The Pomp Podcast - #1327 Sam Corcos on How To Run A High-Performance Startup

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Sam Corcos is the Founder & CEO of Levels. In this conversation, we talk about how to run a high performing startup, calendar management, team management, personal productivity tips, decision making, networking, and more. ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= Introducing Espresso - the world’s most interactive portable display. They have a portable screen that is incredibly light, comes with a nice stand, and the user interface is very easy. Anyone who listens to this podcast can go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠us.espres.so/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. They have a brand new offer waiting for you.  ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Sam Korkos, the founder and CEO of Levels. In this conversation, we talk about how to run a high-performance startup. He keeps up with 1,000 people per

quarter, how he does calendar management, how he manages his to-do list, what personal productivity tips and tricks Sam uses, and then teaches other founders, and then why he says it's best to think of a company as a team, not a family, how writing is an act of thinking, and the more complex the tool, the less useful it is. This episode is packed with insights, and I think that you will walk away smarter and know better how to run a company, especially a high-performance startup. And so here is my conversation with Sam Korkos. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a

specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by BASE. BASE is making it their mission to bring a billion people on chain. What exactly is BASE? It's a layer two offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, BASE is shaping the future of the on-chain world base is a canvas for everyone with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem whether you're an emerging creator a seasoned developer or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time base is designed to bring your ideas to life so if you're looking

for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily base is your destination join in and make on-chain the next online learn more at base.org or follow along on twitter at build on base again that's at build on base to see cool things to do on chain every single day today's episode is brought to you by espresso the maker of the world's thinnest portable display now listen up if you're like me you feel like you are at a command center when you sit down at your desk i got a gazillion tabs open and different windows for different activities there's my web browser my text messages i've slack open and i got a notes app i normally work on a desktop and it can be very, very productive. But everything falls apart the second I leave my desk. If I'm

traveling, if I go to a coffee shop to do some work, or just want to work from the kitchen table, my laptop doesn't have enough screen space. I lose my command center and my productivity falls off a cliff. It's a major problem. But this is where Espresso comes in. They have a portable screen that is so beautiful that you think Steve Jobs came back from the dead to create it. The thing is incredibly light, it comes with a nice stand, and the user interface is so easy that I figured it out, how to do it in less than three minutes. If you listen to this podcast, you know that's not an easy feat. So the Espresso team and I, we became friends. I got to know them because I really liked the product. And those screens, they now want to offer them to any fan

of the podcast. So we struck a little deal. Here's how it works. Anyone who listens to this podcast can go to us.espresso. Or that's too confusing. Just go click the link in the description. If you go to Espresso's website, they've got a brand new offer there sitting for you. You get a little discount, and you'll get a beautiful screen. Trust me, I use mine every day. You'll love the Espresso screen, and I think it'll make you more productive. Go check them out today by clicking on the link in the description. All right, guys.

Bang, bang. I've got Sam here with me. Sam, I thought a great place to start. If we're going to talk about how to run a high-performance startup, which you are doing, you raised over $50 million. You've got this great product that's out in the market. Customers love it. is first, we got to start with, how do you pick an idea? How do you pick a market to go after?

And then how do you pick your initial team and getting those dynamics right? So maybe walk us through, what did you do for Levels? And how did you make sure that you're going after a market that you thought was worth actually going after? Yeah, Levels is, it's not my first attempt at building a startup. I did a couple of bootstrapped companies that didn't really see a lot of progress. And then we did one that was a YC company that hit a revenue plateau. It's still running, but it didn't hit the trajectory that we were hoping for. For me, what I found was helpful was actually taking time off. I took a year off work after my last company. I think some people would describe it as a sabbatical. But for me, it was I maximized for meeting as many interesting people

as I could, learning about what was available. A very tactical thing that was helpful for me was i set a lower bound on i i will not commit to a new company for at least six months and that ended up being probably the most important thing because there were so many good opportunities that popped up within the first few weeks that i felt like i had to do it now or i would lose the opportunity and then a couple weeks later after 10 more of those ideas came by i realized like the world is awash with good ideas. And so being patient and really making sure that you're picking the right target so you can put more wood behind that arrow, that was, I think, the best strategy. So I ended up starting Levels because Josh, who I'd known for years, he's one of the people I...

I have a quarterly goal of staying in touch with 1000 people. And Josh is one of those people that I regularly stay in touch with. And he mentioned that he'd been working on an adjacent idea for about a year and a half. And I had him come up to New York. My goal was to basically convince him why this idea was terrible, which it was. There were many, many reasons why the approach that he was taking was not a good one. But we realized that there were many flavors of the idea around software that were actually really interesting. And so we started working together and eventually we started the company. Now, you said that you try to keep in touch with 1000 people per quarter. How do you do that? Walk me through the specifics of what is the system and how do

you actually make sure that you're not letting people fall off the list or you're keeping the right people on the list? I've been doing this for many years now. It's rare that I actually get to 1,000. I usually exceed 500. So it's somewhere 1,000 is a goal that is achievable, but like just it's an aspirational goal um i've tried building a personal crm because i'm a developer so i can just do that which is fun but the more complex the tool the less useful it turns out to be uh right now i just have an air table and uh there's only maybe four columns uh it's almost exactly the same as a peter boyce has a an article i think it's um i don't know people peter boyce is a people person it's it turns out there's some interesting convergent evolution it's

almost exactly the same as what he ended up with and so i just keep a list of those people i find using computers for what computers are good at which is remembering things and just keeping lists and then i try every sunday to just look at the list and i'll come across a name like oh nick you know i haven't talked to nick in a while i wonder what he's up to and then i just give him a call send them a note uh i try to do a lot of in-person events really what i optimize for if i can't do that i'll send an email or i'll send a text or i'll do a phone call so the personal crms are one of those categories where i'm absolutely convinced that no company will ever be successful and the main reason is that it's one of those categories where people's expectations is that

that a personal CRM will automate your social life. And really all it does is it obligates you to spend more time on your social life, to spend more time connecting with people. So it's really, the answer is you just have to put in a lot of effort. And if it's something that's important and it's a priority, then it's worth it. Now, how much of you reaching out is like, hey, what are you doing? Versus you're like giving an update, giving an insight and then asking them and and that uh is it weird do people like hey why is sam emailing or calling me or do they look forward to it because they feel like the same hey i haven't talked to him in a while it's great to catch up so i i would say i optimize for the latter um there was a realization that i

had maybe five six years ago where i was spending way too much of my time with like uh i'll call them aspirational friendships people that i wanted to like me and it was really not healthy and i would call people and they would be like why are you calling me like what do you want and i used to try to like find ways to make those work and then at some point i realized that i should just index more on the people who also want to spend time with me and so sometimes i get the answer of like hey did you need something why are you calling this is weird and then i remove them from the list and then it's fine and like they they're not interested or it's like they're at a different stage of their life i have several friends now who are like really close friends

from college where like now they have kids they have a family they've got like the whole they've got a whole new set of priorities and when i when i text them and say hey i haven't talked to you in like six months i know you just had a new baby and i'd love to call and you know see what's what's new in your life and they don't respond i check in again like hey i imagine you're probably busy let me know if sometime you're available and ignore it it's like okay i don't take it personally anymore it's just you've got a it has to be a two-way relationship otherwise it ends up being really draining and if it if they're the kind of people who also want to spend time with you it's energizing on both sides and that's really what to optimize for yeah that makes a ton of

sense another area where relationships are really important is not just like you external to people but internal in terms of like co-founder relationships i think levels started with five co-founders how do you make sure that not only is the idea good and the market is good but you're kind of going into battle right or going into this really difficult situation with the right people beside you yeah i think the biggest one is you have to have a lot of trust you really have to trust each other and there were several points in our history where some of our relationships got pretty strained and some of them we made it through some of them we did not and the the dynamics are not equivalent so this is another thing that i i really

i've learned through scar tissue uh there's a there's a great quote i think it's by bismarck which is uh he said any fool can learn from experience the wise man learns from others experience. And I learned through experience, so I guess that makes me a fool. But I hope other people can learn from my experience, which is when you have co-founders, you need to be very explicit about who the CEO is and what role they play. So I've been in this situation in the past in different companies where when we started Levels, I was very explicit with everyone that joined. It doesn't matter what your title is. It doesn't matter how many co-founders we have. We have one CEO, which is me. And so if all of you are against me, and I say we go in a certain

direction, we're going my direction. And you have to be okay with that, or this is not going to work. And so being really explicit about the role of the CEO is super, super important. Because as recently as a conversation I had a month ago, with somebody who was a co-founder, ended up leaving their company because of a conflict of visions with the CEO. And they were they were tiptoeing around like who's actually the ceo to the point where like well we'll just both make decisions equally we'll just be equal co-founders and it was a total disaster and one of them ended up uh leaving or probably would have been pushed out of the company so you've got to be extremely clear about that you have to have really clear communication you've got to be

able to express how you feel there was a a good recent example of this with my co-founder josh where uh this would have been a couple months ago i was starting to get really frustrated by like a series of we'll call them divergent conversations as in like they i was saying we're gonna do this and people started pulling things in different directions and opening up reopening topics that had already been closed and we had memos described as i didn't I didn't want to reopen this. We need to move forward and stop debating. And Josh made a comment that felt like he was diverting the conversation and he holds

a lot of weight in the company. And so it can really derail. It can set us back by like a week on just like realigning the team. And so I called him. I said, Hey, Josh, I saw this comment. And I just want to say, I'm feeling resentment starting to build up because it felt to me like you're taking it in this other direction and josh was like oh it was totally not my intention in fact he was busy on other things he didn't even know that a decision had been made so it

was actually my own failure to communicate to the team that the decision was made it wasn't him like trying to derail things but you could totally imagine if you didn't have that clear communication i could have just sat on that and let it simmer and fester of like josh is trying to undermine me he's trying to do all these bad things but by having that ability to have that clear communication i brought it up the moment i have those feelings i texted him i was like josh let's get on a call i want to talk about this and it was immediately resolved and so you've got to be able to have that trust that the other person is going to hear you and they'll understand what your thoughts are and just clear communication very direct communication all the things are absolutely critical you're

You're talking right now about co-founders communicating with each other, but there's another aspect of this inside of a business where you have to make a decision to be default public or default like secretive or private. Historically, almost every company in the world, public or private company, decided to be default private. They didn't want to share a lot of information. A lot of times they didn't want to share information with their own employees, let alone with the public.

That seems to be changing. The whole idea of quote unquote building in public has now become quite popular. How do you think about making that decision for your business and what are the pros and cons of either side of that? Yeah, I would say it's becoming more popular in as much as zero people did it before. So it's like, it's like relatively more popular. And now there are a handful of people that are trying it. We're pushing the envelope pretty far on what can be done in terms of sharing information publicly, like all of our investor updates are public on our website. In the footer, there's an investor updates section. And it's the entire history from

day one of the company you can see every month of progress for the entire history of the business our team all hands the recordings are also shared publicly um one of the things i think is worth putting an asterisk on it is that we also record all of our team meetings and our one-on-ones and we default share them internally but it's not a suicide pact if there's something in the investor update that we think would be a problem for like a third party or we think would cause some issue if it became we don't share it and we just remove it and it's fine if somebody says something in a one-on-one that they're embarrassed by or like they they said something about somebody else that they regretted you don't have to share it but it's usually it's a good indicator of

uh it's a good indicator when you find yourself pausing and saying hey maybe i shouldn't share that it's a good personal reflection of there might be a reason why and you should consider whether that's normal and reasonable behavior so sharing publicly has been it was not a popular decision this was actually one of those things that could only be made if we all agree that i'm the ceo uh i remember vividly the conversation i was walking around in winwood in miami on a call all. And two of my co-founders were basically neutral, but would probably default to not sharing the stuff. And two were strongly opposed. And I said, well, I heard them out. I understood their arguments. And I said, but we're doing it anyway. And that was the first step, which was

sharing our investor updates, sharing a lot of these things publicly. And the benefits, there's maybe some unseen cost of like our competitors know a lot more about our company and our strategy and like for whatever that's worth that's that's out there now but the benefits have been extremely significant every person that we hire to the business is more values aligned than the person hired before them they can see all this information about how we operate they know more about the state of the business. They know more about the team. Similarly, investors have a level of transparency that they have with basically no other portfolio company. And so their ability to help the believability when things come up, when you

need to raise more money, the narrative of the arc of the company isn't, you're just coming out of nowhere. They can see the progress. You call your shots, you deliver on it. And when you don't, you admit it and you pivot and you show people like we made a mistake here we changed course and we're doing this and then you deliver on that it just builds a lot more confidence than would be possible otherwise so it's definitely um it's one of those things that i think is going to work but it reminds me mark andreessen came on our one of our team all hands and he uh he was saying a lot of very positive things about this experiment that we're running around company culture and he said you know it's it's really cool that we're on remote we're doing a lot of interesting

things in remote that a lot of companies haven't done before um but he said ultimately the correct culture is the one that wins which i didn't fully understand in the moment that he said it but as i reflected on it i totally understand what he means which is that you can you can have all these nice things that people say are great but ultimately you need to win and that's the only thing that matters so uh it remains to be seen if this is a winning formula but uh i think i think it is and we're gonna we're gonna run the experiment out and see what happens how do you think about um you have the cash right like how much cash does the business have how much revenue what's the burn rate all these things are in these investor updates they're on the website

uh i get like okay competitors might know what about the employees like are they ever like hey man uh seems like you know cash is dwindling or uh hey man burn seems high this month right like what how do you manage uh kind of um this almost like you need like leadership and uh to some degree i saw somebody tweeting recently they said uh you need to be naive to do a startup like you gotta understand like not think that it's hard because you have enthusiasm and you go tackle the hard problem uh but at the same time you'll be a realist right and you do have to look at hey how much burn uh are we doing how was our run rate etc so like how do you manage that internally and and maybe it's positive maybe actually it uh motivates people or maybe it

doesn't i don't know yeah i think there's a few ways to go about answering that um one is that it definitely adds to the obligation that you have to explain what these things mean um there have been many times internally when like we have we have a meeting every monday called monday metrics where we go over our business metrics and we really the goal of the meeting is to hyper focus on the things that are not working so that we can improve them and something that we didn't totally appreciate until months after we started doing this meeting is that a lot of people who jump into that meeting like monday metrics is all the charts that are going down and to the right, not up and to the right. And that's on how do we fix the bad things. And so people who don't

have enough context see that meeting and they go, oh my God, the business is failing. Everything is going down. And so it definitely requires a little bit more effort upfront to educate people on the team about what these things mean. And that's a trade-off of effort that it requires. It requires more sophistication for people to understand what all these metrics mean um that's definitely just a cost i would say one of the uh one of the the things that's also a prerequisite of this is in many ways a culture is not just individual items it's a lattice of lots of things that have to work together probably our top level most important cultural value is true people like adults which also means that people have to act like adults and we give people examples and we we

discuss this when we're doing onboarding really even before we hire people we make it very clear what it means to be treated like an adult in this company and that it's not for everybody like a specific example when our our numbers had plateaued and we had over hired for what our growth rate was at that point in time. And we had cash. We had plenty of time to figure it out. I wrote a memo in February of last year that said, hey, it was on team size and burn. It was, I think, the name of the memo. And I said, we need to hit these numbers between now and May, or I have to reduce the size of the team. And we were very explicit about that. And in a lot of companies, people would have freaked out

and would have started looking for new jobs and people would have run scared but because of the culture that we've built where everyone has that as an expectation in fact if we didn't write that memo it would have been even more concerning and so it was motivating where they say let's hit these numbers let's go and we didn't end up hitting those numbers we reduced the size of the team by about 30 percent nobody was surprised everyone handled it like an adult the transitions went well we helped most of those people find their next jobs and it was it was about the smoothest least painful reduction in force that i could imagine and in that are people um drawn to this from a recruiting standpoint like attracting the right team members is obviously

pretty big right um and i could see where people uh would find this oh wow this is a more transparent organization the leadership treats it differently is that what you see in the recruiting process absolutely people people self-select in and this is this is one of the flywheel effects of why the term in network theory is preferential attachment where when you create this culture and people know that it's the culture the people you don't even know about will seek you out and every new application we get they often cite a lot of the things and the culture that they really appreciate it's like i want to be i'm i don't like my current company because we're treated like children and like they keep the financial secrets and like there's a secret

top level of management and then we just take tasks and we don't know what's actually going on and they want to be part of an organization where they feel empowered and they have ownership over the future so it's uh the more the more filtering we can do in advance the better and we We have a lot. I would say we probably have more people opt out during the process than any other company I've been a part of. Usually, it's a sales pitch where you're like, here's all the great things happening in our business.

That's why you should join. It is a totally honest statement to say we spend almost the entire process being real with people about why they don't want to join. Because all the great things are all public. They can see that on their own time. they can watch the videos, they can read the updates. That's all public knowledge. But being real with people about why remote might not be for you. Being remote is the number one reason why people opt out. Everyone says they want remote, but they don't necessarily understand

the implications of what remote actually means. When you're a remote company, we've been remote since pre-COVID. So we are remote first, whereas a lot of companies are hybrid remote and they try to shim a lot of these ideas that are from co-located into remote one of the most important things that i tell people is that another value is we're a team not a family and i say we have a lot of really great people and there's a lot of people you're going to get along with but this is not the place to make a new group of best friends that doesn't mean that you can't be friends with anyone here of course you can you can meet them whenever you want but we don't organize play dates for adults. That's not how adults interact. If you want to meet somebody on the

team, you can go see them and it's fine. But we're not going to organize that for you because we expect you to act like an adult. And some people, they've got their own lives. They don't want to go to... I was talking to somebody who applied who is from Microsoft. And one of the things that she really gets under her skin from her current job is how they have optional happy hours for her and her team. And she's like, okay, well, I've got shit to do. So I'm not going. And then in her next performance review, like, well, you didn't go to the happy hour. It's like, well, I thought it was optional. It's like, well, of course it's optional. Like, well, it doesn't sound like it's optional. It's like, well, we just, you know, we'd like you to be more of a team player. It's

like, okay, so I need to go to these. No, of course not. You don't have to. It sounds like I have to and they're just there's this weird dynamic where they they don't treat people like adults and they they have these unspoken expectations and we're just very clear about what those expectations are got it let's talk personal productivity obviously uh if you are operating in this environment uh i wouldn't guess that hey we've done all this organizational structure and it's very unique and thoughtful and then you're just like well i hope i'm productive tomorrow so so what are the things that you do individually to be kind of as productive as possible maybe we could just kind of go through your day and how you uh you make sure that you

get as much done as possible yeah i think so it's actually interesting a coincidence of timing i just spent the last hour with our our head of operations and finance going over his capacity planning and helping him manage his time um i think the biggest thing is to use use a tool that has an aligned constraint with reality, which is to say, use a calendar. There's an infinite number of things you can slot into your to-do list, but they don't tell you anything about how much capacity you actually have. And so figuring out what blocks of time you need to deliver on projects, the result of today's exercise with our head of finance was

he's committed to about 80 hours of work this week, which is more than he has capacity for. And so he either has to offload that, or he needs to cut some of it, or he needs to work a really long week. But he didn't fully appreciate just how much he had committed to this week because it's not on his calendar. It's just a line on a to-do list. And there's just 10 of those things. I can do 10 things, but you don't realize that each of those 10 things is 15 hours. And suddenly that is more time that you've committed to than you have time in the week. And so I found that's a really helpful one is just translating your to do list items onto a calendar. It's probably the most tactical thing that you can do. Personally, I delegate a lot. That's something that I get a ton of leverage from.

I think I have four or five EAs that just work for me full-time. And they do easily a couple hundred hours a week of effort that I don't have to do anymore. And it's things like sending out automated emails. It's triaging things. It's checking in. It's a lot of the background admin tasks that I don't really have time to do. I think getting leverage from your time from EA or VA or like virtual assistant is probably the least expensive, highest leverage thing that almost all people in business should be doing more of. It is the least utilized, highest leverage thing.

And it's really not that expensive. what is um the things you do with the ea or kind of um uh you know that help that you feel like one unlock their potential to actually be helpful uh but also two you feel like have had the biggest you know inflection point for yourself in terms of productivity i think the there's like the small i would say it's the accumulation of small ankle biter tasks that's the biggest that's the biggest unlock in terms of just uh mental space if there are it's like that thing it only takes five minutes a week so it's kind of hard to justify handing it off because it would take easily that much time to teach somebody how to do it so you might

as well just do it yourself and then you do that yourself for the next year and then you look back and you're like god i really wish that i just handed this off a year ago so i didn't have to do this every week and like that five minutes doesn't take into account the context switching cost of like then you have to jump from one context to another you can't really get any deep work done so you're just sort of jumping between small tasks and so these it's the slow accumulation of those things like i'll give a very simple example previously two days before i have any meeting i would go into my email and i would send the person i'm about to meet a small update on like contacts on me contacts on the company it only takes a couple minutes

per person i have a snippet i just find them i send it and then they have it it only takes a few minutes but i offloaded that to an ea and it takes them five minutes but now i don't have to think about it and it just automatically happens in the background for things like blocking off my calendar or whatever another thing that i i do that i find really helpful is i i put together a notion doc that has all of my meeting notes for every meeting including all the communications i had with that person so i can come into a meeting cold i open up the notes and it's like i see oh this is this person here's their linkedin profile here's the email that was set up to here's the here's the agenda for the meeting it's like oh awesome so i i don't come into the

meeting i don't know if you've ever had this happen but i i used to have this happen where i would see matt i don't know who matt is i come in and i think he's a different person and then like five minutes in i'm scrambling to figure out like wait this is definitely not the doctor that i thought i was talking to this is who is this guy and why are we on the phone this is bad this actually runs marketing for something else yeah 100 exactly exactly so this prevents that from happening gets me ramped up on context way faster that used to take me like 30 minutes a day now it just happens in the background and those things start to accumulate i think i have something like 140 recurring tasks just things that happen in the background that i no longer have to think

about they're just automated and it's really not that expensive if you if you want to go the cheapest route you can find people directly in like the philippines they're four five six dollars an hour and they can just do all these things in the background the the more robust more premium way to do it is to work with an agency we use athena and they're awesome they're they're more on the expensive side but they handle a lot of the training logistics so it's like you kind of make a trade-off of where how much time you're willing to commit to these things but either either path is really good some people hire in the u.s they tend to be more expensive and the reliability is a little bit different but it's a lot of different ways you can go about it now what about uh loom

i know that you use a lot of uh notion kind of these like communication tools maybe you know what are the tools that you probably use the most on a day-to-day basis and how do you use them to actually unlock some of this so everybody should use calendly it's like the first thing it is it's a tool that allows somebody else to schedule things without the like back and forth of hey when are you available well i'm available at six on this day i'm not available how about this day the back and forth you just skip all of that and it just it's solved some of the things are just solved by technology. Calendly is a solved problem for that use case

that a lot of people spend at least minutes per week coordinating. Or it's like, I'll have my admin talk to your admin, and then they have to go back and forth. But this doesn't help. This is solved by technology. Loom is an incredible tool. It just records your screen.

And it seems very simple, but it's incredibly powerful, especially in the age of effectively free video you can capture way more things in looms i was talking to another founder recently who their company went remote and their team is drowning in zoom meetings and this is one of the one of the worst aspects of hybrid remote is when you take when you take all of the co-located practices and you just try to force them into remote so it's like do all the same meetings but now do them on zoom and it is when covet happened i i i used to host i still do i'm starting them up again pretty soon twice monthly salon dinners on random eclectic topics

which are a lot of fun the uh when covet happened we decided all right we're gonna try it the same exact people on zoom and it was horrible it's like the same people with the same topics i think that's it's usually tons of fun. It felt like a work meeting and nobody was paying attention and I just wanted to leave as quickly as I could. And so Loom is really useful because the first step that anybody should do when you go remote is have a rule, no status updates are allowed in synchronous meetings. Just full stop. If you're going to send a status update to somebody like a stand-up if you're doing a stand-up meeting if you're updating somebody on the state of a project that should be done in content it should be done in a loom record a loom say all right here's my

update for the day i worked on these four things i did this other people who don't need to see that don't have to watch it and the people who do can watch it at their convenience at 2x speed it's better for everybody they can watch it while going on a walk and so this being stuck in zoom meetings four, five, six hours a day for just listening to status updates, 90% of which aren't even relevant to you is such a, it's not just a time suck. It's also just like soul crushing to have to go through that. So Loom is an incredible tool that allows for more personalized async communication. And when you see people consuming this stuff asynchronously, how do you know that they got it? Like one of the things that I always find is sometimes I will send emails to

the team and nobody responds and then i'll like ask later like hey did you guys read that like yeah of course i read it yeah and you know i hope they read it i think they read it uh they didn't respond and so i've almost gotten to the point where i'm like hey when i send an email i want you to respond for me you're not responding for you like you're responding for me that i don't have to sit there on mental cycles and like think about like oh did people see it or did they not so how do you think about things like loom and in these other platforms so that's uh an interesting tangent that we could spend a lot of time on it's around internal communications it's something that i've thought a lot about we've tried slack we've tried threads we've tried

uh twist we've tried we've tried seemingly every tool that's available to manage team communications and i have found all of them either lacking pathological or both the problem is that many of these companies are started by either people who work in video games or social media and they optimize for engagement over productivity and so you end up getting really distracted and have a hard time focusing at work um email email has its own challenges it's a closed silo of information so somebody's not looped in on an email they don't ever see it and they can't ever see it and there's no way to do things like a thumbs up like people who use github you can you can thumbs up a post and then you know that the person saw it there's

ways that you can ensure like emoji responses is a really good way to just see like 25 people gave this a thumbs up they clearly saw it you don't have to worry about it there's no functionality for that in email so we've been we've internally built our own communications tool that replaces slack and email and a bunch of other things that solves for a lot of these problems we may externalize it at some point and make it a standalone product but it's uh that's the short answer is we ended up building our own solution because there isn't a really good one out there to solve for the exact problem that you described that is uh it's kind of crazy right that uh that that's not built yet um let's talk a little bit about uh setting the vision we talk a lot about

productivity and one of the things that's really interesting about your business is um there's hardware there's software there's a lot of things that are changing around ai uh there's a rising interest in uh kind of health and you see this with like you know huberman and all these kind of uh different content platforms how do you make decisions in this like uncertain fast-moving world where maybe you have a good idea of like what's kind of your like finish line or like well what's like the north star but everything is changing you know very very rapidly between here there i think um i think people generally overestimate how valuable current events are to any company i've been i've been news sober for 11 years now i don't consume news articles

current events in any form i i avoid it i read books instead i found that the most valuable way to think about decision-making is, I think this was something that I remember from an interview with Jeff Bezos, where he says, sometimes the best way to go about this is to think about the things that won't change. In Amazon's case, it's like,

do people want your products to be more expensive or less expensive? Less expensive. Will they ever want it to be more expensive? No. Do they want shipping to be faster or slower? like always faster and it always will be faster so if you can focus on the things that will always be the case that will never change those tend to be the most impactful and valuable levers as

opposed to like the seemingly urgent fires that are going all around and then you look back on them a year later you don't even remember what they were because they were so fleeting so it's It's part of the reason why we have this culture of long-form memo writing. We have, for the really impactful decisions, it's not unheard of for somebody to write a 100-page memo on a decision that will impact the business for the next 10 years and might impact millions or tens of millions of dollars in spend. And so making sure that we're making the right decisions, not just based on seemingly random current events that are coming at you all the time, it's about looking forward and being

able to make those long-term decisions. I think that's really the answer is by filtering out all the noise is how I prefer to make those decisions. And talk a little bit about that like memo culture, right? Are you sending them before meetings, people are reading it kind of a la Jeff Bezos? Are you sitting in the meeting? I think actually is what Bezos and Amazon was doing. Does one person write it?

Does somebody else like edit it? You know, just kind of talk through a little bit as to like, maybe there's a decision that needs to be made. How do you guys start with the information gathering process, the writing, and then ultimately the presentation to everyone else? So ultimately one person is responsible for writing it. That doesn't mean that they are the only person that can write it, but there's only ever one person responsible for anything.

and that person has a name it's not like a department it's a person is responsible for the thing it's possible that they're able to delegate the entire memo to somebody else or a group of people but they're still responsible for the final output it kind of depends on how important or impactful the thing is so in an example of if if the thing that you're proposing is going to impact $20 million of spend over the next year, you better be damn sure that it's right, especially at our stage. That's a lot of money for us. If you're saying, I want to spend an hour to do this experiment, it can be one paragraph. It doesn't need to be that long. You just need to write it down so that we have a record of it and we can reference it in the future

and do a retro on how that decision-making was. So the recent example that I gave, There was a 100-page memo written on a very important strategic decision, and he's been writing it for three months. And there were some really, really... It wasn't his full-time job for three months, but it took three months to collect enough information to have confidence in a decision. There was new information in there that we didn't know of before that was uncovered during his research that probably would not have come up had he not really committed the time

to going deep on this we all read the memo it took like half a day to read this memo because it's extremely long and you know a handful of people that really were relevant we spent a half a day reading it and then we schedule a meeting to discuss and then there were action items that came after so it's about building all of the background context ingesting it understanding it coming up with questions and then you have a meeting the meetings are really there not for status updates the meetings are there to resolve conflict to handle disagreements whenever there's misalignment to bring those to alignment again so uh it's uh there's a a line from matt mullenweg at wordpress that we uh that we've stolen which is i think uh

he he says you should be as async as possible but not more and so some people when they go async they try to do everything async and they try to like resolve conflicts async and like no no conflict has ever been resolved by text message it only gets worse every message that you send just escalates there's more misinterpretation and things get worse and so having your long form thoughts and writing writing in my mind is thought i think you actually can't separate those two i think writing is the act of thinking and so having that writing having that artifact building that context and then coming synchronously to resolve any misunderstandings or questions and generate new ideas i think that's the best approach the last thing i want to talk

to you about is uh networking so you mentioned earlier trying to keep up with a thousand people but i think that there is something different about like staying in touch with people you already know compared to meeting new people that maybe you should know or you want to know and so how do you think about uh the systematic process of uh not wasting a ton of time but also feeling like hey i'm meeting the right people yeah i uh the term networking certainly gets a bad rap i was actually at an event recently and uh somebody mentioned that the reason why they were there is for networking and like i i was i was just watching him interact with everyone around And he would go up to them, he'd have like a five minute conversation, and then he'd add them to LinkedIn. And then he felt like he had achieved his networking goal. And it was just like, I don't know what that accomplishes.

um i think building deep meaningful relationships is certainly one really valuable and useful thing to do in one's life it is the strongest correlate to your lifetime happiness is how deep your relationships are with the people that you care about so that's absolutely something to optimize for there's also a second order effect uh which is your your weak ties there's a great like classic paper in network theory by ranavetter called the strength of weak ties which if you haven't read it it's definitely worth checking out uh it's an academic paper but it's not very long about how you're something like twice as likely to find your spouse from an introduction from an acquaintance than you are from a friend and you're more likely to find your next job from an

acquaintance than a friend because they have access to information that your own network likely doesn't have because if your network already has that information you probably already have that information so exposing you to new ideas that you would otherwise not have access to another another term for this is eigenvector centrality which is if you want to build a really powerful network it's about knowing how connected the second and third degree people are in your network and so not just finding one dense network of people who all know each other it's being connected to the people who know all the people and networks that you don't already have access to um so there's there's definitely some there's some degree to which if all of your

relationships are weak ties you probably end up very unhappy you'll be very well connected it's probably better for your professional success to have a lot of really like meaningful acquaintance level relationships but personal fulfillment and happiness tends to come from really deep long-term relationships with people that you care about and how do you go from meeting someone to like making sure that you're going to follow up do they you meet them you build a relationship they go on that i want to keep up with you a thousand people and do you kick people off the list so you only keep it at a thousand or uh how does that work i kick people off the list you know um like the biggest reason why people get kicked off the list is this basically a lack of mutual

interest it's like i send them a note i say hey i'm in town are you free for coffee and they don't they don't respond and then maybe a few weeks later i say hey sorry i missed you last time i was in town are you free for a call we haven't i haven't talked to you for a while and then they don't respond it's like you know at some point you just say all right like they're at a different stage in their life if they want to reconnect like they can reach out to me it's fine i don't take it personally um a thousand there's definitely an upper bound and so there's some degree when i when i go through the list i just think like am i some of it is just you can consider it an energetic perspective of do i do i feel like i want to interact with this person does it bring

me energy or would talking to this person drain my energy and i only keep people on the list where it's like when i talk to them i get excited i'm happy to talk to them as opposed to like if they were calling me on my phone and i saw their name pop up i'd go oh god i it's like and i feel obligated it actually reminds me there was a there's a seinfeld episode about this do you Do you know that one with George Costanza? No, I don't. Yeah. He was lamenting how he has these weekly calls that he has to do with his parents.

Every Saturday, I think, is like, they always make me call them every week. And the whole episode is from his perspective on how he hates doing these calls. And then the episode closes and he's like, all right, here it goes. And he calls them. And his parents see him calling like, oh, God, another one of these calls. It turns out nobody wanted these calls. It was routine. Everyone felt like it was an obligation.

And you just have to know where your energy is coming from and optimize for things that give you energy, not drain. And when you're measuring this, it feels like work is one of those things that either people really enjoy or they don't enjoy. How have you, if we kind of take this full circle of like you pick a market, you pick people to work with all this stuff. How do you reevaluate along the way? Like, this is what I want to be doing. This is energizing to me. this is something that i want to continue to do like what is that process is it you put something on your calendar like every 90 days i'm going to check in with myself or is it something where you

kind of just have a feel for for yourself and kind of your mental state or what so every once a quarter i take a week off to do a think week which i've largely stolen from bill gates um i i do i i stay off i try to stay off of communications tools as much as possible i do a lot of thinking i do a lot of reading i do a lot of writing people who have seen some of our memos might our big strategy memos tend to be clustered around certain dates because a lot of them tend to be written in a flurry during these think weeks because that's when i have most of the space to reflect and to write some of them nothing gets done for work and it's just personal reflections um the i think the most impactful

thing is the is one once a quarter zooming out and get and making the space for think weeks i actually i have a i have a notion doc that's a public document on how the process that i use for those i'm happy to share that um the uh the second thing is really just day by day which is every day when i i see emails in my inbox when i get new tasks when i see things on my calendar if i dread doing those things i as quickly as as soon as i recognize it i seek to change it so that i am excited the only reason why i'm able to work 80 90 100 hours a week is because it doesn't feel like work. It's fun. Like I would do this in my free time. I do do it in my free time. Like this is the thing that I like doing. For a lot of people, they feel like they're

stuck. And this is a series of conversations that we've had with people in our company as well, where they're doing the tasks that they feel like they're required to do, and then they burn out. And then they come to me and they say, I'm burned out. I've been doing this thing for six months, and i hate it and it's like why didn't you say something you don't have in fact somebody else on our team actually likes doing that thing like you should have just told me six months ago and then that person could have been doing it this whole time and they love doing that so i think that's a big thing is just being being aware of what is sucking your energy and what gives you that energy so you're excited to come to work every day it is um the warren buffett like tap

dance to work right and if you can just uh recreate that over and over again that's uh it's pretty powerful um where can we send people to find you on uh on the internet or if they want to work at levels uh potentially use the product uh where can we send them just my twitter account it's probably or x account at sam corcos it's probably easiest place and the website's levels health.com amazing sam i uh i always enjoy talking i always learn something which i appreciate and And you, of all people, I think that I know, you're maybe one of three to five founders that have built these systems that I was just like, damn, I wish that I could do that. And I pick up little tips and tricks here and there, but I think that it's such a deep level of discipline and commitment to install them. And it's kind of like people don't want to do the work up front, but when I hear you talk, I'm like, I should just rip the Band-Aid off, go install this, and my life might be easier on the other side.

So I appreciate you being the inspiration that maybe I need and hopefully other people as well. Yeah, and let me know if I can help. I've helped a lot of people take the first step to building some of these processes. And also, maybe after the show ends, those three to five people, I'd love to meet them and see if I can learn from them as well.

You got it. We'll definitely do it again in the future. Sounds good. Thank you.