Persuasive communication and managing up | Wes Kao (Maven, Seth Godin, Section4)

**Wes Kao** (0:00)
I think that most people assume that their boss has to manage them.
And they feel a little bit resentful that, why should I manage my boss? They're getting paid more, they are my manager, they have more responsibility. And you can continue to think that way. And your career might be fine. But if you embrace that, if you manage your boss, they're going to appreciate you much more, you're gonna get more opportunities, you're gonna have more trust with them. There's all these great things that happen when you decide to manage up.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:36)
Wes Kao is the co-founder of Maven, a cohort-based learning platform that I use to create my own course on product management. But even more interestingly, she's helped folks like Seth Godin start his Alt-MVA course, which is legendary. She's also helped people like David Perell, Tiago Forte, Scott Galloway, and even Morning Brew build their cohort-based courses. She's one of the smartest people I've ever met on the art of teaching, and I've learned a ton from her. And in our chat, we cover a concept I love called the super specific who. We talk about the state change method and how using this idea, you'll run better meetings.
We look at a bunch of advice for why you should spend time managing up and how to manage up effectively. We talk about a bunch of ways to write better, tips for saying no, and a bunch of other really interesting topics. I always have such a good time chatting with Wes, and I hope that you learn as much from this chat as I did. And with that, I bring you Wes Kao.
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Get started quickly by setting up Burbix with no code, low code, or complete integration in as little as one afternoon. Visit burbix.com/start to get started. That's berbix.com/start. Well, Wes, I've learned so much from you over the years in so many different ways while building my course through your writing, through your tweets.
And generally, you're just a super fascinating human that I love this excuse to get to learn more about you and for listeners to learn more about you. And so with that, Wes, welcome to the podcast.

**Wes Kao** (4:01)
Hey Lenny, great to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:03)
It's my pleasure.
So just to set a little context about the West that we know today, your career path has been pretty untraditional for many of the guests that we've had on this podcast. And so I'd love to just hear a kind of a brief high level overview of your career and kind of understand what made Wes the West that she is today.

**Wes Kao** (4:23)
I started my career in corporate retail at the GAP headquarters in San Francisco. So I did a rotational training program rotating between Old Navy, Banana Republic, GAP. And it was a great foundation in business fundamentals. You know, a lot of people talk about, should I out of school go to a bigger company or should I go to a startup? So I kind of went to a bigger company and gradually have gone to smaller companies since then until finally starting my own in the past 15 years. So, you know, I think that the getting to see inside what a company that's, you know, been around for 40 plus years was like, was really, really fantastic training and set me up for success for, you know, jumping into tech and other roles since then.