Building the First Metabolic Fitness Company with Josh Clemente, the Co-Founder and President of Levels

In this episode of Dive In with host Simran Sandhu, Co-Founder and President of Levels Josh Clemente share why and how he created a startup. What began as a personal health journey turned into a professional one. Thanks to a problem-solving mindset and a team with shared goals, Levels now has a waitlist of over 100k and counting. They “why” is simple: people want to be healthy.

Startups begin as default dead

Your company becomes alive when you figure out good product-market fit.

Here at Levels, we use terminology at early-stage startups that your default dead until you’re not, right? And that’s like the product-market fit chasm. When you cross the chasm, suddenly you’re default alive. And that’s what every small company has to be thinking about is like, what is stopping you from becoming default alive? Focus there. Don’t solve the complex sort of nice to have aesthetic functions, figure out what your customers need, and build that for them. And do it as quickly as you can because time moves faster than you might expect, and there’s a lot of ways to burn resources.

Let ignorance & confidence work together

Josh was able to bridge different industries by focusing on problems that needed to be solved.

There’s something to be said for just developing an intuition for solving problems. And then once you have that, you start to see problems that can be solved all over the place. And my dad used to use this Mark Twain quote all the time, which was “all you need in life is ignorance and confidence.” And what that means I think is that if you don’t know how things are done, then you won’t worry about doing them differently. And if you have the confidence to do them differently, then you’ll do them. And so, it’s like that’s kind what’s necessary I feel like to bridge between industries and to feel confident in doing so is like I don’t have the credentials really to work in several of the industries I’ve worked in. But at the end of the day, if you don’t get hung up there and you just think about what’s the problem that I see that could be solvable here.

The slow onset of metabolic dysfunction

The reason metabolic health doesn’t get the attention it should is because it slowly sneaks up on you.

In the health industry, I myself experienced the problem that I think needs solving, which is that metabolic dysfunction comes on slowly and society’s not paying attention to it. And there’s an opportunity to close the loop between the actions we take every day and the reactions our bodies experience and use our health data to make better choices. And that is not currently, it doesn’t exist today. And it’s obvious to me that as the rate of dysfunction accelerates globally, this has to exist or we have no other option essentially. So, it will exist and what I experienced and I’m happy to jump into my own story, but what I experienced was kind of like a patient zero example of it. And so, there was no qualification needed. It was just, oh yeah, this is a problem and it’s solvable.

Health benefits from feedback

Without feedback, we can’t easily improve our diet or lifestyle for the better.

Health is the compounded outcome of the decisions we make over days, years, decades. People are living lives without any feedback on the decisions they’re making. And so, this is how you end up in an environment where we’re constantly stimulated, we’re not sleeping well, we’re stressed all the time, and our food is tailored for the convenience of our lives rather than for nutrition. And so, it’s very easy out feedback to course correct. It’s very easy for people to end up way off the track of health. And so, I experienced that myself. I’m someone who has never really experienced weight gain necessarily. I’ve been fairly fit my whole life, certainly played sports, worked out a lot, I was a CrossFit trainer for the past eight years. But while I was at SpaceX, I started to experience inexplicable fatigue, symptomatic episodes where I would be shaky and just uncomfortable, and I need to just sit down.

Data makes a big difference

In engineering and in life, the key to understanding something lies in being able to measure it.

If you’re trying to understand how a system works, you have to measure the most important data to dreams associated with it. And if you want to prevent a system from failing, you need to already be measuring it. You can’t measure it after it’s failed and try to fix it. That’s not the way that you design complex systems. So, it felt quite frustrating for me. I eventually got a CGM and within about a week, I realized that I was either borderline or full-blown prediabetic. And that’s when things really changed for me is I looked into the data and understood very quickly that this is a much bigger and quieter problem than I had realized. In the US, today we have over 120 million people who either have type two diabetes or prediabetes and of the say 84 million who have prediabetes, almost 90% of them don’t know they have it. So, this is a quietly developing disorder that affects different people differently. And the reason became obvious to me, it’s that people don’t have the feedback. They don’t know that the choices they’re making each day are driving them in a direction.

Build a team with shared principles

The Levels cofounders are all unique, but they share a common goal and sense of trust.

First of all I think it’s really important for people to focus on shared principles. If you have a great idea, you’ll find a lot of people who believe it’s the future, believe that it’s worth pursuing but you really need to agree on the how and the why more importantly. You need to understand how this person looks at the world because once sort of the company is moving, you need to be able to rely on and trust each other to have the same sort of mental models. And I think that it’s important to have that preexisting trust with a co-founder. And we luckily have that across all of us here at Levels and it’s a really amazing thing to see. Once you do find that person who you’re intellectually compatible with and you’re working on the same problem together, it’s just unbelievable how quickly it becomes a force multiplier.

The winning combination of a CGM + Levels

While existing CGM tech can provide raw glucose data, Levels tech provides the added insight to help users understand it.

Continuous glucose monitors have been around for more than 10 years. They’ve been used and clinically approved for the management of diabetes. And what they do is they provide a raw data stream. They just tell you this is your glucose level. That’s fantastic. And they’ve developed in a really promising direction hardware-wise, but they don’t tell you what lifestyle choices you’re making to induce these levels and what you should do about it or could do better. And so, Levels, we exist as the platform on top of the hardware. So, we’re the interface between raw data and behavior change. And you can kind of think about this the way you had Will Ahmed from WHOOP on, right? And WHOOP is essentially a behavior change model built on top of heart rate monitoring. So, a simple heart rate monitor that gives you your BPM versus a WHOOP are two entirely different things. A WHOOP tells you how to make your sleep better, how to make your training better. Levels sits on top of raw glucose data and we tell you where the interface between nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress exists and how you can optimize.

People want to be healthy

The waitlist for Levels speaks clearly to the fact that people want to find meaningful ways to measure and improve health.

Most recent numbers are we’re at about 118,000 on the wait list. So, things are moving. No, it’s hard to stay on top of it myself. But there’s so much pent up interest in this space that has not been tapped into because there’s an assumption that people only care about health information if they’re sick and it’s a misassumption. So, people actually care quite a lot about being healthy. We have used evidence of rates of obesity climbing despite evidence that you should eat better and work out more as evidence that people don’t care about their health. But the reality is as I mentioned, it’s the fact that we have no feedback on the decisions that are leading to this. We use the bathroom scale as basically the only health data in our lives. So, when you provide an opportunity to see beneath the skin, essentially, to have a real time measure of a molecule that’s coercing through your body that is being used as your primary energy molecule, that turns directly into energy or fat, depending on how you’re how you’re consuming and when you’re consuming, it’s like a huge unlock for awareness. And that’s what people truly want.

Going from beta mode to high-volume use

Once the demand for Levels increases, the price can decrease, making the technology affordable in the long term.

Right now the beta experience is $399 for the first month and then $199 a month thereafter. And the reason for that price point today is the device costs themselves. So, these are clinical-grade sensors, they’re used today in of course the monitoring and management of conditions of metabolic disorder. What we need is to massively increase the volume of use. And so, this is like the traditional market forces. When you open up a massive market multiple times larger than the existing one supply and demand can do their thing and we can bring pricing down. So, I expect that in the longer term once we launch and we really scale volumes, our target is to be $99 a month. So, more affordable than a gym, more affordable than a nutritionist and something that is continuously there helping you kind of guide your lifestyle. I think we can get there. I would say hold me to it, but in less than three to five years, we’ll be in that $99 a month range.

You don’t need to be a scientist to be healthy

The future world should be one where every person can gain necessary insight from their body in order to pursue true health.

What we need is a world where you sit down and you’re going to eat lunch, you don’t need a PhD in nutritional biochemistry. You have intel from your own body on what you’re going to eat and why. And it goes beyond nutrition of course, but that’s the point. Is that we have the technology, it’s just a matter of building it or organizing it in such a way that people have access to it and that it is insightful. And once we’re in that future, I think the problem takes care of itself. People become healthier because they have no reason not to.

Simran Sandhu: Welcome back listeners to another episode of Dive In. I’m your host, Simran Sandhu. And today I’m joined by Josh Clemente, who’s the Co-Founder and President of Levels. Levels is also the first metabolic fitness company and they actually let you track your blood glucose in real time, so you can optimize your diet, exercise, and overall health. Now as always, before we hop into this interview, I’d also like to give a special shout out to our sponsor DeliveryEnd, which is looking to make it safer to shop on marketplaces like Facebook and Craigslist. Now that said, let’s dive in. Josh, so excited to have you join us today.

Josh Clemente : Simran, thanks for having me.

Simran Sandhu: Now I want to jump right into your amazing background. You worked at SpaceX, Virgin Hyperloop One, and Mission Integrated Technologies before you got to Levels. Talk to me a bit about your experience at SpaceX and what exactly that entailed?

Josh Clemente : Well I started at SpaceX right after they initially made it to orbit. And so, that was when SpaceX was still relatively unknown in the world of space by technology, certainly an underdog. And so, I got the opportunity to be on the ground floor, just basically building like our lives depended on it, which is what the environment I think would be best described as. There was no security. Every launch was a make or break launch for the company. And many times we were reminded by Elon and Gwynne that if we didn’t succeed on this flight, we weren’t going to have jobs a few weeks later. And so, that pressure I think combined with the quality of the team, introduced just a once in a lifetime opportunity certainly for me to really cut away the excess that is oftentimes associated with the space flight industry.

Josh Clemente : And we focused on first principles, what does it take to get this product over the finish line? I say product, to get this hunk of metal into orbit with the payload still intact. And we really didn’t spend much time on complex solutions and it was all about just exactly that getting it done. And it was a really brilliant opportunity for me on the manufacturing side when I first got there and then eventually I moved into the life support systems team. So, SpaceX had been successful as a launch provider and now we were talking about taking humans to space. And so, we put together a team internally to start doing that. I was one of the first that got the opportunity to work on that and eventually was able to lead the Pressurized Life Support Systems team, which was dealing with oxygen and pressure controls for the cabin and for the space suits and the fire suppression systems. And it was another really incredible opportunity to work on the evolution of systems that are keeping astronauts alive right now in orbit.

Simran Sandhu: Okay. So, for a first role out of college, this sounds like a lot of pressure and you’re working in a fast pace, do or die kind of environment. How did that impact the way you approached other career decisions and ultimately what you’re doing now with your own startup?

Josh Clemente : Well there’s a benefit to not having a preexisting awareness, right? So, ignorance is helpful in certain scenarios. And so for me, it was the first job I’d had. I really didn’t know what it was like to work at a big company that didn’t have an existential crisis on it. And the nice thing is that the mission was crystal clear, always. There was no pivot on the horizon. It was like, we’re going to either do this thing or we’re going to die trying. And so, having that clarity of scope and also having the team and the leadership more importantly, who are willing to pull out all the stops to get you the resources you need to succeed, frankly a really great experience. I never felt despite knowing that this could fail and we could all end up looking for other jobs, it was always quite comforting to know that you’re in it together and that you are not going to be sort of left solo trying to figure things out, if that makes sense.

Josh Clemente : And so, I really quite enjoyed it and I think that that experience definitely carries over, right? And here at Levels, we use terminology at early stage startups that your default dead until you’re not, right? And that’s like the product market fit chasm. When you cross the chasm, suddenly you’re default alive. And that’s what every small company has to be thinking about is like, what is stopping you from becoming default alive? Focus there. Don’t solve the complex sort of nice to have aesthetic functions, figure out what your customers need, and build that for them. And do it as quickly as you can because time moves faster than you might expect, and there’s a lot of ways to burn resources.

Simran Sandhu: Right. I mean those are all great points. Now you’re an engineer by trade, but just talking high level here, you worked in aerospace, then defense, and now you’re in bio wearables. What was it like to make these transitions in industries, which I’m assuming are so vastly different from one another?

Josh Clemente : Yeah, I think there’s something to be said for just developing an intuition for solving problems. And then once you have that, you start to see problems that can be solved all over the place. And my dad used to use this Mark Twain quote all the time, which was “all you need in life is ignorance and confidence.” And what that means I think is that if you don’t know how things are done, then you won’t worry about doing them differently. And if you have the confidence to do them differently, then you’ll do them. And so, it’s like that’s kind what’s necessary I feel like to bridge between industries and to feel confident in doing so is like I don’t have the credentials really to work in several of the industries I’ve worked in.

Josh Clemente : But at the end of the day, if you don’t get hung up there and you just think about what’s the problem that I see that could be solvable here. And so at SpaceX, the problem was obvious, I believe in space flight as the future of civilization. And I think that it’s important that we get costs down and we get lift capacity up. And so, re-usability is an absolute necessity there. So, that was obvious. In the defense industry, it was a slightly more nuanced problem, but certainly there was an opportunity to make people safer while they were trying to rescue others. And then in the health industry, I myself experienced the problem that I think needs solving, which is that metabolic dysfunction comes on slowly and society’s not paying attention to it.

Josh Clemente : And there’s an opportunity to close the loop between the actions we take every day and the reactions our bodies experience and use our health data to make better choices. And that is not currently, it doesn’t exist today. And it’s obvious to me that as the rate of dysfunction accelerates globally, this has to exist or we have no other option essentially. So, it will exist and what I experienced and I’m happy to jump into my own story, but what I experienced was kind of like a patient zero example of it. And so, there was no qualification needed. It was just, oh yeah, this is a problem and it’s solvable.

Simran Sandhu: Yeah, and you completely read my mind there because that’s exactly what I was going to ask you next. What inspired you to go and create Levels and tackle this problem with metabolic health?

Josh Clemente : Well first off, health is the compounded outcome of the decisions we make over days, years, decades. People are living lives without any feedback on the decisions they’re making. And so, this is how you end up in an environment where we’re constantly stimulated, we’re not sleeping well, we’re stressed all the time, and our food is tailored for the convenience of our lives rather than for nutrition. And so, it’s very easy out feedback to course correct. It’s very easy for people to end up way off the track of health. And so, I experienced that myself. I’m someone who has never really experienced weight gain necessarily. I’ve been fairly fit my whole life, certainly played sports, worked out a lot, I was a CrossFit trainer for the past eight years. But while I was at SpaceX, I started to experience inexplicable fatigue, symptomatic episodes where I would be shaky and just uncomfortable, and I need to just sit down.

Josh Clemente : And my irritation and my cognitive faculties were not around me. I was always struggling to remember things and just feeling generally irritable. And this came on slowly, but one day I just woke up and realized I feel like I have a terminal illness, something has gone wrong and I can’t really explain why or where it came from. To make a long story short, I worked with my doctor and he ran a couple standard blood panels, didn’t really find anything out of the ordinary. However, I started on my own just reading into the literature on energy, non-metabolism, which it’s the set of processes that take our food and environment and turn it into energy for every cell in the body. And so, it became clear that metabolism or metabolic health is the foundation upon which physical health and mental health are built.

Josh Clemente : You can’t have brain tissue that works well if your brain cells can’t get energy. You can’t have strong muscle tissue if you can’t unleash energy. And so, that’s all metabolic in nature. So, I became obsessed with this. I started pricking my finger actually to measure the primary energy molecule, which is glucose or blood sugar as we call it. And couldn’t make much sense of it, it was just kind of a point cloud. I was using Excel and all this stuff. It was getting kind of crazy. But then I read about this technology called CGM, continuous glucose monitoring. And this was developed for people with diabetes, so that for those with diabetes, they’ve lost control of the glucose feedback loop. So, glucose starts to rise uncontrollably and that causes cellular destruction. So, even though glucose is an important molecule, it needs to stay in a tight range where it starts to destroy the peripheral tissue, the nervous system.

Josh Clemente : You start to have complications with cardiovascular disease, blindness, stroke, Alzheimer’s, dementia, it’s called type three diabetes. So, a lot of bad things start happening. So, I became aware of this and these devices and wanted one of those myself because I’m pricking my finger and basically replicating this function. I asked my doctor for one and he just denied me flat out and said like, this is not for you, it’s for sick people. And so, putting my systems engineering hat on, it didn’t make any sense that if you’re trying to understand how a system works, you have to measure the most important data to dreams associated with it. And if you want to prevent a system from failing, you need to already be measuring it. You can’t measure it after it’s failed and try to fix it. That’s not the way that you design complex systems. So, it felt quite frustrating for me. I eventually got a CGM and within about a week, I realized that I was either borderline or full blown prediabetic.

Josh Clemente : And that’s when things really changed for me is I looked into the data and understood very quickly that this is a much bigger and quieter problem than I had realized. In the US, today we have over 120 million people who either have type two diabetes or prediabetes and of the say 84 million who have prediabetes, almost 90% of them don’t know they have it. So, this is a quietly developing disorder that affects different people differently. And the reason became obvious to me, it’s that people don’t have the feedback. They don’t know that the choices they’re making each day are driving them in a direction. And so, that experience and the CGM giving me direct insight into the effects of my nutrition, my exercise, my sleep quality, my stress levels each day, it transformed my approach to life. I truly became I think in tune with my body in a way that I had never been before and I just knew this is something I wanted to work on. It was fascinating to me. It helped me probably avoid a lifetime of unnecessary chronic illness and I want to proliferate it and that’s what Levels is.

Simran Sandhu: No, that’s amazing. I mean it’s a problem you personally faced and then you were determined enough to go and do something about it. And throughout that process, you found your other co-founders who also come from very impressive backgrounds. How did you go about connecting with them and getting them to go pursue this problem with you?

Josh Clemente : Well my co-founders were all within about one degree of a network separation from me. So, Sam Corcos, who’s the first person I was able to convince to come aboard, he and I had known each other for several years. We were sort of like professional network friends. So, we knew each other and we cared a lot about what each was doing professionally. We weren’t like close personal friends, but we knew how each other operate, their principles. We agreed on the way the world works and the way to attack problems. And because I had that context, Sam was one of the first people that I really dove deep on this concept with because I felt so strongly that he had the skillset that could be complimentary to what this project needs. And it was the same with David and Andrew and Casey, who each bring expertise in a certain area.

Josh Clemente : But also the way that they think about the world and the way they think about health specifically was super compatible with what the vision for Levels was. And so, first of all I think it’s really important for people to focus on shared principles. If you have a great idea, you’ll find a lot of people who believe it’s the future, believe that it’s worth pursuing but you really need to agree on the how and the why more importantly. You need to understand how this person looks at the world because once sort of the company is moving, you need to be able to rely on and trust each other to have the same sort of mental models. And I think that it it’s important to yeah, have that preexisting trust with a co-founder. And we luckily have that across all of us here at Levels and it’s a really amazing thing to see. Once you do find that person who you’re intellectually compatible with and you’re working on the same problem together, it’s just unbelievable how quickly it becomes a force multiplier.

Simran Sandhu: Yeah, that’s great. I think finding that alignment is usually one of the toughest things you can do when you’re searching for potential co-founders. Now when you guys to decided to come together and do this, what were some of the first steps you took? Was it building a prototype? Conducting market research or something else?

Josh Clemente : Well there’s quite a bit of backstory. When I left SpaceX, I spent about a year at Hyperloop working on essentially space technology in a tube. And then after that, I spent a year entrepreneurially working on the Mission Integrated Technologies product, which it’s a tactical equipment for government sales. While I was working on Hyperloop and we call it MIT for short, I had this side project of learning about my own health and that evolved very quickly into like a total all consuming passion. And so, I spent the year after designing the tactical vehicle immersed in research and trying to develop the concept for Levels and it took some time to land on the key pieces. So, I had done quite a bit of regulatory and sort of legal and say mechanistic research into what are the moving parts and what needs to happen in order for more people to gain access to their realtime blood sugar levels, such that we can then build the behavior change platform on top of it?

Josh Clemente : Right? Because that’s what ultimately Levels is. And so, that year was spent in research mode, not a lot of forward progress on paper but a lot of background development work. And then when the co-founding team came together, we were able to hit the ground running. And there was a good concept in place. There was a proof of concept more importantly, where we could use existing technology, continuous glucose monitors and get access to them for people such that they can monitor their glucose. And suddenly the questions start to arise. Once you have that data stream, it becomes really insightful and you’re like, whoa, there’s all of these intuitive and counterintuitive things happening. And that’s where you can add more value. So, we were able to get a proof of concept going almost immediate within a few weeks of putting the team together.

Josh Clemente : And from there, we were able to raise some seed money and develop the first app concept. So, to kind of close the loop on all of this, the important thing to think about as it relates to what Levels is working on is that these devices, continuous glucose monitors have been around for more than 10 years. They’ve been used and clinically approved for the management of diabetes. And what they do is they provide a raw data stream. They just tell you this is your glucose level. That’s fantastic. And they’ve developed in a really promising direction hardware wise, but they don’t tell you what lifestyle choices you’re making to induce these levels and what you should do about it or could do better. And so, Levels, we exist as the platform on top of the hardware.

Josh Clemente : So, we’re the interface between raw data and behavior change. And you can kind of think about this the way you had Will Ahmed from WHOOP on, right? And WHOOP is essentially a behavior change model built on top of heart rate monitoring. So, a simple heart rate monitor that gives you your BPM versus a WHOOP are two entirely different things. A WHOOP tells you how to make your sleep better, how to make your training better. Levels sits on top of raw glucose data and we tell you where the interface between nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress exists and how you can optimize. So, it’s important that we improve accessibility of the hardware and simultaneously build this intelligent layer on top to lead towards better outcomes.

Simran Sandhu: Wow. I mean that’s really interesting and clearly people want this information because even though you’re in beta, you have tens of thousands of people who are on your wait list. So, do you even create buzz for a product or service like this?

Josh Clemente : Yeah. So, most recent numbers are we’re at about 118,000 on the wait list. So, things are moving. No, it’s hard to stay on top of it myself. But there’s so much pent up interest in this space that has not been tapped into because there’s an assumption that people only care about health information if they’re sick and it’s a misassumption. So, people actually care quite a lot about being healthy. We have used evidence of rates of obesity climbing despite evidence that you should eat better and work out more as evidence that people don’t care about their health. But the reality is as I mentioned, it’s the fact that we have no feedback on the decisions that are leading to this. We use the bathroom scale as basically the only health data in our lives.

Josh Clemente : So, when you provide an opportunity to see beneath the skin, essentially, to have a real time measure of a molecule that’s coercing through your body that is being used as your primary energy molecule, that turns directly into energy or fat, depending on how you’re how you’re consuming and when you’re consuming, it’s like a huge unlock for awareness. And that’s what people truly want. They want to know about me. They don’t want to know about society on average, they want to understand what should I be doing differently? And so, we really haven’t done much besides create this concept and put it out there into the world.

Josh Clemente : And it has organically just spread like wildfire. We’ve spent almost nothing on marketing. We’ve done podcasts and educational material on our blog, but it’s really if you look at it, our social platforms are people sharing these insights that they’re developing organically themselves and they’re sharing those with their network and it’s really person to person spread in a way that is very promising of course, for product market fit. But more importantly I think very promising for the future of the technology. People are ready to embrace it. This is not something that’s for biohackers or fringe sort of fitness freaks. It’s for people who just want to know how to live healthier and I think that that is really every one of us.

Simran Sandhu: Got it. And for our listeners who are interested in using Levels or want to try it, what will it cost them? Essentially, how does the business model work here?

Josh Clemente : So, right now the beta experience is $399 for the first month and then $199 a month thereafter. And the reason for that price point today is the device costs themselves. So, these are clinical grade sensors, they’re used today in of course the monitoring and management of conditions of metabolic disorder. What we need is to massively increase the volume of use. And so, this is like the traditional market forces. When you open up a massive market multiple times larger than the existing one supply and demand can do their thing and we can bring pricing down. So, I expect that in the longer term once we launch and we really scale volumes, our target is to be $99 a month. So, more affordable than a gym, more affordable than a nutritionist and something that is continuously there helping you kind of guide your lifestyle. I think we can get there. I would say hold me to it, but in less than three to five years, we’ll be in that $99 a month range.

Simran Sandhu: That’s awesome. And certainly making it more affordable is naturally going to help grow growth significantly as well. You guys also raised 12 million in your most recent round. How are you allocating the capital and what are you foreseeing in the near future?

Josh Clemente : Yeah, so we raised through a number of vehicles, like started off with Safe Notes early on, and then raised our large round that was led by a16z. And yeah, so right now we’re a very lean organization. We were remote even before COVID. And so, we don’t have office overhead. We have a distributed team who are able to live wherever they want and live sort of in that area that is best for them without affecting their sort of compensation capabilities. So, we’re dedicated to being a truly remote first organization and that’s been really beneficial to keeping burn low. But more importantly, we have a lot of dry powder but as I mentioned earlier on, it’s very easy to burn through resources, right? It’s very hard to stay focused when you’re well capitalized and execute on the key priorities for the company.

Josh Clemente : So, what we’re focused on is developing the product that leads to the behavior change that is necessary. Our company mission is to solve the metabolic health crisis and you currently have half a billion people globally with preventable type two diabetes and that number is increasing at an increasing rate. So, it’s critical that we develop something that is in a sense sticky that it retains on its own because people are learning from it and they’re implementing the lessons learned. And so, that’s where we are today. We’re in beta mode, just continually iterating and focusing on our member feedback and making sure that the features we roll out are the ones that will lead to the highest sort of bang for the buck and actionability. And right now, that’s a fairly affordable process.

Josh Clemente : Frankly, we’ve got good runway. It is also time sensitive. We want to get this out there into the world and have people again, expand this market and move the beyond glucose to other health molecules that are really important. So, today again, we’re hanging back. We’re not really doing much beyond extreme product development and once we do hit that milestone where we feel the product is where it needs to be, which I expect will be quite shortly later this year, that’s when we’re going to hit growth mode. And then that’s where the money pipeline is very important, right? It’s to help access channels and then amplify.

Simran Sandhu: Right. And a bit of an open-ended question here, but what does success look like for you guys?

Josh Clemente : Well I think to answer the question in terms of numbers, I think we have today 88 million people with pre-diabetes and of them something like 90%, 70 to 90%, depending on the study, will eventually convert to type two diabetes if they don’t change something. And so, I would like to prevent the next 90 million cases of type two diabetes here in the US and I ideally the next 400 million globally. And that requires years, right? We’re going to have to see long term outcomes to know that that was achievable. So to me, success is widespread adoption of bio wearable technology. So, frankly, whether it’s Levels or someone else like this needs to happen. People need to use their health data in real time to make decisions. Today, you go to the doctor, you get some information, and that gets archived.

Josh Clemente : You don’t refer to it. It doesn’t tell you what to eat for lunch. And what we need is a world where you sit down and you’re going to eat lunch, you don’t need a PhD in nutritional biochemistry. You have intel from your own body on what you’re going to eat and why. And it goes beyond nutrition of course, but that’s the point. Is that we have the technology, it’s just a matter of building it or organizing it in such a way that people have access to it and that it is insightful. And once we’re in that future, I think the problem takes care of itself. People become healthier because they have no reason not to.

Simran Sandhu: Okay. That really helped put things in perspective. So, thank you for that. Josh, what would be your one piece of advice to an aspiring entrepreneur or someone who’s currently building their company?

Josh Clemente : Well this is a great question. I think I have to say from my own experience, trust your instincts. If you feel convicted in something, although these might feel like points intention, trusting your instincts, and also getting feedback from other people that you trust. You’ll come up with something that people will push back on and think is not a great idea. And I certainly ran into that myself, but I wouldn’t take that as the idea is invalid. What it means is that you need to hone your pitch for yourself and for those around you because at the end of the day, the team is everything.

Josh Clemente : And although you may have something really important and that’s where trusting your instincts piece comes in, you more importantly need to develop the team in order to achieve it. There is really no solo success in my opinion. And so, I think anyone who’s working on a problem that seems like it would change their lives, you’re probably onto something, but you should work on it till you can get somebody that you trust to believe in it as well because that’s the first step I think towards success. It’s building the team and being able to pitch great people on it and get them to believe in the mission.

Simran Sandhu: All right. Amazing advice and insights from Josh Clemente, the Co-founder and President of Levels. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast. In the meantime, take care of everyone. Cheers.