#10 – Protecting mental health and avoiding burnout at startups | Alex Lieberman & Sam Corcos

Burnout is real. But often, it can be alleviated by working smarter, not harder. As Executive Chairman of Morning Brew, Alex Lieberman is all about pursuing efficiency and enabling team members to work in the ways that serve them best. In this episode, he speaks to Levels CEO, Sam Corcos about the importance of mental health in the workplace, along with common issues like burnout and imposter syndrome and how these can affect productivity at a growing startup.

05:25 – Doing smart work

Sometimes doing hard work can result in burnout. You need to find an effective and efficient way to complete work while managing both time and quality.

What I started noticing is, if I went three days of sleeping five or six hours and working my 12-to-14-hour days, my brain would just be foggy and everything would just move slower, like people wake up feeling lethargic. It’s like my brain would be lethargic. And yeah, so I very much had this moment where I was like, “I need to take care of my body.” And it’s when I started thinking more about smart work, because my whole life, especially I was born into a Wall Street family. My parents worked super hard. My mental model was like, “Success is simple. You just outwork people and you’ll figure it out,” but I think I started having a way more nuanced view where it’s like, “Yes, working hard does matter.” In every business, there’s probably some base amount of time that you need to work in order to achieve the things you need to achieve, but it’s actually probably way less than 12 to 14 hours a day. That’s when I started thinking way more about smart work and caring way less about how much people were working during the day. And it was unlearning the habits I was taught, because on Wall Street, it was very much like you get in before your boss. You leave after your boss and face-time was very much a real thing.

08:10 – The effect of shifting to remote work Alex said that The COVID-19 pandemic caused a rapid shift to full-time remote work for many information workers.

In some ways, I almost feel like we are super intentional about the meetings we have or don’t have at The Brew, because I think most meetings are a complete waste of time and I think that is generally becoming more of a normal line of thinking than it was say five years ago, but I think I was also just giving the example of going from one company, super large corporation, old school to a startup, but I think you also see that same shell shock occur at different levels within a business, right? So as an individual contributor goes to being a manager and gets more and more senior, it’s like how your time is dictated looks very different, because you go from having someone tell you what to do to you’re telling yourself what to do. And yeah, I think to that point, the best people we’ve seen within Morning Brew always have this great gravitational pull to the stuff that matters most and the way that their schedule’s structured is really just dedicating time to the stuff that matters most.

21:47 – Three different types of learners

Alex says that while some people learn from context-specific settings, others learn in a way that’s work-agnostic or context-agnostic.

I feel like there are three different types of learning. There’s your context-specific learning as a professional, which is the language, the concepts, the processes you need to understand to do your job well. Then, there’s the work-agnostic learning, which is how to be a smart, effective, likable worker. And then, there’s context-agnostic work, which is to me where generalism comes in, which is being someone who’s just an interested person who does things that are not necessarily related to your job, but it makes you better at your job.

32:24 – Be productive on your own

When you don’t have a lot to do, it doesn’t mean that you’re not productive. Maybe you just need to know what’s more important and do it in an efficient manner.

Going back to what you said about having the open calendar, not knowing what to do, we have been taught a false definition of productivity, right? And so, I think what you’re basically saying is productivity, at least in my mind, is doing the most important things in the most efficient manner as consistently as possible. And I think, in this world where we’re constantly interrupted by people renting out our time permissionlessly, we’ve been trained to think productivity is getting back to so and so’s message, do it, busying, efforting. And even this was a huge transition for me, from the early days of Morning Brew where efforting actually did line up pretty well with being productive, because we had to put out a newsletter every day. That had to be done. We had to write it. We had to code it. We had to send it out. And so, that was a lot of effort, but that was the most important thing, to put out a product until the market accepted it.

35:22 – Why do people feel burnout?

Keep an open mind as you consider the options. Try not to let a demanding or unrewarding job undermine your health.

I think a response to when I asked you, “Why do you think people feel this way?” is you said there’s some company pressure, and then there’s some internal pressure. And I think the internal pressure is the most grounding or high-impact thing, meaning if you don’t have a deep sense of self in your abilities, in what it means to do a good job, in a feeling of balance, in confidence in what you’ve done and what you’ve put out, I think it doesn’t actually matter so much the company you’re working in or the culture. I think you will find ways to feel stressed and burnt out, because if your own intrinsic, I don’t want to say insecurity, because that’s not the word, but constantly striving to do more, right? It’s like this balance of, “How can you be a striver while being satisfied with the work that you do?” And so, to me, I think what’s really interesting is companies don’t work on this at all. This is work that I’m doing myself on my own time, like reading, but I actually think this is the thing that has the biggest impact. And no matter the culture you build, this is the thing that drives people’s happiness and the issue with it is, I think, in a lot of people that end up being great employees, they suffer from this feeling of perfection-seeking, never feeling satisfied. Then, on the external expectations side, I think if someone does have a deep sense of self and satisfaction while also balancing that with striving, then I think what you do at the external layer does matter. And so, to me, it is a combination of, I believe, more than the leadership in a company.

38:35 – Other people can also do your work

Hiring other people helps you reach your goal and make your work easier.

From my own experience, I have found that any more than, call it, six direct reports, it becomes hard to effectively manage. But there is nuance in my description, which is that most of my experience, honestly, most of my direct reports were either junior or mid-level, because I moved out of the day-to-day before we really had an established senior leadership team. And there is so much difference in actively having to train someone versus a lot of our senior leaders at Morning Brew truly are autonomous in so many ways. And actually, that generally means you’ve hired the right person where you feel like you don’t have to effort a lot other than basically, I can’t remember who’s used this definition, but in a lot of ways, the operational CEO is making these tiny adjustments to point towards the North Star, but there’s some momentum that’s headed there anyway.

46:54 – Giving feedback

Performance review. Does the mere mention of this event make your heart sink? When done in the right way and with the right intentions, feedback can lead to outstanding performance.

I think the hard thing for a first-time founder and manager, and Austin and I have struggled with this in general, is say someone is not performing well, but it hasn’t been happening long enough that it’s time to fire them. Basically, my thought is you should give someone as much chance as possible to change their behavior and to perform well, and it should never be a surprise before actually letting someone go. But as you start giving the feedback of someone not performing well, how do you keep them motivated and empowered, right? If on a weekly basis, it’s the same story of, “You’re not doing a good-enough job,” how do you create the opportunity for behavior change to happen if someone feels so disempowered because they feel like, “No matter what I do, this person isn’t going to be satisfied”? And I haven’t figured out the answer to that, but I think that is such a hard thing from a management perspective, to be honest and direct but give space for behavior change.

51:06 – Tackling problems before they grow

When your team can work in the way that’s most efficient for them, they’ll be better able to tackle small issues before they transform into big problems.

I feel like there’s almost an overarching principle, which is the principle of businesses, which is they look really small until they look huge. It’s problems, small problems, are invisible until they’re massive and unworkable. And so, it’s like, if we know that, it is generally going to be the case where, because we have shortcuts as people that basically tell us, “What should we focus our time on?” And every small problem is never going to be the priority until it’s a massive problem that’s accumulated and we’re like, “Shit, we should’ve worried about this before.” Because that’s the pattern, I think it has to come back to behavior, where it’s like you just have the right behavior so those little problems don’t pile up into one massive problem. And this goes back to what I was saying before of the different types of work knowledge and no one spends time on improving themselves, the work-agnostic level, which is no matter what type of work you’re doing, if you are a knowledge worker, there is a certain way of working that can help you. And it’s going to be a little bit different for everyone, but there is no education to do that. And I could go on forever about probably something that could be helpful in school but isn’t taught in school is, yeah, so many people aren’t reaching their potential and it’s just because they don’t necessarily even have an awareness around a way of working that could help them so much.

54:07 – Knowing what’s the best content

Alex says that people might not find the best content on the internet unless they know someone who actually makes good content.

The best content that lives on the internet is not content you can find on the aggregators today. Google is great for finding commoditized knowledge, but for nuanced knowledge or perspective for specific knowledge, to me again, if you could put what you just described in the hands of so many entrepreneurs, it would help them so much, but actually people can’t find it unless they know you or follow you, which is just such an interesting thing.

Alex Lieberman (00:06):

In every business, there’s probably some base amount of time that you need to work in order to achieve the things you need to achieve, but it’s actually probably way less than 12 to 14 hours a day, and that’s when I started thinking way more about smart work and caring way less about how much people were working during the day. And it was unlearning the habits as taught, because on Wall Street, it was very much like you get in before your boss. You leave after your boss and face-time was very much a real thing.

Ben Grynol (00:35):

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 (00:58):

Hey, listeners, Ben Grinnell here, part of the early startup team with Levels. When thinking about building companies, it is inherently hard, whether you’re a founder, an early team member, or even at a growth-stage company. When you’re part of a startup, the nature is to move fast, to ship things really quickly, and that can lead to burnout. It’s pretty straightforward to see the path of how that happens, and sometimes people don’t always express the way that they’re feeling, these sentiments about how fast things move.

Ben Grynol (01:30):

And sometimes, there’s even things like imposter syndrome, where people are surrounded by others and they don’t feel good enough about the work they do. They feel inadequate to be in the role they are and a lot of this is irrational thinking, because the most important thing that people can do at a company is to be transparent with each other, with themselves, to be honest about the way they’re feeling when undertaking certain types of work.

Ben Grynol (01:55):

And so, Alex Lieberman, co-founder of Morning Brew, and Sam Corcos, co-founder and CEO of Levels, the two of them sat down and they talked a lot about this philosophical thought behind startup life, what it’s like to actually feel burnout, how to create the conditions so that people feel they have the right channels, the right avenues, the right cultural values to mitigate burnout so that they don’t go down a path of feeling like they’re constantly on the hedonic treadmill of work.

Ben Grynol (02:25):

They talked about things like productivity. They even got into mental health and why it’s important for all team members, people individually, to take time and manage their own mental health so they don’t fall down a sense of burnout. Startups are very much sprints, but they’re also marathons. They take a long time to build, years, 10 years in many cases, until companies go public. It’s a very common thing. Anyway, the two of them sat down and they had a really deep conversation around a lot of these thoughts. Here’s Sam.

Sam Corcos (02:54):

Yeah. So some of the things I wanted to chat about are related to in the adjacent space to mental health. Specifically, we just did an employee engagement survey. The results were super great, but there were a few things that I’ve been talking with Miz and Josh and a couple other people on the team to try to understand a little bit better. And I guess I’ll start by asking you the question of what is your relationship with burnout. Have you come close to that at any point? Have you been on the other side of it? What’s [crosstalk 00:03:34]-

Alex Lieberman (03:33):

I’ve-

Sam Corcos (03:33):

Yeah.

Alex Lieberman (03:34):

Yeah, I’ve definitely experienced it. And I thought I was impervious, because my whole MO, in college especially, was I always had the mantra in my head of like, “I’m not going to be the most intelligent. I have enough intelligence, a baseline IQ, where I think I can achieve what I want to achieve, but the way I’m going to actually achieve those things is by outworking people.” And that can be super unhealthy if you don’t have a governor on it or any sort of fail-safe, because when I went from working after college at the University of Michigan for Morgan Stanley where every minute of every day was dictated for me.

Alex Lieberman (04:16):

I worked in sales and trading. I was on the desk at 6:30 a.m. I was out of the office at 7:30 p.m. and I was trading the whole day. I was constantly either helping clients with their orders, or I was buying or selling on behalf of the business. And then, when I quit my job in September of 2016 and went full-time on Morning Brew, it totally changed, right? I went from every minute dictated to zero minutes dictated. And when you’re in the early stages of building a business, there’s no end point.

Alex Lieberman (04:48):

I could work forever if I wanted to, especially for the first few years. I’d be working 14, 15-hour days and I think when I really experienced burnout is when I started conceding on sleep, because I’m someone who needs seven hours at least. In the early days of Morning Brew, when we would send out the newsletter, it wasn’t like today where everything is very automated. We have a CMS that we built for our writers. We had to code our newsletter templates, so Austin and I were in HTML and CSS every night coding the newsletter.

Alex Lieberman (05:25):

And inevitably, there were always bugs, and so we were working until 2:00 a.m. And then, I would wake up the next day at 7:00 and that just didn’t fly. What I started noticing is, if I went three days of sleeping five or six hours and working my 12-to-14-hour days, my brain would just be foggy and everything would just move slower, like people wake up feeling lethargic. It’s like my brain would be lethargic. And yeah, so I very much had this moment where I was like, “I need to take care of my body.” And it’s when I started thinking more about smart work, because my whole life, especially I was born into a Wall Street family.

Alex Lieberman (06:03):

My parents worked super hard. My mental model was like, “Success is simple. You just outwork people and you’ll figure it out,” but I think I started having a way more nuanced view where it’s like, “Yes, working hard does matter.” In every business, there’s probably some base amount of time that you need to work in order to achieve the things you need to achieve, but it’s actually probably way less than 12 to 14 hours a day. That’s when I started thinking way more about smart work and caring way less about how much people were working during the day. And it was unlearning the habits I was taught, because on Wall Street, it was very much like you get in before your boss. You leave after your boss and face-time was very much a real thing.

Sam Corcos (06:44):

It’s very performative.

Alex Lieberman (06:45):

Exactly.

Sam Corcos (06:46):

Yeah, I’ve been told that there were some investment banks or consulting firms that put little weight sensors on your chairs to see how much time you spent in your chair. [crosstalk 00:06:57]-

Alex Lieberman (06:56):

That is absurd. I hope that is not true.

Sam Corcos (07:01):

Yeah, you hope it’s not true and it would not be in the least bit surprising, I’m sure.

Alex Lieberman (07:05):

Yeah, seriously. That’s exactly right.

Sam Corcos (07:07):

Yeah, it’s funny when you say having every minute of every day dictated, and then switching to have the opposite, because that’s something that we’ve seen a lot. I actually tell people this pretty explicitly when we do early culture-fit interviews. One of the things that we’ve discovered through the process of building our company is that we’ve been fully remote since day one, since pre-COVID, and so we’ve been intentionally remote instead of temporarily or hybrid remote.

Sam Corcos (07:41):

I would describe it more as a personality type than any sort of judgment, but people who need external structure in order to be effective tend to have a really hard time in remote companies, because instead of showing up and then executing against the tasks for the day, it’s pretty common for an engineer at Levels to have two or fewer meetings per week.

Alex Lieberman (08:03):

Totally.

Sam Corcos (08:04):

And it’s like, “What do I do now?” “Well, now you do anything. It’s up to you.”

Alex Lieberman (08:09):

Yeah. In some ways, I almost feel like we are super intentional about the meetings we have or don’t have at The Brew, because I think most meetings are a complete waste of time and I think that is generally becoming more of a normal line of thinking than it was say five years ago, but I think I was also just giving the example of going from one company, super large corporation, old school to a startup, but I think you also see that same ko shell shock occur at different levels within a business, right?

Alex Lieberman (08:39):

So as an individual contributor goes to being a manager and gets more and more senior, it’s like how your time is dictated looks very different, because you go from having someone tell you what to do to you’re telling yourself what to do. And yeah, I think to that point, the best people we’ve seen within Morning Brew always have this great gravitational pull to the stuff that matters most and the way that their schedule’s structured is really just dedicating time to the stuff that matters most.

Alex Lieberman (09:09):

And I think what happens is, a lot of people, they get this time paralysis where they don’t know what to do with their time. They just start filling it up with things. And yeah, I think to your point, it’s like, yeah, our best employees ever, I would say they’re pull employees where they pulled the whole company forward versus us having to push them. And it’s like they understand what is the most essential job for them to do. They understand the business well enough to understand how they impact it and I would say they are hyper-efficient at 95%-plus of their time being dedicated to the things that they know are moving the needle for the business.

Sam Corcos (09:48):

Yeah, and it’s funny in the co-located environment. Somebody on our team sent out an article that said, “Tools like Slack make it really easy for people to LARP their jobs. You can just, every once in a while, make a contribution to a random Slack channel and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, they must be working.’ And then, months go by and the work output is just close to zero.”

Alex Lieberman (10:11):

Totally.

Sam Corcos (10:11):

And I’ve been in situations in my life. I don’t know how much of this you’ve experienced, but productivity theater is definitely something that I’ve experienced. I’m reminded of one specific instance. I should be mindful of not naming specifics, because this will be-

Alex Lieberman (10:27):

Yeah.

Sam Corcos (10:28):

This will be a public podcast, but there was somebody. When I was doing a lot of contract work, I came in to work on a project and the guy who had been working on the project for some time, the product person, I remember within the first week I was there as a programmer to come in and figure out how to move things forward, he took up a conference room. You know those conference rooms that are all glass walls so everyone can see what’s going on?

Alex Lieberman (10:54):

Yep, yep.

Sam Corcos (10:54):

He made this big show of blocking it off for an entire week and filled the entire inside with sticky notes of ideas and had a big sign on the door like, “Nobody’s allowed in here. Super great thinking going on.” And so-

Alex Lieberman (11:09):

It reminds me of when I see certain people doing public-speaking engagements. I always think back to when I see Elon do a fireside chat, the thing that’s always stood out to me about him is someone asked him a question and he processes for super long, an awkwardly long period of time, but I’m saying to myself, “There is clear…” or at least my thought is, “There’s a lot going on up there. He’s processing everything,” but then there are the people I know who take a long time to give off the look of being super thoughtful, but actually it’s just like monkey with cymbals going on.

Alex Lieberman (11:44):

And I actually think it’s really interesting to think about from a leader or manager’s perspective is how do you sniff this out well. How do you sniff out people who are being performative in the work they’re doing versus actually caring most about output? And also, I feel like that’s one symptom. Another symptom is the chronic excuse-giver, where it’s like something happened, something external in the world happened, that impacted their ability to do something.

Alex Lieberman (12:16):

And it starts out as a very small thing, and then it’s another small thing. And all of a sudden, it’s like, three months later, the big project that was supposed to be the big output has been delayed by three months. And because no excuse is so big, it’s very hard, as a manager or leader, to, whether it’s let the person go or make a big change, because everything seems super small, but the question is like you’ve just lost three months of time. How do you sniff that out? How do you sniff out just not effective work that basically runs below the radar for so long?

Sam Corcos (12:47):

Yeah, and it’s easy. I was talking to somebody about this recently for the excuse-givers. It’s almost like there’s some stress or anxiety that comes from doing these big important projects, and so seeking reasons, I think, is almost like trying to find the excuse, and waiting and searching for something else to do-

Alex Lieberman (13:10):

100%.

Sam Corcos (13:11):

… so that you don’t have to do the big project.

Alex Lieberman (13:13):

And to be totally honest with you, the way my brain works, I would be lying if I said that I was the world’s most efficient worker. I am not and the way my brain works is I very much am the divergent thinker. I’m constantly thinking of ideas and that’s the beauty of my brain that I really appreciate about myself, but it also is that part of my brain that makes it really hard to sit still. And so, I’ve always wrestled between, “Alex, just have the freaking discipline to sit down, do what you say you’re going to do and not get distracted,” but I’ve said that since freshman year of college.

Alex Lieberman (13:51):

And I still don’t feel like I’m 100% there. And so, there’s part of me that’s like, “I’m never going to feel like I’m 100% there.” It’s this constantly evading goal, but the other part of me is, when I feel honestly my shittiest in terms of work, it is when I procrastinate most. I’ve always thought to myself, “Why do I feel so shitty when I procrastinate?” And I think, at its core, it’s like I have not kept my word to myself. I have told myself I’m going to do something and I haven’t done it. I’ve lied to myself and there’s nothing worse than that.

Alex Lieberman (14:27):

And so, honestly, that continues to be the grounding thing that tries to push me more towards being a smart, disciplined, effective worker is, if I can’t keep my word to myself, how am I going to be able to keep my word to anyone else that I make promises to?

Sam Corcos (14:40):

Yeah. I’m convinced some of this is personality, because I’m pretty in a similar boat. I’m relentlessly novelty-seeking, and so doing the same task for more than even just a couple weeks is just so grinding to me and I can’t do it, and I’m reminded of… This was actually something that Ben, who runs growth and runs our podcast for us, he said, “It’d be cool if you and Josh and Casey and some other people on the team could start recording podcast intros.” And I had it on my list and I was like, “Look, Ben, if I’m going to be honest with you, I am way too unreliable to do this consistently. We’re going to have to find somebody else who can do this.”

Alex Lieberman (15:27):

I had the same exact thing happen where, for my podcast just growing up in media for the last six years, all I’m relentlessly thinking about is distribution and how do you make every piece of content count. And so, what I’ve consistently said to the producer for my podcast Founder’s Journal is like, “I’m spending, call it, two hours for every episode scripting. We’re recording for 15 to 20 minutes. We’re putting a lot of time into this, so let’s squeeze all the juice out possible.”

Alex Lieberman (15:55):

And so, what I’ve said is, “Every episode that comes out, not only should it be coming out in the podcast feed is because we’re recording video. It should be a YouTube video that’s edited and we should have five pieces of derivative content that are posted on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok.” And when I was talking to him, he was like, “Yeah, I’m all for that, but just so you know, the team is wondering when you’re going to start posting these things, when you’re going to start putting this together, because they’re making some of these videos.”

Alex Lieberman (16:22):

And I’m like, “That is an absolutely fair point. You cannot trust me at all for consistently putting out this derivative content. I would love nothing more than to have a social producer who puts out all this stuff. I will give them access to all of my accounts, but my brain will be too fragmented during the day to consistently put it out at specific times.” And so, it like sometimes this is where I waver mentally of like, “Should I be harder on myself, where I should have a higher standard for putting this stuff out and figuring out a process to do it, or should I just own the fact that I haven’t done it for the last eight years, and that’s okay, and just delegate it so it actually gets done?”

Sam Corcos (16:57):

Yeah, totally. Circling back on the topic of hours worked. I work a lot of hours. I would say I have not come super close to burnout myself. I prioritize sleep. I also have a general rule of not doing things I don’t want to do, at least not for more than a few days. That really helps a lot. Just I often feel like I’m retired. Just I work on the things that I want to work on all the time and it’s super fun. I have most of the rest of the day today blocked off for writing, which I’m very excited about.

Alex Lieberman (17:34):

Amazing.

Sam Corcos (17:34):

Yeah. And for some people, that would be a grind and it would not be fun, but for me, it is. Something that’s been interesting and I’m curious to get your take on it, in the engagement survey that we did with our team, a lot of people said that they felt pressure to work a lot more hours. And I have mixed feelings about this, because one is that I really do think people should work however much they want to work. It really doesn’t matter to me.

Sam Corcos (18:06):

I actually have a friend who is a CEO and he runs two companies, and one of these companies is his full-time job and the other one is a side project that the board only allowed him to do if he committed to working, I think it was, either three or four hours per week on this project.

Alex Lieberman (18:28):

Honestly, I’d love to know his process, because being able to run a company effectively three or four hours a week, it’s an amazing thing to think about.

Sam Corcos (18:35):

Yeah, yeah. He said that company is so much more functional than [crosstalk 00:18:43]-

Alex Lieberman (18:43):

So interesting.

Sam Corcos (18:44):

Yeah, because it’s a forcing function where he can’t do individual contributor work at all. It’s just off the table, and so all of his time is spent thinking on the systems level and on bringing on the right team. And it’s just really interesting to see how he feels like that company is much more effective than the company I think is like four or five hundred people.

Alex Lieberman (19:10):

So wild.

Sam Corcos (19:11):

Yeah. And so, I wonder, part of this is because we are fully remote and I really sincerely actually don’t care how many hours people work. I have no idea how many hours people work. All I care about is the output, which is back to what you were saying before. It’s a notoriously hard thing to measure. So I wonder what to do about that.

Alex Lieberman (19:34):

Yeah, I want to provide thoughts on that, because we’ve had similar things. Do you have a sense of why that is, why people feel that way?

Sam Corcos (19:42):

I’ve been speculating a lot. I can throw out random ideas.

Alex Lieberman (19:46):

With a disclaimer that it may not be the actual thing.

Sam Corcos (19:49):

Yeah, or very likely not the actual thing.

Alex Lieberman (19:52):

Yeah.

Sam Corcos (19:55):

I think there are several paths you have to consider. One is the company pressure and the other is just internal pressure, like tied up in one’s sense of self-worth or-

Alex Lieberman (20:10):

Oh, I see what you’re saying, yep.

Sam Corcos (20:12):

Yeah, imposter syndrome or a lot of these internal things. I think both of those paths would need to be explored. Some of it is also, I think, just strictly related to time management maybe, so maybe that’s even a different path is just knowing how to work more effectively. I’ve been working a lot with Casey, my co-founder, to get better at working smarter and getting better at comms and not over-committing oneself, and it’s been going really well for her and I think it’s really reduced her stress levels. In fact, she did a podcast on this somewhat recently. So I think all of those paths need to be explored and I don’t know which one it is in this particular case. Maybe it’s some combination of all of them.

Alex Lieberman (21:00):

Yeah, one thing that comes to mind also is some people naturally have the ability to, or have whatever impetus or structured thinking to be able to, create a system that works well for them to work smartly, but to me, that should be a very outsourceable learning exercise, meaning you’ve been working with Casey on this. It’s actually crazy to me when I think about it, that this isn’t something that every professional has the tools or systems to figure out.

Alex Lieberman (21:32):

And maybe there’s 10 different tools and it’s some patchwork, or one or two, that work best for each person, but I feel like we spend so much time at… I was actually thinking a lot about this yesterday. I’ve been reading the book Range by David Epstein on generalism-

Sam Corcos (21:46):

Yep, I’ve read it.

Alex Lieberman (21:47):

… [crosstalk 00:21:47] specializing. And I feel like there are three different types of learning. There’s your context-specific learning as a professional, which is the language, the concepts, the processes you need to understand to do your job well. Then, there’s the work-agnostic learning, which is how to be a smart, effective, likable worker. And then, there’s context-agnostic work, which is to me where generalism comes in, which is being someone who’s just an interested person who does things that are not necessarily related to your job, but it makes you better at your job.

Alex Lieberman (22:24):

So for my girlfriend, it was her doing debate club in high school that I think has helped her a lot in customer success. For me, it’s liking art a lot, which I think has actually helped me think about media and content. But yeah, I think we spend so much time on context-specific stuff but not on the other two buckets, which I think is really interesting. To the point of the engagement survey, we’ve had the same exact thing in the past. I can’t speak to recently.

Alex Lieberman (22:51):

We’re actually doing an engagement survey now. So I’m interested to see what happens, but especially earlier on in the business, there was feedback to our head of HR that people felt like they had to always be on. And it was partially because they felt like my co-founder, Austin, and I worked all the time, but what’s interesting is it wasn’t necessarily us saying we worked all the time. It was the signals that were interpreted as us working all the time.

Alex Lieberman (23:17):

So it was people late at night popping into Slack and seeing that Austin and I have green dots on, or seeing the Twitter content we put out, because we create a bunch of content and the proportion of content related to work and business versus life. And there’s a story that is created in all of that, and so my thought is like, even if we weren’t working a ton of hours… And what I can honestly say is I know I work less than I did at the beginning of the business.

Alex Lieberman (23:45):

That’s partially being out of the day-to-day, but I know Austin works less being in the day-to-day and operating the business than when we were in year two of the business. And I don’t know specifically what he works, but I think the hard thing is, even if that is the truth, human beings are story-making machines and there’s nothing wrong with that, that we all are, but I think understanding what is every data point we give out that can be interpreted as overworking, I think, is such an important thing.

Alex Lieberman (24:12):

So the Slack thing, I would’ve never thought about that, of people perceiving the online button. Even if my computer just isn’t in sleep mode, people perceive that as, “Oh, so and so’s working right now,” because that’s the only data they have. And so, I think intentionality around the signals we give off, that can be tied together in a story that isn’t actually healthy for the employee is something we become way more thoughtful about that we weren’t in the beginning.

Sam Corcos (24:36):

Yeah. And I wonder for a lot of these things, the feeling like they always need to be on. One of the things that we’ve been thinking a lot about is how… So we don’t use Slack. We’ve finally and successfully killed Slack within our organization.

Alex Lieberman (24:53):

Wow. How do people communicate?

Sam Corcos (24:56):

We use Threads primarily, which is most similar to a forum. It’s an asynchronous communication tool. Slack pretends to be asynchronous, but it really is-

Alex Lieberman (25:07):

Yeah, but it’s not totally.

Sam Corcos (25:08):

It’s really not. And I think it’s a pathological tool that creates compulsive behavior. That’s a whole longer conversation, but it’s been better. It’s still not the ideal tool that I would like built, but it’s progressing in that direction, which has been very positive.

Alex Lieberman (25:25):

What do you think still misses? And when you say Threads, are you saying-

Sam Corcos (25:28):

Yeah.

Alex Lieberman (25:28):

Is there an app called Threads or is it [crosstalk 00:25:30]-

Sam Corcos (25:29):

Yeah, Threads.com.

Alex Lieberman (25:31):

Oh okay.

Sam Corcos (25:31):

Yeah, it’s a relatively new one. They’re Sequoia-backed. They’re still somewhat early, which I think is actually good for us, because we can nudge the roadmap a little bit in the direction. I’ve thought a lot about this. I have on the order of 100 pages of documentation on what the ideal communication tool would look like, so hopefully we can nudge them in the right direction.

Alex Lieberman (25:52):

And so, I’m assuming what you like about Threads is the fact that it’s truly asynchronous, that people can’t necessarily encroach on other people’s time. There’s as much of a sense of expectation of immediacy. What do you think is still absent from it that would be in your perfect communication tool?

Sam Corcos (26:07):

Yeah, yeah. I would say the other thing that’s nice about it is that it’s quantized, email as opposed to a fire hose, where you have to stay up to date on the fire hose or you just immediately fall out of the information flow. It’s a huge problem. They still have features that are slot machines and I think slot machines are bad. They currently prioritize new ephemeral information over important information, so this is actually almost exactly tied into what we were talking about before, finding excuses not to do things.

Alex Lieberman (26:44):

Totally.

Sam Corcos (26:47):

They actually have a really good primitive, which is followups. So one of them is, “You must do this thing and I’m requesting it of you. So that should be the top thing that you have to do, because it’s literally somebody saying, “I need you to do this for me,” but instead right now, the platform prioritizes like, “Oh, look, somebody made an update on this project. Oh, look, there’s an update here. Oh, look, it’s Twitter notifications.”

Alex Lieberman (27:10):

Right, yeah. It’s basically creating a feed and creating some noise within your company.

Sam Corcos (27:14):

Yep. It’s creating the noise, and so it gives you that dopamine hit where you feel like you have the same level of productivity of solving a problem for someone else on the team, but you’re really not. The things that are actually important end up getting pushed down to the bottom and ignored, so those are some of the biggest things that I’m trying to nudge them in the direction of doing that.

Alex Lieberman (27:38):

It’s so interesting, because there’s so many. I think there are edge cases where you do need someone immediately, but then the question is, is it just such a slippery slope? Because if everything thinks that they can have someone’s attention immediately, all of a sudden, their schedule becomes other people’s schedule.

Sam Corcos (27:55):

Yeah. And one of the things that we’ve, we’ve settled on this as part of our onboarding, is a… The first month of onboarding for teammates at Levels is really deprogramming and I think we previously underestimated how many workplace norms people have from other companies that they just assume are reasonable that are actually quite bad. One that we do now is we use a very simple tool called Mailman. The website’s Mailman HQ. It’s an almost absurdly trivial tool. What it does is it batches your emails. So I personally, I think, get email two or three times a day every day of the week, and it makes it so that I don’t compulsively check email anymore, which is nice.

Alex Lieberman (28:49):

Totally.

Sam Corcos (28:50):

For onboarding, we have every new person on the team install Mailman to set defaults, which is you get email three times a day, Monday through Friday, and not on weekends. You actually can’t access your email on weekends and the goal here is not to paternalistically say, “You can’t check your email on weekends,” but to just set it as a norm. And after the first month, you can do whatever you want, but just to make it clear that this is okay.

Alex Lieberman (29:19):

Totally.

Sam Corcos (29:20):

The thing that really connected the dots for me was Tom, who’s somebody… He runs partnerships for us and he’s one of the most bought-in people to the culture that we’re building here. He mentioned to me in a conversation that he knows he doesn’t have to check email, but he can’t help himself. He still feels this compulsive need to check email all the time on weekends and he wants to disconnect, but he can’t. And that was a recognition for me that maybe some of this is also related to the tools themselves. Maybe the tools we are using are actually toxic and pathological, and so-

Alex Lieberman (29:59):

Totally.

Sam Corcos (30:00):

… figuring out how to break that.

Alex Lieberman (30:01):

Look, I have my work computer that I’m plugged into now, and then I have my phone. On my work computer, and it’s a little bit different again, because I’m not in the day-to-day. And I want to acknowledge that, because it impacts the immediacy of the stuff I do, but I don’t have Slack on here. I don’t have the Twitter app. I don’t have text messages connected to this computer, because I know, when it becomes notification central, the technology is stronger than me.

Alex Lieberman (30:27):

For the longest time, I just thought I would be able to control it, but I wasn’t able to. And so, it’s, in effect, the same thing. It’s just keeping my cellphone outside of the office. I think what’s so interesting about this system that you’re building is, one, how because you’re creating a new norm, how there actually could be just this downstream effect of ultimately alumni of your people, having a downstream effect on so many other companies, hopefully working in a smarter way.

Alex Lieberman (30:56):

To me, that’s actually a great thing, but I think there’s also another side, which is ultimately people leave a business. When people end up leaving your business for whatever reason, how they will interact, to me, it’s going to be a culture shock to work in what I think you would argue is not as effective or efficient or smart of a way when you’ve been indoctrinated in a new system that, oh, you’re not forced to do but at least is showing you an alternative that at least, foundationally, you think works better for people.

Sam Corcos (31:28):

Yeah, and it’s an interesting thing. This actually ties into having every minute of every day filled or scheduled. I remember talking with Chris Jones, who came on to lead customer success for us. In his last job, he said that he would have 10 different Slack windows open on multiple desktops and he said his job was basically Whac-A-Mole on Slack all day. It was just all day, every day, super high stress. And he came to Levels and opened up his calendar, and it’s empty and there were no meetings, and we don’t have Slack. It’s just like, “This is different.”

Alex Lieberman (32:09):

Totally.

Sam Corcos (32:09):

Yeah. And he said it took about two weeks to get used to it. It actually was anxiety-inducing to start. After about two weeks, he said he felt like he was on the other side of rehab.

Alex Lieberman (32:22):

It’s so interesting.

Sam Corcos (32:24):

Yeah.

Alex Lieberman (32:24):

Well, I think in a lot of ways, going back to what you said about having the open calendar, not knowing what to do, we have been taught a false definition of productivity, right? And so, I think what you’re basically saying is productivity, at least in my mind, is doing the most important things in the most efficient manner as consistently as possible. And I think, in this world where we’re constantly interrupted by people renting out our time permissionlessly, we’ve been trained to think productivity is getting back to so and so’s message, do it, busying, efforting.

Alex Lieberman (33:04):

And even this was a huge transition for me, from the early days of Morning Brew where efforting actually did line up pretty well with being productive, because we had to put out a newsletter every day. That had to be done. We had to write it. We had to code it. We had to send it out. And so, that was a lot of effort, but that was the most important thing, to put out a product until the market accepted it. And then, as we started hiring people and as I started managing people, it’s like my world was rocked, because all of a sudden, productivity was…

Alex Lieberman (33:41):

There was no form of immediate gratification, right? It was like, “How do I set someone else up for success where I see that success a month from now, three months from now, six months from now?” not, “How do I put together a newsletter or set up a growth partnership that has impact today?” And to me, that was actually a pretty hard transition, because innately, we’re immediate-gratification beings. And actually, being the most productive version of yourself as you grow within a company oftentimes isn’t based on immediate gratification at all.

Sam Corcos (34:14):

Yeah, I wonder. So it sounds like you’ve had this feedback before and you’ve worked through it. Given that we are fully remote, that people on our team have full autonomy over how they spend their time and given that I’ve really… First of all, we have no way of knowing how many hours you work. If we wanted to know that, we’d have no way of knowing it. If it was something that we optimized for, we couldn’t even measure it.

Alex Lieberman (34:39):

Not everyone in the company does the Sam time monitoring? No.

Sam Corcos (34:45):

Even if we wanted to optimize for just hours worked, we couldn’t enforce that in any meaningful or useful way. So I wonder, people who worked so many hours to the point where they are experiencing burnout. I’m trying to think about how I should approach this, because it feels a little bit strange to me, only because it doesn’t feel like there’s company pressure to do it. Maybe there is, but it doesn’t seem like it is to me. And is it something where we need to just have somebody on the team help people manage this? How do people end up in that situation?

Alex Lieberman (35:22):

So I think it goes back to actually the thing you were saying, which is, I think, a response to when I asked you, “Why do you think people feel this way?” is you said there’s some company pressure, and then there’s some internal pressure. And I think the internal pressure is the most grounding or high-impact thing, meaning if you don’t have a deep sense of self in your abilities, in what it means to do a good job, in a feeling of balance, in confidence in what you’ve done and what you’ve put out, I think it doesn’t actually matter so much the company you’re working in or the culture.

Alex Lieberman (36:00):

I think you will find ways to feel stressed and burnt out, because if your own intrinsic… I don’t want to say insecurity, because that’s not the word, but constant striving to do more, right? It’s like this balance of, “How can you be a striver while being satisfied with the work that you do?” And so, to me, I think what’s really interesting is companies don’t work on this at all. This is work that I’m doing myself on my own time, like reading, but I actually think this is the thing that has the biggest impact.

Alex Lieberman (36:28):

And no matter the culture you build, this is the thing that drives people’s happiness and the issue with it is, I think, in a lot of people that end up being great employees, they suffer from this feeling of perfection-seeking, never feeling satisfied. And so, to me, that’s the base layer. And so, if someone doesn’t have that ability to feel satisfied with their work, I don’t think it actually matters what you’ve built within your company from an expectation perspective, because it’s their internal expectations that are driving them.

Alex Lieberman (36:55):

Then, on the external expectations side, I think if someone does have a deep sense of self and satisfaction while also balancing that with striving, then I think what you do at the external layer does matter. And so, to me, it is a combination of, I believe, more than the leadership in a company. I think the thing that has the biggest impact on your happiness is your boss. And so, I think the other interesting thing that we think about at The Brew is not only what is the expectation that say Austin and I are setting within the business, or that Austin is setting within the business or leaders are setting within the business, but every person’s boss has the proper way of operating and expectation-setting, has that drizzle down in an appropriate manner.

Alex Lieberman (37:41):

And I think that’s sometimes a hard thing to diagnose, because it’s easy to know when you’re talking to your direct report and they seem burnt out, but if your company ends up being three layers, it is hard to identify, “Oh, this boss isn’t setting expectations in the right way.” You can end up diagnosing it, but it takes a while, because basically you need to find a pattern in a number of direct reports of these people feeling like they have to always be working because their boss is always working.

Sam Corcos (38:09):

Yeah, yeah. I’m curious, how many people is Morning Brew right now?

Alex Lieberman (38:13):

It is 165 right now.

Sam Corcos (38:15):

165, okay. Yeah, we’re about 40 right now. Basically, the engineering team has a lot of direct reports. I have a lot of direct reports and [crosstalk 00:38:27]-

Alex Lieberman (38:27):

How many do you have-

Sam Corcos (38:27):

… success-

Alex Lieberman (38:28):

… out of curiosity?

Sam Corcos (38:29):

Direct reports?

Alex Lieberman (38:30):

Yeah.

Sam Corcos (38:30):

It’s a tricky question. I guess probably 15, maybe-

Alex Lieberman (38:34):

Oh my God, wow.

Sam Corcos (38:35):

… something in that range, yeah. It’s a little bit different, only because we’ve hired so senior that they’re, on paper, direct reports, but in many ways, they aren’t. They’re pretty autonomous. It was very much intentional. I’m incredibly lazy, contrary to popular belief.

Alex Lieberman (38:54):

I can tell.

Sam Corcos (38:55):

I-

Alex Lieberman (38:55):

Well, I feel like you know yourself well, which is why you’ve developed a lot of these systems.

Sam Corcos (38:59):

Yeah, so my goal is to hire people to do things so that I don’t have to think about them at all anymore, so that’s going pretty well.

Alex Lieberman (39:07):

By the way, that’s a great point, right? Because I think I had tweeted this out last week, but at least from my own experience, I have found that any more than, call it, six direct reports, it becomes hard to effectively manage, but there is nuance in my description, which is that most of my experience, honestly, was before… Most of my direct reports were either junior or mid-level, because I moved out of the day-to-day before we really had an established senior leadership team.

Alex Lieberman (39:35):

And there is so much difference in actively having to train someone versus a lot of our senior leaders at Morning Brew truly are autonomous in so many ways. And actually, that generally means you’ve hired the right person where you feel like you don’t have to effort a lot other than basically… I can’t remember who’s used this definition, but in a lot of ways, the operational CEO is making these tiny adjustments to point towards the North Star, but there’s some momentum that’s headed there anyway.

Alex Lieberman (40:05):

And so, it’s like giving feedback on long-range planning, giving feedback on a hiring plan, tackling blockers or obstacles on, call it, a weekly or biweekly basis. Beyond that, actually you shouldn’t have to do that much more with some new super senior.

Sam Corcos (40:21):

Yeah, it’s definitely been the case. Some of the entities within the company, our editorial team, Mike Haney, he’s very senior, much more capable of running an editorial organization than me. And we have monthly check-ins that usually are just us catching up about life stuff. There’s really not a lot I have to contribute there.

Alex Lieberman (40:44):

Totally.

Sam Corcos (40:44):

That’s a whole entity within the company that I don’t even think about. And technically, he reports to me, but there isn’t really much to do there.

Alex Lieberman (40:52):

I feel like the only thing to do and I’d be interested to hear how you think about your editorial is you, at the highest level, thinking about what purpose does your editorial serve within the company and is it worth allocating resources towards. What goals show you that you are driving towards that purpose and having… What did you say his name is, Mike?

Sam Corcos (41:11):

Mike Haney, yeah.

Alex Lieberman (41:11):

And having Mike Haney basically come to you with, every so often, because you’re not going to see this impact on a weekly basis, showing you are you on pace to hit that goal, such that your purpose is being served as an editorial org.

Sam Corcos (41:26):

Yep, that’s exactly right. The goal of editorial from day one is, two years ago when we kicked this off, metabolic health was not a term that anyone knew. And so, his North Star was, “I want people to use metabolic health in the same way that people talk about sleep today. Everyone talks about sleep. Nobody even knows what metabolic health means, so that was the North Star. And between the content that we’re putting out, the press, the podcasts, the podcast stuff is really fascinating. I think Tom did some quick numbers on all of the podcasts that Josh and Casey did. I think it’s on the order of a million hours of listen-time to-

Alex Lieberman (42:11):

That’s awesome.

Sam Corcos (42:12):

… to Casey and Josh, talking about metabolic health, which is pretty wild.

Alex Lieberman (42:15):

And also, I haven’t listened to all the content, but I would assume it’s relatively evergreen in nature, where you’re constantly building up this increasingly valuable shelf that you can find ways to plug and repurpose over time.

Sam Corcos (42:28):

Yep, that’s right. And so, my main contributions are generally recommendations for types of content. So I’ll have a conversation with a family member or a friend who asked a question like, “What’s the deal with the cholesterol?” And I’ll say, “You know what? That’s a good point. We should have a piece on that.” And then, I’ll send a message to Haney, and then he’ll say, “Oh yeah, we already have it drafted. It’s going out in two weeks.” It’s-

Alex Lieberman (42:50):

All right.

Sam Corcos (42:51):

… awesome.

Alex Lieberman (42:52):

“Yeah, job’s done here.” That’s amazing.

Sam Corcos (42:56):

The number of times that that’s happened is pretty extraordinary.

Alex Lieberman (42:58):

Well, it is a weird feeling at some point, where you’re almost like, “Should I be doing more here? I feel like I’m not doing as much as I should be doing,” but at the end of the day, Austin and I talk about this all the time, but it’s just why having great people matters so much, right?

Sam Corcos (43:14):

Yeah.

Alex Lieberman (43:15):

It really is such a barbell in workload where it’s like you have great people and you work less, because they’re so good at what they do, and they pull you and the whole company forward. Actually, it’s hard to contribute, because there’s so much more domain expertise than you’ll ever have. End up making the wrong hire, not only do you have to put so much work in to coach them and basically help do their job for them, but also the whole company ends up getting pushed back by six to 12 months, because it becomes way harder to hit goals, because you aren’t going to be able to do their job well, because you don’t have that expertise.

Alex Lieberman (43:49):

And by the way, if it’s a senior person, it has a collateral impact. If you don’t think they’re doing their job well, that means definitely their direct reports and their direct reports absolutely don’t think they’re doing their job well.

Sam Corcos (43:59):

Right, yeah. And actually, tying it back to the conversation of the people inching towards burnout in perhaps more of a self-directed way, one of the things that we’ve been talking about internally, so we don’t have a formal system of doing performance reviews yet. Miz, our head of ops, has been starting the process of figuring out how to do that consistently. We’re about 40 people now. We’ve been in business for about two years, think it’s about time we have something more formal to give people feedback on performance.

Sam Corcos (44:34):

Miz actually, he thinks that this type of system will help a lot with this burnout question of, if people know that they’re performing adequately as opposed to just ambiguously, knowing that, it might help. Do you have any theories about that?

Alex Lieberman (44:50):

Yeah, so we do semi-annual performance reviews. So we do at the half-year, and then we do end of year. So right now, where we are is that the team is doing self-reflections, and then right at the end of the year is when the conversations happen and we do it through a platform called Culture Amp, which is where a lot of our reviews and our engagement survey, that’s what it happens through. I think that performance reviews are really valuable for a few reasons.

Alex Lieberman (45:19):

It basically is a force function of thought on the behalf of the manager and the direct report to spend dedicated time thinking about themselves or the other person. The part of performance reviews that I actually think is overrated is I actually think performance reviews, in a lot of ways, are just documentation of existing conversation. What I mean by that is, if you are in a culture where there is direct and honest conversation, nothing should be a surprise in a performance review.

Alex Lieberman (45:55):

And if there is, that actually to me, actually reveals improper expectation-setting or communication at the culture level across the whole business. I think that’s an amazing learning that can come from performance reviews is understanding. And we actually don’t do this, but I think it’s a really interesting question is asking people, “How surprised were you by what you heard in your performance review?” because I actually think that can be such a revealing thing about communication in a company.

Sam Corcos (46:20):

Right, because I think for a lot of these things around surprise, one of the most common, I do a lot of informal advising to mostly first-time founders and one of the most common pieces of advice that I give them is everybody struggles with personnel issues. And the most common piece of advice is, “If you were to fire them now, do you think they would be surprised?”

Alex Lieberman (46:44):

Totally.

Sam Corcos (46:45):

And they’re like, “Yeah, totally.” Like, “Okay, well, that is your fault. That means you have not given them this feedback that they are not performing.”

Alex Lieberman (46:54):

I totally agree, and Austin and I talk about this all the time. It should absolutely never be a surprise. I think the hard thing for a first-time founder and manager, and Austin and I have struggled with this in general, is say someone is not performing well, but it hasn’t been happening long enough that it’s time to fire them. Basically, my thought is you should give someone as much chance as possible to change their behavior and to perform well, and it should never be a surprise before actually letting someone go.

Alex Lieberman (47:22):

But as you start giving the feedback of someone not performing well, how do you keep them motivated and empowered, right? If on a weekly basis, it’s the same story of, “You’re not doing a good-enough job,” how do you create the opportunity for behavior change to happen if someone feels so disempowered because they feel like, “No matter what I do, this person isn’t going to be satisfied”? And I haven’t figured out the answer to that, but I think that is such a hard thing from a management perspective, to be honest and direct but give space for behavior change.

Sam Corcos (47:51):

Yeah, totally, yeah. I wonder if people would be surprised about not just the negatives, but performance reviews can also be positive.

Alex Lieberman (48:00):

Totally.

Sam Corcos (48:00):

I did a performance review recently of somebody on the team and most of the feedback was glowingly positive, which was great, and I don’t think that this person was surprised by the feedback. I can see two paths here. One, it might make the person feel like they can relax and they don’t need to crush too many hours. It might also make them feel even more pressure to keep it up and to work even more hours to make sure that they maintain that. I don’t know.

Alex Lieberman (48:31):

Well, and I also think there’s an additional pressure that keeps managers from doing what you just said, which is just give a great review, because I think we’ve also been taught that to be a good manager is to give constructive and actionable feedback. And if we’re not doing that, how are we making the person better at their job? But I think an interesting thing to think about is, as a manager, you’re only seeing one part of an employee and there are other parts that say coworkers are seeing or other teams are seeing in their work with them.

Alex Lieberman (49:00):

And so, how is the space provided for feedback to be given from that level? Because maybe there’s opportunity to grow from that level where there isn’t opportunity to grow from say the manager/direct report relationship level.

Sam Corcos (49:11):

Yeah. For the reviews that we’ve been doing, we’re still figuring out the best process for it. We ask people above, at the same level, and people who report to them some questions around what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s something that you think needs to be adjusted. It’s been interesting to see how, in some of the reviews that we’ve done, the feedback from different levels within the company are wildly different. So it’s something I think we need to figure out is doing performance reviews effectively, but I am curious to bring it back to the question of we’re putting together a lot of internal content.

Sam Corcos (49:50):

And I know that you and I talked about this before. We did some recently on how to use Threads, which is our communication tool, how to use Notion. I did a basic recorded conversation with Jackie, one of our new growth hires, and showed her basic tips and tricks of how to use a Mac, which it’s like how to use multiple desktops, how to use Spotlight, all of these things that I take for granted-

Alex Lieberman (50:13):

Totally.

Sam Corcos (50:13):

… that are actually not universally known.

Alex Lieberman (50:17):

100-

Sam Corcos (50:18):

Yeah, we’re putting a lot more emphasis on work-productivity content and I think this is something that Miz, our head of office, and I have been speculating on is making it very clear that there were other ways to be effective other than just putting in more hours, but I think part of it is also there’s… Because I’ve been in this situation before. I’m sure you have as well where project data just accumulates. And then, at some point, you don’t realize it, but you can’t take on new work anymore. You can’t even hire somebody to get out of this pit that you’ve dug yourself in.

Alex Lieberman (50:54):

Totally.

Sam Corcos (50:55):

And I don’t know if having somebody dedicated to helping people ensure that they don’t get buried under a pile of project debt, something that we’re thinking about.

Alex Lieberman (51:06):

Well, I’m just thinking about this on the spot, but I feel like there’s almost a overarching principle, which is the principle of businesses, which is they look really small until they look huge. It’s problems, small problems, are invisible until they’re massive and unworkable. And so, it’s like, if we know that, it is generally going to be the case where, because we have shortcuts as people that basically tell us, “What should we focus our time on?” And every small problem is never going to be the priority until it’s a massive problem that’s accumulated and we’re like, “Shit, we should’ve worried about this before.”

Alex Lieberman (51:36):

Because that’s the pattern, I think it has to come back to behavior, where it’s like you just have the right behavior so those little problems don’t pile up into one massive problem. And this goes back to what I was saying before of the different types of work knowledge and no one spends time on improving themselves, the work-agnostic level, which is no matter what type of work you’re doing, if you are a knowledge worker, there is a certain way of working that can help you.

Alex Lieberman (52:03):

And it’s going to be a little bit different for everyone, but there is no education to do that. And I could go on forever about probably something that could be helpful in school but isn’t taught in school is, yeah, so many people aren’t reaching their potential and it’s just because they don’t necessarily even have an awareness around a way of working that could help them so much.

Sam Corcos (52:25):

Yep. Sorry, I’m next to a snoring dog.

Alex Lieberman (52:27):

Love it. I don’t hear them, but I’m glad they’re relaxed.

Sam Corcos (52:33):

Yeah. There’s a lot to that of teaching some of the more basic skills. It’s funny, because I was talking with Scott, our head of product, about this where I wrote a very long memo about principles of decision-making. How are decisions made in an organization? And he read through it and his response was, “I’m not really sure why you wrote this, because this is all obvious and everyone knows this.” And several other people, maybe half of the rest of the team, read through it and was like, “Oh, wow, this is super helpful to know how decisions are made.”

Sam Corcos (53:09):

There’s this cursive-knowledge problem where it’s like, “Surely everyone knows how to disable your dock and auto-hide your menu bar to get 10% more real estate on your computer and to swipe between multiple desktops and to use website blockers to not get distracted by things.” You just make all these assumptions and it’s hard to remember what it was like before you knew all of these things.

Alex Lieberman (53:36):

Totally. Well, it even makes me think about you all don’t use Slack anymore. I can think about the same probably thing for Threads, but it’s like Slack is basically like you’re in a Wild West town.

Sam Corcos (53:45):

Yeah, totally.

Alex Lieberman (53:46):

There’s no sheriff and police. There’s no traffic cams or traffic control, and you’re just like, “Go.” And the fact that there’s not rules of engagement to help people navigate the madness is crazy. Also, the memo you were just referring to about just making decisions. Is that stuff all public?

Sam Corcos (54:06):

Yeah, do you want me to send them to you?

Alex Lieberman (54:07):

Yeah, can you send them to me?

Sam Corcos (54:07):

Yeah.

Alex Lieberman (54:07):

And also, this just satisfies my broader thought that the best content that lives on the internet is not content you can find on the aggregators today. Google is great for finding commoditized knowledge, but for nuanced knowledge or perspective for specific knowledge, to me again, if you could put what you just described in the hands of so many entrepreneurs, it would help them so much, but actually people can’t find it unless they know you or follow you, which is just such an interesting thing.

Sam Corcos (54:37):

Yeah, yeah. I’ll send you a whole list of the public docs of-

Alex Lieberman (54:42):

Yeah, please do.

Sam Corcos (54:43):

… how I think about company-building. I will probably consolidate them and publish it as a book at some point in the next few years, but-

Alex Lieberman (54:48):

Oh yeah, no, you have to. This is the same thought and I harp on this all the time of the value of curation, and it’s like how much value would there be in people being able to follow you for the content, not just that you create but also the content you’re reading to inform your thinking.

Sam Corcos (55:04):

Right, for sure.

Alex Lieberman (55:12):

Yeah, that’s my tangent on-

Sam Corcos (55:14):

Yeah.

Alex Lieberman (55:15):

The best content is just living in the nooks and crannies of the internet today.

Sam Corcos (55:18):

Yeah, I think curation, broadly speaking, is severely undervalued.

Alex Lieberman (55:23):

Yeah, it’s so interesting.

Sam Corcos (55:25):

There is so much noise, and so finding signals is much harder than people assume.

Alex Lieberman (55:30):

Totally. I totally agree.

Sam Corcos (55:32):

Yeah. In fact, we’re having this problem already internally where, within Threads, we have so much communication internally. It’s very hard to know what to follow and what not to follow, just with internal company comms.

Alex Lieberman (55:45):

Totally. Yeah, you can-

Sam Corcos (55:45):

Span that out.

Alex Lieberman (55:46):

Yeah, exactly, with infinite information. But yeah, within a company, it’s… yeah. And it’s like how do people know where to look and-

Sam Corcos (55:53):

Right, discoverability.

Alex Lieberman (55:55):

Yeah, so interesting.