How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin

Just feel like no one's being honest and teaching founders this. Be early. Don't order the most expensive thing on the menu for a video call, like an appropriate background. Don't smell like shit. Tell me why you decided to spend time teaching people proper etiquette. You have a lot of really young people. They've been holed up in a room coding, and they show up encouraged by Silicon Valley to be somewhat abrasive on purpose. You want it to show up in a way where people like, okay. This is someone I can work with and trust. Etiquette is a skill for how to show up in a room with a low heart rate. You're at the Kleiner Perkins holiday party. You have all all the venture capitalists in the world and all the CEOs. You're at your first company. You're like, oh my god. This is my shot, and I need to convince this person of that and make this connection. It becomes very transactional. If you show up like a little Energizer bunny, you're gonna scare a boat off. You're gonna project totally the wrong vibe. This isn't your one shot. You'll have other opportunities. You kinda wanna show up with the self confidence and the calm of abundance. This is part of the story. This is not the entire story. Today, my guest is Sam Lesson, partner at Slow Ventures, previous VP of product at Facebook, and two time founder. This is an unconventional episode that may surprise you in how interesting and useful it is to your life. I asked Sam to come on the pod and talk about proper etiquette. You'll hear the backstory of how Sam got into this stuff, but this is turning into a big thing for him. He's teaching classes around the world. He published a book on proper etiquette. I love his framing for why etiquette matters, that the goal of learning good etiquette is to show up in a room with a low heart rate. And we cover all kinds of social interactions like introductions, small talk, meals, meetings, and basically all of the most important things you need to know when it comes to etiquette. I personally found these tips really, really useful, and I learned a lot from this conversation and from his book. Sam is also hilarious and so fun. And I hope you enjoyed this very unique episode. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 19 incredible products, including a year free of lovable Replit, Bolt, Gamma, n eight n, Linear, Devon, Post Hogs, Superhuman, Descript, Flow, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Pattern, Drake, Chevy, or D Mobbin, and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to lenny'snewsletter.com and click product pass. With that, I bring you Sam Lesson after a short word from our sponsors. …