Sam Corcos (Levels) – Solving the metabolic health crisis with real time glucose monitoring

In this episode of The Consumer VC, Levels co-founder and CEO Sam Corcos speaks with host Mike Gelb about his roots in the world of innovative startups and venture capital. Sam explains why it’s so difficult – yet so important – to be thoughtful about where you put your time and energy. He shares his journey to Levels, why he’s a low-ego CEO, and the benefit of shipping to paying customers ASAP.

The truth about expertise

Sam says that to be considered an expert, you just need to know a bit more than the average person.

Expertise is often just knowing marginally more than other people. And I guess I’ve often underestimated my own level of expertise. I grew up around cars and actually have a lift and a whole car shop at my parents’ house where I grew up. And growing up around cars, you just pick up things like what a disk break is, how to change oil. All of these things seemed really trivial. You hear a sound in a car and it’s like, oh, that car has a bad starter. People are like, “How did you know that? Are you a magician?” It’s like I thought everybody knows this stuff, but it’s interesting how you just osmose different things. I imagine if your parents are a carpenter or somebody is a really great cook, you just know like, how do you not know how to cook eggs? Doesn’t everybody know how to do that?

How to minimize regret

The key to professional happiness is to put your energy into interesting projects you care about.

Jeff Bezos has this regret minimization framework, and that’s the decision-making process that he used. That’s a helpful one. One for me, it’s maybe related to that, is what are sets of problems where if I spent five years trying to solve it and it was not successful, I would not look back on it as a wasted to time. I would look back on it as, you know what? Even though it was unsuccessful, I’m glad that I did that. And that really helped narrow down to a handful of things that I really cared about. Healthcare broadly speaking is one of them.

Don’t get distracted too soon

We live in a world of numerous opportunities. But your best bet is to take time to reflect before committing to new projects.

I was actually giving this specific advice to a friend who’s in that situation right now, which is explicitly don’t commit to anything for at least six months. Just give yourself a floor on commitment because every new idea is going to feel like the thing you have to do, and it usually isn’t. The number of times during that year off that I took that I felt like, oh man, this is the one, I’ve got to do that. And then I took a step back, gave it a little time and then it was like, oh wow, this other thing is the one I want to do and this other one is the one I want to do. And then I started to realize that the world is abundant with opportunity and that I don’t need to pressure myself to take the first thing that’s in front of me.

Sam’s experience using Levels

It was a lightbulb moment when Sam was able to connect his energy slumps with a gluten-related pattern of spikes and crashes.

There were a lot of stars that aligned that led us to this path. One was a recognition that a lot of my own life, a lot of my own choices were actually the source of a lot of my lifestyle problems. The classic midday energy crash that a lot of people experience, I had issues with that constantly, and I had always attributed it to lack of sleep, lack of, or too much caffeine. It had literally never occurred to me that my dietary choices could be impacting the way that I feel. I was a firm believer in all calories are the same. When I used a glucose monitor for the first time, this was, I think maybe the second day that I was using one, I had my normal breakfast of oatmeal, and I saw my numbers go up into a range that you’re not really supposed to be able to see as a healthy person. And then I had crashed into pretty deep hypoglycemia, and it was just exactly the same time when I was feeling drowsy and tired. And it was just the light bulb went off.

Solve problems at scale

Sam’s background in startups means he’s always on the lookout for how to get innovative products into the hands of many.

Being in startups, I pretty much only think about how to solve problems in a venture scalable way. Doing things like doctor training is good, but it’s not venture scalable because humans are expensive. And so you have to figure out a path to get the marginal cost of whatever you’re doing as close to zero as possible. And products get cheaper over time and services get more expensive over time. So doctors are getting more and more expensive, but things like televisions and iPhones, these things get cheaper over time. And so this is a product that solves for a lot of the misinformation and misunderstanding around diet that would otherwise be solved for through much more expensive mechanisms. So it seemed like the tip of the spear on really giving people visibility into how their choices affect them.

Don’t eat too much sugar at once

When your body is flooded with an excess of glucose, it’s the equivalent of taking multiple shots of alcohol at the same time.

An analogy that I would like to give related to that, which I think most people can relate to, is it’s a very different experience having five drinks of alcohol over the course of a day and doing five shots. Everyone knows taking five shots is probably not great. You’re going to feel weird. If you have them spaced out over the day, you probably won’t even notice them. So it’s a very different experience. And so pumping in all of that glucose or that sugar into your body at the same time has a similar effect inasmuch as your body is going to respond pretty aggressively to it. And so just in terms of lifestyle, keeping a relatively stable glucose curve, you will feel different.

On being a no-ego CEO

Sam wants what’s best for the company. That means taking on the role of CEO today, but potentially giving it up down the road.

Josh gives a pretty raw account of how emotionally difficult it was for him to be okay with somebody else being the CEO. There was definitely in his mind an assumption that he would be the CEO. And after a lot of conversation, I think the conclusion was that the things that a CEO does are the things that I’m much better at…I don’t have any ego attached to being CEO. I’ve even told this to Josh that if we get to a point in company history where my skillset is more suited for a strategy role and we get to a point where we need somebody who’s more of like an Eric Schmidt to come in and be the big corporation CEO, then that’s something that we’ll probably do. I’m interested in solving this problem much more than I’m interested in being CEO.

Managing multiple co-founders

Levels has many co-founders, which works well for the team. Sam has a “veto” power as CEO which he rarely utilizes.

I think having more co-founders can be a huge asset or a huge liability, depending on how you manage it. In our case, it’s a huge asset. There have not been any downsides so far. And the main reason is that for a lot of companies that have multiple co-founders, the founding team is often hesitant to engage in difficult conversations. A failure mode that I’ve seen personally, not within companies that I’ve been involved with but companies that I’ve seen that friends have been involved with, is there’s no clear final decision-maker. At our company, we all agreed at the very beginning like, “Look, we’re all going to be co-founders, but we all have to agree that if push comes to shove, I’m the only person with a veto. We all have to agree that I’m the final decision maker.” And it’s interesting because it has not actually, I don’t think it’s happened at all in the two years we’ve been around. There hasn’t been any decision where I had to exercise the veto.

Nurture investment relationships

It’s hard to overstate the importance of relationships, especially when those relationships could result in trusting investors.

We started with investment just because we knew this was going to be a venture-scale project. I just sent out an email to a handful of angel investors that I knew and VCs, and we raised about a million pretty much, I don’t know, within the first few weeks. It was not that hard, just 25 to 50 K checks. One of the nice things about having that network that you built over the course of 10 years, we actually had one person, I told him that we were raising money. He wired $75,000. I had to hound him to sign the documents. He wired the money before even signing anything. And I saw him three months later at a conference, and he came up to me, he was like, “So tell me about this thing you’re working on.” So building that network and keeping those relationships warm is not really the right word because it underplays how important they are.

Don’t be afraid to ship early

Despite the scary state of the first Levels product, Sam didn’t hesitate to get it in the hands of paying customers.

I wanted to get paying customers, and I wanted to get the product in the hand of customers as soon as humanly possible. And I don’t care how janky it is. I want it in their hands and I want them paying for it. I think everyone else on the team was super uncomfortable with that because it’s really janky. It’s expensive, and it can feel hard to justify. This is a beta product that’s really bad, so how can we in good conscience charge somebody $400 for this experience? That’s rational but I think it’s also incorrect because it’s a question of what is it that you’re proving? In that case, we were proving, is this something that people are willing to pay for?

Keep your hiring pipeline open

The best job candidates aren’t looking for jobs. Nurture hiring candidates in the same way that you nurture potential investor relationships.

I found that our best hires are people that often took months to get interested in what we’re doing. And the best hires really almost never looking for a job, being open to being patient and having a conversation. I actually just got an email yesterday, an engineer that I sent an email to him in March and I’ve been keeping him in the loop since then. And he just emailed me yesterday and said, “Hey. The more I think about it, the less happy I realize I am at my current job and I’m actually thinking about moving on. Let’s have a conversation.” There’s really no pressure. Worst-case scenario, he might know other engineers that would be interested in what we’re doing.

Mike Gelb: Hello. Hello and welcome to The Consumer VC. I am your host, Mike Gelb. And on this show, we talk about the world of venture capital and innovation in both consumer technology and consumer products. If you’re enjoying this content, you could subscribe to my newsletter at theconsumervc.substack.com to get each new episode and more consumer news delivered straight to your inbox.

Mike Gelb: Our guest today is Sam Corcos, co-founder and CEO of Levels. Levels makes it easy for people to see how their diet is affecting both their health and their lifestyle in a quantifiable way by measuring biomarkers in real time. In previous episodes, we discussed tracking your sleep and your exercise, but Levels is tracking your blood glucose so you can make better decisions about what you consume. This was a fascinating conversation about how to optimize what you eat and how wearable technology can really help you understand your body better. Without further ado, here is Sam.

Mike Gelb: Sam, thanks so much for joining me. How are you?

Sam Corcos: I’m good. Good to be here.

Mike Gelb: Thanks so much for coming on. It’s great to have you on. I wanted to start from the very beginning. What was your initial attraction to entrepreneurship?

Sam Corcos: I think part of it was a rejection of other options, maybe deep seated problem with authority. I don’t know. I would say that I very nearly went into finance, and my parents really tried to force me into law school and I really didn’t want to do those. I went to Claremont McKenna for undergrad, and certainly when I was there, pretty much everyone either went into investment banking or consulting. Those were the two options that you have. After talking to a lot of people who had gone down that path and realizing that pretty much all of them hated it, it’s interesting when you get a lot of signal from people that you respect who say that you should not do something. There’s a saying, it might be Bismarck, somebody has a saying along the lines of any fool can learn from experience. Wisdom comes from learning from others’ experience. I think there’s something to that. If 10 or so people that you respect tell you that a certain thing is a bad idea, it’s probably a bad idea.

Mike Gelb: That’s a really great point. And it’s also I think really good that you had that awareness too that, hey, all these people are maybe on paper seem like they’re having great jobs but maybe they’re actually not. And you actually talk to them. They’re actually really not enjoying the work. That makes a lot of sense. Well, you really went on a tear. You’ve started a few companies in quite a few different categories and really are a true serial entrepreneur. So I want to start maybe with CarDash. What was that experience like starting that company, and when you start new companies, what are the first questions that you begin asking yourself?

Sam Corcos: Yeah. I think early on in my career, I would say that they were just interesting problems to solve. There wasn’t really any bigger intent to be on that, and they were with people that I knew and it seemed plausible. So CarDash, I had just left Sightline Maps and I was doing a lot of software consulting and I ran into my friend, Yinon, and he was looking to start a new company and he had this idea that ultimately became CarDash.

Sam Corcos: One of the interesting things, I’ve learned that expertise is often just knowing marginally more than other people. And I guess I’ve often underestimated my own level of expertise. I grew up around cars and actually have a lift and a whole car shop at my parents’ house where I grew up. And growing up around cars, you just pick up things like what a disk break is, how to change oil. All of these things seemed really trivial. You hear a sound in a car and it’s like, oh, that car has a bad starter. People are like, “How did you know that? Are you a magician?” It’s like I thought everybody knows this stuff, but it’s interesting how you just osmose different things. I imagine if your parents are a carpenter or somebody is a really great cook, you just know like, how do you not know how to cook eggs? Doesn’t everybody know how to do that? And so it just seemed like a natural fit.

Sam Corcos: I’ve been on the technical side for most of my career, and Yinon was looking for a technical co-founder, and as it happens, I was one, and I was looking for the next project to work on. So we had really good chemistry. So I think for me, a big part of it is team, working with people that I really connect with. That was probably the biggest factor for CarDash, was it was a big learning opportunity and it was with people that I really respected.

Mike Gelb: What made you interested in the human body?

Sam Corcos: I’ve been interested in biological science for a very long time. It was my best subject growing up. I had actually published a paper on non-small cell lung carcinoma when I was in high school, working with a med student at UC Davis. And I was very much planning to go the route of basic research and academic science when I was younger. To be honest, I got pretty jaded by academic science. My friends who are currently in academia would say fortunately, I got jaded early because it’s a lesson that a lot of people learn after a decade sunk into it. It’s very political and very slow and frustrating.

Sam Corcos: I would say that the thing that got me interested in this specifically was I took a year off work after CarDash, and that really gave me a lot of time to reflect on really how I wanted to spend my time. It was an interesting realization that I had around how much of my time I had spent working on things that were directly in front of me, easily tens of thousands of hours. I work pathologically. I probably, a light week for me is an 80-hour week. 80 to a hundred hours is a very normal work week for me and has been since I graduated college. And so I’ve spent tens of thousands of hours working, and I’ve probably spent single digit hours up to that point actually thinking about what I want to work on.

Sam Corcos: And so when you think about just the delta between those two, it’s maybe 10 hours of like, what do I want to do with my life? And maybe 30,000 hours actually working on stuff. It was pretty interesting. And so I really took a good chunk of that year thinking about, what are the problems that I actually care about?

Sam Corcos: I kept trying to come up with different framing for myself. Jeff Bezos has this regret minimization framework, and that’s the decision-making process that he used. That’s a helpful one. One for me, it’s maybe related to that, is what are sets of problems where if I spent five years trying to solve it and it was not successful, I would not look back on it as a wasted to time. I would look back on it as, you know what? Even though it was unsuccessful, I’m glad that I did that. And that really helped narrow down to a handful of things that I really cared about.

Sam Corcos: Healthcare broadly speaking is one of them. It’s one of these institutions where it’s becoming an increasingly large percentage of GDP. Its quality is getting worse. Costs are going up. It’s actually getting worse at an increasing rate. So there are certain problems where things are bad, but every year, they seem to get incrementally better. And you could argue, it might not be getting better at a rate that is necessary to achieve some successful outcome, but the first derivative is negative, and there are some problems where the first derivative is positive and there are some problems like the metabolic health crisis where the second derivative is positive. The rate of increase is increasing. It’s accelerating. And I realized that there are certain areas where I thought I could probably … My involvement can move the needle on some of these societal scale problems. And so I really spent a lot of time thinking about those, and I narrowed it down to maybe three to five major areas that I was interested in.

Mike Gelb: It seems like when you’re thinking about starting a business, also when you talk about CarDash, you really also looked at the market and analyzed the market and realized that it’s a big problem, as well as of course the healthcare system and of course what you’re doing with Levels. What I guess is that process like, just for founders or entrepreneurs that are listening, that, one, to obviously make a big impact? I know that’s obviously very important to you, especially when you had that reflection. What’s that process like in terms of figuring out, okay, where do I want my impact to be?

Sam Corcos: I think introspection is a really important one, talking to people who know more about things than you do. I talked to a lot of friends and people that I respect in the course of that time and just really learned about what is out there. I would say one of the things that’s … I was actually giving this specific advice to a friend who’s in that situation right now, which is explicitly don’t commit to anything for at least six months. Just give yourself a floor on commitment because every new idea is going to feel like the thing you have to do, and it usually isn’t. The number of times during that year off that I took that I felt like, oh man, this is the one, I’ve got to do that. And then I took a step back, gave it a little time and then it was like, oh wow, this other thing is the one I want to do and this other one is the one I want to do. And then I started to realize that the world is abundant with opportunity and that I don’t need to pressure myself to take the first thing that’s in front of me.

Sam Corcos: That experience was really helpful in seeing a more holistic picture. It’s uncomfortable for people to think about what they actually want. Everyone goes through this quarter life crisis of what do I do with my life. And that’s okay. It is not an easy question of how you want to spend your time. It’s easy to check out and just go through the default path or watch television and not have to think about it, but if you really want to solve this problem, it requires thought and effort, and that’s not easy.

Sam Corcos: So I would say blocking off time is the biggest one. Really commit the time to it. It’s an interesting thing because the amount of time that it actually takes is a lot less than people often expect. It’s a similar thing with, say, long form writing. I do a lot of writing. And what’s interesting is that the act of writing, it has a disproportionately high emotional cost to the actual time cost. There have been important company memos where I’ve been procrastinating for three months to write this memo. It’s like, oh man, this is going to be so much work. And then I start writing it, and then an hour and a half later, it’s done. It’s like if you were to ask me without me keeping track of my calendar, how long did that take? I would say, oh man, that was two months of work. It was like, no, it was one and a half hours.

Sam Corcos: And so it’s the same thing for deciding what you want to do with your life. It’s committing five hours to really introspecting about this. It’s going to feel like three months of work, but it’s actually not that much time.

Mike Gelb: So when you were thinking about wanting to, thinking about healthcare, thinking about helping people and create an impact, why did you decide to focus on continuous glucose monitoring? When you’re thinking about different types of products to actually introduce, what was that like?

Sam Corcos: Yeah. I think there were a lot of stars that aligned that led us to this path. One was a recognition that a lot of my own life, a lot of my own choices were actually the source of a lot of my lifestyle problems. The classic midday energy crash that a lot of people experience, I had issues with that constantly, and I had always attributed it to lack of sleep, lack of, or too much caffeine. It had literally never occurred to me that my dietary choices could be impacting the way that I feel. I was a firm believer in all calories are the same.

Sam Corcos: When I used a glucose monitor for the first time, this was, I think maybe the second day that I was using one, I had my normal breakfast of oatmeal, and I saw my numbers go up into a range that you’re not really supposed to be able to see as a healthy person. And then I had crashed into pretty deep hypoglycemia, and it was just exactly the same time when I was feeling drowsy and tired. And it was just the light bulb went off of, wait a second. What are the symptoms of hypoglycemia? It’s feeling tired, shaky hands. I have all of these things. This is what it is. This whole time, it’s just been oatmeal, and it never even occurred to me. And so it was the first time I was able to look into the black box and have some understanding of how my diet was affecting me. You don’t have to just buy into whatever marketing language of it’s heart healthy. These things are all healthy, but healthy doesn’t really mean anything until you have data to back it up.

Sam Corcos: So that was one of the things. It was just a personal recognition of I’m a fairly knowledgeable person on these things. I read a lot of books, I think a lot about health, and I was completely ignorant to this, which means that a lot of people are probably ignorant to this.

Sam Corcos: The other was a recognition of scalability, which is to say being in startups, I pretty much only think about how to solve problems in a venture scalable way. Doing things like doctor training is good, but it’s not venture scalable because humans are expensive. And so you have to figure out a path to get the marginal cost of whatever you’re doing as close to zero as possible. And products get cheaper over time and services get more expensive over time. So doctors are getting more and more expensive, but things like televisions and iPhones, these things get cheaper over time. And so this is a product that solves for a lot of the misinformation and misunderstanding around diet that would otherwise be solved for through much more expensive mechanisms. So it seemed like the tip of the spear on really giving people visibility into how their choices affect them.

Mike Gelb: As you say, I also suffer that problem, and I’m sure a lot of people do that are listening, that you just have that midday slump where you just don’t have energy. When you started to notice, obviously when you first started tracking it with glucose monitoring, what were maybe some of the other lifestyle choices that you were making? I was talking, for example, with Harpreet, the founder of Ōura Ring. And he was saying how he now doesn’t have coffee, and after 10 AM, he won’t have coffee, for example. I’m always curious to hear especially the health side.

Sam Corcos: Yeah. I’ve used Ōura Ring as well, and the biggest thing for me was cutting back pretty substantially on alcohol consumption, especially after 7 PM. I’ve never really been a big fan of alcohol anyway, and so I’d say 90% of the time I consume alcohol was out of social pressure. I’ve used the Ōura Ring, and my biggest takeaway was reducing alcohol consumption and especially before bed. I noticed just how much it impacted my sleep quality, and so I rarely have more than one or two glasses of alcohol on an outing anymore. It’s just not worth it. That was a big improvement because sleep quality is very important to me. I have an eye mask and earplugs and I try to maximize my sleep quality whenever possible.

Sam Corcos: I would say one of the other takeaways from using glucose monitoring, it’s the recognition, I would say mixed meals or something that was a big surprise to me, which is to say if you have something that’s really high carbohydrate by itself, it’s a pretty acute spike and then a crash. Whereas, if you have something that’s like you have a salad beforehand that has a lot of fiber in it or you pair it with fats or protein, that acute spike is blunted. The glycemic variability with these spikes and crashes, they matter a lot in terms of lifestyle. There’s also pretty good evidence that it affects long-term health as well.

Sam Corcos: An analogy that I would like to give related to that, which I think most people can relate to, is it’s a very different experience having five drinks of alcohol over the course of a day and doing five shots. Everyone knows taking five shots is probably not great. You’re going to feel weird. If you have them spaced out over the day, you probably won’t even notice them. So it’s a very different experience. And so pumping in all of that glucose or that sugar into your body at the same time has a similar effect inasmuch as your body is going to respond pretty aggressively to it.

Sam Corcos: And so just in terms of lifestyle, keeping a relatively stable glucose curve, you will feel different. I think the other one that I noticed is that when I do decide that I’m going to have a high-carb meal, going on a walk afterwards makes a huge difference. If I do Thai food, which is usually pretty high carb, if I go on a 30-minute, 60-minute walk afterwards, it completely changes the way that my body metabolizes. Glucose is actually an interesting molecule because it can be directly processed by most of the cells in your body just directly, in your muscles as well. So if you go on a walk after taking in a meal that has a lot of carbohydrates in it, your body will process it pretty directly.

Mike Gelb: Wow. That’s really interesting. And so has this also changed if you were to have a high-carb meal, and I know every person’s body is a bit different, but does this change time of day that you think about to have maybe a high-carb meal or do you just feel if you really want to truly optimize your body that no matter what time of day it is, I’m going to go on a 30-minute or an hour long walk? Does that make a difference?

Sam Corcos: Yeah. Different people have different responses to these things. People tend to be most sensitive in the morning, but that hasn’t been consistently true. Actually, another thing that I learned from using Eight Sleep and the different sleep trackers is that eating really late really also negatively affects my sleep quality. I try not to eat after 7:00. I’ve noticed that’s the cutoff for me. 7 PM dinner is the latest I’ll do dinner.

Sam Corcos: The timing around eating is interesting. There’s a lot of evidence around intermittent fasting. The evidence is accumulating. There is a lot to be said for timing of what you eat and timing of when you eat and also what you eat. So it’ll be interesting to see as more evidence comes in. That’s really a relatively new area of research.

Mike Gelb: I know for your previous companies, you were, if it’s fair to say, more so on the technical side. Why did you decide for Levels to be on the non-technical side to be the CEO?

Sam Corcos: I was quite involved in the technical side for the first year or so. I haven’t written meaningful code in probably a year, which is definitely a first. It was an open conversation that I had with my co-founder, my first co-founder, Josh, on really just assessing who would be best for the role. We actually, coincidentally, yesterday, released a podcast covering some of the stuff on our podcast on co-founder dynamics, which might be worth a listen to where Josh gives a pretty raw account of how emotionally difficult it was for him to be okay with somebody else being the CEO. There was definitely in his mind an assumption that he would be the CEO.

Sam Corcos: And after a lot of conversation, I think the conclusion was that the things that a CEO does are the things that I’m much better at. I spend a lot of time thinking about network. I spend a lot of time on email. I have most of the investor contacts. If you just write out the responsibilities of the CEO, also the fact that I have just much more experience in early stage. Josh was at SpaceX, and he has a lot of experience in hardware and being really scrappy, getting things shipped in operations, but those are not necessarily things that make for a good CEO. So I think it was largely a recognition that I’m probably the best fit for the role.

Sam Corcos: I don’t have any ego attached to being CEO. I’ve even told this to Josh that if we get to a point in company history where my skillset is more suited for a strategy role and we get to a point where we need somebody who’s more of like an Eric Schmidt to come in and be the big corporation CEO, then that’s something that we’ll probably do. I’m interested in solving this problem much more than I’m interested in being CEO.

Mike Gelb: Yeah. You’re interested in really serving what’s actually best for the company and not actually really have the ego attached. And I really appreciate just how transparent and forward you are with the reasons why you are the CEO of the company and also how you thought about the roles, the level of expertise and the experience that you’ve had. What was it like building a company with five co-founders and how did you all come together? I think you’ve spoken a little bit about how you met Josh and speaking with Josh, but I would love to learn about the others as well.

Sam Corcos: I think having more co-founders can be a huge asset or a huge liability, depending on how you manage it. In our case, it’s a huge asset. There have not been any downsides so far. And the main reason is that for a lot of companies that have multiple co-founders, the founding team is often hesitant to engage in difficult conversations. A failure mode that I’ve seen personally, not within companies that I’ve been involved with but companies that I’ve seen that friends have been involved with, is there’s no clear final decision maker. At our company, we all agreed at the very beginning like, “Look, we’re all going to be co-founders, but we all have to agree that if push comes to shove, I’m the only person with a veto. We all have to agree that I’m the final decision maker.”

Sam Corcos: And it’s interesting because it has not actually, I don’t think it’s happened at all in the two years we’ve been around. There hasn’t been any decision where I had to exercise the veto, but just knowing that there is a decision maker reduces a lot of that tension. It’s existential problem for other companies. One of the co-founders has a very strong opinion and somebody else disagrees and there’s no way to resolve that conflict. Having a final decision maker is really important.

Sam Corcos: The other major advantage to it is that Casey does a lot of our podcasts, and she’s one of the co-founders. I think in a lot of companies, there’s an assumption that the CEO does all of the things. If you have more co-founders and you have more people in leadership that can do these things, Casey is better at it than I am so it doesn’t really make sense for me to do it. I can talk about business strategy. I can talk about team building. I can talk about myself personally, but Casey is way better about talking about metabolic health. She is a doctor from Stanford. She knows this stuff like it’s the back of her hand. So having her go on the medical podcasts or the wellness podcast to talk about this, it does not make sense for me to do it. And having more co-founders really extends your leadership capacity in a really positive way.

Mike Gelb: Once you all, the five of you, came together and you realized that you wanted to start Levels, you were having these conversations, what was the process like building out the first product? Did you first seek investment or did you try to build out an MVP beforehand or what was going through your mind?

Sam Corcos: Yeah. We started with investment just because we knew this was going to be a venture scale project. I just sent out an email to a handful of angel investors that I knew and VCs, and we raised about a million pretty much, I don’t know, within the first few weeks. It was not that hard, just 25 to 50 K checks. One of the nice things about having that network that you built over the course of 10 years, we actually had one person, I told him that we were raising money. He wired $75,000. I had to hound him to sign the documents. He wired the money before even signing anything. And I saw him three months later at a conference, and he came up to me, he was like, “So tell me about this thing you’re working on.”

Sam Corcos: So building that network and keeping those relationships warm is not really the right word because it underplays how important they are. These are people that I care about. And so just staying in touch with them and knowing what they’re up to really makes a big difference. It’s like one of those, they say an overnight success story 10 years in the making. It’s very much that. You have to invest a lot of time in people to be able to do things that quickly.

Mike Gelb: That makes lot of sense. When did you get into Y Combinator? What was that experience like?

Sam Corcos: Yeah, that was CarDash. We did CarDash through YC. It was good. The Y Combinator I think is most useful for first time founders. There’s a lot of material around things like burn rate. Some of the stuff that are really important to know, the YC network is also very strong. There’s a lot that you can do within the YC network. There’s an internal social network that you can tap into and ask for advice and meet people. So we went through YC and CarDash. We were not accepted on our first application very early on, and we were accepted on our second application. And I think the statistic that they told us is that something like 40% of YC companies were not accepted on their first application, which I did not expect.

Sam Corcos: So a lot of people try on multiple occasions and they tend to get in. In retrospect, it makes sense because if you applied once and you don’t really have a lot of traction and six months later, you apply again and they can compare how much progress you’ve made in that time period. If you’ve made a lot of progress, they can see that. It gets a Mark Suster post on Investing in Lines and Not Dots. If you see the line and the line is going up and to the right, you have more confidence.

Mike Gelb: Yeah, that makes sense, and I actually love that post of Mark. That was awesome. With Levels, once you were able to raise a million, then what was the next steps because of course, then you’re off to the races?

Sam Corcos: Yeah. The next step was getting feedback from customers. This was something that maybe this was the only time I had to exercise the CEO veto, was I wanted to get paying customers, and I wanted to get the product in the hand of customers as soon as humanly possible. And I don’t care how janky it is. I want it in their hands and I want them paying for it. I think everyone else on the team was super uncomfortable with that because it’s really janky. It’s expensive, and it can feel hard to justify. This is a beta product that’s really bad, so how can we in good conscience charge somebody $400 for this experience? That’s rational but I think it’s also incorrect because it’s a question of what is it that you’re proving? In that case, we were proving, is this something that people are willing to pay for?

Sam Corcos: It’s easy to give people things for free and they’ll probably say yes and because they’re your friends, they’re going to say nice things about it even if they don’t like it. If you haven’t read the book, The Mom Test, it’s definitely worth a good read because it talks a lot about … It’s a pretty short book. It talks a lot about how your friends and family will always give you positive feedback, as well as your early customers if you talk to them on the phone. So it’s about how do you get around that and really validate whether people like your product or not?

Sam Corcos: So getting in front of customers, most of our early customers did not like the experience and that’s actually fine and normal and okay. And it’s the question of then talking to them, why didn’t you like it? What you’re trying to suss out is are they indifferent? If they’re indifferent, that’s the death of the company. They just don’t care. They’re like, “Yeah, I used it and like, meh.” Okay, that’s an existential problem. If what they tell you is like, “Man, I really want to like it, but god, the interface is so bad. I really wanted to do this on this day and I couldn’t like. I just wish that your app was better and it could do these things.” It’s like, oh, interesting. This person cares about this problem and wants to solve it.

Sam Corcos: And so I think probably eight out of the first 10 people really didn’t like it. We shipped another version. We have an inside joke at the company because the first version of the app that we shipped, I think I largely built it myself and it was really bad. And anytime you log the food, I forgot to remove the hard coding, so everything that you logged was pork tacos. We joke, we call it the pork tacos version where we shipped it to people and people were complaining like, “Hey, no matter what I add, it just calls it pork tacos. My notes don’t show up.” And so I was like, oh, okay. It’s an example of you have to just ship quickly. If you try to solve for every edge case, you’re going to delay the launch. As embarrassing as it is to have the pork tacos version of your app, get it out there, and then you know what? We fixed the pork tacos bug and we had that solved within about a day. It’s okay to be embarrassed by early product launches. Just get it shipped.

Mike Gelb: After you raised the million, at what point did you realize that you needed to raise another round, and how did you approach fundraising when it was bigger checks that were outside angels that you knew?

Sam Corcos: I would say we always knew that we were going to raise more capital. It’s one of the nice things about being a founder before and having failed, is that some of the failures really inform decisions in the future. One of the biggest problems that we had at Sightline Maps is we made the logical decision of we should raise money when we’re running out of money. Why would you need money when you’re not about to run out of money? So we built our fundraising around running out of money. And as a result, we gave up all of our leverage and ended up taking terms that were really not great. The longer version, we had a term sheet signed. By the way, for those who don’t know, term sheets are not binding so people can change their mind. And then if you only have a month of runway at that point, you’re in a lot of trouble.

Sam Corcos: So we decided that we would raise our next round when we thought we had the most momentum. And so we knew based on the trajectory of things, that would likely be in September of last year. And so we built out the team and we started scaling things up. And the approach that we took is there are a couple ways you can approach fundraising. One of them is very high stress. One of them is very low stress. We chose the very low stress route, which is figure out who you want at the table. Get them in the loop early. It can never be too early. Day zero, get them in the loop, add them to your monthly investor updates, keep in touch with them, keep them up to date on how things are progressing, have them feel that drum beat of progress.

Sam Corcos: I think I started. Andreessen ended up leading our round. I think we first got in touch with them in February of that year, and I told them, “Look, we’re not raising right now but we will be raising our seed round in September. And so I’ll add you to our monthly investor updates. You’ll see what we’re up to. Every month, we’ll check in, and you can see how things are going.” So by the time we got to September, a lot of people, the way that they approached it is like there’s this mad dash at the end. There really wasn’t that. The partner meeting was largely a formality because all of the questions had already been answered and all of the funds that we wanted to be involved in the process were already involved, and they had six-plus months of context on what we were building.

Sam Corcos: So I found that to be a very easy approach. Other people that I’ve talked to would say that you should really only do that if you have extremely high confidence in your ability to execute because saying in February that we’re raising our seed round in September is a stake in the ground that’s hard to walk back from. But if you have high conviction and high confidence, then it’s a pretty low stress strategy. I was the only person on our team that did anything in fundraising. We didn’t have to get the entire team involved. It was all done remotely. It was very casual, not a lot of stress.

Mike Gelb: I’d love to understand as well, what is your approach to hiring and team building?

Sam Corcos: The approach I’d say first and foremost is to just put in the work. It is something that is almost universally under-invested in. It’s another one of those things where the emotional cost feels much higher than the actual time cost. Many of the companies that I advise mostly informally, they’re just friends of mine who run companies, they complain about how hard hiring is. And when I actually dig into how much time they’ve spent on hiring, which they consider to be their biggest problem, it’s usually single digit hours. It’s painful to ask people to connect you with others. It’s painful to get rejected all the time and people who are not interested in what it is you’re doing.

Sam Corcos: I would say the other approach is we found that just being very transparent is really helpful, sharing our historic investor updates. Something that we’re actually announcing pretty soon is we publish all of our historic investor updates and weekly team all-hands publicly now. It’s on our website now. If you look at the bottom, inside the company, there’s a link, building in public. I don’t remember what the link is called, but it’s there now. We haven’t announced it yet but it’s available. And you can see our first investor update from when we started the company and everything since then with almost nothing redacted, only confidential information from third parties, not even internally information that would normally be considered private. It’s really just things that contractually we have to keep private. So that’s been a really big one.

Sam Corcos: I found that our best hires are people that often took months to get interested in what we’re doing. And the best hires really almost never looking for a job, being open to being patient and having a conversation. I actually just got an email yesterday, an engineer that I sent an email to him in March and I’ve been keeping him in the loop since then. And he just emailed me yesterday and said, “Hey. The more I think about it, the less happy I realize I am at my current job and I’m actually thinking about moving on. Let’s have a conversation.” There’s really no pressure. Worst-case scenario, he might know other engineers that would be interested in what we’re doing. I think one of the things that is often underappreciated is you don’t necessarily have to sell them on what it is you’re doing. You just need to be honest about your company and your culture.

Sam Corcos: We’re fully remote. We’ve been remote since pre-COVID, which was a controversial decision at the time. It’s much less controversial now, but explaining what being remote actually entails. And there are real trade-offs to being remote. Many people are looking for their work to be the center of their social life, and it’s not going to happen when you’re remote. That’s just the reality. It does give you a lot of flexibility. You can live anywhere you want. You can live whatever lifestyle you want. Nobody is going to be looking over your shoulder. You don’t have to show up at an office. But my co-founder Josh, when he was at SpaceX, there was a real camaraderie there. A lot of his best friends are people that he worked with at SpaceX. And those types of social dynamics don’t work the same way in a remote company, and so it’s a real trade-off, and a lot of people drop out of the process when we told them about that. And honestly, that’s totally fine.

Sam Corcos: I have a friend who the CEO sold him really, really hard on joining the company and he signed. And as soon as he showed up on day one realized that a lot of the stuff that he was told was not true. Why? What is the point of getting somebody to join a company when it’s just a lot of misinformation? Having unhappy people at the company, people who are not aligned with your values, what’s the point? It’s bad for both the company and the person who joined. So just being really honest and transparent about that has been a big part of our strategy.

Mike Gelb: Well, then since you were remote first, what were some of the ways that you’re able to build culture and build community being remote first? Especially in those early days, it’s so hard.

Sam Corcos: If you had asked me five years ago what culture means at a company, I would say it’s getting drinks with your coworkers.

Mike Gelb: Right.

Sam Corcos: And I think that’s completely wrong. The more I get involved with culture, it’s really a question of how does your company operate? How do you treat people? It’s a question of what is it that you value? What is it that people will model? The culture of investment bankers is bringing your laptop to a funeral and working while you’re there and being in your seat and sleeping under your desk and the productivity porn where you’re demonstrating how much work you’re putting into things. Even though you might not actually be that productive, it’s just the signaling of work, going to clubs and getting bottle service. That’s a cultural thing. That’s different than the social aspect.

Sam Corcos: So when I think about culture building, I think about what are the things that we want people to model? One is asynchronicity, asynchronous communication. Treating people like adults is one of our core values where we’re not going to look over your shoulder. You’re remote. We expect that you will be able to manage your own time and you will be able to get work done. If you have issues with these things, you can tell us and we can help you, but we’re not going to, by default, assume that you are going to be a nine to five schedule and we’re going to tell you what to do. So it’s very much a push culture rather than a pull culture. So in terms of community building, these things happen …

Sam Corcos: I’ve been thinking a lot about this actually very recently in terms of I think there are different types of relationships that form in companies. When I think about some of the closest relationships that I have in terms of a working relationship, some of them I’ve never met in person before. Many people … Actually, coincidentally, this morning, I met with Alan, our lead designer for the first time, and I’m also the first person at the company that he’s met in person. It was great. It was a great meeting. We went for a walk for three hours. But working relationships don’t necessarily have to be in person. You don’t necessarily have to be best friends with them. You can have respect for them. You can work with them in a very productive way.

Sam Corcos: The social component I think is a very different question, and different people will have different goals as it relates to social interaction. Some people really value it a lot. I know my co-founder, David, values it a lot. Other people probably value it a lot less. And for them, they just want to get their work done and they want to do whatever their big hobby is. Maybe they like going skiing. And for them, it’s like, I like to work during the week. I like the people I work with. I like the culture of the company. I like how we get things done. And I like going skiing. I don’t really want to be friends with everybody here. And that’s fine. If you’re bought into the mission, you understand the culture. I think those things are very different, and I think they often get conflated in a way that makes it complicated for people.

Mike Gelb: Apart from remote work, what were some of your biggest learnings during COVID and what was life like managing Levels during this time?

Sam Corcos: I think the most interesting thing was how little it affected us because we were fully remote. I think our total productivity loss from COVID was our head of product had to take a half a day off work and wants to move some stuff. Yeah, it was pretty small because everyone was already at home. Everyone was already remote. We already had all the documentation. So really not a lot changed.

Sam Corcos: The biggest thing was the fundraising environment went completely dark for several months. I think from basically March until June, no investors responded to my emails. It was a pretty weird time, just like what is happening? And we had enough runway to not have to worry about it too much. Assuming things would eventually return to some form of normalcy, it was pretty weird and uncomfortable, but we just kept focused on what it is we were doing and things worked out okay.

Sam Corcos: I think one of the biggest shifts was how when we started the company fully remote pre-COVID, people thought it was a bad decision. And then basically roughly around April, I started getting phone calls from all the other founders I know, saying, “How do I do remote?” So I became the subject matter expert and ended up writing a lot of documentation and help people learn how to build remote companies. So that was a big transition.

Mike Gelb: I heard that from other entrepreneurs. That period between March and June was pretty scary if you didn’t have enough runaway. I’d love to also know, what are some important habits that you’ve developed for productivity? I know, like for example, you read two books a week. You’re extremely productive. Also, if 80 to a hundred hours is still minimal for you? What are some of the habits that you developed that really optimizes you to get things done?

Sam Corcos: I think one of the big ones is I only do things that I want to do, as strange as that sounds. I’ve never come close to burnout as most people define it. And one of the reasons is that most people experience burnout because they’re forced to do things that they hate, and I will do things that I don’t like doing in small bursts. There was a couple of weeks when I had to jump in into solving some major operational problems at the company, and I had to manually reconcile a thousand customer records between several different sources of truth, and it was a huge pain, and I did not enjoy it, but I recognized this is a short term thing. If I had to do that every day for a year, I could not do it. So understanding the things that give you energy and the things that don’t.

Sam Corcos: I work a lot of hours. It doesn’t feel like work to me. The things that I do for work are the things that I do in my free time. People ask me, “What do you do for fun?” It’s like, well, I write code. I think about company stuff. All the stuff I do for work is what I do for fun. When I take a vacation, I’m writing long form thought on company building and strategy. That’s what’s fun for me. So that’s one of the biggest ones. If you enjoy what it is you’re doing, really the time just flies by.

Sam Corcos: I think another one is I’ve been news sober for about eight years. I haven’t consumed any news in any form, written, television, in newspapers since about 2013. And that’s been a really big improvement for just my mental health, and it’s freed up a tremendous amount of time. It’s allowed me to read as much as I do. I did an experiment where I traded the amount of time I was spending on news for reading books, and I managed to read eight books that month, which is more than I had read in a very long time. Everything was better that month. So I just kept at it. So I’ve been doing that for a long time now.

Mike Gelb: What’s one thing you would change about venture capital?

Sam Corcos: I think that one of the changes that we’re seeing already is great. So I think that especially in the early stage, there’s a lot more capital available. I’m not sure I would answer it in the context of things that I would change. I would say that I am in favor of the current trends of venture capital, which is more capital available at the early stages, which enables more top of funnel of people taking bigger risks and starting new companies. This is a relatively new phenomenon. There has never been this much capital at seed stages for companies. I think it’s a really good trend.

Sam Corcos: One of the reasons for it is that a lot of founders from the second or third generation of big tech companies now have their own capital, and writing a 50K angel check is trivial for them and so they’re just giving it to the ecosystem. I like organizations like On Deck that are trying to push more people to take those risks and building a community around it. I think it’s really good. So I wouldn’t say there’s something that I’d want to change so much as I would like to continue to encourage venture capital to go earlier and earlier stage and getting fewer people to go into law and investment banking and more people into startups and adding value to the world.

Mike Gelb: I love that. And I agree with you. On Deck is just a remarkable organization that really gives, I think, much needed infrastructure to the early stage community, which is great. I was going to ask you what’s one book that inspired you personally, one book that inspired you professionally. But you’ve read so many books, this has probably too hard to answer.

Sam Corcos: I can think about it. A book that it’s inspired me, although it came too late in my life, I think it would’ve had a meaningful impact on me if I had read it in college but I don’t think it was even written when I was in college. It’s Andrew Yang’s book, Smart People Should Build Things, which makes a really strong case. It’s very relatable to people who are in their early 20s who feel social pressure to go into law or banking or some of these high status jobs. One of the interesting trends that I’ve noticed is that working at Goldman is a lot less shiny than it was when I was in college, which is great. And working at a startup has much more appeal than it did. So I think that’s a really positive of change.

Sam Corcos: I think one book that really inspired me, as cliche as it might sound, is The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. That really changed the way that I think about time in a lot of ways. It made me realize how important developing the skill of delegation is. It’s had pretty significant professional impacts. I actually hired a personal assistant after reading that book, which was eight years ago now, and I didn’t really have anything for her to do. I put an ad on Craigslist. I hired a personal assistant, and my goal was I know that delegation is important. I need to find something for this person to do, and I will pay them money to do it. And it was a really useful exercise in learning how to communicate effectively with another person and just starting with the assumption that if they fail at this, it’s because I did not communicate the instructions effectively, instead of getting mad at them. It’s really important skill to develop, and it’s not obvious or easy to be able to delegate effectively. So that was one that definitely had a pretty big impact as well.

Mike Gelb: My last question for you is what’s maybe the best piece of advice that you received that was really helpful when you think about yourself as a founder and an entrepreneur?

Sam Corcos: I can think of a lot of things. I think the biggest one is to work with people that you really respect. There have been a lot of interesting opportunities that seemed like they were financially lucrative. And actually, some of them really would’ve been financially lucrative, but I got weird vibes from the people. And working with people that you really respect, that you can spend a lot of time with, and that you think you can learn from is super important. I think it depends a lot on one’s age. If you’re younger, it’s really about finding people that you can learn from.

Sam Corcos: Another thing, a personal learning is a quote that I really liked, which is what we see as courage in others, we see as weakness in ourselves. And there was an interesting moment for me when Sightline Maps didn’t work out and I left. I expected … My own perception of myself was that I was a failure and that everyone would perceive me as a failure because my friends went into investment banking, and now they’re working at Goldman and McKinsey and they have all the stamps on their LinkedIn profile. And I have the stamp of tried to start a company and failed.

Sam Corcos: And what was interesting being on the other side of that was how it was largely the opposite. My friends who worked in banking were jealous that I took this risk and had these incredible experiences and opportunities that they couldn’t even dream of and how it made me massively more hirable because I had such a diverse set of skills and experiences. This is one of the reasons also why I like communities like On Deck and Y Combinator is that it gives people confidence in being willing to take those risks. So the more that we can do to encourage people to take those risks and be okay with failure. My first two companies completely failed. My third company ended up getting acquired, but it was largely a soft landing for the team. It is still operational, but it was not a venture exit. And just being okay, taking those risks. If you put in the effort and you’re sincere about it, at some point, you’ll probably figure it out.

Mike Gelb: Well, Sam, this has been such a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you so much for your time.

Sam Corcos: Sure thing.

Mike Gelb: And there you have it. It was such a pleasure chatting with Sam on the show. I highly recommend following him on Twitter, @SamCorcos.

Mike Gelb: I love it if you’d write a review on the Apple Podcast. You’re also welcome to follow me, your host, Mike, on Twitter, @MikeGelb, and also follow for episode announcements at Consumer VC. Thanks for listening everyone.