🏗️ Issue #88: Building In Public
CEO Sam Corcos talks about building a company in public, the lessons he learned from being a serial entrepreneur, and the founding story of Levels - his fourth tech startup.
💬 Welcome to issue #88 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. We’re back from a little spring break last Thursday — hope you didn’t miss us in your inbox too much.
Few people will ever build a startup from scratch, and ever fewer will build four. This week, Claremont grad and serial tech entrepreneur Sam Corcos (CMC ‘11) talks about creating a movement around building in public, the lessons he learned from founding multiple startup companies, and how he helped start his fourth tech startup – Levels. It’s a Claremont world out there. 👇
~ Josh, Miles, Pat
👤 Community Spotlight: Sam Corcos & Levels
Sam is a CMC ‘11 graduate and the co-founder of Levels, a health and wellness company committed to advancing personalized metabolic health. Prior to founding Levels, he was Head of Technology and the co-founder of CarDash, a Y-Combinator company that makes automotive repair and maintenance as convenient and transparent as possible.
From the very beginning of Levels, you emphasized remote work and building in public as important pillars to build around, which are not values always shared by others and certainly weren’t in 2019. What motivated you to focus on those two pillars? Any examples of opportunities that those pillars have ‘unlocked’ for Levels?
I would say that a huge part of building in public just had to do with knowing that we needed to build a movement around this. Giving people more transparency into what we're doing and what our goals are would really build that trust, which is super, super important for us. The health industry has a real shortage of trust, so I think being more transparent is a good strategy. It's also a really good way of recruiting people. People want to join a team where they can have this sort of visibility into what they're doing. That's another big part of it.
The idea of being remote-first was also pretty controversial when we did it. I think a big part of it was that I really liked working remotely as an engineer. In many ways, we were optimizing our culture around what I think the ideal experience for an engineer would be. Ultimately, development velocity is the thing that moves your company forward so optimizing for deep work for engineers is really important. We still need to meet up from time to time. We're actually hosting a team dinner here in New York tonight. We meet up a lot in person, but I think giving people the space to live their own lives however they want is really powerful.
I would also say that it's not for everyone. I think most companies and most people probably should not work remotely so it ultimately comes down to personal preference for some of us. Interestingly, I did a podcast with Delian Asparouhov from Founders Fund on exactly this topic, and we have a bet on the future of what remote work will ultimately look like.
Levels is now the fourth technology startup you’ve founded, and at this point, ‘startup founder’ is clearly cemented somewhere in your genome. As you reflect on your previous ventures, what do you feel you have ‘mastered’ or grown the most in as a founder since your first stint?
I would say that starting companies is a really accelerated learning curve. It’s a journey of going through the entire lifecycle of a company from starting it to having it die, having to let go of your team, fire people, and hire people. It can be pretty traumatic, and I don't necessarily recommend it for everybody. In fact, I would say I do not recommend it for everybody. I don't remember who said this, but they said that being a startup founder is like chewing on glass and staring into the abyss. There's definitely some truth to that. If you're not willing to do that, then you should just probably work at Google or something because it's a lot more comfortable. Being a founder, you get 10 years of work experience every couple of years and it’s always a very intense experience.
In the most abstract sense, I would say that the area I’ve improved the most is in decision making. I feel like I make better decisions now in general. I do some advising for early stage companies — some of them I do formally, some informally — and it's just so interesting to get their perspectives because the answers and the right solutions to their problems are now so obvious to me. For new founders, it's still very daunting. Should they hire this person or not? Should they pivot into this space? Should they build this feature? The answers are usually pretty obvious the fourth time around. Whereas for somebody with less perspective, or maybe a more accurate way of describing it is “less scar tissue”, it’s different. So if they ask me if they should hire this person, I'll tell them that I have been here, I have hired this person, it was a disaster, and these are all the reasons why.
It's probably from just having been around the block long enough to see and experience things. There's a Bismarck quote that I really like, which is something along the lines of “Any fool can learn from his mistakes but the wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” If you're in startups and you really are running at the wall as fast as you can, you're going to learn a lot from your own experiences and you just do it in a very rapid way.
Learn more about Levels and read the full interview below👇
🤝 Pardon the Introduction: Brooke Barrett & BenchK12
Brooke Barrett (SC ‘03) is a former educator who has worked in the classroom & in C-suite roles with various school partners her entire career. She started as a substitute teacher and now has nearly two decades in K12 education. She’s also been a trusted advisor and partner to K12 organizations through her consulting firm, Edutelligentsia.
Brooke is now the Founder and President of BenchK12 – a talent empowerment platform designed for the unique needs of K12 education. Since being founded in 2020, BenchK12 has been focused on addressing the challenge of teacher shortage and retention in the US by modernizing the credentialing, hiring, placement, support, development, and advancement of K12 educators. Their goal is for their technology to help schools save money and time on administrative work so that more resources can be spent in the classroom.
Brooke just announced their public community round, which allows anyone to invest in BenchK12 and co-own a piece of the company for as little as $100. She was also recently on The eLearn podcast to give more detail on how BenchK12 can help solve teacher shortage in the US. Check them out on WeFunder if you’d like to support their mission.
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Sunil Rajaraman
Claremont graduate Sunil Rajaraman (CMC ‘01) is an accomplished entrepreneur, investor, and thought leader in the tech industry. He helped found and run Scripted.com, a marketplace for businesses to hire freelance writers; Unsugarcoat Media, which acquired The Bold Italic and subsequently sold it to Medium; and Radiance Labs, which helps companies communicate with customers on Facebook Messenger and SMS. In 2019, he also joined Foundation Capital as an entrepreneur in residence, where he advised startups on their GTM strategies. He is currently the founder and CEO of a new stealth technology company — Hamlet.
Sunil recently shared his first GPT project called Tiredbanker, which summarizes earning reports from every S&P 500 company for the past 10 years and tells users which CEOs and CFOs have the best track record. Here’s more info on Sunil’s latest project.
💼 Who’s Hiring?: Whoosh & Coursedog
Claremont entrepreneur Colin Read (CMC ‘06) is the co-founder and CEO of vertical SaaS company Whoosh, Inc. They’re a modern hospitality tech company focused on streamlining club operations and improving the member experience. With a cloud-based and tablet-focused approach, Whoosh streamlines operations to save clubs 20+ hours weekly in staff time per department. They’re backed by top-tier VC investors including Craft Ventures, and are focused on disrupting the golf and tennis club industry. Right now they’re looking for a Lead Product Designer to join their growing team:
Nicholas Diao (PO '17) is the CTO and co-founder of Coursedog. They empower academic administrators to support on-time completions and operational excellence with integrated academic and event scheduling, course demand projections, curriculum management, and online catalog solutions. Coursedog’s co-founders are Forbes 30 Under 30 Award winners, and the company has raised over $110M in capital since being founded in 2018, including a recent $90M Private Equity Round led by JMI Equity. They’re currently hiring for several open positions:
Check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1,000+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 40+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!
If any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s must-watch 📺
Roya Amini-Naieni (HMC ‘22) is a Claremont grad and the CEO of biotech company Trilobio. Roya co-founded the company in 2021 to change the way synthetic biologists do science. Trilobio is a genetics engineering lab working on revolutionizing synthetic biology by developing a novel and cost-effective end-to-end automation solution for DNA parts assembly.
This week’s Claremont financing 💸
Congratulations to Claremont entrepreneur Nicholas Diao (PO ‘17) and his company for receiving a $90M strategic growth investment from JMI Equity. Nicholas is the CTO and Co-founder of Coursedog – an academic operations software that enables higher education institutions to optimize curriculum planning, course scheduling, event management, and catalog management.
This week’s top listen 🎧
Claremont entrepreneur Bobby Tzekin (PO) was on the VentureFizz podcast to share the founding story of his company, Wisetack – a lending technology that adds financing options into any software platform. In this episode, he talks about a startup’s early hires, being customer focused, and what's on his book list. Bobby also shares his career journey from consulting and project management, and some great advice for Claremont PMs.
Everything else you need to know💡
Congratulations to Claremont grad Sabrina Zhou (CMC) and Storspay on their recent Pre-Seed investment and for being in the top 1% of applicants selected to participate in the Techstars New York accelerator program. Sabrina is the co-founder and COO of StorsApp – a platform that automates retail lending to small businesses around the world using USDC stablecoin.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🌎 Bringing Quantum Security Into Orbit….. Post quantum cybersecurity leader, QuSecure, recently announced that they have accomplished the first successful multi-orbit data communications test secured with post-quantum cryptography. In collaboration with Accenture, this project shows that crypto-agility, successfully rotating to a less vulnerable algorithm, is real and possible. Claremont grad and Forbes Technology Council member Skip Sanzeri (CMC ‘83) is the co-founder and COO of QuSecure.
Being the behemoth that it is, Cisco, co-founded by Claremont entrepreneur Sandy Lerner, has the largest market cap out of all the public, Claremont-founded startups at ~$200B+. Coming in at second is the cloud-based tax compliance platform – Avalara. Co-founded by Claremont grad Scott McFarlane (CMC), the company went public in 2018, and currently has a market cap of ~$8.2B.
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