Sam Corcos: Why Founders Should Take as Many VC Meetings as Possible | E1093

Harry Stebbings 0:00 Do you agree with Vinod Khosla that 90% of VCs actually detract value?

Sam Corcos 0:04 It's a little bit challenging because when you're fundraising, you're a prophet, not a missionary. You have the vision and you're trying to get people who already get it. You're not trying to convert people to your religion. I think one of the major mistakes that people make early on is they treat investor contacts like precious gems. The reality is that-

Harry Stebbings 0:23 What was the best first investor meeting that you had?

Sam Corcos 0:27 I think the best we had was with-

Harry Stebbings 0:33 Sam, I am so excited for this. I was just running on the treadmill. I was listening to you and Tim Ferriss, and it was the worst episode to listen to running on a treadmill because I was constantly typing notes, which is a great sign. But thank you so much for joining me

Harry Stebbings 0:46 first.

Sam Corcos 0:46 Glad to be here.

Harry Stebbings 0:47 Now, I would love to start with a little bit of background. I always find actually what people wanted to be when they were younger very informative. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Sam Corcos 0:57 My first real memory was I wanted to be a scientist. I was fascinated by biology and oncology, so I think it was a research scientist.

Harry Stebbings 1:05 (laughs) Well, you know, there's still time. There's always a second chapter, Sam.

Sam Corcos 1:11 Yeah. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:12 Um, were your parents pushing you to be a doctor? You're not an Asian child and so I don't think they were like beating you to either be an engineer or a doctor. (laughs)

Sam Corcos 1:19 Yeah, well, I- I do have Jewish parents, so doctor or lawyer were the- the default two

Sam Corcos 1:23 choices. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:24 I- I- I've learned, you know what? We can only, uh, we can only disappoint parents. Um, but I wanna start with a story that Vinay at, uh, Loom told me.

Sam Corcos 1:33 Uh-huh.

Harry Stebbings 1:33 And he said that, uh, he encountered you one day in the street when you weren't with a home base, we should say. And, uh, you asked him if you could stay the night.

Sam Corcos 1:42 Yeah. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:42 Can you talk about that story, Sam?

Sam Corcos 1:45 Yeah. I- it's, uh, from the perspective of Tom, who was, uh, on our growth team. I had just landed in New York to spend some time with him and other people, and he asked me where I was staying, and I said, "I don't know. That's a, that's a, like, multiple hours from now problem." And he said, "Well, what- what do you think is gonna happen? Like what normally happens in these situations?" And I said, "You know, I'll run into a friend and then I can stay with them. Worst case, I get a hotel." And then about 30 minutes later, I bumped into Vinay walking through Washington Square Park. He mentioned he had just arrived. He had an extra bedroom in his Airbnb. I asked him if I could stay there, and that was it. And Tom, I think, is absolutely convinced that I staged that whole situation. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 2:29 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 2:30 But it always happens that way. I'm- I'm convinced that the universe is conspiring in my favor. These things just happen all the time.

Harry Stebbings 2:36 Listen, after Loom's acquisition, Vinay is now officially the world's most highly paid actor in that situation. (laughs)

Sam Corcos 2:43 Yeah, totally. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 2:45 Um, listen, I- I do want to ask, though, 'cause, you know, being without a home base, it does, I'm sure, shape a lot of mindset. How did it inform your mindset in terms of not having that home base and being a lot more fluid in terms of movement and transportation?

Sam Corcos 2:58 I think the biggest thing that it teaches you is that things are gonna work out okay. People often over-plan things, and if you go with the flow and you make room for spontaneity, really interesting things can happen. There's, uh, there's a whole practice of just saying yes to more things and just allowing events to unfold in whatever direction they're gonna go and just being comfortable with that. So I think being- being more mobile really enabled that.

Harry Stebbings 3:24 Can I ask you then, why do we plan? Is it because we have to? Because we have a boss to report to?

Sam Corcos 3:30 (laughs) I think most people plan because the ambiguity of not knowing what's coming is stressful. And I think I was probably in a very similar situation in a prior life where you plan every step. It's like, well, you know, when we- if we're going on vacation to Paris, we need to make sure that we have planned what we're gonna do every day. Otherwise, there will be nothing to do. But the reality is, people do things there already. Like, there are- there are interesting spontaneous things that can happen just going on a walk and just meeting new people. So I think being open to

Sam Corcos 4:05 that is really the important part.

Harry Stebbings 4:06 I'm just pushing back here. Th- this is where I love the show, 'cause it's just like me just going off schedule.

Sam Corcos 4:12 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 4:12 Um, you're- you're an optimizer in so many ways. You totally can go to Paris and have a beautiful time, but you won't have the optimized time of the right gallery on the right day, with the right guide, if you don't plan. Does it not go against your optimization frameworks and mind?

Sam Corcos 4:29 I think it depends on what you're optimizing for. I think that's the ultimate answer. If what you're optimizing for is to go to certain galleries, and the only way to do that is to plan three months in advance, then by all means, that is the optimal way to do it. If what you're optimizing for is interesting new experiences that you wouldn't have had otherwise or meeting new and interesting people, then it's actually really counterproductive to not allow space for that. When I was spending time in, uh, in Europe, I was in Estonia, and I made friends with some random people that were just at a bar, and I ended up going on a road trip with them for several days through like Serbia, Croatia, and like slept on their couch. That would not have been a thing that I would have had the capacity to do if I was super fixated on what plan I had already.

Harry Stebbings 5:19 Can I ask, has your flexibility of mind ever got you in trouble? Your spontaneous nature ever led you to, you know, a precarious situation? I'm just intrigued.

Sam Corcos 5:30 It's led me to some situations that I thought at the time were precarious, but it turns out most of these risks are severely overblown. Uh, a lot of this depends on one's situation, but the risk of things, like, this is a real statistic. Say if you have a child, the odds that your child is kidnapped by a stranger is about the same as them getting struck by lightning. Like that- that is how rare these things actually occur. And so things like hitchhiking. Hitchhiking is actually not dangerous.... just as a probabilistic thing. But people think that it is because we've all, like, seen the serial killers who pick up hitchhikers and it's like, it ingrained in our memories and so we, we apply that model to everything else in the world when it really ... Ultimately, the news is poison and it makes you view a, it gives you a perception of the world that is not real.

Harry Stebbings 6:24 Would you like to sit on my sofa? (laughs)

Sam Corcos 6:28 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 6:28 Hitchhiking might not be, but that sofa looks incredibly dodgy, doesn't it? (laughs)

Sam Corcos 6:33 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 6:34 Would you say that you're, r- like incredibly risk willing person? I'm always fascinated by attitudes to risk and whether yours has stayed the same over time.

Sam Corcos 6:43 I would say it's definitely increased over time, um-

Harry Stebbings 6:46 It's increased? You're willing to take more risks today?

Sam Corcos 6:49 Yeah. I think I've always been a fairly risk tolerant person, and over time as I've realized how many things feel risky or appear risky on paper are actually not as risky as people think they are. Like starting a company feels risky, but really what's the worst that can happen? Like, it doesn't work and you feel like mildly embarrassed? It's actually ... The downside situation is not the worst thing that can happen. There are many, many worse things

Sam Corcos 7:17 in the world.

Harry Stebbings 7:17 There is. But I'm, I'm always intrigued though on that one because, like, I meet founders who are more risk averse with time because they take on more cash, they have more employees, they have more customers. And so the weight of expectation really rests on their shoulders a lot more so than when you're no one.

Sam Corcos 7:33 Yeah, for sure. People, w- when you have something to lose, it, it is this, it, it really is straight from the book, The Innovator's Dilemma, which is the more success you have, in theory you should be able to take much larger risks because you have huge amounts of cash, you can take these moonshot bets but people tend not to for some reason, and this is just a thing that we've seen throughout all of history. The more reputation you have, the more afraid you are of failure. Which is ironic because it should be the opposite, but this is, this seems to be just a, a default state

Sam Corcos 8:07 of human nature.

Harry Stebbings 8:08 How important do you think luck is, Sam?

Sam Corcos 8:10 I think it would depend a lot on one's definition of luck. I don't remember whose quote it was. Maybe ... I think it might have been Vince Lombardi, he said that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. And so I think in some ways you can create your own luck, but there is definitely a degree of just probability in the whole thing, so luck plays a significant role. But if you're not prepared to recognize an opportunity when it comes up or you're not prepared for it, you're not taking full advantage of the luck that's made it your way.

Harry Stebbings 8:38 No, I, I totally agree with you. Sahil Bloom actually did an amazing tweet on the four different types of luck and I, I thought it was actually a brilliant framing.

Sam Corcos 8:45 Hmm. Interesting.

Harry Stebbings 8:45 I'll send it to you afterwards, it's really fucking good.

Sam Corcos 8:47 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 8:47 Because I hate the generalized, "Oh, luck is what makes it up," it's like fuck that, I was in the gym training every day for the last four years.

Sam Corcos 8:54 Yeah, exactly. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 8:54 Anyway, uh, you mentioned that like what happens, you know, when a company maybe doesn't work out and we overemphasize how bad that might be. I really only like to invest in serial entrepreneurs, Sam, because I think you do so many stupid things the first time around, and I want to talk about the stupid things you did first time around. (laughs) What are the biggest lessons from your prior

Harry Stebbings 9:13 companies that impacted how you build Levels? That one was from Vinay, to give credit.

Sam Corcos 9:18 After previous companies I usually spend some time reflecting and writing on what the big lessons learned were. I would say from my last company, Cardash, one of the biggest lessons that I learned was, I would say it was the first time ... You, you sure you're familiar with the Dunning-Kruger curve of, of-

Harry Stebbings 9:33 I am but, but, but for those that aren't maybe listening can you explain it?

Sam Corcos 9:37 Yeah. So the idea of th- the Dunning-Kruger curve is on the f- it's a U-shaped curve on the far left, on the, the X axis is, uh, how much you know, and on the Y axis is how confident you are that you know it. And so if you know very little, you tend to be very confident in how much you know. (laughs) If you know a little bit, you realize how little you know, and then at some point you actually become an expert. And, uh, I would say during my last company, and this may be ties into your hypothesis on this, is it was the first moment when I realized that I had maybe bottomed out when it comes to things like software development, that maybe my opinions are actually valid and I don't need to just defer always to the loudest person in the room because it was a regular occurrence that we had a loud person in the room who said, "We should do it this way," and I said, "Well ... " and he seems to have very strong opinions on this so we'll go with that. And then six months later it's like, "I knew it, this is a huge problem, now we have to fix this and it's my fault." So I would say that was the first moment when I realized that I actually have some valid opinions. Another really big reflection, and this was something that I recognized while I was at the company, not just in retrospect, was I, I had really failed at an important value around ownership. There was a specific moment when I was, uh, Yanan, who is our CEO, I was the technical co-founder, CTO, he and I had a disagreement about the path forward and I, I was unable to fully get behind it, to disagree and commit, and so when people would ask me, "What do you think about this idea?" I would say, "Well, you should ask Yanan," or like, "Yanan thinks that we should do this." And I wouldn't say like, "I'm on board with this, this is what we are doing," it was more like, "This is what he wants to do." And he actually called me out on it, which I, I really appreciate. He pulled me aside, we went on a walk and he was like, "You can't do that, we have to be on the same team and if you're not, that's a huge problem." And so that was a big reflection, was just realizing that there's a point at which, you know, you can disagree behind closed doors but once the path is defined, which is defined by the CEO, you've got to get behind it or you've got to leave, frankly. Like if you can't get behind the idea and you can't get behind the path forward you should probably leave the company.

Harry Stebbings 12:01 Can I ask you bluntly, I don't agree with disagree and commit if you're a co-founding pa- I just think it's too diff- on large strategic things. I think it's too difficult if you disagree to

Harry Stebbings 12:12 commit fully, to commit to do at 1:00 AM, to miss your friend's birthday, to miss ... if you don't agree with it.

Sam Corcos 12:19 I think the answer is then you have to leave.I think that's the answer. Like, a, starting a company is not a suicide pact and you're not committed for the rest of your life. If ultimately you cannot get behind the idea then you have lost confidence in the CEO of the company, and ultimately, you're probably better off working

Sam Corcos 12:38 somewhere else.

Harry Stebbings 12:38 What was the hardest thing about moving from technical co-founder to CEO?

Sam Corcos 12:42 I, I'd say probably the hard part was the lack of clear feedback loops and deliverables. That was one of the strangest things, was when you're a software developer, especially if you're a good one, you're shipping a lot and you can see the immediate impact of what you're shipping. You see people using it, you get feedback, you iterate on it, you improve it. There's just this constant delivery pipeline. When you're the CEO you have a... You have a 1% impact on everything, but you have almost nothing that you can actually point to as your own work product. I was reflecting on this with my co-founder Josh when we were talking about... We did a podcast on founder dynamics that was a really interesting one, but really it was from Josh's perspective more than mine. Just having this recognition that we have our Friday forum where we celebrate all of our wins, and I very rarely make an appearance as a person who has an attributable win. And so just realizing that my role is

Sam Corcos 13:41 just not that anymore.

Harry Stebbings 13:42 Why do you do that cool, if you don't mind me asking?

Sam Corcos 13:44 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 13:45 I, I find wins quite uncomfortable, I don't want everyone to get complacent, um, we haven't won shit, we're still behind other people in media, in funds. Why do you do it and what would you advise founders around that? Advise me.

Sam Corcos 13:58 Yeah. I, I think it is incredibly important for team morale to see forward progress. If you only feel like you're failing and losing all the time, people will get demoralized. Winning is an intoxicant in terms of morale. And if you see forward progress, people get really inspired and motivated to push even harder. But if it feels like you're just failing and losing all the time, it gets really demotivating.

Harry Stebbings 14:23 I agree with you on the forward progress. I tweeted recently that little and often is my secret to retaining great talent, and what I mean by that is you have title and salary and I increase them separately but little and often to create that-

Sam Corcos 14:35 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 14:35 ... kind of feeling of forward momentum more frequently. Do you have any lessons on what it takes to retain the real best, like I said there? Are there any for you?

Sam Corcos 14:45 Th- this is maybe a slight tangent but we, we've done away with titles beyond just... Yeah, beyond just functional definitions like engineering,

Sam Corcos 14:55 product, ops.

Harry Stebbings 14:56 Wh- wh- why did you do away with titles, Sam?

Sam Corcos 14:59 This came from a conversation we had with Darren Murph from GitLab, and they have a different philosophy on this but he had a statement that really caused me to rethink this whole concept of title. So we're an incredibly transparent company. We post all of our investor updates publicly online, all of our team all-hands are publicly posted online. Remains to be seen whether or not this is a good idea but it's something that we're trying. One of the things that he said is that, uh, titles are a form of compensation. We share basically everything, including all of our one-on-ones and team meetings are all shared within the company, so you can see all of the one-on-ones between every other person at the company. Performance is shared within the pump- within the company so you can see who is not meeting expectations right now, who is, who's delivering a lot of value. The only thing that we don't share is compensation data, and so-

Harry Stebbings 15:56 Oh, can I, can I just dig in-

Sam Corcos 15:57 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 15:57 ... sorry on that, it's too, too interesting. I think people are their best selves and can truly be honest when they feel safe. If me and you have a one-on-one, I don't feel safe if it's transparent. I can't be vulnerable in many ways.

Sam Corcos 16:10 Yeah. It's, it's... So I would say one note is that it's shared by default, but again, this is not a suicide pact. So if you say something that you don't want shared to the rest of the company, you don't have to share it. You just say, "I don't want this one shared," and then it doesn't get shared. And so there are certain personal things that people don't want shared and that's totally okay, but there is definitely some degree of vulnerability that is required to be comfortable with the people that you work with. It, it can really only be done in a place that has very high trust.

Harry Stebbings 16:40 And then, sorry, I'm strawman-ing here. I think that was the term. Uh, if it's not I like it. (laughs)

Sam Corcos 16:44 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 16:44 Um, uh, and then performance. If someone's not doing well, it can then lead to other people losing faith, and if that's very visible, they don't need their teams to turn against them in real time as well, they know that they're not doing well. If they're really bad, their teams will reject them like organ rejection. But does it not create teams turning against people potentially prematurely?

Sam Corcos 17:08 So I think the answer is it depends a lot on what sort of team you've built. And so if you have built a team with very high trust... I can tell you how this happens in practice where we, we use the, uh, uh, a, a common heuristic that we use is the keeper test from Netflix, which is you often do this role-playing with the manager and you say, "Close your eyes." Imagine you have somebody named Mike on your team, right? And you really... Or just even imagine a specific person on your team that you have questions about, and imagine I'm that person and I come up to you and I said, "Harry, I have some bad news. I've decided that I, I'm not happy here and I'm, I've just accepted a job at Google." And then the question is, how do you feel right now? And if the quest- if the answer is relief or, like, excitement, that's a very bad sign. You should feel very concerned of, like, what did we do wrong to lose this person? You, you should fight really hard to keep this person. If you never... If you feel anything other than that, it's a problem and you should probably consider letting that person go.

Harry Stebbings 18:13 So if you're not sure, that's the s- as bad as, like...

Sam Corcos 18:18 Yeah. If you're not sure, that's a bad sign, and we tell them directly. I had a one-on-one two weeks ago...... where I said to somebody on our team, I said, "I did the keeper test exercise. Right now, you do not pass the keeper test. If you were to leave, I would feel kind of indifferent. And neither of us want that to be the case, so we need to figure out how to get you to the point where I am excited for you to be here and where I'm confident that you're contributing value." And that meeting is shared within the entire organization. And I can tell you, in practice, there's the, like, worst-case scenario fear of, like, everyone's gonna turn against them and, like, there's gonna be all this politicking and backstabbing. The reality is what happened is people saw the video and several people said, "Hey, Sam, you might not know, but he's been helping me on these projects and he's been a huge contributor." And then other people said, "Hey, I can help. I can help mentor him to develop these skills that are gonna be really important to get him to the point where he's able to contribute in a really positive way." So in a high-trust culture where people are supporting each other, usually the opposite happens. If you, if you've built the right culture, people support each other. And I would also say that one of the other notes that you had of people know who the low performers are, they actually very often don't. The people who work directly with them, maybe, like, the two or three people who are closest to them know, but everyone else at the company, if they end up leaving, it's a complete mystery why they left. If you have an engineer depart, somebody in operations had no idea that this person was a low performer. They don't even know what it would mean to be a low performer because it's not in their industry. They're- they- they haven't had any exposure to that vertical. So having these things out in the open, it both enables people to be much more supportive and positive, but also, I would say, increases trust and transparency across the company.

Harry Stebbings 20:10 Can I ask you, uh, how big is Levels today, people-wise?

Sam Corcos 20:14 We're about 50 people.

Harry Stebbings 20:16 Okay. And everyone passes the keeper test?

Sam Corcos 20:19 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 20:19 When does quality begin to degrade? And I- I always... And maybe you can ar- argue with me here. It- I love a good debate.

Sam Corcos 20:25 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 20:25 It's the end of the day. It's dark.

Sam Corcos 20:27 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 20:27 Let's go. Um, but, uh, the- the present for your little one's coming, so you can, you know, forgive me after this. Um, but,

Harry Stebbings 20:35 uh, my- my question is, like, at some scale, you cannot only have A players. 500, 1,000, 200, whatever that is, the definition of an A player, by definition, is a bit rarer. Um, when does quality begin to degrade do you think, and how do you think about that looking forward?

Sam Corcos 20:51 It's interesting to think that, like, the keeper test is something that we got from Netflix, which is a much larger company. And I'm sure they developed that heuristic at some point beyond our current scale. I think in many ways, there's also a U-shape to this, where in the very early days, sometimes you just hire the best person that you can get because you don't have a lot of choices.

Harry Stebbings 21:12 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 21:13 And then over time, as you see some amount of traction, you can attract really incredibly exceptional talent. And then at some point, it does appear that the talent bar decreases. And I think some of it is just that you end up hiring effectively commodity roles where you're just like, "We need 100 engineers," as opposed to, like, "We need this specific person."

Harry Stebbings 21:34 I totally get you around that kind of commodification of role, you see it especially in particularly sales and marketing, with no disrespect there.

Sam Corcos 21:40 No.

Harry Stebbings 21:41 But I do want to ask, you mentioned trust also quite a few times. Can trust be regained once lost in teams? Or is once trust gone, it's- it's gone?

Sam Corcos 21:50 I would say it... The answer of can, the answer is yes. Is it likely? No. (laughs) I can give you a good example of how we rebuilt trust for a lot of these things. So in the early days when... We've had two cycles of transparency. The first one was sharing a lot more information publicly, sharing a lot more information within the team. This would have been in 2020. And, uh, the two exceptions that we made were compensation and individual performance. So we kept those two secret. So one-on-ones were secret. Uh, if somebody was failing, it was secret. And when somebody would depart, they would write their own definition of why they were leaving, like leaving for personal reasons, leaving for whatever else. It actually created a tremendous amount of distrust within the organization. People would, people would be very skeptical of like, "Wait, why is so-and-so leaving?" And they just didn't have enough information. It created a lot of distrust of our team and our culture by not being transparent about it. And then a couple years later, we had this next cycle where we just increased transparency even more. One-on-ones are now shared. Our performance reviews are all shared. And, like, the- the risk that you run when all these things are shared is if you have a culture where everyone is political and nobody trusts each other, it's all gonna fall apart. But the nice thing about companies, as opposed to things like countries, is you get to choose who's at your company.

Harry Stebbings 23:22 (smacks lips)

Sam Corcos 23:22 And if you see a performance review and you're like, "This person is politicking," you can fire them. And you can just choose to only have people who operate in good faith and who follow the system that you've put in place.

Harry Stebbings 23:33 I totally agree with you. A- a- and, like, family, sadly, you can't fire them (laughs) , despite many attempts on my behalf.

Sam Corcos 23:42 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 23:42 (laughs) I'm lucky they don't listen. Um, no, but my...

Sam Corcos 23:44 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 23:45 A perfect kind of tangent that kind of takes us to the next topic, but you mentioned that kind of the transparency around everything. I have another disagreement, but I- you're convincing me slowly. But fundraising transparency-

Sam Corcos 23:56 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 23:56 ... is a real challenge for me because teams get caught up in it. "Oh, we're gonna raise a round." And then if it takes longer, if it doesn't happen, it can create real morale challenges. How do you think about transparency on fundraisers and the challenges associated?

Sam Corcos 24:11 If you've built up enough social capital internally, think of it like you've built up the trust bank with enough of a- enough credibility that people know that you're not lying to them, then it's totally fine and it's never been an issue. If people get the sense that you're gaslighting them because you're selectively sharing information...... that's when you run into real problems. It depends a lot on the type of culture that you've built. If it's the type of culture where you're just, you don't share anything, and you just say, "Keep out of it," this was really something that was aggressively pushed by somebody early on at Levels, where they were at a company that seemed to be doing extremely well on paper. But they never shared financials. They never shared anything. And then one day, the company just died, and the CEO just announced like, "Yep, we ran out of money. Everyone's fired." (laughs) And he said, "I don't want to repeat that experience. People should know the financial state of the company. People should understand what's going on because people can contribute to these things." I always try to look at what is the best thing that can happen rather than... I, I would, I would reframe maybe something to think about for these things is like instead of thinking if everyone at the company is super political and wants the worst for the company and only what's best for them, if you have a bunch of difficult people who are gonna make your company building really hard, if you only have those people, what could happen? Versus if everyone at the company wants what's best for the company and for everyone else here, what's the best thing that could happen? And what you often find is that the best outcome is the one that actually happens if you have the right people.

Harry Stebbings 25:49 I, I, I totally agree with you there in terms of if you have the right people. I think getting the right people is sometimes a challenge as, as we discussed-

Sam Corcos 25:55 Yeah, of course.

Harry Stebbings 25:55 ... and retaining them even harder. On the fundraise itself, you took a very kind of strategic and deliberate approach to it. And I do want to dive into this because I heard about it from so many, from your Nivs and your Moshe's of the world to Vinay's. And so I just want to ask first, how did you approach the fundraise? What worked and what didn't? 'Cause we met in your fundraise, didn't we?

Sam Corcos 26:16 Mm-hmm. We did.

Harry Stebbings 26:17 Yeah. I, I have to admit, ah, it was a bit of a fucking mistake, wasn't it? (laughs)

Sam Corcos 26:22 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 26:25 Some things you keep in and some you take out.

Sam Corcos 26:28 Uh-huh.

Harry Stebbings 26:28 I'm actually happy for that to stay. (laughs)

Sam Corcos 26:30 Yeah. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 26:32 Uh, by the way, I loved you. I just worried that churn is real. (laughs)

Sam Corcos 26:36 Oh, yeah. I mean, uh, churn is still very high. It's like, uh, 25%. We have 25% retention, which is not what it needs to be for this to work in the long term. So we've got a lot to figure out.

Harry Stebbings 26:45 Okay. Do you... Okay, great example. Uh, do you not wi- like, that's fascinating, and people will be interested by it. Do you not worry that growth investors will hear that and go, "Oh, that's worrying."

Sam Corcos 26:55 I mean, they're gonna find out about it one way or the other. It is the reality, so... (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 26:59 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 27:00 It is a number that's, that's been slowly creeping up. It was 20%. Now it's 25%. Our target is 40. We just have to figure

Sam Corcos 27:07 out how to get there.

Harry Stebbings 27:08 So how do you create ongoing... Is that before we do fundraising? I'm just interested. Like with, with like Levels, you know, once you know your kind of patterns, X is good for me, Y is bad for me, it's like a bit like Aura. You hear Aura have a lot of problems in terms of like-

Sam Corcos 27:20 For sure.

Harry Stebbings 27:20 ... I know drinking is bad for me, da, da, da.

Sam Corcos 27:22 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 27:22 How do you create recurring patterns when we are quite predictable humans?

Sam Corcos 27:28 That is, that is definitely the core challenge of the product that we've got to figure out. I think some of it is around accountability and goal setting. The people who stay the longest, they value the accountability of the tool more than they value the discrete learnings of each step.

Harry Stebbings 27:46 Mm.

Sam Corcos 27:46 So we'll use the Aura example. If you value keeping you accountable to getting to bed on time and getting good quality sleep more than you value learning that alcohol is bad, then you will tend to stay retained for longer.

Harry Stebbings 28:01 I think, uh, like disincentives are not used enough. Too many things about like, "Oh, I'll give you $10 if you go to the gym or if you have your rate below X." Actually, people will respond much, much more actively to losing $10-

Sam Corcos 28:15 Yeah, for sure.

Harry Stebbings 28:15 ... than gaining it. Connect your Chase or Wells Fargo account, and if you don't do these three things that you said, we'll take $20.

Sam Corcos 28:24 Yep.

Harry Stebbings 28:24 And you can then put it in a pot to X charities. I just think there's something to be had around disincentives and turning it into a financial play as well.

Sam Corcos 28:33 Yeah, we've done something in the range of about 15 different, 15 cohorts with, uh, the Wearable Challenge, which we've been doing with Justin Mares-

Harry Stebbings 28:42 Cool.

Sam Corcos 28:43 ... where you commit some amount of cash upfront, and then every time you miss your goal, you lose some amount of money from it.

Harry Stebbings 28:50 Yeah.

Sam Corcos 28:50 So-

Harry Stebbings 28:50 Yeah.

Sam Corcos 28:51 Yeah. It has, it has been pretty effective.

Harry Stebbings 28:54 Well, fine. Already got it.

Sam Corcos 28:56 Yeah. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 28:57 Okay. No need to show off. Um-

Sam Corcos 28:59 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 29:00 No, okay, but on the fundraise itself-

Sam Corcos 29:01 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 29:01 Like, uh, talk to me. How did you approach it and what worked and what didn't?

Sam Corcos 29:05 The things that worked, we, we approached it by casting a very wide net. We spoke to a lot of people. I think one of the major mistakes that people make early on is they treat investor contacts like precious gems.

Harry Stebbings 29:17 Mm.

Sam Corcos 29:17 And they're afraid to talk to an investor until their idea is fully baked and provably the best thing ever. The reality is that you have more than one shot on goal. And there's actually, in my experience, there's nothing better than, say, you have a conversation with a growth investor, and your retention is only 25%, and they say, "You've got to get that number up." And then six months later, you say, "All right, it's now 40%." And they go, "Wow, okay, that's real progress towards goals that matter." And I think, uh, it was Mark Suster who has the, the piece, Investing in Lines, Not Dots.

Harry Stebbings 29:51 Amazing.

Sam Corcos 29:52 Yep. And I think most founders treat each fundraise like a dot rather than a trend line. And so knowing that these relationships, a lot of the people that we raise money from are people that I've known for three, four, five plus years. And I think this also maybe ties into the, the serial founder dynamic is when you've been doing this for a long time, you have hundreds of contacts in all these spaces, and you know who to talk to. You also know how to do the pitches. It's just way easier to do it. Whereas a lot of early founders, they know like one investor. They know one principal at a second or third tier firm, and they are terrified to even bring this up to them because they might say no, and they might never get another chance to fundraise.

Harry Stebbings 30:36 So you mentioned second or third-tier

Harry Stebbings 30:38 firm there. Often, we hear, you know, when you're going out to start a raise, uh, "Go to the third-tier firms first 'cause you wanna kind of kiss a couple of frogs before you meet the prince." Do you agree with that, or do you think this is too much of a gamified approach of fundraising?

Sam Corcos 30:52 I think you should take as many meetings and do as many pitches as you can. The feedback that you'll get from really good investors tends to be really positive. Like, y- you will learn from people who have way more exposure to your market category than you do. I cannot even count the number of people who they, the number of first-time founders who have this, what they think is this incredible idea, and then they get to their first investor pitch, and they say, "Yeah, you know, it sounds like these five companies that we passed on. Why are you different than them?" And they go, "What five companies?" (laughs) And then-

Harry Stebbings 31:26 Do you not think that's a poor-quality founder? I mean, if you don't know your market ... Like, if you were to ask me about fund or media competition, I could tell you every one, break them down by pros and ... Like, that's just a bad founder. Sorry.

Sam Corcos 31:38 I would say an inexperienced founder maybe more than anything. But the reality is that VCs or investors broadly just have way more exposure than a founder does. If you're a founder and you're working on your one company for five years, you don't know what's going on outside of your company. You don't have the capacity. You're not getting pitched new ideas five times a day for five years. So you have way less exposure to what's going on in the world. And so when you start working on whatever your next company is, you don't have the benefit of having been pitched a thousand times. And so you're necessarily limited.

Harry Stebbings 32:14 What do you think about leads, most of the check going to a lead, versus a much more distributed round?

Sam Corcos 32:20 This is sort of a lazy answer, but the answer is that there are trade-offs, and you have to pick which trade-off works for you. There is more overhead. I knew that there would be a lot of things that we needed from our investors when we were really early, and that there was a tremendous amount of value that is untapped in all of these angels and operators. Before we had our first institutional capital, I think we had about a hundred angels and operators that were investors that we were able to tap pretty consistently for the first couple of years.

Harry Stebbings 32:47 Okay, sorry, I, I, I have to. I, I've tweeted before about ... Uh, and I think you actually put it in one of your notes, which (laughs) gave my ego great pride.

Sam Corcos 32:55 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 32:55 Honestly, I read it, and I was like, "Oh, Sam. I knew I should have invested." (laughs)

Sam Corcos 33:02 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 33:02 Jesus Christ. Uh, anyway, um, my point being, like, I think that y- it's great to have these names, but very, very few actually extract the value that they want or need from them. How do you think about extracting that value from them in the most efficient way when you have a lot?

Sam Corcos 33:18 Probably the easiest place to start would be what doesn't work when you bring on investors, and what doesn't work is usually the default behavior of all founders. (laughs) So, this is what I would say d- which does not work, which is don't assume that your investors can read your mind. Don't assume that they have as much context on your business about what your business needs are as you do, because they spend maybe an hour a month thinking about your company, and you spend all day every day thinking about your company. I would say another thing that doesn't work is, uh, passively criticizing your investors for their lack of engagement if you haven't even bothered to make an effort to engage with them. It, it takes real proactive effort to be able to get the value that you wanna get. Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 34:06 So I find that often founders don't know the value that I can provide. And what I mean by that is, like, say you have a sales pipeline, okay, or a partnerships pipeline maybe for you maybe. You don't know that I went to school with the, uh, CEO of GoPro-

Sam Corcos 34:20 Totally.

Harry Stebbings 34:21 ... or that I am brother-in-law to the head of X.

Sam Corcos 34:25 Right.

Harry Stebbings 34:25 And so how do you open-share what you need to 100 people in an effective way?

Sam Corcos 34:32 I guess we'll, we'll say on what, what does work, this is probably the simplest one, and it is where almost everybody fails, which is the first and most important thing is you need to know what you need. (laughs) If I say, "How can I help?" and you say, "Uh, I don't know," y- you've already failed. You need to have a list of things that your, you and your team need help with, because you'd be surprised at how often people can deliver. I think that's the first one, is just you have to know what it is your needs are.

Harry Stebbings 35:01 And so you have a Google Sheet that you share at the bottom of an update saying, "This is what we need."

Sam Corcos 35:05 Yeah, in our, in our investor update, we have an Asks section of things that people on our team need or things that the company needs, and we very regularly get conversions from those from our just sort of the broad outreach to our investors. I would say the highest leverage ones tend to be more specific. I would say a, a well-written request to an investor is highly targeted, which is if you're sending too much noise and not enough signal as your requests, they'll eventually just get filtered out and ignored, so knowing who may be able to connect you with somebody or who may be able to convert on a request. I would say also try to keep it very specific and also time bounded. I always try to imagine myself in the investor's seat when I'm writing one of these. I try to imagine, "If I was to receive this, could I respond to it in one minute, or is this something where I now have to do a bunch of work to try to interpret what the request even means?" And I try to also be specific where it is ... It's interesting, the, the difference between saying, "Hey, we're hiring a designer. Let me know if you know any good designers." You tend to get, like, a 0% conversion rate from that. But if you say, "Hey, I'm looking to meet more designers. Can you connect me with the two best designers you've ever worked with?" People immediately think, "Oh, I know these two people. I'll connect you with them right now." And so the more specific you can get ... This ties into, uh, chunking bias, which is a, just a cognitive bias of how our brains work. If you can get something really concrete and easy to execute on, your conversion rate goes up a lot. I think we've had something like...... thr- more than 3,000 specific investor asks that I've sent people. And I think our conversion rate is maybe 50% from that group, but pretty high.

Harry Stebbings 36:57 Is that good, do you think?

Sam Corcos 36:58 There are things that some people just aren't going to be able to deliver on, and that's okay. Guess from the exposure that I've had to other founders, that they probably send something in the range of five requests per year. And so something in the range of 1,500 conversions is probably a lot better than, than is average. So, (laughs) you know, the... in terms of what the hit rate is, it's maybe lower than average, but you end up getting

Sam Corcos 37:23 a lot more value from it.

Harry Stebbings 37:24 I find that when it comes to, like, sales pipeline in particular, share a Google Sheet with the companies that you wanna speak to, the specific person within the company-

Sam Corcos 37:31 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 37:31 ... hyperli- hyperlink their LinkedIn so it's-

Sam Corcos 37:33 Totally.

Harry Stebbings 37:34 ... super easy for me to go, "Oh, shit, actually I do know three people with him." And then also say like, "Hey, put your name alongside it, so that people know that you've got it and no one else does." And what you create then is this, like, social competition dynamic of like, "Oh my God, Sam's got a load of... L- geez, Sam is really good, huh?"

Sam Corcos 37:53 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 37:53 And then when I'm another investor, I go on that sheet and I'm like, "Shit, I should bring Sam into more rounds 'cause he fucking works for his company."

Sam Corcos 37:58 Yeah, yeah.

Harry Stebbings 37:59 How do you create that accountability dynamic within ValueAdd?

Sam Corcos 38:03 Even more work you can do is you can go into their each of their LinkedIns and find all of their mutual connections with anyone at this firm, and you can say, "We think these five people would be the best contact and you're one degree separated from them. Could you reach out to any of them and help us get one step closer?"

Harry Stebbings 38:21 Hmm.

Sam Corcos 38:21 And so the more work that you're willing to do for them, the m- higher likelihood that they will be able to deliver on it.

Harry Stebbings 38:27 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 38:27 So, I think always have a clear understanding of what it is that you need as a company. Um, I would say another is, uh, setting clear expectations early is another one that I think people miss out on where they just take money from whoever is willing to give them money. But the reality is that not everyone is going to deliver value. If, if it is really an expectation of you that your investors will be engaged and respond to your emails and participate to some degree, you should set that as a clear expectation and say, "This is what we expect from our investors. If that's not you, totally okay, but this, this is probably not the right company."

Harry Stebbings 39:05 Do you agree with Vinod Khosla that 90% of VCs actually detract value?

Sam Corcos 39:10 I'd have to think about it. I would say that it's a little bit challenging because we interact with mostly operators and angels, and so I'm not sure they even really qualify as VCs, and they've been super value additive. And the only real institutional capital that we have, we work with a16z, and they have this whole services model that's been incredibly high leverage.

Harry Stebbings 39:33 Hmm.

Sam Corcos 39:34 I think, uh, we did an analysis where they have a tremendous number of operating partners. We did analysis, I think our team has extracted value from, I think, more than 110 of the operating partners from the Andreessen team, were pretty aggressive about finding ways to get value there.

Harry Stebbings 39:53 Can I ask you, ValueAdd teams in venture platforms are actually pretty looked down upon, if we're being honest.

Sam Corcos 39:59 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 40:00 Do you think that's incredibly unfair? And why do you think that is, given the value that they're perf- providing to you?

Sam Corcos 40:08 I think part of the answer is that most firms are not good at it-

Harry Stebbings 40:13 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 40:13 ... is sort of the short answer. I, I think most firms, they understand... When they talk to founders, they say that it's a thing that they want, but they're not very good at delivering on the value. Not a controversial statement to say that the a16z team is the best in the business at doing this.

Harry Stebbings 40:28 Why, why is that? Is it the depth? Is it the breadth? Is it the... What is it that makes them so good?

Sam Corcos 40:35 I think a big part of it is, at least within the health and bio vertical, they have a, a BioHealthHub, which is a Notion doc that just has all of the services that they offer. And so they say, "If you need to do an executive comp study, we can help you with that. If you wanna put your general counsel on an email list with other general counsels in the category, add them to this list. If you want marketing leaders on a list, you can put them here." They have all of these services that are available to you that can prompt more discoverability on what they're able to do. First of all, they have a much larger operating team than other firms. But there are also some smaller firms that we've been able to get a ton of value from. So one is Trust Ventures. They're smaller and they're much more focused on regulatory. And so whenever we have a regulatory strategy question or something that's a little bit more nuanced and challenging, they've been incredibly valuable in thinking through these things.

Harry Stebbings 41:31 What was the best first meeting you've had with an investor?

Sam Corcos 41:34 I would say there are quite a few. The ones that go well are the ones where I can tell they immediately understand what it is that we're going for. There's, uh... I don't remember who said this, but, uh, when you're fundraising, you're a prophet, not a missionary. You have the vision and you're trying to get people who already get it and are already bought in. You're not trying to convert people to your religion. It is an uphill battle when you're trying to explain to an investor and they just don't, they just don't believe that there's a market. Trying to convince them that there is, is an uphill battle. It's probably never gonna work and it's gonna be a lot of toil. And so finding the ones who they've already done the research. They're not, they're not taking this meeting as like a random thing of, "Oh, well, you know, I gotta fill up my 9:00 AM slot." They're taking it because they're already looking for a company in this category because they've done their homework and they get it. A- and this is, uh, an interesting thing is we share a lot of material in advance of these investor meetings. What's so fascinating is you would assume that the people who have the most time to read through these things are like the principals at the lower tier investors because they have, they have lots of time. The reality when we did our series A raise or our, our seed raise, we can tell because you can see in Notion who reads everything, the people who were most engaged was Mike Vernal at Sequoia and Jeff Jordan at Andreessen. They read every document.Jeff actually even fixed some typos, like, deep in, like, a 50-page document. Most of the other people, they would skim it or they wouldn't even bother reading it, and then they would come to the meeting and ask very basic questions that were all answered in all the material I already sent.

Harry Stebbings 43:06 Okay, so I, I, interesting questions here. I say, actually, if it's like early, early meetings, don't send it ahead of time because generally investors look for reasons to say no. "Uh, you know, it's gonna be a retention problem. Uh, it's gonna be this." And they come in with a preconceived notion of, oh, it's healthcare, oh, it's consumer hardware. Let me just fucking sell you this pen. And I, I can bring you the energy that a slide deck can't do. Do you know what I mean?

Sam Corcos 43:32 I hear you. I will say that the number of investors available is effectively infinite, and the amount of time that you have to pitch people is finite. And so if you can get them to say no before you have to spend any time with them, that's actually a win, not a loss. If you can send out enough information and the only meetings you take are the people who get it, who are the most excited and motivated to meet with you, who have already done the homework, so you don't have to repeat yourself and do all the stupid bullshit of, like, "Hey, what, what is your revenue?" It's like, "It's in, I already sent this." It's like, "Well, what's, what's the total addressable market?" "I sent you a whole memo on total ad- did you not read it? I, I can just read out loud all of the material that I sent to you, or you could just read it. Like, it, it's up to you."

Harry Stebbings 44:17 Or I could just do a podcast, fuck

Harry Stebbings 44:19 it. (laughs)

Sam Corcos 44:20 (laughs) Yeah, exactly.

Harry Stebbings 44:21 No, I, look, I, I, I get you there. Should you speak to associates? It's the age-old thing of like, oh, only speak to partners.

Sam Corcos 44:27 I would like to believe that the answer is yes, you should. I, I have friends who are associates and principals at these firms, and, uh, I've tried to get a meeting with a partner through them, and I shared with the principal a whole bunch of information, and they got super excited. They shared it with the partner. The partner said no. And then, like, two weeks later, I meet with the partner, and they have no recollection that the principal shared any of this information with them. And so I don't know even what role they play within these firms, so I think it would depend a lot on the firm. So it's, it's not a knock on the principals. It seems to be more a knock on the industry and how principals and associates function within them.

Harry Stebbings 45:11 I mean, generally speaking, uh, you know, being in the industry, there's kind of two functions or two types. One is, like, the research person who is just incredible depth and analysis, post-meeting, benchmarking, landscape analysis, you name it. And the other is outbound sales prospecting. We can't miss anything, be it all the drinks parties, be it all the events. Nothing gets missed.

Sam Corcos 45:34 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 45:35 Those are the two types that I find. Can I ask, on the operator side, uh, how did you approach minimum check? Sometimes people put in minimum check sizes. How do you feel-

Sam Corcos 45:45 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 45:45 ... about that, and what advice would you give, given Collecting The Best?

Sam Corcos 45:48 If there's one thing I would have done differently is I would have used a roll-up vehicle of some kind to just make the collection easier. Those weren't as common when we did our seed round. It was the round that had the larger number of people in it. Um, having a roll-up vehicle makes it much simpler when you need to get signatures and things like that. I think the, the reality is at some point, depending on the amount of money that you need to raise, there are only so many meetings that are worth the time. If you just do the math, say, if you want to raise a million dollars and you think you have X number of months to do it, you can work backwards from, based on whatever conversion rate you expect. If the minimum check size is $1,000, you're probably never gonna get there. If the minimum check size is 25,000, you can do the math and say, "Yeah, you know, if I take this number of meetings, we can deliver this round in that amount of time." If you're raising $20 million, taking even a $25,000 check is probably not gonna be a high leverage use of time because you need to raise so much more capital.

Harry Stebbings 46:53 I agree. I just hate it when I see minimum check sizes and I'm like, you know what? The 5K check is proportionally incredibly valuable to that software engineer who's a genius when it comes to whatever that specific thing is. And so-

Sam Corcos 47:06 For sure.

Harry Stebbings 47:07 ... do, do you know what I mean? Don't be too prescriptive, I find.

Sam Corcos 47:09 I, I think it depends a lot on what your intention is. If your goal is strictly to raise the amount of capital that you think that you need to raise, then it, it, there, the minimum check size is absolutely the most relevant thing in terms of, uh, valuing your time. But if your goal is to build an army of angels and operators, the minimum check size is much less relevant. And I think exactly to your point, when we did some analysis on who are most ROI positive investors were, one of the biggest categories was early employees at post-IPO companies.

Harry Stebbings 47:43 Hmm.

Sam Corcos 47:43 And these are people who have some amount of capital that they want to deploy, but maybe, you know, $5,000, $10,000, but they also have a lot more capacity to help. And they also know more people that are on the front lines. They tend... If you need to hire somebody who's a really good designer, finding a design lead who is an early employee at a post-IPO company probably knows 10 or 20 really good designers, some of whom might even be looking for their next role. And so for a $5,000 slot in your cap table, you can get a tremendous amount of value from it, but it really only makes sense if you're able to extract value from it and make a process around it.

Harry Stebbings 48:21 Sam, I, you're Mr. Transparent. Um, if, if my question is not followed by a name, it is political.

Sam Corcos 48:30 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 48:30 What was the best first investor meeting that you had?

Sam Corcos 48:36 I think the best first investor meeting that we had was with Moshe Lifschutz.

Harry Stebbings 48:40 Wow, okay, why?

Sam Corcos 48:41 And I think, I think the reason was that he immediately understood the value of what we were doing, and I think it, it unlocked some of the theater and salesmanship that we ended up using in all of our following pitches. This was the first pitch where Josh, my co-founder...... at the start of the meeting, drank a green juice that was called Health Drink on the, on the cart. And halfway into the meeting, he just showed his glucose numbers and showed it just rocketing up during the meeting. And you could just see it in the eyes of Moshe and the other people in the room, like, "This is amazing. I need, I want to get one of these." And they totally understood the value proposition. So some of those early meetings, I think one of the other things is you've got to try lots of different things when you do these investor pitches. If you only have one deck with one pitch, you're doing it wrong. You've got to try different avenues of attack. You've got to try different language. You've got to try different pitches to determine which of these work, and eventually you narrow in on, like, these three talking points always work, and then you get really good at it.

Harry Stebbings 49:51 How important is theater? Like you said, that kind of the exhibition of it. It's a performance in some ways.

Sam Corcos 49:57 Totally.

Harry Stebbings 49:57 How important is that versus no, no, no, natural and discu- discursive conversational?

Sam Corcos 50:03 I think it's going to depend a lot on the type of business that you are and what stage that you're in.

Harry Stebbings 50:07 Yeah.

Sam Corcos 50:07 I think if you're trying to pitch a big vision for the future, theater is absolutely critical. If you're a B2B SaaS company with like very consistent growth numbers that's super boring, like all you really care about is CAC to LTV.

Harry Stebbings 50:22 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 50:22 And that should just be your only slide, is like, "Here's our CAC to LTV and here's our growth rate, and we expect this to continue indefinitely."

Harry Stebbings 50:29 Can you imagine being like a series C payroll company then, like halfway through, "And look-"

Sam Corcos 50:34 Yeah. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 50:34 ... "look at that number-"

Sam Corcos 50:36 Yeah. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 50:36 ... "on cell C4, weren't expecting that."

Sam Corcos 50:39 Exactly. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 50:41 (laughs) That i- that is amazing. Um, Moshe is great. When you look at the investors that didn't provide value, what is the reason that they didn't, do you think? You asked too much of them? They didn't know what... they didn't know what you wanted? They couldn't add value? What was it?

Sam Corcos 51:00 I think some of this just maybe ties into, maybe we'll go back to the Vinod comment of like, some of them just aren't good.

Harry Stebbings 51:06 (laughs) Okay, so when you look at that, some of them just aren't good. Listen, you know, it always happens. You have people who you thought would add value and don't end up.

Sam Corcos 51:15 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 51:15 What did you get wrong there?

Sam Corcos 51:16 It's a question of how much time are you willing to invest in having a 0% failure rate? And I think the answer is you're going to have some failure rate. We, we keep track of all of these things, on how many emails we send, what the conversion rate is on those requests. And like we have several people on the list that I've sent them 17 requests and they've converted on zero of them. You know, we set very clear expectations before they started and they're like, "Oh yeah, we're super engaged. We- we're gonna help you with all of these things." And as soon as they get allocation, they just ghost you. You know, some percentage of people are like that. In theory, I think what I could have done to verify that they would be value-add is I could have gone to other companies that they've invested in and I could have asked. But is it worth it for a $25,000 check? Probably not.

Harry Stebbings 52:05 The one that I do say, like one that is worth it is literally if you have half an hour, go to Crunchbase, go see their other angel investments, if they do many, and if you've got a good founder network, like I'm sure you do, um, or many serial founders, I mean, if it's a case of just WhatsApping, "Yo, um, Moshe, is he good? Yeah. Great. Love him. Eh." Do you know what I mean? Like you'll get answers very quickly.

Sam Corcos 52:26 Yeah. I think it's a question of where the ROI is on those. I definitely do diligence on some of these investments. I think it really depends on how much the investment is and what sort of a role you expect that person will play. If you're taking on a board member, you need to do the amount of diligence that you would do if you're considering marrying this person.

Harry Stebbings 52:46 What did you do for Jeff then?

Sam Corcos 52:47 We did a lot. I talked to... He's, he's been around for a long time, so there are a lot of people who have direct exposure to him that I was able to reach out to. It's like, "Hey, Jeff was on your board for five years, good or bad experience?" And everyone had just overwhelmingly positive things to say about working with Jeff. And so that was a really strong indicator.

Harry Stebbings 53:10 Do you worry that with someone like Jeff, you're... he has such weight to his words, he's seen so much. Bluntly, who are you to say, "No, Jeff, I, I appreciate your opinion, but you're wrong and I'm going to do something different?"

Sam Corcos 53:24 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 53:24 Do you worry that it's too easy to just succumb to what they say even when they might be wrong?

Sam Corcos 53:29 I think for maybe early stage founders, that is a very serious risk. I think once you've been around for long enough, you realize that nobody knows anything. (laughs) They don't know anything. You don't know anything. Like you're just making your best guess. And so you should always take, take what they say seriously, because they have a lot more exposure than you do. But don't take it like it's gospel, because there's a pretty good chance they're wrong. There's also a pretty good chance that you're wrong. So you just need to figure out how to get those cycles as fast as possible. There are some investors who have different reputations, like Keith from Founders Fund is known for being pretty full contact, and I talked to some people who really did not like working with him, but they didn't like working him... They didn't like working with him for reasons that I would actually enjoy working with him, where he's very direct, he doesn't hold back, and some people don't like that level of just direct communication. I actually vastly prefer that over the more passive hands-off approach.

Harry Stebbings 54:31 I think honestly, the best people do. Yeah. (laughs)

Sam Corcos 54:34 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 54:36 Yeah. I- I've, I've spoken to Keith many times about this, by the way, and we're just like, "Yeah, but they're just not the best." So...

Sam Corcos 54:41 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 54:42 I mean, I can sugarcoat it and say-

Sam Corcos 54:44 Yeah. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 54:44 ... it's great, but you know, 3% retention is not great. Uh, speaking of ROI on time, uh, you're an optimizer to the extreme. We mentioned the Tim Ferriss discussion. I'm intrigued. I think a lot about like high performance and what it actually means to me, and it changes over time. What does high performance mean to you, Sam?

Sam Corcos 55:04 I think a plausible definition might be the ability to deliver...... on what objectives that you set for yourself. It's like, you call a shot and then you deliver on that shot. It means that you're right a lot. But then again, you could set the wrong goals. If you're, if you're delivering on the wrong goals, is that technically high performance? I would say probably not. So performance in many ways is just winning. It's on being right a lot. That's what high performance means.

Harry Stebbings 55:33 I often find like actually you just underestimate yourself a lot. Um, I, I would never ... If I was setting goals for myself, I would not have thought that I could be where I am now. (laughs)

Sam Corcos 55:46 Sure. Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 55:46 And so like hitting the goals would've been like an associate at like, you know, a, a firm. Um, which by the way would be terrible 'cause I can't count.

Sam Corcos 55:53 Yeah. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 55:55 Uh, (laughs) but like, do you know what I mean? So like how do you think about actually you consistently underestimate yourself?

Sam Corcos 56:00 I think some of it comes from fear. I think that's where it comes from, is people don't like failing at things. And it's something that holds people back on really just their entire life trajectory, is this fear of failure, of being perceived as a failure. And so you can set much more cautious goals of slight incremental things that you can count as a win, but ultimately this ties back to our earlier conversation around risk. A lot of these things are much less risky than people would expect. And so taking the really big swing, even if you fail, you will have learned so much more than if you take the easy path of, like, getting a job at Google or, like, working at McKinsey or something along those lines.

Harry Stebbings 56:45 I, I agree totally in terms of that, you know, uh, I often ask myself, what's the worst thing that happens here? And like the worst thing is not nearly as bad as you think.

Sam Corcos 56:52 Exactly.

Harry Stebbings 56:53 You normally project in your, when you're kind of lying and then like, and then I will end up being, you know, without a home base asking Vinay actually-

Sam Corcos 57:01 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 57:01 ... for a spare room. And that was quite fun. You enjoyed that. (laughs) Um-

Sam Corcos 57:04 Right.

Harry Stebbings 57:05 Question. I, I again, I listened to Tim's show with you. I wanna ask you, for someone listening today who wants to get more out of their time, what would you say that they should do? What have you done that was actionable that allowed you to get more out of the limited time you have?

Sam Corcos 57:20 I think the ... Honestly, if, if you were to talk about first steps, it's knowing how you spend your time now. That's, that's really the first step, is if you wanna get more out of your time, where is your time going today?

Harry Stebbings 57:32 Okay, so we do a calendar audit?

Sam Corcos 57:34 Yep. Do a calen- Keep track of just ss- how you spent your time. There are some tools you can install that are helpful. I think Rise is one, RescueTime is another. Or you can just do it manually. I still just do it manually. If I spent an hour on, uh, email, I have a one hour block that I retroactively update for email. And so just keeping track of how you spend your time is really important. You might discover, this is what I discovered the first time I did this when I turned on RescueTime, I don't know, eight years ago, I was spending way more time on Facebook and social media than I was expecting. If you had asked me to make a prediction, I would have said, "I don't know, it's like 20 minutes a day." It was really, like, three or four hours a day. Yeah. I had a problem and I did not recognize it. Every time I would walk, like, in between things, I would just quickly s- do some scrolling on my phone. I had this, uh, this, uh, compulsive twitch where when I would open Chrome, I would do Command-T F Return, and I would just do it compulsively. And I would open Facebook without, without even realizing it. It wasn't until I installed a website blocker and I would just kept getting this, like, website blocked. They're like, "Website blocked?" It's like, oh wow, I just compulsively opened Facebook without even realizing it. And so just recognizing how you're spending your time is really the first thing. It's just knowing where your time is going. If you can do that, the rest of the stuff is actually pretty easy.

Harry Stebbings 58:58 Okay. So we do that, we analyze the time, we have this breakdown of how we spend our time across these different activities. What do we do then? And what's been the most impactful for you?

Sam Corcos 59:07 One of the biggest is using your calendar as your primary to-do list. That's probably the biggest unlock for me in terms of just being realistic about how much I can deliver in the course of a week.

Harry Stebbings 59:21 And so that means if you have to write the investor update, you'll block out that time in the calendar very clearly.

Sam Corcos 59:26 That's right.

Harry Stebbings 59:26 What hap- What happens when things take longer, when emergencies happen? 'Cause I do this too, but then, fuck, there's a deal on and that whole morning set- aside for the investor update, that's diligence and reference calls.

Sam Corcos 59:36 Yeah. For sure. I think the answer is you have to create some amount of extra space in your calendar that buffers any changes. There's nothing worse than one slight change happens and then you have this cascade of everything gets pushed out for, like, two months because you have one small change. I think it'll depend a lot on how variable your schedule is. I think in the investor world it's more variable because it's like the hurry up and wait dynamic, where it goes from nothing's happening to all of a sudden we have to sprint for three days. And so creating maybe 50%, maybe even 75% open space in each given day. And then if you have time, it's way easier to pull something from tomorrow into today than it is to push things back multiple months. So, uh, that's probably the way that I would go about it.

Harry Stebbings 1:00:25 Can I ask you, do you worry about having a child? And what I mean by that is like, you know what? They shit on you at 3:00 AM, you lie in as a result and miss the 7:00 AM meeting or whatever that is, they create just time things. (laughs)

Sam Corcos 1:00:39 Yeah. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:00:40 I love your time blocks intensely, Sam. Good luck. (laughs) Do you worry about that?

Sam Corcos 1:00:45 You know, it's, it's interesting because in theory you would think that's the case. I would say in practice every friend that I know who has had children ends up becoming more scheduled and they end up taking scheduling much more seriously because their time is so much more limited and they have to block off more time for things and they have to be very, very intentional. In theory, you can see how that might happen. But in practice you end up getting much more scheduled.

Harry Stebbings 1:01:11 What elements of parenting are you nervous about?... I, I'm nervous about being mediocre, if I'm honest.

Sam Corcos 1:01:17 (laughs) Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:01:17 Like, you, you, we're both fucking machines now.

Sam Corcos 1:01:20 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:01:20 When you've got a kid, it's t- you're tired. Your mind is on, like, they're not gaining enough weight in the first six weeks. Your wife is like, "I, I don't like you anymore. You're not shagging." Take that bit out.

Sam Corcos 1:01:32 Yeah. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:01:33 You know? Like, as worries me. What are... What are you nervous about?

Sam Corcos 1:01:38 I think the biggest part is I'm, I'm most nervous about my ability to stay present. That's the thing that I'm most nervous about. I have maybe a 15-minute attention span when I'm spending time with other people's children. (laughs) There's, there's only so long that I can find it amusing to play with a two-year-old. I, I've been told from friends of mine who are on the other side of this, that when it's your kids, it's just totally different and it's unexplainable.

Harry Stebbings 1:02:03 It's actually very variable.

Sam Corcos 1:02:05 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:02:05 As a professional interviewer, I can tell you, 'cause I ask th- a lot of people, very variable and it's binary. One, it's like it's so magical and it's so different, which I totally believe and see. And the other is, there are phases of your child's life-

Sam Corcos 1:02:17 Yeah, right.

Harry Stebbings 1:02:17 ... you will engage with more actively.

Sam Corcos 1:02:20 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:02:20 And a lot struggle with the naught to four-

Sam Corcos 1:02:23 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:02:23 ... or naught to three where it's just less intellectually stim- You can't have any form of conversation. So, I think it's like being willing to accept the imperfection of stages.

Sam Corcos 1:02:33 Yeah, definitely. That's, that's probably on my mind of the, the only thing that really concerns me in any way is just being able to manage that dynamic.

Harry Stebbings 1:02:43 Do you worry about the relationship with your wife changing?

Sam Corcos 1:02:46 I think if you don't worry about it, you're fooling yourself, because the statistics are very real. Um, I wish I could remember the exact number, but something in the range of 80% of people say that their marriage is worse after having kids.

Harry Stebbings 1:03:00 Mm.

Sam Corcos 1:03:00 So, knowing that that is a very real phenomenon and trying to get ahead of that, I think is super important. So, coming up with routines and rituals to make sure that you don't lose that level of engagement, I think, is gonna be really important.

Harry Stebbings 1:03:15 Do you have any in mind that will help?

Sam Corcos 1:03:17 We do a weekly date night, which we have scheduled on Wednesdays. We do also, every Saturday, we have scheduled family priorities where we have a running Notion doc of logistics, things that we argued about that we wanna talk about. Just dedicated time just to us, where we're present and talking about what's on our minds. As the empty space is harder to fill with time for each other, you have to figure out how to make that work.

Harry Stebbings 1:03:46 You're a very strange personality.

Sam Corcos 1:03:49 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:03:49 And what I mean by that, in, in the nicest way, is like, you have this spontaneous, "I'm gonna travel. I'm gonna stay with, uh, a friend on their sofa and not book a hotel." And then you also have this incredibly rigid optimizer mind of, "I'm gonna do Notion docs on what we discussed last time and reach a conclusion on." D- do you see that weird dichotomy in yourself?

Sam Corcos 1:04:10 I actually don't think of it as a dichotomy, because I think there is a larger principle that explains all of it that most people struggle with, which is-

Harry Stebbings 1:04:20 Sure.

Sam Corcos 1:04:20 ... I try to be very intentional with my time. And I think most people are not very intentional with how they spend their time.

Harry Stebbings 1:04:28 But that goes against the spontaneous, going back to what we've said. If you go to Paris, if you try to be intentional, everything will be planned to optimize for value extraction from the city of Paris.

Sam Corcos 1:04:37 If that is your intent. I think that's really what it comes down to. If your intent is to explore and to find new things that you otherwise would not have, like, I want to explore a place and be open to whatever the universe has in store for me, and we're just gonna see what happens. I'm just gonna... My intent, sometimes when I go to a new city, my intent will be to meet 10 strangers-

Harry Stebbings 1:05:01 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 1:05:01 ... and just go up to people on the street and just talk to them and see what happens. And it's a very uncomfortable thing to do, but you often find people are much more interesting than we usually give them credit. And so, intentionality, really in all things, I think is where, where that comes from.

Harry Stebbings 1:05:16 In terms of intentionality, I think finding the right partner is a very difficult one. What do you think are the biggest mistakes that people make when trying to find their romantic partner? And I heard that you had a list for finding your romantic partner.

Sam Corcos 1:05:30 Yeah. (laughs) I did a lot of reflection in a previous point in my life, and I, I wrote many, many pages of thoughts on what I'm looking for, what my values are. I ended up with a one-pager. I, I consolidated it down to really six major bullet points, with a handful of other ideas in there. I found that incredibly helpful to just recognize what is important to me, what are my deal breakers. I think the biggest mistakes that people make is they treat dating like it's a sales problem rather than a matching problem.

Harry Stebbings 1:06:01 Hmm. What do you mean?

Sam Corcos 1:06:02 Like, ultimately... Uh, as in, you're not trying to convince this person to like you. There were... People have different personalities. You really... Uh, I, I have found that it's much more effective to just be very direct and transparent about who you are and what you're looking for. So, one of the things that I... When I went through this period of much more intentional dating, I had this realization that I'm dying, and that I only have so much time in my life to reach the goals that I want to reach around having kids and starting a family. When you do the math, let's say you wanna be married with kids by the time you're 35. If you then do the math on how many shots on goal you have to find your romantic partner for the rest of your life, it's actually not very many. (laughs) So, being much more intentional about how you spend your time and who you are dating and how you're, um, how you're making that assessment, I think is actually super, super important and generally underinvested in, based on how important it is.

Harry Stebbings 1:07:00 What was your list? Like, what mattered to you?

Sam Corcos 1:07:04 Yeah. I, I can send you the one-pager, if you're curious. I think-

Harry Stebbings 1:07:07 Yeah.

Sam Corcos 1:07:07 ... I would, I would often show it on the first date. And I would also... I, I would state really early on that-... my goal is to be engaged within six months, or separated. I, I don't wanna have this linger on for much longer than that. Usually you have enough data points within about six months to know if it's the right fit.

Harry Stebbings 1:07:26 You know a thing, you're always in the honeymoon period when six months. By then they move, then they move in and they leave the wet towel on the floor and-

Sam Corcos 1:07:33 Yeah. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:07:34 ... you have to eat the disgusting granola that you hate and she's also gluten-free and you've just had enough of that fucking bread.

Sam Corcos 1:07:39 Oh, it's a question of what matters to you. If, if the granola's a deal breaker, (laughs) then, then I guess it is. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:07:46 Why did you break up? It was the granola.

Sam Corcos 1:07:48 Yeah, that's right.

Harry Stebbings 1:07:49 Actually this is a no-go.

Sam Corcos 1:07:50 That's right.

Harry Stebbings 1:07:50 Um, oh, but if you were to summarize like one or two from the list that really mattered and have played out in the relationship, what would they be?

Sam Corcos 1:07:58 Uh, so for me, one of the most important ones is open-mindedness. That's something that I've learned personally is just very important. And I specified needs to be somebody who can be friends with a Trump voter and a Biden voter. And if you can't do that, it's probably gonna be very challenging because I have a very diverse and interesting group of friends. And if you cannot tolerate people with different opinions, it's not gonna work. I've been down that path in previous relationships and it's not, it's not the right path for me.

Harry Stebbings 1:08:27 How do you test that out early? Can you just be as simple as asking it? 'Cause everyone's gonna be like, "No, I'm 35."

Sam Corcos 1:08:31 Yeah. Yeah, so if you, if you share these things very early, like sharing the six-month goal in your one-pager, I had at least a half a dozen dates that ended within 10 minutes. Like I-

Harry Stebbings 1:08:43 Well, well, how did it end in 10 minutes?

Sam Corcos 1:08:45 I, I shared the one-pager and they looked at it and they just said, "This is not me." And I would say, "Oh, okay. Well, I appreciate you telling me. And, uh, I, I'd really I'd like to be respectful of your time and I don't think that this is a match. So if it's okay with you, I think we can probably call it here." And-

Harry Stebbings 1:09:03 What did they say?

Sam Corcos 1:09:04 Almost every single one of 'em said like, "That's refreshing that I didn't have to waste the next two or three hours in a date that I was not going to enjoy."

Harry Stebbings 1:09:13 (sighs)

Sam Corcos 1:09:13 And then I'd just go back home and go back to work, so...

Harry Stebbings 1:09:16 (laughs) Oh my god, that is amazing. I, uh, no, I'm British so I would say like, "Oh, no, let's have ho-

Sam Corcos 1:09:22 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:09:22 ... let's have dinner. Let me, you know...

Sam Corcos 1:09:23 Right. (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:09:24 Let me try and convince someone I don't like to like me back. Um...

Sam Corcos 1:09:28 Right.

Harry Stebbings 1:09:28 It's just like fundraising.

Sam Corcos 1:09:29 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:09:29 Um... (laughs)

Sam Corcos 1:09:30 Exactly.

Harry Stebbings 1:09:31 Um, uh, final one. When we apply this to actual co-founder dynamics, what do you think are the biggest mistakes you see in co-founder dynamics today? You've had a couple of different relationships in that respect. What are the biggest mistakes you see?

Sam Corcos 1:09:45 Uh, I think one is not really knowing who your co-founder is.

Harry Stebbings 1:09:49 Hmm. What do you mean by that?

Sam Corcos 1:09:52 So the co-founders that we have at Levels, they are either people that I've personally known for many years, or one degree separated within my network so that I have a lot of data points on the quality of the person. I know a specific person who started a company with somebody who ended up embezzling a bunch of money from the company, and now their reputation is tainted because the CEO was a fraud, and it's because they jumped into it without really doing their diligence. It seemed like a very new and exciting idea. But if they had done some diligence talking to other people, like, "What do you think about this person?" they probably would've known that this would've been a real problem. So I think that's a big one. Co-founder dating is real. Treat it like you're gonna marry this person, because you almost are in terms of how impactful that relationship is on the rest of your life. It's not quite as important, but it's still very important. I think another is not setting super clear expectations early around the role of the CEO. That's another super important one that I've seen break companies apart.

Harry Stebbings 1:10:51 Should co-founders have equal equity?

Sam Corcos 1:10:53 I think it depends a lot on the situation. As a rule, I would say no, it's not required. I think it depends a lot on subject matter expertise. It depends a lot on also how you view the definition of what a co-founder is. If it's more of a label of was there at the founding of the company, versus somebody who carries some other weight, it's, it's more of a philosophical, uh, question that different people will have different answers to.

Harry Stebbings 1:11:21 What could you do today to be a better co-founder?

Sam Corcos 1:11:23 If there are things that I can do better, they are unknown unknowns right now.

Harry Stebbings 1:11:28 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 1:11:29 They are, they are things-

Harry Stebbings 1:11:31 I, I don't know what I could do better. I just, I'm great.

Sam Corcos 1:11:34 It's not, it's not that I'm great, it's that I, I'm not aware of any blind spots that I have that I'm not actively addressing. So a really good example of this is, I think this might have even been as recently as yesterday. I found myself building resentment towards my co-founder, Josh.

Harry Stebbings 1:11:50 Mm-hmm.

Sam Corcos 1:11:51 And it was really, yesterday was the first time that I recognized that feeling. This isn't a thing that'd been bubbling up for months. It was just like, "That's weird. I got a message from him today and I feel resentful."

Harry Stebbings 1:12:03 Why?

Sam Corcos 1:12:03 And so... So I, I didn't totally know why, and so I, I said, "Josh, let's get on the phone. We need to talk." And so I said, "Hey, Josh. I got this message from you and I don't totally know where this is coming from, but for the first time in a very long time, I felt resentful." So I, I had negative feelings come up when I got this message. Like, "Let's try to figure out where this is coming from." And we talked about it for like an hour. We eventually got to the bottom of where it came from, which was there were a lot of other conversations going on that I was quite frustrated by, and this one felt like it was related to that. And it felt like he was, I don't know, taking sides against me in something, and like building more momentum around making my job more difficult. But actually, it was just completely unrelated. And so getting to the bottom of that and just being able to talk about it, and just it resolved it very quickly where we realized there was no negative intent. He wanted to actually support with this thing, it was just not super well-worded and the timing kind of lined up in an awkward way that made me feel a certain way. So being able to talk about those feelings, even if you don't totally understand them in a really open and vulnerable way with your co-founder is really, really important.

Harry Stebbings 1:13:18 When you have an issue, you should discuss it straight away.

Sam Corcos 1:13:22 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:13:22 Agree or not?

Sam Corcos 1:13:24 Absolutely.

Harry Stebbings 1:13:25 ... I disagree. (laughs) So my... That, that was like a, a discursive statement in, in an essay.

Sam Corcos 1:13:31 (laughs)

Harry Stebbings 1:13:31 But it's like, you know, sometimes you're fricking tired and your child hasn't slept and your wife hates you. And it... Just not now, Sam. Okay? And other times, "You know what? I'm calm. We can have a quiet, thoughtful discussion. We're in the right place. It's quiet, it's not busy." I think it's important to pick your moment.

Sam Corcos 1:13:51 Yeah. Yeah. I, I would say immediately is a relative term. Like, the timescales we're talk... I'm not saying, like, the moment that it happens, you need to call them. Within a reasonable amount of time. Like, most people let these things linger for months or years before they bring it up. And by that point, it's far too late.

Harry Stebbings 1:14:09 Sure.

Sam Corcos 1:14:10 I think if, if you realize that you're cranky and you haven't slept, waiting until the next day is totally fine. I think the-

Harry Stebbings 1:14:17 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 1:14:17 ... the timescales matter here. Most people wait for months or years, not days or hours.

Harry Stebbings 1:14:23 No, I, uh, I totally ... Uh, it's a brilliant... Yeah. There's a Jordan Peterson and he does like, you know... Like take the piss sometimes and it's like, "X is a relative term."

Sam Corcos 1:14:34 Yeah. (laughs) Right.

Harry Stebbings 1:14:34 And it's kind of like he, he asks, you know... I think it was like, you know, uh, "What is a down round?"

Sam Corcos 1:14:39 Yeah.

Harry Stebbings 1:14:39 And then he goes, "Well, down round, it's a relative thing that you abstract-"

Sam Corcos 1:14:43 Right.

Harry Stebbings 1:14:43 "... into the universe." Too funny. Final one before we do a quick fire. What could you do to be a better husband?

Sam Corcos 1:14:48 I think being more present is something that I'm constantly working on. I have a hard time detaching from work. And so my, my wife, she's very good about bringing this to my attention when, like, we're-

Harry Stebbings 1:15:01 (laughs)

Sam Corcos 1:15:01 We're on a walk and she's like, "You're not here, are you?" (laughs) And the answer is no. I, my mind is somewhere completely el- like, completely in a different universe right now. And so-

Harry Stebbings 1:15:12 Should, should you be on the walk at all then, or sh- like, is it good to try or is it good to say, "You know what, darling? You go, I'm, I'm just somewhere else today."

Sam Corcos 1:15:22 Y- if