Jonathan Swanson
Founder & Chairman, Athena. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@swaaanson ↗LinkedIn ↗athena.com ↗
Swanson co-founded Thumbtack, an online home-services marketplace, and later founded Athena, a platform providing executive assistant services. He is also a venture investor and widely known for his operational frameworks on delegation and leverage.
2shows
2appearances
57statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
11said about them ↓ Everything Jonathan Swanson said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Athena prototyped an AI that monitors screens to auto-delegate tasks
“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…”
Leaders should delay company-wide crisis disclosure until an actionable plan exists
“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 gonna work, and so you have to kind of get a handle of the situation you know, the people who need to know it, and then once there's …”
Trillion-dollar companies cannot be built through startup incubation studios
“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.”
Swanson: Thumbtack Generated 25% of Craigslist's Service Postings Before Being Banned
“And this scaled up to a point where it was like a quarter of all Craigslist service volume, all these auto posts from Thumbtack pros. And then, you know, not surprisingly, we got a cease and desist that told us we should stop this and we'd been banned from Cra…”
Swanson: Active founders have the best deal flow and feed VCs
“Active founders have the best deal flow. That's actually where VCs get most of their deal flow and they have the most fresh and relevant operating experience.”
Billions of people will learn to delegate to machine assistants
“It's gonna become ubiquitous. People are, there's gonna be billions of people learning to delegate to a machine assistant”
Founders who do not hire an assistant end up being the assistant
“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.”
Advanced delegation requires exporting internal preferences to delegate by algorithm
“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 gonna get what you want. The more advanced way to delegate is called delegate by algorithm, where you actually export your own…”
Remote teams build communication debt and need bi-monthly in-person gatherings
“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.”
Top executive assistants only perform as well as their delegator
“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…”
Traditional interviews fail for C-suite executives because they excel at interviewing
“One thing that is obvious as you hire execs is the more senior they go, the better they are 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…”
Trusted peer networks outperform executive recruiters for sourcing talent
“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.”
Standard interviewing fails because it does not test actual work
“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.”
A Google search penalty once wiped out Thumbtack's web traffic and revenue
“At Thumbtack, there was a moment, you may remember this, a decade ago, where I woke up, and I had a message from someone on 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 …”
Only one co-founder goes the distance as a technology startup scales
“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.”
Most people should operate in 'war mode' 90% of the time
“Well, most people should actually be in war mode, like, 90% of the time, and that same Yeah, hardcore-ness is just like, the right would operate.”
Reviewing a routine list of lawsuits at board meetings signals startup scale
“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. It'…”
Swanson: Most Founders and CEOs Are Mediocre Delegators
“Most CEOs
And founders are actually pretty mediocre delegators.
when it comes to working with an assistant we've worked with, you know, a thousand plus at Athena and some of the best YC Sequoia back companies, and most founders never graduate beyond the kind …”
Swanson: Executives Should Invest in EA Relationships for a Decade Plus
“CEOs tend to make is they don't invest long-term.
They have one EA for a couple of years and then another one for a couple of years.
These relationships compound over time.
You want to invest for a decade plus.”
Jonathan Swanson employs six executive assistants to manage his daily life
“I'm lucky to have a half dozen EAs who support me now, and I know that may sound insane to lots of people, but to me, it's obvious it's not enough.”
Swanson increased his free testosterone by 10% by eliminating household phthalates
“I measured free testosterone before and after, and it was 10% higher.”
Achieving leverage requires overcoming the initial inefficiency of delegation
“Cardinal sin of delegation is that it will be faster or 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.”
AI assistants will evolve into full autonomy like self-driving cars
“Yeah, I mean, it's a moving target, obviously, is gonna 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, and th…”
The other half of the tape: Jonathan Swanson's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 10 times in 3 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Alex Lieberman 10
Statements about Jonathan Swanson, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Founder's Journal 10
2023 10 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jonathan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Founder & Chairman, Athena | 1 | 39 | 100% 3/3 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| FOUNDER'S JOURNALLEDGER | Founder & Chairman, Athena | 1 | 18 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Founder's Journal → |