“I started digging into the completion rates of video courses and realized that they were abysmally low. I think three to six percent is completion rate.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
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More from Wes Kao
Insight
Kao: Executives succeed when treating a founder's personality as a constraint
“I think that many pairings of execs and founders that work really well are when execs recognize that their founder can be spiky in different ways that might not really make sense, that they are really good at certain things and not as good as at other things.
…”
Wes KaoMay 22, 2025▶ 19:44How Wes Kao coaches founders to influence, lead, and get what they want | (Co-founder of Maven)
Insight
Kao: Speed vs quality is a false trade-off in most situations
“Trade-offs like speed versus quality, you know, like people talk about that and throw that around, like, You probably have room or I had room to be faster and to produce better quality without starting to trade off on either. That in most situations, there's s…”
Wes KaoMay 22, 2025▶ 56:37How Wes Kao coaches founders to influence, lead, and get what they want | (Co-founder of Maven)
Insight
Kao: Public speaking is a terrible mental model for workplace communication
“There was so much of communication that operators and founders do on a day to day basis where public speaking is actually a terrible mental model. If you think about it with public speaking, it's one directional. You're sage on stage. You have one speech which…”
Wes KaoMay 22, 2025▶ 1:16:44How Wes Kao coaches founders to influence, lead, and get what they want | (Co-founder of Maven)
Insight
Kao: Low-emoting leaders should amplify enthusiastic wording over forced facial expressions
“If you are someone who's low emoting instead of trying to be, you know, high emoting, you should basically take that into account and turn up the enthusiasm in your words, in the actual content of your words, instead of relying on your facial expressions or to…”
Wes KaoMay 22, 2025▶ 6:53How Wes Kao coaches founders to influence, lead, and get what they want | (Co-founder of Maven)
Insight
Wes Kao: Most people over-index on explicit rather than implicit feedback
“I think that most people over index on explicit feedback. So we wait until, you know, our colleague complains about something. Or, you know, gives us very direct feedback before we're like, oh, okay, this was bothering them. Whereas if you took a step back and…”
Wes KaoMay 22, 2025▶ 9:49How Wes Kao coaches founders to influence, lead, and get what they want | (Co-founder of Maven)
Insight
Kao: Frame recommendations under a founder's existing values, not new ones
“It is much better
To frame whatever it is you want to talk to them about or your recommendation under an existing umbrella of what they already care about, of values they already have, of ways that they already think the business should be run.”
Wes KaoMay 22, 2025▶ 18:34How Wes Kao coaches founders to influence, lead, and get what they want | (Co-founder of Maven)
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