Wes Kao is an executive coach, advisor, and entrepreneur who writes at newsletter.weskao.com. She is co-founder of Maven, an edtech company that raised $25M from First Round and Andreessen Horowitz. Previously, she co-founded the altMBA with bestselling author Seth Godin.

Newsletter for 60,000+ high performers on Wednesdays at 8am ET
-> weskao.com/newsletter

Live, 2-day course on Executive Communication & Influence 
-> https://maven.com/wes-kao/executive-communication-influence

1:1 executive coaching for tech leaders 
-> https://www.weskao.com/coaching

Wes Kao

Excited to be featured in Lenny Rachitsky’s “The AI-Native Product Manager” series. I’ll be teaching a free workshop on the topic “how to get buy-in as a PM.”

Of the 1,700 tech operators who have taken my course in the past 1.5 years, product managers are one of the biggest groups represented. About 1/3 of my private coaching clients are product leaders at companies like Meta, DoorDash, Atlassian, Amazon, Google, etc. I love working with product folks, and want to help you succeed because the bar for PMs is getting increasingly higher.

In this session, I’ll cover how to:

1. Present to impatient executives: Be prepared to move fast, speak directly, etc.

2. Manage up to senior leaders: Most PMs suck at managing up. We'll cover principles that will serve you now and throughout your career.

3. Anticipate questions and prevent skepticism: How to anticipate questions to avoid endless back-and-forth.

You will be able to apply these principles to stakeholders upwards, downwards, and laterally. 

The workshop will be on Friday, March 13 at 12pm ET. It will be an action-packed 30 minutes.

I rarely do free workshops, so if you’ve been curious about my course or found my Lenny podcast episode helpful, I hope to see you there.

Sign up link is in the comments.

a16z-backed founder turned executive coach. Helping tech operators improve their executive communication, leadership, and influence

Interim VP Marketing for hire. I take marketing strategy & execution off your shoulders. Business goals → Marketing strategy → Growth model

Hi 👋 I'm VP Marketing at Owner.com. I've built and led marketing teams at companies big and small, from public companies ($HUBS, $EA) to early stage startups.

I spend a lot of time thinking about marketing and how to be a better operator, teammate, leader. I post hot takes now and then. Follow along!

A bit more about me: 
- themarketingstudent.com
- davidfallarme.com

David Fallarme

There's a constant pressure to do 10X more things with AI. A useful starting point, but a dangerous trap to avoid.

Execution used to be expensive. That cost forced you to think first! Now that filter is gone.

Many times, I've started vibe coding something, got excited watching it come to life, then stopped and realized: hold up. I don't actually need this. It doesn't solve the real problem. I've made a cool but useless toy.

An Elon-ism I think of whenever I load up Claude: 

The worst thing a smart person can do is automate something that shouldn't exist in the first place.

The best marketers in the AI era won't be the ones doing 10X more things. They'll be the ones with the restraint and judgment to build the right things 10X better.

We ran an AI science fair for our marketing team. Started just for fun, but ended up having more impact than expected! Here's 3 projects, from low to high difficulty:

1. AI help center videos

Creating videos for your customer kb usually means lo-fi looms (made by various people, of varying quality) or HD videos that take hours to write, script, edit, etc. 

Haley Smith used a custom gpt to standardize internal docs into a script, then fed that to an AI tool that added a voiceover to a screen recording. New total time-to-video: 10 minutes

2. AI podcast from sales calls

I like listening to sales calls, but I hate having to scrub through a call to skip to the interesting parts, like hearing how our pitch landed, or discovering new objections I haven't heard

I used our call recording tool to send a customized summary of certain calls to slack, zapped that to ElevenLabs, and zapped it back to an mp3 in Slack, so I can power through a bunch of "podcasts" about our sales process while I'm walking my dog

3. The talking AI marketing dashboard

Reporting on organic media is a pain. Even when you have tools. You're still inevitably in pivot table CSV hell + manual analysis to get the insights you want.

Michael Lim set up an app that ingested everything (platform data, transcripts) into supabase. Then hooked up the supabase MCP to claude. Now, he can talk to his dashboard ("hey what video got most engagement on FB in Oct 2025?") and get answers instantly

And since it's in Claude it can also draft content - like, "based on our top performing content, suggest outlines for <topic>"

For most of last year, I think AI was helping me maybe get 10-15% productivity gains. That was most marketers I talked to. But for me, the AI science fair - along with the models improving dramatically - I can now see a clear path where I can legit get 2x more done. 

The forcing function of presenting to your team is a huge factor. We're doing another science fair in April. If you're feeling this underlying anxiety to get better with AI, I highly suggest doing something like this. 

Making it social turns it into a team sport, and it's way more fun when you get better together.

taplio

The Battle

Wes Kao

David Fallarme

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreWes Kao's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreDavid Fallarme's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Wes Kao

David Fallarme

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Wes Kao's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreDavid Fallarme's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreWes Kao's LinkedIn Performance