Getting past the “Cardinal Sins of Delegating” with Jonathan Swanson of Athena | E2218

24:12So this huge fire hose, and we put them through a huge battery of tests, many automated, to assess them across lots of different dimensions. For the very top 1 % of that, we invite them to in-person training centers. So we built four-story training centers in countries around the world. They're like beautiful startup park. People come in, they do their in-person interviews, and there they get, if they pass in-person interview, then they enter a multi-week training program that's run by the former head of University of Michigan Business School. We call it Athena Academy. me. We've actually got it accredited.

24:45So it's a degree offering college. And so our assistants get free education as they work with you. And if they stay with us for five years, they'll get a MBA degree from us for free. So not only do you get someone to help you scale your startup or spend more time with your family, you get to support someone getting an MBA degree for free. And we absolutely invest a lot in AI and AI training and all the tools. In fact, I got word from our partner at OpenAI, they obviously have a million businesses using them. They said Athena was the fastest ramp of any enterprise they've worked with and the highest utilization per employee.

25:23So it just went straight up because it's built exactly for our use case and our assistants are trained on how to maximize the use of it. And that's kind of off the shelf. And now what we're building next is we're integrating that into all of their workflows. So it will happen more naturally and more automatically without them even having to go to ChatGPT. Is that a piece of software you might break off later and sell as a standalone entity? A hundred percent. That is our secret plan. We're effectively building workflow management that will optimize how fast they can work, the quality, et cetera.

25:56We think the only way to build this is with a human that live with this full system. Once it's working to the degree we are proud of, then we will take it to market. And then any assistant in the world, $10 million could use this as kind of a$200 a month SaaS offering to double their productivity. How fast is the company growing today? I know Jason's an investor, so he buys access to the data. I don't. So I'm curious. I think it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people, I'm sure, but I don't have a good feel for how fast the business itself is growing in its current stage of maturity. We have a good story about this growth.

26:27When J. Cal and I met for lunch at the Greek restaurant, I bootstrapped the business to that point with my own capital. And I asked J. Cal, will you be my first investor? And he said yes on the spot, which made me love him again. And we're at about a 40 million run rate then. Today, I'm happy to share we're exceeded 100 million run rate. So we've grown quite nicely and expect to continue that growth into next year. JCal and I have some special deals that we're cooking up. I don't know if we can share those things yet, but we're cooking up some deals that will set us up for a big bang next year.

27:02We had a crazy moment because Jonathan said, I also want to make you like an ambassador, you know, an influencer for the company. And I said, well, I've never done that before, but let me think about it. And so we did a deal. And when you hear me talk about Athena all the time, I always use my Athena Wow to get like a free couple of weeks. So if you go to athenawow.com, you get a couple of free weeks. But the reason I did that was I wanted to see if, you know, the podcast, both All In and This Week in Startups, would that be able to kind of move the needle? Well, sure enough, when I mentioned it on All In, my bestie Chamath was like, tell me about this Athena thing.

27:34I need an assistant. He was going through the same pain and suffering I was, which was, I can't, like just hiring people in the valleys. You hire somebody for an extraordinary salary and they hate you for it because they have to drive an hour because they can't afford to live in Atherton or Palo Alto or San Mateo or San Francisco. So he got one. So the two of us then talked about it and we got rid of, I guess, Chris on your team was like, hey, can you stop? talking about Athena for three months. We ran out of inventory. We have no more assistants left. We had a wait list for many, many months because of this.

28:07I was basically like, most of us are happy. The supply team is crying because of the fact that we had to go hire a thousand assistants. And we can do that, but just takes more than a couple of days. And so we spent last year investing heavily in the supply side of the business. So we opened multiple countries, not just the Philippines, Kenya, Guatemala. We're building these training centers. and we now have the capacity to scale to a pretty ridiculous level. And so - How many a month, Jonathan? How many new assistants can you get through Athena Academy and kind of onto the system per month or quarter right now?

28:39So 500 is kind of the max before things start to break at the current capacity, but we got more buildings going up as we speak. I think it's smart. When you're an entrepreneur and you get product market fit, you can break it, right? You can build the skyscraper too fast, right? When you start doing that and you don't have a strong foundation, bad things happen. You probably experienced this. Yeah, Jonathan. Of course. I mean, Thumbtack, I mean, Thumbtack's been through all the ups and downs of every startup and we're fortunate to be in the strongest position in its history. But there's some really close near misses in Thumbtack's history that you probably know about.

29:13Permission granted. Tell us the story. The most memorable moment is I woke up one morning and I had an email from someone in the Philippines that said, Jonathan, I just searched for Thumbtack in Google. and there's no results. And I was like, what do you mean? They're like, when I search the word thumbtack.com, it does not show up. Uh-oh. And I'm like, whoa. And at this point, we were heavily dependent on traffic from Google. And by the way, Google's also an investor. And so I look at analytics and traffic has gone to zero. We don't know why. We run to the office, we call our emergency meeting.

29:45And this is kind of the madness of a startup life is I've got 30 new employees who I'm doing a new employee onboarding with. I'm telling them about the history of the company. And then I'm taking calls from the press. And there's literally a journalist who's outside asking what's going on because things are starting to spread. And basically there was a misunderstanding. Google thought that we had done something inappropriate. They had given us the Google death penalty, which is not that you're deranked, but you don't exist. Just fully unpersoned. Wow. Excommunicated, yes. You're no longer recognized by the gods.

30:19Exactly. It's like a black site. Yeah. It was a very intense couple weeks. We had to do a bunch of work to prove that we were in the clear, but we eventually got there. And I mean, in the midst of this, I was supposed to be flying to a friend's wedding to propose to my wife, had to cancel all of those things. But I tell people now it's one of my best. It's one of my favorite experiences because your back is against the wall. You have no choice but to do whatever it freaking takes. And you just lock arms and you're like, we're going to do it. And then when you come out, you take a little breather.

30:51and you're like, that was insane. Let's not do it again, but it was actually kind of a fun experience. Launch is a fast-growing organization. We've got more than a dozen employees working with me here in Austin and another dozen spread out all over the world. But there's so many moving parts when it comes to hiring and managing employees. There's the onboarding, of course, payroll. You got to pay them. And listen, I've got all these podcasts to do. I don't have time for payroll benefits, HR taxes, answering questions, nor do I want to hire a full-time person and then have them do five hours of work a week.

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31:55We want you to try Gusto today. So we're giving you three months free when you run your first payroll. That's right. Three months free. F-R-E-E. That's my favorite price, folks. Go to gusto.com slash twist. That's Gusto, G-U-S-T-O.com slash twist. What an amazing service and a partner. Great partner. Amazing. If you're going to be an entrepreneur, you got to be prepared for these kind of things. I have two Athena assistants. And what I did was I said, let's have them every Saturday and Sunday. They said, hey, J. Cal, you don't need people on Saturday and Sunday. I said, I have a plan. Number one, I can afford it.

32:26I can afford to build out this infrastructure 365 days a year. So I'm going to try. Athena was like, OK, we'll roll with it. Then I said, here are two or three things you can do when these are big data projects. One of them was to take every episode of This Week in Startups in chunks and put it into a Google notebook LLM, take all of my hits on CNBC and the press, every podcast I've ever appeared on, and put them into different notebook LLMs to make LLMs of my appearances so that producers can say, hey, what has J. Cal said about Apple over the years on CNBC? And they can pull it up. I never had that ability.

32:58But they also empowered that. And then on the weekends, I say, hey, can you look at the top 100 podcasts, use this tool, Descript, or whatever tool you want to use, whatever I do, and just go through the sponsors. And here's my new director of sales, Ricky, who's unbelievable. Go into Pipedrive and see if we've talked to that customer, when's the last time we talked to them and put into the Slack room, hey, these are seven advertisers on these other podcasts, and here's the last time we talk to them. That's a backstop for Ricky and I and for the sales team to know if we're missing. And I don't want highly paid salespeople, six-figure people listening to other podcasts and timestamping and doing that work.

33:35This has been unbelievable for the sales team. And so when you are not utilizing your Athena assistant, Jonathan, you can give them backstop projects and they do it. You say, of course, I didn't figure this out for six months. You know, what I tell people is like, when they're like, how, what should I use an assistant for? I say, first make a list of all the things you don't like doing. You don't like paying bills, calendar, inbox, et cetera. Start there. And then once you have that list taken care of, then tell me what your personal and professional goals are. You want to make more friends? I can tell you your assistant could help plan dinner parties at your house every week.

34:16You'll make a bunch of friends. You want to give a good gift to your dad? I have an assistant today. I hope my dad's not listening. Going through his entire Facebook account and DMing every friend, asking for a touching story or memory of my dad from the last couple decades, collecting hundreds of these. And then on his birthday in a month, he's going to get a book from me. it's a collection of all these amazing notes from all his favorite people in his life and this took me 10 seconds to come up with it's gonna take my assistant six weeks to execute the project it's a huge project but it's gonna be one of the most meaningful gifts i'm ever able to give incredible to me that's just like it feels so good i get to give someone a good income and i get to give my dad this like amazing gift oh my god so they could go interview people get that video save it clip it and just have it prepped for a videographer or documentarian.

35:09Oh my God, it's so genius. I mean, the possibilities are endless. It's really cool. I will say the other thing that's worked out really well for me is I wanted to do an activity with my 15-year-old. And so I said, hey, set up pickleball for 10 weeks in a row with an instructor. Then I want to do like archery or I want to do, I just rattled off ideas with my daughter. One of them was like rock climbing. So we came up with like four or five concepts that are hard activities to learn. You know, like there's some activities, like if you want to play, I don't know, checkers, you can just start playing.

35:40But there are some that are hard for the first two days, like skiing, golf, rock climbing, pickleball. You got to learn the rules. It's just like you suffer for two to five sessions and then you actually start to enjoy it. So this was a concept I had to build grit in my daughters and to have an experience for us to build grit together and then get through the other side. My daughter now, 15, can play pickleball and she knows how to score. And, you know, like it took seven, eight times, but it really worked out. They did all that for me. They coordinated it all. They gave me four choices for each one.

36:09And it was arduous. And then I tried to get an archery folks to come to the ranch and set up an archery. They got me all these quotes, whatever. It was just too hard to do. Nobody wanted to do it. But then we found eventually other activities. Another way to say it is it would not have happened without the Athena assistant. So it sounds like you can either have an Athena assistant for your family, say, that does all this amazing stuff for you, or you could have one child in private kindergarten because they're about the same cost now. If you look at$36 ,000 a year, which is one-fifth the price in San Francisco and one-third the price in any other city for this level of executive support or half, you can be inefficient with it and not feel guilty.

36:48I think that's like one of the things. And you can experiment with it, yeah? And if you don't have a lot of cash, then the first thing you could have the assistant do is help you save money. So, hey, come in here. Look through all my subscriptions. Look through all my receipts. Help me find ways to save money. Wait on the phone for three hours to get a refund for this sort of thing. So lots of our clients will start with that because if you can cut the cost of your assistant in half on day one, then it makes it even easier. When you look at your 10 plus years building startups, and we had a great question come in from the audience about product market fit, TechnoChief2000, watching the live stream, youtube.com, search for This Week in Startups and put on the, after you subscribe, put on the bell and you'll get an alert when we go live.

37:36TechnoChief asks, how do you know an idea has real market pull versus founder delusion? When should a founder pivot? And when should they double down? It's a very open-ended sort of question here because you have micro pivots, mini pivots, all kinds of interesting bangs that occur. So tell me about your experience with that. You know, I heard someone describe it as, you know, you have product market fit when it feels like the market has you by the nostrils and it's just pulling you. It's uncomfortable. At Athena, the first time I experienced that, we launched the service and I didn't know how much demand there was going to be.

38:14and a thousand people signed up in the first 24 hours. And I'm like, all right, that means we have to hire a thousand assistants. That's not product market fit yet. It's product market fit for the idea. We got to now deliver on it. And once we went live and we started growing, our growth was driven entirely by referrals. We didn't do any paid marketing, any ads. Our favorite clients told their favorite friends and that's how it grew. And to me, that is the definition of product market fit. When your customers do the selling for you, then you got a product market fit. And now it's possible to build big businesses that require huge sales teams and lots of ad spending.

38:52And that can be, you can build billion dollar businesses that way. But my definition of product market fit is your customers market for you because they love it so much. Jason, good definition? I think it's extremely tight. Andy Ratcliffe, who's been on the program, Wealthfront, founding partner at Sequoia, great firm. He talks about this nostril pulling as like people are calling your office and telling you, I want two Athena assistants. I need them to work this. I need them by this date. And then I'm doing six more here. In other words, your sales team goes from founder-led sales where Jonathan is like explaining to me the concept and we're brainstorming how to onboard people, whatever.

39:31And that's founder-led sales, right? It's really hard. It's arduous. It's like product discovery mixed in with sales. Then you hire a sales team. You try to replicate that. You try to make it in a process, right? So you have product market fit, but the sales team's then saying like, I sold these people, but these people won't budge. You kind of have semi-product market fit. Then at a certain point, you have a salesperson, it's scaling. Say like this week in startups and our ads or a founder of university, we have product market fit. We know we do. So it's okay. Can we scale it, not break it? And then make sure you don't sell it to the wrong people.

39:59So you're fine tuning. Don't sell Athena assistance to people who can't afford it. Don't sell it to people who are bad at delegating and who are control freaks and will never change. It's a great point. One of the things we say is Athena is for clients who want to invest because relationships compound and you get what you put into them. And if you just expect to show up and your life is automated, it's not how it works. I've spent a decade getting to this point where I have time abundance and I have all this leverage. And, you know, what we tell people is you got to go full time. You got to go all in.

40:32You have to give your lots of feedback. You basically have to take your personal algorithms and export them from your head into your assistant through lots of feedback and suggestions over many months. And if you're willing to put that effort in, then we say, then we want to work with you. But if you don't want to put that effort in, you're not set up for success. And it doesn't matter how good the assistant is. What percent of potential customers fail that test and you tell them essentially, this is not going to be for you? Well, we tell people on the way in. So lots of people just don't sign up.

41:03And then the sales team probably disqualifies 10 to 15 percent who just don't feel like they're going to put the effort in. Raul over at Superhuman, who when I was doing Open Angel for him, I did Reportive. So he was part of that first cohort of just brilliant founders. when the industry was probably 10 % of the size it is now. So it was much easier to find a great investment because there just weren't that many founders and there just weren't that many investors. It was like a more boutique industry. Less competition. Less competition for dollars, less people involved, more people involved for the right reasons, less people involved for the wrong reasons on both sides of the table.

41:34If people are not willing to do an onboarding for Superhuman, the email product, which is now includes Coda, includes Grammarly, and I'm obviously an investor now in that larger company because they got acquired and they rebranded as Superhuman, which is wild. You would just say, you know, If you're not willing to do a 30-minute onboarding and learn the quick keys and have us show you how to use it, you're not going to get value from it. So I don't want to take a dollar a day from you. It's just that easy. Our first learning when we started this business was we'll recruit and train the assistants and then we'll match them.

42:00And maybe that's enough. And we matched with the very first client. And the first client's like, how do I delegate my inbox? How do I delegate my calendar? How should I do this? And we did the second client. And they said the exact same thing. And so then we said, OK, we need to teach the assistants to be well-trained. But we actually have to invest just as much in teaching the clients how to delegate. And so we built a delegation program. We've actually launched this new formal coaching program where if you want for an additional amount, you can get a delegation coach who will meet with you at a regular frequency and help you know what your goals are.

42:34Think about how to use your assistant to delegate, help you find roadblocks. When something's not working, help you problem solve it. and that kind of ongoing investment in your own skill of delegation is really the key to getting to the next level. That's where it kind of unlocked for me. And this constant feedback is the key piece. Today, my Athena assistants, one of them said like, it was just like weird sentence in the summary. I like them to give a summary of my calendar every morning, every day, check it, look for duplicates, look for issues, make sure the link to the location I'm going works on Google Maps because sometimes people invite me to something, They put in a weird address.

43:10I'm traveling in Singapore. You click on it, it doesn't work. And then I'm like, okay, I don't know where I'm going. So they click on that ahead of time. They check it in Uber. They make sure Uber is working in that country. There's a lot of little details I've given them. But they put in like a sentence that was written by AI. And I said, what's this? And they said, well, I started putting my communication to you in chat. I said, please don't do that. I would rather have like a mistake in your grammar. You fix the grammar, but don't have it give me a sentence. And it's like, if you have time between these two meetings, you can use it to catch up.

43:42I was like, don't give me AI slop. Not for me. Maybe somebody else likes to have a bunch of flowery language wrapped around what they're doing. Not for me. Don't ever do it again. I don't want AI slop. I want crisp bullet points. But this is like, you have to be willing to say, I want crisp bullet points. I want to train my Athena assistant to do it the way I want to do it. Yada, yada, yada. And if you look at the best assistants at Athena, it's no coincidence that they work for the best clients. The clients who are really good at delegating, who are just maniacs about building systems, those assistants become the best.

44:18But it's actually a partnership. It's not that the assistant's the best, it's that the combination is the best. And so when someone feels like their assistant's not right, we first investigate the assistant to make sure they have the capabilities, but then we also look into the client and say, hey, maybe you actually don't know how to delegate right, and we're going to give you feedback on how to get more leverage out of this person. It is super important to have a playbook and a checklist. This is why I always, every single person who comes to work for me, I make them read the checklist manifesto because Jack Dorsey had read in, I don't know, some interview with him or heard him on a podcast and he talked about this book and how he gives it to everybody at Square or Twitter.

44:58And it turns out like checklists really reduce mistakes. We had a mistake today with a company we were syndicating and we skipped the part of the checklist. And it's like, you know, if you make a checklist for your Athena assistants, for your researchers, analysts, yourself, the chances of you making a mistake in highly repetitive tasks goes down in a massive way. It reduces mistakes. It also explains your thinking. Like if, you know, you want to plan a dinner party. This is, you know, when I was at Thumbtack during the busy days, I told my assistant, I don't actually have any friends outside of Thumbtack.

45:31I just work here all the time. So I need you to help me make some friends. And so she's like, all right, I'll help you plan dinner parties at your house every other week. And if I just said plan dinner parties, she couldn't have done a good job because she doesn't have the context. She doesn't know who to invite. But instead, I did what you said. I made a checklist. It's OK, I want six to eight people there. I want them to have just raise capital. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, who were, you know, at the time, just tiny little startups. Invite the founders. Here's the message. Get a chef off of Thumbtack.

45:59and I want to walk home from work at 8 p.m., walk into my apartment and there'll be eight new people I don't know that I get to hang out with for that night. And I dialed in that algorithm, that checklist and eventually it was just autoplay. And then I can be like, hey, whenever I land in a new city, have a dinner party waiting for me. People I'd like to meet. And then you're just kind of meeting everyone. I made most of my best friends from these dinners. I actually met my wife at one of these dinners and that's the sort of stuff that it starts with the checklist. Sounds simple, but it can become something bigger.

46:28You have an Athena assistant watching the baby in the crib? Is this, or if you were worried about your kid, would, this is an idea you came up with? It's creepy, but brilliant. This is black diamond delegating. I'd like to clarify. Okay. Black diamond, double black diamond or black diamond? Feels like double black. I do raise my children. I don't delegate the raising and loving of my children. There are certain lines. This is actually came from my wife. She was like, you know what? We have this baby monitor on and when the babies cry 90 % of the time they don't actually need us they go back to bed a minute later what if we had someone in the Philippines watching the baby monitor remotely and then there's an algorithm a checklist if they cry for one minute don't intervene if they cry for two minutes play a lullaby if they cry for three minutes give us a call and wake us up and we still use that today we've got four kids now and 90 % of the time the remote assistant can actually calm the situation down and we don't have to be called.

47:27But of course, if we're called, we go in and we help our kiddos. Interestingly, we have a company we invested in, Deep Sentinel. What they do is they have cameras everywhere that are two-way cameras. They built this hardware. Jonathan, you're going to think this is hilarious. But they had the insight you had, which is, hey, there's people around the globe who are looking for work. And this is work you're probably not going to get an American to do, especially now when we have 4 % unemployment. I mean, everybody wants to argue about this, but we still don't have a lot of people. So here's this security camera.

47:55If somebody's in front of it, it does a motion detection. That red light starts going in a circle, as you see on the screen here. Then the microphone turns on. Somebody, a remote security agent, I'm not sure where they use them, starts talking to them and says, hey, you're trespassing a person in the black hoodie. Now, I don't know if they're using US or not, but in the beginning, maybe they were using people in the Philippines. But anyway, the concept is somebody could be doing this remote. It turns out most people don't need an on-prem security guard. And the on-prem security guard falls asleep, plays candy crush chess reasonably.

48:27It's like a boring job to look at eight monitors. Yeah, you can have one human watching multiple houses. Eventually, you can have machines watching. And so you have machines plus humans as a backstop. Which I think is where they're at is, hey, an alarm goes off. There's motion. What type of motion is it? So my security systems tell me what type of motion it is. Oh, that's your gardener. I have the facial recognition for the gardener. I don't get an alert for that. But if it's an unknown and this literally happened, a new gardener was sent. I got an alert. Oh, new gardener. Great. Yeah. You create lots of, prevent lots of dangerous situations with my night watch situation with our kiddos.

49:03Like we've had times where one of the kids was climbing out of the crib and about to fall to the ground. It was the first time they'd ever been able to climb. And we wouldn't have known about it until we found them, you know, crying. But instead the The night nurse called us and we ran over and grabbed them. And having that human in the loop is pretty cool. So genius. Here's a question from one of our nodies. The nodies, just so you know, Jonathan, are my true, true fans. They are the notification gang. So we call them Nody Gang, N-O-T-I, because they have the notifications turned on. And they're the first to come to the live feed.

49:37So Nody Gang member Pilgs, P-I-L-G-S, says, Hey, team, does Athena work with medical space? How do they handle EMRs and other HIPAA-type systems? And he's on every day. So shout out to Pilgs. Yeah, great question. So our employees are recruited, trained, and then managed and replaced by us. But then once they join your team, they go through all of the legal and onboarding that you would put them through. So if you have specific systems or security or rules that they have to follow, you treat them like any other employee. And for most of our clients, most of the company doesn't even know this assistant is necessarily from Athena.

50:14They're fully integrated. It's just their Athena. It's just their assistant that we've recruited, trained, matched, and then increasingly will superpower with AI. So we can work in lots of different verticals and situations. Now you have to be certified for all the health stuff. We can't do that for you. But assuming you are, then our Athena assistant can roll in behind what you already have in place. I can give an example of this because we are international. We have international partners had to lock down all of our data. I have operations, not just in the United States, but I also have operations in the Middle East and Japan.

50:46Each of these countries has different privacy regulations. So I needed to lock down all of our computers. It's a little draconian. Some people are like, oh my God, spyware on our computers. Like, hey, we work at a finance company. This is just table stakes. We have to travel around the world. Our Athena assistants have to be in our notion. They have to be in our Grammarly, our Slack, our superhuman. So they also have to. So I talked to Jonathan. I think we sent our own laptops, so you gave them laptops, and then we put our software on it. We lock down their computers because they have access. We can't have somebody submit a business plan to us or their financials or legal documents we need to review and sign and then have them get hacked.

51:23And if they do get hacked, God forbid, we need to have a way to trace that and figure out how big the hack was, et cetera. So you guys were able to accommodate our stack, yeah? We purchase and deploy the laptop so that we can install security and controls and mobile device management and all the normal things you'd expect so that you can be in control. Oh, right. You have your own concerns about that, right? You have to make sure that your Athena assistants are tight. And this is why we set up real entities. People come in for interviews. We have driver's license and we're on the ground. And when someone asks me, could something go wrong?

51:58I'm like, look, if you hire an assistant in San Francisco, could something go wrong? Of course. So you need to use practical precautions. But if someone in San Francisco does something wrong, they face the full force of the law and they're deterred from doing that. We select the right humans, but we also do things the right way. So the incentives are right so that everyone is protected. When we were doing Mahalo back in the day, I was building a human-powered search engine backed by Sequoia. And Rulof was my backer here. And it didn't work out. we were too early and we also had Google search problems.

52:27But one of the things we experimented with was in the Philippines, hiring people to help us build out these search pages, Wikipedia pages and comprehensive search. And we had this firm that we were experimenting with. We had 20 people on duty and they were telling us, this is what we pay the folks and this is our cut, right? So we had this arrangement. Because we were in boots on the ground, we actually wound up sending Mike Rhodes, one of the great employees I had there to Manila to do training. And shout out to Mike Rhodes. But that was after we had this problem, Jonathan. Some of the people on the team, because I had mentioned, I think on this very podcast that I was, what I was paying them and how great this like was, said, we're not actually getting paid that amount.

53:02We're getting paid like a third of that amount. And I was like, what? And we go to the person, the person's like, oh, no, no, it's a misunderstanding. We had these training people. Anyway, they were lying to us. They were being dishonest. We didn't have boots on the ground. We sent boots on the ground, you know, dah, dah, dah, dah. We wanted them in an office. We wanted to know their names. So then we said, okay, we came up with this great system. They would send us pay slips. Three months later, same complaint. We get the pay slips. They were doctored. The person sent It turns out - That's crazy.

53:23It's not crazy. When you're dealing with an emerging frontier world, which Mr. President Donald Trump, even Jason, he recognizes even Jason has these insights. He calls it the third world. I call it frontier markets. I use the proper language. But listen, President Trump can use what he wants, okay? Precise language. In these markets, it's a little bit of the Wild West. So like there's the United States, there's like banana republics, and then the Philippines or India. they might be somewhere, and they call them the emerging markets or frontier markets for the reason. You have to deal with this.

53:57And that's why Jonathan, actually having a partner like Jonathan and Athena makes a lot of sense because I don't want to deal with this stuff. I had to deal with that stuff. Look, what I tell founders is I want every founder to have an assistant. You don't have to use me. If you don't have any budget, use ChatGPT and use it as your partner, brainstorm, help you set goals. If you have budget for$5 an hour and that's all, then go on to Upwork and one of these services and hire yourself with the caveat that you need to interview hundreds of people and have lots of precautions for all the reasons you just said, Jason.

54:29Yes, that's always an option when you know, I hired the very first person in the Philippines off work at the time and interviewed a couple hundred people and you have to interview a lot like a Athena we've at 400 people for everyone we hire. Wow, you're interviewing 10. You're probably not going to get that gem but you can do that on your own if you don't have budget like I want you to do that. Don't use Athena. But if you can afford$3 ,000 a month, then don't take the brain damage. AthenaWow.com slash VIP is my VIP link. I'm going to keep it up for a little bit. Instead of getting two weeks free, you get four.

54:59It's the best deal in the world. And like I said, you get what you put in. If you're not willing to delegate and put work into it, please don't do it. If you're on a budget, please don't do it. Go do Upwork, find websites, five or whatever you want. But this is the secret behind my productivity is my dual Athena 365-day coverage. Man, it is incredible for me. Listen, I do my Tahoe trip. I don't want to say this because I got to gatekeep it. But it's hard when you go certain time periods. When I go to Niseko for skiing, it's hard to get reservations. So what do I do? Six weeks out, I set up my reservations for the week I'm planning on going.

55:36When I go to Tahoe, same thing. I book these restaurants six weeks out. They know who I am. My Athena assistants take time on the phone. want to have a little script, yada, yada, it's Jason Calcannon, it's coming in. You want to make your life easy as a founder and reclaim your energy. Jonathan, it is such a privilege and honor for me to be the first investor in two extraordinary unicorns that you and your partners, Marco, and the teams have built. Thank you for being first. We couldn't do it without you. You've been amazing and excited to - Let's tell the truth. You could have done it without me and you would have done it without me.

56:08Maybe not the first one. It may have been harder with the first one. I'll I don't know if that round would have been catalyzed. I mean, look, we wouldn't have given up, I tell you that, but we had been trying and you helped catalyze it. So I'm going to give you credit on this one. Okay, I take credit for the first, take no credit for the second. I like it. I'll split the difference with you, which is great to know you. For those of you who are founders out there, if you want to have the relationship Jonathan and I have had for a decade, it's very simple. Go to founder.university. In Japan, Saudi, or America, the sun never sets on the J-Cal empire.

56:38I'm operating in three different time zones around the world now, Jonathan. I am scaling thanks to my Athena assistance. I love you, brother. Love you. Thank you so much. Appreciate the support. We'll see you all next time. Come to Founder.University. Why don't you come? Okay, we'll talk to you soon. Oh, no, yeah, you should come and talk. You're going to give a talk. That's why I'm going to get your time. Japan sounds fun. I love Japan. Second week in January, you could come be a mentor and then we could go hit the, do you ski or not? I do. I was actually on the ski team growing up, slalom team.

57:05It is not far from Philippines. Let's talk about it. Could be a one-two punch. All right, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.