The Ledger
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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.”
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.”
Peter Thiel and Founders Fund Passed on Investing in Thumbtack
“We tried to get Peter Thiel and Founders Fund to invest and they passed.”
Swanson: Thumbtack Would Not Exist if Craigslist Had Innovated on Product
“It's easy to give Craigslist a hard time for not innovating on product, but if they did we wouldn't be here.”
Swanson: Google Capital Gave Thumbtack $100M Term Sheet in Five Days
“Google capital came to us and said, we're interested in investing. We weren't fundraising and we said, okay, we'll talk to you. And five days later, they gave us a term sheet for a hundred million dollars.”
Swanson: Co-founder dynamic is marriage intensity without makeup sex
“I mean, with founders, it's you have all the intensity of a marriage relationship, but there's no makeup sex, right? So you have to find other ways that you can bond, whether it's going for a long run or having a drink or whatever it might be.”
Swanson: Thumbtack search traffic fell to zero after Google de-indexed it
“And I went to, you know, Google analytics and our traffic had not fallen by 10 or 20%, but a hundred, zero. And we were de-indexed. We were completely removed from Google.”
Swanson: Philippine hire beat American applicants on English proofreading quality and price
“This woman in the Philippines named Mikan beat the Americans and everyone else, not just on price, but on quality. She was a better English proofreader than Americans.”
Swanson: Believing It Is Faster to Do Tasks Yourself Ruins Delegation
“The cardinal sin of delegation is thinking it's faster or better to do something yourself.
And of course it is, you can always do something faster or better yourself, but the way you gain leverage is you spend more time upfront delegating something so that you…”
Swanson: C-Suite Delegation Demands Autonomy, Assistant Delegation Needs Prescription
“C level you need to, you know, reports, you need to give total autonomy and freedom to, and you empower them at the highest level and hold them accountable against the very highest goals of the company.
with an assistant, you need to be much more prescriptive…”
Swanson's Powerset fund gives active founders capital to angel invest
“Power set is Founders backing founders venture fund. So we give capital and coaching to active founders, not to invest in their company, but so that they can invest in other startups.”
Swanson: Only 1-2% of venture capital comes from active founders
“Last year there was about five hundred billion dollars invested in venture capital, one or two percent of that came from active founders. Most of it came from institutional VCs”
Swanson: Thumbtack Indexed Tens of Millions of Pros by Web-Crawling Billions of Pages
“And from these billions of pages, we crawled, we created an index of tens of millions of service pros websites who were looking for active work. And then we created a mechanism to reach out to them programmatically and get them to sign up for Thumbtack.”
Swanson: Thumbtack proofreader Mikan grew to manage over 1,000 people in the Philippines
“And so she went from individual contributor to a manager of five and 10 proofreaders to then eventually a general manager of a team of a few hundred To eventually the head of our team in the Philippines managing over a thousand people.”