20VC: Why Founders Should Take as Many VC Meetings as Possible, Should Founders Meet Associates, How to Get Intros to the Best VCs, How To Extract the Most Value From Your Investors, Why Post IPO Operators Are the Best Angels with Sam Corcos @ Levels

25:11I mean, they're going to find out about a one way or the other. It is the reality. So it is a number that's been slowly creeping up. It was 20%. Now it's 25%. Our target is 40. We'd accept to figure out how to get there. So how do you create ongoing? Is that before we do fundraising, I'm sure it's it. With levels, you know, once you know your kind of patents X is good for me, why is that for me? It's like a bit like, or you hear, or I have a lot of problems in terms of like, I know So, you're drinking is bad for me, but how do you create recurring patterns when we are quite predictable humans?

25:43That 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. 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 attend a stay retained for longer. Okay, but on the funniz itself talk to me How did you approach it and what worked and what didn't? The things that work we approach it by casting a very wide net So 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 and they're afraid to talk to an investor until their idea is fully baked and provably the best thing ever.

26:35The 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 in your pretensions 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, that's real progress. And I think it was Mark Suster who has the piece investing in lines, not dots. And I think most founders treat each fundraise like a dot rather than a trend line. A lot of the people that we raise money from are people that I've known for three, four, five, plus years.

27:08And I think that's also maybe ties into 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 one principle 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. So you mentioned second or third tier firm there. Often we hear, you know, when you're going out to start a race, go to the third tier firm's first because you want to kind of kiss a couple of frogs before you meet the prince.

27:44Do you agree with that or do you think this is too much of a gamified approach if I'm raising. 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. You will learn from people who have way more exposure to your market category than you do. I cannot even count the number for first time founders who have 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?

28:13And they go, what five companies? Do you know a thing that's a poor quality founder? I mean, if you don't know your market, if you were to ask me about fund or media composition, I could tell you everyone brightened down by pros and like, that's just a bad founder. I would say an inexperienced founder, maybe more than anything. But the reality is that VCs or investors broadly just have way more exposure. 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.

28:49So 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. What do you think about leads most of the chat going to a lead versus a much more distributed round? The answer is that there were trade -offs. And you have to pick which trade -off works for you. There is more overhead. Our first couple rounds were primarily operators and angels and that ended up delivering a tremendous amount of value for us 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.

29:31I think we had about a hundred angels and operators that were investors that we were able to tap pretty consistently for the first couple years I've tweeted before about I think that 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? Probably the easiest place to start would be what doesn't work and what doesn't work is usually the default behavior of all founders. So this is what I would say which does not work, which is don't assume that your investors can read your mind.

30:05Don't assume that they have as much context on your business about what your business needs are as you do Because they spend 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 Passively criticizing your investors for their lack of engagement if you haven't even bothered to make an effort to engage with them It takes real Proactive effort to be able to get the value that you want to get so I find that often and founders don't know the value that I can provide. And what I mean by that is, you say you have a sales pipeline, or a partnership pipeline, maybe for you, maybe.

30:41You don't know that I went to school with the CEO of GoPro. Totally. Or that I am brother -in -law to the head of X. And so how do you open share what you need to 100 people in an effective way? Two ways to go about this. So I guess we'll say on what does work, this is probably the simplest one, and it is where almost everybody fails. The first and most important thing is you need to know what you need. If I say how can I help and you say I don't know, you've already failed. You need to have a list of things that you and your team need help with because you'd be surprised at how often people can deliver.

31:19I think that's the first one is just you have to know what it is your needs are. And so you have a Google sheet that you share at the bottom of an update saying this is what we need. Yeah, in our investor update we have an ask section, things that people on our team need or things that the company needs and very regularly get conversions from those, from the broad outreach to our investors. The highest leverage ones tend to be more specific. A well -written request to an investor is highly targeted. If you're sending too much noise and not enough signal as your request, they'll eventually just get filtered out and ignored.

31:56So knowing who may be able to connect to you with somebody or who may be able to convert on a request. Try to keep it very specific and also time -bounded. I always try to imagine myself in the investor 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's interesting that 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.

32:31But if you say, 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 to them right now. And so the more specific you can get, this ties into a chunking bias, which is 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 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.

33:02Is that good, do you think? Yeah, I think there are things that some people just aren't going to be able to deliver on and that's okay. But ultimately, I would 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 1500 conversions is probably a lot better than is average So you know that in terms of what the hit rate is it's maybe lower than average But you end up getting a lot more value from it. I find that when it comes to sales pipeline in particular It's share Google sheet with the companies that you want to speak to the specific person within the company Yeah, I put it hyperlink their LinkedIn.

33:39So it's super easy to 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 that is this social composition dynamic of, Jesus Sam is really good at that. And then when I'm another investor, I go on that sheet and I'm like, shit, I should bring Sam into more out. How do you create that accountability dynamic within Vatuad? Yeah, I think even beyond that, even more work you can do is you can go into each of their LinkedIn's and find all of their mutual connections with anyone at this firm.

34:13And you can say, We think these five people would be the best contact and your one degree separated from them Could you reach out to any of them and help us get one step closer the more work that you're willing to do for them the Higher likelihood that they will be able to deliver on it always have a clear understanding of what it is that you need as a company I would say another is setting clear expectations early is another one that I think people Miss out on they just take money from whoever's willing to give them money But the reality is that not everyone is going to deliver value. If it is really an expectation of you, that your investors will be engaged in responding to your emails and participate to some degree, you should set that as a clear expectation.

34:54This is what we expect from our investors. If that's not you, totally okay. This is probably not the right company. Do you agree with Vinal Coast that 90 % of VCs actually detract value? 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 a 16z. They have this whole services model That's been incredibly high leverage. 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 recent team.

35:31Pretty aggressive about finding ways to get value there. Value and teams in venture platforms are actually pretty looked down upon it for being honest. Do you think that's incredibly unfair? Why do you think that is given the value that they're providing to you? Part of the answer is most firms are not good at it. 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. Why is that? Is it the depth? Is it the breath?

36:06What is it the mason so good? A big part of it is at least within the health and bio vertical, they have a bio health hub, which is a notion dock that just has all of the services that they offer. If you need to do an executive comp study, we can help you with that. If you want to put your general counsel on an email us with other general councils 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. So 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.

36:46So one is trust ventures, 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. What was the best first meeting you've had with an investor? The ones that go well are the ones where I can tell they immediately understand what it is that we're going for. When you're fundraising, you're a profit, 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.

37:19It is an uphill battle when you're trying to explain to an investor and 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 going to work and it's going to be a lot of toil. And so finding the ones who they've already done the research. They're not taking this meeting as like a random thing of, oh, well, you know, I got to fill up my 9 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. And so I would say the best meetings are the ones with the, and this is an interesting thing is we share a lot of material in advance of these investor meetings.

37:50What's so fascinating is you would assume that the people who have the most time to read through these things are like the Principles at the lower tier investors because they have lots of time the reality when we did our series a Raise we can tell because you can see in notion who reads everything the people who were most engaged was Mike Rinal at Sequoia and Jeff Jordan and 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 already sent.

38:25Okay, so 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. You know, it's going to be a retention problem. And they come in with a preconceived notion of, oh, it's healthcare, oh, it's consumer hardware. and actually let me just sell you this pen and I can bring you the energy that a slide deck can't do. 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.

39:03If 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, Hey, what is your revenue? I already sent this. It's like, well, what's the total adjustable market? I sent you a whole memo on total, did you not read it? I can just read out loud all of the material that I sent you, or you could just read it. It's up to you. Should you speak to associates? I would like to believe that the answer is yes you should.

39:32I can tell you, in practice, I have friends who are associates and principles at these firms. 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. Two weeks later, I meet with a partner and they have no recollection that the principal shared any of this information with them. I don't know even what role they play within these firms, so I think it would depend a lot on the firm. It's not a knock on the principles. It seems to be more a knock on the industry and how principles and associates function within them.

40:08I mean generally speaking, 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. Those are the two types that I find. Can I ask on the operator side, how did you approach minimum checks? Sometimes people put in minimum check sizes. How do you feel about that and what advice would you give given collecting the best?

40:42If 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 our most ROI positive investors were, one of the biggest categories was early employees at post IPO companies. And these are people who have some amount of capital, 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. If you need to hire somebody who is 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.

41:21And so for a $5 ,000 slot in your cap table, you can get a tremendous amount of value from it. Sam, you're Mr. Transpan. If my question is not followed by a name, it is political. What was the best first investor meeting that you had? I think the best first investor meeting that we had was with Mosha Liftschitz. He immediately understood the value of what we were doing and I think it unlocked some of the theater and sales 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 called health drink on the cart.

42:04Halfway 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 Mosha and the other people in the room. This is amazing. I want to get one of these. And they totally understood the value proposition. 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.

42:35And eventually you narrow in on like these three talking points always work and then you get really good at it. How important is theatre? Like you said, that kind of the exhibition of it. It's a performance in some ways. Totally. How important is that versus none -no -no natural and and discuss it conversational. I think it's gonna depend a lot on the type of business that you are and what stage that you're in. 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 very consistent growth numbers that's super boring, all you really care about is CactiLTV.

43:09And that's just your only slide. Here's our CactiLTV and here's our growth rate and we expect this to continue indefinitely. When you look at the investors that didn't provide value, What is the reason that they didn't, do you think? I think some of this just maybe ties into maybe we'll go back to the the node comment or like some of them just aren't good. Okay, so when you look at that, some of them just, listen, it always happens. You have people who thought our value and don't end up. What did you get wrong there? It's a question of how much time are you willing to invest in having a 0 % failure rate?

43:42You're going to have some failure rate. We keep track of all of these things on how many emails we send, what the conversion rate is on those requests. We have several people on the list that I've sent them 17 requests and they've converted on zero of them. Set very clear expectations before they started and they're like, oh yeah, we're super engaged. We're going to help you with all of these things. And as soon as they get allocation, they just ghost you. Some percentage of people are like that in theory. I think what I could have done to verify that they would be value add. I could have gone to other companies that they've invested in and I could have asked.

44:15but is it worth it for a $25 ,000 check? Probably not. The one that I do want to say, like, one of these worth is Litchy. If you have half an hour, go to CrunchBase. Go see there other angel investments if they do money. And if you've got a good founder network, like I'm sure you do, or many seropharmacy, I mean, if it's the case of just what's happening, yo, Moshay is a good, great lover. Do you know what I mean? That you'll get on very quickly. Yeah, I think it's a question of where the ROI is on those. 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.

44:47What did you do for Jeff then? We did a lot. So there are a lot of people who have direct exposure to them and everyone had just overwhelmingly positive things to say about working with Jeff. Did you worry that with someone like Jeff, he has such weight to his words? He's seen so much. Bluntly, who are you to say, no Jeff, I appreciate your opinion but you're wrong and I'm going to do something different. Do you worry that it's too easy to just succumb to what they say even when they might be wrong. I think for maybe early stage founders that he is a very serious risk. Once you've been around for long enough, you realize that nobody knows anything.

45:23They don't know anything, you don't know anything, that you're just making your best guess. And so you should always 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 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. I talked to some people who really did not like working with them, but they didn't like working with them for reasons that I would actually enjoy working with them.

45:54He'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. I think honestly the best people do. I've spoken to Keith many times about this by the way and we're just like yeah, but that's just not the best I mean, I can sugarcoat it and say it's great, but you know three percent retention Great, but you've ROI on time. You're optimized it's the extreme. We mentioned the Tim Ferris discussion 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?

46:32I think a plausible definition might be the ability to deliver on what objectives that you set for yourself. 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 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. I often find like actually you just underestimate yourself a lot. If I was setting goals for myself I would not have thought like could be where I am.

47:07How do you think about actually you will consistently underestimate yourself? I think some of it comes from fear. People don't like failing at things. It's something that holds people back on really just their entire life trajectory. Is this fear of failure 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 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 working at McKinsey or something along those lines.

47:47For someone listening today who wants to get more out of that 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? If you were to talk about first steps, it's knowing how you spend your time now. If you want to get more out of your time, where is your time going today? Okay, so we do a calendar audit? Yep, keep track of just how you spend your time. There are some tools you can install that are helpful. I think RISE is one, Rescue Time is another, but you can just do it manually. I still just do it manually if I spent an hour on email.

48:21I have a one hour block that I retroactively update for email. Just keeping track of how you spent your time is really important. What I discovered the first time I did this, 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. I had a problem and I did not recognize it. Every time I would walk in between things. I would just quickly do some scrolling on my phone. I had this compulsive twitch 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 even realizing it.

48:59It wasn't until I installed a website blocker, and I would just kept getting this like website blocked. It's like, oh wow, I just compulsively open Facebook without even realizing it. 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. 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? One of the biggest is using your calendar as your primary to -do list.

49:29That'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. And so that means if you have to write the investor update, you will block out that time in the calendar very clearly. What happens when things take longer when emergencies happen? Because I do this too. But then there's a deal on and that whole morning set for side of the semester update that's diligent in some reference schools. 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.

50:06I think it'll depend a lot on how of the 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, 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. Can I ask you, do you worry about having a child? And what I You lie in as a result and miss the 7 a .m. meeting, whatever that is. They create just time sings.

50:45I love your time blocks intensely. What's that? Good luck. Do you worry about that? 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 be very, very intentional. What elements of parenting are you nervous about? I'm nervous about being mediocre if I'm honest. Like, we're both fucking machines now. When you've got a kid, you're tired. Your mind is on like, they're not gaining enough weight.

51:19In the first six weeks, your wife is like, I don't like you anymore. As far as me, what do you know, this about? I'm most nervous about my ability to stay present. I have maybe a 15 minute attention span when I'm spending time with other people's children. This, there's only so long that I can find it amusing to play with a two -year -old. That's probably my biggest concern. 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. It's actually very variable. As a professional interviewer, I can tell you because I ask that a lot of people, very variable as binary.

51:55One, 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. You will engage with more actively and a lot struggle with the 0 to 4. Yeah. When you're 0 to 3, where it's just less intellectually stint. You can't have any form of conversation. I think it's like being willing to accept the imperfection of stages. Definitely. The only thing that really concerns me in any way is just being able to manage that dynamic. Do you worry about the relationship with your wife changing? If you don't worry about it, you're fooling yourself because the statistics are very real.

52:29I 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 Knowing that that is a very real Phenomenon trying to get ahead of that. I think is super important coming up with Routines to make sure that you don't lose that level of engagement I think it's gonna be really important. Do you have any in mind that will help? Do a weekly date night which we have scheduled on Wednesdays We do also every Saturday We have scheduled family priorities. We have a running notion doc of logistics, things that we argue you about that we want to talk about, dedicated time just to us for what we're present and talking about what's on our minds.

53:08As the empty space is harder to fill with time for each other, you have to figure out how to make that work. You're a very strange personality. And what I mean by that in the nicest way is, like, you have this spontaneous, I'm going to travel, I'm gonna stay with a friend on their sofa and notebook hotel and then you also have this incredibly rigid Optimize the mind if I'm gonna do notion docs on what we discussed last time and then reach conclusion on Do you see that weird dichotomy in yourself? I actually don't think of it as a dichotomy I think there is a larger principle that explains all of it that most people struggle with which is I try to be Very intentional with my time most people are not very intentional with how they spend their time So that goes against the spontaneous, going back to what we've said.

53:55If you go to Paris, if you tried to be intentional, everything will be planned to optimize for value extraction from the city of Paris. 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, I want to explore a place and be open to whatever the universe has in the store for me. And we're just going to see what happens. My intent, sometimes when I go to a new city, my intent will be to meet 10 strangers. 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.

54:33Intentionality really in all things, I think is where that comes from. In terms of intentionality, I think finding the right partner is a very difficult one. What do you think of 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. Yeah. Was the list. Yeah, so I did a lot of reflection in a previous point in my life and 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 consolidated it down to really six major bullet points with a handful of other ideas in there.

55:09I found that incredibly helpful to just recognize what is important to me, what are my dealbreakers? I think the biggest mistakes that people make is they treat dating like it's a sales problem rather than a matching problem. You're not trying to convince this person to like you. People have different personalities. 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. 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.

55:44When you do the math, let's say you want to 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 being much more intentional about how you spend your time and who you're dating and how you're making that Assessment I think is actually super super important and generally under invested and what was your list? Like what mattered to you? I would often show it on the first date I would state really really on that my goal is to be engaged within six months or separated I don't want to have this linger on for much longer than that.

56:20Usually you have enough data points within about six months to know if it's the right fit But if you were to summarize like one or two from the list that really matters and have played out in the relationship What would they be so for me one of the most important ones is open -mindedness But 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 going to be very challenging because I have a very diverse and interesting group of friends If you cannot tolerate people with different opinions, it's not gonna work I've been down that path in previous relationships.

56:56It's not the right path for me How do you test that out of it? Can you just be as simple as asking it because everyone's gonna be like no I'm yeah, 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 Well, I had the end in 10 minutes. I shared the one page 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. 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.

57:28What do they say? Almost every single one of them 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. And then I just go back home and go back to work. final one, when we apply this to actual co -founder dynamics, what do you think of 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? I think one is not really knowing who your co -founder is. What do you mean by that? 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 networks that I have a lot of data points on the quality of the person.

58:07I know a specific person who started a company with somebody who ended up in bezeling a bunch of money from the company. And now their reputation is tainted because the CEO was a fraud. 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 have known that this would have been a real problem. 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.

58:39I think another is not setting super clear expectations at early around the role of the CEO. That's another super important one that I've seen break companies apart. I should co -founders have equal equity. 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 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 what's there at the founding of the company versus somebody who carries some other weight, it's more of a philosophical question that different people have different answers to.

59:14What could you do today to be a better co -founder? I think this might have even been as recently as yesterday. I found myself building resentment towards my co -founder Josh. Yesterday was the first time that I recognized that feeling. This isn't a thing that had been bubbling up for months. It was just like that's weird I got a message from him today and I feel resentful. Why? I didn't totally know why and so 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.

59:50I 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. 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, building more momentum around making my job more difficult. But actually, it was just completely unrelated, 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.

1:00:23He wanted to actually support with this thing. It was just not super well -worded in 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. When you have an issue, you should discuss it straight way to a way. A agree or not? Absolutely. I disagree. That was like a discursive statement in an essay. You know, sometimes you're freaking tired and your child hasn't slept and your wife hates you and it just not now, Sam, okay?

1:01:00And 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. Immediately is a relative term. I'm saying more like 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. If you realize that you're cranky and you haven't slept, waiting until the next day is totally fine. The timescales matter here. Most people wait for months or years, not days or hours. Final one for you to go great fire.

1:01:34What could you do to be a better husband? I think being more present is something that I'm constantly working on. I have a hard time detaching from work. My wife, she's very good about bringing this to my attention. We're on a walk and she's like, you're not here, are you? And the answer is no. My mind is somewhere completely out, like completely in a different universe right now. And so... Should you be on the walker tool then? Is it good to try or is it good to say, you know what darling, you go, I'm just somewhere else today. It's some of both if you don't try ever, you'll just never do it.

1:02:09That's a problem. If I was only able to go on walks with her, when my mind was fully present and off of work, we would have a much harder time going on walks and finding time. I think this is more a matter of practice, of like leaving my phone behind, putting extra effort into trying to stay present and being in the moment. I've learned to just give up. Yeah. So, it's like, mom, you go. I'm not gonna forget. I wanna do a quick fire. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. So that's sound okay. Sure, let's do it. Okay, so what piece of content has really kind of captured your heart or mind lately?

1:02:45Well, this one's gonna be a little bit nerdy. There's this guy, William Cendione, who's a French programmer who has a YouTube channel, and he has this whole series called Can It Be Done in React Native? Which I've been captured by. There are all of these limitations with React Native that I've always accepted as true, and he's figured out ways of doing very complex UI interactions. What do you not want to do, but still do? I still eat a lot of sugar, and I try to avoid it, and I know it's not on -brand. I probably eat less sugar than the average person, but yeah. What's the best resource allocation decision you've made within levels?

1:03:21That's some of the easy one, which is hiring the right person for the right role. So we've made a couple really, really strong hires that have changed the trajectory of the company in a very positive way. What's the worst resource allocation decision that you've made? Basically the same thing. Hiring the wrong people. What did you learn from the worst hires? I learned that our product org got much too large, and I've learned that having more engineers is better than having more people in product. What in the world most concerns you stay Sam? This may be ties into how important this concept of open -mindedness is.

1:03:58The collapse of the epistemic comments really worries me, which is this general erosion of our ability to collectively make sense of the world and agree on what is real or not. We seem to have divided aggressively into different camps. It's very hard to find common ground. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? The role of product within software development. Product management broadly should play a much less significant role than it does as a default in most software development companies. Why do you carry the American Constitution wherever you go? As a reminder of organizational design, it's a remarkably short document that has had incredible impact on the world and I'm often surprised at how few people have actually read it.

1:04:42It takes maybe two hours to read. What one word would be on your tombstone if you could choose? Am I intentional? Final one for you. Next five years fee. Say we do this in 2028. Where are you then? Hopefully in five years we'll have three more kids and levels will have reached its potential and started to really make a dent in solving the metabolic health crisis. Where will retention be? Much higher hopefully. Sam, listen, I've loved doing this. This has has gone in many different tangents but it's been fantastic so thank you so much. Thanks, Harry. I so enjoyed that show as Sam, like God, I can't believe I turned down the seed round there, but if you want to see more from that episode and you want to watch the full video you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20VC, that's 20VC, but before we leave you today, I love any innovative approach to venture and startups and that's why I love arising ventures.

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