Wes Kao on Maven, Managing Up, and the Super Specific How
Source: Lenny’s Podcast Speaker: Wes Kao Link: Episode
Wes Kao is the co-founder of Maven, a platform for cohort-based courses. Before Maven she co-created the altMBA with Seth Godin, growing it from zero to thousands of students across 45 countries. This first Lenny’s episode covers the communication and teaching principles she developed across those years — in particular the discipline of specificity, the art of managing up, and her approach to live-session engagement.
Key ideas
- The super specific how. Most communication fails not because people disagree with the what or why, but because the speaker stops before the how. Audiences already know the goal is important; what they need is the specific mechanism. Skip the preamble. The talk or message should start as close as possible to the actionable instruction.
- Start right before you get eaten by the bear. A metaphor for eliminating backstory. If the audience needs to know a bear is chasing you, start the sentence when the bear is about to catch you — not when you entered the forest. Applied to pitches, presentations, and Slack messages: cut everything that precedes the moment of tension or decision.
- The BS pyramid. Content hierarchy by signal-to-noise ratio: Twitter is the lowest-density medium (most social performance), long-form writing is higher, courses are the highest (least room for vagueness because students will act on what you say). The implication for teaching: if an idea can’t survive a course, it probably can’t survive scrutiny in any medium.
- State change as engagement. Live sessions lose audiences when the speaker holds the floor unbroken for more than three to five minutes. The solution is deliberate state changes: switching from lecture to chat, polls, breakouts, gallery view, or screen share. Each switch resets attention. The mechanic is not entertainment — it is cognitive reset.
- Eyes lighting up. The face cannot fake genuine interest. Wes collects the moments when a student’s expression shifts — the micro-signal of a resonant idea — as raw material for content, pitch refinement, and understanding what is actually useful versus what merely sounds useful.
- Managing up via the state-of-Lenny email. A recurring written brief from report to manager covering: current priorities, blockers, and what is on my mind. The brief prevents surprises, builds trust through transparency, and trains the writer to articulate their own priorities with clarity. Wes learned the format from Lenny himself and considers it one of the highest-leverage communication habits for anyone without direct authority.
- Saying no via trade-offs. When declining a request, name the specific thing that gets deprioritised if you say yes. The Alex Peck method: make the cost visible and give the asker the decision. This transforms a refusal into a prioritisation conversation and moves agency back to the person asking.