📚 Sam Corcos way, Time tracking, Post PMF, Viral growth, Making ideas happen, Torpedo bat, Stoop coffee

Porches, Glass box skyscrapers, Smoooooothie, Best thing since sliced bread and more.

Hello, this is post #205.

We crossed a big milestone last week—this little gang is now 1,000 strong.

I still can’t believe there are 1,000 of you who’ve signed up to read this newsletter every week. It all started as a way to share my favourite finds with a small circle of friends and colleagues. Now, it’s grown into a curious, thoughtful community that stretches far beyond the people I know personally.

Along the way, I’ve had the chance to chat with some of you—and every conversation leaves me feeling grateful and inspired.

So here’s a heartfelt thank you. Thanks for giving me the space to share what excites me. You’re awesome. Stay curious. Always.

Let’s have a quick look at what’re covering in this post:

Before we dive in; a quick favour…

If this piece sparks even a tiny ‘hmm’ or ‘aha!’ along the way, do me a kindness: tap the ❤️ or drop a thought in the comments. Curiosity thrives when we trade reflections, not just clicks.

And with that out of the way, let’s get to our main features.

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🤹 Sam Corcos on Time Tracking

Sam Corcos, co-founder and CEO of Levels, has some of the most radical ideas out there when it comes to management and product building. His earlier posts—like the “Breakdown of how he spent his first two years building Levels,” and “How to make delegation your superpower”—are among my all-time favourites on First Round Review.

He’s just published a follow-up to his original “time breakdown” post, reflecting on the last three years. It’s packed with fresh insights and shows how intentional effort can guide you through any phase of life or company-building.

Here are a couple of my favorite snippets from the post:

On burnout:

On 1:1s and meetings in general

Sam’s take on 1:1s is pretty radical—and he’s not alone. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who manages 60+ direct reports, famously doesn’t do 1:1s either.

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⏲️ Rahul Vohra on Time Tracking & PMF

Another great perspective on this came from Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra on Lenny’s podcast. He talked about his approach to time tracking and how it led to a key insight that helped him significantly boost his contribution to Superhuman’s success.

Tracking his time revealed that Rahul was spending only 6% to 7% on product, design, and marketing—areas where he excels. By hiring a president to handle operations and restructuring his role, he increased this to 60% to 70%, dramatically accelerating Superhuman’s product velocity.

Rahul’s approach to PMF is one of the most well-known narratives in startup lore. In this episode, he dives deeper—not just into finding PMF, but also into what comes after. He shares a few insights from the post-PMF stage, including one that’s pretty counterintuitive—and definitely worth thinking about.

Ignore feedback from users who don’t love your product’s core value—focus on the “somewhat disappointed” users for whom your main benefit resonates.

Rahul shared some great lessons on building viral products. His key message? True virality doesn’t come from a product feature—it comes from word of mouth. Superhuman has nailed this, so his take is definitely worth a read.

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🌀 Rex Woodbury on Viral Growth

If you’re curious about viral growth, Rex Woodbury has a fantastic essay called “Viral Growth: how to keep lightning in the bottle”. He breaks down two main types of virality:

1. Built-in Virality: This is virality embedded in a company’s business model or product.

2. Viral Boosts: These are one-off “boosts” that drive growth, but that aren’t intrinsic to the business / product.

He backs it up with examples from Airbnb to Duolingo, making it a fun and insightful read. The following snippets caputres useful actionable for Tiktok. You can notice that it has much wider applicability.

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🎬 40 Principles for Making Ideas Happen

Action Digest is one of my favourite newsletters—perfect for creative folks, operators, and org builders. Scott Belsky and his team do an amazing job curating stories of design and operational excellence, turning them into clear, actionable advice.

Last month, they ran a three-part series with 40 principles for taking action & making ideas happen. It breaks down what it really takes to succeed creatively and helps you build a structured, sustainable creative life—one where you consistently do your best work.

Each idea is worth your time. The full collection is a goldmine for builders.

Here’s a sample—check out the full post and bookmark it as a go-to reference.

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🏏 Torpedo “Bat” of Innovation

The “Torpedo” bat is making waves in Major League Baseball, and YouTube is packed with videos breaking down why it’s a total game changer.

For those unfamiliar, it’s a newly designed bat being used by the New York Yankees—created by Aaron Leanhardt, a former MIT physicist. He combined data, material science, and a whole lot of ingenuity to reinvent an object that had stayed the same for decades.

It’s a fascinating story of innovation. Om Malik shared a short but sharp take on it, with a few standout observations that are especially relevant when thinking about innovation and problem-solving (emphasis mine):

The Torpedo bat, with its distinctive bowling pin-like design, proves that even products with 100 years of history can be revolutionized through a precise combination of data, design, and scientific analysis. It also illustrates that established order is often transformed by outsiders who aren’t bound by traditional thinking. Just as Apple revolutionized mobile phones in 2007 by abandoning physical keyboards, Leanhardt’s physics-based approach challenged baseball’s century-old assumptions about bat design.

Another thing I have learned from watching innovators closely is that innovation walks a fine line between regulation and revolution. This bat is yet another example of what I have seen in Silicon Valley. The Torpedo bats are within Major League Baseball’s requirements yet transform the game. YouTube pioneered video sharing while navigating copyright laws, Uber reimagined transportation despite taxi regulations, and OpenAI is developing artificial intelligence within a very gray regulatory framework.

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🏡 Stoop Coffee: Community in Making

Tyler and I were already having leisurely weekend morning coffees in our house, so it was an easy pivot to sit outside with our coffees and enjoy the sunshine. And thus our tradition began. Every weekend, we would bring our folding chairs out onto the street – we had to make do since our house doesn’t have a stoop – and enjoy our caffeine. As we saw people entering or exiting their homes, we'd enthusiastically wave them down, introduce ourselves, and write down their names in our shared spreadsheet. I wore a goofy tie-dyed Six Flags hat so people would remember us as “those people” and we started calling this our brand awareness campaign (but of course, we live in SF).

That’s all it took to get the movement started. And they kept showing up—again and again. It took a couple of months before the first person joined them for coffee. Then another. And before long, it grew into a block party with over 100 guests.

Patty Smith’s idea of Stoop Coffee is a great example of how community building is a natural process—you just need to plant the seed.

I loved this story and am surely going to give it a try soon.

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👋 Porches - Everyday Third Places

One of my favourite childhood memories is sleeping on the roof during hot summer nights. There was a special charm in getting the porch or rooftop ready each evening, then hanging out under the stars before drifting off to sleep. We weren’t alone—this was a shared ritual across the whole neighborhood.

David Oven’s Inside Out (Archive here) reminded me of that memory. He’s talking about a different part of the home—the porch—but touches on similar benefits: a space for informal gatherings, health perks, and even better sleep on hot summer nights.

Porches are semi-magical spaces, intermediate between inside and outside … porches embody “the benefits of public life, the thrills of nature, the atmosphere of weather, the exhilaration of coming and going, the calm of simply sitting down, the warmth of family and friends, and the restfulness of solitude.” For years, they also played a prominent role in American efforts to prevent, manage, or cure several devastating diseases, among them tuberculosis, influenza, and pneumonia.

When I think of such informal meeting spaces, Goa’s porches come to mind. Mario Miranda captured their charm beautifully in his illustrations—here are a couple I found.

Mario Miranda's Goa Porches

Goa’s porch, Gujarat’s aangan or wada—they all served the same purpose: spaces for everyday social gatherings, where the neighbourhood came together. This is where family extended beyond walls and turned into community.

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🏙️ Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes

Today, no matter where you are in the world, most tall commercial buildings look the same—metal and glass skyscrapers with little character or soul.

Brian Potter’s essay “Why skyscrapers became glass boxes” digs into why that is. It offers a great overview of how the construction industry has evolved over the past century, mapping out the key drivers and how they connect with the broader social and political landscape.

One could argue that there’s a sort of market failure at work here: because architecture is ultimately funded by the people who occupy a building but viewed by people outside of it, there are externalities (in the form of benefits of attractive exteriors) that aren’t being appropriately priced in. An “efficient” market for architecture, which used some sort of mechanism to properly weigh the preferences of everyone who has to look at the building, might be expected to produce more beautiful buildings (for whatever your definition of beautiful is).

I love pieces like this—deep dives that open up entire worlds I barely knew existed. They make learning feel effortless and fun.

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✨ Everything else

1. Kevin Kelly gets curious about and finds the origin of the phrase best thing since sliced bread?

2. Mad Over Marketing does his signature deep-dive into a business that started in 1966, nearly went bankrupt in 1986, got acquired in 2011—and is now the coolest thing in 2025. If you haven’t guessed it yet, he’s talking about Erewhon. And yep, the story is absolutely wild.

3. Werner Bronkhorst creates hyper-realistic paintings that feel almost like sculptures. His work features tiny human figures set against vast, open landscapes—like golf courses or pristine blue beaches—capturing a striking contrast between scale and space. (via Dense Discovery)

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ICYMI…

The internet moves fast, but great ideas stick around. Here’s some of my favourites from last week’s post in case you missed it somehow.

1. 11 Types of Insights

2. Under the Hood Team-BHP.com

3. How to build a village

Check them out and more at

📚 Team-BHP, Type of insights, Show don’t tell, Ideas aren’t getting harder to find, vintage stationery ads

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That's all for this week, folks!

I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.

If this piece sparked something for you, I’d love to hear what stood out—leave a comment and let’s keep the conversation alive. And if you know someone who’s always asking "why?" or "how come?", pass this along to them. The world gets more interesting every time a curious mind shares what they’ve found.

Pritesh