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

**Sam Lessin** (0:00)
I just feel like no one's being honest in teaching founders this. Be early. Don't order the most expensive thing on the menu for a video call with an appropriate background. Don't smell like shit.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:08)
Tell me why you decided to spend time teaching people proper etiquette.

**Sam Lessin** (0:12)
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 in some way abrasive on purpose. You want to be able to show up in a way where people are like, okay, this is someone I can work with and trust.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:24)
Etiquette is a skill for how to show up in a room with a low heart rate.

**Sam Lessin** (0:27)
You're at the Kleiner Perkins holiday party. You have 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, but 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 going to scare them off. You're going to project totally the wrong vibe.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:46)
This isn't your one shot. You'll have other opportunities.

**Sam Lessin** (0:48)
You want to show up with the self-confidence and the calm of abundance. This is part of the story. This is not the entire story.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:58)
Today my guest is Sam Lessin, 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 the 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 enjoyed 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, Replic, Bolt, Gama, N8N, Linear, Devon, PostHawk, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Perflexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Pad, EnjoyCast, JP or DMobin and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Sam Lessin after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by 10Web, the company that pioneered AI website building before ChatGPT. In the last three years, over two million websites have been generated with 10Web's Vibe Coding Platform. 10Web's Vibe Coding Platform is a powerful way to build websites. Think of it as lovable for WordPress, frontend, and backend. Users can build any website at any complexity, e-commerce, portfolios, information websites, blogs, and it comes with the WordPress admin panel and thousands of ready-to-use plugins. 10Web also offers website generation as an API as a service for SaaS companies, marketplaces, hosting providers, MSPs, and agencies. SaaS companies can embed it via API so that users can launch AI-generated sites directly inside of their platform, connected to their own data. Agencies and MSPs can get a white label dashboard to manage clients and resell under their brand. Hosting providers can self-host the API builder on their own infrastructure.
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**Sam Lessin** (4:26)
Blast to be here. I'm excited to have the conversation.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:29)
This is going to be a very different conversation. I suspect this is actually going to be really, really useful and really, really interesting to a lot of people.