04: Building a 40k Person Waitlist and Problem Solving like SpaceX with Josh Clemente of Levels

This is Dan Hightower with Product Market Misfits, and we have an amazing guest here today to talk about all things from what it's like to work at SpaceX to quantified self with a company called Levels, which you can find at levelshealth.com. The Levels team has raised around $4 million from some amazing investors, including Cyan Scott Bannister, Matthew Delavadova, Julia Lipton, Michael Arrington, Loop Ventures, Basecamp Fund, Shrug Capital, Todd Goldberg, and Rohovora, and previously worked at some amazing companies including Y Combinator-backed CarDash, Google, Hyperloop, and SpaceX. Levels tracks your blood glucose in real time so you can maximize your diet and exercise. I'm very excited to welcome Josh Clement, founder of Levels, to Product Market Misfits today. On the personal side, Josh is a mechanical engineer and CrossFit Level 2 trainer. At SpaceX, he led a team to develop life support systems that sustained astronauts on the May 2020 trip to the International Space Station aboard Dragon Endeavour, which was the first new crew-carrying spacecraft since 1980. So I'm incredibly excited to hear how and why Josh made the jump from SpaceX to Quantified Self. Josh, great to connect with you, man. I've used the product for the last like month, super excited about it. Levels has changed my behavior in some ways we can dive into, but before we do, I'd love to hear from you about how you, how you got to where you are today.

Yeah, great to speak with you as well. And I'm excited to hear that the product is working well. I got here kind of through a circuitous route. I'm an aerospace engineer. I'm a mechanical engineer by training. I spent close to 6 years at SpaceX, originally working on spacecraft mechanical systems. And then I started working on life support development, pressurized systems, breathing gas, suit oxygen controls, fire suppression controls, things that astronauts will need to, to visit at the space station and beyond. And first vehicle I worked on flew in May of this year with Doug and Bob to the International Space Station. And so I worked on that program and had an amazing time. But after 6 years at SpaceX, pretty stressful environment, I was, I was basically burning out mentally, physically. My quality of work-life balance was nonexistent and my diet, exercise, sleep, stress foundations were all just disastrous. And I was feeling some pretty intense fatigue, like just really strong fatigue waves every single day that had gotten to the point of interfering with my ability to function effectively. And so that is the process by which I slowly but surely discovered metabolism, metabolic function, which underlies energetic energy production, and got obsessed with the human body and physiology. And that led me down a rabbit hole, which ultimately led to starting Levels, which is a company entirely focused on helping people optimize their own lifestyles so that they can Improve metabolic function and maximize their quality of life.

Can we, can you like break down for us simply the importance of glucose and then more generally talk about that within the context of how Levels works?

Yeah. So all of our cells, they require energy to function. And the way we use our food and environment to create that energy is called our metabolism. So it's a very broad definition, but suffice to say that we have an extremely crucial system here that runs on the fuel we provide it. And the 2 primary fuel sources in the modern human diet are glucose, which is a monosaccharide. It's a sugar and fat. Consume fat and it is a free fatty acid. And then it gets oxidized as fatty acid oxidation. Whereas, uh, with glucose, we don't really consume glucose. We consume carbohydrates, which break down into different sugars, glucose being the primary one in our blood. And so glucose is absolutely critical for the human body to function. However, it's, it's also an extremely reactive molecule. So in the presence of oxygen, you can create some pretty nasty byproducts if glucose levels are too high. And, and the contrast is that if glucose levels get too low, the, the brain and other tissues that really need that energy start to shut down very quickly. So there's a tight bound that glucose levels have to be maintained within in order for us to run effectively. What we have in modern society is a situation where over time we've begun to defeat the systems that control glucose within that tight band. bound. And the runaway symptoms of this, they're often called by different names, things like PCOS, you've got cardiovascular disease, you've got stroke, you've got type 2 diabetes, you've got mental conditions like dementia and Alzheimer's, which is now being called type 3 diabetes. So you have all of these disparate descriptors that essentially define the same thing, which is metabolic breakdown and insulin resistance. When, you know, the human body is running at proper sort of inside its proper ranges and everything is nicely controlled, you have hormonal balance, you don't have a lot of runaway systems, you don't have a lot of those reactive byproducts being produced. And that's when the human body's at its peak potential and you can really maximize healthspan. But when things go poorly in one way or the other, without a feedback loop to the person, this is when you start to have chronic lifestyle illnesses set in. And, and the biggest ones here in the United States are the ones I just listed.

I'd be curious to hear how you position Levels to be a consumer product, not a medical device, and how you might've leveraged the mental side of the importance of glucose as a personal performance optimization.

I was again, at SpaceX and I was experiencing the cognitive effects of metabolic dysfunction. I had always been a fitness-first person. So health is fitness. If you have abs, if you can run fast and jump high and lift heavy weights, you're healthy and nothing can defeat you and you can eat whatever you want. And so I did exactly that. I would work out and then I would eat whatever I wanted. I never put a second thought into it. And eventually I got to this point, like I said, where all of a sudden I had this disparity between how I look and how I feel. So I look like I'm healthy, but I feel like I'm the bottom of the bottom, like just lowest 5% in terms of health. And I mean that I literally did not have the energy to make it through a workday. I was reliant on coffee the way I would be reliant on an IV. And it's just, it was a requirement. And my mood was completely broken. My concentration was broken. My focus, my recall, all of these things were lagging. And so I was experiencing these effects, but I had no, no label for it. I went to my physician, all of my blood panels came back inside the normal ranges. And I didn't know much more beyond that. Now I read a paper which was written by Dom D'Agostino, who has since joined our research board, which is a really cool thing to like loop all that back together. Absolutely. But, uh, yeah, at the time I read this paper and it was a, it was written about the effects of basically oxygen toxicity on the central nervous system. So when, when astronauts or divers are exposed to high-pressure oxygen environments, their brains, because of that increased reactivity, oxygen is a very reactive molecule. And so with that increased reactivity, you basically destroy tissue in the brain very quickly and you can have seizures and you can effectively die very quickly. And I was designing an oxygen system at SpaceX at that time. So this was a very interesting area of focus for me. So I read this paper and essentially it showed that for rodents, feeding these rodents a ketogenic diet can extend their lifespan in the high-pressure oxygen environment by 5 times. And so that kind of blew me away. It's like, wait, they're just basically eating a fat-focused diet rather than a sugar-focused diet. And this is giving them the superhuman power of living 5 times longer in a deadly environment. And that was the first wake-up call for me that diet can have legitimate physiological benefits. And so I started to look into nutritional strategies and eventually this led down the rabbit hole where I came across glucose tracking because glucose is the molecule of energy for most humans. I decided, you know what? I now am, you know, I, I can't ignore the fact that diet matters and nutrition matters. I wonder where my glucose levels are. And so I bought this device that's called a glucometer. You prick your finger, you bleed on this little test strip and it gives you your blood sugar level at that moment. And I started using this. I was pricking my finger up to 60 times a day and, uh, couldn't really, it was just kind of a point cloud. I wasn't, you know, I was plotting this stuff in Microsoft Excel and it was like, didn't make much sense to me. Uh, it couldn't make heads or tails of it. And then I read about this device called a continuous glucose monitor, and this was developed for people with diabetes to help them monitor their blood glucose and meter in insulin. So they inject insulin to help manage their glucose levels. And I said, you know, I need one of those, you know, I'm pricking my finger all day long. That's the thing I want. I just want the full-time high-resolution stream. And so I went to my doctor and asked for one because they're prescription only. They're for, again, managing diabetes. My physician was like, no way, you know, you're, you're super healthy. You don't— this is for people who are overweight. It's for people who are sick. You don't need that. And so that just kind of like doubled my desire to get one. Yeah. Eventually I did. And so it took me about 6 or 8 months, I think, from that from that visit. And I had several other physicians on telemedicine platforms turn me down. Eventually I got one. And within 2 weeks, I found out that I was pre-diabetic and my blood sugar control was completely broken. I was all over the place, the highest highs, and I was spending up to 2 hours over 160 milligrams per deciliter, and then crashing back down to hypoglycemic lows. And the separation, the time separation between a meal that I would eat and that crash that I would experience that I felt as shakiness and hunger and irritability was about 2 hours. And so it's. It's pretty hard to connect those dots when you don't have that feedback loop. And so that, that realization, seeing the patterns on this device suddenly just woke me out of my stupor. You know, everything I was doing all day long, I was feeding myself foods that were causing massive instability and roller coasters of glucose, which cause roller coasters of insulin, which cause, which affect other hormones like ghrelin and leptin, which are hunger and satiety hormones. And all of the, you know, anger and irritability that we described in modern society, I was experiencing it. I was now seeing it. And so that whole process of realization, and then by consequently using that same data to define a new diet, a new approach to lifestyle that helped my blood sugar stay rock solid and experiencing then the benefits of that, like not superhuman energy, but just controlled energy. The pattern was now fixed. I wasn't having the highest highs, but nor was I having the lowest lows. And so that whole process just drilled home for me. That this is by default a technology that millions and millions of people could benefit from. It's also ready for primetime. It is a consumer product wrapped up in a medical packaging. And so that, that's kind of the core moment where I said, you know, this is what I want to do. I want to bring this to other people.

So V1 was finger pricking like 60 times a day, which doesn't really work for your current solution, right? Because it's continuous. And when I use it, I'll see Like I ate some Chinese chicken, which I now call sugar chicken because my blood glucose went up to like 210 immediately after eating it, which is trash. And I saw the, I mean, saw the actual like spike and return to normal. And that correlated with how I felt, you know, how you feel after eating a bunch of Chinese chicken. Yeah. That's one example. Another is I'm a relatively healthy person. I used to, before Levels, have like a regular Clif Bar in the morning, which I thought was like a pretty decent choice. Like, turns out it's not. I've replaced Clif Bars now that I saw the spike that it creates with like the RX Bars. And I'm still toying with like which one I really like best. But

yeah,

I mean, when you're talking about medical interventions, it's always like, well, prove to me the behavior change and then I'll invest in your medical intervention startup. Yeah, I'm seeing myself every time I go into the convenience store. I look at the Clif Bars. I'm like,

nah. Right. Yeah. So I mean, that is the exact— that's the example right there. And I think the way we describe this at Levels is closed-loop feedback, right? So in control, in control system theory, you have open-loop systems and closed-loop systems. And open-loop systems are where you make decisions, you provide a command, and then you don't measure the effect of that command in order to influence the next command, right? That's called open loop. You're just making decisions on the fly, flying blind, basically. Closed loop is where every decision you make is influenced by all of the prior decisions you've made because you are measuring the output of that choice. And so for the way this translates into a product is seeing the effect of your decision immediately after the decision allows you to have context for what that did. Now today in modern society, we develop our lifestyles based on Either no data or the bathroom scale, which takes weeks or months to adjust, or the yearly checkup at the doctor, which has absolutely no functionality for picking what to eat for lunch. Right. So you sit, you know, you get your printout of blood panel results and there's a bunch of numbers on there. How do you know what to eat for lunch? So, right. I mean, that, that, that those 2 things are too disconnected in order to be useful. And so with Levels, you know, you, like you said, you have Chinese chicken. And then 15 minutes later, your blood sugar is on a rocket ship ride to lunar orbit. And then, you know, 40 minutes after that, you're getting the shaky crashing and you're hungry again. And that's the hormonal rollercoaster effect. And so for me, I mean, it was exactly the same thing, except it was every single meal. I mean, I seriously felt like, oh man, like I haven't done anything right in years. And some of the worst ones for me and the most shocking were oatmeal, just plain oatmeal was, was a total disaster for me. And I mean, this is something that's advertised as heart-healthy for everyone. For me, it puts me into a pre-diabetic blood sugar zone. And then a really interesting one was pressed juice. So just carrot, celery, and green apple juice pressed right in front of me. There were no additives. I got it from this organic juice cart and I hit 210 as well and stayed up there for about an hour. Oh. And so what was funny is there was a, there was a girl there who saw this happen. I showed her my blood sugar and she was like, I skipped the Frappuccino to get that, that pressed juice every morning, and what I want is the Frappuccino, and it's, it's doing the same thing to you. So, you know, for some people— and again, we can get into this, but there's a lot of individual variability involved here. And so, you know, it's not the case that what happens to me happens to everyone, but it is important that everybody ground their decisions in their own data.

I saw a tweet from someone that said that ice cream is okay for them.

You know, ice cream is All things considered, it's a pretty balanced meal. It's got sugar. It's got a ton of sugar, a ton of fat, a ton of protein, but those things tend to actually in combination manage a blood sugar release. So fat tends to slow down the digestion pathway. And so you go from that rocket ship ride to a slower, more controlled increase. Now, whether or not that's necessarily healthy for that person, hard to say, but you know, the, the data is clear that Super high elevations in blood sugar are extremely inflammatory. So you do not want your blood sugar to go very high. Like, you know, you said you went to 210 on Chinese chicken. You know, the American Diabetes Association says that, you know, normal people would rarely exceed 140 milligrams per deciliter. And I think that is a lack of data that's, that is driving that statement. I think it's true that people should not exceed 140, but I think it's happening all the time and people just don't have any feedback on it. And we're not measuring, you know, the, the non-diabetic blood sugar space is just completely untapped. Nobody has done. high-resolution full-time data in a meaningful way.

That reminds me of, uh, like the average American heart rate data. But you, you know, you probably have, I don't know, I would guess your heart rate resting is like 50 beats a minute or 45 or something like that.

Yeah.

It's like

in the, in the 50s and 60s,

which, which is diagnosed bradycardia.

Right. Right.

Exactly. The average American, but we have all that data on heart rate because we've been tracking heart rates for A couple

decades for sure. And I mean, again, this is like these, a lot of these ranges are developed by just averaging the population. It's like on average, this is, this is not good. And the problem is that, uh, for blood sugar specifically, the, the normal zone is just the average of people who don't yet have diabetes. Yeah. And unfortunately, if you look at the numbers in society, 88% of American adults are metabolically unhealthy. 90 million American adults have prediabetes and 90% of those do not know that they have it. And the reason they don't know is because they have no feedback. And this is from random sampling by the CDC. And so we have a society that is extremely unhealthy. 70% are overweight or obese. So when you just average the people who haven't yet been diagnosed, you're averaging in a huge amount of dysfunction. And so we then have people who are calibrating off of these dysfunctional zones and saying, oh, I'm healthy because I'm inside the normal range. And in fact, we're just slowly ratcheting further and further towards the society being entirely— Yeah. Entirely diabetic, which is a terrifying thing. It's really happening right now. And, you know, we need to shift the whole bell curve back to the left, which is what Levels is doing. You know, we're redefining the ranges that we're not calling them normal. We're saying this is what's optimal. And it may be very challenging to stay there, but the point is that every choice you make, you want to be kind of bringing you closer to health, not, you know, bringing you further away.

Yeah. And I do get that when I use the app, I get that gain, like the optimal zone. I want to stay in the optimal zone. And totally, that's super interesting because you have leveraged that great experience in the app and a really seamless medical experience, which is obviously way better than 60 finger pricks a day to convince a lot of people of the value here. You are, you are early, early days and you may, you're like not even publicly launched yet, but your waitlist is over like 32,000 people.

I think we're at 40,000 as of this weekend.

Yeah, that was like last week when I asked you how big it was. Now it's at 40,000. That's amazing. How did you create that level of demand?

Well, first off, I think that the space that we're in is, is ripe. People want better information about themselves. They don't necessarily want better information about the whole average population. They just want to know what— how healthy am I? And how can I do better? We're seeing this with the decentralization of fitness, like Peloton and Tonal and all these companies who are, they're coming to you. It's no longer a gym thing. You've got wearables that give you your heart rate, that tell you how you're sleeping. That, you know, this personal health information trend is a fantastic one and we're, it's still nascent, it's still brand new, but it's certainly the case that people want personalization. They don't want to get cut and paste information. And I think we're hitting this at a prime time when with COVID for example, There are very close connections between COVID and metabolic syndrome. So the outcomes for coronavirus are much worse for people who have preexisting metabolic dysfunction. Combine that with the fact that people know that they're flying blind. They have this intuition that they're using data in every other part of their lives except for their own health. And so when you bring a product out that provides a— you're measuring a molecule in the blood, This is not, you know, it's not a superficial measurement. Like, you know, I can measure my pulse with my finger and I can measure my step count, you know, by hand or mentally, but I can't measure my blood sugar. And now this device provides a very convenient way of doing that full-time to a smartphone, uh, with a very seamless and elegant user interface. And so the, you know, frankly, it's been entirely organic and it's been amazing to watch, but people want to share this stuff with each other. They want to show, Like this intuitive result. Like I always felt this way and now I have data to back up why I feel this way. You know, after I sleep for 5 hours, I'm ravenous all day long. Well, now I can see that my blood sugar is completely erratic after I have that short night of sleep. But when I sleep 9 hours, my baseline's 20 points lower and my swings after meals are much more controlled. Uh, or the counterintuitive thing, you know, I've been having this pressed juice every single day instead of a Frappuccino. And then I get my blood sugar monitor and I find out that that's causing a disastrous blood sugar spike and crash. And like, you know, this might be the reason that I haven't been able to lose the weight that I thought I would lose by going on a press juice diet, you know? And so it's those types of things that are reinforcing. It's positive and negative reinforcement. You know, it's like, it's demonstrating for you the way your specific body responds to your specific choices. And so all of that, just like it combines to provide, you know, in combination with hardware, software, and those magic moments, a lot of really shareable opportunities. And so. We've been benefiting on social media. We've done essentially negligible marketing. This 40,000-person waitlist and growing is the effect of people sharing their own stories. And we do have a lot of people with large followings who have become early adopters, which has been amazing. And so that flywheel effect of people just saying, it's not that I can necessarily apply what this person's learning because there's so much personalization involved. I need this product myself in order to know for sure.

So many products today are subscribing to the waitlist launch approach. Are all waitlists equally valuable? There are different ways of creating a waitlist. How do you balance, you know, building a huge waitlist with creating a waitlist of highly qualified, you know, buyers that are unlikely to churn down the road?

That's a good question. And I mean, it's something we're very focused on at this point. We're still heavily in development and focused very much on on product feedback and on our early adopters, you know, giving us everything we need to know whether we're resonating. And so it's kind of a time function, you know, the waitlist continues to grow and there's definitely feedback effects there where the larger it is, the faster it grows. And so we're benefiting from that. We've been in development for some time, but I would say that I'm very confident in the intent of our waitlist specifically because we've done such little performance marketing and we are not driving large volumes of people through advertising. Where you can simply click a link and join. We have a pretty involved form that you have to submit in order to sign up on the waitlist, and it's at the homepage. And again, most of this is coming from organic places like search traffic, podcasts, and from testimonials on Twitter and elsewhere. So people are— you know, we've been focused very much on both product development and on explaining the use case here. So podcasts, for example, are a great opportunity for people to hear specifically how metabolism affects their end goals. You know, you might be a person who has a really exceptional handle on physical fitness like I was, but you might be dealing with the cognitive dysfunction that you can't get ahold of. It's like, why do I feel so mentally fatigued? Why am I having such a problem with recall and memory? And when you hear on these podcasts, the way that the brain is metabolizing glucose and what happens, the fogginess that sets in and the recall issues that have been demonstrated in the research environment, glucose is not controlled. You start to have this flash, this, this light bulb moment. And then you go and you look in our blog and you read our blog posts about cognitive clarity and it all starts to come together. And that's when you sign up for the waitlist. And so I think we have this, you know, it is certainly not an optimized funnel onto our waitlist by any means. Again, we're very product focused. So when, when you have a waitlist that builds and the only information out there is highly educational information, I think That goes to show that this is a very intent audience. We could definitely be doing, we could be kind of amping this thing up by providing single-click additions to the waitlist, add your email address and hit enter, but I think that would be doing us a disservice. The way we have it set up right now, you have to go through some hoops and I think that demonstrates that people really do want to get their hands on the product.

Yeah, there are 3 people in my Twitter DMs right now that reached out seeing my tweets about the product and they're like, I filled out the form. But I haven't heard back. Like, can you help me figure out like how to get the beta or the trial? And I think that's when you know you got something right.

Right. Yeah. I mean, we originally anticipated that everyone who signed up would, would like go right into the early access program. Like there would be a few hundred or a few thousand people and that we would, we would put them all into the program, but it quickly got to the point where, you know, for the purposes of the invite-only program that we're running right now, the early access, We, we, we just can't do that much volume and still get high quality feedback. And so the, you know, we started to have to like sort of sift through and pull people out of the waitlist. And, and now obviously it's just kind of been a runaway effect and sorry to those 3, 3 people. We're going to get to you soon.

Good problem to have as a startup.

I'm not complaining. That's for sure.

Yeah. So you could count Levels as my second quantified self-device on my body. Play that out 5 years. How do you want levels to fit into what will probably become like this opportunity to have like 20 things attached to your body?

Yeah, I've done a ton of research on the, the bioengineering possibilities and the electrochemistry that underlies the sensors and the potential for other molecules to be measured. And suffice to say, I'm optimistic. There are, there's a huge potential here to take the same form factor. So I have on my arm a small disc. I think you might be wearing one as well. And it has a little filament in it and that filament is measuring directly glucose, glucose molecules in the skin cells. So it's in what's called the interstitial fluid. So it's not actually in the bloodstream. It's in a layer above that. And there are a lot of molecules in that area that can be highly valuable to understand. These are things like lactate, cholesterol levels, free fatty acids, ketones, cortisol, insulin, potentially. Those hormones, those last 2 hormones are the hardest to measure, but those others are actually fairly straightforward. And so you can imagine a device that has Either a variety of filaments or a single filament with segmented areas on it that each are measuring a different molecule in the same form factor and all streaming to your smartphone. And that's super useful information to both drive behavior change, but also to influence the medical community and help people better understand, you know, if you walk into the physician's office with, with 3 years of lactate, ketone, and glucose information, along with nutrition logs and sleep logs from your Apple Watch. You have a complete picture of that person and how they are functioning in both— not, not just how they're functioning right now, but why they are functioning that way as a function of their lifestyle choices over the past 3 years. And this can completely change the relationship between physicians and patients because that context is so valuable.

Yeah, that's a huge vision. The product itself is beautiful. The application is a really enjoyable experience. I'd love to dig into that. You come from SpaceX. That's not a medical community. I know that astronauts have an unbelievable amount of health quantification going on, but as you thought about launching the company, maybe this has to do with how you selected early co-founders, but I'm curious how you thought about bridging the gap into a medical device product and where you focused your time. You know, you didn't build a device, you built an incredible experience, and I'd love to hear how you broke all that decision-making down.

Yeah, well, first of all, thank you. I'm glad that you see it the way I see it. I think it's a really delightful experience, and obviously there's plenty of ground to cover, but suffice to say, you know, the experience of using a CGM to change my own lifestyle was very positive, but it was lacking in experience. It required a huge amount of research into what was happening and why. And the devices currently today, they come with software that is essentially just the bare bones operating system. You know, the manufacturers of these devices, they're, they're intent on providing a means of full-time measurement for glucose to people with diabetes. And with, when you have diabetes, it's an immediate need. You need to know your glucose. And, and really beyond that, it's up to the provider you're working with to make changes and all of that. So when you're talking about a new audience, the consumer audience, That immediacy is gone and that sort of acute problem to be solved is not there. Instead, it's a much broader concept. It's like specific goals and it's aspirational and it's really in this space of wellness. And the wellness space, you look at companies like Apple with the Apple Watch, you look at companies like Peloton, Tonal, they have exceptional, elegant experiences. People don't want to make major sacrifices to improve their daily behaviors. You got to fit this into a really Hardcore lifestyle. In many cases, people have high-intensity schedules and they don't have time to figure things out. And so it became clear to me that although the hardware was, was not optimized, like there's plenty of room for improvement, it was very good. And where the experience was lacking was in connecting the dots between that hardware and the end goal, which is specific behavior changes across diet, exercise, sleep, and stress. And so. So, you know, if you want to compare it to heart rate monitoring, for example, optical heart rate sensors are a commoditized product. They're, they're not expensive, but what takes an optical heart rate sensor and turns it into a Whoop strap or an Oura Ring is the implementation. It's the user experience. It's how, how easy and elegant is the software and how much does it elevate the focus to, to like, how much does it filter through the noise and give me the signal basically and tell me what to do and how. And so that's kind of what we're trying to do here is we know that our, the core competency of developing continuous glucose sensors is already managed. That's, you know, there are great manufacturers. They're doing amazing things there. They've been doing it for decades. Where the opportunity lies is connecting again, that hardware to the end user and providing an elegant experience to wrap it in. And so that's where we focused and it really allowed us to do quite a bit very quickly because we were leveraging existing devices. We didn't have to do that intensive development process, all the financial outlay that would come with it, and it allowed us to really focus on the beauty of the experience. And so I have to credit my co-founder, David. He's got an unbelievable design intuition. He's our product guy, and he's done a great job along with our contract design agency, The Working Assembly. I want to give them a shout out. Together, they've really put together, I think, something really beautiful that people can jump into and learn from very quickly.

What did you learn at SpaceX that helps you in your day-to-day at Levels?

Yeah. So SpaceX is a— the best way to describe it is it's driven by first principles. So that's something that Elon holds very dear. And first principles are basically the— if you think about a tree, you've got the trunk and then you've got all the branches and then you've got all the leaves. And so it's easy to focus on the leaves as the first thing that strikes your eye when you're looking at a tree, but the leaves are supported by branches, which are supported by the trunk. And the trunk are the bare minimum, the basic principles upon which the other, the sort of outer design details are attached. And so for any problem, there is the core problem to solve, and then there are a ton of peripheral problems that you could get distracted trying to optimize. And so what we did at SpaceX was just like, what are the core problems that need to be solved? And if you use first principles like physics, what is the physics Gravity is a physical problem. In a lot of cases, it's like, to build a rocket, how much does the aluminum cost for that much surface area? That's a first principles problem to solve. And from there, we can decide, all right, is this thing— is it possible to build for the price target? So it's very, very simplistic conversation. When you sit in on a meeting at SpaceX, and this is something I'm really proud of, essentially anyone, no matter what their background is, would understand the conversation. They might— they may not have specific experience with it, but there are no acronyms, there's no jargon, and it's all about ensuring that anyone who's in the conversation, whether a PhD in aeronautics or astrophysics or a brand new intern who's still in, you know, in their bachelor degree, they can all contribute to the conversation in the moment, because that's the only way to foster out-of-the-box thinking, to open the opportunity up for anyone to contribute if they have a good idea. So, you know, I think that that's a really powerful lesson. And it shows that, honestly, we had a lot of people at SpaceX who had very diverse backgrounds. We had people who had geology backgrounds who were designing rocket structures. And so it's very much an open-minded culture where if you have an entrepreneurial mindset and you have a motivation, you will learn on the job. And that's the qualification you need. It's the demonstration. It's not a qualification. You don't need that piece of paper to say that you're qualified for the position. It's more so show us what you can do. And so I think we're, you know, at Levels, we're taking a very similar mindset where let's, let's solve the core problems. The core problems of metabolic dysfunction are people are completely blind to the effects of their choices. So let's give them the information, the specific information they need, not a bunch of fluff. Let's give it to them in a way that is easy to consume. And, and then let's ensure that the team is built on, you know, a foundation that believes in science and challenges their own assumptions and is willing to challenge the assumptions of others to forge kind of a new market very quickly. And so I hope we're echoing SpaceX in some way. Certainly I try to.

I mean, I see it. You've taken almost atomic-level, molecular-level measurement and turned it into a beautiful app that's easy to understand. And you have raised a little bit of money. I'd love to hear the fundraising story. This is such a big idea. I'm so curious, at what point along the journey you raised first money and what that looked like?

So my co-founder Sam is, he's a multi-time founder and just really a powerful mind in the area of network theory and certainly has a ton of experience with raising. And this was my first time raising venture money. So he really helped define the right strategy because I wasn't I did not have the right strategy figured out in advance. So I had worked on a company prior to Levels called Frontier Biometric, and the goal there was the same as Levels, but I was taking a very slow growth bootstrapped approach. And it became clear to me that that was not the right approach to maximize the chances of success. And I needed to replicate that SpaceX environment where you have an absolutely dynamite team working on a massive problem together. It was not something I was going to pull off on my own. And Sam was one of the first people I thought of. We teamed up very quickly for Levels and we basically started bringing in money right away. And so we did that on safe notes, mostly in-network people that we knew. So this was primarily angels. We had a few small checks from institutionals, and that was a process of essentially just making phone calls. And Sam has a very strong network given his prior startup experience. I had access to some networks, and so together we were able to bring in sufficient funds, about $1 million, over the course of a few weeks, and we used that to start to build the team out. From there, we kind of kept a SAFE note open for a few months, and we ended up raising about close to $4 million on SAFEs over the course of 8 months. And we've since signed term sheets for our seed raise, and that's currently undisclosed, but the details will definitely be coming out shortly, and we'll use those funds to go from this beta phase into our first stage of growth. And so yeah, we've been nicely capitalized. We've definitely benefited from a fantastic network of investors. You know, just, we have people from all walks of life, other startup founders, other investors. We've got professional athletes like Matthew Dellavedova, just some really great people who support us in making connections. And, you know, it's been really powerful for me to experience this like earliest stage of funding and all of the benefits it can bring.

So you went from Very little background fundraising to $4 million raised pretty quickly. I'm curious if you have a preferred resource that got you up to speed, or maybe it was just your founder, but perhaps not.

Yeah, most of it honestly came from conversations among the founding team. So Sam, again, he has great experience with this. Andrew Connor, who runs engineering, my co-founder, he also has quite a bit of investing experience, both his own investing, but then also he worked at a company that was acquired by Google and became Google Voice, and they had raised money as well. And so he had been through this process himself. And so that really helped influence me. I also really looked to a few books, like Secrets of Sand Hill was helpful to kind of understand the real larger-scale institutional investment round. But honestly, when it comes to the earliest money in, it's all about just relationships. It's about connecting with people. And so I think that was the biggest surprise to me, was that most angels are looking for a fantastic team. They're really the earliest money in, and they have to feel confidence in the people. And so understanding that, I would just— I think that was the most helpful resource for me, was just to see that you have to demonstrate trust and have that preexisting relationship in order to really maximize the pace. It's hard to get quick money. from scratch. You've got to know, you know, have some— it's honestly like even loose ties, some loose relationship is better than none for sure when it comes to those early conversations.

So what has been the biggest mistake or 2 that you've made?

Let's see. I, you know, I call this a mistake. I really don't necessarily think things could have been different because it was a very significant lesson learned. But that time working on this project myself and essentially trying to define all of the boundary conditions and say like, Here's the whole business plan. Here's every problem that needs solving. I've done all the work in advance. Now let's just like hire some contractors to knock it out. That process was extremely educational for me, but it did not move the ball forward very far, all things considered. Now, again, I learned just a huge amount about human physiology. I wrote a white paper that was instructive for bringing on the early team. It demonstrated that there was a use case here. It like did a bunch of the educational heavy lifting for bringing other people up to speed on why this is something to do. But I could have accelerated that process by 9 months for sure. And we could be 9 months ahead of schedule from today. So I kind of call that a bit of a regret that I didn't treat the scope of the mission with the appropriate execution, if that makes sense. It certainly was clear that this required an all-star team of data scientists and product designers. And I'm over here, a mechanical engineer working on it solo. So I would have definitely accelerated that process if I did it all over.

Okay. secret weapons. I ask you what your secret weapons are for an unfair advantage in work and life. So what is your secret weapon for staying consistent with your exercise and nutrition? You can't say Levels.

Okay, I was gonna say Levels. I'm not gonna lie, the accountability there is huge. But without Levels, I would say I really enjoy physical fitness, but But I have kind of evolved away from the super high intensity workouts. And I've started to realize that movement is what is most critical for people. And you get an 80/20, so 80% of the benefit for 20% of the effort. You get an 80/20 benefit from just doing something. And that doesn't have to be getting in your car and spending 90 minutes sweating it out on a treadmill at a gym or lifting heavy weights at the end of a workday. If you just get up and walk around the block. 2 or 3 times or walk up and down stairs while on a phone call. You get massive benefit, both mentally in the reduction in cortisol, but also I've seen this with blood sugar control myself. And so you're getting physiologic benefit. And so my secret weapon is having learned that lesson and knowing that if I can just get 100 pushups in before bed, I'm better off than if I say, uh, this is a lost cause and I'll have to work out tomorrow. Anything is better than nothing.

Yeah. That's super hard for me coming out of the military where If you're not throwing up in a bucket by the end of what they do to you, then it wasn't a real workout,

right? It's rampant. I mean, I've got 2 brothers in the military and I see it from them too. They come home and they're like, you know, we'll do a 6-mile run and 100 pull-ups and they're like, all right, let's go work out now. Yeah.

Okay, so secret weapon for team culture in this now remote world.

Yeah, so Levels has been remote from the, the very first days. So Sam and I chose to make this a remote company. The things that we've learned over the past year have been really amazing. I think the biggest one, making sure you take the additional minute to announce something interesting. So we have, for example, channels where we can share emails, like the founding team can just throw emails into Slack from, you know, exciting developments. And this may be a new employee joining, it may be just a piece of praise that we get from our investor network, but we're able to just plumb that right into Slack so that everyone else can see it on the fly. And that's a nice little way of just creating a little buzz or just providing an afternoon boost for people. And beyond that, we have an intentional day. Well, it's not a day, it's an event every week called the Friday Forum. And on the Friday Forum, we get the whole team together, we go through accomplishments for that week, and we also typically will have a special guest. So this will be like Dom D'Agostino or Ben Bikman or Molly Maloof, who are on our research team, or it'll be like an early adopter, somebody who invested early, or somebody who was an earliest customer, and we'll have them join. And we just go through and just basically, it's not a hype. It's not just like a hype meeting, it's not some sort of party, it's just genuinely demonstrating the progress that's been made across all departments for everyone to see. And we do it synchronously and it takes about an hour, but it's great. And then everyone has an opportunity to share something personal at the end that happened that week as well. And it's a really nice way of like rounding out the weekend or the week going into the weekend and have everyone like kind of reflecting on, wow, like, you know, again, that might have sucked for me, this week might not have been great for me, But we really moved forward unbelievably fast this week, and it's just a way to just reflect on that quickly and together.

I like that. Okay, last one, general tech stack, and not the actual hardware device, like the software, I mean.

So I would have to say Retool. Retool allows you to basically build custom internal tooling for your dataset, and we use this— basically all of our operation systems are built with Retool, and these are simple SQL queries, but we can build dashboards and visibility systems for our operations. operations team and our customer success team to get into the dataset in a really meaningful way and without building these custom tools. It would be unbelievably intensive for the engineering team, but instead, this can take a few minutes running a query and all the visibility is essentially no-code built in. And so Retool, I think, was essentially turnkey. It's been a phenomenal experience. I'm speaking for engineering, but I'm also speaking for operations and logistics. Which is, you know, kind of what I've been working on the past few months here. And, uh, it's been awesome to be able to just turn that system on and use the database to keep things running. So definitely a big plug for them.

Well, Josh, the floor is yours. Anything you want to say before we wrap up?

Well, I really appreciate you bringing me on. I would recommend if anyone wants to learn more about the metabolism side or the specifics of how that breaks down, check out our blog. That's at levelshealth.com and then jump on the Waitlist, I promise we'll send some emails and keep you in the loop.

Awesome, Josh. Thanks so much for spending time with me today. What you're doing to change quantified self is truly amazing. Thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe for more amazing conversations with founders like Josh, and you can find the notes from this episode at productmarketmisfits.com. Check out Levels at levelshealth.com and read more about the science at levelshealth.com/blog or on Instagram and Twitter @Levels.