Transcript
[00:00:00] Josh Clemente: I think we’re good to go. Halfway through July. Welcome everyone to another episode of time travel. I am grateful today for finally being moved out of my house. It has been a colossal pain, involving lots of trips, lots of realization that I hate material things and I’m going to shed all of my belongings and I will never own another item again, including utensils. But I’m out of the house and I’m almost to the destination, which is near Avalon, New Jersey. So anyway, it feels good. All right, so that’s what I’m grateful for. Kicking off from there, if I can get it to change. Okay. So got the pretty Levels slide with all the team on there. We are going to continue interviewing for several positions, primarily expanding our engineering and data science teams. Andrew is doing a lot of heavy lifting on that. We’ve got some amazing candidates and he’s spending a lot of time doing a really good job, rigorously vetting them and then handing them off for additional conversations with the team. Some of you may need to have calls with candidates and if so, appreciate you taking the time to do that. Super important for us to build culture and know who we’re bringing in. And with our exceptional candidates who have joined us, like Hao hitting the ground running this week. I think it’s just an example of how important it is to have this really great vetting process upfront. So if you have any questions on specific positions where we’re looking to fill, definitely reach out. And if you have people in mind, great.
This merits its own slide. The new website is live and it’s just absolutely glorious. I’ve gotten several cold messages from friends and family who were, I guess just visiting the website, and said, “Oh my goodness, this thing is amazing. One of the nicest websites I’ve ever seen.” So yeah, awesome work everybody, getting that done. Okay. All right, achievements this week. So we raised some additional capital at 20 million cap from founder collective recently, Sam we’ll have some more details on that. We have demand at 25 million caps. We’re still raising on safe notes. For those of you that don’t know how that works, it’s not actually a priced round, but it basically demonstrates demand at a certain threshold of valuation and it’s really important signal. And pretty amazing how awesome these conversations are going. Our waitlist broke over 21,000. I think it broke 20,000 this past week as well. Last week, it was 19,200. And so now we’ve been hitting a consistent pace for about 265-275 signups per day.
We didn’t have any crazy spikes this week from Twitter frenzy, we just had consistent inbound, which is nice. And although we have not had any crazy spikes, we also have just a consistent flow of Twitter FOMO. And people are reaching out and saying things like, “Literally, I’m getting major FOMO.”, “I see everyone posting about Levels and you’re building the perfect platform and I need this.”, “I get a fresh dose of envy every time I see these screenshots, which is happening to me every week.”. People are like in agony, you can see in the middle there’s Joel Runyon, who’s in the midst of a battle between Justin Mares and Nat Eliason on who’s going to give him the link to sign up for Levels. And so that’s the type of thing you want to see. You want to see people who, Joel Runyon’s an elite endurance athlete. And him he wants this. He wants to get him himself to the next level. And It’s just really funny to watch and awesome to know that this is the product we’re building that people are desperate to get. And then when they do get it, you’ll see Krishna shared a really personal but important note on Twitter as well. About how 4 days into Levels he’s realizing that he has to make some changes in his life because he’s, if not pre-diabetic, he considers himself to be at risk. Which, that’s why we’re here. It’s to provide mental health awareness, give people the data that they need to make the choices they want to make. And it may be the case that Krishna completely changes his life as a result of the first 4 days of Levels. Like this other beta tester who, you can see the quote there, “I can’t even tell you, my entire day has turned around thanks to Levels. Complete lifestyle change.”
So this is awesome stuff. Both the desire to get in and after the fact. Apple Healthkit, exercise imports are live. This is huge. This is out to the customer now. Awesome work David and Jhon, and everyone on the inside to make that happen and to continue expanding on that. The Wearable Challenge cohort 3, we’ve pushed back to August 10th. There are some small changes we want to make to the structure and strategy. But overall very excited for that next cohort to start. There’ll be some planning stuff, we might need a little bit of engineering resources to get that across the finish line in the next week or so.
Allie, if you haven’t watched Allie’s videos, please do. I think she’s probably the best, thus far, at explaining what Levels does and why. She’s just messaging it extremely well through her videos. And we of course, are featuring her first video on the website now because it is such a good example of just breaking it down for the average person who’s looking to get healthier. She released part two. It’s awesome. Watch it, like it, share a comment or two.
And then we’ve started the transition from our DIY internal consultation system. So this is the, it’s like a Google sheet network. It’s HIPAA secure. It did what it needed to do, but it’s very basic. And that’s how we’ve been running all our consultations, our prescription consultations between our physician network and the customers. And it is now time, we’ve tapped the limits of that system, we’re moving to the new embedded EHR, which was built along with True Pill. As of right now, that process has begun and ideally we’ll be wrapping up here in the next few days. It’s a shared effort between us and their team. Beyond that, we had great calls with Dom D’Agostino. He’s kind of a legend in the space and metabolic health, PhD researcher which works with NASA, works at the university of South Florida on neuroscience. Talked to the co-founders of Draft Kings, were very connected in the athletics world. They’re enthusiastic about what we’re doing, making a lot of amazing connections. Basically, Serena Williams and her husband who runs Reddit, they’re both excited. We’re going to potentially be having conversations with them very soon. So just a lot of really awesome, initial conversations this week as well.
Got on the Spartan Up! podcast this past two days, which was really fun. And I think the biggest audience thus far, a nice step in the right direction, good practice. And then had conversations with Poosh. Who is that? That’s the brand that Courtney Kardashian runs for her lifestyle and wellness world. And a couple other VC conversations in there. So anyway, really awesome week. Due to my transition from living in one place to living in the other place and that not being an immediate thing.
I was completely blindsided by how behind I was on planning for the virtual assemblage. So had to delay that unfortunately, but I appreciate everyone bearing with me. So we’ll be doing that Thursday and Friday, the 30th and 31st. And the concept here is we’re just gonna spend time together. So we’ll be running some lightning rounds. People will share some concepts or some topics of interest. We’ll do games. We’ll probably do an e-dinner over Zoom and just spend some time together and chat. If you’re interested in doing something in particular, send some suggestions to me, I can always use those. So ideally it will be something that can be shared with the entire group synchronously. Gonna reiterate this one, we really need to get to pre-orders. We’re doing this right now we just need to formalize it. We’ve got the new website up. We are like, there. And we are already selling to people with codes, like Todd Goldberg. So we just need to get the mechanism in place on the website and start selling this program in advance and then get to launch ready, secure the next gen hardware partnership. Weekly beta trends – this is the reporting coming out of our dashboard in Retool, which is awesome, straight from the database.
You can see there was a dip in total new orders this week from a 149 last week to 53. That 149 was as a result of some Twitter action that went off. It was pretty wild and we’ll continue to see some of those spikes. We’re amortizing those big spikes across, we amortized most of that across this week and then into August because we hit our revenue goal in week 2 of July. So we’re basically gonna to do what we’ve been doing and staggering our deliveries in order to make sure that we can we can recognize the revenue in the month that we need to so we’re not setting precedents that we cannot keep. Yeah, nothing too big here. Sam, financing biz stuff.
[00:07:38] Sam Corcos: Yeah. So we raised a little bit more capital. I think we’re, at this point, pretty much set. We have more than a year of runway now, which is great. So we’ll be raising our larger, probably large seed, small series A in September, that’s when we’re planning to kick things off. We already hit our recognized revenue goal for July. So that’s a really good position to be in. It really gives us a lot of flexibility to focus on iterating on the product and making sure that we can scale ops. So when we start bringing in more people, we can handle all of them. So it’s a good position to be in for sure. Next slide.
And this is unrecognized revenue, so this is just the cash that came in. As I mentioned before, the recognized versus unrecognized, Josh touched on this as well as we, from an accounting perspective you recognize revenue when the customer starts the program. So these are the people who have paid for it. And that’s, we had another $15,000 of cash come in this last week. Know those are being staggered through August as we can support more of them. So we’re in good shape.
[00:08:51] Josh Clemente: Yep. Any questions on any of this finance biz-dev stuff? Revenue. Pre-orders. Okay. Casey, our favorite part of the week.
[00:09:03] Dr. Casey Means: So yeah, more good progress on our SEO and domain authority metrics. So on the left, just continuing with this image. So at the top, we’re looking at the last 7 days of our clicks impressions and average search position. And from top to bottom, it’s basically week over week since May 21st. So continuing to move up with our average position, we’re at 12 today. Our impressions took another great jump from 102,000 to 140,000 impressions this week. And our total clicks from 2000 to 3,200. So yeah, so those just keep moving in the right direction. On the right here, our 7 day active users went up from 8,000 to 12,000 between last week and this week. So good progress. All along organic search traffic continues to be moving up as well. Next slide.
So we talked a little bit about featured snippets last week and did some more digging on that this week. There’s some tools that can help track this. And so I think it’s something we should start tracking more closely. We’re featured in quite a bit of snippet, so here’s a few examples. We are now the featured snippet for “what is metabolic fitness?”, we’re the featured snippet for “glucose and skin”, “glucose non-diabetic” and “glucose exercise performance”. So some really strong things there. And digging into this a little bit more has definitely inspired me, in terms of our content strategy, continuing to refine it because there are some really specific things you can do to rank for these. And it’s obviously high value to us in terms of inbound traffic.
[00:10:33] David: Unbelievable. It’s awesome.
[00:10:34] Josh Clemente: These are basically the topics we want to rank for. It’s just, boom.
[00:10:40] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah, it’s also fun, I couldn’t include the whole page, but like the sources underneath us are some pretty top tier sources, like webMD and Met Helpline and things like that. Yeah, Google algorithms working for us. Next slide.
Yeah, just some small press wins this week through our marketing company. The purpose of these is mostly just for backlinks and to just continue pushing forward our domain authority. So we were in VC Sheets, Tech Panda. External links is also something that I’m going to be increasingly tracking. Currently we’re about 3,600 total external links to our site, which is good. It is really important, the quality of those sites. So spammy things will not serve us, but really high quality backlinks from sources that are reputable via Google’s lens is important. And yeah, continuing to do things like guest posts. Every time we do it on podcast, those are gonna be strong backlinks to us. Yeah, we just want to drive that number up and up. And then we secured a spot on the Entreprenista feed, which will be press backlink for a couple of weeks from now. They’ve got 108,000 followers and they’re going to do a feature on me and Levels in their main feed. Next slide.
Yeah, so the podcast effort is going super well. I feel like in the past week or two, we’ve made it a step function increase. So these are all podcasts that are currently booked or recorded. About half of these, Josh is doing, half of them I’m doing and yeah, some of them are really strong tier2 podcasts that are going to get a lot of views. Today I’m on 2, later this afternoon, Mind Hub and Pavocast. And then just going to be consistently doing these week after week for the next, we’ve got quite a few booked. And there are many more than the pipeline.
[00:12:25] Josh Clemente: That one on the bottom left, Fit Insider, is recording today as well. I’ve got that at 3 O’clock. Yeah. So we have 3 today. That’s wild.
[00:12:29] Dr. Casey Means: Awesome. Just wanted to give some visibility to the rest of the team on some of our podcast processes. So this is like huge kudos to Nick Krasny and Tom for helping on this. And we’re really just refining a systemized process for outreach. And it’s working really the way we’re tracking this. So there’s, obviously tens of thousands, way more than that, podcasts and we’ve essentially created this incredible systematized kanban that can essentially help us find the podcasts that are most relevant to us, that can actually search podcast episodes by keywords that we care about. And then this is a way for all of us to have visibility on who’s done outreach, what our network connections are, what stage we are in the process. And as we all know, this has been a really great way to spread our message and also get inbound traffic. So we’re just really doubling down on this week after week, and it’s starting to bear fruit, which is exciting. Next slide.
[00:13:26] Nick: I just wanted to point out, it’s easy to set up a system like this, it’s hard to use it as successfully as Casey and Josh and Tom have been. So I just want to give kudos to the hard work of actually doing it. We had a call with a company yesterday that does podcasting and he said that he’s been doing this for 4 years and he’s never seen a company that has done this part of the process as well as we have. So shout out to Casey and Josh and Tom for really, really advancing the state of the art here.
[00:13:51] Dr. Casey Means: He’s being nice, this is totally a Nick Krasny effort and that cheat is, really badass and is his brainchild. So anyways, but it’s an awesome, it’s been a really fun collaboration and I’m really enjoying the process and the meetings with Tom and Josh and Nick. So thank you guys. Last thing here, just some new blog posts. So this week has just been figuring out how to use the new blog and, the new WordPress site since we moved over from WebFlow. But it’s really nice, better functionality, really excited about it. Couple new posts up about “How to prevent ER visits”, “Stress and Glucose”. We’ve been getting continual great feedback on our blog and our content. Some quotes here from Sequoyah investor, “The blog is full of wisdom.”, “Learn section is in the app is amazeballs.”, “So much content. It looks super professional.” The producer of Ben Greenfield and Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof podcast said, “Your blog post answered all the questions I had. Just shared it with my co-host.” So people are resonating with it, super happy about that. Next slide. I think that might be it for me. Yeah, that’s it.
[00:14:52] David: As always, hard to follow up. That was, excuse me, that was extraordinary.
[00:14:55] Josh Clemente: Yeah. Awesome. David.
[00:15:00] David: Oh yeah. So any questions on content stuff? Cool.
[00:15:03] Josh Clemente: All right, David, all you.
[00:15:06] David: Awesome. So as it has been for the last couple of weeks, our current product focus is on blocking the 10 X scaling efforts. And we’re still making progress on some of the async onboarding that we talked about last week, but I wanted to give a huge shout out to Hao this week for jumping in his first week at Levels and solving one of our major issues with the monthly report. We’re, as part of this scaling effort, we need to better productionize our weekly and monthly reports such that the data quality is a 100% and there’s no janky issues with them. So the current effort is aligning the monthly report to the customer’s 28 day program experience. And with the original version of this report we’ve had a gap problem where, so you did your first week and then you took off for 3 weeks, and then you did your second sensor, you’d have a report that kind of looks like the 1 on the left, where you’d see a huge gap and not all your data. And so Hao’s efforts are bringing in lines so that we show you your 28 day experience no matter when you’ve experienced it. And it’s coming along really well, so that part’s going great. More progress on this throughout the rest of the month. And our target is to, by the end of July, to have the initial async onboarding and reports shored up. Next slide.
Beyond this, one of the biggest things we’re hearing from customers is that they love the product, but they want a bit more education on what it means. And they want a bit more guidance on the program and where they’re at and what to be doing. The last couple weeks I’ve been talking about some of these education concepts, snippet cards, and for the last several quarters we’ve talked about getting to the point where we move towards actionable insights. I’ve spent a couple of days this week, first putting this out onto the spreadsheet and then thinking through a prototype on how this might look. This is in progress and just a concept to play around with. But I wanted to give you a quick demo. If you can go to the next slide and then share. Cool. Can you guys all see my screen? Good. Okay. Sweet. What you’re looking at here is just a concept for what it might be, what the Levels app might look like in the future. So, you order Levels, you install your app, and before you actually onboard, this is like day -1 or day 0, you might hit something like this, where you see a section where you get high level details about Levels and anything else that you need for the program to get started. And then education cards on content that’s relevant to that moment. So you might want to know how to apply your sensor, watch this quick video, or view the details to see if the instructions. You might want to get context on your 28 day program and what to expect. So let’s say, I don’t have those actually a clickable right now, but let’s say you went ahead and you connected your account, once things are finished, maybe something like this. Now this is like an intermediary state. We need to get it to the point where we’re not always explain the graph right away, but imagine the next step is “log your first activity” This is like day 1 – so right now customers might not know to log or why they want to log, what to get out of it, and then the cards down below might switch to week 1, so now you’re officially kicked off.
What to expect in week one, you might have some common questions like, “what is normal for my glucose responses?”, “get to know the sensor warmup period”, things like that. So let’s go ahead and just add our first meal – Cliff Bar. Call it a cliff bar, saved. Awesome. So I’m not sure this is the right moment to reveal this, but this is just a concept. You can imagine, “Okay, I did my first log.”, introducing zone scores, now you can learn a little bit more about what to expect here. It’s pre-selected right here. You can see what the log was. If you click that, you get to know more about the scores or you can just back to the normal dashboard. And this is what the experience with Levels currently looks like. You get your dashboard, metabolic score, and your pending responses. Then of course, this cards down below, if you want to see them. Here, I also have the concept where we’re showing the pending data state. But let’s fast forward to the point where you actually have some data – once you have the data we might, because this is a big spike, we might detect that, and also, this is your first log. You might want to understand how to interpret your own scores. And you might want to understand what a high glucose event means. In the future it’d be awesome if we could paint this zone with those exact, like these regions and tell you what each of these regions mean, but this is a step in the direction. So if you were to select this zone, like you did today, you would see the card, but you’d also see any related insight cards that are relevant to that. That’s all I had for now. That’s what I’m playing with. Any questions? But of course, this is one implementation. This doesn’t have to be an app. Like we can take the same education cards concept, and just email it to customers. On like, day 1 – here’s the email snippets you get, which is the same stuff. And then the future things I’m going to be doing for this is, that was just the day 0 in one experience, which are very unique and special moments. The next step is, I want to show what happens day 2 morning, like, “Hey, your morning report’s ready.” Or what happens when we detect an anomalous event? “Hey, we had 3 spikes yesterday you didn’t log. What happened here?” How do we display a multi-action required, like a 3 event, how do we guide the user through “Take action on this one. And that one. Then the third one.”? Or maybe there’s only, maybe we prioritize it and say, only this really big one is important, the other 2 aren’t important enough and we only want to capture your attention from one minute. So those are the things that I have on my mind and if you have ideas here, I would love to explore it with you.
[00:20:06] Josh Clemente: Looks beautiful. These like live mock-ups are incredible. I am a visual learner, so I need to see this stuff and it looks super awesome.
[00:20:16] David: And it’s also awesome to see the photo shoot assets come to life. They’re like, so well brand aligned and they just slide right in to the app and that photo of Rodney running just works.
[00:20:23] Josh Clemente: Keep in mind, everyone, like literally all of the visual assets we have, David’s wife got those for us. Essentially, just the scrappiest possible approach and they are ideal. They’re perfect. I always forget that we never paid a production crew and we did this whole event. It was just like, we show up in New York and she takes amazing pictures. So yeah, totally agree. All right. And,
[00:20:46] Andrew: I lost your slides. Anyone else lose them?
[00:20:49] David: I think Josh needs to reload.
[00:20:55] Josh Clemente: Can you see them?
[00:20:57] Andrew: Yeah. Okay, cool. Sweet. Cool. Very fast again, I think we covered a lot of the big stuff. Candidate pipeline continues, we have a couple offers going out today and yesterday, so that’s really exciting. Thank you everyone for conversations you’ve had with people. People are super excited about what we’re doing, so that’s a really exciting. Yeah, I call out the new monthly report improvements. We also, Sam solicited a contractor to help with performance improvements in the app. I think Sam calls them like, ankle biters things. It’s a thing that you never prioritize yourself, but they stink. And yeah, you should soon expect to see a much more performance, like top scroll bar and stuff.
[00:21:37] Josh Clemente: Nice. Curious, what type of change improves the performance? Is it something, like is it a total refactoring or like how does that work?
[00:21:46] Andrew: It depends on what the problem was. Yeah, sometimes if it’s doing too much work while rendering, that can be a problem. And a lot of times you can just skip that work. Other things is like using, so like in the mobile app where, I’m going to overly simplify here – It’s coded like a web page. And there are native implementations of things and there’s a less native implementations. And so often the native implementation written in machine code can be a lot faster. So like for graphs, we dropped down to that. And so that can be another thing. But basically something being slow, it’s either you’re doing work that you don’t need to be doing or there’s a faster way to doing it, or you’re waiting on something that you don’t have to wait on. So if you’re waiting on remote data from the server maybe you can display something before you have that data. So it’s, there’s no one solution, but it’s, I guess there’s a menu of options that are decently standard when trying to make things run a little faster.
[00:22:35] Josh Clemente: Nice. Thank you. Okay, any other questions on anything we’ve covered so far? Cool. So we’re on to the rapid fire. We’re going to, again, always try and keep these nice and brief. Love hearing personal in particular, so Sam.
[00:22:55] Sam Corcos: Yeah, I think that the thing that I’m most excited about is how, I think Josh and I were reflecting on this, maybe weeks or months ago. It’s hard to remember how long ago it was but we were reflecting how, when taking all this marketing stuff and SEO and podcast strategy, we’re like, “Man, we really have no idea what we’re doing.” And every person we talked to, who’s an expert is, “Wow, you guys are like the best we’ve ever seen at this.” Like, how is that possible? We’re just making this stuff up. And it’s pretty exciting to see how it really is working. Quantifiably, when you look at the data, it’s working. It’s good to see that when you have such a strong team of generalists, we can just, we can figure this stuff out. And it’s definitely across the board, on anything we’re taking on, we’re executing on a world-class level. So just very excited to work with all of you.
[00:23:43] Josh Clemente: Plus1. Casey.
[00:23:46] Dr. Casey Means: Awesome, I echo that so much. Yeah. It’s been so fun actually, to just, I’ve been reflecting on this too. A year and a half ago I was in the operating room doing sinus surgery and now I’m deep into content marketing and like SEO metrics. And I’m like, “I love it.” It’s so much fun to learn about. It’s absolutely fascinating and our whole team is becoming so good at this. And it’s just really exciting. So totally echo that as well. So for me, let’s see something I’m excited about, I’m going to go with personal, 2 things. One, I’m doing a one night camping trip tomorrow night at Mount Hood and really excited to sleep in a tent and climb up to this, it’s basically the highest point you can climb to on Mount Hood without summiting, called Barrett Spur. And yeah, I’m going to be sore on Monday, but really excited. And second thing is, my parents just got a Sprinter van and they said that I can borrow it. And so I’m going to totally try and copy Andrew’s trip, probably. I’ve just like, my like remote work van juices are starting to really percolate. So anyways, yeah, totally gonna borrow from my parents and try and do a little road trip, probably sometime later in the fall. So Andrew you’ve inspired all of us.
[00:24:58] Josh Clemente: That’s awesome. Yeah, I have I was just talking with Chase Brown, who’s one of our medical advisors about building one out and leaving it, like we would share the cost and then leave it in certain states and then someone would fly, drive it to a new state, use it, leave it there and fly back. And then just have a traveling timeshare type of thing. Yeah. And also this week, Erin Hanson, who’s helping us with Wearable Challenge just told us that he’s moving into a sprinter van with his wife. Like, this week or something like that. So this is a whole new thing that COVID has allowed, I think. All right, Jhon.
[00:25:30] Jhon: Yeah, yesterday was my first time creating a Retool application and I was so impressed about how easy it was and how powerful it is, the tool. So it took me like 10 minutes, created the application, it was my first time and I didn’t even have to take 5 minutes to try out. So yeah, it’s a big, powerful tool. On the personal side, next Monday is Independence Day here in Columbia. So it’s going to be holiday. We are going to do some barbecue. I will spend some time with my family.
[00:26:05] Josh Clemente: Awesome. Cool. Evan.
[00:26:09] Evan: So I saw this trick or this tip online for having a really nice shower where you take a eucalyptus branch with the leaves and you make a bindle and you tie it to the shower spigot, and then you take a shower and it’s supposed to be very like, spa. So I collected, on my walk the other day, a bunch of eucalyptus. And it’s set up so when I take a shower this evening, it’s going to be real nice. So I’m looking forward to that.
[00:26:39] Josh Clemente: So Equinox has eucalyptus scented towels. And I think this is the appropriate next step on your path to being Equinox like at home.
[00:26:46] Evan: That’s right. I’ll get my, I’ll have an Equinox gym here at home. Nice.
[00:26:52] Josh Clemente: Nice. Hao.
[00:26:55] David: Cool, yeah. So it’s been pretty fun to play with the monthly reports thing and get to know house metric and house log tables, which are, seems the important pieces in our database and yes, just been fun. And personally, yeah, I posted yesterday, water cooler, like the starting stuff and really excited about to see how it turns out. Maybe it will definitely help if you’re like constantly on the road, on the run. And you will probably get a better internet connection from it. Hopefully.
[00:27:34] Josh Clemente: I am also excited about it. Nick.
[00:27:38] Nick: Hi. What am I excited about, a couple things. I think professionally the most fun hour I had this week was with Casey and Evan. And we were basically talking about period trivial sequel queries we can run in order to create our version of the Ok Cupid blog. So these are things where it’s like, we’re not trying to get published in a paper or we’re not, “In a study of 50 subjects…”, like we’re not doing that. We’re literally just trying to figure out okay, what’s average glucose by age? Are there fun things that we can write about that might be interesting to a broader readership that leverages our proprietary data in a way that’s fun and hopefully useful, but not clinical, if that makes sense? And personally, there’s a game coming out, a video game coming out today I’m excited about. Hopefully get a few hours to play it this weekend. It’s a sequel to a game I really enjoyed and one that had a pretty good soundtrack. So I’m looking forward to getting into that world again. And that’s my update.
[00:28:27] Dr. Casey Means: What game is it?
[00:28:28] Nick: It’s a Nintendo game called “Paper Mario.” And the reason why I’m so aesthetically interested in it is because everything is made of paper. Like the aesthetic of it is absolutely beautiful and so creative and so distinctly Japanese. I don’t think it would have been as well if an American studio tried to make it. But it’s pretty silly, it’s got a lot of comedy writing, which is pretty good. And the last soundtrack was like this really, I don’t know, it was like this Dixie Land kind of thing, that was unusual. So I think it might be different composers this time so I’m a little bit crossing my fingers. But either way it should be a lot of fun. My friends who may have gotten copies a little earlier, telling me they’re having a lot of fun with it.
[00:29:05] Tom: So I’m back up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I’ve been running back and forth between Massachusetts and New York, depending on very complicated quarantine dynamics. And I’m here with my brother and we have 2 friends who are visiting us this weekend. And I haven’t had a ton of social interaction outside of my own family over the last few months so this is going to be much needed. It’s not quite a party, but it feels like a party, even though there’s only going to be 4 of us. So I’m excited for that. And then on the Levels front, this has now been said a few times on this call, but I’ve just been really energized by the progress on the podcast front. And now, beginning this week, on the affiliate marketing front, which I dove into more over the last couple of days. And it’s just been really fun to tackle these new projects by combining our teams’ intellectual horsepower with quickly triangulating best practices that exist out in the field with our own research and calls with other external parties. I’m just excited for what’s coming down the pipe with some of these marketing channels.
[00:30:08] Josh Clemente: Nice. Yeah, what I’m most excited about, but I’m going to go with an interesting, like series of anecdotes. So this week a sample of the people I’ve spoken with on-calls are Dr. Ramji. Who’s a quadruple board certified cardiologist from John’s Hopkins and Penn, works in AI and prediction of cardiac events. Dom D’Agostino, university of South Florida researcher, Strongman, keto enthusiast, neuroscientist, the guy that started Draft Kings, which is a public multi-billion dollar company that works in the world of sports and sports betting. Joe DeSena who started Spartan. Every single one of these people has a completely different background and perspective and every single one of them was equally enthusiastic about what we’re doing and is eager to throw their specific skillset behind what we’re doing. And it’s not, none of these were sales conversations. 100% of them were personal conversations in which just sharing what we’re doing and why was all that was necessary for them to really subscribe and dive in. It’s just exciting. It’s not intimidating anymore to have calls like this, it’s exciting because I’m looking forward to hearing this individual’s perspective and learn from them. And it’s super fun and I’m loving seeing the network and different people embracing us. And then, I’m obviously personally excited to be done with my move and it’s been a long road.
And then at the end here, I want to introduce everyone, Lori was able to join us. So those of you that don’t know Lori Morrison, she is the machine behind Levels. She is the one that keeps this place doing what we’re doing, which is getting CGMs in the hands of people who need them. Every order that goes out the door, all of the detail oriented shipping, tracking, and the people who are moving around for COVID and making sure that prescriptions are in order, in fact, that’s all Lori. I’m really glad she was able to join us this week. Everybody should say hi, or just give her a wave. And if you’d like, Lori, I don’t wanna put you on the spot, I know this is your first time on the forum, but I added you to the list here and we just typically share a few seconds about something we’re excited.
[00:31:58] Dr. Casey Means: You’re on mute.
[00:32:04] Lori: Thank you, Casey. Oh, I love being invited here. And it’s wonderful to experience the different aspects that you guys are bringing out. I have had nothing but positive, let me rephrase that, most of the interactions with the customers have been incredibly positive and it’s exciting to see the excitement in them. They just can’t wait. And I don’t know, it’s been fun to solve problems and get into Retool and deal with that, the pharmacy has been great. And like some of you, this is probably the largest group of people I’ve been around, even virtually, in months. Yay. I don’t have a face mask on and I’m not at the grocery store. So thank you for inviting me.
Personally, I started a garden and now I have a war on some kind of rodent. I don’t know what it is yet, but I will. My husband and I will conquer that hopefully.
[00:32:56] Josh Clemente: We’re behind you. Keep us posted.
[00:33:00] Lori: I’ll let you know. Yeah, thank you guys.
[00:33:01] Josh Clemente: Thank you, Lori.
[00:33:02] Lori: It’s great to see your faces.
[00:33:05] Dr. Casey Means: Lori, It’s so exciting to have you here. Thank you for everything you do, and also feel free to post garden photos to Slack.
[00:33:14] Lori: I sure will. Thanks Casey.
[00:33:16] Josh Clemente: All right. Thank you all, Mike, you want to close this out here?
[00:33:19] Mike: Yeah. A lot has been said already. But I think the Twitter stuff is pretty awesome. Like, the conversations that were happening, a couple have already been referenced and I continue, like I said it last week and then Sam corrected me because it wasn’t that long ago, but like, the conversations, like calls this week, everyone can see my notes, they’re just far different. There’s still some feedback in there, but it’s more “wow”. Yesterday, I think the quote was, “It’s 8 days in and I’ve completely changed my life.” I think it was, “I moved away from eating late, ordering Postmates to cooking every night and now at least getting 8 hours of sleep.” And I don’t know, it’s just like an awesome feeling. And it’s an awesome feeling to do things that matter but more importantly with awesome people. And I’m just very grateful for that.
[00:34:12] Josh Clemente: Love it. Way to wrap it up. All right. Cool. So the story of the day this week is Jhon. We’re rolling through these things so fast it’s crazy. So Jhon let me know if you need me to swap out for a screen share or if you just want to talk verbally.
[00:34:26] Jhon: Yeah. I will share my screen.
[00:34:28] Josh Clemente: Nice.
[00:34:34] Jhon: Can you see my screen now?
[00:34:36] Mike: Yeah, but it’s hard to hear you.
[00:34:37] Dr. Casey Means: Your volume is super low.
[00:34:39] Jhon: Oh, sorry. How about now?
[00:34:46] Dr. Casey Means: A little better. That’s good.
[00:34:48] Jhon: Did you see the presentation “My trip to Europe”?
[00:34:54] Mike: Yes, we can see it.
[00:34:57] Jhon: Okay. My personal I want to share today is about my trip to Europe. This was back in 2009 when I was still at the university. I spent 18 months there and it was one of my greatest times of my life. But before I dive into the details of the trip itself, I want you to know how I got there, because it wasn’t as easy as buying of it. All this started when I got accepted at the National University of Colombia. I was very lucky because only 1% of the applicants get accepted there. The reason is that is the best university of Columbia and it’s a public university, therefore studying there is almost free. The tuition per semester is like $100. And actually I didn’t have any other options that getting accepted to a public university. Because private universities here are very expensive. Anyways, I was lucky. And it was my fourth year at the university, I just want to say that here in Columbia, you must study 5 years to get a bachelor degree, and it was my fourth year. And my grades were good enough to get a scholarship.
So the scholarship consisted of 6 months of German lessons here in Columbia at the university, 2 months of German lessons in Germany at the Gerta Institute. And when you study, having an internship in Germany, all expenses included. But the problem was that we were 20 aspirants from the engineering faculty and there were only 10 spots for them. These were eight really hard months for me because once the competition started I had a part-time job, I was working as a software tester in the company here in Columbia. I was getting 4 hours a day of German lessons, and I had to keep my university grades up. Because the decision at the end was going to be made based on a German test which is called The Zertifikat Deutsch, an English test, very tough one, and my university grades. And only the best 10 people will get scholarship. I was lucky again, I got the scholarship, me and my family we’re so excited cause that was the first time a member of the family was going to be traveling abroad to study and work. I learned that in Germany, specifically in Munich, I studied at the Technical University of Munich. Then I did an internship, a company called Steileit, I was working as a front end developer. I was the first employee or intern there. This company was acquired by a big TV, German TV channel there for $80 million, I think, five years after I got there.
Germany was all about beer for breakfast, beer at lunch, for dinner, beer while I was traveling in the train, heading to work, heading to the university, beer everywhere. In Munich we celebrated the beer festival, Oktoberfest. And when you are in Germany, especially in the south part of Germany, you drink at least a liter of beer, which is called in German a Mass. We were drinking a lot of Masses and it was really fun time. My visa had an error, so I will say I was able to stay there for 7 additional months. It was originally 1 year, the scholarship, but thanks to this error I was able to stay more time. Europe, I visited more than 50 cities there, in different countries. I really liked cities like, Berlin, Paris, Rome. Ror me, for example, Berlin, it was the perfect balance between the messy of a city, the natural messiness of a city and great security, traffic, everything. So I really liked Berlin. I visited most of the west, the east part of Europe, but I got also to very rare place like Istanbul or Athens. For example, Athens, for me, was very similar to Bogota, to Columbia. Istanbul was very different to the other places in Europe. I really had a great time there. As I said before, this was one of the greatest times of my life and I really enjoy that.
[00:39:40] Dr. Casey Means: It looks like you did some cool, like tracking or outdoor adventures in some of these photos. Were there any particularly awesome hikes or mountain ranges?
[00:39:51] Jhon: Yeah. So you already know that here in Columbia we have no snow. So this was the first time I saw snow. Of course, it was the first time I do some ski. I tried that a couple of times in France and in Austria. It was hard. of course, but it was really fun.
[00:40:12] Josh Clemente: It’s amazing, awesome. Jealous of that trip, that’s for sure. But we’re a remote company. No reason you can’t do it again now, huh? Other than COVID. They won’t let you there now. All right. Awesome. Thanks everybody for contributing. Thank you Jhon for putting that together, excited to share in that. And any other last topics of interest or comments, quotes, anything anyone wants to share?
[00:40:34] Dr. Casey Means: Thanks for always leading a great meeting, Josh. This is like, definitely a highlight of the week. You do an awesome job, thank you.
[00:40:38] Josh Clemente: Thank you. It’s fun for me too. I love the opportunity to just like dwell on what we did. And it’s always shocking to me, the chronology and the time travel. I literally mean it feels like a warp because I’m always ambushed by Thursday and then can’t believe how much we accomplished since last Thursday. So it’s awesome. All right, everybody. Enjoy your Friday, enjoy your weekend and we will talk soon. Bye bye.