#231 Josh Clemente – Founder of Levels & Former SpaceX Engineer

Big Ideas

During his time at SpaceX, Josh uncovered the importance of putting yourself in an environment with brilliant people who have already developed the frameworks you are hoping to learn.

“I certainly have benefited from working at places like SpaceX where the average, the median was way above me, everyone around me was just so much better at what they were doing and so once you get comfortable with your position in an environment like that, you recognize the opportunity”

There’s a story behind why Josh calls himself Level’s Patient Zero. After battling mental fatigue, denied access to a continuous glucose monitor, Josh had to jump many hurdles to finally uncover that his glucose levels were pre-diabetic despite being physically fit and eating what he thought was ‘good food’.

“It tends to be everyone has to do this or they’re doing it wrong, and the reality is we have a growing body of research that shows that humans are extremely diverse in the way that their bodies function their metabolic systems which is the system which produces energy from our food and environment is very unique, and so Levels is building that uniqueness to the core product”

The future is looking extremely bright for Levels, with 76,000 people on the waitlist and endless messages from current users that have dramatically changed their metabolic health.

“I am just super optimistic that we’re going to take a big chunk out of not only the financially but socially, costly, metabolic dysfunction that is ravaging every developing country in the world and it’s exciting to see progress towards that goal”

Josh handles stress by asking the question “Is what I am stressed about going to matter in five years?”

“I like to just ask, is what I am stressed about going to matter in five years? If I can just ask myself that one question invariably the answer is no. Every once in a while there’s something that’s going to have a big implication for your life and that’s a good way to examine it, but certainly for the majority of us if we can ask that question about the day to day stress we’re experiencing, most of the time it’s no”

2:05 Daily Exercise

Josh says that exercise is his daily habit that brings the most benefit to his life. It’s time that he can not only feel good physically but also take a mental break from whatever tasks are currently stressing him out at that time.

“That process of creating that deliberate space allows me to really collect my thoughts and center myself”

2:53 Finding Time for Himself

As the leader of the startup Levels, tasks and responsibilities can get hectic. Josh says it can get overwhelming to be leading a company that people rely on and feel as though he should always be pushing, but he makes sure to take time for himself.

“If you fail on a personal level you won’t be able to achieve what you’re trying to achieve for everyone else”

Josh says the first step is recognizing that it is intrinsic to success to take time for yourself and recharge. After that it’s the tactical step of blocking off the time for yourself on the calendar.

4:07 Unblocking Others

Josh says he is currently going through an experimental adaptation and says he is learning a lot, especially from his co-founders at Levels. For him, Josh says he has always needed to preserve long blocks of time to think and do deep work, which he thought was key to having a good outcome, but now he is recognizing that it’s very project specific.

“What my responsibility is in this company is to provide resources for the team and to continue to grow the team and it may not necessarily be that I dedicate long blocks to solving some program need or some project need, in fact I need to unblock other people who are better at that”

5:53 Deep Work

One thing Josh knows about himself is that he can’t have a block of deep work and then a block of continuously switching calls. Josh takes one day a week (Tuesdays in particular) as a deep work day to reflect and focus. Josh spends 10-20% of his time in that deep mode whereas previously he would spend 10-20% in the context switching mode and everything else was problem solving.

“The reality is that you can adjust to basically anything you just have to recognize that it’s going to be a bit uncomfortable at first, you’re going to have to get used to it, try some new tools, and once you get your stride it feels good”

7:48 Structuring Deep Work

Josh uses his calendar to block out chunks to structure what he thinks about. He says that one thing he learned from his co-founder Sam is that to-do lists don’t work.

“You can put infinite items on a to-do list but the reality is that time is finite”

Josh estimates the amount of time it will take him to complete each deep work task and tries to stay committed to that schedule best he can.

“I think I’ve improved as a person on my ability to predict what I can fit into a week because I have it all laid out in front of me and I have to be honest, like yeah I’m not going to get those two things done at the same time so one of them has to go.”

9:35 The Impact of High Quality Team Members

Josh thinks the biggest and most valuable piece to understanding what the most important thing he can be focusing on at all times is having really high quality team members who can help you assess your own priorities.

“It’s very easy to get distracted by a shiny object and if you have multiple people who are gut-checking that it’s a huge benefit because the whole group combined can maintain a predefined trajectory”

Josh explains how he is among five co-founders at Levels and they each have a diverse individual skill set.

“Conversations are really nice in the sense that there is typically someone who is closest to the background of a specific problem so we can rely on them for expertise and then everyone else can use their best judgement in terms of whether or not this seems like it should take priority”

11:38 Memo-Driven Culture

Levels has always been a remote company, even prior to Covid-19. Josh says that they decided to lean into the distributive model and foster a memo driven culture:

If a conversation on a topic goes beyond 10-15 minutes during a meeting, Josh and his team identify a stakeholder to do the research on the topic, write a memo, and distribute it to the team for them to provide their additional thoughts.

“That allows each of us to really assess the problem, set aside the time we need, tackle it, and then put our thoughts down so that everyone else those in context and then we come to a set of action items and we proceed”

Ultimately, the productivity is based on the memo-culture, asynchronous tasks, and synching continuously throughout the week to make sure that everyone is up to date.

“The beauty of these memos is that they are the entirety of the conversation. If you are a new candidate, you’re joining the company, you can go and review all of these memos and not only see the ultimate outcome in terms of strategy for the company but you can see everyone’s thoughts along the way”

16:17 Bringing On Co-Founders

Josh originally formed Levels with his co-founder Sam and they initially wanted to bring on more co-founders to bring on deep skill sets. With the initial co-founders all being in different parts of the country but wanting to start the project immediately, the result was what Levels is today which is a fully distributed remote team.

“I wanted that remote work because I felt like it would really contribute to a balanced lifestyle but I wanted to be sure it would be successful”

Josh says that it saved Levels to have already been remote when Covid-19 moved many other companies remote for the first time.

18:25 The Levels Co-Founders

Josh says that the beauty of the Levels co-founders is that they are all about one degree of separation apart. When it comes to fellow co-founder Sam, Josh knew that he was a fantastic problem solver who is a great networker, transparent problem-solver, and someone who values speed over perfection like himself.

“My awareness that we shared principles and so the way we thought about the world was similar enough that I didn’t think we were going to have big trouble even at the highest levels of the company”

The other co-founder, David had previously worked at Google and had immense expertise in developing product that Levels needed. Andrew, another co-founder, worked with David at Google and is a spectacular engineer, executing huge projects like Google Voice. Final co-founder Casey was a Stanford-trained surgeon turned metabolic health evangelist and provided the expertise in the medical field.

“It was frankly just looking for shared principles and shared ways of thinking about the world and then that was the context within which every one of these co-founding decisions was made”

22:27 Self-Work

Josh says that the biggest thing that Sam and him agreed on was that Levels needed to be a transparent high integrity organization that did not subscribe to a specific dogma. In terms of product, Josh says that they are challenging a lot of preconceptions about what it means to take control of your health.

“It’s really important that people be willing both to take a potentially non-mainstream approach but then also if we find that the direction we’re heading in is not doing the degree of good that we thought it would, we have to be willing to adjust course”

Having people who have high integrity at their core gives the team higher confidence that the course correction can be made if it needs to be.

25:05 What Levels Does

Levels answers the question, “What should I eat and why?” using real time data from the individuals body in a closed loop fashion. Users wear a sensor on their arm which measures the molecules in their body and then you receive real-time feedback from Levels on how good or bad the decisions that you make are (what you eat, how much you sleep, the stress throughout your day, etc) and then they surface insights to help users improve their decisions.

When it comes to nutrition, Josh describes the current views as ‘tribal’, saying:

Through Levels, people are finding out what small decisions they are making throughout their day that are ultimately impacting their end health goals.

“The reason we believe this is necessary is that 88% of American adults currently in the United States are metabolically unhealthy”

28:58 Surprising Feedback

Josh says he considers himself Patient Zero for this application.

“I discovered, despite being a crossfit trainer and caring deeply about physical fitness as a way to maintain long term health, I discovered essentially by accident that I had either borderline pre-diabetic or fully pre-diabetic glucose levels”

Josh was able to figure out which day-to-day decisions that he had previously thought as being healthy were actually causing his glucose levels to rise.

“I think the most surprising thing to me was how significant the implications of chronic stress are for health and wellness”

31:01 De-Stressing

For benign moments of stress, Josh closes his eyes and focuses on his breathing in order to clear his mind.

“Similar to taking an hour out to go for a run, you’re intentionally taking control of your physiology and putting your body in a specific state. I think breathing just for a few minutes can replicate some of those and I see a big benefit for my mental well being”

If Josh has a long period of stress covering a few weeks, he likes to take long walks, particularly at night, because there is not as much stimuli.

33:54 Origin Idea of Levels

Josh says that he was at a point in his life where physical fitness alone wasn’t cutting it in terms of feeling healthy.

“I was doing the things that I thought create health and I just felt like I had a terminal illness”

Josh had never examined nutrition beyond eating what he thought was ‘good foods’, until he read a research paper that made him reevaluate his diet. He read the book, Wired to Eat by Robb Wolf which introduced to Josh the new technology of a continuous glucose monitor. Josh went to his doctor and was denied a prescription because his doctor said it was for people with an ‘advanced condition’, that was the moment Josh says gave him enhanced conviction to create a solution.

“Why is there a gatekeeper to me understanding my own body’s information? That felt like a violation to me. I feel very comfortable working with an expert and I understand I don’t know everything but it seemed as though I should be granting access to my own body’s information as opposed to having to ask for my body’s information”

Josh ended up getting the CGM (continuous glucose monitor) and discovered his blood sugar was very erratic.

“Overtime I recognized that this information is crucial, it’s actual and you can change it with your choices and there’s a blockade. We need enhanced access to this technology but we also need to then take it and create actionability”

39:38 Turning an Idea Into a Company

From the time that Josh read the research paper that opened his eyes about nutrition and began experimenting with his own metabolism physiology, it was well over a year.

“I left SpaceX in 2016, I was experimenting pricking my finger in 2017, I read Robb Wolf’s Wired to Eat book in 2017, and then by early 2018 it had congealed into this is what I want to do and I was putting pen to paper on a business plan”

Josh explains how the area of opportunity was found throughout his own learning process to improve his glucose for the two years prior to the aha moment for a business idea. He uncovered that he could use the CGM hardware and build on top of it.

“It’s the insight framework that lies on top of the hardware and tells you this is what this means and this is what you should do instead”

42:07 Connection and Curiosity

Josh is a voracious learner, specifically when it comes to specific things like spacecraft, machines, and vehicles, but in order to be genuinely curious and motivated to learn about something Josh says he has to feel a personal connection to the topic.

“This whole process of self exploration, I never had a deep interest in human physiology or medicine and I think that’s the uniqueness about the way I approach things is, and maybe there’s a selfish component here, but if I have a connection to it it makes it that much more meaningful and I think it gives me a framework to understand the information”

43:46 Developing Frameworks

Josh says there is no replacement for seeing a framework in action by being around people who have developed those frameworks already.

Environments like SpaceX, Josh says, lend themselves very well to sharing expertise.

“Work with great people. Try to not only work with them but try to have them work alongside you or show you how they work”

46:14 Simplicity Trumps Complexity

Josh says that first principles and the idea that the most elegant solution is the simplest is something he hadn’t truly internalized until his time at SpaceX.

“The first principles are essentially the core fundamental components of any problem”

Josh believes that when beginning to solve a problem do not rely on the expertise of others or what’s been done before, the core of the solution conversation should be around what we are ultimately trying to solve and to try to solve it with the least number of additional complexities.

Josh explains how during his time at SpaceX, complexity was not rewarded, in fact the simplest solutions were the most celebrated.

“One other thing that we had at SpaceX that Elon from the earliest moments drilled home was just in pursuit of the elimination of an expertise culture, a complexity culture, there was no acronyms and industry jargon was essentially illegal”

Josh has applied this to his team at Levels, saying that despite the fact that they are working on complex human physiology solutions, the mechanics can be described very simply and should be.

51:00 Josh’s Previous Roles Influencing Levels

Josh says he has had experiences in his past roles where organizations are incentive misaligned where it’s all about vanity metrics. He explains how these metrics often are what distract organizations from the primary purpose of what they’re trying to accomplish.

“Anything your tracking has to be driven by your core focus”

Josh uses SpaceX as an example, saying that the goal of SpaceX is to make humans multiplanetary and during his time there the only measurement was evaluating if each decision would take them closer to that ultimate goal.

“It’s key at Levels that we keep our eyes on the prize and the goal is to reverse the trends of metabolic dysfunction”

52:58 Actively Suppressing Company Growth

Josh says that Levels is currently still in development mode and actively suppressing their growth.

“We’re focusing very much on customer feedback, on the quality of their experience, and on the behavior change that we think is ultimately necessary”

Josh and his team focused on strategy, tactics, and continuous updates. The majority of the investor fundraising for Levels took place during the peak uncertainty of Covid-19, but the continuous transparent updates and documentation kept the investors confident in them.

“Beyond that, they became very familiar over those months with why we were doing what we were doing. It wasn’t a single pitch meeting that defined the conversation, essentially we were doing the due diligence process for them on not only our specific product and team but the entire marketplace”

58:33 Turning Customers Into Investors

Josh says that the strong roster of institutional and angel investors for Levels has been critical for the company.

“We have very much leaned into our investors as a network of experts and as a source of potential introductions to additional experts and we really value collecting information to check our own approach and improve our cadence”

Josh brings up how they are transitioning to a subscription based revenue model but in the beginning they were just trying to get first time customers to give them feedback on their experience with the product. He says that these first customers ultimately became investors.

“These were early investors who were telling us this is what the product should look like and what it should do for me to be happy”

59:21 Josh’s Role

Josh says that he plays the ‘flex’ role within the team, since he does not have a software engineering background and that is a large component of what they are doing right now. Josh focuses on hiring and identifying the current resource constraints.

“There is a prevailing sense of trust among us that we are doing this together for a reason, we trust each other, we believe in each of our ability to make good decisions and so it’s very nice that we can just allow some of us to focus on the bigger picture, some of us to focus on the iterations that have to happen everyday and we stay synched up on those on a memo format”

1:01:45 Bringing on New Team Members

When bringing new people onto the team, Josh says that they start by sending the angel investing cohort a detailed requirement page for the role and ask them to introduce them to the two best people in that space that they know. After this, Josh and his team send over an immense amount of the memos and documentation to the candidates and focus only on the candidates that take the time to read through and dissect that information.

“We start from the position of our network which allows us to conserve resources and focus where the recommendation is highest and someone has previous experience with them”

1:05:27 Company Culture at Levels

Josh hopes employees would say that working at Levels is like being given the best job you’ve ever wanted.

“I think that what we are building here is a work environment that I certainly have always wanted which is one that because of the asynchronous approach that we’re taking, you really have the ability to define your approach”

1:07:52 The Future of Levels

With over 76,000 people on the waitlist right now, it’s no question that the future is bright for Levels.

“Even more importantly, the product is making meaningful differences in people’s lives everyday. I mean we get messages constantly from people who have seen dramatic improvements in their metabolic health”

Josh is excited because as he says, “the goal is manifesting right now.”

1:09:22 Book Recommendations

Josh’s three book recommendations that he has recently loved are:

1:09:20 Who Josh Would Love to Interview

Peter Attia

“I think he is by far the leading thought leader of real time bio information for better health”

Connect with Josh