This week, we’re sharing a remarkably-detailed, unvarnished follow-up to one of the most popular articles on The Review.
How I Spent 17,784 Hours in 5 Years as a Startup Founder
When Levels co-founder and CEO Sam Corcos decided to start tracking how he spends his time, he got, in his words, "a bit obsessive" — meticulously recording every 15-minute increment. A few years ago on the Review, he shared the results with an astounding level of detail. Not the optimistic or sanitized take on how he’d like to spend his time — an exact breakdown, minute-by-minute, of the first two years building Levels.
Today, Corcos is back on the Review — this year, with five years’ worth of data to dive into. He unpacks exactly how he spent 17,784 hours working on Levels, but this time, with a new twist: What happens when a startup levels up from survival mode to scale-up? How does that change what the founder/CEO spends his time doing?
There are some assumptions you’ll probably make. More folks on the team likely means more time spent doing people management tasks (like 1:1s). Less coding, more strategy sessions.
Turns out, it’s a lot more nuanced than that. As Corcos tells it, there were points on Levels’ journey where the startup fell into many of the prescribed patterns of scaling. But Corcos has actively worked to correct these sways towards bureaucracy and entropy — at times taking quite drastic measures.
Here’s a sneak peek at 3 of his counterintuitive findings:
- His direct reports more than tripled from 6 to 20—but time spent on team management barely changed. How? By ditching recurring 1:1s and focusing solely on decision-making meetings.
- Strategic work took just 5% of his time, proving you don't need countless strategic planning sessions or offsites to set direction. Instead, he uses quarterly "Think Weeks" to reset the company's course.
- Stepping away from the codebase was "a costly mistake that was painful to undo." It took completely rebooting the engineering org to get back on track.
His approach to ditching all of his 1:1s (inspired by Nvidia’s Jensen Huang) or dismantling the entire product and design org (inspired by the “responsible engineer” culture at SpaceX) might not work for every founder or every startup. But as Corcos unpacks exactly how he spends his time and what he’s learned five years in, you’ll find yourself reconsidering some of your priors about what it actually takes to operate as a high-impact founder/CEO at scale.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
Recommended resources:
-Former Forbes senior editor Alex Konrad launched Upstart, a new tech media newsletter worth a follow.
-Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra (who went viral when he published his engine for assessing PMF on the Review) is the guest this week on Lenny’s podcast.
-What does content marketing look like in a post-SEO world? Check out this 30-minute Maven Lightning Lesson.