#80 – Building a startup: A Q&A with Latitude (Sam Corcos)

The job of a CEO is highly stressful and demanding. Everyone wants an answer, a quick fix, or a piece of your attention. So how do CEOs juggle expectations, obligations, and decision-making without burning out? During this Q&A with Latitude, Co-founder and CEO of Levels Sam Corcos shared his take on CEO life and what building businesses has taught him.

06:10 – Be mindful of your time

Sam said CEOs need to be mindful of how they spend their time. Be intentional with your scheduling and what you commit to.

You have to be mindful of how you spend your time. That is the constraint as a CEO. I think the biggest one is to try to solve problems at a systems level more than anything. So I think the most important thing when considering time, for me at least… This is maybe just a personality thing, but I found that I’m extremely sensitive to contact switching. If I’m jumping from task to task, I’m not going to get anything done the whole day. Yesterday, I had no calls or meetings the whole day, and I just wrote several memos and thought about a number of important company organizational design things. Today, it’s basically just only meetings, because I’m happy to just jump from meeting to meeting, but going from one idea to another and jumping back and forth… It is funny. I meet a lot of people who think that they’re good on multitasking. They’ll even describe it as a skillset that they have. And I can tell you empirically, every study that has been done on this topic shows that nobody can multitask. It is not a thing that exists. You should not try to do it.

09:44 – Schedule both work and rest

Sam said just because you’re working doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being productive. Don’t waste time on unnecessary tasks, and don’t be afraid to take a break when you need one.

It’s often easy to rationalize and to justify staying working. If I’m not working, I’m not moving things forward. But there’s another quote, something like, “There’s nothing more wasteful than working on something that should not have existed to begin with.” And so a lot of time, you can spend five or six hours working on a thing, but if you just spent one hour thinking about what you should actually be doing, you might not have had to spend that five hours on something that was completely wasteful. I actually do a think week once a quarter. I take an entire week off. I’m actually in the last day of my think week right now for this quarter. I take an entire week off of work. I don’t do phone calls. I don’t do meetings. I don’t do anything for the entire week. I just do writing. I just think about what’s important.

11:52 – Don’t get distracted

Sam said it’s important to know what your priorities are and to hold yourself accountable to solving those truly important problems.

It’s really easy to get distracted. Doing the hard thing is hard, and that’s why most people don’t do it. And most companies fail, and that’s not fun. I advise a number of startups. One of them is on the tail end of failing, and he’s having a really hard time accepting that. And I can tell you, having been on the other side of it, it’s not that bad, but it’s really hard to know that until you’re on the other side of it. So really knowing what your priorities are and holding yourself accountable to solving those really important problems is probably the most important thing as it relates to time management.

13:02 – Raise money before you need it

Sam said you shouldn’t wait until the last minute to start fundraising. Approach investors before you need the money, and you’ll be much more successful.

We timed our fundraising around when we would run out of money, which makes sense. Why would you raise money when you have money? You raise money when you don’t have money, because that’s when you need money. Turns out that was a mistake, because turns out when you don’t have money, nobody wants to give you any money, because they think you’re about to run out of money. So realizing that cash is an asset, and that you need to start your fundraising process… People often say 18 months or 12 months before you’re out of cash. We talked to… I think it was the founder of Instacart said that you should raise money when you have momentum, not when you need money, and I think that’s very true. It can be hard to justify. I had to write a memo on this to the team why we raised more money when we did, because we didn’t need it.

16:00 – Make people want to work for you

Sam said instead of spending money on a recruiter, put that money toward content. That way, you’ll naturally attract people who want to work for you.

Ben, who’s our head of growth, often used the term a poll product, where instead of you pushing ads on people, people come to you. There’s a term in network theory called preferential attachment, which is a similar concept around making something where people want to be associated. Instead of putting that $80,000 of recruiting fees towards hiring Riviera or some of these recruiting firms, instead, put it into content. We have a full-time multimedia producer in house who just creates content for everything. We have a company podcast. We have a YouTube channel. We just make content for everything, and we’re just really transparent about how we operate. That has really paid dividends in recruiting. Of our last 20 hires, I think 18 of them specifically mentioned the podcast and all of the content we put out as one of the main reasons that they wanted to join. Because it really is a leap of faith that people are taking when you join a company, and if you don’t know who people are, if you don’t know how they operate, it really can be stressful to make that decision.

23:03 – CEOs are the decision-makers

Sam said the power of decision-making rests in the hands of the CEO, so make sure to block off time to solve the problems your company is facing.

CEO definitionally is the ultimate decision-maker in the company, the final decision in the company. It’s just the dictionary definition. Making good decisions, it’s not going to be easy for me to explain it other than to say read lots of books, make lots of bad decisions, and try to learn from them. Most of the time, the failure modes I’ve seen in people, and certainly my own failure modes, is prioritizing the wrong things, focusing too much on things that feel urgent right now, and not blocking off the time to really do the uncomfortable thing, which is to solve the hard problems that are not urgent.

24:41 – How to avoid burnout

Sam said burnout is often self-imposed, so to avoid exhaustion, invest in a business you love working for.

Burnout is something that is self-imposed, generally speaking. It’s probably unlikely that especially first-time founders can be successful without working more hours than 40 hours a week. I can’t think of an example of a CEO, say, under the age of 30 who was successful while working normal hours, but that’s not the same thing as burnout. I work 80 to 100 hours a week, and it really doesn’t feel like work to me. I don’t do things that I don’t want to do. It’s just one of my philosophies, and it kind of permeates the entire organization, where we regularly have people audit what they’re spending their time on. And if we hired you as an engineer and you’re focused on backend, but you don’t want to do that anymore, then fine. Let’s find something else for you to do. People shouldn’t have to do things they don’t want to do.

25:40 – CEOs have to delegate

Sam said CEOs can’t do everything. Hire someone you can delegate tasks to so you can focus on being a CEO.

Delegating is really important, and it’s not something that you just know how to do. Delegating takes practice. I went onto Craigslist, and I posted asking for an executive assistant. I didn’t have anything for her to do, so I just hired her with no tasks for her to do. And I gave myself the challenge of finding something to delegate, and it was pretty hard. I had to come up with ways to task her with things. And through the process, I would ask her to do something, and then she would respond with a bunch of questions, and I would realize, “Oh, I didn’t give her enough context to be successful here.” And so over the course of the last nine years, I’ve gotten pretty good at delegating.

31:02 – Hire people who share your vision

Sam said if you hire people who are compatible with your company’s goals and values, you won’t have to babysit them to make sure they’re doing their jobs.

I do think that there’s something about being able to make assumptions about the people that you work at. If you can’t assume that people are motivated, then you need to solve your upstream hiring process. Because we are fully remote, we have been since day one, we don’t even have the ability to look over people’s shoulders, even if we wanted to. There isn’t a fiber of our being that has the co-located office environments. Somebody was telling me about a consulting firm, one of the big consulting firms that add weight measurements to their chairs so they can measure how much time the person who works there spent in their chair. If you have that kind of culture, I can see why that would be useful, but we’re so far in the opposite direction that we do as much as we can to make sure that people understand the vision and they feel like we’re making progress towards that vision, but intrinsic motivation is something that we filter for very early on. One of our core guiding principles is to treat people like adults, and it’s not our job to solve for intrinsic motivation.

39:01 – Your company is not a family

Sam said company culture changes all the time, so the person you hired two years ago may no longer be compatible, and that’s okay. No one owes unconditional love to a job or company.

If the company culture has adapted in a way that they’re no longer comfortable with, then that’s a conversation. And it’s not a failure if somebody who started on day one… After two years, you’re basically a different company. If you’re a rapidly-growing startup, you’re a different company every 6 to 12 months, so it’s not a failure that they were the right person for the first two years, and they’re not the right person anymore. That’s okay. And so I think it’s important to keep in mind that companies, it’s a team, not a family. You’re here to solve a problem. You don’t owe unconditional love to somebody for the rest of their life in the context of a company, which for some people sounds uncomfortable, but it’s also kind of obviously true. A family dynamic should be different than a work dynamic, because it can lead to these weird pathological tendencies as well, if you think about it the wrong way,

Sam Corcos (00:06):

The biggest thing is to know what your priorities are. It’s often easy to rationalize and justify staying working. If I’m not working, I’m not moving things forward. But there’s nothing more wasteful than working on something that should not have existed to begin with. And so you can spend five or six hours working on a thing, but if you just spent one hour thinking about what you should actually be doing, you might not have had to spend that five hours on something that was completely wasteful.

Ben Grynol (00:39):

I’m Ben Grinnell, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health, and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Ben Grynol (01:04):

The more exposure that Levels tends to get, the more requests there are for individuals’ time. Well, Sam Corcos, he’s no stranger to getting email requests, especially cold ones. Often one will come in the door, either through email, through Twitter, through some DM on some platform, you name it. Well in this case, Latitud, an incubator and a fund that focuses on nurturing and building tech founders in Latin America, well they reached out to Sam, and they asked if he’d be open to doing a Q&A about some of the ways that he thinks, some of the ways that we’re approaching building the company, and to give general startup insight based on his experience. And this wasn’t originally recorded for the Levels podcast, but there were a lot of great questions, so we thought, “Why not distribute it anyway?” Here’s the conversation with Sam.

Sam Corcos (01:56):

My background’s in software development, and so a lot of my personal biases come from software development. Probably the most important word when thinking about resource management is the word constraints. You have to know what your constraints are, and ruthlessly eliminate those constraints. And so in almost every software company, it is engineering time that is the constraint of progress for the company. So figuring out anything that you can do to maximize the value of engineering time should really be the number one priority. There are a lot of good books on this. One is called The Goal, which is a classic. On the topic of resource management that’s specifically focused on software companies is The Phoenix Project, which is another one that I would highly recommend. I recommend reading a lot of books. I try to read at least two books a week, and that’s really where a lot of the learnings and value comes from.

Sam Corcos (02:58):

There’s a quote that I like. I think it’s in one of the articles that I posted, but a quote from Bismarck where he says that, “Any fool can learn from experience. The wise man learns from others’ experience.” And I think that really speaks a lot to how one should think about these problems. And sometimes, the only way you can learn it is by learning it the hard way. At my second company, Sightline Maps, which didn’t really go anywhere, I had read about sales cycles and why they make it hard to run companies when you have really long sales cycles. But it really wasn’t until I experienced the pot of gold that was at the end of the rainbow that always felt like it was a couple weeks away, and it felt like that for two years. Really made it hard to plan and to build a company around that, so the more you can learn from books and from other people’s experience, the better.

Sam Corcos (03:48):

I think one of the most important things to think about as it relates to… I think there’s probably two ways to go about it. One is the personal side, and one’s the company side. On the work side, probably the most important thing to avoid is bikeshedding. It’s a term that’s pretty well-known in the programming world. I’ll post it in the chat here. It’s also known as the law of triviality. There’s a famous story. The simplified version is somebody was looking at the transcripts of a city council meeting of a town that was thinking about building a nuclear power plant, which is a very big decision in this town. And looking through the transcripts, what he expected to see was a lot of debate about, “Should we build a nuclear power plant in our town?”

Sam Corcos (04:29):

And what he found is that they spent almost the entire conversation talking about what color the bike shed should be, and how many bikes it should hold. Because the hard question of “Should we build a nuclear power plant,” nobody really knew what to do, but everyone has a preference on what color the bike shed should be. So it’s like, “Well, I think it should be blue. Well, no, I think green’s a better color.” Because everyone can argue at that level, so the entire conversation just got stuck in arguing about that. There’s another saying that most startups die of indigestion, not murder. And this really comes from bad resource management, when there is some really hard problem that you know you need to solve, but it’s easy to just find, “Well, instead of doing that, we’ll just spend a couple weeks on this quick win that’s going to be easier.”

Sam Corcos (05:18):

And next thing you know, it’s a year later. You still haven’t solved the hard problem, which is the whole point of doing this, and instead you’ve just been polishing things that really shouldn’t have even been built to begin with. So I’ll kind of leave it there and jump into the questions, if that sounds like the right format. Does that work?

Latitude Team (05:34):

That works perfect. So we quickly explain we have a Lightbeam link. So everybody, you can go up and share your questions and upvote. This first one I actually think I know who asked, and I’m going to call her out just so she can ask the question live. Laudi, do you want to come up and ask your question?

Speaker 4 (05:55):

Yes. Hi, Sam. So based on the content that you share on Levels podcast, which by the way I loved, you seem very thoughtful about your time. So the question is: How do you allocate your priorities and manage your time as CEO?

Sam Corcos (06:10):

Yeah. I think you have to be mindful of how you spend your time. That is the constraint as a CEO. I think the biggest one is to try to solve problems at a systems level more than anything. So I think the most important thing when considering time, for me at least… This is maybe just a personality thing, but I found that I’m extremely sensitive to contact switching. If I’m jumping from task to task, I’m not going to get anything done the whole day. Yesterday, I had no calls or meetings the whole day, and I just wrote several memos and thought about a number of important company organizational design things. Today, it’s basically just only meetings, because I’m happy to just jump from meeting to meeting, but going from one idea to another and jumping back and forth… It is funny. I meet a lot of people who think that they’re good on multitasking.

Sam Corcos (07:00):

They’ll even describe it as a skillset that they have. And I can tell you empirically, every study that has been done on this topic shows that nobody can multitask. It is not a thing that exists. You should not try to do it. So trying to keep the main thing the main thing… Somebody said that at some point. It’s probably Paul Graham. He’s sort of the oracle of these kinds of quotes. Because I proactively budget my calendar, I’ll often look at it… Probably about once a month, I’ll look at what I’m scheduled to do, and I’ll ask myself, “If I don’t do these things, will it kill the company?” Oftentimes the answer is no, but usually the answer is no. And then I just start canceling things, and I’ll just completely redo my calendar. This is not an easy thing, but things always feel urgent in the moment, and part of being the CEO is to be able to insulate yourself from the seemingly urgent things that are actually not that important.

Sam Corcos (07:56):

This isn’t an easy thing to do. I would suggest meditation, probably therapy, I don’t know, but something to just get to a point where when somebody comes to you with something that feels like a crisis, it’s really your responsibility to not panic and to be able to weigh the trade-offs. And most of the time, I can tell you when we have had things that seem like a crisis, you can just say, “I don’t know. Let this one go. This will just be a small failure, and we can move on. It’s not worth dedicating the resources to fix it.” And that can be really painful for some people. It’s a failure mode that I’ve seen in a lot of startups, especially with first-time founders, where they expect the failure rate to be zero, and they’re afraid to launch. They want to make sure that if one customer has a bad experience, that they redo their entire process to make sure that nobody else has a bad experience, but that’s just not realistic.

Sam Corcos (08:48):

There’s a good First Round piece by Rahul from Superhuman on finding product market fit, which if you haven’t read it, it’s definitely worth the read. He basically says almost everybody tries to find their worst customers, the people who complain about it, who are like a one NPS, and they try to convert them into 10s. And what you really should do is you should fire everyone who’s not a 9 or 10, and just lean into those 9s and 10s, and make a product that’s even better for them. Find more of those people. Fire your worst customers, and keep moving forward. So most people spend all of their time, probably from a sense of self-worth, probably deep childhood traumas or something, but trying to convert the people who don’t like their product, when really you should be focusing on your advocates.

Sam Corcos (09:33):

So circling back to the original question of how to manage time as a CEO, the biggest thing is to know what your priorities are, I think is probably one of the most important things. It’s often easy to rationalize and to justify staying working. If I’m not working, I’m not moving things forward. But there’s another quote, something like, “There’s nothing more wasteful than working on something that should not have existed to begin with.” And so a lot of time, you can spend five or six hours working on a thing, but if you just spent one hour thinking about what you should actually be doing, you might not have had to spend that five hours on something that was completely wasteful. I actually do a think week once a quarter. I take an entire week off. I’m actually in the last day of my think week right now for this quarter.

Sam Corcos (10:22):

I take an entire week off of work. I don’t do phone calls. I don’t do meetings. I don’t do anything for the entire week. I just do writing. I just think about what’s important. I spent half of yesterday writing out a pre-mortem document, which is a narrative style of… Each section starts with, “Levels died today,” and then you just think about a reason why the company died, and you write it out very specifically. “We died because our product velocity stalled. We weren’t able to solve these big problems. Eventually, other people joined the market and they caught up to us, and we’ve just been stuck in a situation,” and then thinking about ways to mitigate those risks. So I think there were six scenarios that I came up with in this pre-mortem of likely failure cases of the company. That’s something that I’ve found is extremely helpful.

Sam Corcos (11:14):

We have a lot of memos internally, and it’s not a coincidence. I’ve probably written three quarters of them internally at this point, just because we’re still quite small. We’re only about 40 people. But they tend to be written in clusters. We had a dozen memos written in June of 2020, which was during my think week in June. They tend to cluster around these weeks where I have a lot of time to just really think about what’s important for the company. I’d say knowing what your priorities are and keeping them the number one priority… And as it ties into bikeshedding as well, there’s no easy way to know. Maybe asking people on your team to hold you accountable to this, but it’s really easy to get distracted.

Sam Corcos (11:55):

Doing the hard thing is hard, and that’s why most people don’t do it. And most companies fail, and that’s not fun. I advise a number of startups. One of them is on the tail end of failing, and he’s having a really hard time accepting that. And I can tell you, having been on the other side of it, it’s not that bad, but it’s really hard to know that until you’re on the other side of it. So really knowing what your priorities are and holding yourself accountable to solving those really important problems is probably the most important thing as it relates to time management.

Latitude Team (12:27):

Thanks, Sam. And actually, the next question is very aligned with a little bit of failing, is: What has been your most expensive and important lesson as a CEO so far?

Sam Corcos (12:40):

I’d have to think about it. I can think of a lot of other lessons at previous companies as well. This is my first non-technical role as CEO. I’ve usually been lead engineer, CTO. Some of the most expensive lessons… This is a really stupid one, but at Sightline Maps, we didn’t know what we were doing. It was our first time raising money, and we timed our fundraising around when we would run out of money, which makes sense. Why would you raise money when you have money? You raise money when you don’t have money, because that’s when you need money. Turns out that was a mistake, because turns out when you don’t have money, nobody wants to give you any money, because they think you’re about to run out of money.

Sam Corcos (13:20):

So realizing that cash is an asset, and that you need to start your fundraising process… People often say 18 months or 12 months before you’re out of cash. We talked to… I think it was the founder of Instacart said that you should raise money when you have momentum, not when you need money, and I think that’s very true. It can be hard to justify. I had to write a memo on this to the team why we raised more money when we did, because we didn’t need it. We currently have 40 months of runway, and we just closed our series A, which I think is officially closing in a couple weeks. We don’t need the money right now, but we have a lot of momentum, so now is the time to do it, not when we are running out of money. I would say another really expensive lesson was from CarDash, which was around understanding your growth channels. That was a painful lesson where we went through Y Combinator. We started scaling very quickly.

Sam Corcos (14:15):

We went from no revenue to a million dollars in revenue in just a few months while we were in YC, and we didn’t really know why. We would ask our customers, “How did you find out about CarDash? How did you find out about the service?” And they would say, “Oh, well a friend told me.” And we told ourselves, “Hey, this is organic growth. This is what you want, right? This is a sign that it’s working.” And then we hired a lot of people, and then growth stalled, and we didn’t know why. We didn’t know why, because we didn’t know how it got there to begin with. And we’d really over-hired assuming that this growth curve would continue, and we didn’t know what levers to pull because we didn’t even know what levers there were to begin with. So we’ve been much more intentional and methodical at Levels about building a lot of long tail inbound.

Sam Corcos (15:04):

So focusing on, in our case, content, working with creators, things that just have this long tail effect where you can be much more predictable and consistent about inbound. So that was a hard lesson of making sure that you have a sales cycle that you understand and you can repeat. I think some of the biggest lessons at Levels would be… What? What’s been the most expensive lessons so far? I don’t know. There have been so many hard lessons learned at other companies that… I have not repeated most of them, which is good. Let’s see. I think some of the things that were mistakes in previous companies that we have not made this mistake at Levels is we invest a lot of company resourcing into recruiting. Recruiting, for some people, means hiring a recruiter and paying $80,000 for an executive hire. I just don’t think that’s a good use of resources.

Sam Corcos (16:00):

Ben, who’s our head of growth, often used the term a poll product, where instead of you pushing ads on people, people come to you. There’s a term in network theory called preferential attachment, which is a similar concept around making something where people want to be associated. Instead of putting that $80,000 of recruiting fees towards hiring Riviera or some of these recruiting firms, instead, put it into content. We have a full-time multimedia producer in house who just creates content for everything. We have a company podcast. We have a YouTube channel. We just make content for everything, and we’re just really transparent about how we operate. That has really paid dividends in recruiting. Of our last 20 hires, I think 18 of them specifically mentioned the podcast and all of the content we put out as one of the main reasons that they wanted to join.

Sam Corcos (16:49):

Because it really is a leap of faith that people are taking when you join a company, and if you don’t know who people are, if you don’t know how they operate, it really can be stressful to make that decision. But what most people who join Levels say is they’ve watched the Friday Forums for so long, they already feel like they know everyone on the team. And so when they start, it’s just like being on the other side of the television. It’s not a big change from what they were anticipating. I’ll say that that is the most expensive mistake I’ve made in the past, is not investing in talent and team. This is a mistake that we have not made here, but I have made in the past, is: Don’t be afraid to hire senior. This is a thing that people often talk about. They’re like, “Yeah, this person’s really great, but they’re too senior for the role.”

Sam Corcos (17:35):

I’ve found that if you set the expectations very clearly of, “On paper, you’re probably too senior for this role, because you’re going to have to be in the weeds doing these things. Are you okay with that?” And if they say yes, then they’re opting into also doing the grunt work for some period of time before building out their team. We had this conversation… Josh Mohrer, who joined us to lead global operations for us, he was the general manager of Uber New York, and he scaled Uber New York to what it is now. He said that he wanted to join, which was a surprise to all of us. The pushback from internally was, “He’s too senior for this role. We don’t need somebody of this caliber right now.” And I said, “No, absolutely. If he wants to join our company, we should hire him immediately. And it doesn’t matter what he costs. Just get the best people on board.”

Sam Corcos (18:24):

Don’t be too cheap in hiring. It kind of depends on what it is you’re doing. We’re not in an industry where… [Netflix 00:18:31] has this concept of talent density. It’s worth reading the book No Rules Rules if you haven’t already. It’s about Netflix culture. The concept of talent density, it makes a lot of sense when you think about the math behind communication pathways, which is that the number of people at your company scales linearly, but the number of communication pathways between people scales polynomially. So if you have three people, there’s a communication pathway between two people. Once you get to 20 people, even 50 people, there’s like 1,000 communication pathways. So communication and overhead becomes much, much more expensive with large organizations. If you can keep the team smaller and higher caliber, adding one person necessarily adds less than one unit of capacity, because it adds to overhead. So we’ve really taken that to heart. We’ve hired very senior, very capable people.

Sam Corcos (19:23):

Honestly, a big part of it is that I’m personally quite lazy when it comes to these things, and so hiring senior people means that I don’t really have to manage things. I was on a podcast with Alex Lieberman, who started Morning Brew. He asked how many direct reports I have, and I think it’s like 20. But it’s also kind of not 20, because doing a quarterly check-in with somebody, does that count as managing them? Not really. So because we have people who are so senior and capable of managing their own time, it can extend your capabilities. In many ways, your role as CEO is to find those people. Somebody in leadership is somebody whom you can delegate decision-making to without looking over their shoulder. So getting to a point where you have as many of those people as possible, that’s really the main goal of the job.

Latitude Team (20:10):

Awesome, Sam. Thanks so much. And then we have [inaudible 00:20:12]. Do you want to come read the next question?

Speaker 5 (20:15):

Yeah, absolutely. Sam, thanks so much for all the amazing insights. Here’s a question that was asked by the community. Could you please outline your decision-making framework as the founder for difficult decisions?

Sam Corcos (20:28):

Yeah. It depends on what kind of difficult decision. So one commonly used one is the Eisenhower Matrix, if you’re familiar with that. It’s a very simple one of how important is the thing, versus how urgent it is. Almost everybody focuses their time on high-urgency things that are not important, because they’re usually the easiest things to solve. High urgency, not that important, but I can do it right now. I can stop what I’m doing and I can get it solved, and it feels good to solve things. The hardest things to do are the not urgent, high importance. Those ones almost never get done at companies, but they’re usually the most important. It’s really easy to rationalize putting them off. This is another thing where our team’s very good about this now, but it was challenging in the early days when press opportunities would come about.

Sam Corcos (21:20):

I know from experience that press is an amplifier. Press is not a growth lever. Most companies who pursue press will spend an inordinate amount of their time trying to get more press, and trying to do this sort of thing, but it’s not a good use of resources. So we created some more specific criteria for when we would do a certain thing. One of the reasons why I looped in Tom on the email here for whether I should do this conversation… And we have some criteria, which is one, it has to be recorded so that it’s in the form of content, it has to be distributed in some capacity, and there are some criteria that we have to just make sure that it’s good use of time. I think that in terms of how to make important decisions, I found that writing out long-form documents and really clarifying your thoughts on why you make certain decisions…

Sam Corcos (22:07):

And also, because it’s in documentation form, distributing that to the rest of the team so that everyone else knows how decisions are made in the company really helps a lot. It also helps to ask third parties for specifically hard decisions. There have been some people we had to let go at the company, which were not comfortable. That’s probably my least favorite part of the job. I much prefer dealing with computers. So figuring out people stuff is the least fun part of my job, but it is necessary. Sometimes, just talking to a third party who you know is very experienced with [inaudible 00:22:40]. Sometimes, the results you get back are kind of mixed, and that’s okay. You have to figure it out. Other times, which has been the case for us… Other times, every single person gave the same answer. “What are you doing? You know what the right answer is here. You’re just being a coward.”

Sam Corcos (22:56):

Okay. All right, fair enough. All right, I know what I need to do. And so that just gives the motivation to make the right decision. CEO definitionally is the ultimate decision-maker in the company, the final decision in the company. It’s just the dictionary definition. Making good decisions, it’s not going to be easy for me to explain it other than to say read lots of books, make lots of bad decisions, and try to learn from them. Most of the time, the failure modes I’ve seen in people, and certainly my own failure modes, is prioritizing the wrong things, focusing too much on things that feel urgent right now, and not blocking off the time to really do the uncomfortable thing, which is to solve the hard problems that are not urgent.

Latitude Team (23:38):

Thanks, Sam. And as you know, most of us are from Latin America, or building something for the region. So the next question, the community wants to know: When is Levels going to be available in LATAM? And maybe on that, tell us a little bit about your growth plans.

Sam Corcos (23:53):

Yeah, hopefully as soon as possible. This is unfortunately all just contractual, working with large medical device manufacturers. They work at a different speed than we do. But we hired Karen. She’s leading international expansion for us, and so she’s been working. I think we had a call with one of the manufacturers yesterday about this. So hopefully very soon, but it’s largely out of our control, unfortunately. I think maybe this year.

Latitude Team (24:17):

Awesome. And then I’m going to call out Jessica, if you want to come and read the next question.

Jessica (24:22):

Of course. Hi, Sam. This is also a question from the community, and you have touched upon a lot, I think, but here it goes. There is a big myth that you cannot succeed at CEO without overworking yourself. So what is your advice for a first-time founder especially on how to avoid burnout.

Sam Corcos (24:41):

Burnout is something that is self-imposed, generally speaking. It’s probably unlikely that especially first-time founders can be successful without working more hours than 40 hours a week. I can’t think of an example of a CEO, say, under the age of 30 who was successful while working normal hours, but that’s not the same thing as burnout. I work 80 to 100 hours a week, and it really doesn’t feel like work to me. I don’t do things that I don’t want to do. It’s just one of my philosophies, and it kind of permeates the entire organization, where we regularly have people audit what they’re spending their time on. And if we hired you as an engineer and you’re focused on backend, but you don’t want to do that anymore, then fine. Let’s find something else for you to do. People shouldn’t have to do things they don’t want to do.

Sam Corcos (25:30):

This was a really interesting learning that I had from, I think, nine years ago now. I read 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, and one of the things that he mentions in the book says that delegating is really important, and it’s not something that you just know how to do. Delegating takes practice. I went onto Craigslist, and I posted asking for an executive assistant. I didn’t have anything for her to do, so I just hired her with no tasks for her to do. And I gave myself the challenge of finding something to delegate, and it was pretty hard. I had to come up with ways to task her with things. And through the process, I would ask her to do something, and then she would respond with a bunch of questions, and I would realize, “Oh, I didn’t give her enough context to be successful here.”

Sam Corcos (26:15):

And so over the course of the last nine years, I’ve gotten pretty good at delegating. So one of the big learnings from that experience is that expression “Different strokes for different folks,” which is that some people like some things, other people like other things, and that’s fine. And [Lori 00:26:31], who’s been my EA for nine years now, things that would drive me crazy are things like wrapping Christmas presents. I would lose my mind if I had to do that, and she loves doing it. And so when it comes Christmas season… Or even not Christmas season. This happens throughout the year. I’ll come across something, and I’ll say, “Hey, Lori, can you get this for my brother for Christmas?” And she’ll order it in March, she’ll wrap it, and she’ll ship it to him for Christmas so I don’t have to think about it. And she loves doing that.

Sam Corcos (26:59):

There’s no judgment in any of this stuff. Different people like different things. I’ve just recognized in myself that I’m relentlessly novelty-seeking, and if I’m working on the same problem for more than a couple weeks, I go crazy. So other people love solving certain types of problems, and just finding the right people to solve the right problems and not trying to force people to do things they don’t want to do. You’re setting yourself up for trouble. I’ve been working this number of hours since, I don’t know, as long as I can remember. I would not say I’ve even come close to burnout. And when I was doing programming, I loved programming. It was what I would do in my free time on weekends, and people would say that I worked too much.

Sam Corcos (27:39):

Okay, you can go skiing if you want. I would rather do this. So I would tell people their judgment of how I’m sending my time is… Just because you hate programming doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be doing it. We have different preferences, so it should be okay. Anyway, the most important thing is to just know what it is you want to do so that work doesn’t feel like work. That makes it a lot easier to get through and not get close to burnout.

Latitude Team (28:03):

And so much, Sam. And we have [Alex Soza 00:28:07].

Alex (28:06):

Thank you. Hey, Sam. My question is: What are your daily nonnegotiable rituals or activities that you do? Whatever happens?

Sam Corcos (28:19):

I don’t think I have any daily ones. I’ve been largely, I guess, what is now called a digital nomad for probably the last eight years, maybe nine years, and I found that I can work from pretty much anywhere. I’m currently sitting on a couch doing this call. And I could be at a desk, I could be at a coffee shop. I’m pretty flexible in how I do things. I like to go on walks and listen to audiobooks. I think maybe this is less of a specific routine. I would say the nonnegotiables for me are around how I structure my time. So if I block off a day for deep work and somebody wants to schedule a meeting on that day, that’s nonnegotiable. No, this day is sacred. You’re not touching my deep work days. And another interesting data point is I currently have five EAs working for me, not including Lori, so I guess six.

Sam Corcos (29:12):

The five are in the Philippines, and they do a lot of my recurring tasks, things like posting somewhere some piece of information, updating stuff. They schedule day-before emails so that people have context coming into calls, say, add Notion docs so that I’m ready for stuff. I have yet to communicate with any of them synchronously on a call. We do all of it asynchronously, email or via Loom. All of the instructions are done asynchronously, because these meetings are anti-work. And so when I think about things that are nonnegotiable, I would say it’s… Minimizing the number of meetings that I have in my life is probably my nonnegotiable.

Latitude Team (29:53):

Thanks so much, Alex, for your question, and Sam. And we have [inaudible 00:29:58] Rojas. Come up.

Speaker 8 (29:59):

Hi, Sam, how are you? My question to you: How do you drive people by a common purpose? And if you do it, how do you do it?

Sam Corcos (30:07):

Something that I think we do quite well is we have our Friday Forums, which is our weekly team all-hands where we celebrate these successes for the week. And this was a mistake that we at CarDash, where we didn’t do it. We just sort of assumed that everyone would know what was going on, and the morale was quite low. An interesting data point from our side is that our Friday Forums are optional. The Friday Forum is actually happening right now. It’s recorded and distributed, so I’m just going to watch the recording. But it’s totally optional, and almost all of the company goes every week. So when you have an optional meeting in a culture of no meetings, and people opt into a meeting, it’s usually an indication that people really get value from it. I think that having that culture of documentation and strong communication is important.

Sam Corcos (31:02):

I do think that there’s something about being able to make assumptions about the people that you work at. If you can’t assume that people are motivated, then you need to solve your upstream hiring process. Because we are fully remote, we have been since day one, we don’t even have the ability to look over people’s shoulders, even if we wanted to. There isn’t a fiber of our being that has the co-located office environments. Somebody was telling me about a consulting firm, one of the big consulting firms that add weight measurements to their chairs so they can measure how much time the person who works there spent in their chair. If you have that kind of culture, I can see why that would be useful, but we’re so far in the opposite direction that we do as much as we can to make sure that people understand the vision and they feel like we’re making progress towards that vision, but intrinsic motivation is something that we filter for very early on.

Sam Corcos (31:56):

One of our core guiding principles is to treat people like adults, and it’s not our job to solve for intrinsic motivation. I think we do as much as we can in the form of content. Maybe that’s the meta answer to your question, is we try to produce as much content as we can internally. But at the end of the day, if somebody is not motivated, that’s nothing we can do about it, and they should probably leave.

Latitude Team (32:20):

Thanks, Sam. There was a running joke on the chat. Well, two actually. [Gina 00:32:26] apparently is applying for a job at Level. And [inaudible 00:32:30], do you want to translate what you just said? Because it’s hilarious.

Speaker 9 (32:33):

Oh, yeah. In most countries of Latin America, what you just said of weighting the chairs to measure the hours that people spend sitting, we call that in Mexico [foreign language 00:32:43], which means butt hours that you spend sitting on your chair.

Sam Corcos (32:50):

It’s often called a butt-in-seats culture. It’s like if you’ve ever seeing the movie Office Space, where you have people sitting in seats, and then you have the managers who just walk around like fox, making sure that people are on task. You can have that kind of culture, and maybe that works if you work with a different category of people, but when you’re hiring very capable, mostly very senior people, it’s kind of condescending to do that. So it’s condescending, and not very effective, so it’s not worth it.

Latitude Team (33:21):

Great, thank you. And we have [Guta 00:33:23] if you want to come up and ask your question.

Speaker 10 (33:26):

Hey. Hi, Sam. Loving it. I asked about culture. You sound like someone that cares a lot about culture, so how do you build it? What are the rituals and tools that you use? We are fully remote over here [inaudible 00:33:42].

Sam Corcos (33:43):

So I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently, on what is culture. By complete coincidence, we released a podcast on some of this yesterday on A Whole New Level, where I had a conversation with my cofounder, Josh, and our editorial director, Mike Haney, on one of these topics. But culture means a lot of different things to different people, and I think that what culture means to me… Culture is the set of assumptions that you can make about other people in your company without having ever interacted with them. When you interact with somebody at Levels and you say, “Hey, let’s get on a call,” you can assume that they’re going to respond with, “Hey, can we not do a call? Can you do send it to me by email?” Because nobody at Levels wants to do meetings. And we do as many things asynchronously as possible until that medium breaks, and then we’ll get on a call if absolutely necessary.

Sam Corcos (34:34):

It turns out it’s almost never necessary. Working with somebody at Levels, you can assume that everyone at Levels assumes good faith. It’s just something that we’ve seen. Everyone at Levels is on board with things like “Treat people like adults,” which is something that we mean it when we say it. We don’t build policies assuming the worst in people. We think, “How would an adult react to the situation,” and then we just build the policy for that. A lot of people, when they think about building culture, they’re often hedging for the worst-case scenario. You’re building a policy around, “Well, what if somebody abuses this?” What you should start with is assume people won’t abuse it. Now what? If they abuse it, fire them from the company. Problem solved. Don’t have people who would act like this.

Sam Corcos (35:22):

So it reminds me of… I was a consultant at a company, helping them with software stuff. It was a relatively small company, but they had one guy who, every week or so, would make just a wildly inappropriate comment about women to everyone in the office. And the next day, the whole company would get an email reminding us of, “Oh, we just updated our policy, that no condescending comments about genders.” It’s just him. Somebody tell him. Why are we adding policies? Just tell him. The policies don’t solve anything if you have people who don’t follow the policies. So in many ways, building culture is around selecting the right people, setting clear expectations very early in the kind of culture that you build. In the conversations that I have, I do a culture fit call with everybody before we make them an offer.

Sam Corcos (36:15):

And honest to God, I spend the entire 30 minutes trying to convince them they don’t want to join. I tell them all of the reasons why people have opted out of the process, why the culture that we’re building is not for everybody. I’ll tell people that we’re fully remote, which means if you’re looking to make a new group of best friends, it’s probably not going to happen, because you don’t have these casual social interactions. You’re going to like the people you work with, but it’s not the same. So that’s what I think of when I think about culture. It’s getting people to commit to a set of principles and shared values, and doing that as early as possible, but also setting the expectation that culture changes over time, and not everybody is going to be able to adapt to it. Over time, you might have to ask people to leave the company, because they’re no longer on the same page in terms of the culture that you’re building.

Latitude Team (37:02):

Awesome. Thanks, Sam. And we’re going to try to make three more questions. Let’s see, but these ones are kind of short and sweet. [Mateo 00:37:10], if you’re here.

Mateo (37:12):

Hey, Sam. I wanted to ask you: If you’re fully remote, even more important to be more aligned. What kind of frameworks do you use to align people, besides what you are already doing asynchronous way of working?

Sam Corcos (37:25):

Yeah, I think lots and lots and lots of content.

Mateo (37:28):

Okay. So you produce the content and then distribute it to the team?

Sam Corcos (37:31):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mateo (37:33):

Or the only meeting that you have is this Friday Forum? Besides that, you avoid meetings.

Sam Corcos (37:40):

Yeah, pretty much. I’ll post in the chat here. I have a snippet, just because I often send these links to people. Copy, paste. I’ll send some examples here. I’ve probably written most of these, but over time, more people in leadership are taking on these memos. What’s interesting is that I have personally been criticized by people who see all of our memos and all of our long-form thoughts. They criticize us for spending too much time on documentation, which is completely wrong, by the way. Because when I actually quantify it, I’ve written three quarters of all of the memos in the company at this point, and it’s… About 4% of my time went into writing these things, which means that most people are spending basically 0%, a rounding error of time, writing up documentation to think through ideas and to share context with the team. So I think getting alignment in depth of thought and…

Sam Corcos (38:34):

Some of these documents that I’ll share with you, we have two documents on just alignment around communication. We have an entire document on principles of decision-making, on how decisions are made within the company. I’ll send some of these as a follow, if you want. But making sure that everyone understands how decisions are made, it increases their confidence in why the company operates the way that it does. It’s also a great opt-out for people who are not on board with these things. If the company culture has adapted in a way that they’re no longer comfortable with, then that’s a conversation. And it’s not a failure if somebody who started on day one… After two years, you’re basically a different company.

Sam Corcos (39:14):

If you’re a rapidly-growing startup, you’re a different company every 6 to 12 months, so it’s not a failure that they were the right person for the first two years, and they’re not the right person anymore. That’s okay. And so I think it’s important to keep in mind that companies, it’s a team, not a family. You’re here to solve a problem. You don’t owe unconditional love to somebody for the rest of their life in the context of a company, which for some people sounds uncomfortable, but it’s also kind of obviously true. A family dynamic should be different than a work dynamic, because it can lead to these weird pathological tendencies as well, if you think about it the wrong way,

Mateo (39:49):

Sam, if I can follow up, have you seen that, for example, articles or writing works more than video for placing that context?

Sam Corcos (39:58):

Yeah, we do a little bit of both. I think that writing does a really good job only because the density of information is much higher. I’d say most of our strategy documents also have a 10-minute summary video as well that we just do with Loom. But the density of information in writing is much higher, and it allows you to quickly skim through it and get the information in a way that’s more scalable, so each medium has its trade-offs. I think the answer is yes and. You just do both.

Mateo (40:23):

Okay, thank you.

Latitude Team (40:25):

Thanks. And we have Adriana up next.

Adriana (40:30):

Yes. Thank you, Sam. So how do you pick the books you read?

Sam Corcos (40:34):

Oh, I have a long list of books. So I do most of them as audio books. I have a wishlist. When people recommend the books to me, I’ll just add it to my wishlist. Yeah, I’m at goodreads.com/samcorcos. I made the decision I will only buy a book if it’s the next book I’m going to read. And what I found is what I had been doing historically is I would buy books optimistically. “Oh, I should read this book,” and then I just don’t have the motivation to actually read it. I would read far fewer books than I would want. So when I finish a book, I would go through my wishlist and then just start looking through, “What do I actually feel like reading right now? And you know what? I feel like reading a book on complexity theory. That sounds so interesting, and I’m just going to read that, or a biography, or whatever.” I’m not going to try to force myself to read things that I don’t want to read. That’s been a huge win for me, is just not trying to force myself to do things that I don’t want to do.