That's rude." There's lots of co-founders here. And now, a decade later, I'm like, "Of course, there is only one co-founder that goes the distance." Because ultimately, as you scale the org, it only makes sense to have one person on top.

• 34:27Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  So.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  I think that's just the reality and you know, it's good to know that going into starting a business. In terms of who to pick, my advice is you pick someone you want to get married to.

• 34:39Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  And you're going to have all the same relationship issues you have with a partner. You know, no makeup sex, but it's still like, yeah, there's highs, lows, and you want someone that ultimately you really deeply trust because there's going to be stress and challenges. But as long as you trust the foundation, then you got a good, a good thing to build on. I'd say, you know, one of the biggest, or if I called a mistake at Thumbtack, because I love my founders, but it's something I wouldn't recommend others do, is we had four co-founders and one was technical, he left after like two years, and then the other three were non-technical. This is like the most idiotic way to start a technology business, but we had no idea what we're doing and you know, it worked out.

• 35:25Erik Torenberg?

  And how did you divide and conquer between those three non-technical?

• 35:28Speaker 00

  We just kind of jumped on things. It's like whoever was good at something would do it.

• 35:34Erik Torenberg?

  But it was no like clear executive.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think that's, you know, it's not recommended because there's like, it's obvious how that could create tension. We worked through it, but that's why it's non, non-standard, not best practice.

• 35:46Erik Torenberg?

  Right. But I'm going back to the original story because I remember there's this, you got into GSB and you were going to grad school, but you, you know, had your buddies from college and you were thinking of starting this, this business, which wasn't even like a personal pain point. You just thought it'd be a good business and you emailed the, you know, you let the GSB people know you weren't going to accept it and they sent you back this very moralizing email of how you're making the biggest mistake in your life, et cetera. You know, it turned out pretty good, but how do you, pretty good decision. How did you at the time think about get enough conviction to take the leap and do it?

• 36:24Speaker 00

  It was scary. I got into, you know, this good school, seemed like that was a safe bet. I knew I wanted to start a business and.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  You know, if I went to business school, I knew that I'd have all this debt. I probably might need to get a nice paying job afterwards. And if I was gonna go for it, I should probably just go for it. But yeah, when the dean sent me that email, it's like, this is biggest mistake of your life. He said something like, you can, startups will come and go, but you can only come to Stanford once or something. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I never responded and I have it as an email in my, this save that I'm just gonna respond to whenever some tech goes public and be like, I made the right decision. And I have nothing against this guy. He's just doing his job, but it's good to have a little just on your shoulder.

• 37:17Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, totally. Okay, so there's EAs and then there are Chief of Staffs. How should we think about sort of the, the difference there? And what's really important to get right in Chief of Staff? It's a role that everyone, in addition to EA, wishes they, they had, but seems hard to find the right person.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's no formal definition. I think it's something that an EA is typically more administrative and taking things off your plate. And Chief of Staff is more offensive and it's the type of person who can follow you into meetings, you could deploy to, hey, like actually take this meeting for me or hey, this problem came up today, go figure out how to solve it. And so a Chief of Staff typically has the capabilities to become a founder themselves. And the only reason they take the job as Chief of Staff is so they can see what it's like to be a founder, so they can go off to do it. So you kind of get people who do more tours of duty and you get super high capability, but you don't get the same longevity as an assistant.

• 38:15Erik Torenberg?

  What have you looked for in Chief of Staff? Or what's sort of the right, you know, there's sort of this tension between, you know, getting someone younger who's, you know, definitely initially gonna do it for, for a couple of years and is more ambitious versus someone who's been more seasoned, but maybe not as high slope or something. How do you think about?

• 38:34Speaker 00

  The way I break it down is assistant, you find someone you want to go a decade with. The intimacy and the compound, you know, that relationship is super important. And so you go deep and that means you probably don't find a founder because they're not going to be excited to do this. It's someone who's much more of a caretaker and is excited to be number two. And then a chief of staff, I do pure slope where you know, the person is going to move on in a couple of years. But they have, yeah, they could start a business, but instead you get them by your side to help solve problems.

• 39:03Erik Torenberg?

  And there are people, you know, like Lonsdale, maybe like a lot or something who have, you know, chief of staff for like a year or two. And then they start a company, then they invest in them and they build kind of this reputation for doing. And then they have sort of these like, you know, alumni, almost a chief of staff, just kind of, you know, Peter Thiel's or just kind of further.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Bezos has this, someone follows him around that goes to every meeting and yeah, it's cool.

• 39:25Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. Let's talk about some, some people who get an enormous amount done. And I'm curious what are the lessons that we can draw from them, whether it's someone like Lonsdale, whether it's someone like Elon, whether it's someone like Sam Altman. Who, who are folks that you've particularly learned something from even just watching from afar of like, how do they build their world? How do they operate? I'll just say one for, for someone like Lonsdale, Thiel has done this really well. They sort of compound these certain talent networks. So, you know, there's like Stanford review or just Stanford in general. They're often hiring people from there and then involved in sort of these talent pipelines. They're sort of, you know, created to, you know, they're deep in the hackathon scene.

• 40:05Erik Torenberg?

  But they just kind of build this proprietary compounding sort of talent base that they're constantly, you know, sort of.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  I mean, the, the talent access is part of it. I think the other thing is there are some people who have just limitless ambition. And you're very much this way of like, well, what if I could do 10 times more things?

• 40:24Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  And I think lots of people just think that's impossible.

• 40:28Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  But it's not. It is possible. And with delegation and empowerment, you can just keep compounding bigger and bigger scale. The other thing that's interesting that we've seen from working with these like power delegators is people assume that. People of great power or wealth or resources can afford this team. And then that is why they have this ambition. But we've actually seen the opposite is the case is as people get more leverage with assistant, their ambition increases. And it's difficult to have big ambition. If you're just weighed down by DMV forms and passports, but once that's off your plate, then you raise your sights and you can be more ambitious.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  And then you go from assistant to a chief of staff and you just keep leveling up to, you know, until you're Lonsdale or the president.

• 41:19Erik Torenberg?

  I think another thing I've admired about some of these people is they, you know, they remark, hold remarkably few grudges. Like, you know, apparently, you know, Peter Thiel like kicked Elon out of PayPal or something. Or, you know, like a lot of these people have had beefs, you know, decades ago. And yet he ended up funding his next company. And so people have very short memories. If someone, you know, mistreats them or they make a mistake or something, they're quick to reconcile and just do business again over.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, look what President Vance said about President Trump before they were partners. I think there's.

• 41:54Erik Torenberg?

  Trump is actually quite forgiving. Or, you know, a lot of people say a lot of bad things about him and he'll continue to work with them as long as they change their mind.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's just a desire to win at all costs. And, yeah, grudges are not helpful.

• 42:06Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, even Trump and Elon, right? Getting into it and, you know, reconciling. You know, TBD where it stands by the time this comes out. And then there is some people who seem to have pretty, like, you know, Bill Gates has like, you know, pretty big team, pretty big operation. But then it seemed like Bezos and Elon maybe have like pretty lean. Yeah, I'm curious how you think about sort of.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  I mean, Elon's the one that makes no sense. It's, he claims to not have an assistant and to be like scheduling stuff. There's a story of Bill Gates being like, trying to schedule a meeting with Elon. He's like, connect me with your assistant. And Elon's like, no, I am my assistant. It's, I hardly believe it, but Elon's just insane. So maybe he is that, that way. I think most normal humans, if you want to get leverage, you have to delegate. I mean, the, one of the cool. Personal teams, I saw this guy who's a billionaire, he runs this hedge fund and he has a team of 40. He has eight personal executive assistants, all of the executive assistants graduate from Princeton, insanely high bar. And I was asking this woman who managed the EA

• 43:14Speaker 00

  team, like, how do you decide what to prioritize your team on? And she's like, if my team can spend one day saving my principal one minute, it's well worth our time. And I'm like, that is so next level. And definitely like, that's something I would love to aspire to, but it's just, you know, the billionaire budget.

• 43:36Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, it's pretty funny. Also, just in terms of prioritization, like, you know, we're hiring, you know, assistants here. And someone's saying, oh, you know, do you want them to be in all meetings with you? And I was like, well, if they're in meetings with me, then they're not working. Like, I want them to be like, you know, finding ways to give me leverage and take things off my plate.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  I mean, this is one of our visions at Athena is that you can have digital assistants that listen to you and work with you and are connected to your Zoom and your inbox and your calendar and can be mining all of that digital exhaust for things your assistant should work on. And so, I mean, your assistant can't possibly sit in every meeting if they're going to do anything. But if the digital, the machine assistants are surveying and pulling things out, that's a pretty cool combination.

• 44:16Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. I think it's interesting to look at how people build out their, like, for example, you know, Mark and Ben funnel everything through Acing and Z and are all in on Acing and Z and of course have, you know, other intellectual or philanthropic interests, but mostly it's like consolidated. Whereas someone like Peter Thiel has this, he sort of fragments it a bit more, you know, like, you know, Founders Fund, but then other, several other, you know, Mithril, several other funds, other company, all sorts of like initiatives that are, you know, somewhat collaborative but independent.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:52Erik Torenberg?

  And he, he sits on top, but also it seems like he lets them, you know, he's not like CEO of them. And he's got this sort of talent, you know, network that he's worked with for a long time, that kind of like, you know, goes in almost boomerangs across the

• 45:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:11Erik Torenberg?

  the universe.

• 45:14Erik Torenberg?

  Lonsdale feels like he's more hands, he's got the HBC universe, but then his, his other initiative, he's like quick to institutionalize something, whether it's like a think tank or like,

• 45:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:24Erik Torenberg?

  You know, it's no coincidence that, you know, Peter Thiel would do the sort of Thiel Fellowship and Lonsdale created university or something. Thiel is almost like early to stuff. He creates a format for something, a template, you know, he does the hard work of sort of, you know, field building and like, you know, doing something that's in a controversial space where it's longevity or charter cities or, you know, higher education. And then, you know, people like Lonsdale institutionalize it to some degree. And then Elon, you know, it's been described, also has this like SWAT team, you know, of people that help him from, from company to company. And he's just able to recruit, you know, world-class people to, to lead these efforts.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think it comes, it's like, what's the right org structure? There's actually no right org structure. It's what's the right org structure for you as a founder?

• 46:14Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  And, you know, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are company builders. And so they're building their leverage like a company, the A60Z is a company. Not that Peter Thiel is not an entrepreneur, but he's more of a philosopher today. And so his system is more like a philosopher. It's all these kind of wild and crazy ideas. And so I think, you know, Jensen Huang has like 46 direct reports or something, which is absolutely insane, but it works for him. And so I think you just have to know what your style is and then you build it for you.

• 46:46Erik Torenberg?

  Totally. And someone like, you know, Sam Altman is like a deal maker and a fundraiser and a talent identifier, you know, and so he's able to, like, I remember he was at Y C and he was talking to my, one of my friends about sort of this universal basic income company. My friend didn't end up doing it, but I was like, huh, that's interesting. Why is, why is he even doing that? He's like focused on Y C. He's like, he has a knack for, for good ideas. He's a knack. And this person was like 22. He has a knack for, you know, high slope talent. And he has a superpower around raising money.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I think new founders, or at least me as a new founder, was like, okay, what are my weaknesses and how do I get better at them? But then a second time founder is like, forgive all of my weaknesses. I'm just not even gonna try. I'm just gonna be really good at my strengths. And I'm gonna hire other people to do all the things I'm not good at. And that is way more effective.

• 47:34Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, totally. The, um, There used to be this sort of skepticism of like, hey, you can't really, and this still is actually, you can't really incubate company like this. The CEO has to be the co-founder or the founder. They have to drive it to where do you stand on on kind of that that debate?

• 47:49Speaker 00

  I think the biggest companies aren't incubated because the biggest companies have a founder who is monomaniacal from the beginning and compounds it for 50 years. And that's not incubation. Incubation is kind of let me try a bunch of things. It's not this monomaniacal power law commitment. So if you're just trying to build a trillion dollar business, I think that's not the way to do it.

• 48:10Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  But look, if you like, you know, we have a mutual friend who likes to remain anonymous, who incubates lots of companies and he launches four companies a year. And he loves doing it and he's going to make a ton of money doing it. And that's just his style. He's not going to probably have trillion dollar businesses, but he's going to have 50, you know, 100 million dollar businesses, which is still incredible.

• 48:30Erik Torenberg?

  Right. Yeah, I think one bull case is more of it's like breeding, like, you know, Sam Altman, in some sense, incubated OpenAI and that it wasn't the main thing he was working on. But then, once he identified that it could be, you know, this massive opportunity, then then went all in, all in with it.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's more like a venture portfolio and, you know, there's probably a bunch of stuff Peter Thiel has done that we don't even remember because like C studying and things like that, because they just disappear into the ether and then things that work compound. And so, yeah, I mean, if you have the resources to launch 10 new things and then just double down on the one thing that's big every year.

• 49:04Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  That's a cool, cool approach.

• 49:06Erik Torenberg?

  Right. A decade ago, Marc Andreessen wrote this blog post on productivity.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:11Erik Torenberg?

  And they were asking him, how do you think about meetings, scheduling, whatever? And he said, you know what? I try not to schedule things in advance because I don't know how I'll feel, you know, next week. And I want to kind of want to do things like in flow. And so when, you know, people are trying to get my time, what I typically say is like, call me right now or Feel free to check in next week and we'll see how I feel.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:35Erik Torenberg?

  And it kind of is like better aligned with sort of the flow state.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  I mean, that's the ultimate flex.

• 49:41Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  It's like if you can pull that off, that is definitely the ultimate way to live.

• 49:46Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  You just work on whatever you want. The world opens up to you. You call.

• 49:50Erik Torenberg?

  Right.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  Obviously, it's hard for most mere mortals to pull off, but yeah, if you can get to that level, that is the dream.

• 49:58Erik Torenberg?

  Right. So then I was for certain meetings where people were cold reaching out or whatever, I was kind of try. It's like, I always anticipate that in a few more days, I'll be like busier than I am or something, or I'll have. Whereas like right now, yeah, I got time. Give me a call. But so I tried that a little bit and then I, Mark did a follow up interview where someone asked him about that, Shuram. And he's like, oh, you know, that didn't work. Like I tried, but that didn't work. Now I'm just scheduled.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  Just back to back all day long.

• 50:27Erik Torenberg?

  And I was like, oh, god damn it. He was doing that. And it's, but he's, you know, he's also mastered multitasking.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  I mean, I think people just, the thing I think you can learn from Mark and other people is just challenge the defaults occasionally. And if you're in back to back meetings all the time, try this other system and see, see if it works. I think most people just go with the flow. I think other thing is most people aren't vicious enough at saying no.

• 50:54Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  And just being super hardcore is like, is that conference you're going to matter? Is that random get to know you chat, meeting, anything?

• 51:02Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  I think you just say no to most things. You know, I've back in the Uber versus Lyft, really scaling war days. I remember emailing Logan a question, probably to come to one of our dinners and he just responded war mode. And I love that. And I'm like, well, most people should actually be in war mode like 90% of the time. And that same, yeah, hardcoreness is just like the right way to operate.

• 51:29Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. What have you learned in your extensive founder career about managing your own psychology, dealing with stress, dealing with the cognitive dissonance of, you know, having to present externally, like, things are amazing even when, you know, you're concerned about Google, you know, taking out your business. What, um, what advice might you have for others in terms of cultivating this?

• 51:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, man, I think it's like a cold plunge or something. It's just, you, it's just shock therapy and eventually you, it's just like you're bathing in existential fear all the time and you're like, whatever, bring it on.

• 52:07Erik Torenberg?

  Totally.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  I don't think there's, there's much other than knowing that it's gonna happen. There's gonna be tons of ups and downs. And one of the clear lessons from Thumbtack, which has now scaled and, and done so well, was that like, there was lots of near misses where we almost died, times where we thought it wasn't gonna work and it's like, you just gotta stay in the game.

• 52:27Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  And if you can stay in the game, you can eventually win.

• 52:30Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 52:31Speaker 00

  And I think Thumbtack was very good at staying in the game so that we can eventually win.

• 52:36Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. It's funny, there's like degrees of panic in the beginning, you know, you're getting your feet wet. It's like, oh my God, someone said something mean about me on the internet. And then it's like, oh my God, someone wants to like leave my company. And then it's like, oh my God, um, we're gonna, we're, you know, we might die. We only have six months of payroll. Then it's like, oh my shit, we're gonna get sued.

• 52:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, it's like the first time you get sued or you're worried about getting sued. And then eventually you have a board meeting and there's just a list of lawsuits and it's just, you review them quarterly. It's just like, that's actually what success is.

• 53:08Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 53:09Speaker 00

  It's like, you're gonna have that stuff constantly and it becomes, yeah, just part of business.

• 53:14Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah, yeah. And you just keep building up more capacity to handle these things and they, you know, just.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's where like, I think co-founders are the best is like, it's the people you can be totally open with and be like, well, that situation's F'd up. And someone you can trust and.

• 53:31Erik Torenberg?

  Totally.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Be on the ups and downs with.

• 53:33Erik Torenberg?

  Let's go to Athena and let's go where we started, which is sort of the intersection between humans and AI. How have you thought about building Athena, given sort of developments in AI? What does that mean for your future?

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Athena started fully bootstrapped, human only, scaled to a thousand people, no outside capital. And then we had this AI moment a few years ago, and it was clear we could make a big AI play, and this could become a generational business, or we could get railroaded by AI. And so, only one option there is go big. And our vision here is this is you take the best of a human, the best of a machine, wrap it into one unified product, and what the machine does will increase over time, just like a self-driving car. And so, the human's the UX, it's on top, it will become more, the human assistant will focus more on project management and high-level work, and really be that like

• 54:30Speaker 00

  caretaker, that empathy, that partner. And then the machine will increasingly do the more mechanical administrative stuff. And, you know, just as when you get into a Tesla, you know, Elon made them with wheels, or with steering wheels, so that you could drive them, because they don't drive themselves when he started. But every time you get in the car, you're actually teaching the machine how to drive.

• 54:51Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  And these models don't generalize well. You have to bring edge cases under distribution. And so, every time you drive, the model gets more powerful. And the same is true in executive assistant. Our humans are driving, they're doing the tasks, but we're building machine models that are being improved by the way they act. And so, the more your assistant does tasks for you, the more our models will improve, and that will allow the human to upgrade what they work on to more high-leverage stuff.

• 55:21Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. That's exciting. So what else can you share about plugs for the company, or things to watch out for, or for people who, you know, want to get assistants?

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, I just say, if you don't have an assistant, you are the assistant. Step one, if you're starting a business, you should hire an assistant. And if you've got 20 bucks a month, use ChatGPT. If you've got, you know, 10 bucks an hour, go on to Upwork and hire someone yourself. If you hire someone yourself, I would say, my main recommendation is you need to interview a lot of people.

• 55:50Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  You know, Athena, we have 50,000 assistants apply per month and we put them through a huge battery of tests and we hire like 1 in 300. So if you're going to hire on yourself, make sure you interview not 10, but probably like 50 people. Yep. If you have the resources for $3,000 a month, then you should work with a company like Athena who can recruit, train, manage, and teach you how to delegate. And then when you have the resources for an in-person assistant, 100, 150K a year, you should do that as well. And then ultimately, when you get later stage, you have a chief of staff, in-person assistant, and a fleet of Athena assistants in the cloud. Yeah, that's a great overview. Well, let's wrap on that. Awesome. Podcast.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed

• 57:17Speaker 02

  in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.