#158 – From Google Product Manager to Co-Founder of Levels | David Flinner & Ben Grynol

Sometimes, your own personal health journey impacts your professional life in unimaginable ways. As a prior Product Manager at Google, Co-Founder David Flinner started his own metabolic health journey and then serendipitously reconnected with Sam Corcos and Josh Clemente. Ben Grynol and David talked through his introduction to Levels, how our company is raising awareness of the metabolic health crisis, and why intentionality is crucial to a god business model.

18:21 – Understand what’s possible

If you want your team to be able to make good decisions, they need to have an understanding of what’s possible.

The whole team really needs be understanding where the other functions are coming from, in order to make the right optimal decisions and make the right trade offs. And I think specifically on the technical side, it really helps to have an understanding of what’s possible. And there’s 10,000 ways to implement an idea, and knowing the amount of work that we want to invest or should be investing before we have certain amount of product market fit or understanding of whether the feature’s going to work is super key. And navigating that with the team and together making the right calls, and what we do know about the experience we don’t know and how much we need to go forward and implement to test something out.

21:00 – Maximize your value

To make the most of your resources, you need to learn how to maximize your value. This means figuring out how to leverage each phase of output you’re in.

I think the key thing to realize is that the engineering side is the bottleneck in a good way. They’re going to have a constant amount of output. And so how do you as a company maximize the value that you’re getting for this finite amount of resources? And you have to understand whether you’re in a phase where you’re biased towards learning, experimenting, or do you already know what you need to go build and then refine it and make it an excellent experience and dial that back, dialed in. And you’re going to get constant output from your resources, but you’re going to get more leverage, if you’re really precise and intentional about what you’re trying to get out of it. And then knowing what the goal is for any specific project, you can figure out what’s the minimum needed to do this, so that we can free up more time for free even more output.

31:12 – An uphill battle

One of the challenges of Levels is raising awareness of the metabolic health crisis so that people understand why Levels is an important company.

We realized that there’s a lot of different realities in the business context, in the market that we had to tackle in order to go into this space. From a mission standpoint, there was just this recognition that we have an uphill battle to raise the awareness of the metabolic health crisis, what it is, why it matters. And a big part of winning in this was going to be lifting the boat in the public consciousness. And we’re not just company building, we’re industry building. And it spans even beyond the industry, we’re actually pushing this rock, I guess, up the mountain and succeeding to get it over on the other side, where this, as Sam would say, in five years from now, we’ll be talking about the metabolic health crisis as we’re currently talking about the opioid epidemic. And so we’re thinking not only do we get access to CGMs and what is the compelling route to go to market and what sort of product will we build there, but there’s this sort of cycle that forms too, in terms of, if we’re going to help solve this crisis, we have to raise the awareness. And the raised awareness is going to benefit people purely for the sake of the raised awareness, but it’s also going to be an input back into the system for whatever product we’re building.

38:39 – Levels is a spectrum

Levels is an experience based on the customer, which means each person’s needs will be different.

I think what we’re talking about with that is really the comprehension. What sorts of understanding do you need to ramp up in order to understand the system you’re in and how you can get value out of it? And I think one thing we have to constantly be challenging ourselves is how much of this is just a gauge that is kind of giving someone a tool to measure for themselves, and how much of this is an experience that is helping to… It’s an experience based on a need that the customer has and a problem that we’re helping them with and we’re delivering a solution to it. And I think it is a spectrum. It’s a complicated space and the body is… Glucose complex, let alone where we want to go in the future with our full spectrum, biological observability and understanding the complexities of it. But how do you deliver a simple experience that is tailored for the members’ proximate goals? They might want to, “I just want to feel my best, I want to look my best. I want to lose a few pounds.” Or “I’ve got history of a history of certain chronic illness in my family. And I just want to make sure I’m on the right track.” With the right amount of understanding that just… Enough understanding so that people, it ties into their motivation and their soul. And they’re convinced that, “This is something that can help me.” But then giving in automatic mode, where people can… No matter how much they put into Levels, we should meet them where they’re at and give them value for that.

40:25 – Being a partner

Levels wants to help people achieve their health goals, which means we partner with people long-term.

We want to be your trusted partner and help you achieve your health goals. And I know that’s very vague, but the vision is broad. We want to not just help you with stable glucose in the long run, but help you for your whole life, achieve your health goals. And we need to be in a place where you turn to us, know that you’re not getting biased or strained advice, and that you can act on that in a way that is actionable, that is trustworthy. But also, we’re all humans, we’re not all on the bandwagon at the same time. We fall off, we come on and so Levels need to be positioned in a way that it’s much more of a good friend by your side, or a very understanding coach or someone who’s there to stand by you in the tough times and the good times, and who can guide you and points you in the right direction, but it’s going to walk alongside you.

44:13 – Be intentional about your message

Every aspect of our business is intentional, from the labels on a graph axis to what kind of data we do or don’t present.

You have to be intentional about what you’re solving and what message you want to get across. And you weave and you designed for that very intentionally across a whole spectrum of touchpoints with the customer. And it’s subtle things that you might not even think of, like the labels on a graph axis, or just maybe even the presence of what sort of data we present or not, or how we add logging. The touchpoints that we would provide certain information for you. Do we give that to you up front, where you’re less likely to read it, or do we pair it in context? When we know that there’s a high volume support issue that people don’t understand, do we pair something there? And it’s really multifaceted approach that we have to take.

47:21 – Be responsible caretakers of data

Our society is constantly learning and growing, which means we need to take responsibility for the knowledge we possess.

We, as a society, have gotten things wrong in the past. There was a point in time where we thought sugar was totally fine or smoking was totally fine. And so I think we’re probably no smarter than the people who came before us. Everyone’s got their flaws and their strengths, and we have to have a healthy dose of humility and recognizing, “What do we actually know now? And we should be guiding people towards and where do we still not know yet? “And is there more research and whatnot? And so that’s another big aspect of this too, is being responsible, being responsible caretakers of the data that’s been entrusted to us and not making recommendations that overstep the boundaries of where we know. Levels is very science oriented, and we’ve dedicated efforts pushing the cutting edge of understanding metabolism. And we don’t know everything about metabolism yet, but what do we know? And what can we give guidance about now, that we’re fairly confident on? How can we push the boundaries of the research so we can even tell more? But until we do that, not overstepping our bounds. And so I think that’s another guiding principle that we have here in our experiences.

50:01 – Keep moving forward

As Levels continues to grow, it will build upon itself. We hope to continue progressing in knowledge and in our relationships with our members.

I think that that movement, as you mentioned, it’ll build upon itself. And hopefully together, we will keep moving forward and keep progressing this state of the art. And that’s one of the reasons I’m so excited that we have been developing good relationships with our members. There’s a good two way communication. We started out building the products with them in that really tight feedback loop, but this is the sort of thing we’re together, now with Levels research studies, we’re going to start pushing the boundaries on what does it mean for metabolism in the general health population? What sorts of insights can we discover? And yeah, there’s a lot of opportunity there and I’m excited about it going forward.

50:51 – Dealing with challenges

At Levels, every day is a new challenge. As we build our product, we’re navigating obstacles one at a time.

I think one of the contents with Levels has been every day is a new challenge. As we both built the product, figure out what people want, remove one obstacle and then chart a course to the next obstacle, so we can remove it. But then also as a company, we’re going from a handful of people all the way up to, I think, near 60 employees now. And there are new challenges every day. And I think the things that are on my mind now are both… I think they cut into two large buckets and there’s probably more, but how are we going to transition from being the beta product that we built, which is the metabolic awareness tool, to the lasting metabolic improvement in general health tool. So not tool, but delivering on those results. And we’re investing a lot on that side into behavior change, understanding behavior, change frameworks, building out a set of system in our product that is fun, engaging rewarding for people that, like I said before, Levels will feel like you’re a friend and you are wanting to come into the app, you’re understanding where you’re at, you are getting that encouragement and direction helping you chart the right course.

52:11 – How do we grow?

As our organization continues to grow, we need to learn how to build our team in a strong and scalable way.

As we as a company continue to build our unique culture and our unique way of operating, what is the right way that we continue to build the team? And how do we go from… It’s not scalable to have the David bot for all of the different future iterations of our product. How do we want to engage as a fully remote creative team, creative development team, figuring out what is the next thing that’s going to resonate with our members. And as we have more and more resources under marching together towards our mission, how do we want to navigate the complexities that come up with a non-linear increase in complexity as you add more people to the team? So if we’re doing a lot of thinking there on first principles on what is the right way to operate as a distributed product team, what are the things that can be done asynchronously? We’re a core to the heart of what Levels culture is and where do we need to jump in on have more synchronous creative sessions, or how do we want to split up the task on how we iterate towards finally landing on product market fit, things like that.

David Flinner (00:00:06):

We built the product entirely from feedback on what we saw were the most common things that people were engaging it with. We paired that with a really intensive member interview process, where we would do a video call with them before, two weeks in, and at the end of the program at four weeks to really understand what was motivating them, what they were seeing, what their fears were. And this tight loop of being the product itself and this basically texting interface and the debriefing sessions really guided our approach to Levels in the early days.

Ben Grynol (00:00:45):

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. Growing up in the Midwest, David Flinner, one of the co-founders of Levels. He spent a lot of time tinkering on computers. His dad worked with them on a regular basis. So he decided to pick them up. The irony is that as a young kid, he thought, “There’s a couple things I don’t want to do when it comes to a career.”

(00:01:29):

One of them ironically, was working with computers. Something that he not only does on a daily basis as we all do, but something that he is very much involved in creating product, building this product from the ground up, the product we call Levels. He also spent a lot of his career working in product at Google, it was this training ground after studying psychology at Yale, where he decided to start getting more involved in tech. He had this opportunity with Google and it brought all of this exposure to this world of technology and what we can do from a behavior change perspective.

(00:02:00):

David and his wife, Stacy, they traveled the world for a couple years. He took some time off Google and he started building his own products, very much as side project to see what would happen. One of the products ended up getting a few hundred thousand users and gained some traction. And so they took this project and kept iterating on it. Over time, David eventually went back to Google and one thing led to another. He was interested in health and wellness and he started exploring what glucose was, what metabolism was, and why he felt a certain way. Serendipitously around the same time he reconnected with Sam Corcos and Josh Clemente who had started working on Levels or what we now know as Levels.

(00:02:41):

Very shortly after Levels was incorporated, David joined the team and they started working on product. He was essentially the product. Version 1 was called the David Bot. People would text them images of their CGM data, a few pictures of things like the food they ate and he’d give them insight. He used this knowledge to start iterating and building the product from there on out and Levels, well, it’s been a long journey, and we still have a lot ahead. But David and I’ve very much talked about things like behavior change, things about meeting people where they are.

(00:03:12):

We even talked about some of the things around building a startup, documentation, all these fun things. Anyway, great conversation with David. Here’s where we kick things off. Let’s take it all the way back to the Midwest. So let’s take it as far back as you want, but you grew up in the Midwest, we know that. And why don’t we walk through growing up there and sort of this evolution to where we are today with Levels?

David Flinner (00:03:40):

Sure, definitely. So I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, pretty typical Midwestern suburban kind of upbringing, I think. Lots of memories fishing in the local ponds, hanging out with neighborhood kids. And some of the earliest days actually, there is a tie in with kind of the future of Levels. But I remember my dad, I was fortunate enough, he worked in a technology company at the time that I think at the time Anderson Consulting. And he used to give me his old computers. And that’s where I really got my hands-on experience at a very early age. I can remember some of the earliest Apple laptops and just playing some of the games like Lunar Lander that came on it. And so I had early exposure to that sort of stuff and was self-taught from the beginning.

Ben Grynol (00:04:23):

Nice. Very cool. And so then, once you did that, was that sort of this catalyst into when you went into school, post secondary, what did that look like as far as how you thought about what you wanted to study moving forward and the things that you were exposed to as a kid? And then sot of what ended up happening with your career, where it’s like you’ve been in tech your whole life?

David Flinner (00:04:47):

Totally. Well, it’s funny, I always said there are two things I’ll never do, when I was younger, at least in high school. I said, there’s two things I’ll definitely never do. Anything’s possible, but I know I won’t work with computers and I won’t live in New York. And I ended up doing both after graduating from college. But I think some of my early experience from computers was, I loved working with technology and I was really good at it, but I thought the only thing you could do was sort of sit in front of a big box monitor all day in a windowless room and write code.

(00:05:21):

And that was sort what it was. I was pretty naive and ignorant as to how the industry worked and didn’t really know what the possibilities were. And so I thought that I wanted something that I could say connected to people. I loved working with people and engaging with people on a relational level. And in college I actually studied psychology and thought I wanted to be a child psychologist. Thought dealing with one on one, helping people out was sort of where I wanted to end up.

Ben Grynol (00:05:51):

Where was it that you went to school? Was it the Midwest that you stayed or?

David Flinner (00:05:56):

No, I went to Yale. So I went up to the East Coast in New England for four years. Going into it, I didn’t really know much about all of the different types of schools you could go to, but graduating high school, just looking at my grades, sounded like I could… Applied at a variety of different schools and did a big college tour. And that was the one that I fit in with most loved, just loved the old gothic architecture and the people I met there and started out that way. And it had a good psychology program as well.

Ben Grynol (00:06:27):

So then you studied that. And what did it look like after, as far as post-graduation? Was that when you went to New York or what was the path following graduation?

David Flinner (00:06:38):

Well, I guess in order to talk about after graduation, maybe the pivot from my desires to stay in psychology and how that ended up in New York. I did an internship at a Yale child psychology clinic. And I think I was a bit scared away from just the pace of life within that. And I think it wasn’t really fair for me because I was an intern, I didn’t have a lot of responsibilities, but it ended up being a lot of clocking in clocking out and pushing papers. And I didn’t feel very stimulated and didn’t get a chance to really interact with people in the way that I wanted to. And so I got to considering what are some other types of meaningful work that I could be more mentally stimulated in and engage with and didn’t require an additional decade of experience to get in before I could hit the ground running.

(00:07:23):

And so I thought at that point, the people around me are applying to banking and consulting, and I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do. I still loved technology, but I thought that was a dead end and didn’t really know the possibilities there. So I applied to some of the traditional Ivy league routes in finance and banking, even though I didn’t know much about it. But I said, “There’s one company that I would definitely love to work for.” This is back in 2008 and that’s Google. “I just love what they’re doing, love their product. And I’ll just throw my hat in the ring there.” And so on a whim, I applied for a job at Google in Boston, actually. I wanted to stay in the New England area. And this was right around the time of the great financial crisis of the time.

(00:08:06):

And so no one was getting job offers. I think my roommate applied to 90 different places and got no offers. I also got no offers except Google bits. So at the time it was an entry level role and it was coming in as a support associate. And after four interviews, I got an offer to go to Boston, but the very next day they called me to let me know that there was a hiring freeze and they actually couldn’t fulfill that. So had to wait several months and they called me back and said, “Listen, we’re starting to hire again in New York. If you’re interested, you can go through the interview process again.” And so I went through the whole interview process again, ended up getting the role and ended up working with computers in New York. I would say, I should have said, there’s three things I’ll never do and that’s win the lottery because the first two came true.

Ben Grynol (00:08:58):

So then you made it out to New York. And what was it that ended up taking you to the Bay because you were in New York for a while and then eventually you’re in the Bay. And so what did that look like as far as the path once you were in or immersed in Google?

David Flinner (00:09:11):

I guess, the short answer is, I switched roles and teams at Google and was relocated out to be more present with the engineering team in Mountain View. So I spent, I think around five years in New York and was working with, at that point, I was working with the teams that were responsible for display, image and video based advertising, the double click team out there as well as YouTube. And we were working on building out some of the ways YouTube incorporates advertising and working with other big partners around the world. And then I switched on to Google Pay and Google’s payment system and their whole team was out in the Bay. So by that point I had gotten married as well, and my wife had a job in New York, but we decided that this was a great opportunity and moved out to the Bay. She was from the Bay Area. So it brought us closer to her family and we settled into San Francisco.

Ben Grynol (00:10:09):

Nice. And then you were out there, for a while. You’re working out there, you’re working in, we’ll call it FinTech, but in the more of a FinTech play within Google, and there was this moment where you and Stacy decided like, “Hey, let’s take a little break from this.” So let’s dive into that. What did that look like and feel like when you thought, “Why don’t we take a break from what we’re doing now and explore the world.” Because it was, it’s such a cool and important part of your story. And so I’d love to hear that and how you did that and ended up going back into Google?

David Flinner (00:10:47):

Yeah. This was one of the first big leaps I think I took on kind of breaking away from some of, I don’t know, the tried and true paths. In 2016 I quit Google to go travel and to try to capitalize on some of the side projects that I had. Turn those into real businesses and see, just to really create an experience with Stacy, that we would have built together and woven together into a thousand strands of experiences that would form a really strong bond that no one could really unweave and have that really solidified a few years into our marriage shared experience. Yeah, we set off and we traveled, saw 70 countries, mostly staying for free at five star hotels over a 14 month period. And then a few extra months of doing our own kind of nomad lifestyle on either end of that. But I guess, backing up into this, I mentioned earlier that I’d always been interested in technology and didn’t really see that there was a route that I could be working with computers.

(00:11:47):

Because I thought, “Well, I could do some computer programming and build my own tools.” That sort of role wasn’t for me. But from the earliest days, I was always building products on my own and figuring out where there was a need and building a tool that would meet that, helping my friends or finding interesting small niche products to build. And by the time that I quit Google in 2016, I had built up some of my own side products that were reaching hundreds of thousands of users around the world and were bringing in some passive income through that route. So I’ve been working for seven years, was getting some passive income that was enough to keep us stable in San Francisco, but would really be, was a once in a lifetime opportunity for us to, while we had had the funding, be able to pull back and try to travel, make something of that and see what happened.

Ben Grynol (00:12:41):

What were the products that you were building? Because we’ve loosely talked about them before, but why don’t we dive into that?

David Flinner (00:12:48):

Yeah, sure. Well, I think as a one man shop, these were all fairly small. But I built them based on some needs that I saw in the world. And they were largely stemming from using a Chromebook, which was an early laptop that I think we still have Chromebooks out there, but the laptop that Google made that doesn’t have an operating system, it’s basically just a browser, right? And so that was in 2011 and the things that I thought so were missing, there some general utility apps. There was no way to… There was no camera in there, you couldn’t turn your camera on. Like we’re engaging now, this is kind of before video streaming became popular, there’s no way to see yourself, record something, take pictures from your computer. And so, one of the products I built out was just pretty much an online version of taking pictures, selfies.

(00:13:41):

It was a camera app. But there was nothing like that out there at the time. And certainly not in the Chrome Web Store. So it quickly became a hit with some of the top ranks at the Chrome Web Store. And then over time developed organic ranking and Google Search and was on the first page of Google for the word camera. And there was a bunch of other utility apps like that that were the main kind of drivers. But yeah, it was interesting. Over time, Dell Tech Support used to forward all of their customers who were having trouble with their webcams to my site to test it and make sure it was working. So I had ambitions of turning this small little side project into a bigger, maybe a SaaS product that would help out and support and other things in the consumer side, pivoting it into an app, just a whole bunch of possibilities. But there was a suite of other smaller things like that, that I was working on.

Ben Grynol (00:14:25):

That’s very much a product plan. So were you continuing to iterate on that? Where you’re making it better and taking customer feedback into account? Or was it build a whole bunch of things and get more wheels going and see which ones hit?

David Flinner (00:14:42):

It was a bit of both. It was a bit of experimentation on that breath search to see where there was interest out there. And then it was also iterating based on feedback. And it was slow and steady. It was sort of a side project that I was doing to teach myself some of the methods on how to go through that process of experimentation and building out, working your way towards finding a winning product. Certainly, we’re doing much more of that here at Levels with a bigger engineering team, a bigger team behind you all working together. But yeah, that’s how I did it.

Ben Grynol (00:15:17):

Were you hacking it to get there as far as what can you use that’s out of the box as far as end stuff and any product work required? Or were you outsourcing some of it for certain aspects of it to get it off the grid?

David Flinner (00:15:31):

It was a little bit of everything, yeah. On certain parts where I knew it was way beyond my complexity and there wasn’t anything I’d be able to do or lean on other resources, then outsource that. There were other aspects where I really wanted to learn something. So I would take extra time and kind of develop some of my coding skills to learn how to do it right and then do it myself. And that really helped me. I think that was a big part of career development for me, was self-guided learning. I’ve never really had a formal technology training, it’s always been curiosity driven by where I saw there was a need. And then to the extent that it made sense, given my limited resources and time. I would try to learn it myself, or if it was truly insurmountable, either going to another project or outsource that component, get some advice on how to do it right.

(00:16:16):

But I think that has been really instrumental in always upleveling to the next stage, identifying where there are growth opportunities taking the extra time to invest in yourself to learn that. And then it becomes a really good tool in your belt, even though I didn’t like to, I mean coding, but that’s not where I find my career. Investing in some of those areas to learn some of the concepts to solve my own challenges has really helped me later on, as I transitioned into product at Google and then at Levels to engage with the different engineering teams, understand the constraints, move faster, really.

Ben Grynol (00:16:49):

Yeah. Because you’ve got that frame of reference very much being technical in product, where you’ve got the foundation to be able to speak the language and understand certain things. And even, there’s been lots of work that when moving things forward, when iterating on different aspects, you sort of go in and have made little changes here and there, but that’s that lens of being technical, because there’s so many, this is digressing a little bit, but getting into product where there are so many skill sets that a great, anybody working in product can have a great product manager, product owner, can have very different skill sets. Very analytical ones, very technical ones, some people are more artistic. I think we’ve got the triangle that Scott refers to often, the scientists, the artist and the what’s the other?

David Flinner (00:17:41):

The general manager.

Ben Grynol (00:17:42):

Yeah. General manager, always got the business lens.

David Flinner (00:17:44):

Yeah.

Ben Grynol (00:17:44):

But yeah, you very much got that technical lens when it comes to product. And I think it’s been instrumental in being able to move things forward and then speak that language. That’s a hold up when working in product, if you don’t have the technical foundation.

David Flinner (00:18:00):

Yeah.

Ben Grynol (00:18:00):

Because it’s almost like speaking two different languages where people go, “That’s not what we can do. That’s not even possible what you’re wanting to do.” So it’s cool that that’s something that you’ve driven.

David Flinner (00:18:12):

Yeah. Thanks. And I think it’s a huge asset also, it’s not just with… Certainly, the technical side is one of those languages, but it extends to really all the different functions that… The whole team only to be understanding where the other functions are coming from, in order to make the right optimal decisions and make the right trade offs. And I think specifically on the technical side, it really helps to have an understanding of what’s possible. And there’s 10,000 ways to implement an idea, and knowing the amount of work that we want to invest or should be investing before we have certain amount of product market fit or understanding of whether the feature’s going to work is super key. And navigating that with the team and together making the right calls, and what we do know about the experience we don’t know and how much we need to go forward and implement to test something out.

(00:19:05):

Even on my side projects, my small products before I started Levels, it’s often not worth investing a fully fleshed out feature before you test it. So why not? I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of marketing tactics that rely on this too, but just throw up a landing page with the proposed value proposition. See if people are interested, do they click through and click on an enable button or a buy button. That doesn’t require really any engineering work. But then down the end of the spectrum, if you do need a complete experience, how do you do it in such a way that it feels end to end and complete, but doesn’t necessarily invest in all of the real infrastructure that’s going to help scale it out and face those things.

Ben Grynol (00:19:48):

Yeah, that’s a key is the minimizing, the expensive input, we’ll call it. That Eng is, Eng just takes a while, I’m generalizing, but it is something that is not as fast to do as some of the other scrappy things that can be done. And it’s expensive. So you make the wrong decision and you spend, whether it’s one day or one week or one month, doing something. There’s a faster way of getting some data or some feedback to be like-

David Flinner (00:20:16):

Yeah,

Ben Grynol (00:20:17):

…”Cool. We changed the placement of a button.” Assume that these are things we can do with landing pages where you’re building out of the box and just testing and iterating. It’s like, “We changed the copy. What did the CTA say? We changed the color. We changed the size. We changed the placement.” These are all these data points. And it gets back to what you’re saying with being able to speak the language, so that you can start to guide things in the right place and go, “Now’s the time to invest in the end work.” We’ve done the homework as opposed to just like, “Let’s go build.” And then you come out the other side and you’re like, “Wow, that was 20 weeks worth of work.” And then it might be the wrong thing to have been building.

David Flinner (00:20:54):

Right.

Ben Grynol (00:20:55):

So having that lens is just integral to really moving things forward.

David Flinner (00:20:59):

Yeah. I think the key thing to realize is that the engineering side is the bottleneck in a good way. They’re going to have a constant amount of output. And so how do you as a company maximize the value that you’re getting for this finite amount of resources? And you have to understand whether you’re in a phase where you’re biased towards learning, experimenting, or do you already know what you need to go build and then refine it and make it an excellent experience and dial that back, dialed in. And you’re going to get constant output from your resources, but you’re going to get more leverage, if you’re really precise and intentional about what you’re trying to get out of it. And then knowing what the goal is for any specific project, you can figure out what’s the minimum needed to do this, so that we can free up more time for free even more output.

Ben Grynol (00:21:46):

That’s exactly it. So why don’t we bring it back to you’re traveling the world, this is 2016 and I think it was Argentina.

David Flinner (00:21:56):

Yep.

Ben Grynol (00:21:56):

There’s this picture floating around of Sam Corcos wearing a suit, probably the only time he has been seen in a suit, but it is you Stacy and Sam. And I believe that’s the first time that you had met.

David Flinner (00:22:11):

Well, I met Sam, I think it was at a cocktail party through a mutual friend. And as you know, Sam is one of the most well networked people and has a lot of friends. And we stayed in touch. I think I was part of his list, he was part of my list and we stayed in touch casually for a couple years. And then we just so happened to have been conversing when we discovered that we were both going to be in Argentina at the same time. And Sam, he said, “Why don’t we get together?” We met up for brunch one day. He had a friend who was a professional Argentine polo player, never ceased to amaze me all the interesting contacts Sam has. And he is like, “Let’s learn how to play polo.” So he coordinated this really awesome weekend where we got together with his friend who has a horse ranch on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and got to play polo, got to spent some time together and just learned about each other and become friends.

Ben Grynol (00:23:10):

That’s very cool. And so you continued traveling after this and traveled until it was 2018 or 2019.

David Flinner (00:23:19):

Yeah, so we were traveling from January, 2017 and until I think March or April of 2018. So a little over a year, I quit Google in 2016. I had about six months off where I was just working on… I was head down building an Android app and working on my products. And then after we got back in 2018, had a couple months off as well. But for that period of travel, we had a one way ticket to Buenos Aires. And then we just let the winds take us where they would and met interesting people along the way.

Ben Grynol (00:23:55):

And then after that, what was the decision after you had traveled to all these countries, what was the decision to go back to Google and dive back into product there?

David Flinner (00:24:09):

Well, at the time, we were excited to come back to the states and I guess, my old team got wind that I was coming home and I didn’t yet have anything official that I was doing. So I wasn’t sure either. So I thought, “Why not go back? It’s a nice soft landing and it’s the team I really love. And there’s a lot of really interesting problems we were working on there and I could jump back in and contribute right away.” So I was excited to go back and hit the ground running with them.

Ben Grynol (00:24:37):

So you went back and then that’s where eventually it led you to this experience of before Levels. You started to feel differences as far as the way that you would eat certain things. I know we’ve talked more about that as far as cafeteria food and some of the things where… You went on a journey of exploration to try to link certain things, it sounds like, the way that you were feeling, physically feeling with some of the things you’re eating and exploring. Blood sugar and CGMs and all of these things, and it sort of came as this full circle thing. But why don’t we dive into, what did that journey look like as far as what made you interested in the world of health and wellness?

David Flinner (00:25:20):

I’ve always been interested in being generally athletic, been a fairly active person. I wouldn’t say that I’ve been an overly ambitious athlete, but kind of a general health seeker. I tried to do the right thing, didn’t really know why, didn’t know what organic was, but tried to eat it from time to time. So, that’s one aspect of this. Another aspect was I was in my early thirties and I wasn’t feeling as with it as my early twenties. I described it as just part of my metabolism slowing down, even though I didn’t know what metabolism was, but you hear as you age, you kind of slow down, get a little bit more brain fog, a little earlier onset of being tired throughout the day. And I felt like I was starting to slow down a bit. I wasn’t sure why. So I wanted to investigate that.

(00:26:09):

I thought I was eating healthy. I was eating, at the time, this is silly in retrospect, but it just shows how ignorant I was about just the obvious facts of nutrition. But I was eating homemade whole wheat pizza, non-alcoholic beers thinking those were good choices and not knowing anything about the underlying physiology of food. So part of this was diet. Part of it was stress. I think working hard in my job, but then also with a really, really bad commute from San Francisco to Silicon Valley each day. Probably was that, probably, maybe it was age, but overall I felt like I was slowing down and didn’t really know why. But because I did remember that there was this phrase that your metabolism slows as you get older, on one side, I started researching that and saying, “Hey, what is this metabolism? Why is it important in energy and your body function?”

(00:27:02):

And that led me to glucose and diet and thinking, “Well, maybe there is something that I’m doing wrong here. If I could track my glucose, I could get a really good proxy for how my metabolic health was.” And that led to the discovery of continuous glucose monitors. And I think this is similar to Josh’s story in some ways, but I quickly got frustrated that you couldn’t get access to these. It was something that required a physician’s prescription and it was something that I didn’t have an easy way to do. And I tried to do it through a couple telehealth consultations and was denied that. So. But before I tried that, when I was searching for this, it’s actually very serendipitous, but Sam was scheduled to stay in my guest room in San Francisco, at this time. He was probably in nomad, but maybe he was in New York, I can’t remember.

(00:27:50):

He was scheduled to come visit us in our guest room the very next day. And so, as it happens, the very next day we were talking about… Or Sam arrives and he starts talking about the idea he had with Josh and how he was thinking about starting a company related to continuous glucose monitors and the metabolic health space. And I was like, “It’s crazy that you’re talking about this because just last night I was researching how to get access to one of these myself. There’s something in the air. This seems like it has legs.”

(00:28:19):

And that night I was talking to Stacy and it just made so much sense to us that the ideas there, this has huge potential. There’s a really great mission and a need in this space to help people uncover how their food is affecting their health and then course correct for the long term. And there’s really no better team that I could think of than working with Sam and then Josh as well. So we made the decision right then and there, even though at the time, it wasn’t apparent to me that there was an opportunity to come on board, that we were going to do it if that opportunity presented.

Ben Grynol (00:29:00):

Yeah. Because it May, it was early May when Josh flew out to New York and he, Sam were riffing on this. And then fast forward to June 25th, 2019, that’s when Levels is incorporated and your official start date is July 26th.

David Flinner (00:29:20):

Yeah.

Ben Grynol (00:29:20):

So it’s like this compressed window of being very quick as far as you coming on board and starting to work towards building V1.

David Flinner (00:29:31):

Yeah.

Ben Grynol (00:29:31):

Everything was an idea up until this point. And it was like, “What do we have to do?” Because Josh was working for years on the infrastructure. He had the lens on what is needed to get access, and the big play was connecting with physicians and trying to build out the infrastructure side, trying to solve the access part as opposed to the product part. But that was just these brick walls, he couldn’t get through brick walls, brick walls.

David Flinner (00:29:59):

Yeah.

Ben Grynol (00:30:00):

And it was basically over. I mean, the way he tells the story, which he’s told on the earliest episodes, it felt like it was over, he had his 30th birthday in April and it was like, well, it’s kind of done. And then it was that serendipitous phone call from Sam. And then very shortly later,… So it went from end of April being air quotes “Done” to a couple of months later, you’re on board and things are starting to move as far as thinking through, like-

David Flinner (00:30:25):

Yeah.

Ben Grynol (00:30:26):

….”Okay. If there’s a product, what does this look like?”

David Flinner (00:30:28):

Right.

Ben Grynol (00:30:29):

But why don’t we walk through what were some of the steps that you started to take? You come on board and then it’s like, “Hey, we’re doing this.”

David Flinner (00:30:35):

Yeah.

Ben Grynol (00:30:35):

What were you thinking about from a product standpoint?

David Flinner (00:30:39):

There were even a few steps earlier than that. And earlier than the incorporation we all got together and what was it? It was probably late May or early June. And we even hosted design jams and brainstorming sessions, where we had our very first assemblage. Now it’s a tradition at Levels, every quarter we have an assemblage. But the very first assemblage was even before the incorporation, there was the three of us who are already committed, and then a few other friends who are initial engineering prospects. I think Andrew was even there. He joined a few days after the assemblage. But the creative idea started flowing very early on. And I think we realized that there’s a lot of different realities in the business context, in the market that we had to tackle in order to go into this space. From a mission standpoint, there was just this recognition that we have an uphill battle to raise the awareness of the metabolic health crisis, what it is, why it matters.

(00:31:32):

And a big part of winning in this was going to be lifting the boat in the public consciousness. And we’re not just company building, we’re industry building. And it spans even beyond the industry, we’re actually pushing this rock, I guess, up the mountain and succeeding to get it over on the other side, where this, as Sam would say, in five years from now, we’ll be talking about the metabolic health crisis as we’re currently talking about the opioid epidemic. And so we’re thinking not only do we get access to CGMs and what is the compelling route to go to market and what sort of product will we build there, but there’s this sort of cycle that forms too, in terms of, if we’re going to help solve this crisis, we have to raise the awareness. And the raised awareness is going to benefit people purely for the sake of the raised awareness, but it’s also going to be an input back into the system for whatever product we’re building.

(00:32:30):

And if we can come up with a system that finds a whole bunch of true believers in the beginning, then that’s going to start to organically spread as well. So we’ll have a very highly targeted, finite targeted audience that starts to nurture the product, and we expand out from that. At the same time, we raise the industry and raise kind of the general awareness in the public and we’ll find somewhere to navigate throughout that. And the approach we took, we really didn’t know exactly how we would get there, but we determined very early on that we were going to lean into velocity experimentation and doing things at that stage of the company, especially that don’t scale. And there’s a lot of problems that we could be solving. And we had to think through what are the existential ones, and we would tackle those one at a time.

(00:33:19):

And there were some existential, some big ones that we knew that were less related to consumer product building. Like you mentioned, the building out the telehealth, building out the way to get access to CGMs was an unsolved problem at the time. And that was the first hard problem that we tackled was listen, “We’re above board. We operate within the regulatory frameworks of the United States. How do we get access to this really critical tool to the general health and wellness audience, and start to adapt it for helping them make changes in their diet and seeing how they can improve their health?” And so the first thing we tackled was that telehealth or that approach to seeing if CGM was right for our customers. And we solved that. It was, I don’t know, maybe a six month period, and there’s a lot of serendipitous stories we could get into in that if we wanted to, but I think maybe, also more interesting is, “Okay, we’ve solved that access problem, now what?”

(00:34:18):

You have a CGM, but is it interesting? Is it not interesting? Will people want to use this? How are they using it? What could they use it to help them? We didn’t really know. And there’s this dual challenge of both raising the educational awareness of what is metabolic health for our potential audience, and then pairing that with their motivations and goals and helping them see how they could make lasting change for things that matter to them. So what we did was, we didn’t even have a real app or a product, but we had the active problem solved, so we ship people who are our pharmacy partner, we ship people a continuous glucose monitor in a cardboard box, unlabeled cardboard box, and the Levels product was, you get this cardboard box sometimes’ got beaten up in the mail and you were supposed to text David screenshots of what you saw in the manufacturer CGM app, and then any pictures of what you’re eating and any questions that you have about the results that you’re seeing.

(00:35:11):

And we built the product entirely from feedback on what we saw were the most common things that people were engaging it with. We paired that with the really intensive member interview process, where we would do a video call with them before two weeks in and at the end of the program at four weeks to really understand what was motivating them, what they were seeing, what their fears were and this tight loop of being the product itself in this basically texting interface and the debriefing sessions really guided our approach to Levels in the early days.

Ben Grynol (00:35:46):

Hey, you were the product, the David Bot was what we still refer to it as to this day. The hard thing is, so there’s the metabolic health crisis and bringing awareness to that. It’s this idea of category [inaudible 00:35:59]. Right? So there’s wearables, but then there’s like bio wearables, when we start to get into data based on internal biomarkers, which is a very different play than something that’s giving you something like step count. That’s a very different wearable, totally different insight.

David Flinner (00:36:15):

Totally.

Ben Grynol (00:36:16):

But the challenge is that it’s overwhelming, because it becomes so foreign. Unless somebody has spent, I don’t want to oversell and say a lifetime, but unless somebody has spent a significant amount of time, really learning about health and wellness, it’s like the average person will not, I mean, even to this day, the average person will not have heard of things like glucose Levels and what is an average glucose level that you should expect to have. We don’t even have to get into that right now, but where it gets really hard is from day one of the experience. So going back to we’ll say, late 2019, early 2020, if we use the analogy of a car, a full gas gauge is great, you want it to be full, but a tachometer that’s all the way to the right is not good.

(00:37:10):

And bringing it back to glucose, it’s like, people don’t know when they’re starting to interpret, is this good? Is this bad? People don’t know, so they need that help, they need the foundational layer. Because in the case of the car, as an analogy, it’s like, well, the tachometer you want low and the gas gauge you want high. So it’s these opposite things. And that’s something we generally know because we drive cars and we get used to it, it’s in front of us on a daily basis. But when you start to talk about not only new sources of data, but trying to interpret what that means, and then people internalize that and they say, “This is me. This is what’s happening inside of your body. I have no idea what to do with this.”

(00:37:51):

That’s where that product challenge comes in. And that’s why it was integral for you to be the product, to be there providing that insight layer. And now the next step is taking that and saying, “How do we give people the feedback they need to be able to actually take action? Call it the, so what, and the now what. So it’s the, so what? And then the, now, what? “What should I do with this? Is it good? Is it bad? I have no idea.” So it’s a very hard-

David Flinner (00:38:16):

So much to unpack there.

Ben Grynol (00:38:18):

Yeah.

David Flinner (00:38:20):

So much unpack. Even just to go back to the car analogy, if you think about it, in modern cars, you don’t need to know what a tachometer is even. So you can just get in an automatic car and drive. And as long as you’re in drive, that tachometer is really redundant. You don’t have to look at it at all.

Ben Grynol (00:38:35):

Yeah.

David Flinner (00:38:35):

And so I think there’s a spectrum of balance on, I think what we’re talking about with that is really the comprehension. What sorts of understanding do you need to ramp up in order to understand the system you’re in and how you can get value out of it? And I think one thing we have to constantly be challenging ourself is how much of this is just a gauge that is kind of giving someone a tool to measure for themselves, and how much of this is an experience that is helping to… It’s an experience based on a need that the customer has and a problem that we’re helping them with and we’re delivering a solution to it.

(00:39:09):

And I think it is a spectrum. It’s a complicated space and the body is… Glucose complex, let alone where we want to go in the future with our full spectrum, biological observability and understanding the complexities of it. But how do you deliver a simple experience that is tailored for the members’ proximate goals? They might want to, “I just want to feel my best, I want to look my best. I want to lose a few pounds.” Or “I’ve got history of a history of certain chronic illness in my family. And I just want to make sure I’m on the right track.” With the right amount of understanding that just… Enough understanding so that people, it ties into their motivation and their soul. And they’re convinced that, “This is something that can help me.” But then giving in automatic mode, where people can… No matter how much they put into Levels, we should meet them where they’re at and give them value for that.

(00:40:00):

And some people, yes, will want to go deeper, maybe shift it into sports gear, or buy a manual car. And that’s okay. We can have a way to gracefully fall back into those data driven mindsets. But if we want to get this to be accessible and to reach a billion people, it’s going to have to be simple and resonate with a lot of people. So I think that’s one big way I think about this. I think another one is, we want to be your trusted partner and help you achieve your health goals. And I know that’s very vague, but the vision is broad. We want to not just help you with stable glucose in the long run, but help you for your whole life, achieve your health goals. And we need to be in a place where you turn to us, know that you’re not getting biased or strained advice, and that you can act on that in a way that is actionable, that is trustworthy.

(00:40:53):

But also, we’re all humans, we’re not all on the bandwagon at the same time. We fall off, we come on and so Levels need to be positioned in a way that it’s much more of a good friend by your side, or a very understanding coach or someone who’s there to stand by you in the tough times and the good times, and who can guide you and points you in the right direction, but it’s going to walk alongside you. And these are some of the kind of higher level narratives that I like to structure Levels around, to guide us, as we think through, “Hey, are we getting too technical in these details? What is the actual problem we’re solving? Can we keep it? How can we simplify this? How can we remember that this is a relational thing?”

(00:41:29):

And we’re not just there to show you gauges and show you what your glucose Levels are. Are they high? Are they low? What is high or low mean? But that whole experience. And that’s not to discount the importance of the base layer, we have to have a table stakes layer of comprehension. And in the early days, we really focused on that. We would show raw glucose data and people told us, “Whoa, whoa, you have no idea what this means.” What does it mean? It’s like, there’s calibration errors. It’s like, what does it mean to be 72 milligrams or 142 milligrams per deciliter? It’s just numbers. So we spent a lot of time on that comprehension layer, building out things like color coding the graph, investing in simplified scoring systems that kind of abstracted away. Some of the more details while not hiding them. You could rely on a more relatable analogy for what that means for you and then content education. But there’s a long way to go.

Ben Grynol (00:42:22):

Yeah, its the, “What should I do with this?” And we’ve heard stories too, and this is incentive for us to continue pushing this forward, to really solve this problem is, when people have seen data that has been surprising that they haven’t understood, whether high or low, right? We’ve heard stories of people taking action. I’ve got texts from friends saying, “Hey, should I go to the hospital? Is this urgent?” Right? And it could be something that you go, “It’s totally fine.” But it’s so foreign that you’re not used to seeing those numbers. If you see your gas gauge on, if it’s on whatever it is, 15 miles left, whatever, the lights been on for a while. And then it’s like, yeah, intuitively we all know that means that signal, that cue is, “Go to fill up with gas. You have 15 miles left, you’re going to run out.” But when you see this data that is high, low, you don’t really know what… We’re doing, a better job with product and content to give people the insight to say, “Here’s where you want to be from an optimal perspective.”

David Flinner (00:43:34):

Yeah.

Ben Grynol (00:43:34):

“Here’s some of the patterns that you should see and you should think about when you think through the way that the food or the lifestyle choices that you… The food you eat. Yeah. The lifestyle choices you make, this is what you might see.” But without that, it’s just almost lost. And then it becomes we don’t want it to ever be an anxiety inducing experience where people feel so overwhelmed that they disengage.

David Flinner (00:43:59):

Right.

Ben Grynol (00:43:59):

Because then it’s a lot harder to reengage them to say, “No, we want you to walk away feeling empowered over the decisions that you make.”

David Flinner (00:44:09):

Yeah. And I think what this scenario kind of highlights is that you have to be intentional about what you’re solving and what message you want to get across. And you weave and you designed for that very intentionally across a whole spectrum of touchpoints with the customer. And it’s subtle things that you might not even think of, like the labels on a graph axis, or just maybe even the presence of what sort of data we present or not, or how we add logging. The touchpoints that we would provide certain information for you. Do we give that to you up front, where you’re less likely to read it, or do we pair it in context? When we know that there’s a high volume support issue that people don’t understand, do we pair something there?

(00:44:52):

And it’s really multifaceted approach that we have to take. I think zooming out this goes back to the challenge that we had in the very first day, is that we’re so young in this industry, it is still a foreign concept to a lot of people. We’re both simultaneously iterating towards product market fit with the Levels product and we’re raising the awareness of metabolic health. And so in our early days, we had this unique challenge in the app, maybe hopefully 10, 15 years from now, everyone’s going to know what glucose is, why it matters. And it’ll be a little bit more easy on that education side, because they’ll already have some of that context. But even then, I think it’s a very intentional product decision on what we choose to focus on and how we do so.

Ben Grynol (00:45:36):

And change takes so much time. It’s taken decades for people to really understand things like the impact of sugar, period. If you look back, I mean maybe fast forward-

David Flinner (00:45:50):

Isn’t that shocking? Yeah.

Ben Grynol (00:45:51):

It’s wild. But fast forward, what’s it going to be in 2050 when somebody’s walking down the street with, I won’t name a brand, but we’ll say some type of soda in their hand? What are we going to think about it? It’s kind of like the way smoking was even in the late 70s, early 80s, even up until the 90s, that’s when smoking started to become this thing that people had awareness of the health implications, it really started to change.

David Flinner (00:46:20):

Right.

Ben Grynol (00:46:21):

And so then now, fast forward to 2022, you look at that and you go like, “There’s enough education about what the implications of smoking are.” And the same thing goes with sugar.

David Flinner (00:46:31):

Right.

Ben Grynol (00:46:32):

So hopefully fast forward, when we can start to look at biomarkers in bio-observability, all the different markers that we can give people insight about in the future as technology changes, as there can be more education, more awareness of what these things mean and why people should care about them. That’s what will help us to get healthier, to increase lifespan and healthspan. It’s a lot of work to do, but it’s very much full circle the way that you’re thinking through everything, as it relates to what you studied in school. This is very much the psychological play of saying, “What do we have to do to give people…To get into their minds, to understand the way they’re thinking about things? How do we meet them, where they’re at?”

David Flinner (00:47:15):

Definitely. And just to go back to one point you raised, and I think it’s an interesting observation that, we, as a society, have gotten things wrong in the past. There was a point in time where we thought sugar was totally fine or smoking was totally fine. And so I think we’re probably no smarter than the people who came before us. Everyone’s got their flaws and their strengths, and we have to have a healthy dose of humility and recognizing, “What do we actually know now? And we should be guiding people towards and where do we still not know yet? “And is there more research and whatnot?

(00:47:42):

And so that’s another big aspect of this too, is being responsible, being responsible caretakers of the data that’s been entrusted to us and not making recommendations that overstep the boundaries of where we know. Levels is very science oriented, and we’ve dedicated efforts pushing the cutting edge of understanding metabolism. And we don’t know everything about metabolism yet, but what do we know? And what can we give guidance about now, that we’re fairly confident on? How can we push the boundaries of the research so we can even tell more? But until we do that, not overstepping our bounds. And so I think that’s another guiding principle that we have here in our experiences.

Ben Grynol (00:48:23):

A lot of it too, is helping to lift the more… Everything is symbiotic in some way, shape or form. And there’re definitely network externalities, to be a little bit nerdy about it, that come with creating this ecosystem of thought leaders and all these things. But if we look at Dr. Rick Johnson, he’s got the Nature Wants Us to Be Fat.” Book that just came out.

David Flinner (00:48:45):

Right.

Ben Grynol (00:48:45):

And he talks so much about the implications of fructose. So anecdotally, we know don’t drink soda, avoid things that have high fructose content in liquid form. Just not good for you. But when you start to say, “Hey, there’s a higher rate of…” Things he highlights in the book. The reason it’s such an issue is it goes right through you. And there’s higher instances of things like colon cancer over time. Because if you consume these beverages like A, in surplus, B, with consistency over time, these are the implications.

(00:49:19):

Having the ability to have some data where people can see what is happening with their glucose levels in real time, and look at certain things, take this thought leadership, whether it’s Dr. Lustig, whether it’s Dr. Johnson, whether it’s Dr. Gottfried and start to elevate this information and put it out there for people to understand. That is the scientific lens that you’re talking about, where we want to make sure that everything we do is done with integrity. And as you mentioned saying, “We don’t know it all, but we’re going to do the best we can to put forward the information that is out there to educate people.” Because it really does become a movement over time.

David Flinner (00:49:59):

Absolutely. I think that that movement, as you mentioned, it’ll build upon itself. And hopefully together, we will keep moving forward and keep progressing this state of the art. And that’s one of the reasons I’m so excited that we have been developing good relationships with our members. There’s a good two way communication. We started out building the products with them in that really tight feedback loop, but this is the sort of thing we’re together, now with Levels research studies, we’re going to start pushing the boundaries on what does it mean for metabolism in the general health population? What sorts of insights can we discover? And yeah, there’s a lot of opportunity there and I’m excited about it going forward.

Ben Grynol (00:50:37):

What are you thinking about as far as the work moving forward? Some of the things that need to be done, how we cross the chasm, all of these things that come into really finding product market fit?

David Flinner (00:50:50):

I think one of the contents with Levels has been every day is a new challenge. As we both built the product, figure out what people want, remove one obstacle and then chart a course to the next obstacle, so we can remove it. But then also as a company, we’re going from a handful of people all the way up to, I think, near 60 employees now. And there are new challenges every day. And I think the things that are on my mind now are both… I think they cut into two large buckets and there’s probably more, but how are we going to transition from being the beta product that we built, which is the metabolic awareness tool, to the lasting metabolic improvement in general health tool. So not tool, but delivering on those results.

(00:51:38):

And we’re investing a lot on that side into behavior change, understanding behavior, change frameworks, building out a set of system in our product that is fun, engaging rewarding for people that, like I said before, Levels will feel like you’re a friend and you are wanting to come into the app, you’re understanding where you’re at, you are getting that encouragement and direction helping you chart the right course. I think that’s one big aspect of this. And then the other aspect is as we as a company continue to build our unique culture and our unique way of operating, what is the right way that we continue to build the team? And how do we go from… It’s not scalable to have the David bot for all of the different future iterations of our product.

(00:52:28):

How do we want to engage as a fully remote creative team, creative development team, figuring out what is the next thing that’s going to resonate with our members. And as we have more and more resources under marching together towards our mission, how do we want to navigate the complexities that come up with a non-linear increase in complexity as you add more people to the team? So if we’re doing a lot of thinking there on first principles on what is the right way to operate as a distributed product team, what are the things that can be done asynchronously? We’re a core to the heart of what Levels culture is and where do we need to jump in on have more synchronous creative sessions, or how do we want to split up the task on how we iterate towards finally landing on product market fit, things like that.

Ben Grynol (00:53:22):

Yeah. One of the forcing functions of being remote and being sync in the most positive way is that we’ve had the forcing function of great documentation. Right? We don’t have the excuse for not having it because, when you’re in a sync and an in-person environment, it’s really easy to have the best intentions for documentation and bypass it, or just say, “Nah, that’s kind of a waste of time.” But documentation has been integral for collaborating across the team, for having historical reference of, “Why did we make that decision.” I mean, it came up, side note, it came up today, there’s a growth initiative that we’re going to undertake. It’s committed to. And there was a bunch of documentation that it was like, “Whomever DRIs this, here are the documents.” And I went back in, I thought there were two and I forgot, and I can’t even tell you the number. There are three documents and then all the call notes, it might be eight.

David Flinner (00:54:28):

Right.

Ben Grynol (00:54:28):

So say there are 11 or 12 pieces of documentation. I was like, “Whomever is the DRI for this, this will get you up to speed because we have an analog of something that we already did this thing once.” And just those things, when it comes to product, when it comes to building out, we bring on more Eng, we bring on more design people, we bring on more product people. The more we do this, the greater documentation is to say, “Hey, this will get you up to speed.” There’s always that reference. So it’s been-

David Flinner (00:54:55):

Absolutely.

Ben Grynol (00:54:56):

…it’s been such a cool thing of… Growing teams and building startups is inherently hard, period. But doing certain things well as a remote team, like taking documentation seriously, it’s been a very cool process to be a part of.

David Flinner (00:55:14):

Yeah. I’m so thankful that we have that value and that documentation is a stable foundation for us. Because it is almost nothing more important, I think in product development than good documentation. And the reason for that is that, you have so many different people that are contributing. It’s really important to be clarifying what people mean by the words they’re using. And it’s many different people who are all earnestly working and doing their best towards pushing the team forward and the project forward, may very well have different understandings of what the goal is or what certain definition of a vague terminology is. And really aligning around, what do we know? What exactly does it mean? What are the open questions? It’s critical to driving the team forward and providing a central reference point that lays out the rules of engagement, lays out the state of affairs, really. And so it’s not being transmitted, and perfectly between a game of telephone, one on one A to B to C to D. And having a single source of truth it’s just really key.

Ben Grynol (00:56:18):

And doing things that are necessary when PRs go out, we’ve got the documentation standard now of, “Well, you have to have… Here’s your checklist. But most importantly, here’s a loom walkthrough.” That helps the next person who’s doing a review going, “Oh wait, this is 10 times easier.” Because the default in person, which is such an easy thing to rant about is like, “Oh, I’m just going to push this out into the abyss general PR is slack message, this is probably the general thing is, slack message in channel. “Hey, I need a PR.” And somebody picks it up and I’ll go ask Billy some questions. If anything comes up. And it becomes this huge distraction versus, there’s a much more, not only efficient for both people, but more effective way of doing it.

David Flinner (00:57:10):

Yeah.

Ben Grynol (00:57:10):

And it’s like, we were forced to figure that out because of being remote and because of being asynchronous. And so it’s all these little [inaudible 00:57:17] Yeah.

David Flinner (00:57:19):

Because the type of documentation that lands with the other parties, the ones you want to communicate with, it’s easier for the recorder to record a loom or a screen recording of themselves, or just passively record a meeting, than it is to summarize type up notes, whatnot. And oftentimes, that level of fidelity is easier to consume for the audience as well. Especially, if it’s a PR product demo that’s two, 10 minutes long or a quick meeting. If you have a two hour chat or something, which rarely happens. And of course, you’d want to summarize that for time savings. But I think it’s surprising how easy it is to have any layer of documentation. Any layer of documentation is going to be really useful. And the most friction free format is just recording what you’re doing.

Ben Grynol (00:58:06):

I remember telling you right around the time when it had started that one of the most helpful things that you did, and it encouraged me to do it was, you would always put out supporting looms. You would do some product walkthrough, it might have been… Everything from, “Hey, here’s how I’m thinking about this new feature.”

David Flinner (00:58:25):

Yeah.

Ben Grynol (00:58:26):

Or “Here is a proposed, I’m throwing a dart at the wall of, ‘Do we want to think about this feature’” or here’s a bug. There was always something and it would be whatever, one to five minutes. And I just remember that being super helpful. And so it was something that I remember chatting with you and saying, “David, this is super helpful for getting insight. Thanks for doing this. You’re encouraging me.” And the more that we do this as a team, you set the example, you do this, and the more people do it and it becomes the norm.

(00:58:55):

Now, it’s just silly that we talk about it, because that’s what we all do. We all do these little things, but you realize how helpful these things are, where even meetings, two people can have a meeting and it gets posted. Assume it’s some meeting about, let’s just say it’s about some new product feature. It’s not a waste of six people sitting in a room for an hour spinning tires and just sort of talking. And it feels productive, but at the time it’s way better when the same people can watch that thing and go, “Oh, if I have anything to add, I’ll put a comment on there.” And it’s not like the project moves any slower or different. It moves the same speed, it’s just that it’s a better use of everyone’s time, so you can stay heads down on the right things.

David Flinner (00:59:41):

Not only does it move at the same speed, it move faster because people can watch that video at 2X speed, they can do it on their downtime.

Ben Grynol (00:59:48):

Yeah.

David Flinner (00:59:49):

And it’s strictly value additive, because I’m sure the project team can get it done themselves, but if they get some passive input that materially changes things from an observer, that’s a win.

Ben Grynol (01:00:00):

Yeah. I mean, that’s a weird thing, right? You can you, but you can’t really do the dishes and participate in a meeting. Because, the sense is that you are an active participant. Whereas, when you’re a passive listener of information and you go, “Cool” mental note, or maybe you hit space bar, hit pause, and you make your little note, so that however you decide to like, “Here are my takeaways. Here’s what I’m thinking about it.”

(01:00:26):

It’s like you can do the dishes and listen to an hour meeting. And let’s say you did it on 2X and it’s 30 minutes of your time. You write the notes. It’s like, “Wow, I did this thing that I wouldn’t be able to do.” Because, normally you can’t be in two places, because if somebody goes, “David, what do you think?” And you’re like, “Oh man, sorry I was washing the cup.” It doesn’t work that way. So it’s just such a cool thing to have that as this thread or almost this social fabric of the way that we work, where it feels almost like a unlocker, a little hack of being able to do more in a day.

David Flinner (01:00:59):

Definitely. I’m just super excited about the opportunity ahead of us. I think the team that we’ve assembled, I’m incredibly humbled to be around. I’m learning things from them that it’s more than… They’re much more capable than I am, so I’m just thankful to be in their presence. And I think that as we continue to grow as a team and get into our groove on going through different base changes throughout the company, it’s going to be incredible to see how much we can together with our members, raise the awareness of the metabolic health opportunities and make a change there. So I get up every day thinking about the team we’re working with, the opportunity ahead of us and how we can build that movement.