February 26, 2021

Friday Forum is an All Hands meeting for the Levels team, where they discuss their progress and traction each week.

https://youtu.be/nsudUq9rbKc

Transcript

Josh Clemente: All right. Let’s fire it up. Welcome to the February 26th Friday Forum and we’re going to jump right into it. Okay. So on the app side of the products side, David always gives us a great breakdown of this stuff, but Dashboard v2, which is the big project that’s in flight right now got some up updates in app. So Glance Card iterations, Zone Summary card work. Underhood, there was some nice improvements for faster performance, especially on Android, which is always huge. Android folks were suffering through not being able to access Clubhouse, so we got to give them a good Levels experience, at least. We’ve got in-app content on the program and education side. This is really exciting. So I think we’ve had just a massive improvement in the information structure and the availability of timely content and that continues to improve and there’s some great design concepts in progress so thanks to the content and product folks for continuing to push that.

Josh Clemente: This week, we got connected with some elite level researchers in biosensor tech, so we touched on Optima technology a week or so ago and have been lucky enough to be speaking with some of the foremost experts in that field this week. So always exciting. The Salesforce wellness pilot is live. I want to give a huge shout out to Tom and the operations team for 90 orders out the door quite quickly and David and others for the pre-pilot survey, which is going out today. This is huge. I mean, obviously we’re well ahead of the game in terms of having a large company running an employee wellness pilot this early. So exciting to learn from this project. And Tom’s going to, I think, publish a memo about the strategy here in the coming days.

Josh Clemente: We locked in the first iteration of the Universal IRB protocol. So this is out for review by the investigator team. We have a memo in notion about this program. If you’re interested in it, we got some great research opportunities arising through our advisory team specifically, but a whole host of different, exciting things. UCSF surgery staff, they’re looking to understand the lifestyle effects. So in and out of the hospital or the surgery ward, how people are living and how that’s affecting their performance, essentially as elite performers. So that’s a huge one that we’re hoping to combine forces with WHOOP on. And then the WHOOP member base, so their team is interested in running a large scale, essentially study for WHOOP users who are also Levels users and understanding the bidirectional nutrition to recovery relationship. And then the Australian Army, we’ve got a pitch out there, a proposal from the University of Queensland recommending that the Australian Army incorporate CGM into their readiness protocols.

Josh Clemente: Then we had a huge week for not just Clubhouse, but I think generally growth. So the a16z event that Casey hosted, or I guess was a special guest on, topped, it was close to 5,000 live attendees. The Bulletproof podcast went live. Our waitlist is at over 96,000. I think we’ll be at 100,000 next week, most likely. And MedPage op-ed came out. We had a MuscleTech interview that I think was quite good. Casey is locked in for the Future of Wellness Conference which is going to be, I think, next week or two weeks from now. We had, let’s see Gary Taubes. He wrote Why We Get Fat. He’s a, first of all a journalist, but also a really funny guy and a great, I think, luminary in the space. He’s shining a light on all the ways that we have perverse incentives in society today that are causing people to not know where to go in terms of lifestyle.

Josh Clemente: Rose Marcario, who is the former CEO of Patagonia had some very kind words to say about Levels. That quote is right in the middle there, but it was also echoed by, and I think totally separately by Guillermo Rauch. Both of them said, “Levels is likely to be one of the most important technologies of our generation.” And it was crazy to see that from two different well-regarded sources. Let’s see what else.

Josh Clemente: Yeah. Some great testimonials from folks on Twitter this week, the Levels effect. When I don’t have my CGM on, I’m more careful about out what I eat because I won’t be able to measure the response. I thought that was interesting. I feel similarly. Terry Crews, who joined the Clubhouse event with Casey followed up very quickly and asked to join the program and I think is going to be a strong supporter of what we’re doing. And then I just want to highlight this one, because it’s crazy and close to me. My good friend from home, from rural of Virginia, his dentist, who is in Maryland, had a full page spread on Levels, including a breakdown of metabolic fitness and a picture of one of our early members. And that blew my mind because it’s, yeah, it’s just a crazy deal that this dentist is talking about metabolic fitness and it’s a close loop there.

Josh Clemente: And then we had good conversations with the Alexa Fund group. They’re very interested in what we’re doing. And Ndamukong Suh, who is a pro bowler, an amazing NFL athlete we’re in touch with, we’re we’re in touch with Aubrey Marcus, Tony Robbins. You’ll see several other familiar faces on here. So a really strong week.

Josh Clemente: All right. Jumping straight to the special guest. And this is a permanent one. So I want to welcome Josh Mohrer. We’re going to call him JM, I think is what we agreed on. But Josh is a huge pickup for our team. We’ve been talking to him in a number of different ways, both through investment and potential combining forces in a meaningful way for a long time now. I think close to a year. I took Josh’s lead call, he reached out via Twitter and then we got a phone call together and it was immediately obvious how he got it. And he was already living this and looking for a product like what we were building. So suffice to say I’m super excited to have Josh coming aboard and helping us lay out strategy and execute on it in the coming months and years. So I’m going to hand it over to him to say a few words, tell us who he is and what he is looking forward to.

Josh Mohrer: I’m so excited. I think my head is going to explode, but I’m going to try to keep it together for this. It’s really nice to meet all of you, see all of you. I’ve had the benefit of chatting with some of you so far and I look forward to meeting the rest. As Josh said, I’m Josh as well. My Levels friends call me JM. I’m from New York, have been here forever and married with a couple of kids and a dog. You can see their wonderful artwork behind me, including a special one for today. I previously ran Uber New York from basically the inception after they left San Francisco and started expanding to other cities. And I did that for about five and a half years. Did a bunch of interesting things, probably the most important is that I found Miz and brought him on and he was wonderful there as I’m sure he is here.

Josh Mohrer: My career started basically selling things online in the ’90s before it was common. Some of that on eBay and that led to something that I ran out of my room at school. And then after college, and then one thing led to another, I took a few different roles at early stage startups before Uber. Most recently I was a VC in a few different settings with the understanding deep down that at some point I would return to the operator side when I found something that I really loved. And I learned about Levels and basically in about 15 seconds fell in love and frantically tried to find Josh and Sam and he basically… And the rest is history.

Josh Mohrer: A few facts on here about me, metabolic fitness has been an important thing for me over the last six or seven years. I’ve lost a lot of weight thinking about things differently. I’m a pretty avid runner cyclist, guitar player. And I put some other fun facts up there. Levels really sits at the intersection of a bunch of things I’m really excited about, obviously health and fitness and thinking about the human body, and how it was evolved to be treated versus how people tend to treat it.

Josh Mohrer: Now, the decentralized movement, working from home and rethinking our modern life and working with amazing folks and just the last note, what I’ve watched on these videos. And now it just occurred to me that this is going to be out there, I should have prepared a little script considering how at exploding I am at the moment, but I’ve been so, so impressed with really everything coming out of here, it’s just been amazing to watch. And I couldn’t be more grateful to be part of it going forward. So thank you so much. I look forward to speaking with you and I’m more calm and settled in.

Josh Clemente: Yeah. Well, everyone on the team, obviously it was a very quick process. Josh jumped right in and excited to have him as a force multiplier so quickly. But definitely reach out, get to know each other, connect for one-on-ones and he’s going to be a meaningful part of our expansion and many of the projects we’re working on that have been under resourced so far. And always love the fact that we closed the loop with the Miz. I think JM brought Miz in and Miz is bringing JM in. And it’s always cool to see some stuff like that happening. And to just imagine how all of these pieces are connected across the years and anyway, excited to see where things go. Thanks, JM.

Josh Mohrer: Thank you.

Josh Clemente: All right. Real quick, culture topic. So first off I want to restate the mission. So we’ve reframed the mission to be more concise and more accurate. And so we’re on a mission to solve the metabolic health crisis. This one is a bit easier to both say and remember and I just want to make sure that we reiterate it because I sometimes revert myself back to the reversing the trends of metabolic dysfunction, which is too complex, and actually isn’t what we’re on a path to do. So solving the metabolic health crisis, let’s all try and reinforce that amongst each other and outwardly.

Josh Clemente: Virtual assemblage. So obviously COVID is on a good trajectory now it looks like. But at the time that we had to make the call, things were looking a little bit sketchy still, so we’re going to be doing a virtual three day. We’ll have events across three days, calendar from March 10th to 13th, really want to shout out at Miz for pushing this and pulling it all together. Awesome job as usual, always organized, always better at these things than I am. So I appreciate that. And thanks to everyone for participating and sharing feedback about out it. These calendar events should be on your calendars today. So if you don’t have these, please let us know.

Josh Clemente: And then I want to shout out Ben, we’re going to be doing these culture shout outs regularly, but Ben’s email game has definitely brought to my attention how poor mine is. So thank you for leveling us up. His emails, if I could describe them in three words, organized, actionable and complete. There’s rarely information missing. And it’s framed in such a way that you can just jump to what’s important. So yeah, I’ve noticed Tom has pulled in some of these best practices and I need to-

Tom Griffin: Hell, yeah. I have.

Josh Clemente: … do so myself. What’s that? T

om Griffin: I said, hell yeah. I have.

Josh Clemente: I like it. Thanks Tom for being a quick sponge to absorb these things. All right. Over to David. All right. Dashboard v2.

David Flinner: All right. Yeah. So continued work on the next version of the Dashboard. And last week I showed the screen on some of the concepts for the Glance Card, which is supposed to be helping you feel something about how your day is going. What’s important to, without knowing too much about it, just take a quick look and you get a feeling. So next slide.

David Flinner: This is still all very much conceptual. But this week we took a stab at making some interesting backgrounds for the Glance Card that were both more forgiving and tried to meet someone where they’re at, at the low end. And then also being consistently beautiful across the board. So no matter what score you get, it’s still something that’s pleasant to look at. And yeah, that’s where I was playing with this, this week. So you can go to the next slide.

David Flinner: And John has been an amazing machine, rapidly iterating and implementing things. So you can see the GIF on the far right is… Actually the middle one is where we were at last week with that gray background Glance Card. And then this week playing around with the new concepts with the background gradient colors, paired with the dial colors. So the dial colors, which is your metabolic score is a little bit more representative of that letter grade that we’ve had all along, good to bad. And then just playing around with the concept of how do we evoke something else with the background color? So in progress, but let me know what you think. And there’s also a lot more to do here in terms of optimizing the data we show inside the card. So is it just the metabolic score and a glance of the trend line? Are there other summaries we can pull in there? Work in progress. Next slide.

David Flinner: And then, the next thing we were working on was the zone. How do we show a summary of the zones on the new Dash, the Glance board dashboard? So what we ended up with was experimenting with two concepts, and this is what we are currently implementing or actually is implemented for testing. And this is a summary of your zones. It’s yeah, you can see an animation there on the homepage. You’ll see a little summary. You can tap that. It’ll expand out into the full list on the traditional stats dashboard. There are other things we’re playing around with. We played around with a three dimensional Tinder style card stack. We hit some issues with that, that didn’t really render well in the UI. But yeah, take a play with this. Let us know what you think. Next slide.

David Flinner: And then Josh mentioned that John did some really awesome optimizations for the Android side of things. So you probably can’t see it in this GIF, but on Android using the app was almost entirely unusable. It’s so slow. With the new rewrite of the dashboard, the days load instantaneously, all the different content from the Glance Card, the insight cards will all render almost instantaneously. So it’ll be a huge win for Android and iOS will continue to be smooth. Next slide. Let’s see.

David Flinner: So the next thing, you know what? This one is just another reminder, there’s more to come on the Dashboard v2. We’re working on, there’ll be another slot for a daily report, which we’ll do later on. The next thing I’m working on is trying to figure out how do we pull in the education and program journey information into this experience so that as you scroll down, there’s always something to see with Levels you never run out of information of next steps that you could take? Next slide.

David Flinner: And this is the same slide from last week, but on the program and education side, we’re still figuring out what the right way to approach this is. The proposal last week was to have a 28 day program segmented by day. And there were some good conversations between XinLu and Casey and Mike, Mike Haney and myself around maybe that’s too rigid. Maybe we could have something that’s a bit more structured into weekly buckets themed based on learning your baseline, experimenting, exploring and then optimizing and having a little bit less structure around, here’s the same content, but structured into eight buckets that you can choose to work through at your own pace on any given day. So I’m working through some new wire frames for that currently. Next slide.

David Flinner: And then on the subscriptions front, no new screenshots to report here, but Jeremy is making great progress on implementing fulfillment of orders, subscription orders. And I think testing will be starting today. So that’ll be huge for ops and for our members to have this great management experience. Next slide.

David Flinner: And just some new filters for age and sex to the population comparison internal tool. So definitely take a jump in there and try it out. It is interesting. I found it especially fascinating. This is the first time I’ve seen the data broken down by age buckets. So it seems like there are some differences, and it’s really interesting to see. So we’ll keep playing here. We’re trying to define the right experience for how we might incorporate this sort of data into the app and what is meaningful there. Next slide.

David Flinner: And that covers, I think, the bulk of what’s going on this week. A lot of the projects are in progress from last week. These are larger media projects that will be going on for a few weeks. Still looking through longer zone analysis, day score, v2 still in progress. A lot of the backend work on new APIs for that getting set up by XinLu. Yeah. I think that covers us for the week.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Exciting stuff. Looking forward to those subscription tests. I know that’s huge for the ops team. Thanks, Jeremy. All right. Thank you, David and everyone on product and edge for this week’s progress. Quick hiring update. This is, yeah, we went detailed here, but essentially just a lot of great candidates coming through. And yeah, that process is ongoing. Definitely check out levels.link/careers for any available listings. Share those with people that you think might be qualified. The specific ones we’re still sourcing for are designer and developer and legal. So no major stuff there. I think Miz has taken the weekly feedback round up.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. Mike is- Josh Clemente: [crosstalk 00:18:31] Mike is in Yosemite.

Michael Mizrahi: … deep in Yosemite, which sounds awesome. And he’s on the call, just with some spotty service. So the big theme of this week is really the request for guided journey through the Levels experience. We have our PDF guide, which is, here’s what you do week one, here’s what you do week two, here are some challenges to run. Which runs contrary to a lot of the apps. So if you actually look at David’s slides where he was talking about the guided journey, pretty much directly addresses this theme. So that was a lot of the feedback that’s aggregated here. And of course the existing excitement that we’ve got going on.

Michael Mizrahi: Also, I want to give Mike a shout out. The nutritionist pilot is up and running. And so we’re getting some really interesting insights from that. For those who aren’t familiar, we partnered up with a few nutritionists and then found a few customers who were willing to pay a little bit more to get a guided nutritional experience as part of Levels. So these nutritionists are familiar with Levels, they understand what our philosophy is, and they’re just giving these customers, these members a little bit more of a hands-on experience with some guided feedback calls, some input, some interaction. And so we’re learning a lot from that as it’s going on.

Michael Mizrahi: Mike also previewed last week, the member theme tracking. More to come there in terms of how we structure this feedback onto this slide and across the company. So we’re still figuring out how to get information from feedback calls, from support, from the qualitative feedback that we get in comments into that structure, but that should be coming soon. So that’ll add some good foundation for this. Cool. I guess we can go onto the upside next.

Michael Mizrahi: Okay. So a few quick updates here. As most folks know, we have our Levels partnered physicians, but we also signed on with Truepill to work with SteadyMD to add their network of providers to our prescribing physicians. So we’ve shifted 50% of our consults this week on a dime to that SteadyMD network, just to see what the handle times are, see how they hold up and work through any process issues. And so far it’s been so good, which is great that we know we have that capacity. That network is quite large. So if we need it, we have it. And we’re just doing a little bit of a test there.

Michael Mizrahi: Still working through some order flow. Thanks to those folks who signed up. The tricky part here is a few pieces, to get a prescription for the transmitter as well as for the sensor. And so figuring out how to nest those two prescriptions into one fill request has been a little bit tricky with Truepill to make sure that it gets shipped in one box. And so that’s what we’re working on at the moment. And we also have a few things to work through on the physician side, just to make sure that they understand and that they’re are writing it correctly. So good testing. This is the reason we’re doing it, is to work through these, so that if we ever need to move it into production, we can. Looking forward to the feedback, to have a notion page there where you can add your qualitative feedback along the way through onboarding, through the actual CGM experience would be very valuable.

Michael Mizrahi: On the support issue mix we’re tracking data much better than we have been in the past. So thanks again, Braden, Mercy, Laurie, for using those issue type fields. I want to call it the top three issues, over 50% of our conversations are around order subscriptions, order replacements and order placement questions in general. So there’s a lot of things we can do across these three areas to improve the experience, subscriptions we know how much work we’re doing there and that’s going to take a massive chunk of workout. This is just the support tickets, but there’s also the unseen work of charges, of refunds, of fulfillment requests, all these kinds of things. Order replacements, there’s probably some improved tooling we can build there, for ops that would make a massive difference, maybe less so on the customer side. But more to think through on that side.

Michael Mizrahi: And then order status. We get a lot of questions of when’s my consult date? How do I know when my order’s being processed? We can surface that date in the dashboard. We can send email updates. So there’s things that we can do to counter this volume. And it’s on us to do that sooner rather than later, before it catches up with us. So very well aware of what these things are. And as soon as we have the capacity to address some of these, we will either from the op side, from the engineering side, from the product side. But there’s a lot to do it. That’s it from here.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you. And thanks for the breakdown on the end jobs sync there. All right. Ben.

Ben Grynol: All right. Growth. Good tie in from Miz and Andrew. So this reiterates exactly why we’re being very calculated and conscious of growth moving forward, is it would be a misstep if we all of a sudden had 10,000 people and we had outages or we were dealing with issues on the support front. So the more that we can get in front of creating the infrastructure, the better off we are when we go to put the foot on the gas pedal and start to really pursue growth. As far as recognized revenue, so strong month. This is the second best month we have had. So December is the best, second best over even October when there was the big push with Broken Brain, which drove a lot of revenue. $412,000 of recognized revenue. And a lot of that is carried over from January where we had really high cash generation, but didn’t recognize all that revenue.

Ben Grynol: And what this means moving forward is that into March and the following months, we’ve got a strong pipeline of growth that we can see, even though we’re still trying to maintain our target of $300,000 each month. So cash in the bank, 10.6, still strong there. Next slide please.

Ben Grynol: Cash generated this week, so $80,000, $79,000 will finish out the week as a good week. And we had a pretty good push from Dave Asprey with the podcast. It dropped last night. A few other growth drivers that we will go over. And if you can go to the next slide, please. So when we talk about growth drivers, we will talk about awareness, consideration and conversion. And these are main buckets where you think about what happens when it comes to marketing. BARWIS and MuscleTech had two pieces of media go outs. So we had our BARWIS video, and then we had the MuscleTech giveaway. And what the awareness part of it means is, “Hey, we’re trying to let the world know about the metabolic health crisis or about Levels.” And so the focus is impressions. How many impressions are we generating for what we’re doing?

Ben Grynol: BARWIS video across our platforms alone had 16,000 impressions. So IG, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. MuscleTech had a really interesting process where on Monday was the giveaway picture, hard to say what the impressions are based on the likes. But what we can see is that they had one photo go out with the giveaway, moderate traction, that’s the one shown. And then the next day they tagged us in a photo, which was talking about their protein powder. It got 25,000 or just over 25,000 likes, which means there’s an incredible amount of impressions created for Levels in what we’re doing.

Ben Grynol: Middle of funnel, so when we talk about consideration, it’s hard to find attribution, but with Clubhouse, what we noticed when Casey was on, the period of 5:00 PM PST, till the end of the day, if you look at the waitlist signups and again, you can’t find exact attribution, but on average, between that period of, we’ll call it 5:00 PM PST to midnight everyday, we’d get roughly 100 signups. If you look at it day over day and you look at it week over week, this is pretty consistent unless there’s a 10 pole moment.

Ben Grynol: During that period, when Casey was on, because of the awareness, there were 523 waitlist signups. So again, hard to say that that’s directly attributed to what happened, but it’s a really good event for us to take into consideration of how can we start to drive growth through channels where the attention is?

Ben Grynol: And then the last part is talking about conversion. So Kelly LeVeque had a story that she ran. She talked about her link and then Josh and Dave had the podcast, it dropped last night. So far we’ve got $25,000 of beta signups that have come from these links. So really strong conversion. And we’ll still start to see more trickling in from Dave, as people listen to the podcast. Last on growth initiatives. Next slide, please.

Ben Grynol: So growth initiatives, a lot of things on the go. But one main one to talk about is the website. So we’ve made a couple of updates to the site for various reasons. So we updated did the headline, the reason why we started talking about metabolic health above the fold. So that means anything that people see when they land on the site, is because it is absolutely aligned with our mission. If we’re going to talk about solving the metabolic health crisis, it doesn’t make sense to just say your health measured. So we will try headlines like this, we’ll try to look at data AB test different changes we do make on the site so that we can say, “Hey, what is data that is helping to inform our decisions?”

Ben Grynol: One thing that was objective was the call to action button. So previously it was a white outline, transparent button and said request access. If you look at data, the best performing CTA, so call to action buttons are red, green or blue. And so when we’ve got a transparent button, it looks great aesthetically, but it doesn’t help to drive people to actually do the action or draw their visual anchor to the button that we want them to hit. So we changed the color and then we made it solid and changed the copy on it as well from request access, because people don’t know what they’re requesting to join Levels. Something that when they frame it in their brain, even though that’s still driving them to the waitlist, it’s a lot clearer path than not knowing what they’re requesting.

Ben Grynol: Last thing we updated, the press links. So above the fold we updated the press links with the ones that provided the most social proof or signaling for us based on New York Times and Men’s Health, a lot of the articles that have come out recently, updated the linking. And then other sections added were advisors. So we now have the medical advisors, we have a section for investors, not all of them, but some of the funds as opposed to angels and then work in progress. We are creating a podcast aggregation section. So the idea is that it’ll be a lot like the blog where people can go and discover the podcast that Josh and Casey have been on. And it’s another discovery avenue for content for people to learn about what we’re doing. And then we’ll do the same with video aggregation, as far as UGC videos that get put up on YouTube or videos, branded videos that we create.

Ben Grynol: And then the last part is Andrew’s favorite Twitter River. So we’re updating this so that it’s going to be static. It will be visual as opposed to drawing in direct tweets because they are rendering really poorly and taking a lot of data and they don’t respond when you have different window sizes. So that is something that will be updated. And that is it for growth.

Josh Clemente: Thank you, Ben. And thank you for giving the background on each of these subtle changes that are meaningful and calculated. Appreciate that. Okay. Mercy.

Mercy Clemente: So this week on Instagram, we have just under 22,000 followers. We broke 12,000 followers. A common theme, this week’s scene on Instagram was people doing challenges or the comparisons. So they’re seeing what a typical pancake is, how their body reacts to it and then an almond flower pancake. And as you can see on that far left photo, it’s a massive difference. And then Tom did his naked juice for screen juice. And that one was really crazy. There was a lot of people, we actually got a lot of feedback from that one via DMs on people that were really surprised saying, “Oh, my gosh, I used to drink the naked green juice all the time thinking I was making a really healthy choice, because it has all these fruits and veggies in it. And now I’m seeing that in reality it is wrecking my day.” So that was really interesting.

Mercy Clemente: And then Twitter also, just always enjoyable the top teach tweets that Josh also shared at the start of the meeting. So those were just really crazy and really awesome to read and see that people are really making changes and they think Levels is amazing. That’s it for social this week.

Josh Clemente: Thanks. Tom.

Tom Griffin: All right. Quick podcast update. The major update this week was Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey and Josh going live last night. More on that in the next slide. Actually Josh, can you refresh? Sorry. You added a Clubhouse section. There we go. Okay, cool. And then really strong pipeline of upcoming tier one shows, the main one added this week is Acquired Podcast, which is a very large tech focus show that gets like a 100,000 downloads per episode that Josh is going to be on. Shout out to Ben who is friends with the host and secured that one on his own, which is amazing. And then Clubhouse, yeah, this is here to stay. We’ve been participating quite a bit on Clubhouse and we’ll figure out where this will live in future slides.

Tom Griffin: But shout out to Casey who has spent, I don’t know, maybe six hours this week at night, doing Clubhouse talks and has just absolutely killed it. For those who missed them there was one on Monday on with Andreessen Horowitz that included CEOs of large hospital systems, NBA players tell Terry Crews, celebrities all just singing Casey’s praises and saying, “Casey, you are so incredible.” It was really amazing to listen to. And then Mark Hyman hosted one last night. And this was just a lot of the leaders in the space. So it’s not lost on me, listening to Casey and Max Lugavere and Mark Hyman and Dhru Purohit. These are like three of the top 10 names on our wishlist probably three months ago and now Casey is sharing the stage with them, which is where she belongs. But it’s really cool to see. Next slide.

Tom Griffin: All right. Just taking a minute to highlight Bulletproof. So this is a big deal. Dave Asprey who hosts Bulletproof is widely considered the father of modern biohacking. This is a very highly ranked show. It’s often number one in alternative health, 170,000 downloads per episode within 90 days. Past guests are Tim Ferris, Peter Tia, everyone you’ve ever heard of in this space. And they’re distributing this across all of their channels, which is awesome to see, including YouTube. So this video content will be really valuable going forward as we experiment with other different growth activations in the future. Next slide.

Tom Griffin: All right. And then a reminder, this slide looks holistically at different affiliate and influencer activations that are upcoming and anything on this slide is revenue generating. So there’ll be a partner or an affiliate link that is shared. A couple of unexpected Instagram stories this week, which were awesome. Kelly LeVeque and Natalie Ellis and then lots upcoming in the month of March. It’s really our Bulletproof coming out party between the podcast, blog, a couple of different types of podcast ads. So going to be really excited to see how this all performs and Ben and I will provide everyone with an update on performance in the coming weeks. Next slide.

Tom Griffin: All right. Other updates across partnerships, as mentioned, Salesforce is off and running. Technically it starts Monday. About 40 people have already started, which is fine. Salesforce is very surprised that people are so eager. I think we had the highest now of signups too across all vendors, which is exciting. And then lots of new VIPs across entertainment and sports entering our orbit. One note, just as a reminder, individuals included on this slide are not formal partners of Levels or even necessarily users, but rather they’re people that we’re in touch with or we’re in touch with their teams. I think that’s it from me.

Josh Clemente: Nice. Thank you, Tom. Haney.

Mike Haney: Yeah. So a couple of interesting movements forward in content this week. So I want to call it a couple of the articles that went up this week, because they’re indicative of new types that we want to be pursuing and doing more of. The essay by Elias Eid about who’s a type 1 diabetic about having type 1 diabetes and how he sees Levels fitting into that, it’s a really nice piece. Casey really got this going and I just got it over the finish line to get it up this past week. But this kind of perspective, take, opinion on things, both from somebody in this kind of community, but also from other investors or experts in this space are going to fill out what we call our people stories. So in addition to members, more of these kinds of things coming forward, which just rounds out the site, gives people a good emotional connection.

Mike Haney: The other really great piece that went up this week was a collaboration from Pendulum on microbiome. This is a topic we really wanted to write about. It’s really core to metabolic health. I think it’s something people are really interested in because you hear a lot about it. And so we were able to partner with these folks, the very smart people over there, they wrote this piece for us, did a great job on it. We’ve got a couple of other content collaborations with other companies like this that are out in the works, that’ll hopefully be coming up soon. And we’ve also, great thanks to Stacie and to Casey coming up with some new graphic treatments for some of the blog posts. You’ll see more of this stuff moving forward. Next slide.

Mike Haney: I just want to quickly mention the other big process thing we moved forward this week was bringing on a couple of regular contributors in the audio article space. So we put up those first five or six, they were really popular. We’ve gotten a lot of good feed back. And so I took two of those folks who we really liked their voices and just set them up on standing contracts and created a pretty semi-automated process to have them just work through a bunch of these moving forward. So these are the first, I sent 10 to each, there’s a male voice and a female voice and we’re going to get a few more in to really increase the diversity of voices. But you’ll see a lot of move in the audio articles moving forward. Next slide.

Mike Haney: And the last thing I just want to mention, because I’m going to reach out to a bunch of folks today about this is we’re going to start doing a quarterly update and the first one we want to try to pull together and present maybe at assemblage, but this is just to really capture in a quarterly sense how much incredible movement we have and we’re going to focus a lot of it on product, but we also want to highlight cool customer stories and then maybe some highlights from other departments as well. I think folks noted, Sam noted that we have so much movement on a weekly basis and then the annual review was super cool, but there’s so much movement on an annual basis that quarterly seems like a nice place to check in and say, “Oh, my God. Look at how much we moved even in the last three months.” So just a heads up that this will be coming. That’s all from me.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Yeah. The quarterly review concept. I think we could apply that across many of the many of the groups and probably a nice mile marker. So looking forward to that. Thank you, Haney. Onto individual contributions. So 10 seconds each, something we’re excited about, personal encouraged. Mike D

Mike Didonato: How is my audio?

Josh Clemente: It’s good.

Mike Didonato: Cool. I’m really excited to have JM on the team. I remember when Josh took that lead call, I think I was there and immediately was super pumped. And then obviously he got us introduced to Miz and then definitely the Clubhouse events. Didn’t really use Clubhouse much before we started really engaging. And then all of Casey’s events this week were awesome. It was super cool to see that. And then personally, I am in Yosemite. I’ve never been here. I’m hoping to break from work around 4:00. There is a, it’s called Horsetail Falls and it’s like peak time, at sunset it looks like fire. So I’m going to try and capture some pictures once there.

Josh Clemente: Nice. That’s one of my favorite places on earth. All right. I am excited about the future. I think we’re really doing something meaningful here and it keeps coming to mind in the conversations I’m having with people who have been working in this space for decades and are seeing us as rapidly pushing not only themselves, but other adjacent industries at the same time in combining them. And so [inaudible 00:39:49] or tech, future of insightful AI driven, I think lifestyle management, it’s going to be awesome and I’m excited for it. And then secondly, I’m hoping to get some skiing and I’m in Vermont right now and going to try and hit the slopes right after this meeting. So stoked for that. It’s been a while.

Laurie. Laurie: Snow sounds so far away right now. It’s a beautiful day here in Southern California. Hey, Jeremy. I’m very excited about your process here. So subscriptions being electronically driven, all about that. Personally, I think we’re going to drive up the coast today. Not today, feels like Saturday already. This weekend and visit some friends up north. So considering just driving all the way to San Francisco to see my son, though, that is a very long day. But it’s so beautiful, I just want to get in the car and go. So it’s a nice change.

Josh Clemente: Enjoy that. It’s a great drive.

Laurie: Thank you.

Josh Clemente: Mercy.

Mercy Clemente: I’m excited for subscriptions and being automated. That’s huge. And then the Dashboard v2, that also is going to be really incredible. That’s looking great. Personally, I am going to see some of my family this weekend. So yeah, it’s going to be a relaxed weekend. So that’s what I’m excited for.

Josh Clemente: Cool. Casey.

Casey Means: Yeah. So definitely I’m very excited about Josh joining the team. Welcome. This week was really exciting to talk with or to talk with Gary Taubes and have some great emails with Robert Lustig. These are two authors who have had a big impact on my life. So it’s exciting to get to connect with them about Levels and yeah, the Clubhouses were exciting as well to be talking with Mark Hyman, just a dream come true. He’s the first person who got me really interested in integrative health and root cause approach to health. So I owe him a lot and it was great to chat with him.

Josh Clemente: Cool. Miz.

Michael Mizrahi: This was an insane week. I’m just going to list five or six things that were all pretty crazy. So excited to have Josh joining, pretty awesome full circle. The Acquired episode, couldn’t be more excited to hear that. The Bulletproof episode from last night, I’m like 10 minutes in and it’s already awesome. So the distribution there is crazy. Friends reaching out, old friends who I didn’t even know were on Clubhouse were asking me who Casey was, and I had no idea Casey was even on Clubhouse. I missed the slack about it. So that was really, really cool. I got a ton of questions after that. And then subscriptions. So all these things are awesome. I’m excited for the weekend to take a big breath and catch up.

Michael Mizrahi: And then on the personal side, a friend of mine did yesterday, what’s called Everest thing, which is a cycling thing where you cycle the height of Everest on one particular hill. So in this case, Hawk hill in San Francisco or in Marin, right over the bridge. He climbed it 58 times, he started at 8:00 on Wednesday night and finished at like 9:30 last night nonstop, which is insane. I cheered him on for a few rounds and it was really, really cool to see. But I don’t have that willpower. That’s it.

Josh Clemente: That’s crazy. Stacie.

Stacie: Just got so pumped both about Casey and Levels through the Clubhouse events. And I know that my enthusiasm was shared by thousands of people because they posted all over social about it. It was really cool to see people jump from Clubhouse to follow Casey on Instagram. She went up over 500 followers in the last couple of days. So yeah, that’s just a proud moment to see that happening. And then personally, we’re in Pittsburgh. We drove 10 hours yesterday to be with David’s grandma. So we’re here for the weekend.

Josh Clemente: Dom.

Dominic D’Agostino: I’m excited about the research in general and an insulin sensitivity test that we’re developing that I think is pretty cool. And this weekend I have a ski shoot for an ALS fundraiser I’m pretty excited about.

Josh Clemente: Ah, that’s so fun. Enjoy. JM.

Josh Mohrer: Just to repeat some of what I said. I’m so excited to be here. I think Levels is going to be an absolutely massive company and most importantly, it’s going to help and improve the lives of millions of folks and that’s such a worthy thing to be working on. So thanks again, everybody.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you. Ben.

Ben Grynol: Hard to choose, but three things. So super stoked to have Josh on the team. Product, all the work that David and John have been doing is just mind blowing every time a loom gets uploaded to product. So it gets me super excited. And then the last thing company related is seeing emails come in from people like Rose Marcario where the things that I think are in all of our minds about what we’re building and the importance of it and people who build these aspirational companies that we up to are reinforcing our thoughts, it’s just very, yeah, it just means a lot. So stoked on that.

Ben Grynol: Personally, 20 years ago, I custom ordered a guitar from Japan, a nice guitar. And my best friend was a professional musician touring, lived in Nashville, did the whole gig. I gave it to him and he always said he’d buy me a new one. And so over the weekend he gave me a call and he was like, “Hey, I’m going to buy you a guitar.” And so he bought me a very nice Hawaiian Koa Taylor that is something I’ve been dreaming about. So, so soaked on it. And that’s it.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Pictures. Tom.

Tom Griffin: Super excited to have Josh on board. I just feel like we recruit the best humans and talent in the world. So anytime a new person is joining, it’s just a huge deal in my mind and super exciting. And then yeah, Clubhouses for me, were the highlight. Something about them just felt like some cosmic moment in our company’s existence and we were just getting thrusted into the cultural zeitgeist in a way that we hadn’t been. So yeah, I’ll leave it at that.

Josh Clemente: Nice. Haney.

Mike Haney: Yeah. I’ll plus one on JM joining, and Tom said it really well, it’s just incredible the amount of talent and the level of talent that is coming into this company. Personally, I’m excited, we just booked our first vacation in over a year. We’re going to go to Joshua Tree at the end of the month for a week and stay in a funky house in the desert. So looking forward to that.

Josh Clemente: That’s fun. Hao.

Hao Li: Yeah. It’s always exciting to see the group growing again, and also just seeing new Levels being popped up in random places like dental clinic brochure and a podcast I subscribed a long time ago and also got mentioned by Dr. Ben. So yes, really cool.

Josh Clemente: So cool. Sam.

Sam Corcos: On the Levels front, I’m most excited that JM is joining. It’s going to really extend our capacity quite a lot. I think on the personal side, I’m excited for Think Week next week. I’m going to be mostly offline and I’ve got a lot of interesting things I want to think about.

Josh Clemente: Very cool. Looking forward to all of the productive output that will come from your supposed time off. I want to intro Murillo. Murillo has been instrumental in a lot of what we interact with in the Levels software. And he’s on the call. And Murillo, I want to pull you in, I didn’t consult you on this, but please share some thoughts real quick.

Murillo: And here I thought I was being stealthy, just following the call without being noticed. Yeah. So excited to be a part of the team full-time. I’ve been following along for a while now and I’m a big admire of pretty much everyone and just the work that’s being done here and it feels super important. So yeah, I’m excited to just, yeah, get started and get all that context and just jump in. Yeah, for sure.

Josh Clemente: Amazing. Gabriel.

Gabriel: Yeah. On the Levels side, still really excited about the Dashboard v2. And on the personal side, it’s 40 degrees in Chicago, all the snow is melting. Can’t wait to get outside this weekend. Looking forward to it.

Josh Clemente: Spring is close. John, close us out. Jhon Cruz: Yeah. Excited about the Dashboard v2 progress. Thanks to David for his support and great work on the UI and on the concept side. And personally, we will have an [inaudible 00:48:26] or a barbecue here this weekend. So excited to have some friends that I haven’t seen in more than a year coming over.

Josh Clemente: So cool. Enjoy that. All right. We’re jumping over to Ben and his story of the week.

Ben Grynol: Okay. I will try to expedite this because there’s lots of info. The story-

Josh Clemente: [crosstalk 00:48:47].

Ben Grynol: … is called 1 in 30,000. So next slide please. So this is Theo. Theo is Pam and my oldest child. He is six and a half, he’s almost seven years old. And he has a genetic condition called achondroplasia. Next slide please. So what is achondroplasia? You might have heard of it more known as dwarfism. It’s the most common form of dwarfism. And what it’s caused by is a spontaneous mutation of the FGFR3 gene. So it’s something we all have this gene, but upon conception, this gene can get tricked into mutating and then that’s what actually causes this condition. So it’s a genetic condition that Theo has, but Pam and I don’t carry it. It’s not like CF, like cystic fibrosis where Pam and I could carry this gene, but not have it and pass it down. We don’t have it, now Theo does. And so if he chose to have children one day, he would pass down or he could pass down the gene to them. Next slide please.

Ben Grynol: So here’s how it works. So the FGFR3, so the fibroblast growth factor receptor 3, it’s situated on chromosome 4. And in the diagram, so if you’re looking on the right hand side of the screen, the receptor is that wavy looking thing. And then there’s the FGFR3 protein. Next slide, please. And so what happens? I know it’s complicated, but I’ll walk around through it. So the FGFR3 receptor, when it’s mutated, the amino acid, glycine 380, which sits in the middle of that chain is actually swapped out with arginine. And so what happens is that causes, on the right hand side, you can see that red, the wavy looking receptor, causes it to be overly active. So when it’s overly active, the protein, when it’s trying to code or when trying to process FGF, the fibroblast growth factors, the receptor thinks that it’s always doing this. It’s always processing these and that causes there to be slow bone growth.

Ben Grynol: And so there’s two types of bones that it could affect. There’s flat bones and then there’s long bones. The bones that are always growing. The way that these bones grow, if you go to the next slide, please, the way that these bones grow is the long bones, the humerus, the femur, those bones grow on top of… The growth plate’s on top of a cartilage matrix. And so that is something that for average growth, it’s just always compounding. But when the FGFR3 receptor is overly active, it goes like, “Hey, don’t grow this bone.” And so the long bones don’t grow, but the flat bones like your rib bones, anything in your torso, they grow at a normal rate. And so you see with achondroplasia, some of the implications are you get shorter leg and arm stature, but you have a regular length torso.

Ben Grynol: This causes a little muscle tone, it causes things like skeletal problems in the spine and in the legs, you can get bowing of the legs. And it’s really tough on some people, depending on their type of, or sorry, their type. Their degree of severity in their achondroplasia. Also causes in your hands, you’ve got shortened fingers and then you’ve got these cute little trident hands are called. And what that means is that the fingertips can’t actually touch. So we can all touch our hands. And Theo, even though I’m not a Star Trek fan, he’s always got the long an prosper going. So next slide, please.

Ben Grynol: So we get asked very often, and I’ll try to wrap as quick as possible here. We get asked often, “Is there a cure?” And I think that’s the wrong outlook. Because that’s… From a philosophical standpoint, it leads to all these other conversations. But is there a mitigation path? And the answer forever has been no. But in the fall, along came this company called QED. It’s a major therapeutics company. And they said, “Hey, do you want to be part of a phase one trial for this thing called Infigratinib that it’s taken orally and it inhibits the FGFR3 activity or inhibits it, turns off the tap from it being overly active?” So there are only 200 children in the world that are part of this study right now. And if you go to the next slide, please.

Ben Grynol: What they figured out, so the top part of this graph is that, or the graph. I guess, the chart is that this drug that they were testing initially worked really well in some types of cancer and helping to treat them where FGFR3 is overly active. And then they extrapolated from that, and they were like, “Hey, wait, what if we use this for people who have achondroplasia? Would it work the same?” And so they tested it in mice and it ended up working where the mice had average growth in their bones. In the long bones, so that they grew at an average rate.

Ben Grynol: And so Theo’s in, right now, it was a hard decision to make for a number of reasons, but we decided to move forward with it. And so he’s in a phase one trial. So we are living the clinical trials right now for PROPEL 1, and provided that goes forward then he goes into PROPEL 2 which is, it’ll be no different than three, four actually taking the drug. But from it he should get normal growth and normal stature from his long bones and he should get about 12 inches in height.

Ben Grynol: So the reason it’s a challenging conversation is people will ask whether or not this is the right type of thing to do. Knowing how challenging the world can be to navigate as somebody with a shorter stature, living in a world that’s not designed for that, I think it will give Theo opportunities to navigate the world in an easier way. So that was one of the decisions behind it, but yeah, super excited for it. Really interesting to live it. And that is everything to do with achondroplasia and living through trials.

Josh Clemente: Fascinating. Thanks for sharing Ben. Really excited obviously, to hear how the trials continue. I’m sure that’s a long-term process, but we’ll follow along. All right. Yeah. Thank you for that story. Thanks everyone for participating. This was another jam packed week. Just really appreciate you all and enjoy the rest of your Friday and your weekends, and look forward to seeing you next week.