I’ve had 6+ different executive coaches over the last 12 years. My favorite thing about coaching is it provides “system upgrades” to your internal operating system.

Collectively, these coaches have changed my life: Great coaches often identify key growth areas and help you work through the necessary challenges between you and achieving results.

I’ve had coaches teach me how to become more empathetic with my team, improve the quality of my feedback, and enhance my weekly productivity.

SQL is going to die at the hands of an AI. I’m serious.

@mayowaoshin is already doing this. Takes your company’s data and ingests it into ChatGPT. Then, you can create a chatbot for the data and just ask it questions using natural language.

This video demoes the output.

🤯 Mayo is going to teach a course on Maven. He’ll walk you through how to do this and by the end of the course, you’ll have a fully working AI chatbot that anyone in your company can use to query your data.

I've seen it behind the scenes and it is powerful.

How to Control Midjourney using “Additive Prompting” - a lesson from @nickfloats

AI prompt recommendations are useless. It’s far more useful to understand the underlying technique to build your own prompts for your custom use case.

Let’s dive in 👇 Midjourney is the most powerful AI visualizer out there. It enables anyone to build photorealistic images with words. The challenge is that Midjourney prompting is finicky and requires experience to truly master.

Additive Prompting involves these 4 steps:

✨ Big news: After 2 years of private beta and hundreds of hours of engineering work…

Previously, teaching on Maven was invite-only. That changes today.

Now, anyone can use @MavenHQ’s course builder!

Check it out—it’s free to get started. Before, you needed to use almost a dozen tools to get a course off the ground.

With Maven, you can spin up a new course w/our all-in-one tool that covers: email marketing, landing page, Zoom integrations, syllabus, community, & more.

Try it for free: bit.ly/3VzEUZ4

The last two weeks in SF have been amazing. I've also learned a few things that make me optimistic for its future. The food, the vibe, the drinks, the people. I grew up in the Bay Area and while I wish SF was more favorable to tech, it is amazing to see SF in its "true form". Eclectic, stunningly beautiful, and urban.

💥 Big News! 💥

Maven is launching over 100+ new courses today to help you accelerate your career.

Over the last year, almost 10k professionals from Google, Nasa, McKinsey and Tesla have learned career-boosting skills on Maven.

Why are so many people taking courses on Maven? Online learning has gotten a bad rap. Video-based courses are self-paced and boring.

You have to slog to get through them. Most people try and fail.

Only 4-10% of people complete video-based courses.

On Maven, that number is closer to 75-90%!

Company off-sites are becoming more regular and we just had ours at Maven last week. Thought I'd share a bit about what we do to make ours special.

3 rules:
1. 50% fun
2. In person isn't critical for company ops
3. 80/20 rule

A bunch more details on how we run them... Logistics:
- We're 25 ppl all in N. America so we pick a place within 3 hours drive of an int'l airport (Sedona, upstate NYC, Montreal, Costa Rica)
- We've tried 7, 4, and 3 days. I think we'll settle on 4 days as 3 always feels short and more than 4 is too much.

The hardest part in starting a $100m business: picking the right idea to work on.

Pick wrong and you’ll spend years working away with little to no results.

Pick right and you'll have a much better chance to succeed.

Here’s how I’ve decided what ideas to work on… Disclaimer/

I feel like I’ve picked the right market 3x (Udemy, Lyft, Sprig)

That said, Udemy isn’t the clear category winner I hoped for.

I was a (very) small player at Lyft.

Was right about food delivery but picked the wrong model w Sprig.

/Disclaimer over

✨ Announcement ✨

I've spent decades building businesses. The hardest part is the start - coming up with a great idea and getting it off the ground.

In the last year I've finally built some frameworks around HOW to replicate my process... Finding a great idea is super tough, but my favorite part is actually the first 6-18 months of execution.

How do you go from a vision to reality? What's your wedge into a big, new opportunity?

✨Maven is hiring!

Come build the future of online learning with cohort-based courses

In 2021:
🚀 3 to 25 team members
🤑 Raised $25M from a16z
🤯 100 experts making $ doing what they love

We’re hiring in instructional design, marketing, account mgmt, sales, and ops... Course Creation & Strategy

You'll work with some of the biggest creators on the Internet to help them create courses people love.

You've got great all-around skills on creating presentations, lead course strategy, and developing curriculum:

boards.greenhouse.io/maven/jobs/431…

Investor math: ownership-driven. Investors want to own a certain % of a company.

Founder math: valuation-driven. Founders often care about how "big" their company is.

Often this benefits investors more than founders, and so I thought I'd share how this works...

👇🏾 The ground rules:

1. Exit values are highly unpredictable

You can't know in advance whether your company is destined to be a $100M, $1B, $5B, $100B company. Especially because as a founder, let's be honest they all sound like pie-in-the-sky numbers anyway

Many founders assume the best first step in exploring an idea is building an MVP.

This is wrong--there is a better way that can save you time and money.

THREAD: The Minimum Viable Testing framework (a follow-up to my article in the First Round Review)

👇🏾 1/ The common wisdom in the startup world is that you can’t predict whether people will want your product.

Instead, you do some customer research, throw an MVP out there as fast as possible, and hope it hits.

That’s not my approach--and I think it's a waste of time and money.

Wow. Today is the 1 year anniversary of Maven. It's my 3rd internet startup and 7th company. Learning a lot.

These are written as reflections for me and not lessons for you. I hope you'll appreciate me thinking out loud and sharing what's going through my head...

👇🏾 1. The long view.

I started my first startup at 21. I'm amazed at how much of my successes and failures build upon the relationships that date back to 2009!

My reputation has followed me everywhere - for better and (sometimes!) for worse.

💥New Roles at Maven💥

Special opportunity to join a <20 person, fast-growing startup. You'll own a function and grow a team:
♠️ General Managers of Core and Partnership Operations
♥️ Product
♣️ Talent
♦️ Design

Many roles report to CEO + are on leadership team.

Details👇🏾 ♠️ Own and run a P&L for business lines that could be $100M+ in GMV. Reports to CEO.

General Manager of Core Operations:
boards.greenhouse.io/maven/jobs/409…

General Manager of Partnership Operations:
boards.greenhouse.io/maven/jobs/407…

Many people think you need to have a big audience before launching a cohort-based course.

I call bullshit.

THREAD: 6 amazing courses (and Maven success stories) from emerging creators: @SaraSodineParr (4,000 followers): ‘Build the Right Thing’

Teaches you how to get customers to reveal what they *actually* need so you build money-making products from the beginning.

She sold out her pilot cohort at $499 / seat

OK so you’ve seen me tweet about Maven, we raised $25M, and there are a ton of amazing instructors on board.

But what are we really doing here?

The top-secret 10-year vision for Maven...

**Read On** Maven is democratizing education by empowering anyone to build a cohort-based course (CBC).

Heard that before? That was the pitch for Udemy, Coursera, etc. But they are falling short because they focus on video-based courses or MOOCs.

✨Most leaders learn by making mistakes. Lots of them. It's painful and challenging.

My friend @shivanisberry teaches leadership thru Ascend’s Leadership Program for women (now on Maven dot com!)

Her 5 best lessons on imposter syndrome, getting buy-in, storytelling + more 👇🏾 #1 Getting Buy-In

We often assume the “right answer” must be obvious to everyone. Your stakeholders have different context and goals than you.

Build credibility by sharing the backstory. What expertise do you come in with? What work did you do to arrive at your conclusions?

We'll be revealing our name next week!

There's very little out there about naming and domain name negotiations, so I thought I'd share a bit of our story... There were 2 steps:

1) Create a "short list" of names
2) Acquire the domain

The story of how we did it 👇🏾 We enlisted two of our investors to help:

1) @hiiamArielle at First Round who ran us through a naming process (for free)

2) @krutal is a serial entrepreneur who also happens to be an excellent domain name negotiator

Talk about value-add!

Hard to read stuff like this IMHO. Grew up as an brown man after 9/11. Been called lots of names, "random" searched at the airport, etc.

Yet, this is an extremely privileged take.

Where you are from is the #1 first question asked by people I met while traveling.

https://twitter.com/davelu/status/1373857121993850880

Asking your ethnicity through the second question is such an opportunity to connect with people. If you say confidently and proudly where you are from, 90% of people will just continue to engage with you and ask more questions.

Most people aren't racist. They are race-curious.

Profile: @erenbali, CEO of the fastest growing healthtech co in America.

Eren grew up in post-1980-coup state terror, dad expelled for political dissidence, his mom the only teacher in the village

Since, he's founded 2 unicorns @udemy + @carbonhealth

This is a wild story 👇🏾 Eren’s parents were political activists and teachers, members of the Kurdish minority that has been persecuted in Turkey for generations.

They moved back to Durulova (pop. 330) to help teach the local population bc nobody else would.

Fundraising for first-time founders. This is a first principles thread on fundraising that should help any new founder understand how to raise money and what steps to take.

I've personally raised about $70M from 1500 investors & this synthesize a lot of my advice.

**Read On** Step #1: Understand Venture Capital

So many founders message me asking for advice on raising capital, yet they haven’t bothered to actually understand how VC’s work. If you don’t understand why investors invest and what they look for, how will you convince them?