#130 – On working with family at a startup | Josh Clemente, Mercy Clemente, Ben Grynol

Working at the same company as your sibling can be tricky. But Levels’ Founder and President Josh Clemente and his sister Mercy Clemente, Social/Operations Specialist, found a way to work well together and maintain a positive family relationship. In this episode, Josh and Mercy share stories of being homeschooled in a family of nine kids, what homeschooling and asynchronous work have in common, and how their parents inspired them to be independent thinkers.

04:00 – Learning independence

Mercy said homeschooling instilled a certain amount of independence in her because she had to work on her own a lot.

Homeschooling was not a thing that a lot of people were doing. Whereas over the past two years it has become much more popular. But yeah, it was a very interesting experience, but it really helped us to kind of learn how to work with a lot of personalities, but also learn how to work on our own and manage our time and get things done. So my mom would say at the beginning of the day, this is what you need to get done for school today, along with all our other regular house chores. And so we were given this list and if we didn’t complete the list by whatever time we decided to complete the list, then we weren’t allowed to do anything fun. So kind of give us that discipline of, well, if you want to go do this, then check these things off and get it done as quickly as you possibly can before, so that you can go outside and play or do whatever it is that you would like to. So it was a lot of skills.

04:53 – The similarity between homeschooling and async work

Josh said asynchronous work at Levels is similar to homeschooling in that you do a lot of autonomous, deep work by yourself.

It’s funny, Levels is asynchronous and remote and homeschooling was for us, the way we learned was super you’re on your own schedule, very autonomous, deep work. It’s like we weren’t in class, there wasn’t a bunch of homeroom stuff. We didn’t have PE. It was like, if you want to go play outside, you can do that, but that just means you’re going to be working until midnight. So you should get your schoolwork done and then you can go do whatever you want with your friends. So we really kind of controlled our schedules. And most of it was like, here’s a book, here’s the assignment, figure it out. So we had to sort of work on problem solving without necessarily having… My mom, she had kids at all age groups and the ones who were learning to read and write and add and subtract were the ones that needed the most hands on attention. And so as you got graduated past that point, you became sort of pretty autonomous with your time. And we would help each other a little bit, but it was actually to a large extent self-managed.

09:04 – Institute solid boundaries

Mercy said homeschooling helped her learn how balance flexibility and boundaries in her adult work life.

We had a lot of autonomy, but she also still had rules that we had to follow. And I think that those rules kind of let us know, okay, this is stepping outside of the bounds. You’re trying to do too much. Like sometimes we would try to go and work on the trampoline. We had a trampolines as kids. So we’d try to do our school out there and we wouldn’t get any school done. We would just be jumping around and being like, “Well, we’re going to jump for 10 minutes and then we’ll read a half a page and then we’ll jump for another 10 minutes.” And it would take us two hours to get three pages read. Whereas, so then, she’d be like, “Okay, you can sit on the porch or you can sit outside, but you cannot sit on the trampoline.” So it was kind of these little guidelines about you can do this, but there’s a limit, don’t pass the limit or else you’re going to be stuck sitting inside at the table. And I’m going to sit next to you to make sure you do your work. So I think that kind of helped us know, okay, there is flexibility here and we can do so much, but we still need to make sure that we’re in the guidelines and working with each other in a sense to make sure we’re getting what we need to done.

14:08 – Failure is okay

Mercy said her father worked in many different jobs, and because of that she realized failure is okay. Sometimes you just have to try something out and see how it goes.

I think on one hand though there was so many risks and so many different businesses that my dad started, that we were kind of like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” All of us were a little more hesitant. And my parents say that they’re like, “We don’t know why you guys are so much more reserved than we were. Just go out and try things.” And they did always encourage us to go try things. What’s the worst that’s going to happen? It’s not a horrible thing to fail, you can always try something else. And I think that’s something that they really taught us is that failure is okay, don’t just give up. So they really pushed the whole work hard and persevere, be motivated by whatever motivates you go for it and just keep that in mind. That was really a big thing that I learned and getting through college, that was another thing in making sure that, yeah maybe I don’t love this class or whatever, but I’m not just going to drop it and take the F and never go to class. But I’m still going to get a passing grade and make sure I succeed in it, because I don’t know, there’s nothing wrong with giving up, but it’s so much better to just try something out and see how it goes.

15:16 – Be confident

Josh said his father taught him that if you get too deep in the details, you might be too afraid to try something new. So be confident even if you don’t have all the answers.

My dad’s tagline, which I think it’s a Mark Twain quote, but he would always use it, it’s like, “All you need to be successful is ignorance and confidence.” And his point is that if you get too deep in the details, if you’re too expert in the theory of something, you’ll find all of the ways that it will fail. And you’ll just be like, “Nope, not going to work.” So you need a degree of ignorance of how likely failure is in order to even get the gall to try it. And then you need confidence that you’re going to succeed, otherwise why would you try? And he and my mom kind of showed that all the time. I mean, it is kind of crazy to have a huge family like that and just have the confidence that, yeah, we’re going to homeschool these kids and they’re going to be fine. We’re going to pull this off. So I think my mom definitely showed that as well. They had confidence in each other and that they would figure it out.

29:22 – Working as family

Josh said it can be a challenge to work with family members, and it’s better if you have separate things to work on and aren’t together all the time.

I think it’s always going to be case dependent and personality dependent. And I know that they’re really effective teams who are family and I’m sure we could be. It’s just, it makes it that much easier when you can just strictly be on the same team and not be necessarily working together in a way that could create some complexity for people coming into that work environment. And if there is a sibling relationship on a team, a direct working team trying to interpret like, “Can I insert myself between them? Can I pick sides? How do I navigate this relationship?” And so we haven’t had to deal with that because people aren’t having to tie break the siblings at Levels that often. We’re generally working on completely different subject matter. So it just works really well. Yeah. I think many people until they see the last names don’t know that we’re siblings and I think that’s a good thing. That’s a feature.

37:26 – Eliminating helplessness

Josh said his parents’ goal for homeschooling them was to eliminate helplessness so that they wouldn’t get stuck.

My parents, if there’s one thing that I would describe their philosophy or by, it would be eliminating helplessness. I think they really focused on making sure that we would never find ourselves in a situation that we couldn’t find our way out of no matter what that was, whether it’s personal, psychological business, financial, emotional. We would have the tools to at least take a step in some direction and see. And some of that is observing them. And some of it is specific in the way that my dad… I don’t know that my dad ever taught in a step by step, here’s how you do something way. He always taught by, let me know when you’re stuck, here’s the keys. And here’s the tool. Here’s the task. Let me know when you’re stuck. And so ultimately it was similar to schoolwork in the way that we had the textbook, we had the problem set. We would let my mom know when we were stuck. And so the goal was don’t get stuck. Just figure out a way out of that and then you can be free. Your time is yours again. So it ended up with, I feel pretty confident in myself and my sibling’s ability to basically do pretty much anything. We’re not going to necessarily be the best at it. Certainly not in the beginning, but we’re not going to be the worst.

42:40 – Trying new things

Mercy enjoys having variety in her work life, so she appreciates that Levels allows her to try new things and work on what she likes.

I like testing out different things. I like being busy. I like, if someone says, “Oh, I’m working on this project and could use hands.” I like and I want to try it out. I’m interested in just dipping my toes in all different aspects of the company and never feeling like I have to stay in ops just because I’ve been in ops for a year and a half or whatever it is. That’s one thing that I really like here. I always heard coming out of college that whatever job you take initially, that’s the job you’re going to have for life. And you’re never going to be able to change careers. And that always terrified me because I was like, “People are changing in all aspects of their life, why are we expecting them to just stay consistent in their jobs?” And when I’m here, I can just try out all sorts of things. Every week in my one on one, Chris is always saying, “What do you like doing? What do you not like doing?” And it’s fun to know that he is encouraging us to try other things and honestly kind of pushing it. There’s nothing wrong with testing something out. Try it and if you don’t like it, just go back to doing your regular stuff and try something new in a couple weeks or whatever. I’m sure that I’m going to be changing roles a bit as things go. But as of right now, I hope I don’t leave the op side too much because it’s a nice system and I like how it works. I like the people I work with and I just enjoy it. I don’t hate my job.

Mercy Clemente (00:06):

I was like, “Look, you ever need help, I’m happy to help out with whatever you guys need. Just let me know.” And then anytime I saw him, I would always say that. And Josh was like, “Yeah, eventually. I’ll let you know. Let you know.” Didn’t hear anything. And then one day I’d kind of reach my breaking point at work. And I was like, “I really don’t want to do this anymore. It’s making me stressed and anxious all the time. Don’t enjoy it.” In about an hour after I decided that I was going to leave that job, Josh texted me saying, “Do you still want to help with social?” And I was like, “Yes, this is my sign. This is perfect.”

Ben Grynol (00:45):

I’m Ben Grynol part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level.

Ben Grynol (01:11):

It’s not too often that people get a chance to work with family, unless there’s a family business, one where there are different generations involved and one where the business goes on for a period of time. Well, in the case of Levels, there are actually two family members that are working together. That’s Josh Clemente, founder of Levels, and his sister Mercy Clemente, who came on board in June of 2020. Josh and Mercy, they have such a cool backstory and you don’t always hear these things. You might have seen the last names if you’ve seen Mercy@Levels. Well that’s Mercy Clemente. And so it was very cool to sit down and have this discussion about what it’s like to work with family. We heard more of the insight about what it was like to grow up with nine siblings in their family, and to hear about some of the stories, some of the businesses that they actually worked on together as they grew up. And so, anyway, no need to wait. Here is the conversation with Josh and Mercy.

Ben Grynol (02:09):

This is a fun one because I think there’s people who have interacted with Levels in some capacity, from a support standpoint, would know they know these names like Braden@, Mercy@, Matt@Levels. And very few people outside of the team probably know that you and Josh are siblings. And so there’s a lot to this whole story of digging into growing up together and now working together in the way that you came into the company. So why don’t we take it from there. But let’s rewind all the way back to what it was like growing up. I know Josh on different podcasts has alluded to the size of the family and the number of siblings, but I think that’s an interesting thing to begin with.

Josh Clemente (03:01):

Yeah. So Mercy and I are two of nine kids and the third brother joined a little bit later than the rest of us, but ultimately it was a family of nine and I am the second oldest and Mercy is number-

Mercy Clemente (03:18):

Five.

Josh Clemente (03:18):

… five.

Mercy Clemente (03:19):

Directly in the middle.

Josh Clemente (03:22):

So we grew up in Virginia. My mom homeschooled all of us through 12th grade. So all the way through primary school up till college. So Mercy and I both had that experience. We, for several years, I mean, we were six years apart, so I left for college while Mercy was in middle school, I think. And so we were for a while though, we went to the same school together, so there’s that. Had the same teacher. We got a lot in common.

Mercy Clemente (03:52):

Yeah, it was pretty crazy, but it was a lot of fun. I mean, back then, it was very… Like homeschooling was not a thing that a lot of people were doing. Whereas, over the past two years it has become much more popular. But yeah, it was a very interesting experience, but it really helped us to kind of learn how to work with a lot of personalities, but also learn how to work on our own and manage our time and get things done.

Mercy Clemente (04:21):

So my mom would say at the beginning of the day, this is what you need to get done for school today, along with all our other regular house chores. And so we were given this list and if we didn’t complete the list by whatever time we decided to complete the list, then we weren’t allowed to do anything fun. So kind of give us that discipline of, well, if you want to go do this, then check these things off and get it done as quickly as you possibly can before, so that you can go outside and play or do whatever it is that you would like to. So it was a lot of skills.

Josh Clemente (04:52):

It’s funny, Levels is asynchronous and remote and homeschooling was for us, the way we learned was super you’re on your own schedule, very autonomous, deep work. It’s like we weren’t in class, there wasn’t a bunch of homeroom stuff. We didn’t have PE. It was like, if you want to go play outside, you can do that, but that just means you’re going to be working until midnight. So you should get your schoolwork done and then you can go do whatever you want with your friends. So we really kind of controlled our schedules. And most of it was like, here’s a book, here’s the assignment, figure it out. So we had to sort of work on problem solving without necessarily having… My mom, she had kids at all age groups and the ones who were learning to read and write and add and subtract were the ones that needed the most hands on attention. And so as you got graduated past that point, you became sort of pretty autonomous with your time. And we would help each other a little bit, but it was actually to a large extent self managed.

Mercy Clemente (05:51):

I mean, she would check, there were certain subjects, like math was one subject where once we were told to complete whatever pages she would make time in the day to, “Okay, Mercy, now is your time for us to review your answers to the math problems.” And so then we would go through it that way. But other than that, yeah, it was really on our own time. So some of us would be able to finish school by 11:00 AM. And then if we were really feeling stubborn, it would be 11:00 PM. So yeah, it was nice though.

Ben Grynol (06:17):

When did that autonomy begin? I’m assuming just by the sounds of it, that it was probably that responsibility and that autonomy was a lot earlier than other kids would have it, because you kind of had to do it. You didn’t really have a choice of not doing it, if that makes sense.

Josh Clemente (06:36):

Pretty early. I don’t know. What do you think maybe by age eight or nine, you were doing most of your schoolwork by yourself. You had a list of things. My mom spent a ton of time developing a curriculum for each kid and she was able to sort of modify it. So my older sister, she was the first, so she had the most attention to detail. And then I had sort of the hand me downs of her plus a little bit of tweaks here and there that worked for… that didn’t work or didn’t work. And then by the time you got to the middle kids, she had essentially figured out that these are the things that tend to work really well. And I think we were all kind of doing the same evolution of school. So once you were able to read, write and do some basic math, she would teach us how to read lessons and then work through an exercise set and then take a test. And that’s what she would review with us.

Mercy Clemente (07:26):

Yeah. I would agree, I think eight or nine, because then we were able to go and sit in another room. We are able to be there quietly, versus when you’re younger than that, you have probably a lot more energy and want, you’re craving that attention more so. And then eight or nine, you’re at a good state. You can sit at the dining room table, you can sit at the kitchen or up in your room if you wanted to. And you’re able to focus more and knock out those things or take as much time as you’d like.

Ben Grynol (07:53):

How do you think it shaped you? Because autonomy is an amazing thing. In some instances, I think as humans, we all love this sense of autonomy. And it’s an amazing thing because if you have autonomy and agency over your time and you know how to use that autonomy, it can be used for being productive or doing things. Being productive, I don’t want that to sound like doing something related to like business as sort of this heuristic we have in society. Being productive could be like, Josh goes into the garage and starts hacking together, just sort of playing around with tools and wrenches and building things, because he’s got the autonomy where it’s sort of like outside of these school lessons.

Ben Grynol (08:34):

But how do you think it shaped you in the sense that when you’ve got a lot of autonomy from a young age, it kind of leads a person down this path of wanting to sort of go by the beat of their own drum, which is amazing for entrepreneurs and can be entirely dangerous in an organization that’s very linear or very focused on this one way of doing things. So how do you think it, I don’t know, maybe you, the way that you are as adults and the way that you navigate the world?

Mercy Clemente (09:04):

We had a lot of autonomy, but she also still had rules that we had to follow. And I think that those rules kind of let us know, okay, this is stepping outside of the bounds. You’re trying to do too much. Like sometimes we would try to go and work on the trampoline. We had a trampolines as kids. So we’d try to do our school out there and we wouldn’t get any school done. We would just be jumping around and being like, “Well, we’re going to jump for 10 minutes and then we’ll read a half a page and then we’ll jump for another 10 minutes.” And it would take us two hours to get three pages read.

Mercy Clemente (09:32):

Whereas, so then, she’d be like, “Okay, you can sit on the porch or you can sit outside, but you cannot sit on the trampoline.” So it was kind of these little guidelines about you can do this, but there’s a limit, don’t pass the limit or else you’re going to be stuck sitting inside at the table. And I’m going to sit next to you to make sure you do your work. So I think that kind of helped us know, okay, there is flexibility here and we can do so much, but we still need to make sure that we’re in the guidelines and working with each other in a sense to make sure we’re getting what we need to done.

Josh Clemente (10:05):

Our mom, she was a high school teacher before she started the family. And so she had a pretty good understanding of how a classroom structure has to work and how… She wasn’t lax for sure. So we had the requirements that we had to meet. And I think the two ways that it really helped that I can say it confidently helped shape were the autonomy specifically related to learning things. So being able to have a textbook and work backwards from problem sets to solutions and figure out how to reverse engineer things or really just how to read and grasp the right quantity of information, but you don’t necessarily have a dedicated teacher in the classroom with you able to, raise your hand and ask questions too.

Josh Clemente (10:51):

So we were able to, I think start to learn independently, which is something that when I went to college, I would skip class all the time. I was not someone with perfect class attendance. For certain subjects where it was harder to grasp and they were higher level, sure. But I would generally be able to manage better grades if I wasn’t spending that time in class, I had already read past that point and done all those problems. And so it was kind of a waste of time unless I was having trouble with a specific subject. So I think that information filtering and collection was really important.

Josh Clemente (11:24):

And then like Mercy said, homeschooling was not a thing. And certainly, it was not a socially accepted thing. My mom had to really, even though I think she gave us a really excellent education, she had to really compensate all the time to people around us who were questioning her like, “You’re ruining these kids. This is such a huge gamble. How can you roll the dice like this? Why aren’t you being responsible in putting your kids in school?” So we had to be really careful about if we were outside during school hours, we would have to play in the backyard or make sure we were being conscious of the fact that people don’t look at kids running around during school as necessarily a good thing or a thing that maybe is encouraging growth and health in other ways. They looked at it this time as irresponsibility.

Josh Clemente (12:08):

And now it’s, well, two things, I think. At that time it gave us a little bit of an outsider perspective. We grew up kind of as outsiders, we didn’t get to participate in a lot of school sports and going to events even though eventually we built really strong friend groups and we got invited to proms and homecomings and sports events and all that stuff. It took a while. It was not easy initially. It was very much like the public school systems, even though my parents are paying into that tax that is supporting those school systems, we still didn’t get to take advantage of extracurriculars and things like that because we weren’t attending. And that was really difficult.

Josh Clemente (12:43):

And I think it definitely influenced the way I look at systems and the way I look at outsiderness. I’m more than happy to question assumptions and question systems now. For sure that comes from a certain degree of like recognition that we made it this far, because my parents were counter cultural at that point. And seeing that validated has really helped shape my worldview for sure. And I think probably some of my siblings and then also just being able to problem solve. I’m really grateful for the independence that we ultimately picked up then.

Ben Grynol (13:18):

Do you think, we’ll call it this willingness to question assumptions and systems and this appetite for risk, if you want to call it that, or this willingness to take risk and to go off and do hard things, some of it’s got to be driven by autonomy, like the way that you grew up. It was the systems that you’re around. How much of it do you think is that? Or how much do you think of it is the way that your dad had so many evolutions as far as the way that he changed careers? Like he would just start something new and that in itself is risky, but what was it? Was it that as a model? Was it the autonomy? Was it a combination of everything? But what sort of gives each of you the same appetite for risk or maybe this lens towards wanting to try hard things?

Mercy Clemente (14:05):

At least for me, it’s a combination. I think on one hand though there was so many risks and so many different businesses that my dad started, that we were kind of like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” All of us were a little more hesitant. And my parents say that they’re like, “We don’t know why you guys are so much more reserved than we were. Just go out and try things.” And they did always encourage us to go try things. What’s the worst that’s going to happen? It’s not a horrible thing to fail, you can always try something else.

Mercy Clemente (14:30):

And I think that’s something that they really taught us is that failure is okay, don’t just give up. So they really pushed the whole work hard and persevere, be motivated by whatever motivates you go for it and just keep that in mind. That was really a big thing that I learned and getting through college, that was another thing in making sure that, yeah maybe I don’t love this class or whatever, but I’m not just going to drop it and take the F and never go to class. But I’m still going to get a passing grade and make sure I succeed in it, because I don’t know, there’s nothing wrong with giving up, but it’s so much better to just try something out and see how it goes.

Josh Clemente (15:07):

Yeah. I think I agree with Mercy. It’s definitely a combination of seeing our parents and the way that they ran their lives is really interesting. It’s almost like a case study. My dad’s tagline, which I think it’s a Mark Twain quote, but he would always use it, it’s like, “All you need to be successful is ignorance and confidence.” And his point is that if you get too deep in the details, if you’re too expert in the theory of something, you’ll find all of the ways that it will fail. And you’ll just be like, “Nope, not going to work.” So you need a degree of ignorance of how likely failure is in order to even get the gall to try it. And then you need confidence that you’re going to succeed, otherwise why would you try? And he and my mom kind of showed that all the time.

Josh Clemente (15:47):

I mean, it is kind of crazy to have a huge family like that and just have the confidence that, yeah, we’re going to homeschool these kids and they’re going to be fine. We’re going to pull this off. So I think my mom definitely showed that as well. They had confidence in each other and that they would figure it out. My dad started out, he’s had many careers. He was a handyman originally and then he became a contractor in California building commercial and residential property. And then my parents moved, when I was born, they moved to a 108 acre farm in the middle of nowhere, Missouri. And they were temporarily Christmas tree farmers and had this farm in the middle of nowhere. And then they moved to St. Louis and he became a police officer.

Josh Clemente (16:31):

Family was still growing at this point. Police officer, then he went to Virginia, went to the FBI academy. His brother, Jim, he at the time was a profiler for the FBI. So my dad wanted to join the FBI and did that. And then when he worked a number of different roles inside of the FBI and eventually ended up deploying overseas. And while he was in South America tracking down drug cartels, and then he was overseas after 9/11, and started to become more of a burden because he was gone for longer periods of time and of course it was dangerous work. So he eventually retired from the FBI and now has a production company with his brother that essentially works on elevating stories of real life, former and current law enforcement and military.

Josh Clemente (17:19):

He’s now a screenwriter. And this is someone who my mom will say when she met him, he was incapable of writing a sentence. He was just grammatically incoherent and just, he was not a writer by any means. And she still has some of the notes that he wrote her early on in school. And so seeing now that he is a writer and producer and sometimes even acts, it’s just a really funny and unbelievable spectrum of things. And in the meantime, while he was in the FBI, he also started a company called Mission Integrated Technologies that I worked for, for a while. And so he’s been a founder multiple times. He’s been the law enforcement officer, been a builder and just keeps himself busy and literally will never assume that something is impossible, ever. None of us is able to convince him that something is not worth trying.

Mercy Clemente (18:02):

Yes, he’s very positive.

Ben Grynol (18:04):

That’s even by the sounds of it, that’s to this day. So the move from St. Louis to Virginia, we’ll call that the FBI years. And now he’s sort of going through the same thing where it’s kind of like, you think parents get to a certain age and they think like, “Okay, now I’m working differently.” But he’s reinventing himself again over this life where he’s like, “Now I’m going to go to Montana and just build an entire house from scratch.” To the point where when we’ve talked about it loosely, he’s out there in the excavator digging things. It’s not sort of some property with infrastructure on it. He’s just going, “Hey, we’ll figure this thing out.” Which is never changing the outlook on things being too hard. And that’s sort of what it sounds like that was one of the lessons that it sounds like each of you has really taken away where it’s like, just try.

Josh Clemente (18:59):

Yeah, I think so. Both of my parents do not shy away from hard work at all. They kind of put us to shame, especially at their ages relative to us. They’re just hard manual workers today, even though they can have careers in many different fields. Like my dad’s the one who will rather than pay a crew to build a road, he’ll buy the excavator and spend blazing hot and bitter cold nights in that thing, cutting a road across the new property and that’s just his style. He wants a degree of control. He also wants to learn and he knows that he’ll get it done and he can’t guarantee that someone else will.

Ben Grynol (19:32):

And don’t forget about the recruiting too, which is occasional trips for each of you out to Montana. So why don’t we jump into the story of Mercy joining. There’s this text message that flows around from time to time and I think it says, “Still need help with social?” Followed by a yes. And that was sort of the in, or the path in, from what it sounds like. Josh, when was that you sent this message to Mercy? When was that?

Josh Clemente (20:03):

That’s a good question. It must have been early 2020 or mid… Well, I had talked to Mercy in person because I was at the time I was managing a lot of DMs and stuff. Levels was very small. I think I made the account initially and I was trying to manage DMs and it was getting to the point where we were actually, we had, I don’t know, 1200 or 1500 followers or something. And people were sending in a lot of questions and I was not managing this effectively. Some of them were going 15 weeks without a response. It was terrible. But just like another inbox to manage. And so I was like, “All right, we’re getting the point where people are going to start to get upset. We need some support here.” And yeah, Mercy’s at the time I think you were working as a software engineer and maybe not super happy at that role. And so we were at home talking and I just mentioned the problems we were having and she was like, “Well, I could help with that.” And then I probably went dark for a few weeks.

Mercy Clemente (21:00):

Months.

Ben Grynol (21:01):

DM box zero is what you needed to get to. And that was probably at Unlock Levels. This is way back.

Josh Clemente (21:07):

Oh yeah.

Ben Grynol (21:07):

Original handle. So we got to dig into that. Mercy, I didn’t even know this. This is all new information, software engineering.

Mercy Clemente (21:15):

Yeah. So I went to school for computer information systems, and then I got a job right out of college as a software developer. And I really enjoyed it for the first six months or so. And then it wasn’t as much fun as I wanted it to. They were coming out with more and more rules on how I was allowed to code and that took the fun out of it. And that took the whole putting the puzzle together, it just made it more and more difficult and didn’t make sense. So I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And every time I saw Josh, I was like, “Look, if you ever need help, I’m happy to help out with whatever you guys need. Just let me know.”

Mercy Clemente (21:49):

And he had come home in January, him and Mike did a night over at the house. And I’d also come back to my parents’ house for the weekend. And we took a few photos of them. We have this obstacle course at my parents’ house and took a few photos of them that we thought were super cool. Looking back, they were really horrible. But took a bunch of photos for the Levels account. And I was telling Josh like, “Look, whenever you need help, I’m happy to help out. I have lots of free time. I only work and that’s pretty much my whole life. So just let me know.” And then anytime I saw him, I would always say that. And Josh was like, “Yeah, eventually. I’ll let you know. Let you know.” Didn’t hear anything. And then one day I’d kind of reached my breaking point at work. And I was like, “I really don’t want to do this anymore. It’s making me stressed and anxious all the time. Don’t enjoy it.”

Mercy Clemente (22:35):

In about an hour after I decided that I was going to leave that job, Josh texted me saying, “Do you still want to help with social?” And I was like, “Yes, this is my sign. This is perfect.” So I started, I think that was July 20th, 2020, or somewhere around that. So I started just helping with the Unlock Levels, that was the username at the time, Facebook and Instagram inbox. And just trying to get it to inbox zero. Got it to inbox zero. So that way I was just keeping up with it from then on. And then I started helping with Twitter’s inbox. And then from there, it was, “Okay, you can reply to comments as well.” And then it was helping with stories. Post on stories. And then from there it was just kind of slowly led into, “Well, Mike could need help with member support if you’re interested in that. Or if not, don’t worry about it.

Mercy Clemente (23:28):

And I just said, “Yeah, sure. I’ll help with whatever you guys need. I’m I enjoy it. I enjoy social media. I like this kind of stuff. I’ve worked in customer support in the past. This is not really groundbreaking new information.” So I started helping with support and then that slowly led into helping with orders and operation stuff. And then in January of, I guess last year now at this point, I got the full-time offer. But up until that I was just contract work, which was a lot of fun.

Ben Grynol (23:54):

January of 21 is what it was. So yeah, long path from January of 20, when you started to think through these things, and then July is when you really started working. But it’s similar to what you were doing the year before Josh, July of 19, when things first started out and you’re packing boxes and cutting out performance covers and doing ops and doing all these little pieces, and that’s what Mercy’s been doing where it’s like, there’s almost no role that Mercy hasn’t touched in some way, shape or form. Knowing this now probably even the code base, you’ve probably even been in there somehow. It’s interesting to see how this all evolved.

Ben Grynol (24:33):

So when you think about working with family, this is always the question you hear in different businesses is that it can be amazing or it can be challenging because things like feedback can get a lot easier because you feel close to someone, or a lot harder because it’s your sibling and it’s hard to give direct feedback and you’ve got so much history coming into it. So when you think about this, what’s it been like, just being totally honest about it? What’s it been like working with family? Are there things that you go this is amazing or are there times where it can be harder? Especially because of maybe the dynamic too, where it’s like, Josh started this thing, but he’s also your brother and that’s always the way it is. And there’s probably certain optics too I would imagine, like being family within a company it’s like knowing how to sort of interact. But, what are your thoughts on that?

Josh Clemente (25:25):

Well, my thoughts are, so it’s been great. At this point I have very little interaction with like our social and digital and member success front lines. It’s much more learning from what’s filtering out and the takeaways. So Mercy and I don’t necessarily work together on a day to day basis, which I think is a really good thing, probably because when there’s much more, I don’t know, I can see it being more challenging if you’re either co-partners on a project that’s starting from scratch and you have different opinions and you’re used to sort of hashing things out and in some sort of more aggressive family way than you would in a regular work relationship. Or if you have sort of a direct line of management role that can also be tricky.

Josh Clemente (26:07):

But because Mercy and I are both within the organization with different priorities, she’s her own individual working her way through the business and taking on whatever she’s interested in. And it’s not something that I necessarily have to be really thinking about. And that’s really great because to the second part of your question, it can be a little bit sensitive. You don’t want to make implications that somebody is here because of me or something like that. And I asked Mercy to help because I knew that she would do an amazing job at what we needed. And since then she’s gone in 10 different directions, as you said, and all on her own.

Josh Clemente (26:48):

And so I get a lot of pride in being able to work together and we don’t really bring it home. We both understand, we both have a ton of context for what’s happening at Levels and we like to talk about it with our family. But we’re not really solving problems at home or bringing it into get togethers with the family. We just enjoy working on the same challenge. And it’s nice to have enough separation that we can be just kind of doing our own individual thing.

Mercy Clemente (27:15):

Yeah, I would agree. We really don’t have any work contact aside from a couple studies where I’ve helped fulfill orders. Other than that, it’s pretty hands off. I’m in one direction. Josh is completely opposite. But I agree, it is nice though to know that someone is kind of on my team, but not in a biased way. Josh I’m hoping knows that I will not just mess around and just take complete advantage of the fact that my brother works at the same company. But I think that also motivates me, makes me want to work harder because I don’t want this company to succeed, I really enjoy working here. I enjoy my job. I enjoy the people working with the people that I do. So I think it kind of pushes me harder in a different way that it would, if I was working somewhere else. And yeah, outside of work, we don’t really talk about it unless one of our siblings and they ask how things are going. Other than that, it’s just kind of Levels is a different thing and family is on the other side of that.

Ben Grynol (28:15):

I would imagine it would be way harder if it was somewhat of a we’ll call it a linear and a bit of a hierarchical reporting structure where it’s like Mercy reports into Josh and it just gets… I mean that, you hear about this all the time and maybe it’s different with real family businesses where there are multiple… Let’s say they’re 10 people and they’re all family and working together. You hear about these situations where it just destroys people and tears them apart. Because even if you try to approach things in a reasonable and pragmatic way, it’s just there’s always going to be unnecessary tension. And then that does spill over into family life. It’s just unfortunate when that happens, but because things are almost arms length and especially now just you’re focused on very different pillars within the organization, it almost makes it cooler because then you can see what each other is doing and be supportive or just almost advocates or admire the work. And you’re like, “Whoa, that’s really cool.” In the same way you would admire the work of any teammate and you strip away the fact that your family.

Josh Clemente (29:21):

Yeah, exactly. I think it’s always going to be case dependent and personality dependent. And I know that they’re really effective teams who are family and I’m sure we could be. It’s just, it makes it that much easier when you can just strictly be on the same team and not be necessarily working together in a way that could create some complexity for people coming into that work environment. And if there is a sibling relationship on a team, a direct working team trying to interpret like, “Can I insert myself between them? Can I pick sides? How do I navigate this relationship?” And so we haven’t had to deal with that because people aren’t having to tie break the siblings at Levels that often. We’re generally working on completely different subject matter. So it just works really well. Yeah. I think many people until they see the last names don’t know that we’re siblings and I think that’s a good thing. That’s a feature.

Mercy Clemente (30:16):

Yeah. I agree with that. I think it is nice. And there was one person though who did notice the last names and they thought we were married and I quickly was like, “No, no. I agree with that. Yeah. I agree, I think it would be a little more complex if we were to work on the same team. But yeah, it’s nice to have our own separate areas because I know that I can focus fully on what I’m doing and I can be more free in trying different things and testing out and trying ideas. Whereas before I would probably be running it by Josh, if we were on the same team to see, well, what does he think and then go to my teammates. Whereas now it’s kind of like, “Well, I came up with this idea. I’m just going to post it in the support or the ops threads and see what people think.” And then whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea will go from there. But I like having that sense of independence of just being my own person.

Josh Clemente (31:08):

Yeah. One other thing is that I don’t think there would be any difficulty whatsoever in working directly together. It’s really the perception, in a lot of things I think signaling and perception are people really over index on them. Or are like, “Oh, this is going to be a huge problem. People, they’re not going to know what to think if we work together.” I think that’s mostly just overhead and that it quickly clears once you see that it’s actually quite functional. So I think we could totally work together on the same stuff, we certainly will in the future, I’m sure. But so some of it is, if both of us are really doing what we’re doing, which is we want this company to succeed and we’re both working hard at making that happen, people pick up on that. They see that this is like, “Okay, this is one of the good situations. It’s not one of those that you read about.”

Josh Clemente (31:54):

And then the other thing is it’s just, again, really gratifying to see. In terms of feedback, and I think directness, we can have a very direct, structured conversation if we need to in the context of work and neither of us… We come from a family of opinionated, strong willed people and so we will definitely have the back and forth before the disagree and commit. And so I think it fits really nicely with, we’re not going to have an emotional breakdown or some sort of like challenging family problem. We have a very good relationship as family and a very good working relationship that is totally compatible with that. It’s not a situation where we have to pat each other’s emotions and worry about hurting our relationship outside work. In both directions, I think there’s no baggage that we’re carrying into this, that complicates the working scenario.

Mercy Clemente (32:44):

And we technically have worked together in the past. There was a summer where my parents decided to own a food truck and my parents happened to, “Oh no, we were last minute invited to go on this trip for the weekend that we’re supposed to all be on the food truck. So you guys are going to have to run it.” And there was only seven of us that ran it. My two younger siblings, went with my parents. And so we worked very closely all weekend with all of us. And it was a lot of fun and there are many stories from it, but it was also just a lot of hard work, but it was enjoyable because like Josh said, you can have these back and forth conversations about, well, I think we should do this and then explaining, no, I don’t think that’s right, because I think it’s better if we were to try this. And then going back and forth before we were finally to decide how we were going to run this food truck for the weekend, with all of our other siblings.

Josh Clemente (33:33):

It was the first and last food truck weekend for the family.

Ben Grynol (33:38):

Run with it. We can’t leave it there. What food truck was this? I’m guessing it wasn’t a Skittles food truck, which is-

Josh Clemente (33:47):

It wasn’t not that. The beauty of this food truck was that there was no limit to the menu. If you want Skittles, we’ll send somebody out the back of the truck to run to the store and they’ll get you Skittles. It was my dad again, he doesn’t like to say no. He likes to be the yes, man. And so we started off, it was pretty classic menu of standard American diet food, burgers and sausage.

Mercy Clemente (34:09):

Well, actually it was purchased just a coffee truck. And then somehow completely changed from being a coffee truck to a food truck, because-

Josh Clemente (34:15):

A full food menu.

Mercy Clemente (34:16):

… why stop at coffee when you can do a full menu for the full day?

Josh Clemente (34:20):

Yeah. So it was a converted shuttle bus. Of course my dad bought the shuttle bus as it was a shuttle bus. And then cleared out all the seats. Took those seats and turned them into theater seating in the basement of our house. So reuse those of course. But then set up the whole interior, built countertop and frying station and cash register and all this stuff. Literally built a food truck and then imagined that the family would run this thing and make a bunch of money on holiday weekends, I guess. And so it was I think it was 4th of July weekend that this specific event occurred where all the siblings were down there for the weekend, at the Virginia Beach, in the Virginia Beach area. And yeah, we worked in the… It was hot. It was sweaty. We were new to the food service scene, I think in general. Actually Mercy and Kateri our other sister, they’ve worked… Actually several of my sisters have worked food service quite a bit. So I was new to food service.

Ben Grynol (35:15):

And how old were you at this time?

Mercy Clemente (35:17):

I think I was 14, right? I was-

Josh Clemente (35:20):

Yeah.

Mercy Clemente (35:21):

… I think I was 14.

Ben Grynol (35:22):

So you were driving the bus, Josh?

Josh Clemente (35:25):

Yeah, I was 20. I was in college. This was a summer at home. And you know who else featured in this story? Mike Di-

Ben Grynol (35:31):

Mike DiDonato.

Josh Clemente (35:33):

Mike DiDonato was there. That is true.

Mercy Clemente (35:35):

That’s right. Yeah. Anything and everything you could possibly think of, we were trying to serve it there. And we had seating set up so we had to get there at 4:00 in the morning in order to get a good spot near the boardwalk, and set up the seating, set up the inside of the food truck, start warming up the grill and the friers and making sure everything was running correctly and go from there. We would work from like 4:00 AM until I think we would pack up around 11:00 PM or midnight. And then it was an hour drive back to my parents’ house. We then had to do all the prep work for everything. So we were getting an hour of sleep. And then we were doing this for what was it? Was it four days or three days?

Josh Clemente (36:17):

It was three days.

Mercy Clemente (36:18):

Three days, but it seemed a much longer.

Josh Clemente (36:19):

But we raked in a nice purse over for those three days.

Ben Grynol (36:25):

But that’s the thing though, is it sounds like your dad basically tosses you the keys and he’s like, “Go figure it out.” You go and you’re having to use discretion and make decisions and act like an adult. All the things that, I mean, these are very much woven into our cultural values as a team is this idea of treat people like adults, act with autonomy, have agency over your time and figure out how to prioritize what you’re doing. Because there is a scenario where your dad tosses you the keys and everyone’s like, “Well, I don’t know what to do.”

Ben Grynol (36:56):

That’s not the case because of the way that you grew up, but it’s very easy to be like, “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. We can’t figure it out.” And then you’re paralyzed by this thing that’s been given to you and you don’t know what to do with it. But instead you make it happen and you work together in this large group of seven plus one. So eight people, if Mike DiDonato is the eighth in this story. But it’s a really good example of having something that’s a business/a project and seeing it through.

Josh Clemente (37:26):

Yeah. I mean, my parents, if there’s one thing that I would describe their philosophy or by, it would be eliminating helplessness. I think they really focused on making sure that we would never find ourselves in a situation that we couldn’t find our way out of no matter what that was, whether it’s personal, psychological business, financial, emotional. We would have the tools to at least take a step in some direction and see. And some of that is observing them. And some of it is specific in the way that my dad… I don’t know that my dad ever taught in a step by step, here’s how you do something way. He always taught by, let me know when you’re stuck, here’s the keys. And here’s the tool. Here’s the task. Let me know when you’re stuck.

Josh Clemente (38:17):

And so ultimately it was similar to schoolwork in the way that we had the textbook, we had the problem set. We would let my mom know when we were stuck. And so the goal was don’t get stuck. Just figure out a way out of that and then you can be free. Your time is yours again. So it ended up with, I feel pretty confident in myself and my sibling’s ability to basically do pretty much anything. We’re not going to necessarily be the best at it. Certainly not in the beginning, but we’re not going to be the worst.

Mercy Clemente (38:43):

We’ll figure something out. In the meantime, we’ll work through it and whether it’s not exactly what it’s supposed to be, we’ll get something shipped off.

Ben Grynol (38:51):

That’s a sense of humility though. It’s like, you’re not confident in yourself as far as thinking, you’re great. You’re confident in your ability to figure something out. You don’t expect, I’m going to be the best at this, but you go and do it. And that’s what we’ve done over and over and over as every time something new is built within the company, that being a function, that being a feature, that being a you name. It’s somebody figures it out and then you go, go, go and you keep iterating on it.

Ben Grynol (39:20):

And that’s very much the sense of everything that we’ve ever talked about, whether it’s rebuilding a motorcycle or building a Frankenstein motorcycle or any of these like side projects. That’s very much analogous to Levels in the way that we’re all figuring it out every day. So if we think of like, we’re still very, very early in our path, how do you think each of your roles will evolve? How do you think they’ll evolve within the team? The way that you work together? As we get larger, it’s inevitable that you’ll either work further and further apart, or you might work closer together depending on what you’re each working on.

Josh Clemente (40:02):

Well, I kind of today think of myself as filling gaps and helping where I can. So inevitably, it’s getting more involved in our research and sort of long term thinking has been a lot of fun for me. Climbing the very linear portion of competency building is my favorite part. It’s like learning quickly, and I haven’t yet reached in many of these research projects, haven’t yet reached the curve where it starts to like, you get diminishing returns on your time. Maybe in a few areas. But I really love that part. And so right now I’m kind of diving in that direction, which will inevitably lead to some specific projects to push our research program forward, along with our other research team, which has been really fun.

Josh Clemente (40:50):

And it’s a little bit hard to predict where that goes, but in general, the things that I also love are on the company culture and team building side of the equation. And so I think those are areas that for the foreseeable future I’ll be involved in and very excited as the team continues to grow. Mercy’s now one of our most tenured employees. I guess, July 2020. It’s pretty early. So just continuing to build the team out and watch as the senior people are continuing to proliferate the principles and values that we want to build on is very gratifying. And so I intend to stay very closely involved with that for as long as I’m helpful.

Mercy Clemente (41:30):

I also consider myself as someone who is filling the gaps. I know that there are some things that I’m consistently doing, like the operation side and support, but I’m also now kind of stepping back from social just a little bit. And I have other people that are kind of filling in where I am kind of releasing. But I’m also now exploring partnerships just a tiny bit and seeing how I like that and how I’m doing with that, whether I’m doing well in the partnership side of things, or if it’s just kind of, not really for me. But I do, I like the operations role a lot. I enjoy seeing the back end of things and how things are running, I would say. I mean, I’m not in the development aspect, but just kind of how things are running with our members, but also on that side of the team and how they’re working with members and making sure that they are happy. And we’re kind of being more proactive rather than reactive with making sure that we give them what they need ahead of time.

Mercy Clemente (42:35):

So I do like that, but I’m not stuck in one thing. I like testing out different things. I like being busy. I like, if someone says, “Oh, I’m working on this project and could use hands.” I like and I want to try it out. I’m interested in just dipping my toes in all different aspects of the company and never feeling like I have to stay in ops just because I’ve been in ops for a year and a half or whatever it is. That’s one thing that I really like here. I always heard coming out of college that whatever job you take initially, that’s the job you’re going to have for life. And you’re never going to be able to change careers. And that always terrified me because I was like, “People are changing in all aspects of their life, why are we expecting them to just stay consistent in their jobs?”

Mercy Clemente (43:17):

And when I’m here, I can just try out all sorts of things. Every week in my one on one, Chris is always saying, “What do you like doing? What do you not like doing?” And it’s fun to know that he is encouraging us to try other things and honestly kind of pushing it. There’s nothing wrong with testing something out. Try it and if you don’t like it, just go back to doing your regular stuff and try something new in a couple weeks or whatever. I’m sure that I’m going to be changing roles a bit as things go. But as of right now, I hope I don’t leave the op side too much because it’s a nice system and I like how it works. I like the people I work with and I just enjoy it. I don’t hate my job.

Ben Grynol (43:53):

And you can pass all that knowledge on to new team members as they joined, because what was the crazy stat? It was like 10,000 something messages. What were those numbers again, that of the number of messages that you’ve done and the latency to answer a message? It was just mind boggling.

Mercy Clemente (44:12):

Yeah. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was over 10,000. I don’t know if it was conversations or customer’s help, but that doesn’t even include any of the social stuff that I helped. It also doesn’t include, I don’t think it includes Zendesk, which was our previous system or Front, which was when the Mike bot and David bot were happening.

Josh Clemente (44:33):

Yeah, I think it was over 200 members with a 100 happiness score that week. Number one, top performer on the team, lifetime, over 10,000 members with a 95 happiness score and lifetime average handle time of a minute and 12 seconds. This is in addition to social media DMs. And like you said, the old platforms,

Ben Grynol (44:51):

Which is just wild to think about. And so having this foundation, I mean, taking the knowledge that you’ve collected from gathering all this insight, gathering all these questions, answering these things, it’s so helpful across the company and being able to offer that as we scale. Got a lot of work ahead and lots of interesting areas, but having this mindset of being a gap filler within each of your roles is a very interesting way of going about things. And so who knows if one day, maybe this summer, we start a metabolically, healthy food truck of some kind.

Josh Clemente (45:30):

I just love hearing that perspective, because we just read Brave New Work in our book club. And there’s this philosophy of letting people opt into the roles that are interesting to them as the future of work and this new operating system philosophy. And it really resonates. We have a ton of people like, Jesse moving into taking on more research stuff and Braden expanding his scope, and Mercy moving laterally and upward and all sorts of things. And I think that we will continue to experiment as a company, not just let… At the individual level as people experiment, we reinforce what sorts of approaches to letting people test the waters elsewhere work, and which ones are more diminishing returns. And I myself have moved around many times. And luckily we tend to bring in people much better than me to replace me at that thing.

Josh Clemente (46:24):

And so like when Mercy was trying to help us, because we were drowning in social media DMs, we had yet to bring on our head of ops, Miz. And so I was like, I think at that point I was actually interviewing candidates for that role. And then seeing him come in and systematize and add process and really like structure our member communications. And Mercy, being able to basically transition from triaging social, to being a full-time member success operator, it was something I hadn’t even been thinking about. I was just like, “Stem the bleeding on the social DMs.” And it led to this whole future career prospect that was entirely between them as they built out that new segment of the company. So there’re many examples of this where we just like problems manifest, we get people in the door to work on them and then it leads to this actually really impressive well functioning organization within the organization.

Ben Grynol (47:25):

What was your favorite dish of the food truck is the question?

Mercy Clemente (47:30):

Ooh, I don’t know, but I will say we served Philly cheesesteaks on it and I haven’t had a Philly cheesesteak since then. And that was a very long bit ago. So I think more so not my favorite, but kind of what have I stopped eating because of food trucks and there’s a list.

Josh Clemente (47:45):

I think my favorite remains Italian sausage. We would make these Italian sausage with red sauce. It was pretty good, I have to admit.

Mercy Clemente (47:51):

And peppers.

Josh Clemente (47:53):

And peppers. Yeah