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

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/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  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 Corcos, 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,

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:36Anthony Pompliano?

  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 BuildOnBase. Again, that's at BuildOnBase,

• 2:21Anthony Pompliano?

  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 have 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.

• 3:03Anthony Pompliano?

  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.espress.s or if 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.

• 3:47Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 4:00Anthony Pompliano?

  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've 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, like, 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?

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, Levels is, it's not my first attempt at building a startup. I did a couple bootstrap 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... I maximized for meeting as many interesting people as I could, learning about what was available.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  A very tactical thing that was helpful for me was I set a lower bound on 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 of 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, that was, I think, the best strategy.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  So I ended up starting Levels because Josh, who I'd known for years, he's one of the people I.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  I have a quarterly goal of staying in touch with 1,000 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, we started the company.

• 6:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, you said that you try to keep in touch with 1,000 people per quarter. How do you do that? Like, 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?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  I, I've, 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 a thousand's a goal that is achievable, but like just it's an aspirational goal. I've tried building a personal CRM because I'm a software developer, so I can just do that, which is fun. But the more complex the tool, the less useful it turns out to be. Right now, I just have an Airtable and there's only maybe four columns. It's almost exactly the same as a Peter Boyce has an article. I think it's,

• 7:17Speaker 02

  I don't know, Peter Boyce is a people person. It turns out there's some interesting conversion to 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 him a note. I tried to do a lot of in-person events for the what I optimized 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 CRM is one of

• 7:59Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 8:30Anthony Pompliano?

  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 then 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?

• 8:47Speaker 02

  So I would say I optimize for the latter. There was a realization that I had maybe five, six years ago where I was spending way too much of my time with like, 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.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  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, it's energizing on both sides. And that's really what to optimize for.

• 10:23Anthony Pompliano?

  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 Level 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?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  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

• 11:05Speaker 02

  The dynamics are not equivalent. So this is another thing that I really, I've learned through scar tissue. There's a great quote, I think it's by Bismarck, which is, 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

• 11:50Speaker 02

  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 leaving, or probably would have been pushed out of the

• 12:33Speaker 02

  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 good recent example of this with my co-founder, Josh, where this would have been a couple of months ago. I was starting to get really frustrated by like, a series of, we'll call them divergent conversations. As in like, they

• 13:00Speaker 02

  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 describe 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 like, I'm feeling resentment starting to build up because it felt to me like you're taking it in this other direction.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  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

• 14:30Speaker 02

  communication. All those things are absolutely critical.

• 14:33Anthony Pompliano?

  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 even want to share information with their own employees, let alone with, you know, the public. That seems to be changing. The whole idea of quote unquote, building in public has now become quite popular. And so how do you think about making that decision, you know, for your business and what are the pros and cons of either side of that?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  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, we're pushing the, 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. Like 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.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  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,

• 16:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  I remember vividly the conversation. I was walking around in Wynwood in Miami on a call. 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, you know, 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.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  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. 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.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  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 it remains to be seen if this is a winning formula, but I think, I think it is. And we're gonna, we're gonna run the experiment out and see what happens.

• 19:22Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about 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 are on the website. 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 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. But at the same time, you could be a realist, right? And you do have to look at, hey, how much burn are we doing? How was our run rate, etc. So like, how do you manage that internally?

• 20:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And maybe it's positive, maybe actually it motivates people, or maybe it doesn't. I don't know.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's a few ways to go about answering that.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  One is that it definitely adds to the obligation that you have to explain what these things mean.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  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 it'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.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  And so it definitely requires a little bit more effort upfront to educate people on the team about what these things mean.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  And that's a trade-off of effort that it requires. It requires more sophistication for people to understand what all these metrics mean.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  That's definitely just a cost. I would say one of the one of 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 treat people like adults, which also means that people have to act like adults. And we give people examples and 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

• 22:08Speaker 02

  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 like 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.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  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%. 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.

• 23:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And in that, are people

• 23:20Anthony Pompliano?

  drawn to this from a recruiting standpoint, like attracting the right team members is obviously pretty big, right? And I could see where people 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?

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Absolutely. People, people self-select them. 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, when people know that it's the culture, the people who 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 secret. 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.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  And they want to be part of an organization where they feel empowered and they have ownership over the future. So it's a, the more, the more filtering we can do in advance, the better. And we have, we have a lot, I would, 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.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  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 values, 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.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  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, like they don't want to go to, I was talking to somebody who applied who was 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.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 26:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Let's talk personal productivity. Obviously, if you are operating in this environment, 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, you make sure that you get as much done as possible.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  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. 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, 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, the result of today's exercise with our head of finance was. He's committed to about 80 hours of work this week,

• 28:01Speaker 02

  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, he needs to work a really long week. So, 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, it's just a line on a to do list. And there's this 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, 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, I delegate a lot.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  That's something that I, 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, you know, 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, it's a lot of the background admin tasks that I don't really have time to do. I think lever, getting leverage from your time from EA or VA or like virtual assistant is, is probably the least expensive, highest leverage thing

• 29:26Speaker 02

  that almost all people in business should be doing more of. It is the, the least utilized, highest leverage thing. And this, it's really not that expensive.

• 29:37Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the things you do with the EA or kind of, you know, that help that you feel like one, unlock their potential to actually be helpful? But also two, you feel like have had the biggest, you know, inflection point for yourself in terms of productivity?

• 29:55Speaker 02

  I think the

• 29:58Speaker 02

  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 like, God, I really wish that I just handed this off a year ago, so I didn't have to do this every week.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  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, bef- 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 of minutes per person. I have a snippet, I just find them, I send it and then they have it.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  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. Uh, 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.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  It's like, oh, awesome. So I, I don't come into the meeting. I, I don't know if you 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.

• 32:13Anthony Pompliano?

  This actually runs marketing for something else. Yeah, 100%.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  So it's like, you kind of make a trade off of where, how much time you want to commit to these things. But either, either path is really good. Some people hire in the US. 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.

• 33:17Anthony Pompliano?

  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 daily basis? And how do you use them to actually unlock some of this?

• 33:33Speaker 02

  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. Um, Loom is an incredible tool.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  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 Loom's. Um, 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.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  And it is, when COVID 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 COVID happened, we decided, all right, we're going to try it, the same exact people on Zoom. And it was horrible. It's like the same people with the same topics, a thing that's usually tons of fun. It just, 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, uh, the first step that anybody should do when

• 35:38Speaker 02

  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

• 36:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:35Anthony Pompliano?

  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. And, you know, I hope they read it. I think they read it. 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 these other platforms?

• 37:12Speaker 02

  So that's 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 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 so 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.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Email, email has its own challenges. It's a closed silo of information. So if 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 a lot of these problems.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  We may externalize it at some point and make it a standalone product, but it's, 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.

• 38:52Anthony Pompliano?

  That is, uh, that's kind of crazy, right? That, uh, that there's not yet. Um, let, 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 Huberman and, 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 and there.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  I think, um,

• 39:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Um, I don't consume news, articles, current events in any form. Uh, I, I avoid it. I read books instead. I found that the most valuable way to think about decision-making is, uh, I think this was something that I, I, 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.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  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 part of the reason why we have this.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  This culture of long form memo writing,

• 41:01Speaker 02

  we have for the really impactful decisions. It's not, it's not unheard of for somebody to write a hundred page memo on a decision that will impact the business for the next 10 years. And might, 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, that's really the answer is by, it's really by filtering out all the noise. It's how I prefer to make those decisions.

• 41:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And talk a little bit about that like memo culture, right?

• 41:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 41:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you sending them before meetings? People are reading it kind of, you know, Allah Jeff Bezos. Are you sitting in the meeting? I think actually is what Bezos and Amazon was doing.

• 41:54Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 42:06Speaker 02

  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, there's only ever one, one person responsible for anything.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  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, like 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.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  The recent example that I gave, there was a hundred-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 were some new, 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 was extremely long. And, you know, a handful of people that really were relevant, we spent a half a day reading

• 43:53Speaker 02

  it and then we scheduled 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 conflicts, to handle disagreements, whenever there's misalignment, to bring those to alignment again. So it's, there's a line from Matt Mullenweg at WordPress that we, that we've stolen, which is, I think, he says, "You should be as async as possible, but not more."

• 44:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:18Anthony Pompliano?

  The last thing I want to talk to you about is 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 the 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 the systematic process of not wasting a ton of time, but also feeling like, hey, I'm meeting the right people?

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I,

• 45:49Speaker 02

  the term networking certainly gets a bad rap. I was actually at an event recently and

• 45:56Speaker 02

  somebody mentioned that the reason why they were there is for networking. And like, 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.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  There's also a second order effect, which is your, your weak ties. There's a great, like, classic paper in network theory by Randi Vedder called The Strength of Weak Ties, which if you haven't read it, it's definitely worth checking out. It's an academic paper, but it's not very long,

• 46:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  It's being connected to the people who know all the people and networks that you don't already have access to. 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 meaningful acquaintance level relationships, but personal fulfillment and happiness tends to come from really deep, long-term relationships with people that you care about.

• 48:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And how do you go from meeting someone to like making sure that you're going to follow up? Do they, you, you meet them, you build a relationship, they go on, I want to keep up with you with a thousand people? And do you kick people off the list? So you only keep it at a thousand or how does that work?

• 48:34Speaker 02

  I kick people off the list. Yeah. Like the biggest reason why people get kicked off the list is this basically a lack of mutual interest.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  It's like, I send them a note. I say, hey, I'm in town. Are you free for coffee? And they, 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, they're, 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.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  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 know that one with George Costanza?

• 49:59Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I don't.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was lamenting how he has these weekly calls that he has to do with his parents every Saturday. I think it's like they always make me call them every week and he's 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 about to see him calling like, oh, God, another one of these calls. It turns out, nobody wanted these calls. Like, it's just, 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.

• 50:37Anthony Pompliano?

  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 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 yourself and kind of your mental state or what?

• 51:07Speaker 02

  So every once a quarter, I take a week off to do a think week, which I've largely stolen from Bill Gates. I do, 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. The, I think

• 51:50Speaker 02

  the most impactful thing is the is one, once a quarter, zooming out and making the space for think weeks. 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. The, the second thing is really just day by day. Which is every day when 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

• 52:30Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  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 into work every day.

• 53:30Anthony Pompliano?

  It is the Warren Buffett, like tap dance to work, right? And if you can just recreate that over and over again, that's, that's pretty powerful. Where can we send people to find you on, on the internet? Or if they want to work at Levels, potentially use the product, where can we send them?

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Just my Twitter account, or X account, at Sam Corcos is probably the easiest place. And the website's levelshealth.com.

• 53:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. Sam, I always enjoy talking to you. I always learn something, which I appreciate. 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, but I think that it's such a deep level of discipline and commitment to, to install them. And it's kind of like, people don't want to do the work upfront. 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.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  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. So and also, maybe after the show ends, when those three to five people, I'd love to meet them and see if I can learn from them as well.

• 54:48Anthony Pompliano?

  You got it. We'll definitely do it again in the future.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  Sounds good.