Welcome to Wes Kao's Newsletter

A weekly post for rigorous marketers, leaders, and builders

Welcome to my newsletter! Thanks for being here. 

Each week, I’ll cover an idea that will help you build new products, influence others, and be a more effective operator. I’ll always aim to share practical advice rooted in my personal experience, but will experiment with different topics, lengths, and formats.

New issues will be published on Wednesday mornings at 8am ET (because I love a good alliteration re: Wes on Wednesdays).

If you have questions you think I can help with, let me know. I’ll keep it anonymous and share some suggestions in an upcoming newsletter.

Who is Wes?

A bit about me: I’m Wes Kao. For the past 15 years, I’ve been a 2x founder, marketer, operator, manager, and builder. Some highlights include:

• Co-founded Maven, a platform for live online courses. We raised $25M from First Round and Andreessen Horowitz, and have served 15,000+ students and helped instructors earn $14M to date. In 2022, Maven was named the #1 most innovative education company by Fast Company.

• Co-founded the altMBA with bestselling author Seth Godin. Launched in 2014, altMBA was one of the first successful online cohort-based courses. In the first 3 years, we served 2,000+ students in 45 countries and had a 96% completion rate.

• Advised CEOs/founders of companies like Section, Outlier, Poo~Pourri, and Morning Brew.

Since 2010, I’ve written on my blog to document my learnings and insights along the way, which has evolved into this newsletter. For bite-sized content, feel free to follow on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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Why subscribe?

My perspective is informed by being on both sides of various metaphorical tables:

• I’ve been a manager and a direct report

• I’ve been a founder and a team member

• I’ve worked in corporate retail and in stores

• I’ve been steamrolled and done the steamrolling

• I’ve been in front of the camera and behind the scenes

• I’ve been the consultant and the operator who executes after the consultant leaves

• I’ve been the older and younger sibling (yes I’m a middle child, it explains a lot)

I believe being able to empathize with different actors with different incentives allows me to get buy-in, weigh potential options, and strategize to make the most of what I’m working with.

With this blog and newsletter, I hope to share what I've seen work well, so I can provoke your thinking and help you make better decisions about your work too.

Stay up-to-date

Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and archive. Never miss an update.

Sharpen your ability to execute

This newsletter draws from functions that have informed my experience, including marketing, product, communication, management, etc. It’s not any one of those things—it’s a hybrid. Some topics I’ll share about:

• executing well

• setting a high bar

• building alignment

• framing your ideas

• developing finesse

• reducing cognitive load

• marketing first principles

• turning bugs into features

• writing for modern readers

• using messaging as a lever

• improving your communication

• developing your spiky point of view

• building hype for your go-to-market

• teaching your team to think rigorously

• deconstructing the “why” so you can best decide what to do

…and anything else I think could be helpful for you.

This newsletter is for operators, leaders, doers

This is especially for you if:

• You are working on a lean team punching above your weight class

• You believe there’s no upper boundary to how good you can get

• You have big ambitions, and want to sharpen your ability to execute

• You want practical frameworks to apply on the ground in a fast-moving organization

It’s fun to be good at your job. I’m hoping this newsletter will help you get even better at what you do.

Thanks for being on this journey and learning together.