February 25, 2022

Josh Clemente: Welcome to Friday Forum, February 25th, 2022. I’m going to jump right into it. Can everyone see my screen just to confirm? Cool. All right. I want to welcome Marc Andreessen. Not much of an introduction needed here, I’m sure. But just to preface, Marc is one of the creators of the internet, co-founder and general partner at a16 who led our seed round, co-creator of Mosaic, internet browser, Netscape, NING, you name it. He’s been involved with it. And Marc has been an incredible supporter and resource for us as we’ve grown. Super, super excited to have him here on the forum today. Marc I think I want to just kick this off with a question for you, which we posed an email leading up to this and I think you’re excited to steel man maybe the opposition as well, but just curious your thoughts on speaking to the role that culture plays in building and scaling a startup. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. Marc Andreessen: Yeah, so I should start by saying it’s great to be here and I’m a huge fan of the company, of the product, so thanks for having me. These guys told me that this is a five-minute segment and I got to say, if you’ve seen me speak before, it takes me about five minutes to clear my throat. So this is going to be a challenge. Josh Clemente: No rush. Marc Andreessen: I’m going to try to get right to the point. So look, I say this about culture. Culture is a truism. It’s become a cliche. It’s something that everybody talks about. Arguably it’s observed mostly in the breach. There’s a few things about culture that I think you learned the hard way after you’ve been through this a bunch of times. And so I thought I just hit real quick maybe the three things that I think are maybe the lessons you learn the hard way. So the first thing is, I just said culture’s the thing that’s observed in the breach. So the thing that you find at a lot of companies is that they have their values, everybody’s got their list of values that’s always on their website. They have offsite, they go through everything, they write on the list of values. And then a year goes by, two years goes by, and then an interesting thing happens, which is if you do an anonymous poll of the employees and you basically ask people without reference to whatever’s on the website or whatever’s in the slides from the CEO, and if you just ask them, look, just write down what you think the company’s values are, not in terms of what the company says, but the way people actually behave, you often get a very different list, right? And so the values will say, I don’t know, we speak honestly or something. And then it’s like, you know, pull people anonymously and everybody is like, well, this company is shot through with passive aggressiveness and everybody’s lying to each other all the time. And so it’s like, okay, which is the real culture of the company? What they say or what they do. And so the first big, I think, learning is basically culture is what happens when you’re not in the room. And this is a principle that we talk to the CEOs about all the time, which is basically, culture is what happens when the CEO’s not in the room. It’s how people behave when there isn’t an authority figure present. But it’s more than that. It’s also what happens when everybody else isn’t in the room, right? It’s when each of you is not in the room. It’s happening regardless of what role you’re in or what responsibility you have, it’s happening when you’re not there. And so it’s really behavioral and it’s really implicit. And it is really things that happen every day, as opposed to the base sweeping statements. And then hopefully what happens is they reconcile the big formal written thing matches the informal reality. But I think the informal reality is the thing that really matters. The second thing that you learn, the hard way that relates directly to that then it’s basically it’s not just the CEO’s job to perpetuate the culture, it’s not just the management’s team’s job to perpetuate the culture, it’s everybody’s responsibility to perpetuate the culture. And in particular what happens is, as you guys are doing is these companies grow. There’s this mathematical thing that happens, which is, if you think about it, every doubling plus one of the employee base means that the majority of the employees at the company today are not the people who were there before the doubling. And these doublings happen fast, right? When these companies are growing because it’s like 10 people to 20 people to 40 people to 80 people to 160 people. The best companies double 10 or 12 times. And so basically what happens is with every doubling you’re getting in a new majority of the employees. And when these companies grow fast, that can happen really quickly. And then basically the culture is what the majority of the employees think it is. And so if the culture isn’t passed down adequately by everybody who’s already in the company, everybody new who’s joining, the culture changes with each doubling, the culture will become what the new majority of the employees think it should be. And so it’s job to perpetuate that as a company grows, it’s the only way to maintain a culture over time. And everybody has to feel a very deep level of responsibility for that. And then the third thing you learn, and this is the thing you really learn the hard way, is basically, in the end the culture is forged in crisis. It’s tremendously fun to sit around when things are going great, everything’s fun, everything’s fantastic, everybody’s so happy all the time. But basically none of these companies succeed just by everything going great. The way these companies succeed is basically by passing a series of challenges and going through a series of crises. I sometimes call the process of company building, it’s falling up the stairs. The good news is you’re getting altitude. The bad news is it’s like, boy, there’s a lot of crashing into the wall as it happens. And so, basically these companies grow through basically confronting a series of crises. The crises are not fun to confront, but they are necessary to go through the process. And then basically, the culture ends up being, basically in the long run it ends up being basically how these companies confront the crisis and how they work through the crisis. And so there’s this forged in crisis or forged in a fire thing. And in the long run what the company’s culture will be and what people will remember about being at the company is the way that the company handles crisis. And that’s where it really matters. And that’s why it’s so important to get it right up front and to make sure that the culture’s bake at the company is because when the crisis comes, you don’t want to have to make up your culture on the fly, you want to already have a foundation in place that actually determines how people are going to behave when the going gets tough. So I will stop there. Josh Clemente: Really Awesome. Yeah, couldn’t appreciate the insights more. And I think one of the interesting things is that those doublings, I think there’s an expectation that culture can remain exact as it was unchanged during those doublings. And I don’t think that’s the expectation actually, it’s that the culture has to evolve and the goal is to maintain the trajectory and certain things within… Elements within the culture have to change with these doublings as the company gets larger. Do you have any examples or stories that you could think of that might relate or reinforce those sorts of concepts? Marc Andreessen: Well, so it’s always the trial by fire. It’s always when, excuse me, the shit hits the fan, right? And so I would say there’s two versions of when the shit hits the fan. There’s basically the version when the whole world falls apart. And I mean, look, we’re going through… This is happening right now. This is happening right now. I’m not sure if you guys have this situation or not, but we have a lot of companies that have employees in Ukraine, and we have a lot of employees who have companies in Russia. And so how does the company process through having having employees in these very difficult places in these very difficult circumstances, how is that going? Some companies are going to have to do really fundamental changes to how they operate. Some companies are going to really extraordinary lengths of how they’re helping their employees who are trapped in right now, potentially very, very bad circumstances. And so there’re that. There’s also economic crashes. In the dot-com in 2000 it was a wrenching change for a lot of companies, as you go through and a lot of companies cultures fractured under that stress. And so there’s the big external change. And then there’s the company specific things. And I don’t know if you guys have been watching the stock market lately, but there’s two things happening at the same time for a lot of tech companies that have gone public. One is there’s just a general downdraft in stock market prices, but there are some specific companies, I won’t name names, but there are some specific companies that have hit very specific post-COVID crises. And maybe they thought that they had a growth rate established in COVID that would last forever. And it turns out they don’t. And now they’ve got a significant retrenchment underway. And then there’s this thing that happens where it’s a company basically goes, when it’s growing, it’s basically lathered with praise that everybody in the company is a genius and everybody in the company feels like a genius because the company’s growing so well. And then you hit one of these crisis and all of a sudden it’s like everybody’s an idiot, the press is calling you an idiot. It’s like everybody in the company thinks everybody else’s idiot. Your friends are like, “Oh, why are even working for that company? That company clearly is falling apart.” And then of course the most frustrating version of that is when the environment’s going great and your company has hit the challenge, that really sucks. So yeah, like I said, it’s those moments where when people rise to the occasion and rally together as a team and really confront the crisis. It’s those moments that 40 years from now say, you’ll be sitting on the porch with your grandchildren and be like, okay, this is what I did. This is what I was a part of. Those are the things that stick. Josh Clemente: Love it. Well, I want to be respectful of your time. The original question was along the lines of speaking to what role culture plays in building and scaling. And you had mentioned the email, I might ask you to steel man the counter argument as well, and I am curious what that would look like, if you don’t mind. Marc Andreessen: Oh, sorry. The best culture? Josh Clemente: Yeah, yeah. Steel manning the opposite. Marc Andreessen: Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, well best culture is just winning. Josh Clemente: Fair. Marc Andreessen: So the degenerate case, and my partner Ben wrote a whole book about culture. He argus with me about this all the time. And so you can have him on it to argue the other side as well, but look, the degenerate version of this is the companies that sit around and enable [inaudible 00:10:01] and suck their thumb and be like basically spend all their time on figuring out all… And by the way, you get into these silly, especially in the last few years, see these silly things. Our culture is free yoga in the office and the masseuses and the 47 different kinds of organic artisanal ice cream. And we got the oat milk, but now we need the almond milk. And by the way, where, where’s the potato milk? And I want both the non-alcoholic kombucha and the alcoholic kombucha. Well, I’ll give you another version of degenerate culture is basically the ones where it’s like we’re nice to each other all the time, but there’s a lot of people who actually encode passive aggressiveness into the culture. And it’s like we’re nice, we don’t offend each other. Everybody feels like emotionally supported all the time, as compared to basically truth telling and hitting the issue on the table and everybody pitching in to fix fixed problems. And so there are all these degenerate versions. And then the ultimate degenerate version of culture is basically, it’s the company loses, right? Well, I’ll give you an example. Ben has a chapter in his book. This is something he and I agree on. He has a chapter in his book based on blog posts that he wrote years ago that people pass around, which is lies that losers tell, right? And so it’s easy to encode, it’s really easy to lie about how well a company’s doing. It’s really easy to lie about the companies values. It’s really easy to lie to the outside world, but the lies that losers tell, the point that Ben makes basically is the biggest lies that you tell are the lies you tell to yourself. And so you end up with these companies that have a level of dishonesty, which is they say they have cultural values or their cultural values translate to things that are actually not helpful. And then they tell themselves lies that this is going to lead to basically Nirvana and a wonderful environment. And then along the way, at some point they just miss the whole concept of we have to win. It has to work, right? And then the best culture is the best culture is we’re winning, it’s working, it’s going great and it’s going great not by accident, but because of all the incredible hard work that we put into it. Andy Grove used to say you never want a metric in a business without having a counter metric. Because if you just have one metric, that metric gets gamed. And so you want another metric that basically offsets the gaming. You don’t just want to have a metric that says, how many people did we hire this week? You want to have a counter metric that says, are the people any good? And so I would say if your metric is we’ve got a great culture, the counter metric is we’re winning. It has to translate right into victory. It has to translate into the actions and the level of aggressiveness required in order to win. And I guess I would say, there are places on the planet where people are unambiguous on that point. I would say generally speaking, California is ambiguous on that point. Especially in California, there’s a lot of what I call fake California casual or fake California nice. And it sometimes translates into these culture conversations. Just want to say, yeah, make sure there’s an edge to it. But here’s the way to think about it, its culture shouldn’t make people comfortable. Culture should basically be stimulating. It should basically be reinforcing. It should be, I’m at a place that’s going to win at a place. This company’s going to be a T-Rex, it’s going to rampage to the market. It’s going to do amazing things, it’s going to compete, it’s going to be competitors, and it’s going to do all that because it wants to have the maximum impact. It wants to get to the most people, it wants to help the most people. It’s product deserves to be the product that everybody uses because it’s the best product and it’s going to have the biggest impact on people’s lives, and so therefore, it’s going to get to the most people. And to do that, the company does have to have an edge to it. So that would be my counterargument. Josh Clemente: Fantastic. Yeah, I think I also love just thinking about our product, the positioning of a metric and a counter metric. Right now we have blood sugar and you can obviously locally optimize glucose by gaming it to a certain extent. And so building out the product that we are building, it’s he helping me to think through how do we position counter metrics within the product that we’re building such that we are actually improving health as opposed to just feeling good about a glucose curve. Marc Andreessen: Well, I would say that that’s one way to think about. It’s one way to think about it. Another way to think about it, and I don’t know if you guys have thought about this, but it’s basically, it’s the other side. People do deserve it some point to have a little fun. So life isn’t lived just to be healthy. And so that’d be the other side of it, which is like how do we make sure that people also have live enjoyable lives? Josh Clemente: Absolutely. Well Marc, I know I think you had committed to five minutes, you gave us 15, so I really, really appreciate that. I know the whole team appreciated this one in particular, if you’d like to hang around and follow through the meeting, if you’ve got some extra time, we would love to have you stick around, but obviously no pressure there. Marc Andreessen: Awesome. Awesome. Well thanks so much. Hopefully next time, hopefully you can have me for 16 minutes. Josh Clemente: Perfect. Thanks a ton, Marc, have a great Friday and weekend. Marc Andreessen: Okay, thanks Josh. Josh Clemente: Bye-bye. All right. That was awesome. Jumping from there into recent achievements for the week. Big news this week, Cissy, Paul, Brett all started, I think they’re all here on the call this morning. So welcome everybody. Thanks for kicking off your tenure here at Levels with an awesome week. And we have those intro slides coming up in just a minute. Waitlist added a record number of signoffs this week. NPS has been strong for three consecutive weeks and our replacement rate continues to be record lows. These had some counter metrics which Chris will talk about in his section. We definitely have been struggling with a few volume related constraints on the op side, but initiatives like Mark Hyman’s giveaway, which gained us 25,000 IG followers, which is a 40% increase on our account in less than a week. Most of that I think was in 48 hours, 8,000 in the first hour. And this is about one and a half percent of Dr. Hyman’s total following. So this was massively successful. And Dr. Hyman’s code has been a strong converter for us for months now, but this massive spike from a single post was pretty mind-blowing. And of course some of the downstream stuff has affected our ops support capabilities. Casey, Rob and Dr. Perlmutter presented at the Crusonia conference on future metabolic health this week. Casey and Dhru also did another podcast, which was the first one where she did a deep dive into the new metabolic health panel for Dhru’s show. So that just released a few hours ago. Highly recommend everyone listened to that. It’s exciting that we’re getting the news out about the additional products we’re offering. We’ve got the Q1 Assemblage schedule rolling out now. I think Mike D. has sent out calendar holds for all the events and the Notion itinerary is set. So look out for that. Make sure you clear your calendars. Levels was featured pretty extensively in episode eight of Dr. Sinclair’s or David Sinclair’s Lifespan podcast. You can see him there gesturing towards his Levels patch and describing it. So they talk quite frequently about Levels. And this is separate from the ads that we have supporting Lifespan. So it’s pretty awesome to be organically showing up in these conversations. We also organically showed up, and I didn’t have an image of this, but in the, well I would say wearables and biosensors in the future of it, what we’re building, showed up in Tim Urban and Lex Friedman’s conversation, which Tom mentioned at the beginning of the call. And then the whole new Level back catalog is uploaded to YouTube now. So starting to add some depth on that channel. And then we had a really interesting finding from the most recent Wearable Challenge. So for people who are super new, the Wearable Challenge has been an initiative that is peripheral to Levels. A team, including one of our investors, Justin Mayers, has been using Level CGMs combined with some more intensive coaching and cohort based accountability to help people rather than having to commit to a dietary regime, instead just keep your blood sugar within a certain range. And the goal is to lose weight. And so you use the CGM as an accountability metric. And this cohort lost eight pounds on average. Again, this is without enforced eating habits. It’s like eat to your glucose control. 73% of them exercised daily, 72% completely avoided sugar. I think 75% avoided alcohol through the entire challenge. And 94% said that they would return for another cohort like this. So really interesting. This is the platformization of Levels data in a way. So one of the very first examples of a company or a product being built with on top of the Levels product, which is really exciting. So more to come on this, but just wanted to mention that. And then we’ve got some beautiful design and in app progress on the Now Page, as well as deeper dives into food, which we’ll cover later on. And let’s see, what else? Miz’s article on Medium on intentionally structuring and scaling communications was I think hugely successful. I got a ton of emails and DMs about this one. People really, really found it in insightful and the tagline of why Levels quit Slack caught a lot of attention. People were like, “Wait a minute, Slack is where work happens. What? What’s going on here? Why would Levels not be on it?” So it was really interesting. And I think that’s the majority of the stuff here. Jump ahead and welcome Brett. Brett, we’d love to just have you intro yourself and say hi to the team. Happy to have you here. Brett Red: Well, thanks man. Happy to be here. Yeah, so I don’t know if I’m supposed to read these slides or just talk, but I’ll just let you know. Yeah, so I’ve been in designing habits, and I basically worked at the intersection between business goals and user needs for about the past 12 years. And then in the past three in healthcare specifically. And a lot of stuff that he just talked about, stuff that Andreessen just talked about, I’m actually working on explaining that we want you to become metabolic flexible so that you can have pizza and donuts. And so trying to make celebrations and conversations that are educating people about what glucose means, but really about breaking that bigger story that we have, that 10 minute video up into sections that we can use for the app. Yeah, and I’ve said this five times and Miz is probably, is sick off hearing it. This is the most well run company ever. I feel like I know more about this business in four days than I knew about my last one that I was at for three years. So it’s mind-blowing. I don’t know if I can go somewhere else. I think it would be painful. I think I’d be like, I’m going back in time or something. But anyhow. Yeah, and there are some things I feel like I still haven’t really figured it all out, but I’m way further ahead than I expected to be in a short amount of time. Josh Clemente: I’d love to hear that. That’s for sure. Yeah, everyone who has not yet had a chance, please connect with Brett. He has got some really awesome experience and concepts about how we can take the raw material that we’re working with at this company and turn it into concrete and repeatable behavior change. It’s quite exciting. I’ve loved my conversation so far and really looking forward to seeing what we build together. Brett, thanks for being with us today. Brett Red: Thanks. Josh Clemente: All right, Cissy, welcome. Cissy Hu: Hey everyone, great to meet many of you this week. Feel super grateful to be joining the team. And echo the same excitement that Brett just shared. I thought I’d tell you a bit about my journey with metabolic health. My focus here is going to be to accelerate and scale our community efforts. So my journey with Levels started a little over a year ago when I first beta tested the product as a part of my annual Whole30 reset. So during Whole30 I typically have the breakfast diet of roast potatoes and hard-boiled eggs. And I thought I was making a healthy decision by eating Whole Foods. So you can imagine the rude awaken I had when I look at my Levels app on the first day and my glucose Levels are going through the roof. So the background here is my maternal grandparents have had type two diabetes for as long as I’ve been alive. So growing up I would watch them inject themselves with insulin before every meal. And to me it always felt like it was an inevitable thing that I would become diabetic, but I didn’t know how to manage that. And I had gone to a number of PCPs who downplayed any concern I would show because they told me I was too young to worry about it. So even though my grandmother had been nursed her entire life, her health data was pretty much a black box to her and they’ve really had no idea what the impact of their daily habit we’re having on their health. And then more recently, my mom got diagnosed as pre-diabetic and I’ve become really aware of all the additional health precautions she now needs to take on a daily basis. So it’s something I’ve had a front row seat to my entire life. And so when I came across Levels, I realized the work that this team’s doing is going to transform the relationship that people have with food and challenge a lot of the modern traditions that we have around eating. I think a lot of us have cultural relationships with food that we just grew up with, but we have no idea why we have those relationships. So I hope Levels becomes this game changing tool for a lot more people earlier on in their life versus once we get to old age figuring out that we have diabetes with no way to reverse it. And I’ll just add that beyond my personal anchor to this mission, I also strongly believe that Levels is paving the way for the future of work. I think before Levels the definition of remote work was typically not finding meaningful work with an all-star team while getting to pursue a fulfilling life. And I think Levels is really redefining what it means to be remote and Async. So I’ve been consistently blown away by this team and I’m really impressed by the strong culture that you’ve all built and I see put to practice every day through Threads, through Notion and meeting you all. So super excited to get to know you all and learn from you. And that’s it. Josh Clemente: Oops, I was muted. Thanks for the backgrounds to see. It’s super exciting to have you here. Community is just going to be such a major part of what we’re building, to help people find their place and find people like them who see the world the way they are and are on the same journey and really can’t wait to see what you build for us or with us on that front. It’s going to be quite an exciting year, I think, on the community side. Those of you that haven’t spoken to Cissy, please reach out, make yourselves available. And I think there’s going to be some cafes this week for everyone to get to know each other a bit. And then welcome Paul. So Paul is taking on digital channels, digital lifecycle there. There’s a lot wrapped up in those words, but Paul, I’m going to let you take it from here. Happy to have you. Paul Barszcz: Awesome, awesome. Yeah, I’ll keep it short. Super excited to join the team. I’ve been following you guys for many months now, but just being part of Forum right now is surreal. It’s pretty cool. After using the CGM now for almost two weeks, I realized that I have to completely change my diet. I look fine like physically, but I feel terrible and I could see the spikes and crashes and I feel them also. So I’m glad that this product’s out there and I’m really excited for the future. And just in general, my background, I originally studied electrical engineering, but then I switched over to marketing and been working in that for almost 13 years. I had my own businesses also for nine years, and I bring a lot of experience and I’m super excited to take Levels to the next level. Josh Clemente: Love it. All right, well really great to have all three of you starting and joining at the same time here on this forum. And yeah, team, you know what to do, make them all feel welcome, show them where to go and in Notion and how to use the tools and we’ll build some great stuff. Awesome, thank you. Okay, quick culture slide. I mean this is primarily meetups, so this was meetup week. Apparently we have two anniversaries. First off, Laurie has hit two years with us, which is amazing. And JM is coming up on us one year. Well, I guess this is for forward-looking. This is on March 1st. So congratulations to both of you. Have loved to work with both of you and get to know you both and looking forward to many more great things. And then we’ve got some awesome meetups here. We had a New York cohort, we had a Bozeman cohort, and then we’ve got Casey, Rob and David down in Florida. And then we have a Portugal cohort with Marillo and Jeremy all meeting up. So this is awesome. Love to see this stuff. Everyone can organically find each other across the map now. We’re distributed on many continents and it’s pretty easy to find a Levels members within driving distance at this point, which is phenomenal. All right. Jumping ahead to North Star. JM, did you have anything you wanted to touch on this slide? JM: I was just going to read the numbers in case someone else’s audio only. We had 1,658 daily active food loggers last week, basically flat from the week prior. And I added one little extra thing here. We have almost 3,900 active CGM subscribers. That is people who will be getting a CGM from us in the next one to three months. That’s all. Thanks. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you. And to repeat the prayer, Levels helps you see how food affects your health. All right, we got a Async from Scott. Scott: Hi. Everybody should be working toward this priority right now. If you are not, please feel free to raise the question. It’s not to say that we won’t be working on this stuff, but it just deserves a little bit more of a conversation before we do so. All right. Allocation for people has not changed week to week and for subscriptions that we’re going to need to uplift a little bit at least to clear the happy path for the IRB. And then to do a little bit more member facing stuff like having them change their own frequency, changing from one vendor to another, opting out of the IRB, et cetera. So more PM work and more development planning coming there. On the product side for P2. Work continues still on the Now project. I think we’re closing in on a decent release candidate if you want to call it that.I don’t know. Anyway, I’m sure David will have more in his update. Last thing for me is we’re going to continues to report on this weekly just so that everybody gets a sense of how frequently we are releasing. So it has been six days since our latest app release. We are targeting seven days no more between releases. So we’re going to get to the point where this slide will be on the forum every week. Ideally, I’ll add some notes as well. I didn’t have time to do it this week, but I can give you a little bit more character about what’s actually going out to the user base on a week to week basis. And so for those of you that are currently using CGMs and you want to be testing Levels application, we definitely encourage you to get the updates and play around with the new features and give our developers feedback. A lot of times there’s little edge cases, little tickets that we might clean up afterward. And so it’s good for them to know that you are using the features that we’re building and give some feedback on them. So that’s it for me this week and I will see everybody on Monday. Josh Clemente: Thank you Scott. All right, we got Maz on the Async update. Maziar Brumand: Everyone wanted to give you a quick update. [inaudible 00:29:00]. The experiments, two is the new experiments that we’re working on. And then three is the general execution and scoping of the membership project. The elasticity experiments, if you remember, we’re doing a elasticity experiment with a double opt-in crowd and we’re changing price between 199 and 75. And we’re seeing what impact does it have on volume. So we see that if we offer a $100 price, we see a 32% increase in volume. And then if you reduce the price of 75, we’re seeing a 66% in volume, which means that elasticity is about 0.6 for 100 and then 0.1 just over one for 75. What this tells us is that between 199 and 100, we’re not that elastic. And as soon as you start getting around that 100 and go below that, you become more elastic. And that makes sense. As our product gets more affordable into the sub hundred dollars range, more people can afford it and therefore purchase it. We had a thesis that this crowd is probably less elasticity than the general population cause these are folks that have been waiting for a long time to be part of Levels and have been willing to fill survey. So these are people that really want it. So we wanted to look at a more general population and see what the conversion rate and elasticity looks like. So we looked at the Sinclair crowd and in this experiment we still have the conversion coming from Sinclair’s actually a lot lower than our double op, so 4.4% versus 10.8%. We also said that the elasticity is a lot higher. So as we drop price by 50%, we see that actually demand rises by 60%, which is about twice as high as the elasticity on the double op. And so what this tells us is that in the general population, we actually even have higher elasticity as we drop price, which again makes sense. One of the things that we think about is not only we want to create value, which means that the value that we are offering is one of the price that we’re charging, but also we want to look at affordability because no matter how much value we’re creating if your product is simply not affordable as a percentage of people’s discretionary income, you still won’t get a boost in demand. So we really understand affordability. So we run another experiment where we survey members and still preliminary, so not a large sample, but interesting, that 80% of our members actually earn over a 100K. And to give you perspective, about 15% of the US population makes more than a 100K. So basically 80% of our members aren’t the top 15% earners of the U.S. And even within this high income population, 68% of the people are saying that CGMs are too expensive and it’s preventing them from ordering more kits, which means that we need to do a lot more on reducing price, at least on the CGM upfront, even on the membership front so that A, more people in the income distribution can benefit from our products. And then B, people engage with our products throughout the year. And it’s not just the one CGM kit purchase, we’ve got a lot more work to do there. On the other experiments that we have in the wings, we’re thinking about a lot of different things. We definitely want to see what is the elasticity to CGMs. This hopefully will help us make the case why the consumer market’s a lot more elastic, the price of CGMs verse the clinical market and work with the suppliers. And we are thinking about a monthly membership. And we want to make sure if we offer a monthly membership, which could increase conversions quite a bit, we can absorb it from a operational perspective. And then also want to make sure that the product market fit is right so that when we offer this, we actually retain the members that comes through this path. So we’re thinking about monthly membership, but we need to do some experiments to understand conversion and retention and also understand the timing of offering this so that we can best offer this. We also providing one CGM instead of two CGMs. The use case for this would be, for example, people that want to have every other month two CGMs can order one CGM every month and combined with a monthly membership can actually get to a price under $100, which could be really interesting. That’s the magical number that you want to be of less than $100 a month. So you could potentially do that. So we’re going to run some experiments on conversion and retention on that. On the Try-it, this is the idea that we want people to feel the magic of the experience but provide a low barrier to try that. So the Try-it effectively means that you will pay no or very small membership fee. You get once [inaudible 00:32:21] and you can try it and then if you like it, you can upgrade to the premium membership. And we will test this with both retention and conversion to premium. And then finally, we want to put it all together and see with the right membership number and the CGM number, what could elasticity on our demand look like. On the oral project. We’re going to take Scott’s recommendation for the DRI to work closely with the product manager in this case, David. So we sat down together and think about the product, and this is probably overlaps closely with the work that JM and Scott are doing, for lift off to make sure that we have the right things prioritized. And the three things that jump out is make sure the check-out flow is the best experience we get it to, but from a membership perspective and flow perspective, we have a post task manager if we need, so people can take care of task after they make the purchase. And then finally, the ability for members to order one time [inaudible 00:32:59]. So for example, if you just order one during signup, you can go on anytime order more. If you do quarterly and want to do more than quarterly, you can go on order more. So this is all work, and there’s a lot of work going on about thinking about framing membership more accurately and producing more content as well. Thanks for listening. Josh Clemente: Alrighty. Thank you Maz. David. David Flinner: All right. Yeah, the goal of the Now project is to help people always know what to do now, and this is more and more relevant, especially as we move into the mainstream audience. And as you know, the near term goal is we have all these questions that people are running into, really basic six questions that we need to answer. And so we’re laser focused on trying a new experience that we need to test and see if we can answer these basic questions and more generally help people understand what’s going on in the moment, what to do next, what to do now. And the near term goal is to get out our very first MVP launch so we can start to gather learnings from our members. If they like this new interface, if the paradigm works, if the information is clear. And if we’re starting to answer a bunch of these basic questions that we already know that Mike and team from the beginning set up and gather that giant list. So where we’re at is that we’re looking like we can probably launch, most likely launch to a small set of people in next week’s app release. So there’s only a few tasks remaining. Thank you for the feedback so far. Please keep it coming. Given that, we’re looking to learn, do people resonate with the interaction model? Where are they getting stuck? Are we seeing fewer questions on some of the basic onboarding things, the basic week one things that we’re presenting in a big story format? Yeah, so that’s the first part. Justin spent this week wiring up the logging experience and other related core user journeys to work with the new Now components that we’ve been building out in the prototype. So by the end of next week, that will all be working flush in the app and we’ll get our first member feedback. So what’s next? We’ve been working with Alan on figuring out basically insights that matter. For the MVP, we’ve only wired up the existing user feed insights that we had before, but now we want to know not just that, but in any moment, what should you do, what happened, what can I do next? And so to that end, we’re focusing on the food logging experience because we want to show how food helps you, show you how your food helps you understand your health. Alan”s going to talk about this in the designs, but we’re going to show you what happened, why it happened by using the tags infrastructure and show you that you’re not alone. And then also what can you do next with the new foods first experience, that’s going to require a lot more work, but we’re going to experiment with a very small scrap way to do it. And then finally, Alan’s going to get into this, but starting to answer some of the problems that we want to focus on with Now are actually also part of the first time experience. So having a forked different first time experience where when people first try to log or first come into the app, did they see something different that helps them get up to speed faster. So I think that’s about it for Now this week. Stay tuned for next week and we can get this thing out there. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Excited for the MVP. Big update, thank you. Andrew. Andrew Conner: Yeah, quick update on the Eng process, SLA and KPIs. Here are the numbers for everyone and everyone is continuing to do such a fantastic job reviewing poll request. So I really appreciate that. Yeah, that’s it. Josh Clemente: Awesome, thank you. And all right, nothing much has changed here. Same roles as last week. Continuing to take in referrals. Share your network if you have somebody that would make a great fit for Levels, please send them over, even if you don’t see a position that necessarily matches their background. Offers extended for digital marketing and finance, I think that’s a bit outdated, but that is still true. All right, I think this is Mike D. Mike DiDonato: Yeah, cool, thanks Josh. So I posted an update in Threads about Assemblage last night. We wanted to quickly bump it here on the forum. Assemblage is just about a month away. It’s time to get excited. All events are uploaded to our Google calendar right now. The big call to action for everyone is to please join the Assemblage forum if you’ve not already, so that you can see the updates that we’ll be dropping throughout the next month. My update yesterday evening had a couple ask for everyone. So please go check that out. And if this is your first Assemblage, you could find more info about what to expect on Threads and the Assemblage Notion page that we’ll be releasing soon. And one final friendly reminder, attendance to Assemblage events is optional and all of the events will be recorded. So if you miss any, you’ll be able to watch them at a time that’s more convenient for you. And I think that is it. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Looking forward to it. Thank you Mike. Miz. Michael Mizrahi: Yeah, assembly just covered. Thanks Mike. But everyone, yeah, you can find that in Notion. And huge thanks to Mike for organizing this one and executing on it. So that’s awesome. A few other reminders, just because the team is growing and it doesn’t hurt to repeat these things for anyone that might have missed it. So reminder that Friday forum is optional. This is always recorded and sent out, with more time zones and countries in the mix, this falls on Saturday mornings on Friday nights. And so keeping an eye open for what might make sense for the most people on the team. But for now, it’s totally optional. If you need to present Async, you can always do that as you’ve seen a few of those in here already. Other reminder, found out some people are still using Threads in the Mac app. It’s garbage, it crashes, it’s waggy, keyboard shortcuts don’t work. Use the browser, you’ll be much, much happier. And the keyboard targets are pretty snappy, so performance is much better and highly recommend that. One more slide, Josh. Status update on feedback and performance process. So a little bit behind the scenes of what’s going on here. There’s a feedback tracker in Notion that calculates when your next checkpoint is. So there’s a few things going on. 60 days after your first day, there’s an informal manager check-in just to make sure that you’ve onboarded properly, you know where you’re headed, you’ve got the right strategy in place and you can point in the right direction. So that check-in happens automatically. And Vanessa from Athena kicks those off via a thread to you and your manager. The next thing is that every six months after your first date, we alternate between a feedback process and eventually a year retrospective review. This process is totally self-directed and a bunch of you have gone through it already. So thanks for all the feedback. You are the DRI of your own career, responsible for your own performance review. Your manager is involved at a step, but most of it is you soliciting feedback from your peers, doing a review of yourself, and then having a conversation with your manager and charting out where your career is headed, what you want to work on, where you need support, et cetera. So really want to stress that you own this process on your own and we think that’s really important. This doesn’t replace regular feedback with peers. So be sure to speak candidly, speak openly, make sure that you’re addressing issues as they come up with people, both positive and critical feedback. There’s plenty of videos that we’ve done on giving feedback, there’s plenty about this in the book club. This is a core part of the culture and we really want to stress that. So I think Marc Andreesen said it best and I probably can’t top that, but really culture is what we do on our own, what we do between each other when no one’s watching. So the feedback process is not going to be this Notion doc every six months, it’s going to be the daily course corrections and feedback between each other as a team to work on interpersonal relationships and all these things. So just throwing that out there. That’s it for now. If you have any feedback on feedback process, please share it in Threads. Josh Clemente: Love it. I sense a podcast episode, feedback on feedback. Thank you Miz. Looks like we got Alan Async today. Alan: Hey, everybody my first remote Friday forum update. Really grateful we’re able to do this. So what happened this week in design? So took this week to focus a lot on dashboard redesign experiments, structuring some of this work to be more learning focused. Took some time to go a bit more deeply on reward mechanisms. And then finally introducing Brett to my mess. I’m realizing that I’ve been operating a little bit like this here in the background. Try to think of myself a little bit more like this, but really when I’m explaining a lot of this stuff to Brett, it’s probably looking like [inaudible 00:41:21] looking a little bit like this. So I’m sorry Brett, we’ll try to bring that together in the future. So this week really focused on comprehension. This is something that is an existential question for the Levels that we have to address and we’re doing that in a variety of ways on the Now Page. Brett’s also going to start looking at how to address this through some more engaging concepts, especially using animation to start talking about what is glucose? What is glucose stability? A lot of our users actually don’t know what this means. We’ve found an illustrator, an animator that we really like. So we’re going to start queuing him up. But probably, one thing we need to do before we get too deeply into a project that is get some clear art direction for different areas of the projects. Where could we use an aesthetic like this? And where wouldn’t we? How do we keep it all together before he jumps into other big projects, especially things like programs and weight loss and so on. So for me, just giving a bit of a recap on some of that Now Page work, we’re starting to cue this up for engineering and some of this is around comprehension is onboarding experiences. How do we explain some of these basic concepts to our users? So when they first enter the app, they’re going to have a bit of an intro to Levels. It won’t require any click through is just loads up for you. It’s one of the first things you see. And we’ll talk a little bit more about gentle rolling hills and your glucose, about the holistic nature that we’re working towards as a program. And then prompt them to get exploring. We’re also revisiting Score pages. How can we better explain to people what this stuff is? And we’ve broken it down into a three main ways of thinking about a score or a glucose response in a zone. So what happened? Why did it happen? And what can I do next time? This is a pretty straightforward mental model that I think, my hope is it’ll help people better understand, what they’re seeing in these graphs, what might have influenced it that they may not have expected, and then what can they do next time? So here we’ve got our standard graph. We’ve got the ingredients probably pretty familiar with this. If you had a low score and we could to leverage the tagging infrastructure that we are starting to develop now. We can identify an ingredient and potentially call out what’s the most common community score. The thing I like about this is that if you get a low score and it’s an ingredient that’s spiking everyone else, you’re not alone. You’re probably not the only one spiking with something like orange juice or big chunk of carbs, for example. And of course they can jump off, they can look at this other stuff as well. And then finally, what do I do next time? We’ve got all this great community data and we have all this wonderful content led by the editorial team. We’re going to start bringing that into the app as well. So can we surface alternatives? Oh, there’s my low battery signal, nice. Popular alternatives, can we surface spike blunchers that can maybe allow you to eat that same thing but prevent such a large spike next time? And again, another example of integrated explainers, we’ll have this little affordance here beside the spike. If they’re curious about what happened, they can tap on it and we’ll explain a score. Small responses will get score better. And I think some of our users actually don’t know that still even as they’re going deep into the experience. And so you may have noticed on this last slide, bunch of images. It looks like content. Yes, it is content. We’re going to start doubling down in the future on food, on all this wonderful stuff that goes out on the blog and on social, bringing it into the app and tying it back to your data. So this is little more in the longer term direction. And so you’re probably not going to see it for a little while, but we’re going to introduce a section at the bottom of the app called food. It’s going to bring for, or I call it the community table. We’re going to have things like recipes, community meals that have scored well. For example here you can filter it at the top, taking advantage of some of the stuff that Marillo was doing. Filter it at the top. You can find what you like, the search as well. I’m not going to go through all that now because it’s going to get distracting. But you bring up a recipe. And then of course food challenges or experiments, we’re going to put that in a dedicated section and build a bit more of a social movement around that. And then in terms of community, our experiments, David set them up a great way to evaluate that. So we’re going to have a static piece of content here. We don’t want to go too deep down that road until we validate that people will actually click on it or look at it. So we’re going to set it with a simple test and just validate interest in this particular chunk of work. I’m very interested in it, but let’s see what our users say. And then finally, a big chunk of time was spent on looking at the dashboard and reward mechanisms. We’re going to set up some of this as an experiment. So does this concept of a more holistic focus on your wellbeing through Levels make sense? Do people resonate with it? So we have this concept of wins. Does it work for people? We have this giant glucose graph. I love the graph sometimes and sometimes I hate it. And we want to get some info on what happened if we removed it, how would users respond? So we’re going to be doing a lot of different experiments with the dashboard because this is obviously the most important surface area for the product. And so looking forward to launch Darkly going out. So we can start playing there. Is that it? I think that’s it, yes. Okay. Until next week. Thank you very much. Josh Clemente: Thank you Alan. Thanks. JM for saving the day on this one, right? Got the Athena update LJ: Everyone. Happy Friday. LJ here again, giving you your weekly Athena update. So as you can see, we have here a new graph showing you the trend of our weekly delegations from the week that I started giving you these reports. So we have eight active EA, 16 Levels team members who delegated this week and hundred and 44 tasks we were able to accomplish. Moving forward, this is our new delegation for the week from Taylor. So Taylor used Athena app to delegate a new task to Jean regarding his call notes and calendar blockings. So as you can see, this is how we receive your voice allegations. It’s fruit email and it comes directly from the Athena app system. It wouldn’t mention your name or your email, where it came from. So the tip tip right here, if it’s your first time delegating through Athena voice Memo app, please do mention your name just so we wouldn’t confuse you with any other Levels. Team members who are also delegating through this app. So if you want to delegate more, please email [email protected] or simply send a task via Athena voice memos app. So another update right here, we’ve already revamped Athena Wiki page. This is just a snippet of the page. So as soon as you open it, you’ll be welcomed by this video walkthrough on how you will be able to navigate your way through this page. So that’s it for the updates this week. Thank you so much. Josh Clemente: Thanks LJ. Thanks Athena team. All right, Chris Jones, also Async. Chris Jones: Hey everyone, this is my Async update for the Friday Forum for Member Experience. First off, the SLA dashboard, which was new as of last week, couple updates are support response underneath an hour dropped below our target of 50%. I’m not too worried about this because it’s actually really more likely the three-hour one is where if we start breaking this one where our members going to start noticing. So I track both, but this is really the one that I probably care more about and that’s holding study, which is great. Our happiness scores were at say, pretty high, so this didn’t have any impact on that. A lot of red in the order to fill, which is the thing that I brought up last week around how long it’s taking for us to fill consults, to fill the orders and to actually get the product delivered in time, which is from order to full delivery. The full breakdown is normally our charts would look like the distribution would be really over here with about three to five being typical, and 80 to 85% of people getting their orders within a week. Now over half of our members are getting their orders after seven days. And in some case, almost two weeks. So we’re starting to see a little bit of more comments around, when do I get my package? What’s the update? So members are a little bit more impatient as this is taking longer because of as we’re starting to hit the caps and throttling. But you can see here that’s improving, but not nearly to where we were before we started running into our daily order caps. On the day review, I covered this last week, just the real [inaudible 00:49:24] update in terms of the percent of people viewing it steady to get your 98%. This dropped nine points. So as people continue to use it and they might say, “Oh yeah, I know what’s behind door number two,” and they may not use it, but still 78% is a very strong number. So that’s great to see. But I’ll continue to track this to see just at what point does it stabilize. So we know the baseline going forward. Product market fit, this was a survey that we launched when we removed it from the NPS survey and did it on its own. So with 107 responses, still a fairly decent margin of error on it. Our product market fit was 43%, but only 5.6% said they would be not disappointed at all. The breakdown, so how we’re serving this is when they get their week one, week two or week three email summary, it’s a link in that. So breaking it down by the product market fit for each week. After the first week it’s 35, and then 50 and then 50. So not really surprising that the earlier on your journey, you’re still trying to figure it out, you’re still testing, you’re still in the whole, our first week of the program is do what you normally do and just observe. So it’s probably not until the third or fourth week where people say starting like, oh, max starting to understand and learn more. So it makes sense where it starts off low then starts coming up. But again at the week level now your end size is getting really small, so we’ll continue to run it. We also did in this survey a rate the usefulness of the following features around are they aware of the feature, what’s useful, somewhat useful, not useful. So you just see things around the day score, the zone score, the glucose spikers is helpful, but not a lot of people are aware of it or have seen it. Surprisingly, a lot of people have not seen the Nutritionalist marketplace or the challenges. Also, we’ve actually seen low adoption of it. So this is [inaudible 00:50:44] of which feature the people won even aware that we have in the product. And two, getting used out of. This one surprised me a little bit, that a lot of people aren’t aware of our health kit or Google Fit integration, the term they’re bringing data in, might be because I didn’t call it Apple Health kit, so I don’t know if they see the word health kit and not knowing what I’m talking about. So I might actually update that one and just see if that still holds a strong number. And then the next three slides, which I’m not going to go over in huge detail, is based upon what product market fit question… And remember, the goal for product market fit is at least 40. Ideally you’re going to get into 50 or 60%, but if you’re not achieving 40, basically saying you haven’t achieved market fit yet and you need to keep it ready. So within it, I’m not going to read all these, you can hit the pause button and go back. These are when people picked that they were very disappointed. What did they say? So remember the question is, if you can no longer use Levels, would you be very disappointed, somewhat disappointed or not disappointed at all? This is the answer that we want people to pick. So this is people saying that they really like it impacts their biology, trusted content, a lot of great comments in here. On the somewhat disappointed, it’s a bit of a mixed bag in terms of the value that they’re getting off of it. Some people might say they like it, but life would go on. This person actually said, “Not all the results are good,” meaning you might eat something healthy and get bad scores. You’re like, well that sucks. So not having that accountability or be able to eat your cheeseburger, not feel guilty about it is a bit of a relief to people. And then on the not disappointed, the one I actually want to focus a little bit on is the bottom right where this member was talking about not getting a lot of useful information and specifically, for example, “I’m in week four and it said the goal was to stay entirely in my zone, yesterday I did it for the very first time, but the Levels app didn’t notice or say anything.” This gets into us, which I know Alan is working on, around celebrating when people hit goals or do things. For this user. It was a big achievement for them and according to our app, it was just another day. Then the flip side is how we guide them to log and this user was logging and then they petered off. And again, the app didn’t react to it. It didn’t say, “Hey, I noticed we’re not logging and something wrong.” So this user was basically saying, “Hey, I either was really engaged or not engaged and you guys didn’t do anything to correct it.” And then that’s it for Member Experience. Thanks. Josh Clemente: Thanks a lot Chris. Always super helpful insights there. Ben. Ben Grynol: Right. Synchronous update. Growth is focused on value through membership. So everything that JM and Maz are doing around the experiments for pricing and understanding that. And then there’s a lot to do on the communication side of things, how we communicate the value to members and so that they understand what exactly membership is and what it gets them. Next slide please. So these are our experimental metrics, feedback very much welcomed as we’re starting to think more about weekly active users, food logging, some of those as being our North Star metrics on a week-over-week basis as opposed to tracking things like revenue. So if anyone has feedback, please pass it along. What you’re looking at on the bar chart that is weekly actives who are at about 4,400 weekly active members, and the trend line above is the percentage of weekly actives who log food. So last week we had highlighted that roughly 58% of people are logging food. What you can see with the trend line is back in at the end of November, there was quite a high number of people who were logging food. There was a dip in the holidays and sometime around Christmas, that being the 63% where it went up there, people probably wanted to see how stuffing was affecting their health. Then there was a bit of a leg and some oscillation and it started to trend downwards. And so what we want to do is understand why people who log food, why they do it and what value they get out of it. And then the people who aren’t logging food, understanding more around why they aren’t logging food. So next steps are setting up some community calls so that we can understand these things and get some feedback and pass that along throughout the company and so we can each take that away and glean insights from it. One other thing is running an experiment, again, this isn’t set in stone yet, but running an experiment where we can start to reach out to, people even through something as simple as an email campaign to say, “Hey, if you log food, this helps us get more data so that we can help you understand how food affects your health.” So these are all micro things that we can do in a very, very easy way to start to probe people and see if we can change some of these metrics. Next slide please. So this is weekly email signups and new weekly members is the trend line. So the bar chart, you can see just under 7,000 new members added or signed up via email and we added 485 new members as far as memberships. What you’re looking at in the top right corner, we’re going to call the Hyman effect. And so that’s what that roughly 8,000 emails in roughly 7,000 emails, how those come in. When Mark did the Instagram post on February 18th, the bottom blue, the darker blue is our direct traffic to the website. And so this isn’t perfect attribution, this is more a matter of gleaning the insight that this is what happens when these events happen. So Mark had that Instagram post, added 25,000 new members to our Instagram or followers to Instagram, and then we had a surge in traffic. On a daily basis, we get roughly three to 4,000 people coming as direct traffic to the website. And when he posted we had 11,000. Yesterday, we had the same thing. And so if you take that insight, that’s when the Dhru episode dropped with Casey. And so when we have this attention, we’ll call it the Hyman effect from this day forward, when anything related to Hyman goes out, there seems to be a lot of interest in Levels. And so it’s a great takeaway as far as how Tom and Jackie have been building on the opportunity with the partnership to say what can we do to leverage Mark as both an advisor but also a partner. So next slide please. And then the last, again, these are vanity metrics, but show where we are trending, just under 7,000 all-time memberships. And again, this is since we implemented the membership model and we’re at just under 215,000 email signups on our, we’ll call it our email list. Next is on to Tony with Async growth theme of the week. To frame this, Tony, as much as he is a superhuman, there’s a lot of content being put out and so he is going to talk about what it actually takes to put out content in the quantity and cadence that’s being done. So that’s growth for the week onto Tony. Tony: Hey everyone. So our growth theme of the week is on outsourcing. I covered outsourcing a little bit last month and I just want to show you on how it’s been able to increase our content production with multimedia assets, and how we’re able to produce content faster, especially over the last month. So since last month, we’ve grown to a team of nine with multimedia and that’s including two EA from Athena, Vanessa and Erwin, as well as several freelancers that we work with that are outside of Levels. And you can see everyone listed here for each of the platforms that we’re working with them on. So for audio editing, we have Callen, Andrew and Vanessa. Vanessa has been handling a lot of the pre-production as well for podcasts and scheduling them with our special guests as well as with some of you our members. Video editing. We’ve also been working with Max and Sam Seeger, who are two brothers and Erwin, who’s our EA from Athena that has been handling a lot of the editing for our Friday forums. And then our newest concept, which is releasing all of our podcasts on YouTube in a video form. Jenn Lee is our newest person we’re collaborating with for copywriting. She’s going to be incorporating descriptions into YouTube descriptions as well as a whole new level podcast descriptions. She’ll also be incorporating captions for social media in the near future as well. So we’re looking forward to working with Jenn as well. But this is our current team that we’re collaborating with on a day-to-day and a weekly basis, especially over the course of the last month. And it’s really helped us increase our content production every week. And it’s truly shown through our YouTube growth and all the views and all the subscribers that we’ve gained over the last month. And without them it wouldn’t have been able to happen. So I appreciate all the help from everyone, especially the Athena team. And that’s it for our growth theme of the week. Josh Clemente: Awesome, thank you Ben and Tony. All right, Tom or Jackie? Tom: Yep. This is Tom staying audio only for now. All right. Pretty big week for partnerships, content, really nice variety and overall just a ton of exposure this week. So first interviews with Casey, Taylor and Maz Drop. So Casey, as we all know on Dhru Purohit Podcast, first real deep dive on the metabolic health panel. Strongly recommend listening to this one, especially if you’re new to the team. Taylor did his first public facing interview on SiriusXM. I actually think that the listenership was quite big on that one, so great work there. Taylor, that’s posted in Threads given a listen, it’s about 30 minutes. He did an awesome job. And then Maz’s second podcast appearance also went live, which is great. And then on the right side here, Josh touched on most of this, going to scale giveaways with other partners in the future given how enormous of a success they’ve been to date. Steve at SeriousKeto did another food experiment video, and then the two organic shoutouts, which were really that the highlights of my week, I think those are just really cool to see and it’s hard to overstate how valuable this type of organic exposure is that we’ve become used to multiple minutes on these top podcasts of people talking organically about Levels and Casey and the team is just really unbelievable. Next slide. Okay, theme of this week is data. So one thing I worked on this week is creating some models for both forecasting performance of paid partner placements, as well as measuring the effectiveness of those campaigns once they’ve run. And from my perspective, there’s a few reasons why improving measurement is important. Maybe it goes without saying, but going to say it anyway? Especially right now as we approach liftoff and growth mode is finally right around the corner. So first we want to understand this growth lever, meaning that the paid partnerships, placements lever. And really what that means is we want to know what is working and what is not. And in order to do that, we need visibility into benchmark metrics like how these campaigns normally perform or at least the campaigns we’ve done to date. And then how do these metrics compare to a campaign like David Sinclair, which was unequivocally a home run. And then what does that mean for future campaigns like Tim Ferris? What should we be expecting from those campaigns? Which brings us to the second bullet here, which is that we want to have control over our growth. Growth is good usually no matter what, but we want growth levers. We want to understand how to grow and we want to grow consistently and we want to grow on our own terms. And then lastly, once we have control of these levers, we want to pull on them, we want to make them more efficient, we want to use them to drive more growth. So yeah, probably the first time grow growth has ever been on a slide deck before, but felt like the best way to explain it. And then lastly, just looking at these screenshots on the end, this involves quantitative data and also qualitative data. So shout out to Jackie this week who also began to better organize and standardize Notion documentation around documenting and reporting out some of the learnings from the variety of experiments that we’re doing. That is it from partnerships for the week. Josh Clemente: Awesome, thank you Tom. All right, over to Haney. Haney: Good morning everybody. Quick remote update from content this week. First I just learned that command shift L starts your loom so you can start it even when you are already in full screen mode on Google Slides, at least on the Mac. Anyway, three pieces to talk about this week, the melatonin piece, we’ve been chatting about it a little bit, went up last Friday. This was done in conjunction with another company called Base. They assigned it out, used their experts to report it. We edited it, turned out really nicely. Then our oatmeal piece, which we’ve been wanting to do for a while, the problem with oatmeal, how to build a better oatmeal and a nice recipe from Kelly Lebec for a oatmeal alternative. Also incorporating all Levels data there. Fun fact, the average delta glucose for oatmeal among our members is 34, so quite a spiker. And then by the time you’re watching this, another piece will have gone up about hearing loss in metabolic health. This came out of Casey’s whole new level interview with Ben Bikman. And so we took a little bit of that and a little bit of things that were in his book, Why We Get Sick, and Put them together into this article. A couple other things happening in content. We’re very close on the new editor. It’ll probably be more of a senior editor than an associate editor, but two super strong candidates in the final stages now. So we’re going to make final decision and hope to put an offer out next week. Also, the blog redesign is in the final stages of programming, so we should have a live version to start poking at and testing out next week as well. So that’s it for me, everybody Have a great weekend. Josh Clemente: Thank you, Haney. All right, individual contributions made it to the end here. I don’t believe Dom is with us. I don’t believe Laurie is with us either. Let see. It looks like we’re starting with Stacie. Nope, maybe Stacie isn’t here? Stacie Flinner: Oh no, I’m here on the professional front. It was just so cool to have Marc join and hear from him. I got to briefly meet him at a wedding ages ago and was hugely impressed just from that short interaction. And so it has always been very exciting to have them guiding us through this process. And then on the personal front, we have barely been home for the last month, but it’s snowing outside and it’s just going to be very nice to be home and a little more stable for the weekend. So looking forward to that. Josh Clemente: Enjoy. Helena, you’re next. Helena Belloff: So a lot of people missing. Levels wise, I’m really excited about the Now Page project and the Levels member research project I’ve been doing where I’ve been talking with a bunch of members, going through their data, giving them personalized insights throughout the week and having weekly check-ins with them. I’ve learned a lot about our members and a lot about our data actually, and what we need to do in order to scale these guided insights and personalized learning journeys. So that’s really exciting. And then on the personal front, the On Deck data science fellowship starts next week, so I’m really excited for that. Josh Clemente: Nice. Enjoy, Brett. Brett Red: Sorry about that. Yeah, so I think we need to explain metabolic health better. And so I spent my first few days trying to explain it as if I… I don’t know if you guys watched [inaudible 01:06:03], it’s like one of my favorite channels, but trying to explain it as if I’m a child talking to a child. So not only am I a child, but yeah, double 12-year olds involved here. So yeah, that’s been really exciting because I see the potential. I think comprehension is going to be the key to habit formation. So yeah, I’ve had a lot of fun doing that. Personal stuff, yeah, first week this has been awesome. Just mentioned, coming out of a snowstorm. Yeah. Oh, I hit 95% on Levels. My score is 95 and I know if we all share our scores somewhere, but I don’t know, do we have a leaderboard going? I want to get competitive in this thing. So yeah, I don’t know. That was the only things that I had to share. I guess. Josh Clemente: That’s huge. We do actually have a leaderboard, which is buried somewhere. I think it’s still in the app. David, correct me if I’m wrong, maybe we should fire that up back again. I agree. We need some competition going. Awesome to have you Brett, Cissy. Brett Red: Thanks. Cissy Hu: Amazing first week onboarding and getting to meet folks across the team. That was my highlight from a professional perspective. Big shout out to Ben, Miz, and Justin, my onboarding buddy, as well as the ops team for helping make onboarding super seamless this week. On the personal front, no snow on the horizon for San Francisco, so planning to a couple hikes in the city this weekend and then planning some upcoming travel in March and April. Josh Clemente: Awesome, great to have you as well. Cissy. Thanks for joining us. John. John: Levels wise, the Now Page is looking great. Congratulations for the great progress. And on the personal front, my sister is going back to Chile after having visited us for more than a month. We are grateful because we could spend some quality time after so many months. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Good to hear. Jesse. Jesse Lavine: Yeah, I’m really excited about the team growth and all the new skill sets and experiences we’re adding. Personally, I have a friend coming to visit this weekend and I’m also moving out of my apartment, so big logistics for me. Josh Clemente: Nice. Good luck. JM. JM: Yeah, it’s hard to believe it’s been a year. I still feel a bit like the new guy. Though I think it’s possible that I’ve been here longer than half the people perhaps. Just one aspect of that, the Async and remote piece of this has been really incredible for me. I’ve always wondered what if I go all the way with my exercise and just really go crazy and put it first essentially, which I’ve been able to do and it’s great and I love it, especially as I approach a milestone birthday coming up soon. So thank you everyone for that. It’s been lovely and for this past hour I’ve been on the bike. Have a good weekend, and see you at Fireside. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Love to hear that. Andrew. Andrew Conner: I’m jazzed about the IRB progress. I think this is the thing that really unlocks our growth and puts us in such a productive relationship with other companies and so this is fantastic. Obviously other people joining us too, I’m really excited about. Personally, I have family visiting, and so this is the first time my brothers have come to Durango and so it’s been fun. Josh Clemente: Nice. Sounds great. I’m going to loop back to Karin. I think she’s ready to join us once more. Karin Nielsen: Sorry guys. Toddler tantrum to deal with. So some personal news for the weekend, I’ve just managed to get tickets to the League Cup final, which is to watch Liverpool play Chelsea in the soccer as most of you guys would call it. So I’m super excited about that. Josh Clemente: Sounds like a blast. Congrats. Miz. Michael Mizrahi: I am very excited for Riley to start on Monday. He’s starting as our senior finance manager and there’s so much going on there that could use someone who knows what they’re doing and just a ton of expertise. So very much looking forward to that. And then I think starting to focus a lot on the team growth. It’s been awesome to have all the new hires start this week and our team’s growing fast, so there’s a lot of work to do to get our structures in place and keep building this culture out and team out, so excited about that. Personal quick story on the toddlers. I was around a seven-year-old last week and he saw my CGM and said, what’s that for? I was like, “Oh, it helps me make sure I don’t eat too much sugar.” And he’s like, “Oh, I need that.” And so I was like, “Oh, product market fit with a seven-year-old.” That’s funny. Josh Clemente: Love it. Tony, you’re up next? Tony: Yeah, nothing much going on the personal side, but on the Levels side, definitely plus one to the team growth. So welcome Cissy, Brett and Paul again, also excited about those results that Tom shared from the recent campaigns as well. Josh Clemente: Nice. Justin. Justin Stanley: I’m really excited about all the new design stuff that’s being worked on for community and just all the totally new direction for how we explain things to members. Personally, I am looking forward to maybe going to something called Festival the Bourges here, and it’s like an outdoor winter thing. It just depends how cold it is. I’m not as good as Ben’s kids with the cold, so we’ll see. Josh Clemente: Understandable. Mike D. Mike DiDonato: Can you hear the dark car alarm going off? Want to come back to me? Josh Clemente: Yeah, we’ll jump back to you. I think Casey is still in Florida. Ben. Ben Grynol: Yeah. Stoked to have Paul and Cissy and Brett here. And on the personal front think we will take the kids to the planetarium this weekend. So they’re very stoked to go learn more about space and have been asking since last week. So that is what’s on for the weekend. Josh Clemente: Sounds amazing. Mike, back to you. Mike DiDonato: The car alarm is off. So I am excited to be fully jumping in, getting caught up, seeing all of Alan’s design work and all the progress on the Now Page. Definitely have to add the Marc Andreessen joining the call. Team growth. And then we had a little team dinner in New York, so it was pretty cool to see some people and also meet new people like Maxine. Yeah, that’s it. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Sunny. Sunny Negless: Very excited also about the teen growth. I’m particularly excited to see where that segue of what Chris is working on and what Brett’s going to be working on. And that piece that we alluded to with Chris of the how do we celebrate the wins, how do we let people know we are here, we care… And oh, sorry, there are cat chasing in the background. But as someone who sees nutrition clients, a lot of what my job is to check in and say, “Hey, I haven’t heard from you or you didn’t do this thing that we agreed you were going to do.” So some accountability and then drawing their attention to the wins. A lot of times it’s like, “Oh, I have so much further to go,” and a lot of my job is going, “Hey, but remember when we started working together X number of weeks ago, here’s where you were.” So if you could take me out of work, that would be great. If we didn’t need individual coaching like what I do, that would be wonderful. One day in the future. And then it’s personal and still professional. I’ve been hired on to do some contract instructional design for Whole30 HQ and it’s been really, really fulfilling and very awesome to see my suggestions of, hey, why don’t we look at this thing called Notion. And I received my first, in four years with the company, my first time getting a meeting agenda with here are things we’re going to accomplish in this meeting. Not to say they weren’t well around before, but it’s been really cool to see how they’ve taken a lot of what we are doing and implemented themselves. Josh Clemente: That’s awesome to hear. Matt. Matt Flanagan: All right. Yeah, so Levels wise, meeting everybody in New York or seeing everybody in New York was awesome. Personally, I think I just crested 250,000 steps for the month of February, so that was a fun little challenge I just finished and feel really good about it. Have a good weekend everybody. Josh Clemente: Congrats. That’s wild. Dave. David ten Have: We’ll be watching Monarchs hatch. Got a bunch of more of that happening. The girls have worked out how to jump BMX bikes on the driveway, so I’ll be booking a spot at the emergency department tomorrow, I suspect. Josh Clemente: Sounds familiar. It’s a childhood memory of mine. Good luck. For me on the professional front, very excited about the team growth this week, Brett, Cissy and Paul just stoked to continue to see the team growing in such an awesome way. And yeah, I was excited by all the growth on social this week. It was just cool to see the amount of… Not just the response but also the engagement, comments were really aggressive and people were loving it. So it’s pretty cool to see. And then of course the Now Page. And then on the personal side, I’ve been here in Bozeman with my family for a week. Got some awesome powder skiing and cross-country skiing and a little bit of adventuring out on frozen lakes. It was a really cool week and I think it was the coldest I’ve ever been. So we had a minus 45 degree with wind chill moment there and I stood outside and just absorbed what it would be like to not have a warm house to step back into. It was pretty wild. Maz. Maziar Brumand: Everyone on the work front. I’m excited to work with David and Scott and JM on the Membership product work that’s about to kick off. And on the personal side, we planted about 300 river trees last weekend, which I’m really excited to see how they grow. So I think we’re turning the farm into a forest, so we’ll see. Josh Clemente: Love it. Awesome. Jump to Brittany. Brittney McLeod: Oh, thank you. On the Level side, I’m excited about the Q1 assembly, just seeing all the calendar invites coming through and reading on the Threads forum, just about what that entails. Excited about that. And then personally excited, we have a few family members in town this weekend, so it’s always fun to play tourists with them and show them around town and spend some time with them. So yeah. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Brittney McLeod: Have a great weekend everyone. Josh Clemente: Ditto. Thanks everybody. This was an awesome week. We had a lot of asynchronous and a lot of people traveling, a lot of Async updates, so we love feedback generally on how the meeting flows. We’re able to fit it all in time, it seems like the last few weeks, which is great. So this is a constantly evolving process of building this meeting. It’s always optional as Miz mentioned. So yeah, definitely encourage people to lean into that, share asynchronously. But yeah, it is an amazing forum for all of us to keep up a speed on what’s happening across the company, especially in an Async and remote environment where it’s not always visible. With that, stay safe everybody. Jeremy in particular, hope things go well this weekend and just enjoy. We’ll see you next.