Continuous Glucose Monitoring for Everyone
We dive into the fast-changing world of direct-to-consumer digital health, with perhaps the best person in the world: Levels founder Josh Clemente. (Shoutout to Ben Grynol and Michael Mizrahi from our LP community for introducing us!) Levels is on a mission to make consumers everywhere aware of their metabolic health by enabling anyone to track blood glucose levels with a continuous glucose monitor. Josh has had an incredible career, working as an early engineer at SpaceX and later at Hyperloop One before founding Levels out of a very real personal need. Join our conversation as we cover everything from Josh's time at SpaceX to why the market has changed for consumer digital health, and what the future holds for Levels.
More on the episode
Playbooks
1. High risk, high return - having a mentality of "we have nothing to lose" can create the high risk tolerance necessary to achieving high returns.
SpaceX had a "we have nothing to lose" mentality for all of its early days. Elon always reminded SpaceX employees that everyone had to personally have to succeed, or "2,000 people including you will lose their jobs."
2. Internet-based prescription workflows have unlocked a key business model innovation for direct-to-consumer digital health.
The unlocking of therapeutic devices and drugs for direct to consumer cases, as pioneered by Hims/Hers, Roman, etc, has created a new age for digital health. This paradigm has shift has allowed businesses to reach patients directly without spending years (and millions of dollars) negotiating agreements with payers to get a coveted "billing code" from insurance.
3. Often the best startup opportunities come from personal experience.
The story of how Josh came to found Levels illustrates the power of being patient zero of the problem you want to solve. Josh didn't start out looking for a company to start, but by self-experiments simply because he had a problem and was curious.
4. In new categories, starting as a premium product and moving down market as costs come down is often the best strategy.
Tesla's "master plan" illustrates this perfectly: start absurdly expensive & impractical (Roadster), then still expensive but more practical (Model S/X), then mass-market viability (Model 3/Y).
5. Data, data, data.
If you listened to our Meituan episode, you'll remember us discussing the power of Meituan's review data. Similarly, Levels moat lies in its data. Amazingly Levels already owns the world's largest collective dataset of non-diabetic glucose monitoring data, and the company is still in beta! As they amass more and more data, they'll be able to generate more personalized insights and health/lifestyle recommendations for customers.