Wes Kao is co-founder of Maven, the first platform for cohort-based courses. Maven helps creators build a cohort-based course and deliver an incredible student experience at scale.

She helped build cohort-based courses for Outlier.org (from the co-founder of MasterClass), David Perell’s Write of Passage, Tiago Forte’s Build a Second Brain, Section4/Professor Scott Galloway, and Morning Brew.

Previously, Wes was the co-founder of the altMBA. Under her leadership, the altMBA grew from zero to 550 cities in 45 countries in three years. She designed the altMBA's beloved coaching system, grew the global community, built the marketing engine, and built a team of 40 people to support rapid scaling.

In this episode, we talk about Wes’s early experiences building cohort-based courses, how you can decide whether teaching a CBC is right for you, the frameworks you can use to design your course curriculum, and why Rigorous Thinking helps her to build quickly without wasting time on failed experiments.