Sam Corcos, Levels (Part 1): Company Culture through Actions and not Policy

In this episode of Culture Factor 2.0 with host Holly Shannon, Holly and Levels CEO Sam Corcos discuss the importance of company culture. Sam shares the pros and cons of remote work, the importance of documentation, and why you should hire talented people and treat them like adults.

Find your own direction

Sam didn’t just want to be a founder, he wanted to do something that would make a positive impact on the world.

I think part of why I got into startups was because I have a problem with authority and I have a hard time taking direction from people and taking orders from people, especially when I felt like the decisions that were made were not necessarily the right decisions, but I would say another aspect to it, especially in the decision to start Levels. I took a year off after CarDash and spent a lot of time thinking about the different areas that I cared about and wanted to meaningfully and positively affect and I wasn’t set on necessarily start earning another company could have been joining something early stage could have been working as a contractor or consultant for some period of time, but I kind of had this realization that I’m in a really privileged position on life, where I really have basically no downside risk and not a lot of people can take really big risks and if things go poorly, the worst thing you experience is social stigma or really, frankly perceived social stigma.

The silver lining of founding & failing

It can be discouraging when your startups don’t grow as you’d expect, but even failure comes with one huge benefit: experience.

Both Sightline and CarDash were still around, but they didn’t succeed in the way that we were hoping and it was interesting to me how, in my own head, I viewed myself as a failure and everyone around me did not. In fact, they were in many ways jealous of the fact that I was able to take those risks and they were excited by it and they saw it as very much a positive thing. Whereas I saw myself as a negative. It’s interesting to go through that experience…there are a lot of investors who will only invest in second or third-time founders and won’t invest in first-time founders because there are so many lessons that you can really only learn the hard way, through experience.

The importance of clear communication

If Sam had a deeper experience and vocabulary, things might have turned out differently with his previous startups. He’s taken his learning and applied them to Levels.

You can hear people say like it’s important to have open communication with your founders or with your co-founders, but it’s really only through the experience of like, so this is what open communication means, or in the case of say, CarDash, I only realized in retrospect that we really did not have open communication in the way that we thought we did and it was mostly because I didn’t really have the vocabulary to express how I was feeling at different points in the company’s history. So there are so many, I would say almost every good decision that I’ve made at Levels is a direct result of bad decisions that I’ve made in previous companies. So, it’s a learning experience.

Track your personal learnings

One practice Sam has is to collect his most important learnings in a dedicated document.

Culture’s an interesting thing cause so I do a lot of writing and I have for a long time, a lot of these I just keep internally for myself for future reference and I keep a document. That’s my personal software development principles, which is a document that I’ve been keeping up to date for almost 10 years now of just new things that I’ve learned about building software companies and when I look at some of the things that I wrote about years ago, five-plus years ago, I seem to be kind of dismissive of the idea of culture being important. It’s really, in my mind, five years ago, it was all just about execution and getting work done and culture is like this hand-wavy thing that people think that they care about, but doesn’t really matter and the more involved I get leadership, the more important I recognize culture is and getting alignment on culture and setting expectations for these things.

Create a genuine culture

Company culture isn’t just a fancy-sounding section of the employee handbook. You have to live and reassess your values regularly.

A lot of companies will create a policy of our values are X and that is our culture, but people don’t necessarily live those values. They’re just something that they felt sounded important. It’s like when, I noticed this when I was going through the airport the other day that TSA has their core values and one of their core is this innovation and it’s almost a caricature how they just arbitrarily seem to have picked words and they’re divorced from how the entity actually interacts with the world. So I do think that, culture is something that you need to synthesize and crystallize over time and you should constantly reassess this. I was talking with our head of operations this week, about how the values document that we put together a year and a half ago is still mostly accurate, but really does need to be refreshed because we have more new values. We also have different values that are maybe, meaningfully nuanced differences from how we originally viewed them.

Treat employees like adults

Levels employees aren’t held to one static standard. They get to choose what a healthy balance looks like, such as when and how they take vacation time.

Fundamentally, we believe in treating people like adults in many ways, it’s more similar to the Netflix philosophy and to give people a sense of what that really means. We have a series of interviews with people on the team on how they do vacations and Casey on our team. She goes fully off grid. She goes camping. She doesn’t even bring her phone with her and she is off grid for at least a week. For me, I don’t like being off grid. I like spending my time writing. So when I go on vacation, I’m usually writing. Often times it’s even work related just because that’s what I find interesting and everybody has their own way of doing it. Some people take six weeks of vacation, some people take more. Kind of depends on what your needs are and instead of explicitly stating what is allowed and what is not just showing that different people have different ways of doing it and that it can be a reasonable conversation.

A fully asynchronous culture

Levels keeps company meetings to an absolute minimum in order to prioritize time for deep, productive work.

Our engineers are much more productive at our company than a lot of them have been in previous companies because they’re able to block off. It’s funny because, a lot of companies are now shifting to things like No Meeting Wednesday, and at Levels, it’s more like the opposite. Many times our engineers just have like a meeting Monday and that’s the only day they do meetings. We have so few of them and we lean into the positive aspects of remote. It means that you can take time to volunteer locally. You can make more friends in your local community instead of it being more work-focused. So I think that it depends a lot on the way that the company is organized.

Holly Shannon: The framework of business is completely different in the new normal. To explore culture as a strategy, we have to look in places we haven’t before. Looking into company culture from the C-suite to employees and from Fortune 500 to startups. It’s time to understand the human side of company culture and the new shape it is taking. This is the Conversation on Culture Factor 2.0. and I’m your host, Holly Shannon.

Holly Shannon: I’m often asked, does my business need a podcast? My answer is yes, that nothing else is the fast track into thought leadership and being established and seen as the expert in your industry as podcasting. What’s increasingly evident is that it’s a branding machine. It kicks doors open for you to have conversations with leaders. It creates a pathway to partnerships and connections on a deeper level. Social media cannot begin to touch this level of traction. You will not be your industry’s best kept secret. Your ideas and business will have global reach.

Holly Shannon: The added benefit will be tons of content you can repurpose across social media easily. No more writing blogs. It also makes your sales force much more agile. Having a podcast is a great lead generation tool. It’s a pull marketing tool to bring people to your website, people that are interested in your product. So nothing works faster, not to mention it’s great for your search engine optimization. So step into your power, go to HollyShannon.com to launch your podcast now. Now onto our show.

Holly Shannon: I’m Holly Shannon, and this is Culture Factor 2.0 and today we have with us Sam Corcos from Levels. How are you?

Sam Corcos: I’m doing great.

Holly Shannon: So Sam Corcos is co-founder and CEO at Levels, the first real time dashboard for your body’s metabolism, giving you personalized insights into how different foods affect your body and your health. Prior to Levels, Sam founded CarDash, a YCombinator company that makes automotive repair and maintenance as convenient and transparent as possible. His previous venture, Sightline Maps, provides an intuitive platform for 3D printing and visualizing topographical maps, marketed primarily towards the US military. He also wrote a technical book, Learn Phoenix, on building scalable high concurrent web and mobile applications and he co-authored a paper in the field of oncology on the effects of Sys Play and used in conjunction with purified green tea polyphenols on non small, cell lung carcinoma.

Holly Shannon: Wow, that was mouthful. Sorry. He reads a lot of books and enjoys deep intellectual conversations more than anything else, which is why he’s hosted weekly cell on dinners in both New York and San Francisco on a wide variety of subjects.

Holly Shannon: Man, you’re a rock star, Sam. I love this intro.

Sam Corcos: That’s a lot of stuff.

Holly Shannon: It is a lot of stuff. I know that you have done podcasts on Levels in the past and I was hoping to take a bit of a departure today to get to know Sam a little bit more and I think, I would like to dive into how you have been involved either as the co-founder or in some permutation of that in, in bringing about companies like a lot of startups and I just would like to know the inspiration behind it and maybe you could talk a little bit about the pitfalls, because obviously some things work really well and some don’t.

Sam Corcos: Yeah, historically I’ve been on the technical side. My background is in software development. Levels is actually the first time I’m in a technical role. I did spend a good chunk of the first year programming, but it’s been about a year since I’ve really been meaningfully engaged in the code base. I think part of why I got into startups was because I have a problem with authority…

Holly Shannon: We love you already.

Sam Corcos: And I have a hard time taking direction from people and taking orders from people, especially when I felt like the decisions that were made were not necessarily the right decisions, but I would say another aspect to it, especially in the decision to start Levels. I took a year off after CarDash and spent a lot of time thinking about the different areas that I cared about and wanted to meaningfully and positively affect and I wasn’t set on necessarily start earning another company could have been joining something early stage could have been working as a contractor or consultant for some period of time, but I kind of had this realization that I’m in a really privileged position on life, where I really have basically no downside risk and not a lot of people can take really big risks and if things go poorly, the worst thing you experience is social stigma or really, frankly perceived social stigma.

Sam Corcos: It’s interesting to me how in previous companies that they haven’t. Both Sightline and CarDash were still around, but they didn’t succeed in the way that we were hoping and it was interesting to me how, in my own head, I viewed myself as a failure and everyone around me did not. In fact, they were in many ways jealous of the fact that I was able to take those risks and they were excited by it and they saw it as very much a positive thing. Whereas I saw myself as a negative. It’s interesting to go through that experience.

Holly Shannon: It’s very interesting how we take a leap of faith and we try to create something and we’re under this, I don’t know, understanding that if it doesn’t scale fast and immediately and get bought, or if it doesn’t make a certain dollar figure, that it’s a failure, but the fact that you dove into it and you created something, like it’s interesting to me that you couldn’t see the gain in that and that that was not success enough.

Sam Corcos: Yeah, for sure and I think part of it is also. It’s funny because on a previous podcast, I very briefly touched on the, just a couple minutes describing the experience of having been at a company that I effectively ran out of money and did not do the things that we were hoping that would do and I got a bunch of direct messages on Twitter of other founders whose companies were in the midst of going through something similar, what they would consider failure and it’s interesting being on the other side of this, where there are a lot of investors who will only invest in second or third time founders and won’t invest in first time founders because there are so many lessons that you can really only learn the hard way, through experience.

Sam Corcos: I have a friend who had a death in his family, very close family member and he said, it’s interesting when you’re you hear all these phrases like, live every day like it’s your last day and it was only through experiencing something like that, that he actually understood what those phrases mean and it’s similar when you experience this in startups where, you can hear people say like it’s important to have open communication with your founders or with your co-founders, but it’s really only through the experience of like, so this is what open communication means, or in the case of say, CarDash, I only realized in retrospect that we really did not have open communication in the way that we thought we did and it was mostly because I didn’t really have the vocabulary to express how I was feeling at different points in the company’s history. So there are so many, I would say almost every good decision that I’ve made at Levels is directly result of bad decisions that I’ve made in previous companies. So, it’s a learning experience.

Holly Shannon: Well then I would say that all of the previous startup were a success because it got you to this point. You know, one of the things that’s so interesting to me is obviously this podcast is Culture Factor and we talk about company culture, but I think in a lot of startups they, at least from what I’ve listened to and watched on Twitter and LinkedIn, there’s just a lot of talk. Like everybody says the key phrases, if you will, to make it appear that they’re actually walking the talk, but sometimes I feel that’s a facade and do you feel like that’s what happened maybe in some of the previous iterations of your startups?

Sam Corcos: Yeah, totally. I think culture’s an interesting thing cause so I do a lot of writing and I have for a long time, a lot of these I just keep internally for myself for future reference and I keep a one document. That’s my personal software development principles, which is a document that I’ve been keeping up to date for almost 10 years now of just new things that I’ve learned about building software companies and when I look at some of the things that I wrote about years ago, five plus years ago, I seem to be kind of dismissive of the idea of culture being important. It’s really, in my mind, five years ago, it was all just about execution and getting work done and culture is like this hand wavy thing that people think that they care about, but doesn’t really matter and the more involved I get leadership, the more important I recognize culture is and getting alignment on culture and setting expectations for these things.

Sam Corcos: We’ve actually been talking a lot about culture internally, just in the last couple weeks on how does culture form and what type of culture do you want? And what’s interesting about this is that you can have many different forms of culture that are successful even within the same industry, but it’s important to get alignment on those and make sure everyone’s rowing in the same direction. We’re a pretty unusual company and that we started fully remote pre COVID when it was a more controversial decision. We’re an asynchronous company. That’s one of the things that we really prioritize in, asynchronous communication, deep focused time. We do very few meetings as a company.

Sam Corcos: I think our engineers do something like, I don’t know, six to eight meetings per month. It’s a pretty small number we do as much as we possibly can asynchronously just to give people that deep focused time and what’s interesting is, I was talking with my friend, Zach Cantor about this, that culture, you can only use so much proactively, but it is important to periodically synthesize what the culture is and really crystallize it to make sure that new people can become embedded in that culture. So, it’s a question of how do you extract what the actual values are? We’ve been talking recently about a principle of company culture that we think of internally, which is that we prefer to build company culture through our actions and not through policy. I think this is sort of what you’re touching on. A lot of companies will create a policy of our values are X and that is our culture, but people don’t necessarily live those values. They’re just something that they felt sounded important.

Sam Corcos: It’s like when, I noticed this when I was going through the airport the other day that TSA has their core values and one of their core is this innovation and it’s almost a caricature how they just arbitrarily seem to have picked words and they’re divorced from how the entity actually interacts with the world. So I do think that, culture is something that you need to synthesize and crystallize over time and you should constantly reassess this. I was talking with our head of operations this week, about how the values document that we put together a year and a half ago is still mostly accurate, but really does need to be refreshed because we have more new values. We also have different values that are maybe, meaningfully nuanced differences from how we originally viewed them going into the company.

Holly Shannon: I have to believe that there is an evolution in a startup. So the value system has to be reassessed on a regular basis.

Sam Corcos: Yeah, definitely.

Holly Shannon: You know, interestingly, I agree with what you were saying because what you said before, because you could go on any website and you can look at the mission statement on any company and you know it was just written almost for the sake of branding, but it does not translate at all. You know, most people hate their job and they don’t even like their boss. So, it’s just very interesting to me that there’s such a big disconnect. So all that said, let me ask you, taking a look at Levels and with everything you learn, how are you sharing what the culture looks like for Levels with new people coming in and how are you onboarding them and evolving your culture with them?

Sam Corcos: It’s something that we put a lot of emphasis into. So one of the biggest things is through documentation. We’re actually undergoing an interesting internal project right now where we’re having somebody review everyone on our team to directed values from them. So an example of how you would establish culture through actions and not policy is a lot of companies have their HR handbook where they have, this is our vacation policy and it’s a five page document on all of the edge cases that are handled for. For us, just fundamentally, we believe in treating people like adults in many ways, it’s more similar to the Netflix philosophy and to give people a sense of what that really means. We have a series of interviews with people on the team on how they do vacations and Casey on our team. She goes fully off grid.

Sam Corcos: She goes camping. She doesn’t even bring her phone with her and she is off grid for at least a week. For me, I don’t like being off grid. I like spending my time writing. So when I go on vacation, I’m usually writing. Often times it’s even work related just because that’s what I find interesting and everybody has their own way of doing it. Some people take six weeks of vacation, some people take more. Kind of depends on what your needs are and instead of explicitly stating what is allowed and what is not just showing that different people have different ways of doing it and that it can be a reasonable conversation. I think that onboarding broadly is incredibly important for setting expectations, but more than that, I think it’s important to set those expectations before somebody starts because different people want different things and that can be just a personality question that can also be a life stage question for some people.

Sam Corcos: One of the nice things about being remote, is that it allows for a lot of different lifestyles. We have people on our team who have kids and for them, it is a much higher priority for them to be at home, for dinner every day, to read their kids bedtime stories, than it is to be in a high energy startup and making a bunch of new friends and those are both perfectly valid ways to go about working. It’s just a question of which things people prioritize. So we put a lot of effort into documentation and making sure that people know what they’re getting themselves into. I don’t think that the type of culture that we’re building is for everyone and that’s actually okay. If you give people enough information so that they understand, what it is they’re signing up for and setting those expectations very early.

Sam Corcos: I think it’s one of the reasons why when COVID happened and a lot of companies had to switch to being remote, it was really painful for them. Honestly, for us, I think our total productivity loss from COVID, was that our head of product, David had to take a half a day off work once to move some stuff and that was basically it because everything was well documented. We already had the cultural norms in place that were needed to handle being remote. It didn’t really change very much for us and a lot of that is because people who work at Levels know what remote is, they’ve signed up for it, they understand the expectations.

Sam Corcos: People who transition. You have people who came in with the expectation of co-located of making the new group of friends, having their work be the new center of their social life and they’re not living up to that expectation. So the companies are scrambling to find ways to create events for people so that they can get to know each other. They have a lot more zoom meetings. A lot of my friends who switched to remote really hated it because now they’re just spending eight hours a day on zoom calls and no work is getting done. So I think a lot of this is on expectation setting and making sure people understand what they’re getting themselves into early on.

Holly Shannon: If you’re looking at culture, a strategy, which is, is what we’re talking about here specifically, I think that I’m personally starting to see that there’s a real difference between the role that HR plays in onboarding and introducing either a remote culture or hybrid or whatever it’s going to be, but I think that there’s the other side, which is community and I think that when people come in to work for a company there’s certain SOPs, they need to follow, and that’s why they need to go to HR and sign all those pretty forms and they have to get all of their equipment and learn all of the rules and regulations of the company but, I think there’s this other piece that needs to be nurtured and I’m not sure that it is in most businesses, is that community side. I think they’re trying to put it in the pocket of HR and I don’t think that they’re equipped for it.

Sam Corcos: I think it’s an interesting question around, especially on remote teams, what the expectations are. I’ve talked to Darren at GitLab about this, they’re a very large, fully remote team. They’re really the OGs of remote work. The GitLab handbook is a resource that we reference all the time at our company, just because it has such a robust depth of knowledge of a company that’s been doing this for a really long time. One of the things that they say is that the, being remote and doing so successfully means that really, you need to find it. It gives you the opportunity to be more involved in your local community where you’re going to like working with your colleagues.

Sam Corcos: So my co-founder Josh, when he was at SpaceX, a lot of his closest friends right now are people that he worked with at SpaceX, because he’d have lunch with them every day. He’d have dinner with them every day, he’d have drinks with them after work every day, he’d spend time with them on weekends. He would spend all of his time with the people that he worked with and you totally can in a remote environment, if you’re physically in a similar location, but it’s very hard.

Sam Corcos: In many ways, it’s sort of like, you’re trying to push a square peg into a round hole, instead of finding ways in which you can make remote more co-located. You really need to figure out what remote is good at and lean into those things. Remote is really good at forcing good patterns of documentation. It’s really good at giving you access to a much larger talent pool as a company, it’s much better at designing workflows of asynchronous communication so that you can get a lot more deep focused work done.

Sam Corcos: Our engineers are much more productive at our company than a lot of them have been in previous companies because they’re able to block off. It’s funny because, a lot of companies are now shifting to things like, No Meeting Wednesday and at Levels, it’s more like the opposite. Many times our engineers just have like meeting Monday and that’s the only day they do meetings. We have so few of them and we lean into the positive aspects of remote. It means that you can take time to volunteer locally. You can make more friends in your local community instead of it being more work focused. So I think that it depends a lot on the way that the company is organized.

Holly Shannon: You know, I feel like it’s almost a general generational thing. When I think about like our parents, for example, they worked in more of like a nine to five type of setup. You know, they didn’t push these 12 hour days. You didn’t hear about startups and scaling and all the conversations that I think we have now. That doesn’t mean that there were not startups then, but it was such a nine to five. I don’t know, my father would come home, he didn’t hang out with the people that he worked with. He’d go play around a golf and he’d have dinner and it was just different and I think we’re relying on work and the people that we work with to give us our friendships and our community.

Holly Shannon: I just think it’s different now and so people are looking for more out of their experience, but you did make a nod to Darren, Darren Murph from GitLab. So if anybody is catching this podcast, I have interviewed him before and he is a rockstar and he has an incredible free handbook on their website with all kinds of tools, helping companies be more successful at being remote, because they were doing it before they had to.

Holly Shannon: I’m really excited to share this with my Culture Factor 2.0 community I’ve published zero to podcast. It was a book that I built to start my podcast and I created it for myself just so that I could make other podcasts down the road and then I realized that it’s not just for me, it’s for looking to try podcasting for personal or professional reasons. So I’m also really excited to tell you that it already hit the top 10 and three best selling categories on Amazon and number one in hot new releases in two categories and even more exciting, the university of Chicago now carries it in their bookstore. So go buy your copy and get started. Zero to podcast will be in the show note. I’ll leave a link there, or you could go to HollyShannon.com and you could buy the book and get any help you need building it for you or your company. I hope you enjoyed the first part of this interview. Please go to the next episode to start the rest.