On metabolic health, running a remote company, bio-observability and more.
Sam Corcos is a Co-founder at Levels, a company on a mission to solve the metabolic health crisis. Most recently he was the Co-founder and Head of Technology at CarDash, a company making automotive repair and maintenance convenient and transparent. He previously started Sightline Maps with Ben Judge, where he worked with Special Operations Command to develop mapping technology under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement. He’s also written a book on building distributed, concurrent web services using React and Phoenix called Learn Phoenix. As if that wasn’t enough, he worked at the oncology center at UC Davis for two summers, co authoring a paper during his time there which has too many words I can’t pronounce in it, so I’ll leave you to read more at corcos.io.
Sam Corcos
[TRANSCRIPT IS AUTO-GENERATED]
[00:00:00] Alex: Sam Corcos is a co-founder at levels, a company on a mission to solve the metabolic health crisis. Most recently, he was the co-founder and head of technology at cardash, a company making automotive repair and maintenance convenient and transparent. He previously started Sightline maps with Ben judge, where he worked with special operations command to develop mapping technology under a cooperative research and development agreement.
He's also written a book on building distributed concurrent web services, using react and Phoenix called Learn Phoenix. As if that wasn't enough, he worked at the oncology center at UC Davis for two summers, co-authoring a paper during his time there, which has too many words I can't pronounce in it so I'll leave it to you to read more at corcos.io.
Today we talked about metabolic health, running a remote company, bio observability, and more. Hope you enjoy.
[00:00:50] Alex: Alrighty. You want to kick things off here?
[00:00:53] Sam: Yeah, sure.
[00:00:54] Alex: So to start things off and you know, before we get into the details, I think it'd be a good Time to sort of set the stage here. There's a stat that level's put out that 88% of Americans have at least one marker of metabolic dysfunction, meaning only 12% are considered metabolically healthy.
And so for anybody listening, who isn't maybe familiar with levels or what you guys do, I'd first like to ask how you usually describe the company and very broadly why metabolic health matters?
[00:01:23] Sam: Yeah right now, our focus is on showing you how food affects your health and the mechanism through which we do that is using biosensors.
We're currently using continuous glucose monitors because that's the best technology that's available to show you what is happening inside your body. In real time. We also do supplemental blood work and nutritionists and functional medicine doctors with through a marketplace as well.
But the real focus is on is on biosensors. The goal is to show you cause and effect. When you eat something, most people rely on dogma or some dietary philosophy. Loosely grounded in facts, but it's, it's hard for people to know, is, is Quito. The right answer is vegan, the right answer. There's truth to all of these things, but it's very hard to know unless you actually have a feedback loop that shows you how, how your choices are affecting you.
So that's the goal of the company is really to solve this. We're still pretty early. We're still in closed beta. Hopefully we'll open up the beta by the end of this year. We're not in any particular rush. It's really just making sure that we've nailed product market fit, but also we also want to make sure that we've solved, fundamental incentive alignment.
This is something that I. One of the benefits of being a fourth time founder and having been through this the hard way is that growth is not always a good thing. Which sounds counter intuitive to a lot of people who haven't been through it, but growth can be an intoxicated. Once you are in growth mode and the, the the line starts going up into the right very quickly.
It just sucks up all of the energy of the company. Everyone wants to be on growth projects and people don't want to do product development anymore. And then you start focusing on your end resources on scaling and you start focusing everything on sales. And so sometimes if you're not intentional about.
Growth can be the first stages of death for company. It is when you stop iterating, you stop improving loss of version sets in, and you're no longer willing to take big risks. I, I try to fight against this culturally within our company by by, by setting unrealistically bad expectations for things like.
I I told Marillo recently for a project that he's where he's one of our engineers that that there was a, a product, there was a feature that had been stagnant for several months, and I really wanted this to get shipped and we kept polishing it and we kept the scope kept increasing. And I basically told Mirella, I don't care what it is.
I want the shift by the end of the month, our target is to make something that is so bad that we lose 20% of our users. That's the goal. I want it to be so bad that we lose 20% of our users. And that would be fine with me. Just get it shipped. And of course we got to shift and it, it wasn't great. We didn't lose any.
And then we quickly followed up and made it better. And, but you can see how the loss aversion kicks in. And you're like, well, what if, what if something bad happens? What if it's not as good? What if it's a regression at when you're early, you just have to be okay with that. And you have to just move quickly and you have to try as many things as possible.
So a lot of what I'm doing right now is just culturally fighting against that kind of thing. The, the inertia of. Early indications of success can really be toxic to a company. So we're, we're still very early. We're about 35 people on the team now. We are hiring, I think, 30 more engineers in the next six to 12 months.
So it's going to be. It's going to be a wild ride and 20, 22
[00:05:27] Alex: exciting stuff, you know? So second, second. And last question is sort of set the stage here. You seem very, very, very focused on products. What's your vision for the future of levels? Is that something you spend a lot of time thinking about?
[00:05:41] Sam: Yeah. The, the vision for the future of the product is to solve the tracing layer of biological observability. And what that means is.
Once multi-module sensors become a reality, which will probably happen in the next roughly five years. It's being able to show you how your choices affect your health, and that can be anything from food, which is a huge part of it. It can also be parts of lifestyle how the. One of the values that a lot of people get from things like whoop had an aura.
I used aura for several months and it was super helpful. I knew this already from reading books where I knew that drinking alcohol before bed is bad, but it has not really clicked for me until I saw the data come back from my ordering, where I realized like, This is actually really bad and I need to stop doing this.
This is not worth it. It's it's once that loop is closed, that is not as when behavior change can it's. You can, you can trust what's in the study, but once you see it in your own data, that's in control theory, it's like a closed loop system where you can really see cause and effect that's the in observability theory, they call that the tracing.
Yeah, it's software. It was all for how that something similar where this function called that function, which called this query was called that function, which then cause the whole thing to explode. Being able to have that for the human body is really the long-term goal of what we're solving in the.
[00:07:28] Alex: Really interesting stuff. You know, another thing that's particularly interesting about levels and something that's gotten a lot more attention, especially as of late is the fact that you guys are totally remote company. You know, having been through the ringer with online college classes, myself, I can say pretty confidently it's not something many people have been able to execute on properly. But you all were remote even before the pandemic hit. Is that right?
Yep. That's right. Since they once.
It's seems to have worked for you all. What would you say are the biggest advantages of remote for
[00:07:58] Sam: levels?
Yeah, I it's definitely a trade off, so I would not say I would not strictly define it in terms of advantages. Like, I, I literally got an email one hour ago from a grape engineering candidate who passed on moving forward in the process for levels because he said. I really appreciate all the material and the transparency.
I'm really looking for a co-located team where I can be with other people. And this is not, this is not a failure. This is actually the success of the process is to make sure people understand the implications. There are major positives, which are especially for engineers or for people who need lots of deep focused work time.
Th there is no better way to do it than remote because I think remote and async are really intertwined. If you want to do remote successful, you have to embrace. Are you sitting chronicity? Our engineers average, I think two meetings per week, which is, yeah. When, when we joke about this internally, when we hear companies have this like regulatory thing where like we're going to do no meeting Mondays and they have like one day per week of no meetings.
And we're like, yeah, we have some meetings rarely. So it's like, we could have no meetings Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and optional meetings on Friday. And that would be just normal for us. So. That's one of the big advantages. Is it forces good habits of documentation? This is, I think one of the reasons why companies are floundering, that some companies are having a really hard time adapting it's because they're taking old systems and they're trying to jam them into what remote is.
And so you end up just spending eight hours a day on zoom calls and that's worse. The way that you solve. This is a fact I was talking to someone the other day who their, their leadership zoom call is like 70 people. And they're all on a zoom call together. And my response to him was what if you just did the one person who was presenting and they just recorded it.
And then they sent it out to everyone and they could watch it on their own time. If it's relevant to them at two X. 'cause that's what we do. We have no we have a rural internally, but we have no meetings of more than three people and all of our meetings are recorded and distributed internally. The, the, the no meetings of more than three people was more controversial when it was proposed than it is now.
I think people realize now that there is always some arbitrary cap to the number of people in. There are obviously exceptions to these things. There are times when you need more than three, but the once you've experienced the, the efficiencies of having fewer people in meetings and you, you reduce the politics of like who's in the meeting because these things are already distributed and recorded and distributed anyway.
So you don't, you don't miss out on anything. So the leadership meetings are recorded and sent to the entire leadership team. So it doesn't really matter if you're there in person or not. It's actually way more efficient with your time. You can stay focused on what you were working on. You don't need to have this interruption.
So the, the advantages are for engineers, you will be more productive than you have ever been in. Because all you're doing is the stuff that you want to be doing. And you're shipping lots of code. If you're if you're in other roles, it really enables you to leverage your time. These are things that could ostensibly be done in in-person teams using some of these same asynchronous tools, but it's it's like a, it's an entropy.
Where it's so much easier to just like tap someone on the shoulder when they're right next to you. It's like, do I really want to like record a video of myself when I'm right next to this person and then send it to them through email and then get their response asynchronous? No, I'm just going to like tap them on the shoulder.
Cause they're right next to me. And a lot of this comes from my, I largely wanted to build the company culture. Around what I wish it was when I was working on different engineering teams. This is my first non-technical role. I've always been on the engineering side. And so I really just thought as an engineer, what would I like to be the case?
It's like, well, you know, what I really hated in previous companies is when the ops team or the sales team would like break into the engineering room and like grab me by the shoulder and forced me to work on their project, even though it was not priority. And I was supposed to be working on something else.
They're physically right next to me. And they're like, no, no, no, you have to work on my thing. Like, but I have to work on this other thing. No, no, no. You have to work on my thing now. And you don't really have that challenge when you're working remotely because they can send you an email and you can just be like, cool, thanks for the email.
I'm going to go back to what I was. That I won't even see the email because I don't check my email more than a couple of times a day. So there's really no way to strong arm people into doing other things. And so it allows for a level of deep focused deep focused work that you really can't get in any other environment.
[00:13:32] Alex: So you're very much if it hasn't been apparent already an engineering first organization, and now. Like you mentioned before being being an engineer before moving into this role as CEO, if you kept it that way. I think Tesla comes to mind as another company that leans into this philosophy really heavily, but I'm curious to sort of hear you dig into that a little bit further.
Why, why is that the case?
[00:13:55] Sam: Yeah, I think it's it's something that we've been thinking a lot about as well. I think knowing what your core competency is, is it really. Thing for every company. So there's really no judgment as to what a core competency is for different companies. So a good example of this might be Casper, which the mattress company, their core competency is in growth marketing and the really good at it.
They are like branding growth, marketing, these types of things, and they've done that very succinct. They are not a product and engineering company, so it's actually not super useful for them to build the type of culture that we're building. Tesla is a very like hands-on manufacturing buildings type of company.
So. So you need people who are in-person, who are like really building stuff. When you're in software, you should really just think about what is it that you're optimizing for for an hour. In our case, our north star is maximizing development velocity. You've probably seen our, some of our Friday forums and our monthly updates.
We ship all lots. We ship a lot of code. We bring on really excellent engines. And we stay focused on how do we, how do we maximize velocity? So I think the, in our case, recognizing that our core competency is in consumer software and data science. And so leaning into that as much as we possibly can and building the culture around that.
So every other entity within the company supports that, which is our core competency. So I think that's the that's the real focus is that it's a similar thing. People often ask around our marketing strategy and they ask like, they'll say, how do I build a great content machine? Like you guys did? How do I do SEO?
And sometimes it's, my answer is like, well, maybe you should do it. We knew before we took on that strategy. That it was going to, because we talked to people about where they get their information from. And we knew that that would be an avenue that they would use. And so once we knew that it would work, then we built it.
So I think sometimes people, people approach these things the wrong way. They, they often end up building a product that they assume people will want, as opposed to figuring out what people want and then build the product.
[00:16:29] Alex: You're you're anticipating my next questions really well here. I was going to sort of go on to say, you haven't spent any money on marketing, right.
And that same vein word of mouth seems to, you know, ensure you've got a great product. Is your reasoning as simple as that? Or is there
[00:16:42] Sam: more to it? Okay. Yeah, I mean the, the classic YC motto of build something people want is definitely applicable. Our. A growth strategy. Our head of growth did a podcast on this called NPS building and NPS unicorn.
Our, our growth strategy is to, is to build a product that has an NPS over 90. Yeah, which is pretty insane. I think only Tesla and Peloton have successfully done this. Those are the only two companies in history that have maintained that. And so our north star for growth is how do we build the best possible product?
And if your, if your NPS is over 90, all of the other problems basically spelled themselves if, if almost everybody loves your product and is recommending it to people you're in really good shape. So we we've done some. We've had some internal conversations around performance marketing and all these different ways that you can spend money on marketing.
And it's just very hard to justify, like, would I rather spend a million dollars in ads to juice our growth numbers? Or would I rather hire several engineers? Like 10 more engineers? It's like, well, obviously I would rather hire 10 more engineers. So let's just do that and make the product 10 times. And then people will want to use it more because it will be better.
So I, I think about this stuff a lot. We, we we've been talking about things that are defensibility as a company and people often use the word moats and I, I'm not a big fan. Note per se. I do think there is a difference between moats and defensibility. It's maybe a semantic distinction, but a moat is something.
If you managing the actual metaphor of like you have a castle and you dig a ditch around it a moat is something that you intentionally build with the intent to keep other people out of your market. Keep them away from your castle. The something that is defensive. Is like, you just have the best product.
You didn't build the best product to keep other people out. You just built it because it's the best thing. And so it just happens to also be defensible. A lot of these network effects are similarly defensible. You didn't build a network effect to keep other people out of the market. You did it because it makes the best product.
I think a lot about it's something we, we talk about internally in terms of strategy, is, are we building a moat or is the thing that we're building just naturally defensible because it's better. Do you use like other uses a mote analogy, even further the Mongo. Are defensible because they never had a home base.
There's nothing to conquer. They're just, they're just a roving band. Whereas castles are static. They never move. And so it's really, if you wanted to seize your castle, it's just a matter of time if all they're doing is moat building. So that's a lot of the way that we think about these types of problems is how do we, how do we build the NPS funeral?
The next, the big NPS unicorn that makes a product that is so good that everyone wants to use it. No, I
[00:20:11] Alex: mentioned earlier as did you that before running levels, you came from an engineering background. I'm curious. Are there any big lessons or surprises you've taken along the way and making that transition?
[00:20:22] Sam: Yeah, I think.
One of the big ones would be it took me close to a year to
just find, to be able to emotionally grapple with not having deliverables anymore. That was kind of a weird thing. As when you're, when you're in, when you're an engineer, you ship stuff all over.
And it's it's really gratifying to have deliverables that you're shipping that are in the product. You always have something to show. And oftentimes as a CEO, my role is just like shuffling information around. And so I had, you know, between 1% and 20% responsibility for basically everything that happens in the company.
But I don't actually, I'm not actually responsible for anything, but also I'm ultimately responsible for everything. It's, it's a very strange role where it's like, we made the decision to do this thing and I helped coordinate some stuff, but I'm not really responsible for execution. And when it, when it's done, I'm not the person who's presenting it to tell the team about it.
It's just, I'm the guy in the background, I'm shuffling information around doing a lot of email. So that took a while to get used to, and just sort of emotionally accept that that is my role and that is what I'm supposed to be doing. I found that doing long form strategic writing really helped a lot with that same sort of sense of deliverable.
So I've been doing a lot more writing, which has been really helpful for me, which I think for some people that might be a similar thing. They'd be able to get similar value out of I would say that one of the other big things, this is maybe just applicable in general is to really put a lot of effort into bringing on the best people.
This was something that I see as a, as a failure in first time founders, especially is a, a fear of giving up. One's like, And so they often I advise some really stage companies, just informally. A lot of them are friends of mine. And a common thing that I see is there. There's a fear of bringing on people who are better than them because they might get replaced and they might kick them out of the company.
That's the fear. The reality is that the best way to see yourself kicked out of the company is if you don't bring on people who are better than you, if you're trying to build a fiefdom and you, you don't let the right person run the company in the right way, in the right role, you are the bottleneck at that point.
And so that's something that can be really emotionally difficult as to let go of one's ego. Humility is a, is a trait that you really need to develop as a CEO in a way that you don't as an engineer. As an engineer, just shipping things all the time. In the CEO role, you have to recognize where your own deficiencies are where the deficiencies are in the team.
What you have to really be honest with yourself about your own failures and be able to, to make up for those by hiring really good people who can, who can solve this problem. No. I want
[00:23:47] Alex: to take a minute to dig a little bit deeper on bio observability and what that looks like in the future in your mind.
You know, we talked a little bit about vision at the beginning of this conversation. And you mentioned, you know, we've seen a lot of great consumer products in the space, you know, the whoop band or a ring. I know eat sleep is doing with mattresses now. W what does bio observability look like in say five, 10 years time?
And how do you see levels fitting into that more broadly?
[00:24:11] Sam: Yeah. When I think about biological observability, I think about the, in almost every other system that we have, especially in mechanical systems, we have a lot of, we have a lot of things that we're measuring. The, the example that I think most people can relate to is we have, we have more.
Like many orders of magnitude, more data about the health of our cars than we do about our own bodies, which is kind of a problem so the goal is to figure out a way to add sensors and add ways of measuring what's going on inside the body. I think right now, A lot of these metrics are I don't, I mean, in the literal sense, they are superficial meaning outside of the body.
And that, that is the, that is a good starting point. It's better to have at least superficial data than no data where it really starts to get interesting is when you can measure molecules So glucose monitors are really the first it's the tip of the spear for that. Where it really gets interesting is in multi molecule.
And there are a lot of companies working on that right now. I expect we'll see multi molecule sensors on the market probably within five years. And once you can start, once you can start correlating outcomes, decisions with outcomes I'll give you some examples. Glucose is interesting, but it's.
Optimistically 10% of the equation. If you want to figure out what, what your choices actually mean through your health? That's like a very optimistic, 10% would be off it's like maybe even 1% because there are false negatives and there are false positives when you only have the one metric. If you go on a really, if you were really intensive workout, you're going to see a glucose.
But it's not caused by food. It doesn't trigger an insulin response. That's just your, your, your liver dumping glycogen. It's totally normal. If you if you down a leader of fruit toast, you're not going to see anything because it's a different monosaccharide. It's a different sugar. So it doesn't show up in a glucose monitor, even though it's way worse for you that if you drink a bunch of.
alcohol It's going to cause all these different problems, but it's not going to show up on your glucose monitor. Like, oh, it turns out alcohol's fine. Well, actually it's not, but I guess just not, it, it's not the only thing that matters. It's just like one of, one of many things that matter. So being able to pull in more data from different sources and especially at the molecular level, that's what matters.
a lot
[00:26:47] Alex: To add onto that doing bio observability, well, seems like a really difficult thing. And, you know, you mentioned sort of the differences between a lot of these products and your, your, your approach to that. I've seen some videos comparing some popular products that actually ended up getting like concerningly different readings from time to time.
Yeah. What do you think specifically makes it so hard to do? Well,
[00:27:10] Sam: if something that we've talked about a lot internally, I think. I think some of this is cultural. Are you talking about the sensors in particular? You're talking about like sneak metrics and stuff like that. Yeah. On the, w we'll take the sleep metrics as a, as a really good example.
Cause we have actually several internal documents talking about this. The challenge is that the, the science is still in development. It's still very cutting edge. And where I think a lot of, I think that whole space has really shot itself in the foot because everyone comes up with their own like top secret, patented proprietary metric.
And when every company has that, you get your group score that says, great, you did a 90, and then you get your aura. It's like, you were a 40 an apple. So you were at a 26. It's like, wait, Those are all completely different things. I have no idea what this means. I, we've been talking about ways to either through a industry consortium or by open sourcing our own algorithms for these things and just making it very clear what data we're using and why and trying to make it so that anyone can use the algorithms that we're using and making it really transparent.
We don't want it to be a black box. We want the people to understand. Why the decisions, why the numbers are coming back, the way that they are. So some of that I think is just cultural, which is people think that keeping things secret is useful. And I think it's actually entirely counterproductive to the entire industry.
So this ties in a lot to our culture of transparency, but I think that it. I think that's a really big part of it is the, the second piece on the, the accuracy of the sensors themselves. This isn't like, it just improves solely over time. They tend, they tend to track the relative difference pretty well, but the pumps dilute differences can often be can often be.
Plus I think the mean average variance is plus or minus 10%. So you can get sensors that are like, you know, 20 or 30 points off. Out of a hundred, just because one's, one's 10% high, one 10% low. And that's just the way it is right now, but they're getting more and more accurate every year. For another reason is that they, they are calibrated towards people who are diabetic.
That's the, that's the the on label use case is for diabetes management. So they're calibrated people that have much higher ranges. And so over time, these things will become more accurate every year. They get better. So they're currently sufficiently accurate and sufficiently affordable to be used by a subset of the population.
This is the nature with all products like this is that they start out pretty expensive and then over time they get cheaper and more accessible so that everyone can do.
[00:30:12] Alex: You know, as an early stage startups, you've mentioned this a little earlier, you obviously have a lot of focus spent on recruitment and hiring broadly, just to start, what's your approach to recruitment and finding really great candidates.
[00:30:27] Sam: I think this is this is similar in many ways to our NPS unicorn growth strategy, which is what is the hardest thing to do for recruiting. How about, instead of we find them, they find us. So how do we put enough material out there to convince all of the best people in the world that we are the company they want to work for?
Obviously way harder to do that, but if you can pull that off, you're in a much better position. So a lot of our content efforts, a lot of this, a lot of the transparent. Of publishing all of our investor updates, which we do publicly on our website publishing all of our weekly team, all hands publicly giving people a sense of what the team culture is like.
We're actually in the process of commissioning a content series with another content creator that we did one recently on team culture. That was really fun. And we're doing another one now on. Like the super tactical, like nuts and bolts of execution of building remote teams. So it's going to be, people have asked us, how do you do knowledge management within the company?
And we're going to go through step-by-step how to build a notion database and how to manage knowledge and how to distribute that knowledge within your team and all of the policies. Nitty gritty execution of how we operate as a team. Part of that is internally just so that everyone on the team knows how all this works, but really a big part of it is externally.
One I'd like to Uplevel people who are starting companies and just have more companies exist in the world, but also people who it's sort of like Tesla's AI day. I don't know if you watch that, but yeah, like I watched that video and I remember that. If I was working in AI, I would work at this company.
No question. And there wasn't a sales pitch at the end. They weren't saying, yeah. So a buy a Tesla. It was basically like, clearly this was built. This was built for the purpose of recruiting. This is a, this is a recruiting pitch for all of the smartest people. So we're thinking about it very similarly. How do you build a team and a culture where all of the smartest people, the term in network theory is preferential attachment.
How do you make it so that all of the best people preferentially attached to you?
[00:32:55] Alex: You know, it's funny, it, it sounds like your marketing strategy and your recruitment strategy are pretty much the same thing with. Build the best thing I think, I think that's pretty cool. You know, to, to dive a little bit deeper into that, like what kind of person makes a great hire at levels?
You know, you, you mentioned this conversation you'd had with this perspective engineer earlier like what kinds of qualities do you really look for and why might levels be a great place for them?
[00:33:18] Sam: Yeah. I think one is a, an emphasis on deep focused work time. People who've really people who really appreciate.
For some people, the, it can be kind of anxiety, inducing, inducing to not have that external structure imposed upon you. We, we treat people like adults and it's one of our, that's probably our top of value within the company is treat people like adults. So as a consequence, we also expect people to act like adults.
People who like having that flexibility, we're not going to like check in and see how many hours you're working. Nobody cares. As long as you get your work done. If you only work two days a week, nobody's going to know or care as long as you're getting your work done. If you want to work weekends great.
If you don't, whatever, nobody cares. If you only want to work weekends, that's fine too. It's like as long as you're getting your work done, that's great. The. I would say another thing is we tend to hire more senior people. And I think a lot of that has to do with ego. We have very low ego people on the team.
Good examples of this are, if you, if you just look at the transitions we've had within leadership in the last year, like. My co-founder Josh was running operations for us. And then it became very clear that the operations function had grown beyond what he was comfortable with. We had a conversation about it.
And we brought on a new head of operations who has been really excellent. Josh and I actually did a podcast on this, on a whole new level of founder dynamics podcast. And he talks about his own emotional struggle, getting over that that ego barrier to be able to do that. We similarly most recently, David co-founder who ran product for the first couple of years of the company had a similar recognition of David is really good at scoping and specking and doing a lot of the nitty-gritty stuff, but he lacked a lot of the skills on the operational side of a product org.
And so we started an external search and realized we just had somebody internally who was the best person for it. And so we, we. We elevated him a couple of weeks ago to be the new head of product. Yeah. Super low ego. It was just the thing that was the right thing for the company. And so it's nobody here is building a fiefdom.
That's one of the biggest things that we, that we look for is people who are people who are willing to add value, wherever value can be added and who are not attached to like Ben is our head of growth. Right. He hasn't done anything that would be considered growth function in probably six months, he's been working on content creation.
He's been working on internal company culture stuff. It's like, where, where, where can people add the most value? And that is where we put them. There isn't, there's no politics around titles. And some of that I think is. Some of that I think is company stage. We're still, you know, 35 people. It's still pretty small.
You can get away with that for awhile. But most of it, I think is, is that the culture that we've built and the types of people that we bring on. So
[00:36:47] Alex: to, to start to wrap us up here, I thought it'd be fun to go a little bit left field. I'd like to hear a little bit about what keeps you curious, you know, in one of our email exchanges, before we sat down you mentioned you hosts a regular, like salon dinners with founder, friends to talk about everything from the future of education, to the value of art.
How did that all start for you?
[00:37:08] Sam: Yeah, it's been, it's been a real source of, of of personal intellectual value is hosting these dinners. It kind of starts. Accidentally. I had gone to some things that were similar. They tend to have a speaker though, which is not really a format that I liked as much because one of the downsides of reading as many books as I do is that usually I will have read the person's book before I go to the event.
And then they end up spending the entire event, just summarizing their book because yeah, because nobody else has read the book. So they have to just like summarize the whole thing. And I started hosting small dinners with like a couple of friends and these types of topics were sort of organically come up.
And. I would bring them up to people, other friends of mine, like, yeah, I had this really great dinner. We talked about tax and they're like, oh man, that's so cool. Thank you. We should, I'd love to come to one of those. And then it sort of expanded into them. There were five people than there were 10 people.
At some point we got through about 20 people, which turns out to be way too many. And then at that point it was like, all right, we need. I need to count the number of people that come to these and start writing this down because starting to get a little bit out of hand I actually have a notion doc on the whole process that I have for hosting these things.
But the as you probably come to expect, I have documentation for every part of my life. And so that's, that's been a big part of it. It's just I, they, they are purely selfish. So like the. The salon that I hosted on the future of K through 12 education. I have some open questions myself. I was like, what, what does, what is the point of education?
Like what, what does any of this mean? And I try to get a, an intellectually diverse people with different backgrounds that can represent whatever topic is there. I have teachers. I had former teachers, I had administrators, I have ed tech founders, just like a really diverse group of people who can bring different perspectives into the conversation and really just ask these open-ended questions and just listened to the people who are smarter than me.
Talk about it in my presence. And I learned a ton from that particular salon, and that was the most recent one that. And so a lot of these is just me trying to pull information from people who have been like, way, way deeper on these topics than I have.
[00:39:46] Alex: Do you have any favorite topics?
[00:39:50] Sam: Yeah, I mean, very few of them are recurring topics.
There have been a few that were surprising and interesting. So the future of K-12 education was really good because it's a topic that I really care about. We did one on the declining role of institutions which was interesting. And also sometimes the, sometimes the subject you just spend the entire time trying to define what the words even mean.
It's like, well, what are institutions? Then the question is like, are they declining? And we spent basically the whole time just talking about. And that alone was sufficiently interesting of like our, our communities, institutions, our companies, institutions, our governments institutions. W where do you draw the line for that?
Then you often end up drawing something that's kind of arbitrary and then are they in decline? Well, for most of the things that we defined as institutions that we thought were declining, the revenue numbers are going up. So does that mean. Certainly trust. And a lot of these institutions is declining, but they seem to be making a lot more money.
So maybe they're not actually in decline, maybe that's just in our own heads. So another one that we did that was really interesting was that anonymous, unlimited political contributions which is another one of those topics where had a really diverse group of people in the audience. And I.
Wanted to better understand whether it's good or bad. And pretty much everyone came in with one set of assumptions, which is that obviously it's bad and came out the other side with the majority of people in favor of it. Wow. Yeah. Once you, once you really think through the implications of what it means to ban anonymous contributions and to limit the amount that you can.
It's one of those things where in a utopian ideal, you could do this, but it's sort of like the, the, the James Madison quote. If, if men were angels, we would not need government. So you can't start with the assumption that we're all going to be operating with positive intent. You can't assume that. So you have to think through all, like, all right, practically speaking, how would this actually work?
And the answer. It would not. So you have to think through what compromises you're going to make, and it is messy. So there've been many salon dinners like that where there were, there were a lot of, there were a lot of learnings from me personally, around different issues that I was grappling with.
[00:42:32] Alex: It sounds like a really great time. Listen I Sam I appreciate you doing this.
[00:42:36] Sam: Awesome. Well, we'll talk soon!
[00:42:37] Alex: Appreciate you making the time. Bye.