How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook

I just feel like no one's being honest in teaching founders this. Be early. Don't order the most expensive thing on the menu. For a video call, have an appropriate background. Don't smell like shit.

Tell me why you decided to spend time teaching people proper etiquette.

You have a lot of really young people, they've been holed up in a room coding, and they show up encouraged by Silicon Valley to be, in some ways, abrasive on purpose. You want to be able to show up in a way where people are like, "Okay, this is someone I can work with and trust."

Etiquette is a skill for how to show up in a room with a low heart rate.

You're at the Kleiner Perkins holiday party. You have all the venture capitalists in the world, and all the CEOs. You're at your first company. You feel like, "Oh, my God, this is my shot, and I need to convince this person of that, and make this connection," and it becomes very transactional. If you show up like a little Energizer bunny, you're gonna scare everyone off. You're gonna project totally the wrong vibe.

This isn't your one shot. You'll have other opportunities.

You kind of want to show up with the self-confidence and the calm of abundance. This is part of the story, this is not the entire story. [gentle music]

Today, my guest is Sam Lessin, partner at Slow Ventures, previous VP of Product at Facebook, and two-time founder. This is an unconventional episode that may surprise you in how interesting and useful it is to your life. I asked Sam to come on the pod and talk about proper etiquette. You'll hear the backstory of how Sam got into this stuff, but this is turning into a big thing for him. He's teaching classes around the world. He published a book on proper etiquette. I love his framing for why etiquette matters, that the goal of learning good etiquette is to show up in a room with a low heart rate. And we cover all kinds of social interactions, like introductions, small talk, meals, meetings, and basically all of the most important things you need to know when it comes to etiquette. I personally found these tips really, really useful, and I learned a lot from this conversation and from his book. Sam is also hilarious and so fun, and I hope you enjoy this very unique episode. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 19 incredible products, including a year free of Lovable, Replit, Bolt, Gamma, n8n, Linear, Devon, PostHog, Superhuman, Descript, WhisperFlow, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, MagicPad, Andrejcast, ChapAI, Mobbin, and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Sam Lessin, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by 10Web, the company that pioneered AI website-building before ChatGPT. In the last three years, over two million websites have been generated with 10Web's vibe-coding platform. 10Web's vibe-coding platform is a powerful way to build websites. Think of it as Lovable for WordPress, front-end and back-end. Users can build any website at any complexity: e-commerce, portfolios, information websites, blogs, and it comes with a WordPress admin panel and thousands of ready-to-use plugins. 10Web also offers website generation as an API as a service for SaaS companies, marketplaces, hosting providers, MSPs, and agencies. SaaS companies can embed it via API, so that users can launch AI-generated sites directly inside of their platform, connected to their own data. Agencies and MSPs can get a white label dashboard to manage clients and resell under their brand. Hosting providers can self-host the API builder on their own infrastructure. Check it out at 10web.io/lenny, and use code Lenny for exclusive free credits and 30% off API or white label solutions. That's the number 10W-E-B.io/lenny. Vibe-coding platform as an API. Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers. To thrive in the AI era, organizations need to adapt quickly, but many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like: Which tools are working? How are they being used? What's actually driving value? DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift. With DX, companies like Dropbox, Booking.com, Adyen, and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers, and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity. To learn more, visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny. That's getdx.com/lenny. [gentle music] Sam, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.