This week’s guest goes back a long way — Don Wettrick, entrepreneur, educator, and founder of STARTedUP, an organization built around one question: how do you make class time feel more like the real world?
Don just stepped back from running STARTedUP day-to-day to go back to what he calls “founder mode” — more classrooms, fewer meetings. We talk about that transition, his “seekers vs. peakers” framework for spotting opportunity, and a line partway through this conversation that’s stuck with me since we recorded it: everybody can write a perfect email now, which means the deals are being lost the moment a person can’t look up and actually have a conversation. Being human is sought after right now. Being flawed is sought after right now.
This episode’s a little different from the last few: no framework, no big reveal, just a good conversation between two people who’ve been doing this a long time.
Key moments:
0:00 – Cold open: why “being flawed” is suddenly valuable
0:44 – Interview begins, catching up with Don
2:12 – Why he stepped back from CEO to “founder mode”
9:50 – His “seekers vs. peakers” framework
19:34 – Building a class around freedom, mastery, and purpose
23:24 – Playing AI platforms against each other to think more clearly
30:09 – The full story behind the cold-open clip
38:19 – A decades-long journaling habit, and archiving your own growth
