Jonathan Swanson on Building a Unicorn and Delegating 90% of Your Life

Founder's Journal

Morning Brew

Entrepreneurship, Careers, Business

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Episode 17: Today, hosts Alex Lieberman (@businessbarista) and Jesse Pujji (@jspujji) are joined by fellow startup entrepreneur Jonathan Swanson. Jonathan is the co-founder and chairman of Thumbtack—a massive technology leader building the modern home management platform. In this episode, Jonathan tells Alex and Jesse all about how he and his co-founders came up with the idea for Thumbtack, the turning points and oh-sh*t moments of growing the business, and his genius delegation tactics that save him hundreds of hours over the course of a year. Time Mapping: (00:50) - Intro (01:51) - Start of Jonathan Swanson interview (04:04) - What keeps Jonathan motivated, even after all of his career success (05:21) - Jonathan Swanson’s upbringing and background (06:20) - Why Jonathan decided to pursue entrepreneurship (09:23) - The early days of starting Thumbtack (15:48) - The moment that changed everything for Thumbtack (17:09) - How Jonathan navigates his co-founder relationship (22:00) - The event that almost killed Thumbtack (27:00) - The overseas employee that changed Jonathan’s trajectory (30:20) - Jonathan’s career path after Thumbtack (33:40) - Jonathan’s tips for how to delegate as a leader (41:21) - Jonathan’s other businesses (45:00) - How Jonathan hacks his personal life Subscribe to Morning Brew! Sign up for free today: https://bit.ly/morningbrewyt Follow The Brew! Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/morningbrew/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/MorningBrew Tik Tok - https://www.tiktok.com/@morningbrew YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheCrazyOnesPod Follow Our Hosts! Alex Lieberman (@businessbarista) Jesse Pujji (@jspujji) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Google Capital came to us and said we're interested in investing we weren't fundraising and we said okay
0:07.1	We'll talk to you and five days later
0:10.4	They gave us a term sheet for a hundred million dollars and I
0:14.2	Were still remember sitting at in the conference room when they made the offer as with Marco and
0:22.8	We ended the call and I sat down on the floor and put my head in my hands and was just like holy shit
0:30.6	And it felt like
0:32.6	This gap between what we thought our potential was and what the world thought suddenly collapsed and
0:38.6	For years people said you don't have the potential you think you do and in that moment
0:43.9	You know these investors said we believe and that was super validating
0:50.4	What's up everyone? I'm Alex Lieberman. You know this is Jesse Pooji and this is the crazy ones
1:01.0	What's up crazy ones listeners?
1:03.4	We are back with another episode of the show and as promised we're testing a lot of stuff in this new year
1:09.1	We tested last week the new format with going through the Twitter thread riffing about it today
1:14.1	We have our first guest and it's coming full circle because the first person that I ever interviewed when starting morning
1:21.0	Brew was the CEO of Thumbtack the
1:24.7	Amazon for services Marco is apacosta and today our first guest is his co-founder
1:30.1	Jonathan Swanson Jesse, this was a fun one. Yeah, listen up. You're gonna learn about building billion dollar businesses
1:37.4	One person having six EA's and how to cure
1:40.5	Men testosterone issues. Take a listen and let us know what you think
1:44.8	Shoot us an email at the crazy ones at Morning Brew.com and let us know if you want some more good interviews like this
1:51.7	Jonathan Swanson. Thank you so much for joining the crazy ones
1:55.9	Thank you for having me
	...

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