81: Julien Smith, Founder and CEO of Practice

Coaching and mentorship is one of the simultaneously overrated and underrated topics. It’s overrated because we talk about it a lot and recognize the importance of coaching, but it’s underrated because we have a perception that there’s a fixed barrier to be a coach and there’s a finite number of coaches in the world. But what if you could leverage technology to abstract away all the difficult parts of running a coaching practice and give coaches a platform where they could focus on their true strengths. The result would be significant market expansion and additional coaches being unleashed into the world.

This has interesting at scale ramifications - we could move to a world in which everyone in some sense has a personal coach, unleashing our own personal creativity by an additional factor.

These possibilities are what we talked about this week with Julien Smith, Founder and CEO of Practice. Julien was formerly the Founder/CEO of Breather, where he raised over $120M to revolutionize co-working spaces. Julien is one of the most interesting entrepreneurs of our generation and I had to bring him back after we had a great discussion in Episode 41. In this conversation we touched on scaling, self awareness, behavior change, pricing power, and support networks.