Josh Clemente: All right. Welcome to July 23rd. The dinging continues well into July whenever someone joins the Zoom call. All right. So, exciting week this week. Kick it off by describing a few meetings that we had. So Sam was able to head out and chat with the a16 team. They obviously led our seed round, and he was able to spend a lot of time with both Marc Andreessen, Vjay and Jeff. Sounds like they had some really great conversations about the current focus, future potential focuses that we’ve got going, and was able to show Vjay how to play a few board games, which sounds like was quite fun. So that’s great. Really good conversations, really good relationships with them still. I spend most of the week on a bit of a tour around the country talking to a bunch of players working in the biosensing space.
Josh Clemente: It was really productive, met some awesome people. Overall, reinforced what I said last week, which is that, Levels is universally recognized. It’s not just that they recognize the name. They also recognize the progress we’ve made on a brand new market that many people have doubted will ever exist. So pretty awesome validating conversations and could lead to some cool partnerships in the future. This week we have had a bunch of partnerships or… I’m sorry, explorations that we have been working on across the podcast V3 tour. So we’ve done sort of two rounds of podcast tours, which have been overwhelmingly successful. Also considering ways to start generating our own internal content in the video format. So we’ll be probably leading a charge on that over the next few weeks, and then considering some partnerships.
Josh Clemente: For example, Dr. Perlmutter is working on a PBS special about his new book, Drop Acid, which is about uric acid. And so we may or may not be involved in that, exploring it. So a lot of good opportunities coming up. Couple things on the product front. So my data, my data screen, you can see over here, pulling in real data right now. We’ve got deep link shortcuts with the new logging up and running, progress on the meal debugger. So this would be helpful for someone who wants to know why a meal scored in a certain way that they didn’t expect. And so it can be sort of a manual process you walk through to figure that out. Stripe ID verify, social groups concept, which I’m quite excited about, and then the Edge team was able to uncover and fix some significant production issues, which was always good.
Josh Clemente: Let’s see. Working on a transition plan and the model itself for a Levels membership ecosystem. So many of you have probably heard and or read some of the materials here. So we’re definitely going to push towards an ongoing membership for Levels as opposed to the sort of ad hoc approach that we’ve got now. A lot more to come there. And then we locked in some new podcast ad tests across a number of great shows. So we continuing to iterate and learn about the podcast ad approach and what’s working and where. We also put out the Gerald Schulman press release that he joined us as an advisor, a couple great conversations with Cynthia Thurlow. Casey was able to get on a few IG lives. Again this week, we were in touch with Andrew Huberman, who is a really awesome thought leader in the space right now. Continuing to get in touch with more YouTube partners, potential partners.
Josh Clemente: So exploring that channel more deeply. And let’s see what else. Had Levels in the wild spotting, and a couple great anecdotes this week. So one person told us that her friend had lost 71 pounds because of Levels over the past few months, which is just outrageous. And then a ton of great love for the customer service member service experience. We’ve been called Zappos like in our level of customer service excellence. So continuing to just crush it on that front. And I think that kind of wraps it. Great week. All right. I’m going to let Ben intro our special guest this week, Casey West. Just want to thank him for joining us and over to you, Ben.
Ben Grynol: Yeah. I think Casey would’ve first connected with our team through a community call. And then as you start to meet all the different members, you start to learn more about who they are. And Casey’s very, very active in the Facebook community. He’s Gay Mendoza equal as far as answering questions. And the more that we got to know Casey, the more we learned about how deep he is in data analysis and looking at his biometric data. So he does things like monitors his keytones, he monitors his Levels data. And I wouldn’t be surprised given that he is an engineer and loves data, that he probably has some spreadsheets where he’s running regressions against his own data. So I would love to hear Casey just about your… I guess, your interests in Levels and your thoughts on health tech and where it’s going as a space.
Casey West: Sure. Thanks. Yeah. I’m a 41 year old rock climber who learned at age 37, that I was really into these extreme sports that can totally wreck your body, but also require a lot of planning to do well. And I care very much about my athletic performance, but even more so I think about my longevity. I rock climb. I do partnered acrobatics and I want to do this for another 40 decades. So my interest in Levels in the short term is really to try and answer a question around my ability to have metabolic flexibility and develop a diet or an input program that I think I can live with for a long time, and that I think would sustain another 40 years of super active work in my life. And so Levels has really been a key part of that to allow me to get the information I need.
Casey West: And there are some interesting things that I really value out of this. I track my meals in Levels and I track my data obviously, and I can see that I’m sort of already healthy person that has pretty good numbers and pretty good results in the system. But one thing that’s been really interesting is to validate signals that I’m receiving in my body and try and understand and have increased sensitivity to those signals. For instance, I have a pretty good understanding about the difference between the feeling of high sugar or carb load versus say, alcohol, where sometimes those things are together, because I really like to drink beer. And I think I’ve often misunderstood the feeling of getting tipsy, and actually the feeling of having a high carb load in my system is pretty similar.
Casey West: And it’s really interesting to be able to validate that with the data that I get from Levels after I have a meal or have a drink with a friend. I also see it as preventative health. I want to try to get as much information as I can in order to avoid future issues. As I mentioned, longevity is important to me, but some subjects or some things when I’m thinking about, where I see this going for myself and maybe in general. One of the things that I’m really valuing is the idea of specialization and some of these tools. So I use an aura ring to track my sleep. I use Keto-Mojo to track my keytones.
Casey West: And each of these data sets can be valuable in isolation, but they’re even more valuable altogether. If I have a coffee with butter in the morning, because I like to do that after a really bad night of sleep, I can see that reflected in higher blood sugar Levels. Or if I’ve had a really stressful day at work, I might eat Keto bars all day, and still see my blood sugar Levels rise most likely, like the cortisol impact or something like that.
Casey West: So I can kind of see this stuff in the data, but I can correlate it with some of these other devices and tools. One thing as a rock climber is [inaudible 00:07:40] is actually coming out with a tool to two wristbands that you can use to track your climbing performance in your climbing activity. So I want to capture that data and then even bring that back to what’s happening in my blood sugar and my sleep and my stress Levels. So those are really valuable. An area where I can see a little bit of challenge for myself and I think others in the community is the signal to noise ratio on, what’s a device issue versus say a lifestyle issue. When I get a strange number, how can I understand whether or not that’s on account of some decision I’m making, inputs or outputs or otherwise, versus the device?
Casey West: The classic example right now I think is taking a shower. A hot shower or being out in the hot sun for too long versus not doing that. So that can be a little bit of a challenge. And then the thing that I would challenge everybody here and the industry general for is just access. I’m in a very fortunate position that I can spend a couple hundred dollars per device. And sometimes I do that every single month, like with Levels. And I’m getting a lot of value out of that, but I’m in a position to do so. And I think there are people who are much less healthy than me and much more in need of this information. And if there’s any way that as a community or even as a industry, we could make that more available, that would be amazing. Josh Clemente: Really insightful. I love a couple of those anecdotes, which I see myself all the time. And then just generally, the point about how to get this to the point where it’s helping the people who need it most. That is entirely an access issue. Right now we’re solving for actionability, which there’s still a ways to go of course, as you mentioned there. A lot of disparate data sources we need to be able to combine and pull the signal from the noise, but then that really doesn’t matter if it’s just a toy for people who have the access, it’s got to be something much bigger, which it’s a core part of what we’re doing. So Casey, thanks so much for joining us and giving us those details. I never thought about the hyperglycemic versus the ethanol tipsiness effect. That’s pretty interesting. I know exactly what you’re talking about though.
Casey West: Yeah. It’s very interesting to feel that tingling sensation in your body or in your head and neck, and then realize, well, I have had zero sips of alcohol, but I chose to eat a pizza today, and it turns out that’s the reason.
Josh Clemente: Pretty cool. All right. Well, thanks again, Casey. And with that, we’ll jump ahead to a quick culture slide. We’re going to continue to reinforce the Levels one liner. Being able to be descriptive of what Levels does. And this right now summarizes about 99% of what we do. So we help you see how food affects your health. It’s a pretty simple and concise way to describe all of the different nuanced factors that come into play when we’re talking about nutrition and biochemistry and biosensors and all this stuff. A lot of abstract words that people don’t really understand, but seeing how your food affects your health is something that everyone can kind of grasp. Obviously, we do more than just food. We help people understand the context of their lifestyle even into sleep and stress management.
Josh Clemente: But for right now, the core focus of our product is on the nutrition effects. So this summarizes quite well for today. Pretty awesome. This week I was able to get out to San Francisco during my little hardware tour, got a chance to meet Alan and see Casey and Miz, which is awesome. If anyone meets up with others in the Levels team, always love seeing the pictures and hearing about the glucose elevations from the meals that you consume together. And then just want to do a quick shout out here. A happy one year to Jeremy who started on July 23rd, 2020, and Mercy, who has an upcoming one year on the 27th. We’re going to try and continue being consistent with these anniversary shoutouts. They’re accelerating, kind of in proportion with how the team grew, so awesome to already be a year in with both of you. All right, over to David.
David Flinner: Good. Yeah. So the Stripe Identity Verification project is progressing. Very excited to see that coming along. Next slide. And on the app side with Information Architecture, Justin’s been pushing out some in progress demos. So you can see on the left here it’s pulling in my… or I think his metabolic scores. And then today he’s working on the glucose line that’ll show up right where the text is for chart coming soon. And John’s been working on the, pulling out the challenges from the hamburger menu and putting them in the learn module. So good progress on that. Next slide. Sweet. So on some of the more upcoming experimental things, we have a meeting scheduled with Truebill to coordinate with our engineering team on getting some of the API set up for our future metabolic fitness kit test work, that will eventually be servicing in the app, on the new me page. JM’s leading the charge on that one. And it’s going pretty well, so excited to see that progress.
David Flinner: Next slide. And we were jamming a bit on Slack yesterday. Alan had an idea for a new social groups concept that we’ll be piloting. When John wraps up the challenges work, he’s going to try to do a quick implementation of a live experience where you can see your data compared to anyone who’s opted in from the Levels team. So we need to work on the details for this. It’s really important that members, and when we pilot this, that they know and feel that their data is not shared with anyone else. But this will be interesting to see if people like a kind of shared experience. This is derived from that meetup that Josh was talking about, where I think Josh and Casey and Missy and Alan were all sharing their real time data as the meal progressed. So seeing if we might have something similar for members.
David Flinner: On the right, you see some data visualizations where when you look at the real data, if it’s all the same color, there really wasn’t a story. And so Alan iterated on that by highlighting your… on the bottom, it’s your data versus your past day’s data. And on the top, it’s your best day and your least stable and your most stable day compared to all your other days. And so just by showing some minor tweaks and what we highlight, it can highlight, can bring to the forefront a different story. So this is all very much in progress thinking, but we’re excited to try something out. Next slide. And then we’ll also probably be starting up Dr. Casey’s data, depending on bandwidth, but that one’s mostly ready spec wise to go. And so perhaps after that previous slide I just showed, we’ll get to this one. And next slide.
David Flinner: And Josh mentioned the meal debugger, meal insights. So Casey and Alan and I had a really good jam this week on what we could be doing with scoring. And one of the ways that conversation went was, there’s a real opportunity still to help people understand and learn from their meals, and specifically what they can take action on to improve them. And we had this idea in the past where we could extract the ingredients or components of your meal and let you know, “Hey, we can’t say causally which ones cause this spike, but typically, these meals result in a higher glycemic load or glycemic index. So take a look here.” I put together a simple data analysis of our logs. And it seems like we could do something here. We can’t holistically algorithmically do it, but what we’re focusing on and chats with Xinlu is, maybe we pull out and scope this small to some magic moments.
David Flinner: So are there keywords we know that we can extract out confidently, and then only surface this experience when we’re pretty confident that we have a good thing to show you. So something on maybe oatmeal or other known components that would be safe to surface to start out. That’s ongoing work still in the kind of design and exploration days, but making progress. Next slide. And then just briefly to highlight, thank you all for the feedback on the dashboard concepts. I think Alan really appreciates that. He’s working with some agencies to scope out a potential implementation for this. It’s a creative coder type of job.
David Flinner: And so we’re talking with a few design firms to come up with a few examples for this, and then potentially work with them to have that creative coding done. More to come on that. And I think that’s it. Oh, there’s the summary slide. Yeah. So as Josh mentioned, there was a few production issues this week. So huge thanks to the Edge team. I know a lot of time was spent focusing on showing up some of our infrastructure improvements, debugging some of the production app issues that we saw with the last release. Yeah, just really appreciate the timely responses on that and improving the state of the app and our web server for our members. Yeah, I think that’s it, so.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you, David. Yeah. I think we also did put out a deck to a couple contractors to work on the background visuals there, is that right?
David Flinner: Yeah, that’s what I was talking about. So basically… I don’t know if Alan is on the call right now here.
Alan McClean: Yeah, I’m here. Yeah.
David Flinner: Do you want to give just a really brief overview of what this is? The design briefs and what the purpose is?
Alan McClean: Sure. Yeah. So we’ve started to make contact with a couple agencies that have backgrounds in doing this kind of work, which tends to be kind of this intersection of both design and code. So we’re talking to Hush in New York, Datalands, which is another firm that focuses on data visualization graphics, and a couple independent artists, on how we might actually accomplish this. I would love to personally do it, but I don’t trust myself enough to embark on this, at least with respected time. But yeah, we’re hoping to hear back pretty soon. We’ve had some good discussions. We’re going to get some estimates on cost next week. And I think there’s probably some ongoing technical conversations we need to have to just figure out exactly what are the constraints for these developers and how would we integrate it instead of a seamless way.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Looking forward to the outcome there. Cool, great week, everybody. Quick hiring update. The positions remain open that we’ve kind of been closing in on. I think a few top quality candidates across. Certainly the partnership specialists. The head of clinical product we’re still kind of learning specifically what we need there. More to come on that role. And then as always software engineering is open. We also have a standard form to submit if you’re watching this, and want to be a part of what we’re building and or join the talent pool, please head over to levels.link/careers, and submit that form. And that’s I think nothing other major to update there. JM.
Josh Mohrer: I wanted to talk about membership model. This is alluded to a couple times already on this call. I’m going to be leading our switch over to this new model. And Sam suggested I spend a minute talking about what it is and why we’re doing it. You may have read Sam’s strategy piece from March, which I linked at the bottom of this slide for internal folks, but basically, we’re going to be shifting how Levels works. Right now you join and you pay 3.99 for the first month, and you have the option of continuing and getting sensors either every month, every other month or every third month as we’ve talked about here recently. What we want to do as a company is make sure people know that we are aligned with them. And what I mean by that is if we’re just selling widgets, it becomes our best interest to sell as many widgets as we can.
Josh Mohrer: And businesses can lose sight of their alignment with consumers, when all they want to do is sell widgets. And so the idea for this, and I’m going to be talking a lot about this in the weeks to come. This is really just to sampling as I start to write up a bunch of ideas for this, is that we could have a fee that you pay every year to us for access to the hardware we sell, whether it’s CGMs or other things in the future, or services like ancillary or other things that we do in the future. And so we can position that as full alignment with the consumer because they’re paying us the fee and that’s how we make money.
Josh Mohrer: And then on the products and services we sell for as little as we can, and we’ll only advise folks to do things that we really think they should do, not just because we want sell more hardware. So look for more for me if you want to read some stuff now. Again, I’ve linked to Sam’s document as well as a couple others, one that Ben did and one that I did this spring. And I’ll hopefully sending out some longer form stuff in the days and weeks ahead. This is going to be a kind of a big deal for us and we’ll touch everyone. So you’ll be hearing from me a lot about that soon. Thank you.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you, JM. Yeah. Great background reading links there. So everybody who has more questions, go ahead and jump in and give it a read. All right. Ben.
Ben Grynol: Growth. Strong week, $84,000 of recognized revenue. We’ve surpassed our goal for the month, which we did last week, but we are at 485 of recognized revenue, so really strong month. No changes to cash debt or runway. Next slide please. So this is a bit of a recap. These are two, I guess, two summary segments we’ll call it from both the Levels growth strategy and then the Levels community development memos. And what they are, we’ll start with the growth strategy. There were a number of tactics that were outlined as far as what we might want to do to actually execute on this growth strategy. So we had things broken down into seeding growth, kick starting growth and compounding. And then that is looked at through all the Q1 through Q4. And so to date we’ve got 10 out of the 12 initiatives that are completed. And then there are… the two remaining ones are actually underway.
Ben Grynol: So one being the platform strategy as far as multichannel content distribution, and that’s something that’s Haney’s been spearheading. And then paid experiments is something that Tom and I have been working on as far as paid planning. Looking forward to Q1 and Q2 of 2022, and beyond for the rest of the year. So the goal with paid experiments was, “Hey, what does it look like if we test different platforms and align ourselves with different thought leaders or influencers?” We’re pretty comfortable with the returns that we’ve been getting as far as the capital allocation so far that we’ve seen in ’21. So sitting really well there. And then from a community development perspective, we’ve got eight out of the 10 initiatives outlined completed. And then the two that are underway, one of them we’re starting to realize it’s community development or community group 2.0. There might not be a ton of benefit in trying to migrate people from an active Facebook community group, to a different platform like Slack. And granted, we’re still relatively small, and things can change as we have further discussions about how product and community tie into each other.
Ben Grynol: We don’t necessarily want to just say, “Hey, everyone, we’re using a different platform like Circle or Slack or platform Dezure, because we’ve got good activity in Facebook and we’re going to keep it that way until we have a deeper solution, which is product and community combined. And that’s something that David and Alan have started to explore. So closing the loop there, but that’s an update on some of the memos. And then next slide, please. So growth theme of the week is when opportunity knocks. This is a tote bag. It is a PBS tote bag. And this was highly, highly coveted at one time by our friend, JM. As a young child, JM loved the PBS pledge and all he really wanted from it was this tote bag. And so we now have an opportunity where JM might be able to get this tote bag if we do have some involvement with this PBS special that Josh had talked about.
Ben Grynol: So Dr. Perlmutter graciously invited us. He reached out to Casey and he said that there might be an opportunity for him to include Levels in this master pledge package, which is his book and DVDs and a bunch of other ancillary items. We’re thinking through the logistics of it and how that might work. But I have my fingers crossed and we all should have our fingers crossed that one day JM can and get his tote bag. So that is growth for the week.
Josh Clemente: Love that. JM, we’re pulling for you. We’re going to make it happen.
Josh Mohrer: Make it happen, guys.
Josh Clemente: Team effort. All right. Haney.
Mike Haney: So in content, couple of good stories that went up this week, continuing on our five questions train as I mentioned last week when I was talking about content machines. That one is really flowing well. We’ve got probably another four or five member stories in the hopper and we’re also working on some new ways to tell these stories. So we’ve been doing a lot of these five questions. I think they’re great, but we want to definitely introduce some variety. And I would also just mention on there, we do have a notion doc, that I forget what it’s called, but I’ll put it in Slack, but it’s where Braden and Mercy and some other folks have been putting potential candidates to interview, but just another plug to definitely keep your eyes and ears open as you come into contact with people in our community that have some kind of an interesting story to tell or some kind of unique take or experience with CGM or metabolic health or our product specifically. We’d love to chat with them and we’ve got good capacity to do that.
Mike Haney: Also did another book excerpt from Ben’s book this week. We’re doing probably four of those total. This was three. This is a really nice piece from kind of the intro of this book. I think it’s a nice background around insulin and glucose, and he talks about it really well and gives some history there. Couple other things happened in the content department. We had a really good call this week with Dr. Gottfried’s team. We’re going to try to utilize our PR resources, the JTPR team to help any of our advisors as they release new books or have other things going on. But both Dr. Gottfried and Dr. Perlmutter have books coming out this fall that we’re super excited about that are very aligned with our mission. And so to the extent that we can help Dr. Gottfried get on podcasts or broadcasts or articles to promote it, it only helps sort of get our message out there.
Mike Haney: So that initiative kind of kicked off. I mentioned week, we do have a new writer working on the everyone on content initiative. She’s going to start reaching out probably not this coming week, because I’m out all next week. But the week after the first week of August, to schedule interviews with everybody. No rush to it. We’re going to try to do it over the next couple of months. She’s got pretty much everybody’s [inaudible 00:27:21] links. There’s a new table with everybody’s info in the everyone on content page, but just a heads up that you’ll start to see more activity around that. And again, those are just going to be relatively casual interviews. I’ll touch base with probably everybody before the interview happens to kind of set the groundwork for what we’re trying to get done.
Mike Haney: And a couple of other good collaborations coming up, content pieces with some other companies that are kind of in our network. ReCore, which does cardiac recovery work. So hopefully a nice piece on metabolic health and cardiovascular disease and routine, which does micronutrients and customized vitamins. And finally the start of the week, we’ve had a real kind of lag in our organic traffic for the past probably three months. We had a really nice growth going through the winter, and we kind of hit a stall point. And that finally seems to have broken, I think, the last month or so. We’ve had really good weeks. And last week I look back the analytics. We actually had a record week, which is over 15,000 organic users in a week. And that’s about half of our traffic. The newsletter now drives probably 30 to 50% depending on the week and social and others contribute. But it’s really great to see some of the SEO work that we’ve been doing over the past few months finally start to play off. It’s a long game, but it’s good to see it finally kicking in [inaudible 00:28:36] for content.
Josh Clemente: Love it. That’s awesome to hear. I’m also excited about the focus on insulin. As everyone on this call knows, we know glucose is not the panacea that it can kind of seem when we just focus on it. So starting to see the educational content with the analytes that that matter and that we will eventually have access to whether through single point or hopefully eventually continuous is awesome. This is another long play. So great work. Okay. We burned through that. That was fast. Okay. Let’s see. Is Marilo on the call? I do not see Marilo on the call. So-
Ben Grynol: On vacation.
Josh Clemente: Mike D, you want to kick us off?
Mike Didonato: Under the gun here, here we go. [inaudible 00:29:25] one thing, it’s just like the app. Coming to life more and more. I remember for the longest time David said, “If you think this is good, just wait until we get a designer and more engineering help.” And it’s pretty insane to see even the daily updates, so kudos to product and Edge there. And then personally, you can’t tell. The background’s a little bit different today for me. I’m down at the beach spending some time with some of my family that’s out of town. So pretty pump for that.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Enjoy it down there. Haney.
Mike Haney: Yeah. I’ll second on the product side. I just sort of started experiencing the new meal logging flow this week in the app. I don’t know if I’m on time or behind, but it’s really good. It’s so much easier. And it’s one of those things where I didn’t know the improvement was needed, but really enjoying that. On the personal side we leave tomorrow morning for a week plus on the East Coast, seeing some family and spend a bunch of time in New York city. So excited about that.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Dom.
Dom D’Agostino: Yeah. From the Level side, things are going really well with research. So we just have two more weeks left and collecting a lot of data on that. Personal side, it’s my wife’s birthday tomorrow, so I’m planning some fun things for the day. Not sure yet what but planning it.
Josh Clemente: I’m sure you’ll come through.
Dom D’Agostino: Yeah.
Josh Clemente: Enjoy.
Dom D’Agostino: Thanks.
Josh Clemente: Casey. Casey [inaudible 00:30:56].
Casey Means: Yeah, I would say highlight of the week was getting to meet Alan for the first time and in San Francisco and also getting to see Miz and Josh in person, and also did a sort of jamming sess with David and Alan on scoring systems for Levels and just really appreciate their awesome structured sort of product process. That was great. Personally, we have about 12 people coming to Half Moon Bay this weekend, friends of my brother and mine. Yesterday was my mom’s what would’ve been her 72nd birthday. And so we’re having Gale Fest this weekend, which is going to be a celebration of her. We didn’t really get to do a true funeral for her when it was in the middle of COVID. And so we’re kind of having these rolling events and it’s going to be so great to get to see a bunch of people and celebrate. So yeah.
Josh Clemente: That is amazing. I’m sure that will be amazing. So enjoy.
Casey Means: Thanks.
Josh Clemente: JM.
Josh Mohrer: Looking forward to my future move to Colorado at some timescale. Heading upstate in a little bit for the weekend. The weather has subsided a bit. It’s only in the 80s now, which is great for me. Have a great weekend.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. I’ll second Casey. Great to see you, Josh. Great to see Alan. Some really great discussion around insulin, diabetes, the Levels app, work. So very much enjoyed that, and looking forward to the fire side that we have in a little bit. Yeah, that’s it for now? Oh, I remember the other not personal thing, but very excited about the new hires. We had a few offers sign and we have a new hire starting on Monday. So keep an eye open, like Andrew said, but exciting to see the team growing quite a bit.
Josh Clemente: Amazing. Casey West.
Casey West: Right on. Let’s see. Levels related. I’m getting married in October. So I’ve been eating at a lot of food trucks, because we’re going to do essentially a block party with live music and food trucks for our wedding reception. So I’m eating a lot of foods off menu typically, but then watching the results is really fascinating, and I’m sort of picking food trucks based on how the ingredients impact me. And next weekend I’m going climbing outdoors, which is pretty great. And I’m just continuing my climbing journey.
Josh Clemente: Amazing. I love to hear that we’re a part of the wedding planning process. Let’s see. Rob’s not with us. Chris.
Chris Jones: On the Levels front, the groundwork for the future membership model, which I guess I just mean that JM’s my hero this week, since he’s kind of running all those fronts. On the personal side, really excited. Tomorrow I leave for RAGBRAI, which is for… a lot of the Level people know, a seven day bike ride across the gorgeous state of Iowa, which is really a big party on wheels with 20,000 of my closest cycling friends. I’m doing it with my sister, on a tandem, which I’ve never rid a tandem in my life. So we may have a sibling divorce by the end of the week if I don’t watch myself.
Josh Clemente: That sounds amazing. We got to do this. All right. Let’s see. Alan.
Alan McClean: Yeah. Well, it was really great to finally meet some more Levels employees. Finally seeing everybody in person, starting to feel really real to me. And you’re also the first colleagues I’ve seen since COVID started. So that’s also really interesting for me. So that’s kind of a personal and professional highlight. Although on the personal side, because we’re moving back east soon, I’m flexing the… I’ve got to get as many rides in as possible. So looking forward to taking advantage of that leverage a little bit and going for a ride this week.
Josh Clemente: Nice. And of course, good luck with the move preparations. I think Tom is also not with us. Lori. Stacy.
Stacie Flinner: From the Levels side, I think I’m just very excited about sharing resources with Dr. Perlmutter. I think that all boats will rise with this tide. And so I love that the network that we’ve been building can help benefit getting his message out as well. And then personally, just very relieved to have found our next department. We’ve been looking for months and we’re mostly settled in and finishing it up this weekend. So super grateful. I think David mentioned it before, but we are five minutes from the beach, and that’s walking, so very excited.
Josh Clemente: That’s amazing. Congrats on the move.
Mike Haney: I guess that’s me. Okay. Let see. On the personal side, I have been burning the midnight oil, so I’m looking forward to catching up on some sleep this weekend.
Josh Mohrer: All right. Personal side, the little baby is firmly in his four month sleep progression, so we’re just getting trucked by that. But my wife’s dad is coming to visit this weekend kind of on a whim, which is fantastic. So hopefully her and I can and go on a date for the first time in quite a while. On the professional side, I sort of emotionally dumped the blog post and updated my LinkedIn. And I was really, really encouraged by people that from 10 years of my past reached out to be like, “Oh my God, I’ve been following Levels. So cool. Can you get me on the wait list?” And it just started a lot of really good conversations. Actually started a document of this sort of long drip recruit for these all stars that I’ve worked with in my past, that kind of came out of nowhere. So I’m really excited for that. That was a really fun experience for me. And hopefully some people that I would love to bring into Levels as time goes on.
Josh Clemente: That was a strong benchmark for joining the team note that you wrote there. Thanks for doing that and super cool to see the response. Also that hat looks pretty sharp. Shout out to the Swag team. That’s a good look.
Casey Means: So good.
Josh Clemente: Ben.
Ben Grynol: Yeah. Professionally… So my favorite thing of the week was the velocity around a decision that was made to ignore some costs. So we have this animated video that has been in the pipeline for, it seems like perpetuity of all of 2021. And there were differing outlooks on whether or not this should ship. And what’s really exciting is that as a team, we just said, “[inaudible 00:37:42], there is the decision, and we’re not going to overthink this.” And if we had gone back and forth for a week on this, I don’t think that would’ve been productive. So it was really nice to see that we could just ignore some costs and go like, “Cool, let’s just not ship that.” So that was awesome. Personally, going to see my best friend this week, who I haven’t seen in two years, this weekend, on Sunday. And I’m just super pumped for that.
Josh Clemente: Enjoy. Get out of here. No email allowed from Ben. Everyone, don’t engage with email with Ben when he’s with his friend. For me, professionally, this was just a really exciting week getting to get to chat with a number of teams about the development arc of their tech, and how it could or could not be complimentary to us. It’s just insightful to see how these deep science teams are thinking about the future of hardware and the fact that we were kind of influencing it already. So that was exciting. And then personally, later today, Kate and I are going to go and sample desserts by the bucket load. We have to resolve what the dessert menu’s going to be, which requires that we try everything at this Italian dessert place, which is… I have to say it’s a sacrifice, but I’ll do it.
Kate: It’s the oldest Italian bakery in Philadelphia. So the cannolis as you can imagine are delightful.
Josh Clemente: Yeah, it’s a burden, but I’ll carry it. Hao.
Hao Li: Yeah. So Level wise, super excited to see a new bill be in the app every day almost, thanks to Alan and Justin. It’s awesome. And personally, just having fun with Hagger’s new puppies over the weekend.
Josh Clemente: Nice. All right. Kate.
Kate: Thanks for having me guys. I’m usually working on Friday, so I’m so excited to join you. On the Level side, I’m super excited about the Sarah Gottfried collaboration. She’s here in Philly at Jeff, which is super awesome. My mom is going to be a patient of hers starting in the fall, so I’m just thrilled. I think she’s amazing. And on a personal note, Josh and I booked our honeymoon to Santorini last night. So very excited for that.
Josh Clemente: Yeah, ditto. Justin.
Justin Stanley: The Levels front, I’m excited that being able to get my data things out in little bits and pieces, make the reviews easier for the team, hopefully. And yeah, I’m always excited about product and design. So I love the dashboard stuff. And personal, pretty much as only the puppy these days. So looking forward to him incrementally a little baby steps getting better each day and fighting less and listening. Yeah.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Sam is not with us. John.
Jhon Cruz: Plus one on the new app designs. The new screens are looking really nice and I can’t wait to implement the new social experiments. And personally, my parents are moving a bit closer to us, like two hours from here, and they are going to have a pool. So my kid is pretty excited about that.
Josh Clemente: Love it. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente: Professionally, the design stuff, it looks so cool. And then also it’s crazy that it’s been a year since I started actually. Just went back in my text messages between Josh and I, and he actually asked me about helping out on and July 20th. So it’s been just over a year actually. So about the 27th. So that’s exciting. And then personally, my oldest sister just had her baby on Sunday, so I will be going up to meet Emma this weekend. So I’m excited for that.
Josh Clemente: Yeah. I expect pictures. All right. Well, we got done quite a bit early this week, but that’s no evidence of a lack of progress, so great work everybody. Yeah. Enjoy your weekends. And we of a fireside right after this.