Sam Corcos is the founder and CEO of Levels, a remote-first health tech company valued at roughly $300 million, where writing is the central operating system of the entire business. This episode is a deep dive into how Corcos uses long-form writing, asynchronous communication, and the scientific method to run a company with around 40 people, and why he believes most leaders dramatically underinvest in strategic thought.
Writing as the core operating principle
Writing is the pillar everything orbits at Levels. Because the company is fully remote, writing is the only reliable way to communicate ideas consistently across a distributed team and to preserve institutional knowledge over time.
Every new hire goes through a full month of onboarding with no deliverable expectations, during which they read the company’s catalog of long-form memos to understand the mission, goals, and the full history of thinking that led the company to where it is.
Corcos tracks his time rigorously and found that long-form writing accounts for less than 5% of his calendar time, even though it feels like much more due to the cognitive load. He estimates most CEOs spend less than 1% of their time on strategic thought, which he considers terrifying.
The amount of writing required should be proportional to the importance of the decision. A $50 million, decade-long commitment warrants a 200-page memo. A small UI tweak might only need a two-paragraph note. The key mistake people make is thinking everything needs to be a 50-page document.
Writing freezes thought and prevents the “game of telephone” that happens with verbal communication. Even when people read a memo and act inconsistently with it, the written record makes it easy to course-correct by pointing back to the source of truth.
Asynchronous communication and deep work
Levels is built around asynchronous communication by default. Corcos is strongly anti-Slack and anti-texting, which he considers pseudo-synchronous tools that destroy focus.
The median tech worker never gets more than 30 minutes of uninterrupted time and cannot go more than six minutes without checking a communication tool. This makes deep work nearly impossible.
Corcos cites Matt Mullenweg’s principle: “Be as async as possible, but not more.” When teams are misaligned, synchronous communication is critical because the cost of rowing in the wrong direction compounds over time.
New hires go through “Async Week,” where they are forced to communicate only through Loom videos and voice memos, even for simple acknowledgments. This breaks the habit of the “hyperactive hive mind” and pushes people past the point where synchronous communication feels necessary.
Corcos records 15 to 20 Loom videos per day. For sensitive feedback, video is preferred over writing because tone is easier to convey and misinterpretation is less likely.
Levels built its own internal communication tool to replace Slack and email, making open information silos the default. Corcos quotes a Stripe leader: “Fight until your dying breath the formation of information silos.”
The scientific method: hypotheses and retrospectives
Levels runs on a business application of the scientific method. Every project starts with a written hypothesis and ends with a retrospective.
A hypothesis is a statement of what you believe will happen as a result of a project, framed in terms of return on investment. The purpose is to force teams to articulate the expected business value before doing the work.
Example: “Building this feature in eight engineering weeks will increase food logging by 20%, which based on our LTV data should deliver $90,000 per month in business value.” This can then be compared against other projects to prioritize.
Corcos emphasizes that the specificity of the ROI estimate matters less than the exercise itself, because projects almost always differ by orders of magnitude in expected value, which becomes obvious once you do the math.
Writing the hypothesis down is critical because human brains are rationalization machines. Without a fixed record, people will retroactively convince themselves their prediction was correct regardless of the outcome.
Retrospectives are written at the end of every project, using clinical language of “validated” or “invalidated” rather than subjective terms like “success” or “failure,” which are too easy to rationalize.
Retros are expected to take roughly 10% of the project’s total time. A two-week project gets about one day for the retro.
As part of the retro, everyone who worked on the project is interviewed by their peers for feedback. This serves double duty as a performance feedback mechanism and ensures organizational learning, not just individual learning.
Corcos points out that communication is the final step of the scientific method. If you don’t share what you learned, the knowledge doesn’t compound. Retros are shared via long-form memos, the Friday all-hands meeting, and engineering-specific forums.
Think weeks and strategic writing
Corcos blocks off one full week per quarter for deep thinking and writing, inspired by Bill Gates. He tries to stay offline from email and team communications.
It typically takes two to three days of detachment from day-to-day operations before new, creative strategic ideas emerge. Early thinking tends to be tactical; later thinking becomes more fundamental and directional.
He does think weeks with other people present, finding that the energy of being around others in deep flow is motivating and helps sustain focus. When alone, he gets distracted more easily.
He carries a notebook at all times and keeps his phone permanently on do not disturb or airplane mode, having accepted that technological tools are more powerful than his willpower.
Many of the company’s most important memos are clustered around think week periods, reflecting the bursts of strategic clarity these weeks produce.
Transparency and culture
Levels operates with radical transparency. By default, all meetings including one-on-ones and performance reviews are shared with the entire company. Everyone can see company financials and how every person is performing.
This transparency was reinforced by early conversations with Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, who told Corcos he wished he had been more transparent earlier. Corcos took this as permission to push further.
The Monday Metrics Meeting openly discusses things that are not going well. An unintended consequence was that employees who only saw the granular, sub-metric discussions thought the company was dying, even though overall revenue was tripling. This revealed how much contextualization transparency requires.
Corcos uses Netflix’s “keeper test” for performance management: imagine the person quit and you feel relief or indifference rather than alarm. If so, you need to have an honest conversation about fit.
He also references Marc Randolph’s advice: “People notice what you tolerate” and “People notice who you fire.” Culture is only as strong as the consistency with which it is enforced.
Hiring and writing
Corcos approaches hiring as a matching problem, not a sales problem. The company actively tries to convince candidates that they might not want to work there, because the culture suits roughly 5% of people.
Not everyone needs to write long-form memos, but everyone needs to be able to document and communicate their thinking. For people who struggle with writing, workarounds include recording a Loom video and having an EA or ChatGPT create an outline to reduce the activation energy of starting from a blank page.
For engineering hires, candidates do a “teach me something” video where they explain an engineering principle to the team. This tests communication ability, which Corcos considers a core job requirement, not a secondary skill.
The company has 12 EAs available to anyone, and writing is central to delegation. Corcos uses the concept of “proof of work”: a long-form memo demonstrates that someone deeply understands their domain, which builds the trust necessary to delegate meaningful responsibility.
Content and marketing
Levels’ editorial strategy is to “add value to the internet” by creating the most definitive content on topics related to metabolic health. The company’s ultimate guides have driven millions of visitors to the blog.
When Levels started, almost nobody knew what metabolic health was. The editorial team took on the burden of educating the market, which is why the content strategy leans about 80% toward education and brand building (like REI’s magazine) rather than direct product pitches.
Key metrics include average dwell time of three to four minutes per session and multiple pages per session, which Corcos considers stronger signals of content quality than raw traffic numbers.
Corcos tracks his reading using a heuristic: only consume content that took the creator 100 times longer to produce than it takes to read. This almost exclusively means books.
The company also runs an internal podcast and publishes internal conversations on a YouTube channel called Levels Culture. These have become some of the best recruiting tools, even when individual episodes only reach 100 people, because those are exactly the right 100 people.
News sobriety
Corcos has been completely news sober since 2013, after reading Ryan Holiday’s Trust Me, I’m Lying and recognizing that compulsive news consumption was filling his mind with fear and anger about things he couldn’t control.
He replaced news with books and went from reading one book a year to eight in a single month. He has maintained roughly two books per week ever since.
He reports feeling less stress, less physical tension, and a deeper level of flow and thought. When people bring up news events in conversation, he finds that most of the time the events don’t actually matter to his life or work.
Communication principles and mantras
Levels has an almost religious zealotry against acronyms because they create barriers to onboarding and feel exclusionary. Instead, the company uses narrative-based mantras that encode deeper principles.
“Pork tacos” comes from the first version of the Levels app, which shipped with all food logs hardcoded as “pork tacos.” The lesson: ship a scrappy version and be okay with imperfection.
“Don’t move their cheese” means don’t change the user experience without warning and explanation. If you’re going to move a button, give people advance notice so they aren’t disoriented.
Corcos uses a text expander snippet called “Hedge” that auto-completes into a paragraph disclaimer: “These are just my passing thoughts. This is not intended to be a change in priority.” Even with this, written communication from a CEO is easily misinterpreted, which is why he sometimes shifts to video for nuanced messages.
Influences and admired leaders
Patrick Collison (Stripe): admired for rigor, honoring nuance while reducing complexity, and clear communication. “Grow the GDP of the internet” is cited as a masterfully simple mission statement.
Brian Chesky (Airbnb): his handling of COVID and layoffs, his decision to eliminate the product management function, and his insights on integrating customer-facing and building teams have all influenced Corcos.
Brian Armstrong (Coinbase): his emphasis on transparency and willingness to take bold cultural stances gave Corcos courage to push Levels’ transparency experiments further.
GitLab: a major influence on Levels’ writing culture. Corcos cites preferential attachment, the idea that building a culture attractive to a certain kind of person causes more of those people to self-select in, compounding the culture over time.
