Josh Clemente (00:00):
All right. Welcome to first Friday Forum of May 2022. We’ll launch in. There’s going to be a new format here, so we’ll talk about that in just a minute.
(00:13):
All right. Recent achievements. This week, Dr. Terry Wahls officially joined us as an advisor. She joins our pretty incredible board of advisors across academia, direct primary care, medical doctors, PhDs, and performance advisors and enthusiasts. Dr. Wahls, if you haven’t listened to the Whole New Level episode, that’s a great introduction between Casey and Terry that really dives into her background, her history, what she’s excited about, how she has taken MS under control through lifestyle. Very excited to have her on board. We’re going to be able to do a ton both in terms of research and other collaborations leveraging her expertise.
(00:52):
Along with that, Sonya has rolled out a new experience for advisor onboarding and welcoming to keep engagement high, to generate excitement. Each time an advisor joins, it’s somebody joining the team, and so making sure that we have a similar onboarding experience to what we have for our members is really awesome. It’s super exciting.
(01:14):
We completed this week the technical review process that is a prerequisite for liftoff and our first IRB launch. Still burning down engineering and logistics pieces to get to that May 23rd current date. I think JM is going to have an update on this. But on track, huge success to get across the technical review milestone. There are still things that we have to de-risk in terms of the logistics side to get devices distributed and such, but we are pacing according to plan.
(01:44):
On the background metrics side, this month we had the highest conversion rate in seven months at 14.2%, which is great. Happiness at 94%, NPS score +73, which is the highest this year. And then our weekly support volumes were very low. The lowest this year, actually. We also had a number of really interesting… These are monthly and weekly metrics combined. Always tune in to Chris’s deep dive onto what the more volatile week by week numbers look like and how they trend month over month. I love these dives. Chris will have an update on that. We locked in the Huberman Lab podcast partnership, so for those that listen to this podcast, Andrew Huberman really dives into the tactical side of lifestyle optimization. We had a really awesome pilot program on this, and we’re going to go big on the August to December timeframe. Tom and Jackie are taking the lead on that.
(02:44):
We are at 29% GDPR compliance. This is related to our international rollout. This is up from 25% last week. Karen’s tracking this very closely. This involved shipping our Cookie Policy & Manager. Similarly, we are trending towards the UK liftoff. Specific details on that will be in her update. But we released Levels on the app store in the UK and we’re preparing to onboard as a very, very early pilot the first few UK members in the next week. The goal there is to just get the 80/20 learning as quickly as possible where the sticky points are, even before we have the full formal liftoff.
(03:26):
Let’s see. This is an exciting one. Casey gave a Levels class lecture to students in the ME195A Food Technology and Design course at Stanford this past week, which sounds like it was a tremendous success. Talked a lot about Levels mission and translating a mission into a product culture, implications for population data sets on future nutrition. Hopefully this lecture could eventually be scaled. Casey, I actually don’t know if they recorded it, but maybe at some point we’ll be able to tap into these. It’s really awesome to hear.
(04:00):
A few other things you see here. Updated product dashboard density. This is going to be one of the validated learning experiences that we’re going to be testing with members in the coming future. We had a really awesome newsletter go out from Dr. Casey’s Kitchen, which was at a 47.3% open rate. Fertility and metabolism, how it affects both men and women, which it is a tension grabbing headline and not surprising to see an increased open rate, but pretty tremendous. I don’t think anyone should expect close to 50% open rate on day one, which is pretty awesome.
(04:33):
We continue to get some traction on the Series A announcements. We had a couple great Whole New Level episodes recorded. Dan Summers made his debut. We have a bunch of UGC and internal video developed this week on the digital side. We’re also launching a partnership with Turtle Creek Lane. This has been an ongoing, I think, exchange, as her Instagram following is very interested in the lifestyle optimizations that we’ve got going on. And then Mike McKnight. We had a couple great content pieces, including one on Mike McKnight, who ran 118 miles completely fasted with Levels and natural sugars, as well as sandwich substitutions.
(05:17):
I think that covers it here. All right. With that I want to welcome Katie Moore, also known as Katie Type A. I think many of us are familiar with Katie’s work through her digital content as Katie Type A. A big influencer in the healthy living space and a partner to Levels, and I believe residing in the Marin County area in California. Katie, thanks for taking some time to join us today. Our team really, really enjoys hearing directly from our partners and users of Levels. I would love to hear what you’re excited about generally speaking in metabolic health and specific to Levels.
Katie Moore (05:52):
Thank you so much. I have absolutely had such a great experience. I feel like since I started working with Levels just a couple months ago, every single time I log onto the app, there’s something new and exciting and engaging. There’s a new way that you guys are looking at data or presenting data that, as a creator, as somebody who is so interested in the analytics and the science and getting really nerdy with my stats, that’s exciting for me.
(06:22):
I’m excited to share more of this with my audience, and almost create a community or collective within the Type A brand and ask people, because I know a lot of people have joined Levels and are really excited. I’m almost hoping to branch out and start to get their feedback and then share that with my audience. A lot of it is word of mouth and just all those shares that I saw on Instagram. That’s proving you guys are doing amazing work and what you’re doing is working. I’m so excited to continue to work with you guys because I just think this is the kind of data that we need to help people really get a better understanding of their metabolic health over the long term. So thank you.
Josh Clemente (07:06):
Awesome. Some of the YouTube videos that you’ve produced so far, it’s interesting because they really define these strategies for long-term metabolic health. I’m curious about your path to getting to this point. How much familiarity did you have with blood sugar monitoring as a metric or a bio detection mechanism for people to learn about lifestyle? And how much of this is… Because the way you express it is very attractable, very approachable. I’m curious how long you’ve been in this space using glucose detection?
Katie Moore (07:48):
I hate the term biohacking, but I feel like it’s hard to not encompass it all when you start to actually look at your data, and you pick up an Oura Ring and you pick up a whoop strap and you’re doing the cold plunges and all that stuff. I’m just going to put it in this new age, alternative health, taking health in your own hands.
(08:08):
When I started that, I just threw everything up at the wall, and I wasn’t really sure how to piece it all together. It was maybe six months into this journey that I stumbled on the blood sugar monitoring. I believe I started with Nutrisense. That was the one that was available to me at the time. But I felt like after a couple of weeks, I hit a wall with, okay, I don’t know if there’s anything more I can really glean from these insights.
(08:41):
It was about a year later that I got in touch with Levels and using your app. It’s insane the amount of experiments that you guys suggest to try. I’m like, I never thought about that. That’s great. There’s all these other factors that are related now to exercise and my blood sugar. I’m even interested really in hormones and blood sugar, because what happens for women during certain times of the month, how do those blood sugar spikes actually play out? I’m curious. I’m actually going to do a little bit of an experiment and hopefully make a video about that, but that’s a separate thing.
(09:25):
I think it just reengaged my excitement to little learn a little bit more. Because I’m relatively healthy. I eat pretty well. I do all the exercise and hot cold therapy and all that stuff. But I think at the end of the day, is it actually having a good impact on your whole metabolic health long term? I think that’s the beauty of Levels. You can really track these things over a very long duration of time and start to make some really helpful insights about what’s actually hurting or harming your health. So that’s a little bit of my story.
Josh Clemente (10:06):
I’m also curious, as we wrap up this section, I’m curious about what Levels can do to dramatically improve the experience in your opinion? What was the biggest sticking point or something that you hope to see emerge from the Levels experience in the near term?
Katie Moore (10:25):
I actually had a beautiful conversation with Sam around, I want to say October or November, after my Oura Ring video came out, where it talked a little bit about the subscriptions and membership fees and how I just want to make these things more accessible to people. This is really where, I think, your company is just so dialed in. Because you all know the people who need this service the most are probably the people that can’t afford it.
(10:58):
So where I want to see Levels go, and I know that you guys are working on this with the new membership rollout and all of that, is I just want to see these things become more cost effective. I want to see them in hospitals and schools and university facilities, and getting more people access to this kind of data that could potentially help them so much with their health journey. Because it really just takes one positive experience to get somebody to start to actually understand their health better, and see a metric and start to make those correlations between what they can eat and how they can exercise.
(11:40):
I think it’s a rabbit hole. It certainly did that for me. It has made this whole new level of conscious awareness around what I’m eating and how I’m exercising and how all these things do come into play. To think that my mom or my sister or relatives that are maybe not even clued into this kind of stuff could one day be able to afford this and this could be part of their lifestyle, that’s what gets me going. That’s what got me so excited in Levels to start.
(12:11):
So keep up the great work. I don’t have anything from a user perspective. I think what you guys are doing is great. I do love those new cards, by the way. Fantastic. But I really think once we can make this more cost effective and people have user access, that’s when things are going to change. Thank you.
Josh Clemente (12:38):
Thank you. That’s a really awesome reminder. I’m quite excited about a few initiatives we have in play right now. Even in the time that I’ve been using CGM, the price has come down by about an order of magnitude, unbelievably. There’s quite a bit of runway left, I think, in making this more accessible, both by increasing the market size and then letting supply and demand do their thing. And then also just specific programs that we have in place, which we’ll be rolling out sometime soon, which will also come with some pricing improvements. Love that reminder. Accessibility is key. Actionability is the next step, but first you have to be able to get your hands on it. Katie, thank you so much for joining us. This is really awesome. I know everyone on the team appreciates hearing these insights. Just love having you as a partner to what we’re doing here.
Katie Moore (13:23):
I also just want to know when a CGM is coming out for dogs, because he will be lining up first thing to get one. He is very excited to see what kibble does to his blood sugar levels. Keep us posted with that.
Josh Clemente (13:37):
Coming soon. I think we’ve already got a number of examples from our membership where people are using CGMs for their animals, so I think that’s the next wave.
Katie Moore (13:46):
Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much. I appreciate it. Keep up the great work.
Josh Clemente (13:49):
Thank you very much, Katie.
(13:51):
I’m going to jump forward to the Culture and Kudos here. The topic is, what’s up with the new format? This is an experiment. At least a couple messages in the Friday Forum threads over the past two weeks just explaining what the thought process is here. We’ve, over time, drifted in the direction of more and more content, more team members, more projects underway. The forum has been serving a dual purpose where it’s asynchronous time, it’s the only real full meeting synchronous time that we have on our calendar, and we really want to have that connection, that team engagement, member centricity reinforcement, values alignment, et cetera. Simultaneously, we’ve been using it as a project update across all the projects we have going.
(14:39):
As we get larger, as we have full scale liftoff and many new projects hitting the ground, we’re not going to be able to fit all of that content into a 90 minute meeting. Even 90 minutes is more than 50% longer than the 60 minutes that we started out at. The goal here is to attempt a new split focus approach where we have the 60 minute synchronous format, and then we also have all of the asynchronous project updates available, but they can be consumed ad hoc or at your own speed. We’ll combine those two into a single Friday Forum each week, but we’ll have the asynchronous stuff delivered on Thursdays from DRIs, and we’ll have the synchronous meeting on Fridays, 60 minutes long. This is going to be a total experiment. Bear with me on this first attempt here.
(15:27):
I really, really need feedback. If something is resonating or not resonating, if you really value something that we removed or you don’t feel that we’re getting enough of something else, please just make that clear. Go ahead and send the feedback directly to me through email, if you want, or write in a Friday Forum thread. That would be great. That’s what we’re going through today, is the first rollout here, and we’ll see how it goes.
(15:52):
Culture and Kudos number two. We had a meet up in New York City this week. Tom doesn’t look very happy about this. I just noticed Tom’s face here. This was a bit ad hoc. We had some people coming in from Growth who were going to do a dinner at Sam’s. Miz and I happened to be in town, and so we ended up just merging groups and. Sam and Varia hosted us at their apartment in New York City. We also grabbed a WeWork and did some really great just deep sync time, is what we called it. So suspending agenda and diving deep on topics that maybe had built up over the past few weeks or months, and getting some of that out of the way. It was awesome for me to be able to increase my bingo card and meet up with people like Ben, who I had not met in person yet, and Moz. Paul came in from Montreal. It was really great. Came together organically.
(16:43):
Another example, I think following up on the Austin meetup that we had in March, that these sorts of things are really a great outlet. We’ll start to learn from them, and eventually implement something more consistent where we can make these optional and still have the small group where you can have that deep connection, not necessarily moving towards the entire company, but just making these available for people who want to join.
(17:07):
Company objectives. The main thing hasn’t changed. Levels shows you how food affects your health. We had some really great conversations. We’ve had some in threads, some in person, but just engaging over what the alignment, the path of progression is, where Levels shows you how food affects your health such that what? Obviously, we all have the intention of solving the metabolic health crisis, and this is one step on that journey. Understanding how food affects your health is critical, and probably the largest or longest lever that you have to pull on. There will be more to come once we get to the point where… We feel that once you’re in the Levels experience for X amount of time, you understand how food affects your health, that unlocks a tremendous amount of opportunity for the next main thing.
(17:53):
North Star Metric. JM is not with us right now. I do think that he has… Nope. So he updated this slide. We had daily food loggers was down slightly week over week. This can be a noisy metric where we have up weeks, down weeks. You can see we’ve jumped down a little bit here, but still relatively flat, all things considered, especially since we are still experiencing some of the deliberate backing off of the gate. We closed the gate a little bit a few weeks ago as we hit really high volumes, and we’re still experiencing some of the tail end of that effect.
(18:28):
All right. And then Miz has another update on behalf of Moz, discussing the company objectives that he touched on at the end of his first update.
Miz (18:36):
One more update here. Sorry about the background noise. Top objectives here, got member retention, health improvement, and acquisition. Each of these with key initiatives associated with them, primarily US liftoff, UK liftoff, and [inaudible 00:18:49]. We’re using this terminology of GM for who’s owning each of these key initiatives, and then within each one of these key initiatives, there’s a whole host of projects that are contributing towards it. You can find all of this scaffolding in place now. A lot of the work has been really just coming around this. A lot of the progress this week has mostly been on the product side. Moz, Alan, Josh have had good conversations around improving health metrics and outcomes and building a framework for that, and defining what those actually look like in the product. That’s what’s been coming across, and a lot more expected in the next two or so weeks. That’s it on this front on behalf of Moz. Thanks, everyone.
Josh Clemente (19:31):
Just to reinforce that, we aren’t losing sight of the main objectives in order to get the main objectives clear to everyone. Right now, we have a couple key problems to solve. One of them is taking decisions and making it very clear who’s responsible for what, and then being able to understand what the process is to go and execute on those. Then the other side is, what are the key objectives? We need to have laser focus as we’re ramping into general availability and helping people understand how food affects their health and beyond. We got to scope that. And so Moz, with the help of many others, taking lead on aligning what those priorities are, paring back the scope of problems that we need to solve, such that we have the priorities list and the anti-priorities list. That’s what the output of this over the next two weeks, the objective is to get us all clear on what that looks like so we can move forward.
(20:25):
Experimentation & Learning section. The goal of this section, obviously with the new format, is just to continue to reinforce the culture of rapid cycles, experimentation, and most importantly, validated learning. Experimenting really doesn’t provide much benefit unless we learn from it, with the objective of member centricity being first and foremost. The best learning is one that comes from our members as opposed to strict analysis, for example. I believe Stacie is kicking us off.
Stacie Flinner (20:57):
Talking about our Instagram brand color experiments. In the end of 2021, we did a brand redesign. The earliest iterations of our brand, many people thought were a little bit masculine. The Army green just didn’t seem as welcoming, and so we went for something a little bit more, honestly, plant inspired with new greens. We’ve been implementing this fall 2021 rebrand for the last couple months. But in March, Alan and I were chatting, and thought perhaps it hadn’t reached… It could be better, honestly. It wasn’t quite accomplishing what we wanted. We figured one of the best ways to test a new color palette, or just play with color palette, was through Instagram, because it’s so much lower in lift than doing something to our website or other surfaces. The hypothesis is that since our main member base is composed of women between the ages of 35 and 65 and our Instagram following is 78% female, engagement will rise if we soften the brand colors. Move away from the really strong black and white and the really bold green to something that feels just a little softer and more neutral. Next slide.
(22:15):
The only thing we changed in this experiment is the color palette. The quantity of posts, the type of posts, the cadence, all the same. The cost to our team was that it took five seconds to change the colors per post. It’s a much lighter lift, as I said, than going in app and playing around and then trying to gather feedback. Next slide.
(22:39):
All right. Here’s just a quick look for those of you that don’t follow us on Instagram, but you should. Our March brand color palette, those blacks, the deep green that we were talking about, and then a subtle tweak in April where you’re seeing these lighter greens. All of these greens are actually a tint of our deep brand color green. If you can go to the next slide. Next slide, if you can. Thanks. That array at the bottom is an example of one post and how this was applied. You can see that we still have the darker brand color green implemented in the April test color palette. However, everything else is a tint of it. It’s a small percentage of the total saturation. So we’re not going too crazy, just little tweaks. But the difference is in March, things would be perhaps all black or all green, just much stronger. The April was just a tiny tweak. Next slide.
(23:44):
Just so we’re not confusing things, because obviously our Instagram grows month over month, and you want to make sure that you’re not attributing incorrect causality. Our followers between March and April grew by 6%, which is about 5,000 followers. End of March, it was at roughly 89,000, and by end of April, we were at 96,000 followers. That’s the control. It’s a small, very appropriate, modest growth in our following. Our impressions per post, so this is an average, grew 18% between March and April. Next slide.
(24:31):
The impressions only grew 18%, but the likes grew 35%, the shares grew 203%, and the saves grew 36%. It’s amazing. Seeing shares go up this much is incredible because it means that people are so excited about the content that they’re evangelizing it. They are sending it to their mom, they’re sending it to their Instagram stories so everyone that’s following them sees it. 35% and 36% are also very large increases as well, but I have to say that the shares is probably the thing I key off of the most, simply because it means that they’re eager to tell others about it. It’s a form of evangelism. It’s important for our growth. I think it shows that the messaging is hitting home. Next slide.
(25:19):
A simple test comparing two months against each other. The engagement definitely increased across the board with the softer color palette. I’m not saying that these are the new brand colors because we haven’t played… I’m sure there’s even more room for improvement. But I think that this showed that by softening the colors, and not making them girly and not making it pink, but just making it a little more generally inviting, we can increase growth, we can increase engagement, and that just means that we’re getting our message out to more people. Next steps we’ll be potentially redesigning our graphics to be slightly less angular and harsh, and doing additional color experimentation. We can also consider the learnings from this and applying them across other surfaces if we think that it’s valuable and resources allow. So there we go.
Josh Clemente (26:15):
That’s pretty unbelievable. Thank you, Stacie. I think the data on that’s mind blowing. Awesome. Thank you for doing the first Experimentation & Learning example. I think David is taking the next one.
David Flinner (26:29):
Just to reiterate that the product team and development team is focused on validated learnings, especially on the blue sky area on the now project, so laser focused on learning and iterating on that. Next slide.
(26:41):
One quick win. I wanted to say moving this project that Steven worked on, which was adding the glucose line to the meal scores and the in-progress meals into a validated learning. We are not hearing as much about confusion on this screen. I’ve had several people reach out to me saying that they like this on the context. I think this is really helpful for reducing confusion on this screen. Very nice on this one. Next slide.
(27:04):
Just a quick brief recap. What we’ve been hearing from members, as I said last week, was that we’re surfacing a lot of value in these full screen cards. Next slide. But the overall value had been distributed out. You can see the old home screen on the left where it’s more dense. All the full screen cards, you have to tap through many of them to get to all the value. It’s not as glanceable anymore. Next slide. The new hypothesis that Alan and I have been working on over the last week was that if we increase the density of that now page empty state while retaining the full screen treatments, it’s going to reduce friction, boost the overall perceived value that Levels has, and retain the clarity that you have from those individual cards as well as on the summary view. Next slide.
(27:47):
Alan put together, as Josh showed in the first slide, he put together this new prototype, which is a bit more of a modular empty state for the now page. Whenever you collapse those full screen cards, instead of getting hidden behind the activity widget, they’ll collapse into a smaller state, so you’ll always have a glanceable version of what you were seeing just before.
(28:04):
Alan, if you go to the next slide, has been doing some user testing with this. We’re getting some promising reactions, some early design focused validation, that the hypothesis and the proposed solution is resonating with members. Alan’s going to continue to do some of the user testing, but the feedback has been promising so far. I know one of the members said that this is the dashboard that they wish they had when they were starting out. If you haven’t seen it yet, Alan put a really nice, I think about 10 minute Loom that I’ve linked to here. It’s also in the now forum. Go ahead and watch that. You’re going to get a in-depth look at what the thinking is and where we’re going to be taking the next iteration for specifically the empty state for the now screen while retaining those full screen cards. Next slide.
(28:49):
I wanted to close the loop on some of the learnings we had last week. This week, the team responded to some quick wins. Some of the feedback we had was that a few of the cards weren’t as relevant, so Matt flagged that. Some of the cards were saying that we had non-alcoholic… We were giving someone an alcohol insight when they logged non-alcoholic beer. We’re working on excluding those right now with some updates to our string matching filters to just exclude all the things like penne alla vodka or non-alcoholic IPA. We launched the removal of the analog page, which some existing members were finding to be annoying because they already have been logging for a long time. The theme there is that if we present you with a full screen thing, it needs to be really relevant and tied to your data and something that you did. We want to increase and maximize the relevancy there.
(29:35):
Some of the more generic feedback we’ve had in the past around navigation being confusing, Justin pushed out a few nice changes around the reliability of the pagination widget and the tweaks to point to dismiss. So really nice here. We’ll follow up next week on how these are landing, but that was this week’s iteration. Next slide.
(29:53):
I just wanted to mention briefly that there’s a new experiment we’re rolling out soon. I think John will be finished with this today, the metabolic report. Our hypothesis is that a takeaway artifact is going to increase logging and have a sense of purpose in week one, and the metabolic report is going to be that test. So we’ll follow up on that. I think that’s it. Is there one more slide?
Josh Clemente (30:22):
That’s it.
David Flinner (30:23):
One more thing I wanted to mention. I actually forgot to include a slide for this. A big push for the last week has been getting… Now that we have a 50/50 split on our new members going to the now screen and the old home screen, Maxine and Justin and John have been working to help us end-to-end instrument the… Actually, and Chris, all together to instrument analytics on how we’re seeing engagement on the now page versus the homepage. We’re just starting. There were some tweaks we had to do yesterday to get a really nice picture for that. But Chris put together a dashboard. Actually, Chris and Maxine put together a dashboard to let us see food engagement. It looks like the initial take is that we’re seeing more food logs on now, which is promising, but I’ll have more of a report on this next week, so stay tuned.
Josh Clemente (31:09):
Awesome. Thank you, David.
(31:11):
Quick hiring updates.no change to the new team members. We’ve got Hui you joining us end of May as a software engineer, and that is quite exciting. We have on the open roles same thing. We posted a support associate role last week, and I think we’ve had just an overwhelming tide of interest, and many, many overqualified people who are just super stoked to get the ability to work directly with the Levels membership and understand how the product is translating into a marketplace. Super exciting. Tons of great response there. We’re still looking for the PM role, visual designer role, and of course, always software engineers. Our corporate counsel offer is out, and so should have some more updates quite soon. If you know anyone who’s a good match for any of these, please direct them to levels.link/careers.
(31:57):
Individual Contributions. As you can see, the content here is quite a bit reduced versus the previous format, so we’ll just dive right in. We’ve got a little extra breathing room here on these shares, and I think we’ll be able to easily make it through everyone. I’m going to switch out of the share mode to gallery mode. Again, if you want to follow along with what the order of operations is here, it’s going to be… You can click the participants button down at the bottom of your Zoom menu, and that’ll give you the order that I’ll be calling people out.
(32:27):
I’m going to kick off. Personally, I’m really excited to be home right now in Virginia. My parents are starting the process of getting ready to migrate out towards Montana. I’m poorly slept right now, as you can probably tell. But I’ve just been really enjoying hanging out with my parents and my sister here and reminiscing as we pack stuff up. Professionally, I had an awesome time in the deep sync mode with a couple people I hadn’t had a chance to meet on the team yet. Shout out to those of you that I got to meet for the first time this week. Really looking forward to just the team growth and just making these connections that I think are going to be lifelong. It’s great. Alan.
Alan McLean (33:14):
A big highlight, meeting people in an office again. It occurred to me while I was on the train that I hadn’t commuted into an office in years. It was great to see everybody. That was a big highlight of my week. I’m going on some runs this weekend too, so that’s going to be something I’m looking forward to.
Josh Clemente (33:38):
Awesome. Azure.
Azure (33:42):
Hey, guys. I think personal and professional right now, I’m excited for the community call, which is right after this, that I have to go to. Thank you to Cissy for that. Excited to meet members for the first time.
Josh Clemente (33:56):
Nice. Enjoy. Ben.
Ben Grynol (34:00):
Super stoked to have got to meet many people, which has been very cool professionally. Personally, the byproduct of that is diet has probably not been by at its best. There might be a New York slice around the corner after this forum, so we’ll see how that goes.
Josh Clemente (34:19):
No apologies. Britney.
Britney McLeod (34:24):
Thanks. I guess personally and professionally, this weekend, I’m doing a half marathon relay. It’s my first time doing a relay in this context, so excited for that. I’ve been training a bit for that. A good friend of mine that’s also doing the full half marathon, he got Levels about a month or two ago. He’s training ultimately for the Boston Marathon, and has really been watching Levels closely and reading the blog with all of our various articles about marathon training, and has found it so valuable. So that’s been on the personal and professional side. Super exciting to watch him go through that. Thanks.
Josh Clemente (35:11):
I came across some Twitter anecdotes of people who had run Boston whenever that was, a few weeks ago, and saw some really interesting deltas in blood sugar responses. They were posting their glucose. There’s got to be… I think we should dive into the dataset and just see. There’s clear variation in how people respond. That reminds me that we should dig into that. It’s really interesting. Casey.
Casey Means (35:36):
Oops, sorry. Okay, so let’s see. First thing, so excited about Terry joining. Just such an incredible addition to the advisory board, and bringing an amazing perspective around autoimmune disease and metabolic health. So excited. Second thing, I just have been so inspired by Sonya’s work this week. Week four for her, so end of onboarding, and already rolled out this incredible new process really embodying cultural principles. I think this whole welcome program for the advisors, she’s going to retroactively apply some of that to our existing advisors. It just really helps just show how much we care about adding value to them.
(36:17):
Last thing. Unfortunately, he’s not on the call, but Moz, I think I’ve just been very inspired by… He’s organizing large groups of people, I think, to really figure out some of this KPI and OKR stuff, and does just a really beautiful job of navigating conversations amongst a lot of people. I’ve just been really inspired and taking notes on how he does that. Last thing, I’ve just been listening to Lauren and Taylor’s podcast, and they are just absolutely killing it. It’s so fun to hear them talk about Levels on these pods.
Josh Clemente (36:53):
That’s a shout out I meant to make. I feel the same. Hearing the messaging evolve with new people is so exciting. It’s awesome. Chris.
Chris Jones (37:06):
On the Levels front, it is just… With the support associate role, as I mentioned, I think we’ve had 55 people apply within a week with no advertising, people finding it on our website. Only 80% of them are very overqualified for this role. I probably met with two-thirds of them, and just hearing their stories, their passions in terms of Levels or their journey, it just reminds me that this is such a special place and what we’re trying to do is so impactful, and they just all want to be a part of it in whatever way they can. While it blows up my calendar and it breaks my async, which is why my Loom isn’t out yet for the update, it’s really great to meet and hear all the people’s stories.
(37:51):
On the personal side, two things. One, the 100 foot cranes that I mentioned finally came in yesterday. They took down 14 trees around our house, so now it looks very different. You can probably hear chainsaws in the background as they’re now cleaning up all the work. They’ve removed a total of 100 trees from our little five acre plot. I was just watching, like, “Please don’t drop that thing on my house. Please don’t drop it on my house.” I was like a little kid out there taking photos. It was a lot of fun. Secondly, we are hosting a Mother’s Day brunch on Sunday, so a reminder to everyone to tell your mothers that you love them and that you owe everything to them.
Josh Clemente (38:34):
Love it. Great reminder there. Also awesome to hear about the experience so far. A number of those candidates have reached out to me and just expressed how excited they are to just even be able to have the conversation. Just speaking with you, I think, has been really inspiring, even on top of the posting. It’s pretty amazing to hear those anecdotes from people who want to want to join the team. Cissy.
Cissy Hu (38:59):
Hey, everyone. Highlight for me was spending the week in New York with the team as well, getting to know everyone and having some really deep conversations around Levels and life. Really enjoyed it. Also feeling quite under slept. Personally, I’m hosting two of my best friends in San Francisco this weekend, so I’m excited to spend some time outdoors in fresh air, a little less New York City vibes.
Josh Clemente (39:26):
Nice. Enjoy. Jackie.
Jackie Tsontakis (39:32):
Personally and professionally, this week was so much fun seeing everyone in New York. Huge thanks to Sam and Varia for hosting us, and Cissy and Mike for planning out the WeWork and organizing that. We had some awesome big discussions in the WeWork. It was just cool to be a part of those synchronous conversations that we don’t get to have too often. Personally, I’m back in New Jersey for the summer, and I’m really excited to be at the beach and hang out with some family.
Josh Clemente (39:59):
Nice. Enjoy. Jenn.
Jenn Palandro (40:02):
It’s the end of week three. I can’t believe it. I am just really excited to start working on stuff after week four. These past three weeks has been so great to meet people one-on-one and in smaller groups. Very excited about Terry Wahls joining as an advisor too. Personally, this weekend, tomorrow one of my best friends is getting married, so very pumped about that.
Josh Clemente (40:26):
Cool. Have fun. Justin.
Justin Stanley (40:31):
Levels wise, I’m really excited about the little glucose learning game that Alan and Merlo have been tweaking and improving. It’s coming along and I can’t wait for members to get to play with that. Personally, summer’s finally here in Winnipeg. It’s warm enough I was outside in the backyard for the remainder of the afternoon, and it was great. Tomorrow, going to take my mom out for lunch for Mother’s Day. Vietnamese. Excited. Glucose will go way up, I’m sure.
Josh Clemente (41:04):
How did we go from four feet of snow to summer? There was no spring in Winnipeg?
Justin Stanley (41:10):
Well, there’s still some snow, I think, but it’s hot enough that it… We went straight to 22 Celsius, and now it’s all hot and I love it.
Josh Clemente (41:20):
Snow on the ground in summer. Karin.
Karin Nielsen (41:27):
Levels wise, I’m super excited to finally be able to get some people onboarded here in the UK. I get bugged by so many folks about trying it. I can’t wait to get it into people’s hands. Personally, I have my mom-in-law visiting from Switzerland this weekend. My bike actually got stolen last week, so I’m expecting a new one to arrive tomorrow, which is kind of sad, but also exciting because new stuff is cool.
Josh Clemente (41:57):
Nice. Enjoy. Super stoked for the pilot testing over there. It’s going to be rapid learning. Matt.
Matt Flanagan (42:09):
Levels wise, the New York City meetup was a highlight of the week. The conversations we were about to have about value of membership and the synchronous sessions are definitely super high value for me personally. That was awesome. Personally, one of my best friends from high school stopped by yesterday. He actually just started a remote job, and he was going through that honeymoon moon phase of finally having all of his time back to himself and how productive he’s seen himself be in the past few months that he’s doing it. So it’s exciting to see other people doing and exploring this new way to work.
Josh Clemente (42:48):
I’ve been having some really exciting conversations with other teams who are well ahead of us on the progression adopting some of the culture principles. It’s pretty wild. Maxine.
Maxine Whitely (43:03):
Levels wise, it’s been fun to be tracking the IRB approval and the engineering work that’s happening around that. The new UI is looking really good. Shout out to Steven on that. I don’t know if he’s on the call. I’m excited to see some new processes coming in the [inaudible 00:43:22] Personally, I’m actually heading back to New York this weekend, so I just missed a bunch of you. But I think I’ll see some of you later this month, which is really exciting.
Josh Clemente (43:29):
Great. Love it. Haney.
Mike Haney (43:36):
To build off that point, I’ve just really been enjoying the opportunity to follow along the [inaudible 00:43:43] the lift off, the IRB approval. A bunch of things I’m not directly involved in, but because of our transparency and the way everything is documented in threads, I just feel like it’s the way Moz and Jam and Cara and all these people do their jobs. On the personal side, I’m really loving being back out on the trails and doing long trail runs. I’m training for…
Josh Clemente (44:13):
I lost Haney’s feed. I think you cut out there for a bit. We got the excited to be back out on the trail trails doing some long runs, which is awesome to hear. All right. Paul.
Paul Barszcz (44:33):
I’m in New York as well. Super stoked to be here. Haven’t left the country in almost two years, so it’s fun to be here. I think one of the other highlights is I reached my max glucose ever at 200 something. I don’t know. It probably went higher than 200. It was thanks to the pizza. I’m probably going to have it again today. We’ll see.
Josh Clemente (44:59):
Got to do the head-to-head comparison, make sure you’re accounting for poor sleep if that happened. Love that. Ryley.
Ryley Walker (45:08):
I just want to call out there’s been some really cool comments from our partners around accessibility and affordability over the last couple forums. I think it’s a hard problem to solve, but really excited to be part of that from a finance lens. I think finance can obviously play a huge part in getting there. It’s going to be a tough journey, but I think we’ll get there.
Josh Clemente (45:36):
For sure. Really appreciate your support and new perspectives on a lot of these things as well. It’s been awesome. Sonja.
Sonja Manning (45:46):
Hi, everyone. This is the end of my formal onboarding, so that’s been super exciting. I’m excited to continue to learn well into the coming months after onboarding officially ends. I have loved starting to dive into some of the work starting with the Stanford lecture prep and Terry advisor onboarding. I need throw that shout-out that Casey gave to me right back at her. She’s been so wildly supportive and encouraging and providing me amazing feedback along the way. So thank you, Casey. Personally, I’ve had a horrible cold this week, so apologies for any hacking that you’ve heard on my Loom videos. The good news about this week, despite my cold, is my partner, Alex, moved in with me, which has been fun. Mostly someone to make massive lunch salads with. This weekend, I’m just going to relax and try to beat my cold.
Josh Clemente (46:37):
Hope you feel better. Looking forward to Chatting 101 later today. I think that’s going to be our first. Stacie.
Stacie Flinner (46:49):
On the Levels front, excited to finally meet Ben tonight. Came into New York just for that. On the personal front, just things in bloom and getting outdoors, canoeing and sitting on the porch and being able to drink coffee outside. All hugely thrilling.
Josh Clemente (47:07):
Awesome. Enjoy. Tom.
Tom Griffin (47:12):
Redundant, but the Levels New York City meet up. There’s still a few people here. We’ve been hanging. That’s the squad right now. I’m behind on email and threads, so apologies to anyone for that. On Monday, I go to Mexico for a couple of weeks, so I’m very excited for that.
Josh Clemente (47:33):
Nice. Enjoy the hangout and Mexico. Tony.
Tony Milio (47:40):
Also redundant. Just have to say it was so awesome, personally and professionally, just seeing so much, seeing the whole team. Not the whole team, but so many of the team members the past few days, as well as at the dinner the other night. That was just really awesome.
Josh Clemente (48:03):
All right. Well, we basically filled the hour here. This is, as I said, an experiment. We’re going to have a combined video, which will include the asynchronous updates associated with projects. That will go out later today, TBD. We’re going to try and pull that together in a way that is effective, and then everyone can watch those updates on their own time. Once that process happens with one iteration, I’ll send out a request for more feedback so we can evolve this process. Generally speaking, keep the goals in mind. We want to make sure we have the space for personal connection on this live meeting, that’s what synchronous is best for, and then have the space for keeping up to speed on how projects are evolving in asynch way. Anyway, thanks everybody for playing along. Looking forward to the feedback. Have a great weekend. Thanks for all the help this week and all the awesome connection.