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

I never had assistance or service providers or house cleaners in my house, not a world I was part of. But when I graduated from school, I worked at the White House. And the White House, I sat next to the president's executive assistants in the West Wing. And as you might imagine, these EAs were really good, and it set my bar incredibly high. What if I had a team of assistants like the president has? Not the president, but what if I had that same team? What could I accomplish? I hired my first assistant in The Philippines as we're scaling the business. She really transformed what I was capable of doing, helped me scale the business, helped me scale myself. She helped me make friends out of work, helping me and my wife, all sorts of amazing things. The most valuable asset in the world, it's not gold or Bitcoin or Nvidia clusters. It's time. We all have a fixed amount of time. It's forever fleeting. And Athena's mission is to give people more of that most valuable resource so they have more time to build their business, spend time with their family, whatever matters most to them. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Gusto. Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small business and startups. Try Gusto and get three months free at gusto.com/twist. Crusoe Cloud. Crusoe is the AI factory company, reliable infrastructure, and expert support. Visit crusoe.ai/build to reserve your capacity for the latest GPUs today. And Northwest registered agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest registered agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and ten minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit northwestregisteredagents.com/twist today. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Serbs. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. With me again, Alex Wilhelm, and we have a special guest today. Let's get right back into it, folks. Jonathan Swanson, I met you, gosh, twelve years ago. I was doing a little thing called Open Angel Forum. You and, our pal Marco were trying to build a little startup called Thumbtack, but you had a problem. You're trying to raise money. It was hard to raise money. That's right. You you said, Jonathan, come pitch me and my friends, and we'll see what we can do. And we met up at Steakhouse. We pitched you and a dozen other people, and it catalyzed our angel round. We had been looking for money for a couple months, and you catalyzed the whole round. JCal first investor in, and that set us off on a trajectory to build the business we built now, which is doing around half 1,000,000,000 of revenue, very profitable, growing nicely, supporting hundreds of thousands of small business owners. So it's been a fun fun journey. Amazing. It's really interesting what …