The first thing that really unlocked value for us in the early days was how can we make our dollars go further? We don't have that much money. And we need to have disproportionate impact and to do that, we need to build leverage talent at the right price. For a thumbtack, the origin story for us hiring outside the country was we had all these service pros signing up. They would create profiles of themselves. All capital letters, no sit-in structure. This clearly wasn't scalable. So I hired this woman whose name was Micon. She grew up in the Philippines,. Her dad earned two bucks a day, didn't have much money. The things we were able
Today we chat with Jonathan Swanson, cofounder of Thumbtack, Athena, and Powerset. We cover a ton of ground - starting with the Sunday idea club that led to Thumbtack, how to scale a marketplace, and how to choose ideas you'd happily spent a decade on. Next, we jump into the science of delegation - the idea at the core of Athena. Jonathan talks through how to delegate to an EA, when to start with one, a system of delegation that creates asymmetric upside and what type of founders should consider it.