Brian Johnson wants to break the chains of biology. I want to break the chains of time. We can always raise another round or do another trade, but you can't raise another decade. You're running a massive company. You also do investing. You're also happy marriage with four kids. I know the way that you do it all is delegation. What is the secret that you've figured out? Cardinal sin of delegation is that it will be faster or better to do it myself.

And the reason it's a blocker is because it's true.

But the only way you get leverage is by going through that work.

A couple decades ago, you had to be Mark and Driesen, Irvinodikosa, to have a half dozen assistants.

And that costs you half a million dollars.

Now with a company like Athena for $3,000 a month,

you can have your own assistant. What have you learned in your extensive founder career?

Most people think about delegation as a convenience. Jonathan Swanson thinks about it as a system

for living and has built its career around a simple idea. If you don't have an assistant, you are the assistant.

He scaled Bumptack into one of the major home services marketplaces for the last decade.

Now he's doing it again with Athena,

the number one place to hire a personal assistant who can run your calendar,

your operations, your home, and increasingly your AI workflows.

Jonathan is running a 4,000-person company while investing on the side and raising four kids.

The through line is a very intentional philosophy of time.

He believes most people underestimate how much ambition they unlock when they learn to delegate well.

In this conversation, we talk about how elite assistant culture shaped him,

while founders consistently get wrong about leverage

and why he thinks billions of people

will soon be delegating to a mix of human and AI partners.

We get into delegation frameworks,

splitting work across multiple assistants,

...