Cohort 1 (September)

Sell your ideas, manage up, gain buy-in, and increase your impact. Sharpen your skills via hands-on exercises, deep dives, scripts, and more

Wes Kao

Executive Communication & Influence for Senior ICs and Managers

a16z

First Round

Update: The February 2025 cohort is sold out! I've opened an April 2025 cohort, which is now open for enrollment. If you've been thinking about joining, I'd love to see you in class.___ If you're a high performer, you likely got to where you are because of your raw talent and ability to execute. Now that your scope has grown, though, your ability to increase impact depends on how well you influence other people--often without formal authority. In other words, you need people to do what you want them to do--enthusiastically and collaboratively. Unfortunately, no one teaches us how to do this beyond a basic level. So your day-to-day involves avoidable back-and-forth, friction, pushback, apathy, random questions, skepticism, or confusion about areas you believe are important. But it doesn't have to be this way. You and your team can move faster. You can quickly understand each other. You can worry less about cajoling skeptics. You can spend less time figuring out how to say what you want to say. You can accomplish more of what you want--and have more fun in the process. To get to the next level, you can't simply "do" more yourself. You must extend your impact beyond your own work. You must get genuine cooperation and true buy-in from those around you. This is what you will learn to do in this course. WHAT TO EXPECT: This is a highly-interactive course with in-depth discussion, Q&amp;A, examples, exercises, and tactics you can apply immediately. There are 9 hours of live instruction, all live on Zoom taught personally by Wes. We will focus on both the "why" and tactical pieces around the "how." The skills you need to become more effective CANNOT be solved through brute force. In these 2 days, you will come away with new tools. Course content• How to be direct (without seeming like a jerk)• How to perform well in high-stakes real-time conversations• How to sharpen your ability to prevent/overcome skepticism• How to frame 90% around your recipient and maximize buy-in• How to work with (not against) human nature• How to articulate your POV when clarity can make or break the outcome• How to advocate for your ideas the right way• How to instill a sense of urgency so your ideas are heard and acted on quickly• How to communicate your plans and priorities so you build alignment• How to diagnose the question-behind-the-question so folks are satisfied by your responses The course also includes:• Review and reflection• Verbatim scripts for tricky work scenarios• Real-life examples• Hands-on exercises• Frameworks to help you structure your written and verbal communication• Bonus: 2 Q&amp;A sessions• Plus: Homework to put concepts into practice• All Zoom workshops are live, taught by Wes The goal isn't simply to learn the concepts--it's to internalize them. If you put effort into the course, you will make a major leap ahead. If you follow my writing, the course builds on concepts I’ve written about--we will discuss important nuances, edge cases, and examples, with the opportunity to put these lessons into practice. I've designed this course specifically so you begin to build your intuition and muscle memory. All the sessions will be recorded so you can refer back to the material. WHO WILL BENEFIT MOST FROM THIS COURSE: Folks who will get the most from this course tend to be the following:- You care about quality, rigor, and setting a high bar for yourself and others- You are ambitious and you want to sharpen your ability to execute- You are on a lean team punching above your weight class- You are self-aware, open-minded, and intellectually honest I'm looking forward to bringing together a thoughtful group of operators and leaders. Students are from Uber, Amazon, Grammarly, Workday, CVS, Google, Pinterest, Meta, Expedia, Sephora, Twilio, Spotify, Anthropic, GitHub, Zillow, PayPal, Atlassian, Netflix, Square, Stripe, etc. WHO THIS IS NOT FOR: - This is not for you if you are looking for 1:1 coaching for yourself or your team. By nature, a course is 1:many. If you're looking for private coaching, please email me to learn more about rates and availability.- This is not for you if you believe there's nothing more for you to learn about sharpening your communication.- This is not for you if you expect to become excellent in communication overnight. You will likely change your behavior for the better within 2 days, which is huge achievement. But becoming excellent at anything requires ongoing practice.- This is not for you if you want a slower-paced course over several weeks. This is a 2-day intensive designed for busy operators who want to avoid task-switching and who want an immersive experience. Therefore, you will be drinking from the firehose. My goal is to help you drastically improve your competence and confidence in a condensed period of time. Then, you will go back to work and build on this foundation with continued practice.

Strong communication is a force multiplier

Senior individual contributors (ICs). Marketing leads, PMs, engineers, program managers, UX designers, etc. Minimum 3+ years of experience.

People managers (team leads, directors, VPs) and leaders. You run a team and have to balance managing up, down, sideways to drive outcomes.

Teams who want shared language so you can move faster, give feedback faster, have shared expectations, and persuade folks outside your team.

Who is this course for

What you’ll get out of this course

You might only have a few minutes of your leadership team's attention. We will review tactics for how to move fast, frame the conversation upfront, handle unexpected questions, prevent "insecure vibes," etc. Get senior leaders to seek (and truly listen to) your input.

Present to your CEO to maximize highly-visible moments

The more senior you become, the more you'll need to manage up. Hint: It's not about sending a weekly recap of your contributions. We will review real examples and practice how to reduce cognitive load for your manager, share your rationale, focus on the punchline, and more.

Managing up in day-to-day interactions

How do you get buy-in with less back and forth? How do you know the right level of detail (and which details) to share? How can you be more concise w/o sacrificing context? We will dissect these nuances and you will have a chance to rewrite examples to put lessons into practice.

Frame your ideas and give the right amount of context in any situation

Real-world scenarios are often messy, with conflicting data points. Some principles are even at odds. How do you decide what to do? I will share a set of foundational principles, show how to apply them, and you will practice balancing trade-offs in mock simulations.

Combine and "stack" techniques to get people to care about what you care about

Writing a useful, compelling strategy doc/Slack message/email/DM always takes longer than you expect. After the course, you will be able to write faster and more easily. You will practice rewriting a before-and-after example, and have the opportunity to edit your own work.

Write more efficiently to achieve your goals 

Some principles (like reducing cognitive load) apply regardless of your audience--while other situations require you to understand power dynamics, leverage, etc. We will practice "reading" situations and subtext with more accuracy so you can make better decisions.

Influence up, down, and sideways to get things done

You may have trust with your team, but how do you advocate for ideas with other teams? We will discuss frameworks to tackle this, so you can get inside the heads of individuals/teams you want to appeal to more quickly.

Get enthusiastic buy-in and collaboration from colleagues outside your team

Provide a brief description for each module as a way to sell the value of what students will be learning throughout the course.

First Module

Second Module

Third Module

Course syllabus

Director, Sales Analysis & Insights @ Sephora

Meet your instructor

9:00 - 12:30pm Pacific Time12:00 - 3:30pm Eastern Time5:00 - 8:30pm British Standard Time The workshop includes hands-on exercises and opportunities to put lessons into practice throughout. Afterward, there will be an optional 1 hour Q&amp;A. Recording will be available.

Thursday, April 10

9:00 - 12:30pm Pacific Time12:00 - 3:30pm Eastern Time5:00 - 8:30pm British Standard Time Get ready for an action-packed second day. Afterward, there will be an optional 1 hour Q&amp;A. Recording will be available.

Friday, April 11

This course will be interactive, so get ready to chime into Zoom chat, unmute to share, etc. Live workshop sessions will be video recorded and made available to watch/rewatch at your own pace. If you can't attend the full time or need to hop off, you can catch up later.

Live workshops, Q&A, group discussion, exercises, real-life examples

Do you want feedback on a piece of communication? You'll have the opportunity to submit your homework for a live teardown. (You can redact before submitting.) I'll pick to share the most useful ones with the class.

Submit your homework for live review in class

Course schedule

This course builds on live workshops and hands-on projects

Active hands-on learning

You’ll be interacting with other learners through breakout rooms and project teams

Interactive and project-based

Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you

Learn with a cohort of peers

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