EP5: Sam Corcos, founder/CEO of Levels ($12m Seed), on lessons from early startups, why he took a year off before starting Levels, how he spent his time, and why he's building a radically open company/culture

Conversation with Sam Corcos, CEO of Levels health, who is a prolific serial entrepreneur and building one of the most exciting companies in healthcare today. Levels is a groundbreaking product that helps people track their blood glucose in real-time to understand and improve their metabolic health.

We talk about key lessons Sam learnt from his first few startups, why he took a year off before starting levels, how he honed in on the idea for Levels, his approach towards building a radically open company, and areas he's most excited about for the next 5-10 years.

This episode is packed with real insight into what it's like to be a serial founder, and full of actionable advice on how to explore ideas, find purpose, and work hard without burning out.

Episode Highlights:

1. Early startups and nomadic adventures
2. Building a high-trust culture that supports risk taking
3. Thoughts on hiring as a matching problem
4. Why (and how) he's building a radically open company
5. Biggest lessons from Sightline Maps and CarDash
6. Building effective co-founder / interpersonal relationships
7. Sam's framework for choosing what problems to work on
8. Why he took a year off before Levels and how he structured his time
9. Approach to network management and maintenance
10. Approach to time management while exploring ideas
11. How he converged on the Levels idea and product
12. What Sam's excited about for the next 5-10 years
13. Thoughts on synthetic biology
14. Sam's superpowers and how he's honed them

Links:

• Check out Levels' product and unlock your metabolic health
• Follow Sam on Twitter at @SamCorcos
• Read more about why Levels is building in public
• Levels' internal company podcast

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Transcript

0:04  
So hello there, you're listening to paradigm shift, a podcast about people building the future at pivotal moments in their journey. I'm Ashish. And I'm joined by my co host, Zane. And we're super excited to speak with Sam corcos, who is the CEO and co founder of levels help. For those not familiar with the company levels helps people quantify the effect their diet is having on their health and lifestyle by measuring biomarkers, I've used the product and confirm it's super eye opening and interesting levels has raised over $12 million from investors like a16z, Costello, and many others. Thanks again for being here.

0:39  
Good to be here. So Sam, I want to start with your startup journey. Based on my research, it looks like you were one of the few people not working on a social networking startup in 2013. How'd you get started in startups in software,

0:52  
I've been in startups pretty much the whole time my whole career has been jumping from startups to start up, I got into the software development is really what got me into it. And I really enjoyed the deep focused work and the flow state that you get, I also enjoyed the freedom that it gave me I traveled a lot. There's like a four year stretch for the longest that was in one place was a month, all over the US Central and South America, Western Europe. And it's the the joys of being remote. The startups that I got involved with early kind of happened spontaneously, they were just companies that I started with friends of mine being open to new opportunities. And I was with each of them for about two years before realizing that they weren't going to hit escape velocity and then tried another thing, sort of the nature of startups is sometimes you got to know when to end it early, instead of just continuing to go down a path that isn't gonna go anywhere.

1:43  
That's great. And then what kept you going like, what was your motivation? and What kept you trying again, and again, I'm sure a big part of it was a general problem with authority.

1:52  
And an inability to convince myself that working at a larger company and not doing things that I was particularly interested in was going to be something that kept me satisfied, I have a general policy in life of not doing things that I don't want to do, I'll do things in the short term for like a couple of weeks to just get something over the finish line. But I can't imagine myself hating going to work every day, that just would not work for me. And that's the state for a lot of people. So I guess I've had the luxury. One of the nice things about being a programmer is that it's a very in demand set of skills. So you have a lot of flexibility on how you spend your time. So I just kind of go from project to project I did a lot of software consulting as well, that was an easy way to get cash in the door. The nice thing about being nomadic was that my burn was really low. You can solve for these things with both numerator and denominator. And if you just keep your denominator to like $500 a month, you'd be surprised how much flexibility that gives you in your life $500 a month, where were you living, not San Francisco? Well, sometimes I was that I was staying with friends. So I didn't, I didn't pay rent. I've only paid rent, I think a couple times in my life, saying with friends a lot of the time sometimes go into countries that were really inexpensive Berlin is surprisingly cheap. And it was a really fun time, I got to meet a lot of interesting people experienced a lot of things that most people don't get to experience in their 20s. I know at some point you started kardash. And I want to hear that story. But before we get there, since we're on this pneumatic thing, what was your most like memorable place where you lived, there were a lot that are memorable for different reasons. I really enjoyed buenos itis in Argentina, that was more of the I enjoyed it for a call it vacation purposes, I ended up staying on a polo farm for a little while outside of Argentina, I tried to learn how to play Polo. I've never ridden a horse before. So turns out it's quite hard. It was a really, really fun trip. I also really liked Tallinn, Estonia, which is kind of an unexpectedly wonderful place. I also really like Tel Aviv, which is a really vibrant city. But the end of the day in New York is just the best city anywhere. So a lot of places that I really enjoyed that must have like tickled various parts of your brain. I was in a band for two years. And these places, these experiences and places are so different I can imagine like being given to various experiences would lead to so many different types of learnings. So that's really cool.

4:13  
We definitely want to talk a little bit about your early startups and some of the lessons. But before we jump into that, I want to for a minute, go back to something you said about how the reason you did startups is because you have a problem with authority and you don't want to work on things you're not going to be excited about. You know, that's a that's a funny notion, because I think a lot of entrepreneurs have just personally self confessed that they don't think they'd make good employees. So how do you think about that? How do you think about that? Do you think entrepreneurs can make good employees? Because there are companies that hired a bunch of entrepreneurs and like, get a ton of great work out of them and have been very successful with that. But also at the same time, I think it's difficult to do. So now that you're running the startup and building a team and growing. What are your thoughts on that?

4:48  
Yeah, I mean, we hire a lot of entrepreneurs. I think that it's a mental state. A lot of the companies like the Googles of the world, they don't encourage risk taking and The type of behavior that entrepreneurs engage in. So I think it's possible it's really a question of company culture, we give people tremendous autonomy, we'll bring somebody in, and they'll own an entire vertical, all of the discretion to try it. And they'll be able to get their own resources. They're basically an entrepreneur within the company building out a good chunk of the organization, other companies, they index much more heavily on people who can follow the rules and who don't step out of line. And so I think it's more of a culture of the of the company itself.

5:34  
I know you're very focused on culture at levels. Now let's spend maybe like five or 10 minutes on this. So how big is levels today? How many? How many employees? Do you guys have? I know you've grown very fast over the last year.

5:43  
Yeah, it's hard to keep track. I think we're about 35 would be my guess, something around there. 30 to 35.

5:49  
Got it. And what's an example of this notion? Where do you foster just taking in the organization? And how do you decide to make that party a concert,

5:57  
a big part of it is ownership. So giving people the ability to write their own specs, giving loosely defined concepts and trusting that the people you've brought on consult these problems, there are fewer steps in the way we trust people we trust that they will get their stuff done, we really try to make sure that people have as much deep work focused time as possible. There were very few meetings, I think our engineers average, I think two meetings per week. So it's like very, very minimum meeting culture. And even people who are in roles that traditionally have a lot of meetings like Braden, who is in customer success, he only has like an hour and a half of meetings per week. And I think that's a big part of it is if you if you bring on the best people, and you trust them, then giving them autonomy and showing them what the objectives are, like, hypothetically, if you're building something and social, you say, our goal is to build something in social that increases engagement, and we want to ship within two months, you figure it out. And if you have the right people, they can figure it out. It doesn't require micromanagement. My philosophy on this is that if you can't trust that your people are doing good work, then your problems are upstream, you have to figure out hiring and you have to figure out culture. This is especially true in programming I've been I've been in circumstances where mostly this is the case with non technical leadership, where they insist on things like metrics around productivity of individual engineers, and then they compare them to each other. And they'll say, like, well, john only shipped 600 lines of code, and Bob shipped 900 lines of code, Bob must be 50% better than john. It's like, that's just not how it works. Okay, well, then we get to that story points. Like, this doesn't help anybody. Yeah, totally. One thing I've noticed

7:47  
about levels is you're very mission focused company, right? Like, you've got this like very strong vision. And I think mission around helping people take control and ownership of their metabolic health, and how there's just like, so many bad things happening there, like people's diets being so heavy on sugar and carbs. And, and so I think part of what you have going for you is you're able to attract people that are super aligned with the mission, because that's like such a big part of how you operate. And I think the other part of it, I've noticed is actually like having really rigorous hiring, because if you hire right, then everything else is sorted, like skiing downhill. So how do you do that? How do you ensure you've got like the right rigor on hiring,

8:25  
I think one of the biggest things is you have to commit a lot of time to it a lot more than people expect. I published something recently, in first round review on how I manage my time. And one of the most interesting learnings from that is, I feel like I spend a lot of time on recruiting, and we have really great people. And when I actually did the analysis of how much of my time I spent on recruiting, it was something like 2% of my actual time. And if if you had asked me, I would have said it was 10 times that much. And I think it's because I really don't like it. It's the process of like reaching out to people getting rejected all the time. It's like why a lot of people hate doing sales. The other thing to keep in mind is that hiring is a it's not a sales problem. It's really a matching problem. So one of the ways that we're this also goes back to the original question around culture, is that if you understand what your culture is, just be upfront about it. If, for example, we've been fully remote since day one, we were we were remote three COVID. And back then it was a pretty controversial decision. It's much less so now. So being honest with people about what the trade offs are for remote teams, if you're not used to it, it can feel pretty isolating. And there are some companies. Examples are like, I know Airbnb has a very social culture. And these aren't, there's not like a right or wrong answer to this. It's just a path that they've chosen. It probably leads to more social coherence of the team, a much more resilient team, and things get tough, but if you're fully remote, it's probably not going to happen. You're probably not going to have the same sort of social role. Yep, so the people that you work with, and we have a really great candidate recently dropped out of the process. Because when she was looking at our culture, like, you know, I'm at the point in my life where I want to be personal friends with everyone I work with, and remote is probably not gonna be able to do that successfully. It's like, okay, right, this is, this is a matching problem. So it's really just, who are you talking to? And what are their goals? And how does that align with how you want to build your company. So we have a few things like that, where we have some quirks in the way that we operate. Like, at the end of the day, if you bring somebody on, and they're a bad culture fit, and you have to fire them, it's not good for them. And it's not good for you. Like nobody wins in this situation reminds me Actually, I had a friend who works in growth, a CEO sold him really, really hard on the company, the culture, how great everything was, he shows up, and everything was completely different than he was sold. And I remember talking to him on the phone Afterwards, he was like, yeah, you know, he told me it was a rocket ship, he neglected to mention which direction the rocket ship was going. And all of these different assets, everything was on fire, it was super high stress, everyone was super anxious, and he ended up leaving, and like the company lost out on some morale, because everyone else saw that he left, they also lost out on months of that hiring process. And my friend also lost a lot of his own life, going through this process and took a lot of risks probably said no to a lot of other things that would have been good option. So just making sure people understand what it is they're getting themselves into. That's why we do so much in content like we, we publish publicly, our monthly investor updates and our weekly team all hands, they're on our website down at the bottom if you go to inside the company. I don't think we've publicly announced that yet. But it's all there, you can see our very first investor update, you can see all of our weekly team all hands. Yeah. So you can see our weekly team all hands from back when we were like seven people. And a big part of that is just so people can see how we operate. And we share a lot of our documentation. We did a culture project recently with a youtube content creator, that was super interesting. And so nobody when they join levels, nobody is surprised by what they find. I think that's a big part of it.

12:12  
That's amazing. I think this this radical openness is so powerful. And I've seen some of your all hand videos on YouTube, and it's fantastic. It's so love, love but you guys are doing this three moments in your journey that I thought we could focus on in the in the time we have first is your your early startups, you had like a couple of quick ones. And so we'd love to hear lessons. The second is I know you took a year off before levels. And a lot of founders, I think struggle with taking time off, because that can be so difficult, and disorienting. So I want to hear about that a little bit. And then lastly, about sort of like what you're excited about looking forward like levels is doing a lot of great work. And there's a lot of interesting things happening in the health space. And I just didn't tech Jen, Lisa would love to hear about like forward looking. What are some things you're really excited about? So let's start with the top. So you had a bunch of startups back to back. In fact, I think we did yc together winter 17 we're in the same batch. And so tell us a little bit about that. Like, you know, what were some of the key lessons. If you were talking to a younger entrepreneur, what are some things you would check

13:08  
is a good question, because each one of them came with a lot of different lessons. There's a great quote, I think it's a quote by Bismarck says that fools learn from experience, wisdom is learning from others experience. And a lot of these things are wish that I wish that I had read them in a book or really understood them. One of the biggest things we learned going through sightline maps, which was a company I did with a college friend, that was a topographical mapping company worked with the US military. And one of the big lessons we learned is how brutal sales cycles can be to operating a business. And I've heard the term sales cycles. People have told me about what that means. But it wasn't until you experienced that, like there's a million dollar pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And the rainbow is always like two weeks away for three years. And it's very hard to plan things when revenue comes in these like random intervals, and you have no way of projecting anything out. So that was a hard lesson to learn. I would say another lesson that we learned the hard way at sightline maps was around fundraising. We bootstrapped it for the first two years, and then we started a fundraising process. And we planned our fundraising around when we would run out of money. Right? That seems reasonable. It's like, well, we'll start the process and we have about three months of money left, and then we'll get the process done in a couple months, and then we'll have plenty of money. The reality is that cash is an asset, which is something that we learned the hard way, the less cash you have, the less people want to invest in you. And what you should do is you should raise money when you have momentum that your cash position should not be even a consideration in fundraising. The worst thing that can happen and this actually did happen to us, we have a term sheet everything was fine. The lead investor had some sort of change in management and they pulled the plug his term sheets are not binding a lot of people Don't know that term sheets just like a promise. And we said no to everyone else, and this fund had a change of heart and pull the plug on it, then all of our follow on capital got scared, they're like they must know something we don't know, they all pulled out, we ended up taking terms that were like 25%, the valuation that we were expecting, it was definitely a painful lesson to learn that you need to make sure you always have leverage in these things, and you should raise money. If you have 40 months of runway, everyone wants to give you more money, because they know you're not going to die as soon as they give you money. So just keeping that in mind was a really tough lesson to learn the lessons around kardash. A big one was around managing people. Like drivers in particular, I've managed software developers before, but managing different types of people like operational things is very hard. And the number of I honestly don't know how Uber even operates, like the the number of edge cases that just proliferate on all of the ways things can go wrong. When you have people moving things around, and you give people discretion. It was like every day, there was a fire that had to be put out. And it sucked up a lot of energy. Some of this is actually solved by better tooling. So one of the lessons that we learned was that we end up spending way too much of our resources in terms of engineering time on internal tools. And there are a lot of great tools now like retool that didn't exist back then, where you can build a lot of these things internally using just operational time. You don't need engineers to build dashboards anymore. That would have saved us like 90% of our engineering resources. retool was in our batch, by the way, no, yeah, those types of things really help. It's funny how, when you look back on a lot of these things, were some of the biggest challenges that you face are now just SAS products. like trying to do payments before stripe, it was like a good chunk of every company's engineering time. And now it's trivial. And so many of these similar things like we're working with troupville now, we're doing pharmacy fulfillment, five years ago, that would have been an entire entity within your company and like millions and millions of dollars sunk into this in a way that's totally pointless. Like AWS is another classic example

17:17  
yet. So much leverage. Drupal is amazing. Do you guys use them for the doctor console to to get a device? Speaking of kardash? Were the contractors employees? Or, like I guess the operations people in the mechanics? Were the employees of kardash? Or were they contractors that were contractors? Got it? So that's even harder. So how did you guys solve that? How did you drive like a certain level of quality? I know you mentioned it's hard. But did you guys figure it out some solutions? Yeah,

17:41  
not especially I guess brute force sort of the answer. We have a lot of operations, people trying to manage all of this. And there were so many points at which the process could break that, that ended up just being too complex, we ended up killing that whole sorry, side of the business, just because it was too logistically complicated. To do it effectively. I think another one was more like a personal learning. I actually touched on this. Somewhat recently, I did a podcast with my current co founder at levels Josh on founder dynamics, on a whole new level, one of the big learnings that I had at kardash, was how this was only something that I learned in the year off that I took doing a lot of reflecting, which is that I did not have the grammar to be able to effectively communicate how I was feeling. And that's a, it almost sounds like a trivial thing, like everyone should be able to do this. But I had been so focused on coding and trying to be a hyper rational person, that these like bubbling resentments were things that I was feeling. But I didn't have the capacity to surface those early enough now with my co founder, and it eventually created a lot of tension, and ultimately ended with me leaving. And so that was something that I thought a lot about during my year off, I spent a lot of time reflecting on things. I've been much more intentional about surfacing interpersonal conflict very early on. So like with Josh, there were a few moments that were really temps. And I remember specifically, we had a one on one that was an hour. And I felt this tension in the conversation. And in a past life in my previous companies, I would have just ignored it and went back to work. And in this case, I called him back immediately and said, Hey, I don't really know what's going on. But that conversation felt really tense. I think we need to talk about this. And we ended up spending the next six hours on a zoom call talking about it and surfaced a lot of things that were on both of our minds, and that whole week was really uncomfortable. And then at the end of it, we both saw idi and it's been a really positive relationship since that, since really just being able to surface these things into personally before they become catastrophic problems was a really big learning.

19:57  
That's like not spoken about, but It's honestly like co founder issues like the number one killer of startups. And it's so difficult. So thanks for sharing that. I think that's like a really valuable insight and thread to share on the on the pod. So you left kardash, and you took a year off. So tell us about that, that that must have been such an interesting time for you. And clearly you were reflecting trying to figure out what's now. And that sounds like that was a key moment in your journey. So walk us through that.

20:21  
Yeah, it was probably the most important year of my life, just spending a lot of time reflecting on what it is that I actually want. So one of these weird things where when I looked back on my time allocation, the amount of time that I had spent working, I work pathologically, like an 80 hour week is a pretty light week for me. So I'm working all the time. And I noticed that I had spent 10s of 1000s of hours working and coding, and probably single digit, maybe maybe 10s, of hours actually thinking about what I want to do with my time. And there was this bizarre, like, orders of magnitude difference in terms of how I was spending my time and thinking about what really mattered. So I spent a lot of time writing, I did a lot of reflecting, I wrote probably my least 100 pages of just reflecting on what are the problems that I care about, when I looked back at all the other companies like syteline, maps, started accidentally worked on a project with my brother to 3d print a mountain range nearby, because we thought it would be fun. And then, two weeks later, by complete coincidence, Ben, who's my friend from college emails me and says, Hey, Sam, do you know anyone who knows anything about 3d printing topographical maps? And it's like, yeah, I already did this. And that just became a company. And similarly, with kardash, I had left syteline maps, I was doing consulting, and I met eunan. in the hallway of a conference, I known him before, but we were catching up. He mentioned he just left his company, he has this idea for a new project. He's looking for a technical co founder, I was like, Well, I'm a technical co founder, let's talk about this. And I hadn't really given enough thought to what are the types of problems that I actually want to solve, the framework that I ended up settling on was, if I put five years into this, and it failed, what I look back on it and think it was a waste of time or not, healthcare was one of them, education was another one that I really care a lot about. And when I look at those issues, if I put five years into trying to improve health care, and it didn't work, I would say, you know what, I'm glad I tried, if I put five years into a an AB tech startup, or a social media startup, I probably wouldn't feel that way. So that was a big part of it. tactically, I told myself that at a minimum, I would not accept any offers, I would not start anything for at least six months. So say no to everything for six months. And that was really hard. There were so many things that in conversations felt like they were the right answer. And I was like, oh, man, it's such a cool project to FinTech thing, you should totally do this. But only in three months, I saw three more months in my six month hiatus, it let's talk to them. And then of course, next, like over the next three or four days, it's like, you know what, it's actually not that interesting. I'm glad I didn't say yes to that.

23:17  
I think as entrepreneurs is a natural tendency to be an optimist and like, get excited about things. And there's also like, it's so difficult to be in this state of like not doing anything that is sort of this like fragile, vulnerable state that you'd like, twice as susceptible to just jump onto something. So So I think the idea of forcing yourself not to do something for a while is very uncomfortable, but so important. So double click on that. So you did a lot of writing, you wrote hundreds of pages. How did you structure that? Was it just freeform? How did you approach this, this process of writing and reflecting?

23:48  
Yeah, honestly, a lot of it was reformed. And it was, I was just always writing something. And like, sometimes a lot of them are kind of rambling. Like I don't know what to write about. And I'm just writing those words out, like always typing and getting thoughts onto paper. And eventually, things are sort of morphed into different ideas and pathways of thinking. A lot of it was like reflecting on past relationships, and thinking about big industries and societal problems and books that I had read. I think tactically, one of the things that I did that was most helpful, was I had a breakfast meeting every morning at 8am. And I don't have a lot of great I guess, internal structure is maybe the right word. Like I don't have the discipline to wake up. Like my, my co founder at kardash thought he was in Special Forces. And he he's like, wakes up at 4am every day doesn't work out has his routine, like nothing will deter him from his routine, and he's super disciplined. For me, if I don't have like a call in the morning, I'm just going to not wake up. I can't motivate myself to do anything. So I try to use things like guilt, to force myself to wake up in the morning, like, I have a breakfast morning at 8am, I'm going to wake up at 730. If I have early calls, I'm going to wake up, I'm not going to bail, I'm going to wake up, I had to create this external structure to make sure that I stay productive. So I tried to have a breakfast meeting every day, just other people who are interesting in whatever field. Another tactical piece is, I kept in my back pocket Notepad. And I just had a list of asks things that I needed help with. And they're usually pretty trivial things like I'm looking to meet people who are interested in synthetic biology, because I just want to know more about it. I want to meet people who are deeply Christian, because I'm looking to learn more about theology. I'm looking to meet a pastor, if you know one. But it's not like a list of types of people that I was interested in meeting because almost everybody, when they find out that you're taking time off looking to what looking for what to do, almost everyone's gonna say, How can I help? And the usual answer people give is like, I don't know, I'll think of something. But if you're ready, and you have the list, I was really surprised at how often these conversations would convert into like, each conversation would lead to three more conversations, which lead to three more conversations each. And I ended up with like more more interesting people to talk to you than I have time to meet with them. And when I think about the trajectory that ultimately led to the starting of levels was Josh is somebody that I've been keeping up with for a long time, I tried to keep tabs on my personal network, I have a quarterly goal of staying in touch with 1000 people. So I spent a lot of my time really staying in touch with people.

26:42  
That's insane. By the way, 1000 people is not how do you is amazing.

26:45  
It's a lot of effort. It's kind of the lazy answer. But I usually exceed 500, I rarely get to 1000. But that's my target. I think a big part of is not overthinking, I just have a list start with just a list of people that you want to stay in touch with. And every once in a while, just look through the list and see if you talk to them in a while. And you're like, Oh, I haven't talked to Andy in a long time, I should reach out to him. And that's pretty much the whole process. The closest thing, Peter Boyce has an article about this, where he talks about his process using air table, it's like 90%, the same as the way that I do it. It's interesting how there's like this convergent path towards network management, just trying to stay in touch with people making an effort. So many people say that they want to and then this is one of the classic things for entrepreneurs that I talked to, it's like, oh, I have this great idea for this product that's gonna do X, Y, and Z. In fact, a very recent one that this happened. This happened within the last couple weeks. Somebody said, Yeah, you know, we need to start a company and what is going to do is going to be like, unbiased news. And I was like, Okay, yeah, I haven't heard this one before. Tell me more. Like, yeah, it's gonna show information from this side. And that side, and it's good. Okay, is this do you feel this as a problem? Oh, yeah, huge problem. I deal with this all the time. If this is such a problem for you, have you even bothered googling this? You know, there's a, there's a company called all sides sponsored by Bill Gates, that's got a lot of funding that does exactly what you're describing. If this is not a big enough problem for you that you haven't even googled this once ever, it's probably not a real problem. It's similar with network management and maintenance is that it's not something you can do on autopilot. Like if you're if you're willing to commit 20 to 30 hours a week to doing it, then great. And this is where I think a lot of the misalignment comes from, I think that personal CRM is an industry that will never take off. Because there's this misalignment, people assume that having a personal CRM will automate all of your relationships. That's the expectation. As I go, it's going to reduce the amount of time that I have to spend talking to people. The reality is it obliges you to spend 10 times more of your effort on managing these relationships. And so there's this this, this never ending mismatch of how people spend their time. And I don't imagine we're going to see anything in the near future that's going to solve that problem.

29:04  
Yeah, definitely a problem. But the solutions are, are hard. And the business models are hard. So want to hear a little bit about how you converge to levels and talk a little bit about your outlook on the future. So you're, you're doing a bunch of writing, you're meeting a lot of interesting people. I think you've figured out at this point that healthcare and education are industries you care about, and you won't regret spending time on them. So how does that lead to level? So walk us through sort of that how you converged on levels, and I know it took a while to hone in on it. I remember talking to you back in a couple of times. So walk us out of the journey.

29:34  
Yeah, there was a point when I was working on like, 16 different projects concurrently. And I actually I had budgeted my time I downloaded an app parvus which is something that I've actually used in the past when I was a software developer and a contractor to just help you keep track of time and I put my I put an hourly rate and I budgeted something like 10 to $25,000 per project on I will commit $25,000 A My time to feeling out this concept. And it was actually a super helpful feedback loop because I would sometimes start on something I would lose interest. And then I would look at how much time I spent on it. Like, I only spent $1,000 on this, and I committed to 10,000. So it's actually too early to give up on this idea. And other times, I would be like, yeah, this has a lot of potential, but it's still a long way to go. And I get to like the $25,000. Mark, I'm like, Okay, this is decision time. It's like, I thought I would be a lot further along on this project, and then I would kill it.

30:32  
What were you doing? I know, you you measure your time nobody, like obsessively? How are you spending your time? were you doing customer calls? You put it up? And are we talking to experts, so you'd like making landing pages, like there's so many different approaches. But

30:44  
yeah, there were a couple of interesting projects where I ended freedom, I created a lot of MVPs is really what it comes down to a lot of MVPs, running some ads, doing some smoke tests, a lot of conceptual work, the thing that really provided the most value was talking to smart people. Almost all of these were things that had a an implicit co founder, like different Brian towball. And I were working on a project in the called the adult education space, and it was around, it's sort of like taking the concept of the Phoenix project, or Five Dysfunctions of a team to sort of narrative parables around soft skills that are often not taught. And turning those into a podcast form, something that makes it much more easy to ingest and understand the types of skills. But it was the type of project that I was interested in doing. If it didn't require a lot of my time. It wasn't like the top five list of problems that I really cared about. And so the thing that ultimately end up leading to levels, this is interesting stars aligning kind of moment where I remember, I was connecting with my friend, john, just catching up with him. I mentioned that I host these weekly salon dinners with eight to 10 founder friends on a bunch of just esoteric topics. And he mentioned that his friend, Kyle hosts very similar dinners. And so he connected me with Kyle. And then I went to one of Kyle's dinner. And one of his dinners and I sat next to a guy Anson on one side and Edie on the other side. Anson is a health tech founder, Eddie was early at Oscar health. And we just talked for like three or four hours about all the new and interesting things going on in healthcare. And Anson was telling me about new regulations that have changed around telemedicine. They're all these new ideas that I hadn't heard of before. Edie also had a lot of really interesting ideas. And then a couple months later, I caught up with Josh, who's now level's co founder. And he was mentioning a project that he was working on rules related to glucose monitoring and how he didn't know how to deal with the prescription situation. And a lot of things sort of fell in place of like, oh, what you need is a physician network. And like, somehow I know about that now, and I know exactly who to talk to, to get all this information. And it was just like knowledge accumulation from all of these people who are smarter than me on these topics. And then at a certain point, I started putting a little bit of time into levels, I think at one point, it was like number five out of 16. And then it made its way up to like number three out of 16. And then at a certain point, it just became obvious that like, Okay, this is, this is the one that's aligned with my mission, but I want to be spending my time on. And it's, it also has a lot of potential. So I ended up spending a lot more time on it. First of all, that was really interesting. One reaction, one question. reaction is Yeah, this kind of goes back to the person CRM, where I think another problem with that is, most people don't see the value in it, you know, they just don't think it's worth it. They're like you and I'm sure many others, like early on career, like I can write code, or I can go get coffee with someone, I'm gonna write the code. Obviously, it's higher leverage. Yeah, in reality, there are a lot of activities of high leverage. And connecting people building a network getting exposed to ideas that you can't predict is super valuable. The question I had is, you're evaluating these ideas, you're clearly a very methodical person. Did you have a rubric or framework to determine which ones you would pursue? Like, were you evaluating them on certain criteria? Or was it just, this fits my personal mission? This is authentic to me, and it was in a big market I care about and that's enough. Yeah, I think I didn't have a specific rubric. But there were definitely some factors that went into it. It was like it had to be approaching a problem that I cared about. It had to be tackling a large enough market, you can in many ways you can use market size and potential company value as a proxy for impact. It's not always the case. It's a loose proxy. But stripe is a good example, where pretty much all of stripes revenue is like directly proportional to engineering lives saved. Doing these like tedious, repetitive tasks. The same with AWS. It's like you're saving human time doing all of these things, doing healthcare. There are a lot of places where the incentives are directly misaligned. But if you can create a positively aligned incentive, and you can do Apple have a very, very large industry, you can use that really as a proxy for positive impact. So that was a big part. Plus, I'm involved with a number of nonprofits. I'm not super convinced that nonprofits are the thing that moves the needle, and most societal situations, they just don't have the same sort of sustainability. They end up turning into fundraising machines, I had a friend who's on the board of a fairly large nonprofit, they do almost $100 million in revenue a year. And they did their CEO give the board presentation, and they had three goals for the year and it was raise more money, raise more money from these different people and raise more small dollar donations. And it was like, what does our nonprofit do again?

35:44  
Are we do we exist just to raise money? Like, how do we lose sight of the entire point of this organization, if the only objectives are fundraising, like we've clearly missed something here, you have fewer of those misalignment issues in the private sector, because if you if your profit motive is aligned in a positive way, you can get the best people you can continue to thrive and to build positive outcomes. Yeah, that makes sense. You've covered the level story on several podcasts. And so for listeners who want to learn more about that highly recommend, check that out, we can provide links in the show notes, love to talk about, though, about the future. And like the things that you're most excited about, you have a diverse set of interests, to hear kind of what excites you and what you're following these days, I'm excited to see there's a lot of interesting infrastructure being built in health tech right now. troupville, as a company we brought up before is a really interesting example, where they're building a lot of the infrastructure that makes it fairly easy to start a health tech company. Whereas in the past, so like the troupville physician network is one that we plugged into recently, we actually were we helped them work through the process of thinking through that, because we actually had to build our own initially, and it's really expensive. Now it's like plug and play. And so all of these things that used to be a half a million dollars in legal fees, followed by all this logistical complexity, to have a whole team internally manage all this is now just like, it's just an API, and it reduces complexity. So you can focus on the things that you're best at. It's really just about focusing on one core competency. I'm really interested in a lot of the advances in synthetic biology, I think we're gonna see the next 10 years some very, very interesting things in that space. Really, across the board. The rate of innovation in biological sciences has really changed fairly recently, for someone not super experienced with synthetic bio, what are some types of things that you think we'll see the the ability to manufacture complex molecules that have particular use cases? It's an interesting thing, because I was having a conversation with that, I hosted a dinner on the scientific replication crisis, which is an issue in biological sciences right now, where a lot of public research is not something that can be replicated. And some of the people there were synthetic chemists, I really overestimated how many things we can manufacturer synthetically, I asked her of all of the molecules that were aware of like small molecules, fairly simple molecules, how many of them? What percentage do you think we can manufacture synthetically, and she said, less than 1%, like way less than 1%, which is surprising to me, because I just assumed if you knew the shape of it, you can manufacture it turns out, it's very, very hard doing this type of manufacturing. She said it might even be it might even be way less than that depends on like, what scope you define, because there's so many different molecules. Synthetic Biology allows you to manufacture things that are even more complex, like proteins, things that are very, very complex, you can manufacture them, they're much more expensive individually, but you can manufacture them, it's sort of like I was given the example of if you equate it to software development, if you're doing synthetic chemistry. And you're working with these, like raw elements of chemistry, you're basically you're writing zeros and ones in your computer. You're like base level, there's no tooling, there's no anything. When you're able to loop into an existing system like an E. coli bacteria, you get access to mitochondria, and ribosomes, and DNA. It's like writing code with VS code. And you have a lot of tooling, you have continuous integration, you have Amazon Web Services, you have all of these extra tools that make it really, really easy with better layers of abstraction to make more complex molecules that would otherwise be if not impossible, borderline impossible to do.

39:33  
So this is almost like opening up the building blocks for things like impossible burgers and plant based dairy replacements and mRNA vaccines. And so I think what you're saying is, you're seeing being in the space you're seeing a lot of these building blocks are like being available to people and it seems like it's getting cheaper, faster, easier to experiment.

39:52  
Yeah, and with most of these types of shifts, there's an inflection point where things go from the size of a warehouse in $100 million to some inflection point, whether that's like $10,000, or $1,000, whatever the number is, there's some inflection point where it just becomes accessible to everyone, and companies can start building on top of it. And finding those second order problems that need to be solved is really where most of the value ends up being. It's like GPS is a good example where it's useful to have your coordinates. But it's actually much more useful to know how to get from my coordinates to these other coordinates like Google Maps, or to have a car pick me up from these coordinates and drive me somewhere else like Uber is second order products, and that they often end up being much more of a value than the underlying concept itself. Sam, everyone has something or set of things that they do, that they're really good at. It's like play to them work for others. And I've noticed people like yourself, learn what their superpowers are, and leverage them to be as effective as possible. So I'm curious to hear from you. What are some of the superpowers you found about yourself and that you lean on to good question. One is definitely stamina, which is that I've, I've just noticed for myself, I'm able to work longer hours than most people are. I've worked a lot of hours for a long time. And I've never really even come close to burnout, like 12 hour days are pretty normal. seven days a week, I don't really think about it, I would say some element of discipline, I guess maybe introspection, knowing what my own weaknesses are and then solving for them. They talk a lot about these things in the book, atomic habits, like creating friction for things that you don't want to be doing. Like I have website blockers, for a lot of websites that I know are distracting like Twitter, I batch my email processing time, to certain hours, I use a mailman. mailman HQ is a website and they batch send you your emails, so that you don't even get emails more than like twice a day. So it doesn't act like a slot machine anymore. I don't compulsively check email. So just knowing where all of the things are that pull my attention away, that's probably one of them. And actually, the example of scheduling a breakfast every day at eight in the morning, is an example of knowing my own limitation of not being sufficiently disciplined to be able to do this intrinsically. So creating external structures to force myself to do things that I know that I should be doing. I guess time management broadly, is probably one that's being very intentional with how I spend my time. And something related to that, that I've gotten a lot better at over time. A lot of what's held me back in life is this people pleasing impulse, where I would say yes to too many things. And I would often overcommit myself. And I would get stretched in a lot of different directions without losing the forest for the trees as what would often happen, where I would start working on all of these different things that other people wanted me to do. And I would not spend enough of my time doing the things that were really important. So I've gotten a lot better at that over time. But that was definitely not a superpower that I had three years ago. Fantastic superpowers. Thanks for sharing those. I've noticed that based on what you're speaking, when you mentioned the bright early morning breakfast and some other systems you set up, the forcing functions are a big one for you. I personally have found them to be some really helpful. My dad joke would be I don't like Oreos, because it's like any junk food that enters my home. I have zero disability related to the Oreos thing. I was saying somebody and I got a birthday cake for them. And just a small group. So there was like three quarters of the cake remaining. And we woke up the next day and the birthday cake was gone. And she said, Where's the birthday cake? Whoa,

43:33  
did you eat the whole cake yesterday? Maybe. Were you using levels at the time? Yeah, it wasn't.

43:42  
It wasn't pretty. Sam, you've been really generous with your time and it has been fantastic. One of the things I respect most about levels is how you all work in the open and think in the open. And I think what you did here was along those lines. I personally learned a lot and I'm sure others will too. So thanks again for being here. And we'd love to have you back on some time. Sure thing

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