Hey friends,
Back again with another edition of The Founder Newsletter - this is Episode 22. If you’re new here, my goal is to give you a quick synopsis of what got me thinking from this week’s episode of The Founder Podcast in 5 minutes or less.
No idea what The Founder is? Read this.
Mission control:
Learn -> Founder favorite resources
Free money -> Discount codes
And who am I?
I’m Kallaway - a future founder trying to get some answers before I jump in the ball pit myself.
Let’s get it.
This Week’s Episode (Ep 22) 🥦
Guest -> Josh Clemente, Co-Founder and President of Levels
Mission -> Levels is working to reverse the trends of metabolic dysfunction globally using personal health information delivered at the time that we need to make choices everyday
Discount -> Use this link to cut the line and get the Levels beta ASAP.
Episode available on -> Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website
In this episode we talk with Josh about…
💡 Understanding and improving your metabolic health and fitness
🚀 What it’s like working at SpaceX
🤒 Metabolic dysfunction and why it’s rampant in society today
💤 Exploring the modern health stack
🧑🤝🧑 Building a world class team
Summary 🔍
What is Levels and how did Josh get started?
Josh is a rocket scientist and worked at SpaceX for 6 years, managing the team that designed the life support systems in their space shuttles.
Overtime, he started to notice extreme levels of fatigue and experienced volatile spikes and crashes of energy throughout his day. For someone that worked out consistently and followed the guidelines for what he believed to be healthy practices, things didn’t seem to add up.
After experimenting with glucose monitoring, he realized that he was pre-diabetic, borderlining on fully-blown diabetic, and that the foods he was eating were having a significant impact on his performance.
It was this discovery and struggle to derive actionable insights from his glucose monitoring that led him to start Levels.
Today at Levels, Josh and his team are revolutionizing the way people think about their metabolic health. And why is metabolic health so important?
Before Levels, an average person had no way of understanding how efficiently or inefficiently their body was producing energy. Levels enables you to access and understand this information in real-time, so you can start making better diet and lifestyle choices to avoid those energy peaks and valleys.
When you join their program, you’ll receive two, 14-day continuous glucose monitors that stay on your arm and measure the glucose in your blood.
Using the Levels app, you’re able to seamlessly monitor how different foods as well as things like sleep, stress and exercise are impacting your glucose levels and then proactively make adjustments.
In the future, Levels will be able to predict and recommend what you should do to optimize your energy, acting almost as a virtual health coach with personalized recommendations based on your specific choices.
If you want to support Josh and level up your metabolic fitness, use this link to cut the line and get the product ASAP.
Here’s why I’m a fan and excited about the future for Levels:
Continuous glucose monitoring technology has existed for the last 20 years but was previously gated from public use. Levels is taking an underlying technology that is a step change better than the alternative (one-time finger pricks) and democratizing it
Metabolic health is one of the biggest undiagnosed problems that exist in our society today. Rampant obesity is the underlying cause for the majority of the primary causes of death (heart disease, diabetes, stroke). Metabolic health is one of the first data driven ways to address the obesity crisis
Levels enables a data-driven approach that is personalized. Everyone’s body reacts differently to different foods. For one person, a banana may cause significant glucose spikes, while for another, it could have a moderate or low effect. Levels is the first product that enables people to understand their own body on an individual level
They have the early signs of a cult brand. Their social media channels are full of happy customers that rave about the experience of their beta
Josh’s Startup Manifesto 📜
What’s a Startup Manifesto?
At the end of every episode, I ask all of my founder guests the same question:
If you had to write a Startup Manifesto with 5 of the most important key lessons or pitfalls to avoid when starting out, what would they be?
Here’s what Josh had to say:
You have to personal investment in what you’re working on – you have to care about it deeply.
It has to be a big enough problem that other people will want to join you in solving it.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming you can do it alone. If it’s big enough for you to leave what you’re doing and work on it full time, then it’s likely going to benefit from more people than yourself. Lean in on building an exceptional team that’s going to be a force multiplier.
Care about business fundamentals. Be realistic about what you’re building and getting to a place where the business can be successful independently.
Understand the benefits of radical accountability and empowering the individual inside the organization to be unconstrained no matter where they are in the org.
What Got Me Thinking From the Episode 🤔
After reflecting on my conversation with Josh, here’s something that really got my wheels spinning:
Data-driven wellness 🤯
My exposure to Levels opened my eyes to what is coming in the wellness space, and I couldn’t be more excited.
Traditionally, many nutritional best practices have largely been based on large group data-driven trends or individualized anecdotal evidence.
From a large group perspective, one may hear, “studies show that eating almond butter is a good source of fat” and that came from a source that was generalizing based on lots of data points across many people. Anecdotally, I might try almond butter and tell my friends how great I felt after eating it and that could drive behavior.
What has been largely missing, outside of a clinical environment, is a data-driven approach that easily enables an individual to understand how different foods impact them.
Levels is the first solution to do this.
When you wear their sensor and use their app, you’re effectively able to monitor how specific foods cause varying glucose responses in your body.
I was fortunate to get to participate as an early beta tester and was able to identify that fruit sugar (from things like apples, bananas or juices) caused significant spikes to my glucose levels.
This meant that anytime I ate a significant serving of fruit, I often experienced a big crash in the next 1-2 hours as my blood sugar normalized.
As an action of improvement, this now means that I try to avoid fruit as much as possible because it has an incrementally more negative impact on my body.
What was even more fascinating to me was the way that different variables in other aspects of my wellness stack changed my reactions to the same food.
For example, I ate a chicken and rice stir fry meal for three different dinners in the same week. One was following a <5 hour night of sleep, one was following a moderate intensity workout and one was after a normal day of breath work and meditation.
After the meal that followed my poor night of sleep, the glucose response was off the charts and drove a massive crash in my body.
For the other two nights, the same exact meal produced a more muted response, signaling that sleep, fitness, mindfulness and nutrition are all interconnected.
Levels is just scratching the surface of what is possible, but I think we’re headed into a revolution for the quantified self.
In my mind, the more data we can collect in real-time, the better we can make decisions about our day to day lives and the more often we can optimize the way we feel and perform.
I can’t wait for the future of health.
Wrapping it Up 📕
I hope you found this interesting and inspiring! If so and you want to help support my journey to bring The Founder to millions of people across the world, here’s a couple things that would be really valuable to me and the show:
If you enjoyed this post, share it with one friend that you think is on the same wavelength. Can’t hurt and would help spread the word!
If you haven’t already, subscribe to the newsletter so you can get them delivered to your inbox each week!
Listen to the full podcast episode with Josh on Apple or Spotify. If you don’t have an hour to listen to the full episode, pick a couple of topics you’re interested in and skim through (topic time codes in the show notes).
If you’re feeling super giving:
Find our show on Apple Podcasts (https://apple.co/2VCosu6) and (1) subscribe, (2) give a 5-star rating and (3) leave a couple sentence positive review. This doesn’t seem like it would move the needle but it really is a massive help!
Till next time ✌️
Kallaway
Want more? Check out other companies we’ve featured on the show!
— 🧑🦰 17. Kombo Ventures | Kevin Gould
— 💍 11. The Clear Cut | Olivia Landau and Kyle Simon