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Jonathan Swanson
Entrepreneur and Former West Wing Staffer
Jonathan Swanson is the Founder and Chairman of Athena, a company that provides human plus AI assistant services.1 Here are some key details about Jonathan Swanson:
Professional Experience
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Athena: Founded in 2020, Athena matches clients with top 1% executive assistants and trains them to delegate 10 times more effectively.2 The company has grown to 2,000 full-time employees and over 1,000 clients in just four years, with a 100% year-over-year growth rate.1
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Thumbtack: Founder and Chairman since 2009. Thumbtack is a platform that helps small businesses earn billions of dollars annually.2
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Powerset: Founder since September 2022. Powerset is a platform where top technical founders can obtain their own $1M+ fund for angel investing.2
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The White House: Served as a West Wing staffer from 2006 to 2009, where he created financial market reports for the President during the financial crisis.2
Education
- Bachelor of Arts from Yale University (2001-2006)
- Studied at Oxford University in 20042
Athena's Business Model
Athena provides full-time human assistants based in the Philippines or Kenya for $3,000 per month. These assistants are increasingly powered by AI, with dozens of machine learning models supporting their work.1
Vision for AI Integration
Jonathan Swanson aims to leverage AI to significantly increase the productivity of Athena's assistants, potentially doubling or tripling their output. This could lead to improved profit margins and the ability to break the one-to-one client-assistant match.1
Jonathan Swanson is known for his expertise in delegation and time management, which he applies to both his business ventures and personal productivity strategies.3
Highlights
If you’ve followed AI predictions this year, Francois has been the most accurate.
But Kevin Scott (Microsoft CTO) said this summer that scaling laws were holding up, with no diminishing returns. So:
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Did OpenAI’s latest model initially follow scaling laws, then plateau?
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Or did Microsoft/OpenAI redefine scaling laws to refer to test-time compute?
In 1958, Toyota was bleeding money in America, losing $500 on every car they sold.
By 1975, they'd conquered the US market as the #1 import brand.
Their secret? It was so brilliantly simple, it became the blueprint Harvard Business School still studies today🧵 https://t.co/6NBhwgeWPv
