March 5, 2021

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

https://youtu.be/8q15khQmAoA

Transcript

Josh Clemente: Okay, cool. Let’s jump straight into it. I want to quickly confirm. Yep. Murillo’s on. Awesome. Sweet. Okay. March 5th, jumping straight in. Quick off the top. We’ve added to, for a number of reasons, which we can get into, pull back on throughput for the next few weeks. So we’ve got some big promos that are absolutely crushing it. Significantly more conversion rate than expected on some of them. And overall, we’re at the highest number of concurrent users that we’ve ever had in the company.

Josh Clemente: So we want to reassess. We’re going to focus on member feedback. Primarily. That’s always been the focus. We’re not in growth mode. We’re going to pause some of the big promos for a few weeks. I think Tom and/or Ben will get into this as well. And then secondarily, the eng team has been working really hard this past week and, and for several weeks on backup scalability efforts.

Josh Clemente: So just building robustness across the systems. As with everything we test and iterate, and sometimes there are things that break, all of us have seen some sinking issues over the past few weeks, but this is part and parcel with the process of growing and improving.

Josh Clemente: We’ve got a couple improvements coming. So the custom adhesive performance covers we’ve been working on, those are in the top right of the screen. We’re basically working on iteration that removes the adhesive on the center disc so that way you don’t have to keep that little paper tab there. And instead it just won’t stick to the sensor so you can swap them out. These prototypes are on their way, we’re getting 5,000 of them. So we’ll all get some, and then we’ll follow that up if they work with a big order.

Josh Clemente: We had a lot of work this week on strategy docs. So expect to see some of these coming out of draft mode in the coming days. This covers everything from capacity planning, company strategy, IP plans, hardware plans, et cetera. So lots to come and looking forward to everyone’s thoughts on those.

Josh Clemente: I’ve had continued awesome conversations with science and hardware are experts around the world. So these are people that are leading Aptamer development, people that are working on new hardware, people who are developing the research that’s defining what the mechanisms of metabolic syndrome are. So it’s just awesome. We have access to literally the who’s who? I mean, I think we put out a request to meet two people. And within three days we had conversations on the books with them.

Josh Clemente: The profound feedback has been levels has demonstrated that there is a market where there wasn’t one. So giving people an idea that you don’t just have to develop for medical applications, solely, you can also look at the wellness base as a potential application for tech that you’re working on.

Josh Clemente: We’ve got awesome work on in-app and education. So you can see the screenshot in the center there. David covered this a little bit last week, a little bit more this week, but it’s an implementation now. And this is going to be a really important process for helping people learn in context with their experience, which is key for any type of learning.

Josh Clemente: And then lastly, on the universal IRB protocol on the research front, generally universal IRB protocol is in review right now, and then the funds for doctors Ben Bickman and Sarah Gottfried are transferred. They’re up and running. They can start their work now.

Josh Clemente: Couple other things on the page, we had a nice feature on Pop Sugar. We have just shy of 100,000 people on the wait list. I was hoping we would break that by today, but I was foiled. We hit 3 million in gross volume, which is mind exploding. I think we hit a million in November. So this is crazy acceleration, tons of great user generated content in the middle there.

Josh Clemente: We’ve had a couple big names come through. So guitarist for Maroon 5, Orlando Bloom is out there just strutting levels all over the internet and tabloids. And I am soaking it up. We were on the homepage of Men’s Health for about 24 hours, which is just again crazy. Terry Cruz, we had a great conversation with him. He’s a huge supporter, looking forward to hearing his thoughts on the program.

Josh Clemente: And then yeah, got to speak with Tom [So’s 00:04:03] team, leading Optima researcher. I presented on some of the stuff that he’s developing a few weeks ago in this meeting. So, and then I just want to give a quick shout out to 23andMe. Anne and Joyce over there have given us some really amazing feedback on how we’re navigating towards getting our product IRB protocol, what to do and not do so that we don’t have to relearn lessons they’ve learned. So really appreciate them and everyone who’s helped us connect.

Josh Clemente: I think that’s it. Cool. All right. Now, I want to welcome Murillo. Murillo has been, it’s probably a familiar phase for many of you, but he is been working with us as a contractor for many months now. And he’s joining us full-time, has joined us full-time. He’s got some interesting life stories that many of us haven’t got to experience. He’s living in Lisbon, which I’ve heard is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And I’m going to hand it over to him to just say a few words.

Murillo Nicacio De Maraes: Cool. Thanks. Yeah. Super, super excited to be a hope member of the team. So a little bit about me. I grew up in Campo Grande, Brazil. It’s the capital of my state, but it’s a place I don’t think many people have heard about. We’re pretty inland, not a lot going on there, pretty much a service city, but yeah. Grew up there, went to school there, but did a year abroad at UC Davis, which just opened up my world like being from a somewhat small town when you go outside of the country, and you just get to see something, places different as Davis. Which although has this agricultural type of city and vibe around it, it’s really close to San Francisco and just to drive away from LA and things like that.

Murillo Nicacio De Maraes: And cities like that is just, yeah, it expended my world a thousand filled. And ever since I got out of school, I’ve been working with startups doing engineering there, mostly full-time work. The last one was Mira, which it’s how I got in contact with Sam, the CO there knows him and introduced me and said, “Hey,” told me, “Hey, that there’s these guys doing this cool work. I think you’d be interested. Are you interested in meeting?” And yeah, that’s how I heard about Levels.

Murillo Nicacio De Maraes: Just a little bit of my interest. I like to travel after I started working. I travel around the world for a bit, just looking for fun things to do and like snowboarding. I did some boxing when I got to Lisbon. I did some surfing, just trying out new things, expanding my world a little bit more. I like cooking. But recently, I found out that I really like cooking for other people. It’s just a lot more social, a lot more fun.

Murillo Nicacio De Maraes: I love tattoos. I got both of my arms, one almost completely tattooed. And I just have random obsessions about topics. So once in a while I’ll find something that interests me and I’ll dig into it. And which is how I just filled my head with these unknown known’s, which are just random facts that pop up randomly. And I don’t always know how I know them, but they often turn now to be right.

Josh Clemente: Nice. You’ll have to share those into the slack channels. These are ideal for keeping us all up to speed on random stuff.

Murillo Nicacio De Maraes: No, for sure. Yeah. They’re most useful with during trivia nights. That, which is why I’m sorry I’ll be missing assemblage, just because, yeah. It was my chance to show off my skills. Yeah. So over here I’ll be doing mostly engineering. Mobile is my expertise. IOS is what I’ve been doing the longest. So yeah, that’s a little bit about me.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Yeah, there’ll be plenty more trivia nights, so we’ll make sure we get all that random knowledge out of you.

Murillo Nicacio De Maraes: Awesome. Looking forward to it.

Josh Clemente: All right. Well, thanks for sharing, Murillo, and looking forward to continuing to see you accomplish huge things. I mean, it’s been awesome to see all the progress from the app. And yeah, I appreciate that. Okay. Jumping ahead. Next intro. This one’s exciting. Dorothy is, well, firstly, she’s one of our earliest members. So, Dorothy joined, I don’t know, probably over a year ago at this point.

Josh Clemente: I had a lead call with her, and then was… She had an unfortunate incident with one of her sensors early on that she was just such a huge trooper and supporter through, and had such a great perspective. And I really valued how much she provided insight into the project. And then also, I think since then has been a huge resource and the sounding board for community. And so I’m going to turn it over to her, but she’s going to be joining us to help advise on our community development.

Josh Clemente: And this is just going to be huge, huge, huge for us. Airbnb is probably the best in the world at this right now. And so can’t wait to continue to learn. Dorothy, thanks for joining us. And we’d love to hear some of your thoughts.

Dorothy Kilroy: So excited. I do feel like I can say I’m a super fan of levels. So yeah, I do remember that early call Josh. And Mike as well, followed up with me afterwards. And it was the end of my trial. And you asked me some question on, “How do you feel now?” And I said, “I’m just really afraid that you’re going to make me stop. I don’t want to stop.” It was something like that. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I remember being so embarrassed.

Dorothy Kilroy: I was like, God, I can’t believe I’m telling them, “Don’t take it away from me.” So nice to meet you all. Thanks for inviting me to this call. It’s a real pleasure. I’m so excited by everything you guys are doing and the opportunity ahead. It’s just amazing what you’ve achieved. Congratulations on such an incredible, incredible start.

Dorothy Kilroy: So a little bit about me. I’m from Ireland originally. I moved to the Bay area about 15 years ago and thought I was staying for a year, but I’ve never left. I called myself a life hacker because I was walking on a treadmill a minute ago, I’d like to do many things at once and be efficient with time, and always try to make the best of things.

Dorothy Kilroy: And I’ve worked at Airbnb, as Josh said, I’ve been there for about six years now, and it’s been quite the ride, but it’s been awesome. I’ve really built my chops on developing community. And I think when I first got introduced with Levels, I just couldn’t stop saying to Josh, certainly, he got so many emails from me. “Oh, it’s all about community. It’s about community. It’s not just about the product.

Dorothy Kilroy: You’ve got to transition to the community.” And you guys get it. I mean, that’s what you’re already doing. And it’s been amazing to see that. I think really good products are that they’re well built and people built fantastic products, especially in the Bay area. But when people transition to building communities, that’s where true, competitive advantage and business just unlocks.

Dorothy Kilroy: And I’ve just seen that at Airbnb so much over six years, that the thing that’s different is you have not that you are all the same customers doing the same thing, it’s that you share values and you share accountability. And there’s just so much value in that. And you look at the explosion of that in the fitness area over the last few years, what Peloton has done, what Fitbit has done, what Strava has done.

Dorothy Kilroy: I mean, I know you guys are all fitness enthusiasts, so you’ve probably been part of that. But it’s so much more than just the product that they have. It’s the access to other people and to their information, too. And just to share that. So that sea of change, I think, has been exploding. And as people get maybe a little bit more disillusioned from organized groups or religions, and there’s a movement away from that, there’s actually a real movement towards brands and technologies that are allowing access to other people.

Dorothy Kilroy: And so I’m just excited to come in and share what I’ve learned about that, and then hopefully make that valuable to you all. If anyone ever wants to geek out and pick my brain on community, you’ll have my information. And let’s grab a coffee or a glass of wine and I’ll chew your ear off on it for hours. But just looking forward to being useful to you all, and just excited to be on this journey. So thanks for having me.

Josh Clemente: Amazing. Yeah. Super inspiring. It’s something that we talk about all the time and some of the most tactical, easy to implement solutions are, have come from you already. So can’t wait to turn the notches up. Thank you again for joining us and looking forward to the future.

Josh Clemente: Okay. I’m going to drop onto this slide real quick just to, of course, reiterate the new mission statement. So we’re solving the metabolic health crisis, and also to shout out the follow-up mechanism. So this is a pretty powerful one that we’ve got a couple examples here, but just internally, we should always try and follow-up whether with our team or externally to show, to either provide better effectiveness and clarity, internally, to make sure that people aren’t unsure about whether a loop is closed, but also for the exterior dimension, it’s all goodwill production.

Josh Clemente: And so you can see here a few examples. I want to shout out, Tom, David, Sam, everything from closing the loop on. And internal communication about sort of the list of future investor asks and related to podcast opportunities that Tom did just circling back and just making sure that everyone’s on the same page about a certain podcast.

Josh Clemente: Sam, always making sure that the podcast hosts that we have worked with are feel extremely rewarded by getting these incredible bouquets. Laurie, for making sure that that happens each and every time, and picking these unique options that people really seem to love. And that shows them that we’re a company that doesn’t just absorb resources, we also try and pay it back. And I think that’s really powerful.

Josh Clemente: And then David, just continuing to follow-up with, we have a lot of amazing members who are using our product, and many of them will set aside significant portions of their time to provide us with feedback. And this example here is actually a candidate, but it’s someone who set time aside to try and help us out and point out some issues we were dealing with. And David always follows up with really thoughtful responses for people. And that takes time. And it’s easy to just pull the lesson out and mark the email archive and just forget about it.

Josh Clemente: But following up those people is meaningful. So something we should all lean into and try to do better at. And thanks everyone for listening and trying to sift these little tidbits up. Okay. Speaking of David, I think you’ll lead us off.

David Flinner: Yeah, I’ll lead it off. So some great movement on the subscription side from Jeremy. The tech side is looking for really good right now. So a lot of the backend work to integrate with Stripe, create orders automatically and charge for those. And then also request fills from Truepill is now done.

David Flinner: He’s starting to work now with [Mizz 00:15:42] and the ops team to fold that into their processes and start testing it. So throughout that, we expect to find maybe some more gaps and holes that need to be plugged. So it’s not fully ready to launch yet, but really good progress on it, and excited to see where that goes. Next slide.

David Flinner: No screenshots for this one. But there was, as Josh alluded to, there was a bunch of fires the last week with some of our scalability on the server back end. So the whole eng team pitched in and was identifying where some bottlenecks were, what could be some short term fixes to put out the immediate fires. And then there was some good discussions around what designs might enable more scalable efforts for the future.

David Flinner: So those are in progress and to be planned. Andrew couldn’t make the call right now. So I can’t speak to this perfectly, but lots of work to be done here, and huge thanks for the eng team for working overtime after hours to put out some of these issues, and make the experience for our members as seamless as possible, and as down for as little period of time as possible. So thank you again. Next slide.

David Flinner: The dashboard v2 is still progressing really nicely. This week, one of the tangible things is wiring up the glance card to route to some of the other views. So you can see if you tap the dial on the left, which is the day score, it’ll load the old day score view.

David Flinner: If you tap the glance able trend line, it’ll view, it’ll load the stats page. John has been working quite a bit on this new dashboard. It actually requires rewriting most of the old dashboard here. So there’s a lot going on behind the scenes from the calendar, re implementing it, making sure things route to the right pages.

David Flinner: And we’re just about ready for the team to be testing this. So keep your eyes out for the app updates as they come, should be in the next couple days. And the next step for this is we’re going to be adding the education stacks down at the bottom of the new qualitative homepage. And then as the new Day Score gets ready, we’ll be swapping out that the old metabolic score view that’s being shown here with [Jin Lou’s 00:17:45] new work with the new Day Score.

David Flinner: Next slide. Speaking of the education journey, over the last several… You can, actually, don’t play just yet, Josh. Over the last couple weeks, Haney, and Casey, and the team and I have been talking about what, how do we want to help people progress through their education journey? It’s becoming especially more apparent as we nudge up against a new set of users who aren’t the early bio hackers and need a little bit more handholding.

David Flinner: So one of the things we’re doing here is coming up with bite size chunks of information that you can go through, and it feels fun to go through it. You can track your progress. This is increasing the value add around our education that we have in the product. You can play the video, Josh, actually now.

David Flinner: So this is some wire frames that I put together. And the learn module, you can a new lessons tab, all of the new buckets of courses that we want you to go through will be displayed here. And you can see how far you’ve gotten through it, how many you are left, it’s an a la carte model.

David Flinner: We’re going to have the same content be bucketed in different ways. So this is the a la carte experience. And then there’s also going need to be a suggested experience based on what your goals are for the program and where you are in the program guide. But what I like about this is you can see at a glance, what the topics are, how far you’ve gone through, and where you pick up next.

David Flinner: And when you click on these it’ll load existing content, like an article or a video, and we can augment this in the future with a badging celebrate, things like that. Murillo hit the ground running this week. He is mostly done with the front end for this. And I think working on the back end today, so we should be able to start testing this pretty soon. Next slide.

David Flinner: Yeah. And so similarly, outside of the core, raw education list, we want to help our members understand where they are on their 28 day journey, what to expect out of it, and what they should be doing at any given point. So, one of the ways we’re tackling this is we’ve been talking through, do we have a day-by-day program, themes for the weeks or something else?

David Flinner: And so Haney, and Casey, and I were converging on, actually in consultation with a lot of feedback from Jin Lou on maybe a weekly based program where it’s been themed like it always has been. Week one is about exploration and learning. And what we’ll do is the proposal now is to come up with weekly buckets with some sort of content from the raw lessons bucketed into a new weekly model for this. You can see an overview of the week, what to expect, and what levels suggest you to do during that week.

David Flinner: It’s not prescriptive. You don’t have to do it, but it’s like, if you do want to get the most out of it, here are the things you should do. And this is the order that you might want to consider doing them in. You can play the video, Josh.

David Flinner: This reuses a lot of the same kind of framework as the lessons model. You would from the dashboard tap into a week one card. You could see a description about here’s what to expect, and here’s some high level videos on how to get the most out of it.

David Flinner: Let’s see here, go a little bit faster. As you scroll down, you’d see different sections for different stuff, like maybe week one, how to use the app, basics of metabolic fitness, or health, improving your diet, some of the basics there. But importantly, that wouldn’t be all of the improvement strategies.

David Flinner: So if you dove into the lessons module for improvement, you might see a list of 10, 15 things. Here we might say, here’s just the first two you need to know, especially read these. By the way, if you’re more curious, you can jump out to the full lesson and do it at your own pace. Probably in many ways to skin this, but this is our first stab at it. I’m excited to get member feedback and see if this resonates with them or not. But we’ll close the loop based on launching this and getting some feedback. Next slide.

David Flinner: Yeah, I guess this is just reiterating where we were coming from some of those program concept iterations. Next slide. And then this is where we originally envisioned this coming in. So there would be multiple ways for the member to access either the lesson content or the program journey content. But on your homepage, which is always, what should I be doing next? How to think about things. The next thing after John finishes working on the glance card and all the, the primary scaffolding will be to wire up the education experience on the dashboard.

David Flinner: So you can go to the next slide. Oh, actually, sorry, go back. This wasn’t updated. You refresh it? That’s why this wasn’t not working. There you go. Okay, cool. So this is just a rough and dirty wire frame. David Flinner: I don’t have much more high fidelity here. But you can see on the new glance card on the new dashboard, we’ll have first your glance card, then you see week one, maybe. Then you see up next in your education. Something like that. It’ll look something similar to this. And then those are horizontal carousals. If you don’t want to go to the course where recommending, you could scroll to the right, see the next content. There’s always some sort of option you can do that’s interesting. David Flinner: Yeah. Next slide. And this one’s hot off the press. Gabriel’s been working on some explorations for the, or diving into long zones. And one of the cool things he found was that a non-trivial portion of a long zones are a result of a single exercise, probably accidentally being logged as 24 to 48 hours.

David Flinner: So you can play the video, Josh. But this is just a rough concept that Gabriel put together on what we might do to try to help this, alerting members that when they select a time like this, did you actually mean to have an 11 hour change, something minor like that? We’ll have to iterate on the concept for this, but this is one of the things we can do. There’s a lot of other things we can do to step-by-step tighten in these long zones so that people get accurate scores.

David Flinner: Nice. Next slide. And then back more on the product side, I’ve been having conversations with pretty much the whole team on what we can do to start reframing the expectations of what it means to, what are we hoping our members get out of the nutritional guidance within Levels. And so far we’ve been targeting the bio hacker tech enthusiast, early adopter crowd. And they can take the data and place it in context with how they, what they know it means, and use it really well.

David Flinner: But we’re starting to nudge up against almost like crossing the chasm into a more “normal” audience where we have people like the Mark Hyman referrals and Wellness Mama, or people who are just out there, general audience. We’re getting a lot of attendance from them. And we’re hearing feedback from them that they need more help understanding the data, and understanding what it means, and that this relates to your diet, not necessarily your full, underlying metabolic health.

David Flinner: And so this discussion’s underway on how we might put the emphasis on your immediate dietary choices, frame that in the context of this is all normal. Some of these discussions around relative values versus absolute values, could we do things like tweak the colors in a small way? Could we incorporate better intelligent education using that new framework that we’re rolling out with lessons? Things like that.

David Flinner: So these are just high level discussions that we’re having. But it’s really interesting to see that we’re getting new feedback, which is excellent from these new audience segments. And tying it back to the original goal that we’re taking a step back from some of the partner code growth is with these, with all these new members coming through, we have an opportunity to really explore and expand into a breadth of trials.

David Flinner: So we can see, hey, does this technique resonate? Does this technique resonate? And while we’re still young and early, we can try to get that message right so that we can reach the largest audience with this to help with our mission of totally solving the metabolic health crisis when we go live. So work in progress here and happy to engage in conversations, but that is it from product and ends this week.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Great update. Thanks, David. Thanks eng for all the work on the back end. Quick hiring update, we’ve got a new solution coming soon, Workable. Thanks, Mizz, for tackling this, but this is going to be a significant improvement for the whole process. All stakeholders internal, external, and we’re still have these three main positions open. Check out the careers page for just general information. And please continue to share into your network the careers page because we will have some more positions opening relatively soon. Okay, Mike.

Mike Didonato: Thanks, Josh. So it was a great week connecting with our members. By the end of today, we will have spoken with 12 people. We have two key things to highlight, and we’ve heard it before. One specifically with the metabolic score, right now it’s confusing and even opaque for a lot of our members.

Mike Didonato: Some people have even said it’s become discouraging. Others said there’s gamification, but at the same time, I’m improving, but I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of information. And the big anchor for people this week was aura. So they said one of the things that they like are two things, basically that you can look at the readiness score. And then if you want, you can dig deeper into the data on a separate screen.

Mike Didonato: And then the other thing is it’s, I have a poor score because X, Y, and Z, so basically layering in that additional context. And then the second part is around our content. So again, it continues to be loved by just about everyone, but basically there is a desire for more of those quick hits. So I think there it’s showing that someone’s favorite posts are 12 glucose lowering strategies, and then our recipe and meal swap options.

Mike Didonato: So I know that we’re looking at both. I think with the metabolic score in particular, I’m excited to get the Day Score, the new Day Score. And then also the Dashboard v2, I think it’ll help a lot there. And then primarily these calls are coming from some people that are “detractors” and then also subscribers.

Mike Didonato: We have a project this quarter of connecting with a lot of our subscribers. Once we hit our magical number of interviews, I’m going to do a summary doc. But just quick update right now, what we’re hearing is the common themes why people are coming back are A, they absolutely love the constant feedback and accountability.

Mike Didonato: Two, they really love the additional context that our app provides beyond that raw data stream. So the logging of food and exercise. And then three, everyone really loves the pace at which we’re iterating. So kudos to David and engineering. That’s all I have for today.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thanks, Mike. And thanks for the continuing to work on the theme tracker thing. For those who haven’t checked that out, please do. Go to the notion page. If there something that you… I think it would be helpful if anyone is mentally tracking themes of member feedback, whether you’re getting it through email or through some other channel, definitely continue to pass that on to Mike so that can get looped into the theme tracker process. I mean, we’ve got a ton of channels to our members, and so we want to make sure that we’re vertically integrating that into a process that we can close loops on. All right, Mizz.

Michael Mizrahi: Cool. On the op side, so we had another shorter outage this week. This one was about five hours I believe on Tuesday or Wednesday. I think we learned a lot of lessons from the outage the week prior. And so we were much faster this time to get an insight card up, to get our help scout beacon article up, and to escalate the issue. I think Braden started seeing it in Help Scout, propped up to Andrew pretty quickly. We were on it within I think 15 to 20 minutes after that first report.

Michael Mizrahi: So much, much faster than last time around, which was two to three days of compounding issues until it really started tripping some alerts. So Andrew’s implemented a lot more analytics and monitoring. And so we can do some alerting on top of that now. So visibility’s improving here and only getting better.

Michael Mizrahi: So that through a little wrench in our week, but otherwise we’re back on track. Wearable Cohort 8 is scheduled for April. So seven is just ongoing now. Targeting individuals with higher BMIs now. The Wearable team is iterating and experimenting with some different approaches and different mini challenges.

Michael Mizrahi: Some really interesting things going on there in community as well with their WhatsApp group with the moderation of it. And so continuing to have really interesting lessons to learn there that we can translate back. So, that’s continuing to run. Subscriptions, couldn’t be more excited. I think Jeremy reached out this morning for next steps. So ready to go.

Michael Mizrahi: We hit the 700 mark this week. And if we add in the Salesforce pilot members, it brings us up to 850. So they’ll start recurring in a few weeks. So the numbers are huge. We are also starting to see some cancellations at a reasonable rate, nothing crazy. But we are tracking reasons on that in a spreadsheet for now, until we can get it into retool.

Michael Mizrahi: The top reason that we have after no reason is I’ve got too many sensors, I fell behind, I need a break. And so people like to take a break between sensors we’ve found. They take a week on, a week off between those two weeks. We built this into the subscriptions product, I believe so you can pick an every other month subscription model. And if we haven’t done that yet, Stripe supports it. So something we can do pretty soon.

Michael Mizrahi: And then on the newsletter side, this is just a small call out. I think our content’s incredible. The SEO is going well. People love the content on Mike’s slide, previous member for feedback. Of the minority that replies to the newsletter, we get a bunch of sentiments around, “I’ve seen these articles. I just want the CGM. When can I get off the wait list?”

Michael Mizrahi: We have 100,000 people on the wait list getting this newsletter. So it’s a pretty insane number of people. So again, the number of replies here, we’re talking 20 to 30 replies, pretty small percentage. But that sentiment is there. And we should think about different ways to engage a wait list of this number every two weeks with a newsletter. It’s a huge surface. We should really think through. Interesting things we can do there.

Michael Mizrahi: Quick snapshot of the metrics, not a down week yet, it’s only… This was Thursday afternoon numbers. So I will likely be in that 500 range come Sunday evening. So pretty steady clip otherwise, and Brooklyn is up and running, no longer ramping up. So that’s a pretty big number there in terms of the share that Brooklyn’s handling.

Michael Mizrahi: And then on issue types that we’re handling, order placements. So when is my delivery coming? Can I change the date? What’s my status on the wait list? Is about 25% of our contacts. Then the remaining up 20% get us up to half is around subscriptions.

Michael Mizrahi: So product improvements that we can make here are pretty meaningful to driving down this volume, which improves the ops capacity, but also improves the member experience. And then finally, like I always call out that this week with particularly great, our first time for 50% of contacts in less than 15 minutes during business hours, really exceptional support team job. So hats off to Braden, Mercy, Lauren, thanks for… Did I say Lauren? Lauri for running with that, it’s a pretty crazy number to meet and provides a pretty exceptional experience for those writing in. So we’ll keep up the good work on that side.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you, Mizz. And thanks ops team. All right. Over to Ben.

Ben Grynol: Cool. So we are going to start growth with some network shout outs. So the A16 Z team, specifically Julie Yoo, Andrew Chen, Venkat Mocherla, and Jane Suh have been immensely helpful in providing feedback about the enterprise strategy that we are exploring. So Tom and I have had a lot of calls and they’ve all been great about both product feedback and then go to market. So hat tip and much thanks has been very, very helpful.

Ben Grynol: Next slide, please. So growth recap, I think it’s important that we always give ourselves a check. So last February, we were at $11,000 bucks in revenue. And this February we’re at almost $500,000. It is a very big leap. And these numbers when they’re small, sure we can see drastic increases, but call a spade a spade. 4,000% increase is a very big year over year.

Ben Grynol: So we’re going to continue to see a lot of growth as we start pushing and as we launch. But yeah, it’s really good to look back. So next slide, please. So financial 10.6 in the bank. This month isn’t quite closed because Mizz is still finishing up. Mizz and the ops team are still finishing fulfilling some subscriptions. So I think we, if we have 30 more subscriptions come through in processing, we are going to have our best month yet, which is wild.

Ben Grynol: So we’re have 486,000 in recognized revenue for February. And I think we were at 525 as far as cash generation. So there’s going to be some spillover into March as those orders are fulfilled. Next slide.

Michael Mizrahi: Quick clarification, Ben. So the orders are filled, we’re just charging them now.

Ben Grynol: Yes.

Michael Mizrahi: So we’re on a five to six day delay, but they’re out the door.

Ben Grynol: Yes. Thank you, Mizz. This week, so strong week so far, $102,000 in cash generated. And we’ll talk about how that has come about that it is a stronger week given where we’re at right now, considering the week isn’t finished. Next slide, please.

Ben Grynol: So the theme is controlled growth. We saw this with the infrastructure and member experience, the byproduct of having infrastructure challenges. And so as we think about growth moving forward and growth drivers, we want to reiterate that we are not putting the foot on the gas pedal until we can get the things that matter right. If we start to drip in a 100,000 person wait list, we are, we are going to see much larger challenges.

Ben Grynol: So next slide, please. Growth drivers. February recap. So Ben, from a convergence standpoint, generated $112,000 of revenue. Dave, over the past two weeks, based on the podcast ads that we’re running and then Josh being on the podcast a week and a half ago, $87,000 of revenue.

Ben Grynol: If you look at the outcome as far as February goes, those two affiliates, and this is reiterating how important these channels are for us, 37% of our total revenue generated in February came from these two affiliates. It’s very important that we not only nurture the relationship, but use it strategically as we think about conversion efforts. Next slide.

Ben Grynol: So to wrap on it, the implications of things like great affiliate channels. We’ve got ads running on Bulletproof right now. We had to take those ads and we’re changing them from a conversion approach to an awareness approach, which means we’re not going to focus on beta signups, but rather Dave’s going to redo one of the reads to say, “Hey, go to the wait list or go to Levelshealth.com, sign up for the wait list,” because the more we’re getting, the more stress it’s putting on the infrastructure. So controlled growth, theme of the week. That’s it.

Josh Clemente: Nice. Thanks, Ben. All right, Mercy.

Mercy Clemente: All right. So this month I’m just going to do, I decided every month the first Friday I’ll do a recap of the previous month’s social analytics. So this is just recap of February. So Instagram reached 22,800 followers, Twitter we’re at 12,400 followers. For Instagram, we grew roughly… Oh, sorry. I forgot to insert the percentage. Sorry.

Mercy Clemente: But we gained about 3,500 followers in the past four weeks, which is pretty crazy. Oh my gosh, I entered these, I guess I just didn’t save it. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. I had in my notes.

Josh Clemente: It’s okay.

Mercy Clemente: It was about 400 stories, I think, or just under 400 stories. And that does not include all mentions. That’s strictly the stories that we repost on Levels. So mentions and tags, the number is rapidly growing. It’s improved a lot. A lot of people are doing multiple stories in a row, either explaining their CGM or explaining what Levels does.

Mercy Clemente: So that’s broadened a lot of the followers we’ve gained the past month. Our top post that we shared on Instagram was the America, Your diet is Slowly Killing You and this is Why. That was liked over 300 times. So 367 likes. And what was really interesting is 15% of those likes weren’t from people who follow Levels. They were just people that had found the post, seen it on the explore page on Instagram, thought it was interesting and liked it.

Mercy Clemente: So that was really interesting. The post was shared 47 times. So someone DMed it to a friend saying, “Hey, check it out, blah, blah, blah,” and saved the post, saved that specific photo 44 times. Overall for our month or for that photo alone, we got over 9,000 impressions. And impressions are people shared it, liked it, commented on it, anything like that. So that is pretty crazy for one photo alone to have that big of an impact.

Mercy Clemente: Twitter, we were mentioned over 2,000 times. So 2,200 times to be exact. Our impressions for the month were 232,000 impressions. So that is also the same thing where it’s a total number times our tweets were seen, liked… Oh, sorry. So that’s pretty crazy.

Mercy Clemente: Especially considering we only have 12,000 followers. Our impressions are really high. We grew roughly 20% on our following. So about 2,000 followers last month alone. Our top tweet was sharing the [inaudible 00:39:30] video. So that was pretty crazy. We had over 9,000 impressions on that tweet alone, which is explained before, which is the number of times it was seen and shared and stuff.

Mercy Clemente: Engagements on that were 166. So that means that was the number of times somebody clicked the link to go view the video, liked the tweet, commented on it, retweet it, stuff like that. So, yeah, that’s pretty crazy. Oh, our top follower for the month of February is Ryan Wyat. He has 371,000 followers. So I just figured we’d give him a shout at as well. That’s the recap for February analytics on social.

Josh Clemente: Cool. Thank you very much. All right. Tom. T

om Griffin: Sweet. I’ll try to move quickly. Continuing to cruise on the podcast front, Casey recorded a couple big shows this week. And then again, in the far right column, we’ll continue to track on the top tier one shows that are upcoming, not an exhausted list, but just the top shows. And I guess I just want to note that I think in recent days, we’ve with the release of Ben Greenfield and Bulletproof, we’ve begun to associate podcasts with conversions and partner code redemptions.

Tom Griffin: But just a reminder that podcasts are helping along many fronts and sales and marketing. So just building the brand through education and awareness. There’s really no better way to educate the world than speaking to a highly curated community of 100,000 people for an hour with Casey and Josh educating them on metabolic health.

Tom Griffin: Number two, SEO, just great back links. Three, boosting our social following. And then four, just business developments, securing key relationships across these communities. Next slide.

Tom Griffin: All right, media and influencer. So reminder this slide covers partner promotions that will generate revenue. A couple things this week, we had Sarah Gottfried do an impromptu story post, which generated a burst of conversions, which was not well timed, but it was good to see. And then Bulletproof podcast ad, back catalog ad starting on 3/1 which has been really strong.

Tom Griffin: And then as Ben mentioned, we’ve pushed upcoming promos to May. So the pipeline is really strong. And I guess also just quickly to provide further context, if you’re wondering if we’re slow rolling growth, why is our partner, promotion pipeline so strong? And I think in addition to revenue, which is always a good thing, a few other reasons that it’s important that we continue locking in these promos. One, it’s just critical that we secure these influencers ASAP.

Tom Griffin: They’re really a finite number, honestly, maybe 15 to 20 total that are driving 90% of revenue across companies in our space. So unless you begin to solidify these relationships and spend on sponsorships and prove that you can be a great affiliate, the relationship is not locked.

Tom Griffin: Number two, just small tests like this allow us to build out our growth models and start to understand customer acquisition cost and help us forecast. And then lastly, just many require booking in advance. So if we want to book any promos with someone like Bulletproof or Ben Greenfield, we need to book them in the beginning of the year or else there’s no availability left.

Tom Griffin: Next slide. And then just quickly, fun update with some VIPs who we are in contact with. Rich Roll and Shawn Stevenson, two of the top health podcasters, moving along with both of them, which is really exciting. A couple of top guys in the MMA world with millions of followers and world champions. Some Peloton influencers, and then Tim O’Donnell, a guy I’ve worked with in the past, he has the record for the Ironman world championships. And he sent an email to me, really excited to try to just spread the word and take over the endurance community in the US. So more to come on that relationship.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you, Tom. All right.

Casey Means: Awesome.

Josh Clemente: Casey.

Casey Means: Yeah. So this has been a great week for us, for conferences and speaking opportunities about Levels and CGM. This week, we were part of the Foundations of Women’s Wellness summit. I book at Stanford’s Food, Design & Technology course to undergrads, med students, and business students, business school students. And then MIT Berkeley’s Wearable devices in healthcare conference.

Casey Means: And we also had a good drumbeat of press. Shout out to Denny and Tolita for shouting us out in PopSugar, which is a big outlet. And they had great things to say about Levels. We also had some good user generated articles from the Lyon’s Share and Ashley Brook’s Blog. Shout out to Stacy Flinner for connecting us with Ashley.

Casey Means: And we are also featured on Men’s Health Homepage. There’s also a great, very high production value video, including Levels prominently featuring Levels on HNGRY TV that just came out right before forums. I’ll share that link after this, but it’s really awesome.

Casey Means: We’ve got some upcoming conferences in the next couple weeks. Next week, we’ve got the Future of Wellness summit with WellToDo Global, but it’s great to see a lot of inbound opportunities coming and also securing thoughts through our outreach through our company and also through JTPR. Just a framework for how we’re evaluating some of these opportunities and getting the highest value out of these engagements.

Casey Means: So a few things that were prioritizing. So one is that any opportunity we do is recorded. So something that we can repurpose and widely distribute for education, and ideally for helping educate our members. Ideally, the conference or speaking opportunity covers a unique topic that we can repurpose for education.

Casey Means: So for instance, the Foundation of Women’s Wellness summit was all about women’s health and glucose. Other conferences have to do with sugar specifically, or weight loss specifically like the Quit Sugar summit. So these unique topics that we can use for education. Ideally, these opportunities will associate with us with other top figures in the space.

Casey Means: There are opportunities we can use in our marketing materials, and an opportunity to network with other people in this space that we want to get to know. So that’s some of the lens that we’re using to evaluate these. But yeah, lots more to come. Josh Clemente: Sweet. Thanks, Casey. Haney.

Mike Haney: So a couple things I want to call it from the new articles that went up this week. The main theme here is experts. So one of the things we want to start doing is use experts in general as sources within stories, but where we can pulling into the great network that we have.

Mike Haney: So for instance, the metabolic health, Mizz’s piece that went up, we reached out to Dr. Bret Scher, who’s on our list of people to follow, asked him if he would be willing to be interviewed by the writer for this piece. And you could see his advice is really makes up a lot of the thrust of that piece.

Mike Haney: Similarly, a big effort in the next couple of months is going to be building out a network of medical reviewers. There’s all kinds of reasons: authority, Google juice, to get, to have people to have medical reviewers on our piece as this is something that Healthline, Greatest, all the editorial site it’s that do health content have, mostly because Google really rewards it.

Mike Haney: But for us, there’s also going to be a lot of value just in the substance of being able to tap into these people. So for instance, we ran the dairy piece this week by Ben Bickman and said, “Hey, if you have any comments, any thoughts,” he came back and just said, “Nope, looks great.” But then we’re able to list him as a medical reviewer. And I think this will also just make the pieces stronger, so there will be more of this coming up. Next slide.

Mike Haney: I just want to call out the new writers we’re bringing on. So this has been obviously a big part of what I’ve been working on and is still very much a work in progress, but I’m just starting to get some of the first pieces coming through from the folks that I started cultivating a couple months ago and reaching out to. And just wanted to call out that we’ve been getting really good talent, and this isn’t always easy to do when you’re a company.

Mike Haney: A lot of these folks who are journalists and make most of their living from, and their reputation from doing journalism, writing for the Times or writing for Nat Geo don’t always want to come right for companies. And the reason I’ve been able to get some of these folks to come right for us is because we’re doing real journalism. Mike Haney: And they see that when they come and look at our content. The main reason this is good is just we’re getting high quality articles. We’re getting really good folks who are doing the reporting, doing the digging, asking good questions. And the more we build out this network, it’s just going to superpower our ability to generate really good content.

Mike Haney: Next slide. And the last thing I just wanted to throw out there, I finally got around to making something I should have made three months ago, which is what we call a Competition Matrix. Anytime you do an editorial launch, you make this slide with these axis that figure out where you fit in the world, and you always want to be in the upper right quadrant. So you construct your axis such that that’s the space you occupy, and then you make sure nobody else is living in that space. And if it is, you should look at what you’re doing.

Mike Haney: So this is out, this is linked to in the content Wiki. If anybody wants to take a look, there’s some notes about all of these different competitors and why I placed them in here. But this just helps us moving forward helps guide what we do, helps make sure that we’re owning a space in the way that we want to. That’s it for me.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thanks, Haney. All right. Running a little short on time. We’ll probably go a little bit over with Hau’s story at the end here, but that’s okay. Individual contributions, Lauri.

Laurie: Yes. Ops is excited about the subscription situation, Jeremy. I’m looking forward to that. I’m also looking forward to a weekend of just working in the yard, getting my hands in the dirt. And my husband’s going to repair a fish pond that he dug for me. And he built this beautiful waterfall.

Laurie: I’ll put some photos up if you’d like, but it’s leaking somewhere. So I think we have, it’s a 15 by 18 foot pond. It’s going to be a very wet, messy, fun weekend. So I’m looking forward to that, actually.

Josh Clemente: Share some pictures.

Laurie: I will.

Josh Clemente: All right. Dom.

Dominic D’Agostino: Biomarker experiments, I’ve been doing a lot with that. Just came off a 72 hour fast and sending in taking my blood work to the lab, actually, to do that and correlating it with the Level’s CGM data. Excited about that.

Josh Clemente: Love it. Keep us in the loop. I’ve been following your Instagram stuff. It’s great. Tom.

Tom Griffin: I think this week was fun. It was really chaotic. There was a lot going on professionally and personally. Not to romanticize the whole startup journey, but I think it’s really fun to work really hard with an awesome group of people. So there was a moment this week when Ben and I were on a call at 10:00 PM, trying to figure out a bunch of stuff. And I took a moment to just appreciate how much fun this all is.

Josh Clemente: Love that. Dorothy.

Dorothy Kilroy: I’m excited to do some cold water swimming this weekend. For those of you who live in the Bay area, it’s been… I try to swim most mornings in the Bay and it’s really cold. And this week it got down to the low 50s again. Oh. And I feel like it’s like my therapy/punishment. I don’t know. It’s the Irish guilt or something, but anyway, getting in the cold.

Josh Clemente: I’m impressed. Very impressed. Casey.

Casey Means: Yeah. That’s badass, Dorothy, swimming in the Bay. I am, oh, excited about so many things, I would say. I’ll have to choose our expanding team. It’s just great to have Murillo full time. And also Dorothy, to have your advising. Personally, I’m going up to the Napa Geyserville area this weekend to visit my godmother and Godfather’s ranch and I’m, it’s one of my favorite place in the entire world. And I’m really excited to get outside. Josh Clemente: Oh, no. Can you hear me?

Casey Means: Yeah.

Josh Clemente: Okay. Sorry. I got muted. Awesome, Murillo.

Murillo Nicacio De Maraes: Yeah, I’m really excited for all the context I got this week, just meeting everyone and going over the docs, and just seeing how much thought and care goes into everything that we’re doing here has been amazing. Personally, I’m super excited that my girlfriend, after being stuck in Brazil for two months is coming back home tomorrow. So just really to see her again.

Josh Clemente: That’s great. Stacy.

Stacy: In the past week, I’ve spent a lot of time just chatting with different members. Ashley Brook is a personal friend of mine and actually a decorating client. And so we spent a lot of time on the phone, just troubleshooting for her or talking about her experience. So it’s been fun to do in some ways like Mike D.’s job a little bit, fielding our member questions and just learning about others’ experiences through that. And yeah, on the personal side, we’re home after spending a week in Pittsburgh. So it’s just nice to be home.

Josh Clemente: Great. Sam.

Sam Corcos: Yeah. On the personal side, I’ve had a very fun and productive think week, which I always like to do. I think one of the things I’m most excited about in the company side is new team member onboarding is something that’s really hard to do and hard to get right. And so I think Mizz in particular has really done an excellent job on making sure all of our materials and everyone has all the tools they need to get up and running. So big shout out to Mizz.

Josh Clemente: Definitely. Hau.

Hao Li: I’m super excited about the upcoming infrastructure changes we are going to do to help with scouting our up our backend. And personally, I finally found a 2000 Subaru Outback, I’m going to probably buy it. It’s really exciting.

Josh Clemente: Nice. All-wheel drive for life. Enjoy. Haney.

Mike Haney: Professionally, I’m really excited about the content, the product content progress that we’re making. I feel like we were crack the nut this week with the structure, and we’re really going to be able to finally start cranking on that. I think it’s going to make a huge difference. Personally, I’m super excited. My wife, literally, as we’re on this call just got her first vaccine shot. So that’s great.

Josh Clemente: Nice. Ben.

Ben Grynol: Couple things. So Murillo, Dorothy, super excited that they have joined us. Major hat tip to the entire engineering team and Mizz for all the work going into assemblage, because that is, it is an incredible amount of work, and he is balancing that amongst everything else. So big shout out on that. And then carve out, there’s a podcast called Renegade that is Renegades, it’s Springsteen and Obama, Spotify original, super, super magical. So check it out.

Josh Clemente: JM.

Josh Mohrer: It’s been a really awesome first week, particularly getting to meet and do one-on-ones with probably about half of the group so far, with the rest hope fully next week. Thank you for that, everybody. This weekend, hoping to spend some time outside. It’s not going to be warm, but it will be sunny and that’s enough. Thank you.

Josh Clemente: Awesome. Mercy.

Mercy Clemente: I’m excited for subscription. That’s going to be really exciting and be a big help for the ops team especially and all the members. And then personally, I am in Austin for the weekend with my boyfriend. So going to explore a little bit here and see what it’s like. And it’s nice and warm, actually. It’s 75 degrees out. So came at a good time.

Josh Clemente: Missed the vortex. Yeah, I’m stoked for all the team growth, both full time and also amazing contributors like Dorothy, being able to help us just maximize our output. And then I, two personal things. I just got my new kettlebell. I put it through its paces or rather it put me through its paces this morning. And I am growing sprouts, broccoli sprouts, and onion sprouts. So I’m basically a farmer now. So that’s a new career path for me. John.

Jhon Cruz: I’m so excited about the assemblage next week. Not to say that the past ones were not good, but this one just looks amazing and different. Really looking forward to the cooking classes and competitions, because I’m so bad at cooking. So thanks to Mizz and everyone organizing this.

Josh Clemente: Definitely. Mike D.

Mike Didonato: Yeah, I have a few. So definitely new team members, other one, content. Big shout out to Mike, Haney, and Casey, I feel like we’re publishing new posts every day, and still keeping our high bar when it comes to quality. It’s so awesome just to go in and dig and be able to circulate this information.

Mike Didonato: And then the other thing, just how well we’re building relationships. Ben Greenfield, I think we got connected about a year ago. Tom was able to nurture that relationship. Bulletproof, Josh was just on a call yesterday and the person’s like, “The head of partnerships at TV 12 could not stop raving about Levels.” So it’s just pretty awesome to hear that.

Mike Didonato: And then personally, there’s this thing called the 4x4x48 Hour Challenge. It starts tonight 8:00 PM Pacific. You run four miles every four hours for 48 hours. So I’m going to give that a go.

Casey Means: Wait, one more time, Mike. What is it? It’s like physical? Mike Didonato: So you run four miles.

Casey Means: Okay.

Mike Didonato: Every four hours for 48 hours.

Tom Griffin: I cannot believe you’re doing this.

Ben Grynol: This is David Goggins though. You have to have [crosstalk 00:57:18] David Goggins is leading this.

Mike Didonato: Some people might get phone calls. And I don’t know if you’re going to want to talk to me this weekend, but might be getting some phone calls. I might need some pep talks, but we’ll see what happens.

Casey Means: We’re here for you.

Josh Clemente: Keep the updates coming. Mizz.

Michael Mizrahi: What a share to follow. Well, I guess reflection on the week. There are some crazy weeks, there are some calm weeks. I think this was a crazy one on, which there’s just a lot going on, which is exciting in and of itself. And I’m excited to get that all back under control a little bit.

Michael Mizrahi: But in that there was some really good teamwork popping up that I just really appreciated. So Braden stepped up in a huge way to take on a ton of subscription charges one night, which is pretty tedious and he just powered through it. And I woke up the next morning and a bunch were gone. Tom and Ben we’re handling a lot of the partnerships activity that was going on, and figuring out the timing and arrangement there.

Michael Mizrahi: And then the entire eng team stepping up to the outage, just a lot of moving pieces and really cool to see everyone step up. So I enjoyed that this week. On the personal side, I got a new book that I’m excited about from Cal Newport, who’s this productivity professor/author that I follow closely. So his new book dropped this week and I’m excited to make my way through it.

Josh Clemente: Nice. Gabriel.

Gabriel: Yeah. I’m really excited about the [inaudible 00:58:35] team and about the assemblage next week. And then on the personal side, it’s starting to get warmer here. The snow drops are coming out. It might go over 50 degrees this weekend. So I’m looking forward getting out on my bike.

Josh Clemente: I hope it happens. Enjoy it. All right, team. We have a lot of volume to cover every week. We’re a little over. We’re going to block time for Hau to get through his story of the week though. So if you have to drop, please go ahead. Thanks everyone for participating this far. And Hau, looking forward to your story, Browser wars, an internet pop history. I’m going to stop sharing. I think you have a slide deck.

Hao Li: Can you guys see the slides?

Josh Clemente: There we go.

Hao Li: Yeah. So I just want to do a quick presentation on the final history about browsers, since I believe browser is the most essential software you are using every day. And it deserve a little bit of history telling where it comes from and how we got here.

Hao Li: So basically, before we have a real browser, we have a lot tools to transmit informations through internet. But now turn to 1990, the guy called Tim Berners-Lee from CERN, yeah that nuclear CERN actually created the first ever browser, which is more like a text editor at the time. It’s on the next computer platform only, but it is real. The first software actually unleash the power of the internet.

Hao Li: So people can now browse in documents instead of download and open other ways. And that picture of the computer in the slides is the first web server ever, which is also a next computer, which host the first website. Actually the browser name actually called World Wide Web at the time, but it’s confused later. So they renamed it to, I think something called Nexus. Yeah. And that’s how the story begins.

Hao Li: And later on in 1992, there are whole bunch of small, different version of softwares to actually allow you to browsing the maps. The most famous one is Lynx, which is a text-based browser that couldn’t display any graphic content. So in the picture on the left is the Lynx, which is pure, just a text browser.

Hao Li: And to compare, the right hand side is a normal Fairfax displaying the same page, same Wikipedia page. And that Lynx browser still maintain and develop to today, which is, I don’t know what people use it for, maybe dark web. But yeah, it’s still there. And also at the time, Mosaic by the National Center Super Computer Applications was the first browser to allow images embedded in text, making it the world’s most popular browser at the time, which bring us to the modern era of browsing.

Hao Li: Next. And in 1994, a noticeable improvement to Mosaic came landscape navigator, which created by the same person who created Mosaic. And we began to enter in the web era. And also the beginning of the browser wars. So by 1995, Netscape navigator wasn’t the only way to get online. Microsoft also licensed the old Mosaic code and built its own window to the web, which is IE, in famous IE on the right hand side, the really sparked the war, of course.

Hao Li: And then they continue the war ’till the end of 20th century, which of course, now we know now, won by Microsoft. But because I guess at the time Microsoft shift their focus from improve their browser to maybe encrypt their CBT and build a evil empires, people start filling the performance issue from Internet Explorer. And other competitors emerged during the late ’90s and early 2000s, famously the Firefox.

Hao Li: And before Firefox, there was Safari. I think the timeline is in 2003, Apple’s Safari browser was released for Mac, of course, and 2004, Mozilla launched Firefox as the Netscape navigator faded out.

Hao Li: And also, we entered a mobile browsing era in 2007. But yeah, that’s all part of the second browser wars, which means that whole bunch of new competitors actually tried to improve the internet browsing experience and beat Internet Explorer to the ground. So that’s a quick introduction, super quick introduction.

Hao Li: And actually, in 2015, Microsoft tried to combat with their Microsoft Ash. They have a freshly new web engine. However, because the capability issue and also the dominance of the Chrome browser, they cannot just get back to user base. And so which led to the current web status today, which cannot dominated by a Chrome based browsers. So is there any new case coming along?

Hao Li: I don’t think so. The whole browser economics fixed by a Chrome dominant the market, and there are a whole bunch of different variants, but all based on either Chrome, Fairfax, or old, even old IE still exist. So which is side story. But that’s what we have right now. And I hope with also issues like net neutralities stuff, I hope someone can create a new platform or even help bring Firefox with a bigger market share. And yeah, lastly, there’s a quick video I will share later just to show you what’s the popular browser, looks like by time. And yeah. Any questions?

Josh Clemente: What browser do you use?

Hao Li: I use all of them. [crosstalk 01:07:31]. I think for my personal use, I use Firefox a little bit more. But for developing, Chrome, of course, still the dominant one to develop this.

Josh Clemente: Awesome.

Sam Corcos: I remember Internet Explorer 8 was the bane of my existence.

Hao Li: Yeah. I remember when I worked for a garment software vendor, they still need to support IE 6 in 2014. So, which is really sad for garment.

Josh Clemente: That’s brutal. All right. Awesome share, Hau. Thank you. And I love the Star Wars theme throughout. That was sharp. All right, team. Thank you all for joining. Really love this meeting every week, and we’re going to have to get a little sharper on the timing so that we don’t run over every week, but it’s a good sign. It’s a sign of growth. So talk to you guys next week and have a great weekend.