Josh Clemente (00:00):
All right, welcome to Friday Forum, July 7th, 2023. Kind of a light week this week. We’ve got obviously the holiday, a bunch of people traveling, and we had a meetup, which actually we have lots of the growth team here as is.
(00:15):
So digging straight in, this week the growth team had a meetup onsite. I think everybody was able to make it except maybe one. And I think this is the first sort of growth team focused meetup that has happened, at least in the new era of growth focus, which is awesome. See a shot from that. That get together, it looks like they divided people based on introversion and extroversion, which is always a good idea. And seems like an overall great time. On top of that, the Q3 growth priorities memo was shipped, so Karen put that out on Comms, definitely recommend digging in there. Again, this is the core focus for the company over the next few months, and so that’ll be a really good way to get aligned on what priorities the growth team is focusing on and how we’re executing on those.
(00:58):
On the performance marketing side, we’ve got some continued experimentation going specifically on the Meta platform. So we are trending towards, CAC targets have not yet hit those customer acquisition cost targets yet, but we are moving in the right direction. And then we’re also doing some experimentation with, for example, Google keyword bidding. So rather than just producing content that helps us rank on SEO and land on Google keyword search results, we’re also going to be actively taking a position and potentially starting to buy out some specific keywords that we really want to make sure that we rank on. So we’ll be just learning through that process, and again, this is all part of the overall focus on growth and getting, as Tom’s growth memo put it, more of that signage out there, helping people to understand that Levels exists and how to find us.
(01:44):
All right, the single app. We have multiple names for this, but the app surface area reduction, the unified app experience, hybrid, lean hybrid. All that to say the single app which allows everyone to sort of get onto Levels Classic with a reduced amount number of services that we’re supporting, has now shipped to 20%. We have a single logging bug that is currently holding that from going up to 100%, but we’ll be shipping this to 100% of members as soon as that bug is taken care of. So we’re moving in the right direction.
(02:15):
And we have a dog fooding project, so dog fooding, for those who aren’t super familiar is, you want to eat your own dog food is the concept, but the point is that we all are the ones building this product. We want to build a product that we love, and so it’s super important Levels team is not just using in the background, but also putting out their own feedback to the team so that we’re capturing that closed loop. So we’re starting a dog fooding project with about eight of the Levels team. I’m sure we will increase this over time. We’re also focusing specifically on feedback around reports, monthly and annually. So Kosima’s kicked this off, please get involved in the app. We do have an uptick happening in app usage on the Levels team, which is great, but this is a personal responsibility to be in the app and helping us improve.
(03:00):
We also had a deep dive on retention that Kosima did. You can see some of these, it’s super interesting analysis for both May and June. Highly recommend digging into this. This is in Comms, but just some kind of snippets here. Very interesting to see how churn and/or retention relate to specifically glucose in the app and logging. So for example, a very heavy predictor of whether or not somebody is going to retain, is whether they have logged food in the month prior to the month that their membership is up. We also have a really interesting number of people who are using Levels, or rather using Levels without CGMs that they’ve aquired through Levels. So, BYOD for example.
(03:44):
And so we have a fairly high renewal rate there, which is quite interesting. We have not focused on this yet. So anyway, lots of great stuff on that. Dive into Churn, on the set that we’ve shipped into validation. So we have BYOD with Amazon, so this is now out to a few of our members and also to our team. So we are validating that. We’ve got anomaly detection 2.0. The intention there is to reduce duplicate anomalies. So spike detection, we were having that sort of flagged in two locations and we were getting lots of duplicates, and also some dissimilar duplicates.
(04:12):
So events being tagged twice but in dissimilar ways. We’ve got that out and that should be a big improvement. We also have a quick fix on the logging flow. We broke logging into two steps. And it was not clear to people that they could just finish one of those steps and have a complete log, and then add more detail later if they wanted. People felt like they had to go through both steps in order to do a log in the first place. This quick fix is now shipped and in validation, which is great. Then coming up soon, we have a bunch of small bytes, basically just a backlog of items that we can quickly ship to improve the app experience. We have an overall project called Fix Jank, which is going to do a lot more of this. And then the back end of the app is going to be updated to sort of match the front end as we’ve moved into the reduced surface area single app experience.
(04:59):
We’re also going to update the back end of the system. All right. Add new sensor type, ready for release. You can see some images here. We have new sensors coming quickly into the Levels ecosystem and we’ve built a much cleaner flow to help people understand both how to access that menu from the homepage and then also an easy way to step through tool tips and that sort of thing. We’ve got a new homepage built for the Levels website. We’re migrating the WordPress system that the website is built on over to React. So this is all in work. This is going to make, first of all a mobile first experience, and then also just an internal vertically integrated build that we will have much more control over for experimentation. And then all the engineering metrics are much improved over the past few weeks. Specifically I think this is a downstream of the new culture of measurement and accountability that we’re implementing.
(05:51):
So big shout out to the eng team. Again, I mentioned previously the team app usage is increasing. And then on the support side we’ve got a couple weeks of 95% happiness, which we have not touched that level of happiness on the customer support side in a long time, which is really exciting. We have been above 90, but to get to 95% is generally unheard of in the world of direct to consumer products. So huge, huge shout out to the team. We’ve also had an increase in member calls, so across engineering support team. Sam has taken a ton of these. You can see these in Comms. Product, everyone is spending time with our members and I’m going to be picking up more of these. Casey’s going to be picking up more of these, but overall this is the re-centering on our members, on growth, on nailing the basics, and it’s super visible.
(06:35):
Please do check out some of these calls. There’s a lot of them. I think it’s going to be hard to stay on top of all of it, but overall very cool to see the team really aligning and leaning in here. Then we had a really fast effort on weight loss data. Digging into weight loss data and market analysis for a business development opportunity that we may have in a few months. Some of that is visible here, but Zach put out a quick memo on this, or really it’s a document that we shared with a potential partner, but it is really interesting to see the dive on weight loss. And specifically the correlation between weight loss with Levels app usage and specifically with logging. So there’s a trend line here, which is basically median weight change with food logging frequency inside Levels, and you can see a fairly strong and linear correlation, basically as you log more weight tends to decrease.
(07:25):
And then we also saw that and how it correlates with BMI, so starting body mass index. So people who have weight to lose, tend to lose weight if they’re using Levels, and specifically if they’re engaging with Levels over time by logging. All super interesting. Lots more that we have to do here. This is a pretty preliminary dive, but super awesome to see. All right, a few other things. So we have a new insert card for the product that we’re shipping, so this is much prettier. We’ve got a QR code to launch and some simple steps there, so pretty cool to get that out. And then we had a whole new Level with Scott Kelly, who was a retired astronaut, and did the twins study. Which where one of his, basically his twin brother was on the ground, he was in space for a year, and they measured a lot of metabolic and other longevity oriented metrics while the twins were separated by a hundred miles and one was in zero gravity.
(08:18):
So that was a really fun episode and we dove into some of his personal health improvements since using Levels. And then we’ve got some love for the Levels culture and ecosystem here, so I think that’s everything. All right. With that I want to welcome Mariah Vitoria. Mariah is a member of Levels, content creator. She’s been documenting her weight loss journey on social channels and promotes a lot of the same themes around fasting, intuitive eating, low-carb living, and data-driven feedback on health and wellness. Mariah, I really appreciate you joining us today. Thanks for stopping by on the Friday Forum. I would love to hear some more about what you’re excited about in the world of metabolic health.
Mariah Vitoria (09:00):
Yeah, so I’ve had such a positive experience with Levels over the past few months that I’ve been trying out the product. And some really interesting things that I have found is my glucose numbers, specifically around doing cold plunges. So for me I’m always experimenting, trying new things, seeing how I can manipulate the numbers. And that is one consistent thing seeing drops anywhere from 10 to 25 points on my CGM, so that’s been really, really cool. Also, food pairing has been really quite interesting as well. Just adding in a ton of fats to higher carb meals and seeing how my numbers are positively impacted in that way as well. I was actually fortunate enough to speak with one of the nutritionists through Levels, Lauren, yesterday and she was able to help me do a bit of a deep dive on my numbers, which was a really great experience.
(09:57):
She’s super knowledgeable. And she kind of helped me determine some potential things around the numbers, the negative numbers that I’m seeing while I’m sleeping. Pretty volatile actually. And so came kind of to the conclusion that, how impactful my screen time before my sleep is on my number. So that has been something that at the end of the day it was pretty obvious to recognize that, but it was just nice hearing that from someone else. It’s definitely a tough thing to do, like wind down that one to two hours. But she informed me that usually you can see an impact in one hour, but everyone’s going to be a little bit different. And the one to two hour mark of eliminating screen time and TV time is something that can positively impact my numbers.
Josh Clemente (10:52):
Super interesting. I definitely find that my sleep is destroyed if I’m doing screens, specifically if I’m doing knowledge work late into the night. So I have not seen that correlation with glucose though. So, really interesting. Mariah, I’d love to hear with your experience thus far in Levels, what you think we should be investing most in. Where’s an area of opportunity for us that you haven’t seen us yet take a swing at or that you think is just kind of a big miss so far in the product experience, the app, or maybe it’s another product that you think we should be focusing on that you haven’t yet seen?
Mariah Vitoria (11:26):
That is a great question. I guess just always being able to, I feel like when it comes to tracking data, I’m tracking data across many different apps. So just having the opportunity to add more data within the Levels app, whether that’s sleep related data, so it would be really cool in the future to see partnerships with maybe Oura Ring or different companies like that to kind of integrate everything and tell a bigger picture of what’s happening, and to be able to make more accurate correlations.
Josh Clemente (12:03):
Yeah, absolutely. I think that a lot of people are really yearning to be able to pull together all the information that is all sub components of our experience, and we’re tracking this in many locations. And one of the key elements of building a coherent experience is that it has to be useful. Pulling in data has to be actionable in some way or insightful in some way. And so I’d love to, maybe just as the last bit here, what are the main insights that you are interested in personally? You share a lot about your weight loss journey. You’re creating a ton of content around how to live an intuitive eating lifestyle. What insights are you most interested in personally, and what would be the type of data beyond sleep that would help you the most that in the Levels ecosystem?
Mariah Vitoria (12:53):
Let’s see here, probably more information. When I started using the Levels app, seeing my numbers around exercise was something that I had a lot of questions about. So maybe more information around the correlations with exercise and numbers that reflect that. So I’ve seen higher numbers from exercising than I have from foods that I would anticipate to really skyrocket my glucose. And so, maybe some more information around exercise specifically, just to give better direction. And what those numbers actually mean, they’re not necessarily negative, but maybe just some more clarity there.
Josh Clemente (13:36):
Yeah, it’s a great reminder. There’s some intuitive and counterintuitive things that happen when we put a sensor on. And yeah, the high intensity versus low intensity exercise, and seeing those big blood sugar spikes can be pretty disorienting initially. So it’s a great reminder and something I personally see all the time. All right, Mariah, thank you so much for joining us this morning. If you’d like to stick around, we have another couple sections that we go through each morning, or every Friday here on the Forum. Would love to have you, if not, on behalf of the whole team, I really appreciate you taking some time and joining. We really appreciate hearing directly from you and look forward to staying in touch as you continue using Levels.
Mariah Vitoria (14:14):
Thank you, I appreciate you having me. Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to stay for the rest of the call, but I’ll definitely watch back and find out all the new and exciting things that are happening.
Josh Clemente (14:25):
Awesome. Well thank you so much for supporting us and using Levels. And have an awesome weekend.
Mariah Vitoria (14:30):
Thanks, you too.
Josh Clemente (14:32):
Jumping ahead, we’ve got a quick Culture and Kudos slide. So firstly, I want to congratulate Cosima on hitting one year here at Levels. Honestly seems like more, I always give my subjective interpretation of whether the amount of time has passed seems right or not. And in this case, it seems like it’s been longer. So I think that’s due to all the incredible work that Cosima is doing and just moving the ball forward every single day here at Levels. It’s really awesome to work together. And then I have two shout-outs on the Culture side. I want to highlight this example which is visible in Comms around the measurement project, but Galit and Juan have been doing incredible work on the measurement systems. How we sort of pull in data, how we analyze it, how we build charts from it, and how we can essentially pull out learnings and improve both on the growth side, the product side, and just general business analytics.
(15:20):
And they ran into some disagreement essentially on which platform is best fit for the various types of analytics that we need to do. And this is a really awesome example of navigating a disagreement. Both advocating in good faith for the tool set that they think would be the most effective for the team and for a specific use case. And then getting onto a sync call and essentially finding a way to a great solution. This was a combination of disagree and commit, and also just good communication. And so I just want to highlight this is not easy to do, it’s a very active process of making forward recommendations, being solutions oriented, not getting caught up in the disagreement specifically, but actually on the problems that we’re looking to solve. And just a really excellent example, and I really appreciate that, not only did this happen, it happened so quickly. And all the information if you need it, the Loom video of the call, all readily available in the conversation. So thanks to Juan and Galit, and many others who are working on this project.
(16:20):
And then a really cool example of ownership, and just sort of outside the box thinking here, from Stoddy. So Stoddy essentially is recommending that we implement a synchronous outreach for people who are sort of stuck in the purchase process who maybe haven’t completed a consult form, which is necessary in order for a purchase to transition into an order and devices shipping. A lot of people get stuck here. It’s a pretty difficult and hard to understand experience, because we do have regulated devices as part of our product. So Stoody anyways, putting forward a really great idea, characterizing, and without spending too much time just sort of characterizing what sort of costs this might represent and how we might go about launching this program. And it’s a really great example of taking ownership even though this is maybe outside of what Stoody specifically is working on day to day. His goal here is to increase the number of completed purchases into orders and potentially into retain customers.
(17:16):
And that’s just a huge area of opportunity for us. So big shout out to Stoody, many other people doing this sort of thing, but this is a really good example. And then we got some great images of meetups that happened this week. So in Canada we’ve got Zach and Ryley together in Canmore. And then in Montana, Mercy and Taylor were able to get together in Bozeman, and both look awesome. I love seeing these remote meetups in the sync as we are typically able to pull together meetups on the group level, but I love it when people sort of detour out of their way to spend time together. Dog-os name, I do not know. That’s a great question. Riley, you got to let us know. All right, over to Miz.
Michael Mizrahi (18:05):
All right, a few updates on the people side. First one, is that we sent out the updated Q2 culture survey yesterday, so please fill that out by the end of next week. Last quarter saw a lot of change to product strategy, to team headcount. Obviously we’ve gone through quite a bit and there’s been a lot of shifts, so want to take the pulse. See how everyone’s doing. Reminder that this is not optional, so please make sure to complete it so we don’t have to chase anyone. And then obviously we’ll share the action items that come out of each one. This isn’t just passive, but we’ll make changes as a result of it moving forward. Second thing, updated handbook a few weeks ago. So reminding everyone that that’s there and accessible, we’re going to start really managing and maintaining those docs. Two I wanted to point out that had some recent updates.
(18:49):
One is our extended leaves policy, so you have paid leaves and unpaid leaves. We made a change to the paid leave policy and the number of weeks associated with it and brought it to 12, which is kind of a sweet spot of what’s realistic for our stage for the business, but still generous and considerate for people’s needs. So anyone that is on a previous paid extended leave, there’s no changes there. Everything will still be honored, but moving forward the default has changed. And case by case, we’ll take this as they come up. So speak to your manager, reach out to me, whatever it might be if you have any questions on this one. And then the second one here is spending money responsibly. Riley put out a memo with a little bit of an update of how we’re considering our budgets as it relates to forecasting.
(19:28):
The bottom line here is spend with the company’s best interest, in line with company values. Spend what you need to, but also be responsible about this. And so we’re being a little bit more intentional about where our dollars are going, so that we can put it towards growth, and the business, and the mission versus other expenses that might not give us as much return. So that’s that. And then final one is the performance database. As part of the transparency strategy, we’re leaning into sharing more internally with the exception of compensation and leveling, but everything else is for the most part out there in terms of one-on-ones, meeting recordings by default. So not as a rule of thumb, but by default we’re going to lean into sharing things like feedback, monthly manager check-ins, performance reviews moving forward. So if you want to add anything retrospectively, you can do that, just add it to your page in the performance database.
(20:17):
But otherwise, this is kind of just like a baseball card with your performance profile, things you’re working on, feedback from your peers, check-ins from your manager, your own self-reflections. So we’ll test drive this, see how it goes, and curious to hear all the feedback. A few people have already leaned into sharing past performance reviews or to giving peer feedback there, but it’s really, really new and fresh. So we’ll feel it out. That’s it on this side. If you have any questions on spending money, Riley’s going to have some office hours as well moving forward for everything finance, but he’s happy to chat about that too.
Josh Clemente (20:50):
Awesome, thank you Miz. And yeah, just to double click on the feedback part of this, this is, as we say here, everything’s written in pencil. We’re trying to improve the overall culture, how we run this business and this culture, and so we need that closed feedback loop. So let us know how this is working, how it’s not working, recommendations for improvement.
(21:11):
All right, the company priority, does this get us to 10% month over month? So this is the main focus and the main thing, where we’re all working towards this and super important to understand how specifically your program, your project, your function is supporting this. Again, the Q3 growth priorities memo came out. It’s sort of an outlay from the growth memo that Tom wrote a few weeks ago. Please review both of those. It’s super important to understand the strategy and see how your efforts fit into that. And with the Monday metrics meeting, which if you’re not on that channel, recommend subscribing and checking out some of those. But the Monday metrics meeting is where we connect the dots between what we’ve built this week and where the numbers are. And so, that’s how we’re continuing to push the metric driven culture that we’re working towards. All right, with that we’ve got an engineering update from Hui, I’m going to go ahead and launch this.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
I’m Hui, and I Lead Engineer at Levels. So today I’m going to present engineering function at Levels. So I’ll be talking about what does Engineering Team do, and also what do I do, because those are actually two fairly different topics. So first of all, what does engineering do? I think when people are asked of this question, the first reaction probably is coding. I guess the answer is both right and not right. The right part is, yes, Software Engineers do write a lot of the code, and that’s their core job or very essential parts of building the software. That’s our app, that’s our website, and the backend services that are supporting those using interfaces. And the not so right part is, fundamentally what engineering do, what engineer does is to build the right things to achieve 20% month-over-month growth goal for us in the next six to 12 months, right?
(23:13):
And then the right things doesn’t always involve technical solution, while 99% of time they do. And as part of their culture shift that we initiated when we changed our strategy in May, we also want engineer to write less code and be thinking about more around, basically to think less about what implementation to build, but rather whether it’s the right implementation to do. So that means we are seeing, or we are transitioning in this direction, where engineers day to day will be less on coding, but more on product and design. This is also the average looking for the whole team. It doesn’t mean each engineer will do exact the same breakdown, but the gist here is engineers will get to know more about our product, about their user impact, their user experience, user pain points to better understand whether we’re building the right things, and how do we build the right things.
(24:15):
And here I list out the source for truth where you can look up what engineers do exactly at high level. So first of all, this resourcing sheet is something that I, and definitely Sam as well, visit multiple times a day. And from here you can see first of all the Eng Teams division, which is now we have a Product Eng Team and Growth Eng Team. You can see their allocation plan, and also their themes that each engineer is going to work on for a particular period of time. You can also see this on-call rotation, where I will explain more later what this means to mount engineers. Yeah, but here is there’s also truth, where you can see their resourcing and allocation plan. And these two docs are where we keep track of our core product features and also our growth product features. Where you can see their different view that you can explore. That you can see their active projects, which we would have a HDI associated with it, that you can click into each to view the details of each project.
(25:29):
And also on growth side, the view is slightly different, but you can still see what each engineer is working on and also is up to. So if you’re curious about more details around what engineers do. Yeah, these are the source of truth that you can find their desired answers and details. Yeah. Next is if you need to talk to engineering, how do you reach us? So I categorize the different issues. So first is urgent issues, which means whether our app is done or the signup flow is broken. Basically any fire that you see with our systems, please triple mention or call the on-call engineers, which you can find in this rotation in these two roles. And you can either call backend or mobile. And usually if it’s in app things you call their mobile on-call engineer. And if it’s something that’s on backend, for example, glucose data, sign up flows and those then call the backend on-call engineers.
(26:37):
And then if the issue that you want to reach out to engineer for is bug reports, then you can shake the beta app to report the bug. It will go to our ticket management system called Linear, and then we will do charging to get back to you. You can also double mention the on-call engineers for again specifically whether you believe that bug is more in app or more in backend. If you are unsure, you can tag either, and they will tell you who is exactly the right person or a more right person. If it’s feature feedback, you can go to Comms and search for a specific project channel, usually the named by the project themes or names. So you can either try the themes that are here or the name project names that are listing the database, and then you can go to the specific project channel and give engineers feedback.
(27:28):
And after all, if you’re not sure who to tag or where to go to, you can always tag me on Comms, and I can help charge and direct you to the right person if that’s not me. Cool. So this is about Engineering Team, now next is what do I do? And I lead the Engineering Team. I manage currently nine engineers. So my day-to-day is very different from, I see engineer on the team. So about this breakdown of specific engineers day to day in the future we will invite, I see engineers talk more, going into more details about this breakdown. For me, my day-to-day can be closely divided to these three categories. So first the people management, that includes other one ones or those process to keep track of feedback, expectations, performance. And the second part is team building and processes. So let me show you the engineer wiki that I’m building.
(28:31):
Cool. So I divided the different areas for Engineering Team. So you can see their themes here to understand what it means for me to lead the Engine Team or to think about how to build the Engineering Team. Some of these are still work in progress but you can get the flavor here. And one thing to call out is we are not actively hiring and onboarding engineers, but it will be my responsibility when we start doing that again. Yeah. Cool. And then the last one is cross-functional collaboration and alignment. So I spend a lot of my time with Cosima on product side and with Karen on growth side, and obviously the engineers who are allocated to the respective Product Eng Team and Growth Eng Team. I make sure I have the right context and right level of context with most of these projects here so I can help with Eng allocation, Eng planning, and handle escalation where people need my help with prioritization calls, or trade off to make between project A versus project B.
(29:40):
Yeah, so that’s also taking a big part of my time, especially we are spinning up the Growth Eng Team and shaping the new Product Eng Team. Yeah. This is my day-to-day, and in addition to that, I want to spend more time on more strategic thinking, which means I want to read more read book about, read book, thinking more, talking to experienced people, about how do I build the team? How do I think longer term, more forward about their Engineering Team? How do we build effective, efficient, and happy team? All those high level topics. So if you have advice, or suggestions, or people that you think might be a good person that I should talk to, definitely let me know. I’m all ears. Yeah, I think that’s all for me today for Engineer at Levels. Thank you.
Josh Clemente (30:41):
Awesome, thank you Hui. Yeah, this is a new sort of segment, and I really appreciate everybody kind of opening up and sharing what not just the function does, but also as Hui did there, sort of what she does and how she’s thinking about growth personally and for the team. Super awesome to see that, and appreciate everybody kind of collaborating behind the scenes to help each other move forward. I think that that shout out right there at the end, please help me out in thinking about the future of Eng, is a great one. We should all be putting that sort of request out there and making recommendations to each other. Some of us are further along in various areas of development, I suppose, inside the functions as we’ve been more established in the culture of that function for longer. So Hui’s done an amazing job of steering the ship from the old culture of engineering into the new one. And so I love to hear that she’s looking forward to picking her head up and thinking about the long-term here shortly.
(31:39):
All right. Let me see if I can skip ahead without restarting this video. Probably not. Oh, nice. All right. Hiring updates, so not actively filling roles right now, but as we move forward and hit our goals, this will change. If you or somebody you know is interested in Levels, checkout levels.link/careers, share the site. You can always submit a general application, put your information in our orbit, and we will be able to get connected once we have an opening that might be a fit. With that, we are way ahead of schedule, not unexpected. This is a pretty light week. As I said, we had a holiday, we had a meetup, and a lot of the stuff that is really going to be hitting the fan later this month on the growth side has yet to launch. But we’ll be here in the coming days and weeks, so we’ve got extra time for individual contributions. Maybe we’ll even get some time back to ourselves after this meeting. So, I’m going to stop the share. And you can go ahead and hit the raise hand button if you want to share something professional or personal.
(32:42):
I will kick off. So this past week, professionally, I actually took some time out. I was off the grid in Montana living in a shipping container on the top of a mountain in the hailstorms, in the windstorms. And hiking some mountains, and we only had solar power. It was pretty great, really enjoyed it. But I think professionally it always brings me some appreciation to be able to take some time away, and not have the world on fire when I get back. And other than that, very excited for the press on growth. I got caught up last night, and just generally very excited for all of the experimentation, all the activations that are coming down the pike and the measurement project, the analytics dashboards, the Churn analysis, the postdoc analysis, all that stuff is just making it easier to see behind the curtain on these things that really matter.
(33:36):
Lastly, on the personal side. Yeah, I think I’m just sort of in the afterglow of getting some time out in nature out in Montana, so it was great to hang with family. And yeah, I’m going to just take it easy this weekend and get ready for the week. Rob.
Rob (33:56):
Thanks Josh. So, I just got back from my grand tour of Western Europe, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and London. In London, there was a three-day meeting called the Integrated and Personalized Medicine Conference. And all I can say is lots of people came up to me asking about Levels. I’d actually invited Rangan to meet me there, but unfortunately he did not, otherwise we would’ve had a good picture for you for a Friday Forum, but such is life. I did want to mention that Eran Segal, who works with Eran Elinav at Weizmann, gave the talk before me, and they are just doing a bang up job in terms of developing personalized medicine approaches that ultimately I think Levels will need to know about.
(34:54):
They have actually figured out which microbiome species are driving weight gain and metabolic dysfunction at the genome level, actually finding the changes in DNA that make the difference. It was really a remarkable talk. And so we might want to get Eran Segal sometime to give us a little tutorial on where they’re going. Remember they were the ones who first demonstrated that altering glucose CGM data actually has benefits for metabolic health. And they are just light years ahead, and how to commercialize this. They’ve got companies, it’s not like they’re just doing research. They’re trying to monetize this as well, but we need to be watching what they’re doing very clearly.
Josh Clemente (36:00):
Super cool. Yeah, I’m sure most of us are familiar, but Eran and Weizmann Institute, they’re the ones that did the original 2015 timeframe CGM study on-
Rob (36:10):
Savvy, and all. Right.
Josh Clemente (36:12):
Yeah. Yeah, and showed the banana cookie visual that we all talk about, showing how two people can have opposite responses. So yeah, they’ve been at it for a while. Super cool. Thanks Rob. Yeah, we would love to stay in touch with that team-
Rob (36:27):
Also, Chris Palmer was there, it was a who’s who, and I mean Levels was definitely on a lot of people’s lips.
Josh Clemente (36:39):
Hopefully on their arms too, but love to hear that.
Rob (36:42):
Didn’t see any, but-
Josh Clemente (36:44):
They’re incognito.
Rob (36:46):
Right.
Josh Clemente (36:47):
Awesome. Thank you Rob. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi (36:50):
Yeah, speaking of the who’s who, I guess just a little shout-out for both Rob and Dom. Rob, listened to your episode on a whole new level, which was awesome. Listen to yours, Josh too. But both of you, thanks for your ongoing support. It’s awesome and I think we appreciate that you all have been here through this all for so long, and sometimes I look up and see you both on the call and need to check myself. So really appreciate the support and the partnership. It’s awesome to have you on the team, not just like advisors on the side.
Rob (37:20):
Everybody listened to Dom’s discussion with Satchin Panda.
Michael Mizrahi (37:26):
I didn’t do that, but I will. Thanks for the shout. On the personal side, Threads is insane. Not threads.com, but threads.net. I haven’t had this much fun on the internet since, no joke, 2011 or something. I quit most social in 2017, but put a toe in yesterday, and remembered what a fire hose it can be. We created our Levels account just to get a warm start there, and our members are there, they’re already talking, they’re already engaging. People are mentioning us. And so the warm start from Instagram is really nuts. So enjoying that on the personal side. And then otherwise would love to hear how the growth meetup went this week. So if anyone wants to share on that, pretty curious.
Josh Clemente (38:07):
Nice. I haven’t checked out Threads, probably won’t. But excited to hear that things are moving fast. Hui.
Speaker 4 (38:16):
It’s July, so how time flies? Yeah, so I wanted to maybe a bit mini look back for June. So in May we did this strategy change. We did the team size change and then in June we really, at least for Engineering Team, we spun the new team. We having been setting the new operating cadence, and model, and collaboration between the new team members and the new, not necessarily new, but the relationship is new. All of those we are undergoing the new culture transition, and I’ve seen impressive ownership and initiative taking from the whole Eng team, and now it’s July. I think we really need to speed up and then to try to arrive, achieve our 10% month-over-month growth goals. So I’m really excited for their growth expectations we’re going to do, based on all the growth infra and growth rails things we did in June.
(39:19):
So there will be a lot of different themes, a lot of fast moving experimentations for us to aim at that goal. And then on product side, the project that we picked off after the change, we did implementation in June, and a lot of those are going through the validation stage now. And we are dealing a bit of growing pains right now with all these new culture shift and issues being identified by internal testing, by support team. But I also want that from Eng team, and we are working together the team to fix the things, instead of previously we probably would wipe away all those bad [inaudible 00:40:01] or bugs and be just, let’s ship it anyways. Yeah, so I’ve seen good change on both sides, but really I’m looking forward to their second half of the year. And yeah, I think everyone here, or now here live, we really need to tighten up and try to achieve that 10% month over month goal. Yeah.
Josh Clemente (40:27):
Love it. Yeah, nothing to add there. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente (40:31):
Yeah, I am just kind of catching up. I was out for a few days this week and a lot happened. So reading through Comms, all the memos, and everything I’ve been tagged in, so excited for that. And then also was in Montana for a few days unexpectedly, and it was really nice to see Taylor in person. And then spend time with my family and got to see all of my nieces and nephews, which was a lot of fun. They’re all at very fun ages, so a lot of entertainment.
Josh Clemente (41:00):
Putting it lightly there. Mike.
Mike DiDonato (41:08):
Can I get a quick audio check? Cool, cool, cool. So I know Casey dropped some things here about the growth meetup. Just want to give a huge thanks to everyone, specifically Tom coordinating. Karen flew in from the UK, she’s actually on a plane home. Casey flew in, Haney flew in. Tony, Jackie, Matt, so big thanks to the team there. Just a quick recap. First day was primarily relationship building, just level setting. And then day two was where it was really powerful. We really went through everybody from, Tony gave a walkthrough, Haney, Karen did a deep dive into her memo, and we have a lot of great- Sorry, we have a lot of great action items that I know we’re going to share with the team and some follow-ups for next week.
(41:57):
We have a lot to do and I think I’m the newer person on the growth team, but I think one of the things we all walked away with, we have a lot to do, but we’re excited and we know that we have the right team. Including not just the growth team, but all of us to really, can I curse on the Friday Forum, right? I can, right? Make shit happen, and LFG. And then personally, really quickly, I think most people on the team know I got engaged recently and I have family in town this weekend. We’re going to do a little engagement party tomorrow. So kind of stressed, but excited about that.
Josh Clemente (42:37):
All awesome stuff. Thanks Mike. And yeah, enjoy the party tomorrow. All right everybody. Any other volunteers for the week? All right, well it’s first Friday of July, so we have a first Friday on the calendar. Little social hangout after this one. So I think we switched Zoom links, Miz, correct me if I’m wrong.
Michael Mizrahi (43:04):
Yep. We’re going to hop into the other Zoom, and we can do it over the next 30 minutes or 15 minutes. So if you are allotted till 10, feel free to hop in and we’ll do some breakouts there.