Josh (00:00):
All right. Jump in. July 29th, 2022, last Friday forum of July. Jumping straight in. This week, logging and tagging backend are under engineering work right now. So, good progress there. Event-based insights have launched. I think the first 10 are out. And scoring V2 is live in the internal app. Everyone at Levels should have access to scoring V2, including the stability ring. From there, we’ll be launching to a small external beta group in order to continue getting high-value feedback. On the UK fulfillment side, there’s a phasing memo out that Karen produced, and the first packaging is on its way to the UK warehouse, which is exciting. 93% GDPR completion. Lots there and lots still to do. And then engineering kicked off on the major initiatives for the UK closed beta. So, really good week this week. Shout out to Kosima for jumping in on that.
(01:01):
Initial results came in from, these aren’t published, but from one of our studies that we’ve been doing, and this is through an external school. I’m not going to announce exactly what the details are until that’s published, but essentially, it’s studying high-intensity exercise under a high-carb versus low-carb diet. They used Levels as well as some of our scores, and it showed an extremely strong correlation between the dietary philosophy or dietary approach and glucose control and glucose metrics, which is not super surprising. But what is surprising is that is with a corresponding zero drop in performance, at least not a statistically significant one. This will be a really cool finding to publish, and we’re going to try and make that open access when the time comes, so more people will be able to get that original literature.
(01:48):
We hit a million views. I think this is the first video from Levels that has hit a million views, but Dr. Perlmutter’s clip with Casey just hit a million. It’s huge. Something like 23 years of view time, I think Ben said, which blows my mind. And then we had five new blog videos from the McGuffies, breaking down our posts. Three Whole New Level episodes went live, including one with John Parenti, which is really cool. And then Casey, Dr. Casey’s Kitchen hit 45% growth over the past three months. So, really cool numbers. Most of that is due to scaling existing content; so reposting and just learning the ropes with reels. So, making sure that there’s a really sharp hook early on. This week was, or rather last week was the largest for transfers into the IRB. This is continuing to see a lot of transition from our existing user base into the new platform.
(02:41):
Smart shipments launched, which will help us to save money and reduce waste on transmitter shipments. That’s a huge improvement, actually. And then the first-touch email went to the last of our waitlists this morning. That’s the first contact, has now happened for everyone on the waitlist. We’ll continue to garden that list and get more visibility as many of those people are several years old. The first Tim Ferriss podcast went live this week, and then the second newsletter promotion on 5 Bullet Friday, also live today. And then on the engineering side, first of all, a really cool new weekly update. I’m excited to have everybody else see the weekly async from the eng team. Really great insight. And then LinearB is a new app being used for deeper analytics on engineering bottlenecks and cycle times. Super cool. LinearB. Thanks, Ian.
(03:35):
We are also launching an OKRs project, which I’ll have a little more detail on in a minute, and Delegation of the Week and Top 10 Delegation Docs. Continuing to focus on systematizing and driving not only scale for the processes we have, but also targeting, and having key results for everything that each functional group is doing. And then lastly, I want to call out that member support is still getting just hammered with the Liftoff Initiative. Volumes are up at least 80% from where they were a few months back, let’s say in May. Yeah, it’s just really important to keep support in mind during all new initiatives. If we’re standing something up that we really hope will get a ton of resonance, we need to think about support volumes right now, as we continue to try and find our footing there. I think that’s most of it here.
(04:27):
Sneak peek into Dr. Casey’s Kitchen, the filming that we did there. Spoke with Brandon Marshall from House of Athlete in Miami, and he’s a former NFL athlete, very excited about Levels. And then Dr. Andrew Huberman’s landing page is now live, although we have not yet launched that. I think that goes live August 1st. And then Lauren will be on Be Well with Kelly. All right. I’m going to jump into culture and kudos slide here.
(04:53):
First off, I want to welcome, or I want to thank David and Mercy, three years and two years respectively. I don’t think the dates that we had in rippling were exactly correct. I think the 26th and 27th were in there, but I actually believe that both of you started a little bit earlier than that. Anyway, time is flying. Thank you both. I want to give a shout-out to Jeremy. His last day will be August 1st. Just thank Jeremy for two years plus of work and output and partnership in building Levels, and wishing you all the best in your next phases. I’ve got a couple shout-outs here, so we’ll start off with the bottom right corner there. The research team plus Scott, got together in Seattle. Got to do, I think, their first full sync event, and really sounds like it was a great time. Some of the output from that is in the research wiki, so you can check out the new research tasks page that they built out, which shows the very near term and extended roadmap of what they’ll be working on.
(05:54):
I want to also shout out John and Steph. It looks like some recent Android performance issues got to a point where John just dove in to try to figure out what the source was. Integrated Century into the app to provide better observability and ran some manual tests to try to figure out, what is the low-hanging fruit to improve performance without necessarily derailing eng efforts? And then Steph took it over and did a bunch of delegating to make sure that we keep tabs on the performance on Android. Both did a really great job of reporting and surfacing up why they were spending this time, and whether or not this required a whole pause on other initiatives to focus on Android. I just want to shout out both of them. It started with a personal initiative on John’s part, and then transitioned into a really nice scaling effort with Steph to get us to moving and try to resolve some of these issues that have been haggling us from the Android side.
(06:56):
And then big hat tip to Maxine, who has done an amazing job with handover documentation on US liftoff work. It’s really awesome to see scale documentation flywheel happening at Levels. This is, from what I understand, not the status quo in other eng organizations. But the quality and degree of completeness of documentation as represented in that handover document from Maxine is just really amazing. Thanks to the whole eng team and everyone that’s continuing to lean into scalable documentation. Next, I want to call out Laurie. This is no surprise to anybody who knows Laurie, but she just relentlessly, behind the scenes, makes people smile. We got a really nice note from someone who said, “This is literally the most gratitude-led company she’s ever interacted with.” Totally wowed. Made her day, made her week. Fills her spirit. This is the kind of thing that it may not always be very visible for us, but Laurie is, on a weekly basis, getting gifts out to the people who have helped us in whatever way that that might be, podcasts, distribution, members. Thank you, Laurie, for continuing to be so detail-oriented in your work.
(08:10):
And then lastly, in the center there, there’s a screenshot of the support topics and rates of change. I just wanted to put this in there. It may not be super visible, but at the end of the day, volumes are way up across the board. I just wanted to remind everyone that support is managing a tremendous amount of work. Liftoff has been challenging. It’s brought new topics, new volumes. Everyone’s doing a great job, but please think of ways that you can help out. Despite all this, happiness recovered to, I think, 87 this week, which is pretty unbelievable, despite the fact that we’re battling big volumes here. Shout out to the support team. And please, everybody else, think of ways to support. Support. Whoops. Okay, company objectives.
(09:04):
Main thing, nothing’s changed here. Levels shows you how food affects your health. Primary objectives. Right now, still member retention, member health improvement, and new member acquisition. The big one this week, and Lauren is currently working on the first step here, but I just wanted to have a brief note about the OKRs project. The objective for this project is that each functional unit will have a set of objectives that will map to a major company objective. Those being the three we just covered. The project will have a couple different components, so we’ll start off with definitions. What are functional OKRs? These are objectives and key results. And then the tracking and reporting system, and finally integrating those into performance management. It’s a step change in how we trickle down objectives from the very top of the company into the work that we’re all doing every single day, to make sure that we’re all focused on the main thing.
(10:05):
Lauren has taken lead on this. I believe she’s kicked things off with growth team first. Everyone else, all of their functions should expect to have some time set aside to work on OKRs. And then Lauren will be working on adding structure to that. Thanks, everybody, for bearing with this project. And thank you, Lauren, for taking it on. It’s not going to be super easy initially, but I think it’s going to bring a ton of relief and sharpness to what we all pay attention to. All right. I believe this is Maxine. (singing)
Maxine (10:51):
Today, I wanted to talk about how engineering helped allow for experimentation, and talk a little bit about the difference between coding for quality and coding for experimentation. In general, engineering is working on some projects where we know that it is a valuable project. We need it, we know what we need. And in those cases, we’re thinking a lot about adding high-quality code that is maintainable, testable, and durable. There’s another class of kinds of engineering problems that fall into the category of experimentation; when we’re not sure what the exact right outcome is going to look like, we don’t know what the perfect solution is, but we want to get something out there to try it. This is a really good example of that. JM was looking for a way to test alternative copy on the purchase flow. I’ll show you an example here.
(11:37):
Here is one iteration and here’s another iteration, and the way that we did this was just adding a custom query param. Basically, we’re controlling the alternative copy that you see by this little query param. This was a really quick addition for me. It took me less than a day to add this. And it’s allowed JM to successfully test, I think, now three different iterations of the checkout flow. I think this is a really fun thing to call out because it just shows that there are some ways that we can build in experimentation without it being a huge engineering lift. But it can allow for a really big business insight and be really helpful from a data side. Now, I’m going to kick it over to JM to explain some of the results that we found from running this experimentation, and how we’re improving the purchase flow as a result of it. Thanks. (singing)
JM (12:24):
Thanks, Maxine, for the great engineering work and the super cool Check It Out theme song. A quick review. Josh mentioned this last week, but I didn’t share in forum, so I’ll do so very briefly. After we went live with new flow in early July, after about a week or so, we collected some feedback and made changes to the first few screens; with the goal of making people better understand what they’re buying. And specifically understand the research, since we were seeing a lot of drop off on those steps. We did a test, a couple of different AB tests. The larger one was on the homepage. Half of people got the original and half got the change, and the change did much better. We moved on to another test, focused specifically on just the first two steps. The test that’s live right now on the homepage is testing the research illustration against the product and app and patch box.
(13:20):
This test only has about 25 sales on each, so its statistical significance has not yet been met. But I’ll keep you posted on that. The test after that, and the third of this set, will be taking a different approach potentially on the first screen, on whichever one wins, to use more words to explain what someone gets to try to put all the information in there. I would categorize these first few tests as more like testing the test framework and getting out there and trying this, and figuring out how it all works as we start to go a little more serious in the coming weeks. I think probably after this will be a more material change where we try a bunch of new things maybe all at once and see how they go. Anyway, thank you very much.
Josh (14:06):
Love it. Thanks for the high-production value and for the messages there, Maxine and JM. I particularly like the testing, how the testing works. That’s pretty important. Before we roll out big experiments, it’s always helpful to make sure that the infrastructure and instrumentation works the way we think it will, before we put a ton of trust into the numbers that we’re going to get from it. Excited to continue learning on the iterations there. Okay, I think this is David. It’s still formatting, but I have the backup Loom here. Thank you, David, for that.
David (14:38):
On the product side, I’m excited to share that we’re rolling out our first event-based insights that are using the new behavior change framework in terms of the content messaging that we put together. Mike’s been working really hard on these and he’s out of the office today, so I’m giving you an update and a demo on his behalf. But what’s different about these insights is that they are paired both at a moment that matters to the user based on their data. But then the message and the suggestion that we’re delivering is crafted in such a way to hook into their motivation, so they know why it’s relevant. And they immediately get why they should be caring about it. And then the suggestion that we do put forward is within their capabilities to execute on. And it’s paired with a trigger that is another habit that they already have, so that it’ll be easy to take the next step and stack their habits.
(15:21):
Wanted to quickly demo a couple of these for you. You can see here with my Loom demo, so one of the ones that Mike got here is getting active after meals. Here, we have an insight that is going to show after you have a meal that has a low scoring zone, and we want to show that exercise, or any activity after the meal, can reduce that spike. But one of the things here you’ll see is that in the copy, we’re tying this into the goals. So tying it into enhancing fat loss and having stable energy, two of our most common goals. Hooking into that motivation, why should I care about this? Why is it important to me? And then a bit of a background on what sorts of activity you should be doing. A little bit of an overview there.
(16:02):
And then right here, you’ll notice we have, after you clean up the dishes from your meal, start getting active. What we’re trying to do with this is tying it to a habit that they already have. Just this simple trigger. Immediately after you stop eating and you clean up the dishes, go for a walk. Get active. Dance around the kitchen. That’s the subtle nuance and design of these insights that are going out there, and we’ll be seeing how they resonate. Another option here for low-carb breakfasts. We’re tying it into their energy crashes here in the first page. Common go-to options for breakfast that are loaded with carbs cause energy crashes. A few items that our members will be best suited to avoid if they want to focus on stable glucose. A few healthy options, and this is really tying into the capability set of things. There’s a whole range of options that they can execute on if one of them doesn’t resonate with them, as well as a specific recipe for one thing they can actually take away and try that.
(17:04):
You’ll notice here in the takeaway, we say, next time you’re thinking, “What should I have for breakfast?” Try this simple, tasty recipe. We’re trying to hook it into a trigger that happens every day. “Hey, what should I have for breakfast? What should I have for lunch?” And then when they think of that, their mind will come back to this insight and try one of the low-carb options. All right. Next, just wanted to give a brief update on the feedback we’re hearing from the stability ring internally. We’ve heard a lot of positive feedback that people are feeling very encouraged by this, and we’ve also heard about seven bug reports from internal testing. Thank you for getting out there and testing it, for sharing your thoughts on this. We’ve created tickets, and engineering has been working on fixing those as we prepare to roll this out for more beta testing with our trusted testers. Really appreciate the feedback on that so far.
(17:52):
Very briefly, engineering started work on the complementary scoring V2 changes, which will go into my data page. We’re going to have your spike time and spike count, and then you’ll see a day with no spikes indicated with this check mark. And then that is also going to be, jumping here into Figma, tying into a motivational layer, too, with streaks. As you know, we’re placing the metabolic score with this over time. Days without any spikes will have this streak affordance, and you’ll also be able to see your stability ring for 24 hours on past days. The last thing to call out is that John has started work on the new version of logging. This is going to be under eng development for the next few weeks, so nothing to test here now. But that is in flight. And that is it.
(18:43):
One last thing to note on the event-based insights is that we’re going to be tracking this by investigating how we might bring back the thumbs up, thumbs down experience we had on the old insight cards. We still need to engage in how exactly that shows up, but probably when you open up one of the cards, there’ll be some way to register your feedback, whether you liked it or you didn’t like it. We’ll be using that sort of insight to close the loop on how these are landing. That’s it for product. Happy Friday, everyone.
Josh (19:10):
Okay. Thank you, David. Good stuff there. Try not to … It’s stuck here. All right. Here we go.
Alan (19:21):
Hey, folks.
Josh (19:21):
Over to …
Alan (19:23):
Yeah, play the video. That’s great.
Josh (19:25):
Sorry.
Alan (19:27):
We’ve got an update. We’ve got an update from Viktor on some work that he’s been doing this week. I’m really excited to see some of this coming together, so jump in.
Viktor (19:36):
Hello, everybody, and happy Friday. Hope you can enjoy my beautiful new sound here from this new setup I’ve gotten thanks to, mainly, Ben for giving me all this advice. Anyway, I wanted to tell you about some stuff I’ve been doing now during my last onboarding week. I’m trying to dig deep into the design system. There’s been some inconsistency here and there. It’s a great way for me to get to know the app, get familiar with the system, and what kind of puzzle pieces we have to play around with here. To start off, there’s, if you really want to boil this down into four steps. We didn’t really have a typography guide really anywhere, so that was the first thing I did. This is following the Apple Human Interface Guidelines very closely. Last time I counted, it was 16. So we got 16 different type styles we got to play around with here. Whenever we use typography, we can find that. Let’s see it here. This is caption two, strong. This is large tidal, footnote strong, et cetera. It will just really help us to get focused here and use some pre-designed cells.
(20:47):
Second, I wanted to add a color palette. I’ve seen some unlinked colors here and there. We used some different variations of this. Minty green, the Levels screen. Alan shared with me this. This is from another Figma file called the Levels Brand Guidelines 2022, which had a lot of good stuff; this being one of them, one of the good things. There’s a lot of hues here, a lot of base colors and variations of those base colors. First of all, I wanted to add those into a few different sections; one of them being the primary colors. These are the colors you’re going to see everywhere; website, products, social media, these are the four mains. But we also want to have some secondary colors that we can play around with, whether we want to call something specific out, illustrations, and especially do both light screen, sorry, light mode and dark mode. Light mode, as you probably know, we don’t have yet, but that is one of the main tasks going into this.
(21:46):
I started mapping out the dark mode colors we have for really everything. We’re talking about canvas color, meaning the background colors, and card-on-canvas. Cards or background cells that are on top of this canvas color, surface text, primary, secondary, accent tint, interactive tint. It becomes pretty exhaustive, but it’s good to have an exhaustive list that we got to play around with here. But not make it too exhaustive so we don’t end up using out with these colors. After I made that, I’ve been playing around with this and see how this actually applies to our existing or current UI. I’m going to dig a bit deeper into this sometime soon, but for background color, for example, instead of using plain black, or a bit gray but still plain gray, I’ve been trying to introduce a bit of blue into the background. If I unlink this color, which is dark canvas, you see here that it just has a little bit of personality. Involving a little bit of blue here, I think it makes things a bit more interesting. Same goes for the other colors.
(22:48):
This lists this cell color, card-on canvas, also a bit blue, so on and so forth. I’ve been trying to stress test this to see how it works out in context. Again, this is very much work in progress, but I’ve been doing some good. Been making some good progress so far. If we want to go deeper into each cell, so designing not only for iOS, but any kind of product, it really helps to dig into the actual atomic pieces of things first; all the components that lead to the design instead of going straight into just designing a full screen. Again, talking about consistency, it just ends up working better that way. Here, you see all the different variations of cells. You see our new … I’m going into the file components here. Components. Our new scoring cards and the gradient that follows that, from red into yellow, into blue, green. Yeah. Again, there’s way more to this, but I’ll be showing you an update to this sometime soon.
(23:50):
But lastly, I think a lot of people have been waiting for light mode. I’m not there yet. This is just duplicating the color from dark mode, but I want to try to reverse those. In a way, it looks similar. So you have the same feelings. It evokes the same feelings, but obviously on a light background. That’s coming next. Thank you.
Alan (24:12):
Okay. Why does this stuff matter really into the details of design? These are the kinds of conversations we have all the time. But what’s happening here as we’re developing the building blocks that are going to make both design engineering’s life a lot easier, be able to work a lot faster, it’s going to be more consistent. And engineering can have components that are all specked out and consistent, that make it a lot easier to build these things. It is a foundational part of a product design team and we’re really excited to see it develop.
Josh (24:48):
Awesome. Thanks, Alan. And thank you, Viktor, for the glimpse into the detailed background on the design work. I personally am a dark mode user, but I know that there are many out there who are starving for a light mode. I think we need to hear their calls. Okay. Jump into hiring update. Nothing much has changed here. Taylor will be joining us on September 6th. Same with the careers page, so software engineering, R&D engineer. And then generally, you can go to levels.link/careers and if someone you know or you yourself are interested in Levels, Levels’ culture, what we’re working on or what we may work on someday, please shoot your note and some background on yourself at the general application there. Okay. We ripped through that one.
(25:36):
We’re going to do two things. I’m going to stop the share here and we’re going to do individual contributions as usual, but first, I want to make a note about something new we’re going to try today right after this meeting. We’ve been experimenting with the Friday forum approach and structure a few times now. We have shifted most of our project updates to asynchronous, and so those are loaded into Notion every single week. And then they’re collated into a single video, which goes out on Threads. We’re going to try a synchronous watch party for that after this. It’s fully optional. Anyone that wants to join, please do. We’re going to collect some feedback on it, see how it goes. Might be an opportunity to do a little more social viewing and for people to have a calendar block to watch those async updates. Because they are super valuable and super important for everyone to keep up to speed on.
(26:27):
That’s just a note. There should be a calendar event on your Levels events calendar right after this. Again, fully optional. From here, I’m going to try a little something different on the contribution. I want to start off with people who have time zone sensitivities, but also we’re going to do contributions by hand raise. Instead of me just going through the list, if you want to share, throw your hand up using the reactions button on your bottom toolbar and I will then just read them left to right. That way, people who want to share can share, and others can just hang out. Let’s see how this goes. I am going to start off with … Well, yeah. We’ll go Rob and then Karen. Rob, you’re first.
Robert (27:10):
Hi. I’ve just shared an article with both Casey and Haney and Alan, but want to let everybody else about know about it. Not my article. It was in Gem Oncology. I’m going to put it into the chat box, but I think this is going to be super important for Levels and pushing the concept forward.
(27:32):
What it says, they took a bunch of type one diabetics. No baseline insulin. The only insulin they get comes from a bottle. They looked at lifetime cancer risk, and it turned out that there was a very clear gradation between total insulin dose and cancer risk. The highest insulin users had the highest cancer prevalence. Bottom line, glucose is a proxy for insulin, and insulin is the driver of chronic disease.
(28:05):
We need to get that message out to as many people as possible. Because as Casey and I talk about all the time, if you don’t have diabetes, why do you need a continuous glucose monitor? Well, this is why. This should be a flag in staking our position and explaining why Levels is so important.
Josh (28:34):
Amazing. Thank you, Rob. You mentioned you were sharing that in the chat. I think I may have missed it, but would love to read that when you can. Karen?
Karen (28:49):
Thanks, Josh. Professionally, I’m just really excited to watch everybody; so many different teams pulling together to make UK Liftoff happen. Want to give a special shout out to Kosima, who’s taking the lead on all the PMing for expansion. She’s just been awesome at taking stuff off me and organizing us all. Yeah, just want to say I’m super grateful for her awesome work. Personally, we are having our first play date barbecue with random parents of toddlers at Mini’s Ageless Weekend. I’m going to make a pescatarian, low-carbohydrate barbecue for all these folks. Let’s see if the kids eat it.
Josh (29:35):
Sounds like an experiment. Sounds like fun. One other thing that I don’t often do, and I should do, is the prompt for this is something you’re excited about professionally and personal is encouraged. I know I flashed through the slide real quick, but if anyone else who hasn’t raised your hand wants to share, please do. And including Alaine, if you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you. Steph?
Stephanie (29:58):
Professionally, I had the chance to work with John more closely over the past few weeks on the Android performance stuff, and then now digging into back in the app, working on the my data stuff. It’s been really fun and really great. He’s been such a great mentor, and so shout out to John. Personally, I am so excited for this weekend because Brittany, Sissy and I are meeting up to go backpacking together. This has been a long time coming. We’ve been planning it for a bit. I know that the original idea surfaced in March, and so I could not be more excited to go into the woods with a few coworkers.
Josh (30:31):
Sounds amazing. Can’t wait for the pictures. Enjoy. Ian?
Ian (30:36):
I’m so jealous about the backpacking trip. Hope you guys have an awesome time. I hope I can make the next one. Personally, no-brainer. This past Monday in the wee hours, I got back from a two-week vacation in Italy with my wife, and it was fantastic. It was my first time vacationing in Western Europe, or really just Europe, and I just gobbled up all the history and culture. We got a lot of hiking in too on the coast and in the mountains. It was lovely. On the professional front, similar to Karen, I’m psyched about jumping into the UK Liftoff project. It feels like there’s good energy. There’s a good team working on it, and it feels like we’re off to a good start.
Josh (31:22):
Awesome. Very jealous of that one. All right. For me, on the professional side, it’s been really cool to see all of the initiatives around scaling our time, delegations. These are the types of things that other companies probably frown on. If anything, scaling and pushing your work down the chain, closer to the action, or delegating it, it’s not often reinforced at the company level. The work Sonia’s doing to service delegations and the work that Athena’s doing every single day relentlessly to scale our time, it’s just awesome. I love seeing it. All right. Chris?
Chris (32:00):
On the Levels front, I’m just excited about watching the support team rally around the big backlog of tickets, the new issues, the complexity, the long tail, and just watching the team come together. Specifically, a huge call-out to Mercy. I’m looking at the numbers, and over 500 replies in the last seven days? It took me just over a year before I actually jumped in the queue with them. Before, I’m like, “Oh, let me go build Snowflake dashboards.”
(32:29):
Finally, I’m almost at 100, and it gives me a new appreciation for what the team does each and every day, dealing with these members. I’m like, “Ooh, wow, that’s a hard one. Maybe I’ll just skip that one and let Mercy do it, or Brayden.” It’s good for me to get in there myself. I just want to say thanks to the whole support team and for the company to keep support top of mind as we roll this stuff out. Because we’re in growth mode, and that’s a good thing. But it does cost sometimes. Trust the system.
(32:56):
On the personal side, next week I have a good friend of mine coming in from Chicago and his 10-year-old son. And if you’re following my water cooler chat thing, his son eats every bad food known to man; mac and cheese, sodas, hot dogs. I have to get my CGM backup and running so I can do all these AB-tested food that is never in my pantry, just to see how big I can spike. It’ll be a good AB experiment of the All-American Diet of what not to do.
Josh (33:26):
Got to have that data in the catalog. Maz?
Maziar (33:32):
Hey, guys. On the professional side, I’ve been really excited about teams working across, cross collaborating. Being in New York last week was really fantastic. And talking to some people at length, even late night, that you wouldn’t get a chance to talk to, and really seeing that of how can we actually use the best from different parts of the company, for example, in the app. That was really fascinating. And then this week, I think obviously the team, engineering, product, and then UK, really working together closely and resolving some of the issues that came out, it was just exciting to see that the companies are actually working together even when things get really tough, which they will.
(34:11):
On the personal side, just excited to be back. Excited to catch up with people, and looking forward to maybe going for a bike ride with Miz. I know he’s not here. He’s coming back from Hawaii. And then seeing Taylor. Should be excited.
Josh (34:22):
Nice. Sounds great. Rebecca?
Rebecca (34:26):
Hi, everyone. On the professional side, week-two of onboarding almost complete, and I’m almost done with my city training, which has been a big focus this week. That’s really exciting. Personally, so I’m planning a wedding. And this week I finished our wedding website and our save the dates. That was a huge task that I needed to complete, and it’s done.
Josh (34:47):
Congrats. It’s a big one. Mercy?
Mercy (34:54):
Professionally, I’m excited to have hit two years. Doesn’t really feel like two years, but at the same time, it feels longer. It’s a lot of fun. Yeah. I just feel grateful to work with everybody and have good coworkers. I guess that’s personal, too.
Josh (35:11):
Yeah. Congrats on two years. Ryley?
Ryley (35:16):
Personally, I had a chance, met Flanagan, was through Banff last weekend. I had a chance to catch up with him and go for a hike. I think the photos are on his phone, and he’s taking some much needed time unplugged. I promise we’ll get a meetup post on that coming up. Professionally, I’ve been working behind the scenes with our new finance partners, Fury, and really excited about how that’s coming together. I think they’re going to be a great partner going forward, so excited about that.
Josh (35:51):
Super cool. Looking forward to the Banff pictures. Alaine?
Alaine (35:56):
Hello. I left my job in April of 2018 and I had no clue that I wasn’t going to be able to work for four years. I’m finally ready to be able to work again, so that’s very exciting. And then I am actually getting another dog next week, so another puppy. But I know you guys are dog people, so this is Waffles, everyone. You can say hello.
Josh (36:17):
That’s awesome. Congrats on both.
Alaine (36:20):
Thanks.
Josh (36:21):
What’s Waffle’s sibling going to be named?
Alaine (36:25):
Oh, Eve. She’s a German Wirehaired Pointer, Golden Retriever. I had another dog that was like that and I lost him. And then someone found another litter, so I was like, “Well, I guess I’m getting a third dog.”
Josh (36:36):
Waffles and Eve. Like PB and J. Love it.
Alaine (36:39):
And Kevin.
Josh (36:42):
Awesome. Well, thanks, again, for joining us today.
Alaine (36:43):
Yeah. Thanks for having me, guys. Have a wonderful weekend.
Josh (36:46):
Of course. You, too. Casey?
Casey (36:49):
I think a definite highlight of the week is having Alaine on the Friday forum. Thank you so much for sharing your story and inspiring all of us. It has been really fun this week. I’ve gotten to start to work a little bit more with Karen on some UK stuff, and that’s really fun. I’m just so grateful to be around your wonderful energy. We are working on doing some recruiting of UK advisors, and it’s been really incredible. We reached out to all of our advisors in the US to see who they might recommend for UK advisors, and the response was just so helpful. Everyone’s willing to introduce us to people and has so many great recommendations, and just makes me so incredibly grateful for our support of our advisory board. Thank you, Rob, especially. You came up with really great recommendations.
(37:41):
This weekend, I’m prepping for the Bari Weiss podcast next week. I’m really excited about this one. It’s a special one, too. First, because it’s one of my favorite podcasts. I know a lot of people on the team love her as well and her podcast, but also transcends health. It’s not a health podcast. She doesn’t have a lot of health people on, and so I think it’s a real opportunity for us to talk about broader systems issues, which is going to be fun. And then my nephew, six-month-old nephew, Roark, is here this weekend. So I’m going to get to have little baby cuddles as well throughout the weekend, which I’m very excited about.
Josh (38:15):
Enjoy all that. Very excited for Bari in particular. Brett?
Brett (38:23):
Oh, yeah. Hey, everybody. Professionally, it’s been awesome having three teammates. Viktor, I jokingly call us Voltron because we all have these interconnecting skills. And so we come together in a really nice way. And then personally, I’m just doing yard work. That’s all I’m doing this weekend. It’s very zen. It’s a deeply relaxing task, so that’s my life.
Josh (38:48):
It looks nice up there. Enjoy. All right, we exhausted our hand raises. If anyone else would like to share, please feel free to raise your hand now. Otherwise, you’ll all get 10 minutes back and we can reconvene on the watch party, for those of you that want to join. Oh, we got Viktor. Viktor raised his hand. The last one.
Viktor (39:10):
All right, last one. Maybe I’m losing a few, but I want to say a couple of quick things. Professionally, onboarding has been amazing, but it’s been really fun getting in some real work. It’s been inspiring. Then, I have a middle thing between professional and personal that I tried. We made homemade pizza yesterday, which made me spike nothing, nothing at all. That was amazing. Now, we can have pizza in my arsenal, I think. That’s how it works, right?
Josh (39:38):
Only if you share the recipe with the team. That’s how you unlock the [inaudible 00:39:42].
Viktor (39:44):
Personally, I’m going to Yosemite this weekend, so that’s going to be really fun. I’m going for some long hikes.
Josh (39:51):
Amazing. Well, enjoy. All right, everybody. Well, that brings a close to the last meeting of July. See you all. Have a great weekend, and thanks for all the great work.