Sam Corcos
Co-Founder & CEO, Levels · 2 appearances on the record.
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founderexecutiveoperatorauthor@samcorcos ↗LinkedIn ↗corcos.io ↗
Sam Corcos is the co-founder and CEO of Levels, a metabolic health company. He previously co-founded Sightline Maps and the Y Combinator-backed startup CarDash.
20statements → 1claims → 1claims resolved → 4.05/5average certainty → 2.4/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources
1 assertion · 1 opinion · 8 insights · 10 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Sam argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Corcos: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang manages roughly 40 direct reports
“He has something like 40 direct reports, which is crazy, but he does it in such a way that it's not super burdensome, and the intent behind it, from what I understand, is that the closer you get to the ultimate decision maker, the faster decisions get made.”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Sam Corcos on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Sam Corcos said on Founder's Journal that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Levels shares recordings of all 1-on-1s and board meetings company-wide
“All of our meetings, including our one-on-ones are recorded and shared by default to the whole company. So our board meetings, generally speaking, are shared with the whole company.”
Founders cannot evaluate executives without knowing how to do their jobs
“Your ability to assess and know whether they are the right people, if you're willing to put that to luck, then sure, you can just hope that you hired the right person, and you have no way of assessing the quality of their work output. If you can write a strate…”
Slack is a synchronous communication tool masquerading as asynchronous
“Slack is a, it's a synchronous tool that masquerades as an async tool. And so, you end up getting into these multi-hour conversations with your thumbs, where you're, like, waiting for five minutes for them to get back to you, and you're just staring at your ph…”
Levels delegates PM admin and retrospective drafts to Philippine executive assistants
“We've been working with our EAs in the Philippines to do a lot of that admin work, and so they, we've we taught them how to do the daily check-ins, how to do, they even write the first draft of most of our retros now, because they can see all the daily updates…”
Corcos cancels 1-on-1s with direct reports if no agenda is prepared
“If I have one-on-ones scheduled for all of my direct reports, but I've made it very clear and everyone's on the same page that a one-on-one calendar hold is not an entitlement. It is a hold so that I don't double book myself. And if there's nothing on the agen…”
Corcos: Software product quality deteriorates when leadership is detached from building
“I think when you have a software product, I think having leadership who knows how to build software is really important, and the further away you get from the actual building of what it is that your product is the worse your product is ultimately going to be.”
Corcos: Co-founder CEOs must be 80% good at almost every business function
“And so I think the nature of being a co-founder CEO is you have to be 80% good at basically everything. It's kind of a strange role. You have to be able to write a passable growth strategy and a passable clinical strategy and a clinical, you have to be able to…”
Founders should eliminate to-do lists and schedule tasks directly on calendars
“The biggest thing to do is to get rid of your to-do list and put all of your action items on your calendar. Block off the amount of time that you think it's going to take. You have a to-do list. Everyone has a list of things that they want to do, and just tran…”
Founders should delegate tasks they dislike to avoid executing them unreliably
“Really, if you don't like doing a certain thing, like writing investor updates, it means that you should probably have somebody else do it because clearly you're not a reliable person on this specific type of task.”
Levels engineers typically average just three meetings per week
“If you were to look at the calendars of a lot of our engineers, it is Very common for engineers to have something like three meetings per week.”
Levels runs two weeks of synchronous standups before transitioning to asynchronous
“We found for a lot of our projects, people might do two weeks of daily standups that are synchronous live Answer questions, get more context, higher velocity, and then they eventually transition into async standups, where at the end of the day, they just say, …”
Levels enforces a strict company-wide rule banning acronyms
“We also have a no acronym rule because I can't remember them for the life of me.”
Correcting for too few meetings is easier than fixing meeting overload
“It's way easier to correct for. We don't have enough meetings. Let's try to schedule more of them than it is. How do I get out of this situation where I'm trapped all day in meetings?”
Corcos: Time allocation is the true empirical record of your priorities
“How you spend your time is the empirical record of your priorities. You can wave your hands and say that you have a set of priorities, but what you spent your time on is the record of your priorities.”
Sam Corcos tracks time spent with his wife on his calendar
“I keep track of how much time I spend with my wife, and some people find it weird that I have that in my calendar, but it is a real priority for me to know that I'm spending an appropriate amount of time”
Corcos: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang manages roughly 40 direct reports
“He has something like 40 direct reports, which is crazy, but he does it in such a way that it's not super burdensome, and the intent behind it, from what I understand, is that the closer you get to the ultimate decision maker, the faster decisions get made.”
Corcos: Time tracking should be limited to approximately 10 high-level categories
“I try to limit it to about 10 buckets. You can always get more granular But at a certain point, it's not useful.”
Corcos: Levels is shifting product strategy and go-to-market within software
“Right now, most of our major priorities are ultimately within the software org on changing our go to market, shifting our core product strategy. And so a lot more of my time is going towards that.”
Corcos: Levels is probably six months away from active fundraising
“Fundraising is probably still six months away from that being a real push, so I don't need to prioritize that.”
Sam Corcos blocks off quarterly 'think weeks' disconnected from all communications
“I block off one week per quarter. I just directly stole this from Bill Gates to do a think week where I don't engage in email. I don't engage in comms. I just focus on thinking about strategy, and it often takes me two or three days to see the forest.”
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| How to Avoid Meetings & Build a Great Remote Culture | Dec 6, 2023 | 15m |
| How Should You Spend Time As A CEO/Founder? | Nov 1, 2023 | 12m |