Wes Kao: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. I definitely want to chat a bit about Seth Godin. I've been such a huge fan of his for, I don't know, a decade. I used to subscribe to his newsletter and I don't anymore, because it's an email every day and it's overwhelming, even though he pointed out in one of his newsletters, okay, just ignore it. Why would you be sad that I have so much content? But yeah, anyway I unsubscribed recently, but I'm such a fan. And so I'm so curious, one, how did you connect with him and how did that even happen? And then two, what is he like to work with? Both very, very juicy questions. So the way that we connected was Seth had put out a blog post saying that he was looking for a special projects lead to help him figure out what to do next. So this was in 2014 when he had just sold off his last company Squidoo that he had been working on for I think, eight years or so before that. So he was ready for something new, at a crossroads, wanted some fresh inspiration, and I saw this blog post on a whim. And at that time I was at that ad tech company in San Francisco and I thought there are probably thousands of people who are going to be applying to this, so I don't want to get my hopes up. I did want to move to New York. I feel like everyone in SF and California at some time wants to move to New York. And so I thought, all right, I'm going to toss my hat in the ring and not overthink it. And so the application required a video, so there was a written application and then there was a video. So Seth said, "Take three minutes to talk about what you want to build, what you want to contribute, and what you want to learn," something along those lines. And I did my video in one take. Normally I would've done multiple takes for sure, but here I just thought there's a very little chance I'm going to get this. And a couple days later to my surprise, I get an email from Seth Godin. He's in my inbox and I'm just jumping up and down in my living room because he's asked, "Hey, loved your video. Let's hop on a call for an interview." And of course I write a very calm professional response and we did a couple rounds of interviews and I get the role. So I pack my life into six suitcases, get an apartment sight unseen in this little town right outside of New York City, where Seth's office is, it's called Hastings-on-Hudson. And what initially started off as a six month role eventually led to over three years working together and starting the altMBA together. So that's how we got connected, very serendipitous. But my lesson there is don't take yourself out of the running before you get rejected. Don't reject yourself, basically. I think a lot of us have high standards and high expectations of ourselves and it's almost like, oh, if I can't do the best application, then I just shouldn't apply. If I don't have time to take five takes of this video, it won't be good enough, and so I just shouldn't do it. So for me, that was a great lesson in putting your best foot forward, but putting your foot forward. I love that.…

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