Special drop: David on Levels' Podcast!
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Hello, Acquired LPs. David coming at you here with a very special surprise little bonus feed drop. So I had the chance recently to go on Levels podcast, one of our very favorite companies here in the Acquired community, called A Whole New Level, their podcast, hosted by none other than Ben Grinnell himself, Acquired Super LP,

And it was just a blast. We talked about all sorts of fun stuff, acquired stuff, lots of riffing on theories about company building and strategy. And it was just a blast. And so we thought it would be fun to, especially since it's such a fun part of the acquired community, to drop it here in our feed as well.

So without further ado, we will cut over to our fun discussion. And if you like what you hear and you want more levels and more Ben Grinnell, go over and subscribe to A Whole New Level in any podcast player of your choice.

Thanks so much to Ben for having me on and other Ben acquired Ben and I will be back here in the LP feed soon. We've got two really, really cool episodes in the works with our editors now that we can't wait to drop. We'll see you soon. I think there's a main starting point. It's something that,

You and Ben have riffed on quite a bit. You and I have riffed on it loosely. And it's something that we've been thinking more about as a team with Levels, which is an ecosystem versus a single threaded company. And this is somewhat like Amazon and Apple.

Very much an ecosystem versus a company like 23andMe. And I think back, I guess it must have been like the winter. You and I were jamming on this a little bit where it's like, it might've been right when you first tried levels. And the thought was 23andMe is doing great things in the world.

not to dunk on 23andMe, but don't become 23andMe. It was kind of the takeaway. I remember writing that in a little note in my notion of all my thoughts as I was going through doing levels for the first time. And that was like the big one. I was like, yes, don't become 23andMe. Yeah.

Yeah. And there's this conversation around ecosystems, right? Like Amazon and how it didn't start out as AWS. And now that is such a significant portion of its revenue streams. How do you think about when you're

not just vetting portfolio companies. I know early stage is much different, but when you start to think about some of the diligence that you're doing and you see these great companies and you think, man, that is a giant platform or a giant ecosystem that is so hard to disrupt.

Oh, well, let's see. Good question. Where should we start? Let's start with early stage because that's the easy part. No freaking clue. Not quite roulette. Not quite roulette. We'll call it blackjack, but it's still gambling. Perfect timing for this because I'm actually in the middle of doing research and prep work for our next special episode that we're going to record in a couple days.

with the guys from NZS Capital, which stands for non-zero-sum capital, which is a public market fund based in Denver. These guys are great. I just love their philosophy. We met them at a capital camp a couple of weeks ago. And other people have done this, but I think they've done it, really embraced this more than anyone. This idea of applying complexity theory to

Complexity theory for folks who aren't familiar with it is pioneered or really championed now by this place called the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Are you familiar with it? No, I haven't heard of either. Oh, it's so cool.

Basically, the Santa Fe Institute is this nonprofit educational institution dedicated to bringing together leading academics and theorists from a wide, disparate array of fields and bringing them together to collaborate. And specifically to collaborate around this idea of complexity theory, which is the idea that the world and lots of systems, the universe, the world, and lots of systems within it are connected.

and let's see if I can get this definition right. Complex systems, specifically complex adaptive systems are like dynamic. It's like evolution. You can't just like multiply

model out the stock market and be like, these are the rules and this is how it works. It evolves and it adapts and it's complex. And a couple of the big takeaways out of this concept are, one, you can't predict the future. So you just can't. And if you... You can't see coronavirus coming, right? And...

Thus, this idea of rather than being right, you want to be resilient. And so if you study like nature and biology, like ant colonies are this way or bees or, you know, river ecosystems and stuff like that, that's one thing.

And then another big takeaway is the idea of power loss, which is that as behaviors of actors within a complex ecosystem evolve, a lot of emergent behaviors are not going to work.

But a small number of emergent behaviors are really going to work. So there's lots and lots of takeaways about this. But one of the clearest, most pure things of this is venture capital and startups. Let a thousand flowers bloom. You have no idea. And if you just accept that you have no idea what is going to happen, you can still invest very intelligently by running lots of experiments and then let them surprise you.

Yeah, that is really, really neat in the way to think about it, because it gets to like, let's just use the market, for example. It becomes that that discussion or the debate between two sides. The market is perfectly efficient or perfectly inefficient depending on the way you position it. Right. Like, is it?

perfectly efficient when people underreact to actual news and overreact to silly things. It's like, maybe you could call that efficient because then you're extrapolating it to the average investor in public markets doesn't

read a ton of information before making these emotional decisions. You're like, well, that's perfectly efficient from a behavior perspective. And then you're like, well, it's actually perfectly inefficient because they're doing exactly what you shouldn't do, which is make uneducated decisions, right? So everything is complex. Let's get really tangible about it. So the NCS guys would say,

this is related to this idea of like conviction that people talk about. Like we did this episode on TSMC and I was like, wow, this is a great company. I now have conviction about TSMC. And I went and I bought a bunch of TSMC stock after we did the episode. You can oftentimes boil, you know, what really you mean when you say I have conviction, I want to go buy this stock. What you're really saying is like, I have a view that it's going to do well in the future. And I believe that that view is correct, you know? And,

And if instead you look at things and you're like, well, I have no idea if this is going to do well in the future or not. Instead, you might want to invest in companies and things and portfolios that are resilient, that in a wide variety of outcomes in the future of things that might happen that you can't predict that.

X set of companies or X portfolio is going to be more resilient to a broader tale of those outcomes versus like, I think TSMC is going to do well, you know?

Yeah. And it gets into the conversation, not just about diversifying a portfolio for an individual, but also diversifying revenue streams and offerings for a company. And so that's, that's where Amazon gets really interesting because let's use, let's just use e-commerce and let's assume all

E-commerce, let's use like three of their pillars because there's so many channels we could go down, but we'll say like the marketplace side of things, which is just the e-commerce. Like let's leave out third party sellers. Then we've got AWS and we'll use Prime. So like content, infrastructure, commerce, retail.

Assume there's a situation, let's use COVID. Assume there's a situation where COVID makes everything go up as far as transactions on the marketplace and Prime goes up because everybody's at home consuming content. But for whatever reason, the infrastructure isn't required. Let's just make this up. The infrastructure on AWS is no longer required and that used to be the cash cow for Amazon. Now everything's changed with their business model. It's like they're so resilient because they're not...

They're sort of like COVID proof, we'll call it that. And let's pretend the company's not called Amazon because we don't want people to anchor on this being a real example. But the idea is that when one element of a pillar is no longer the cash cow or the like, that's back to power laws where most of the returns are coming from that one pillar or a small subset of whatever we're looking at.

the other ones start to take off. And so that gets into the importance of creating this ecosystem or this platform for a company over time. Yep. And if, you know, bring it back to sort of the original question, if you think about 23andMe, not to like dunk on them, you know, they've accomplished something great. They've actually like directly impacted my and Jenny's life, my wife Jenny's life. So it's wonderful what they've done. But as a business and a company, it's,

you know, for most of their life, like they make a test kit that you take it home and then they give you like flat data from that. And there's nothing else to it, you know, and it's not ongoing and there's no ecosystem, et cetera, et cetera. That's not very resilient. You know, there's not a lot of, you know, the other piece that NDS talks about out of this is like resiliency and then optionality. And oftentimes part of being resilient is having

strong optionality about the future. And Amazon is a wonderful example of that. Whereas, you know, the 23andMe example, less so. Yeah, that's exactly it. You see, especially with marketplaces, you see optionality as being the number one value prop for people. So the idea with, it doesn't matter whether you are wide like Amazon or whether you're vertical like StockX, the idea is...

not only are they solving a different problem where it's like, it is no longer efficient to get sneakers off of eBay. It's that,

You actually can't get all the sneakers that you want if you're a true sneakerhead. And so you need to aggregate really deep supply for anybody that's interested in Pokemon cards, sneakers, like name any vertical marketplace, right? But that's where as soon as you get optionality and you get optionality, we'll call optionality is synonymous with density in a marketplace, supply side density. That's where things get really interesting because, and this is a big juxtaposition,

People want optionality, but behavioral economics tells us to minimize options. And then the next layer of it is what we actually want is we want

it's the way we structure choices it's not actually the it's the number of choices that we make we want to minimize those for people but we want to offer the maximum number of options once you start to drill down the taxonomy of choices gets very academic but it's a really interesting way of looking at things where it's like these two completely different ideas or heuristics about how to be successful is minimize choices but maximize optionality how do you get to the two it's

It's basically choice architecture or taxonomy. We want to thank our longtime friend of the show, Vanta, the leading trust management platform. Vanta, of course, automates your security reviews and compliance efforts. So frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance and monitoring, Vanta takes care of these otherwise incredibly time and resource draining efforts for your organization and makes them fast and simple.

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Yeah. Well, I love the, you know, the StockX example is so cool because it's an unbundling of eBay, right? Which is like, on the one hand, eBay is like maximum optionality. I can have whatever, I can go buy whatever I want around the whole world there. But yeah, like the paradox of choice is also real. And also because they're so wide, like sneaker heads can be served better by StockX. And, uh,

Yeah, I just, I love that example. The interesting thing with eBay is that eBay was...

So let's look at eBay in isolation. Granted, Amazon has a lot of history as well. eBay is one of the first true platform companies from a marketplace perspective, where people took the marketplace and they started building on top of it. And they built on top of it from an ecosystem standpoint where PayPal could not have existed. I mean, it just wouldn't have. Objectively, it would not have made it. Everyone says it who worked with

PayPal in the early days, they would not have made it if it weren't for eBay. And so they had a, what seemed like a bolt on product, but it ended up being part of this giant ecosystem. And then it became a great FinTech product and totally different conversation. But that was one element of an ecosystem. And another element was

Bob and Jane could have a standalone retail store where they collected items that you could go trade in at some value just below what they thought they could get for retail or they'd sell it on consignment. And you saw this happening a lot in the late 90s, early 2000s when...

people would have these stores or they would do retail arbitrage was kind of the next, like we'll call it 2006 onwards where people really took this retail arbitrage approach to build upon this entire ecosystem that was eBay. So it wasn't just even unbundling of the marketplace. It was how are people starting new businesses on top of this other one? Yep.

Really interesting to think about. And that's something that like we think about more and more as we're thinking, how do we, how do we maintain a product centric member centric focus and

But know that there's this long lens of building a giant ecosystem around it, right? Community and an ecosystem. Well, that's what's so, you know, like there's one feature of Levels where the main and only or main thing that Levels does is I open up, you know, the app once or a couple times a day and I get my metabolic score for the day.

okay, you know, fine. Like that, that's cool. Like I like that. It's really unique and novel and useful, valuable data that I can't get any other way right now. But a more interesting future for levels is, you know, you guys are the,

platform, you know, hardware, software, sensitive, the everything that goes into that for understanding for getting data and insights about what's happening inside your body. And you guys can build stuff on that. And everybody, lots of other people can build stuff on that. And like, thanks to that, you let you let the thousand flowers bloom, you have all this optionality about what's interesting and useful to people, either everybody or

you know, broad populations or niche narrow populations that other developers can use the levels platform to access data and give people insight about their bodies and health. Like that, to me, that sounds cooler. Like, I don't know about you guys, but. Yeah, that's something that Sam and Josh have been talking about lots lately, which is

bio-observability, right? So it's Josh always uses, Josh is a big car nut for the record. I actually did not know that. That's awesome. I mean, loves machinery. Of course, makes sense. The idea that you can get more data from your car right now. So the check engine light goes on and you know that if you don't address the check engine light within n number of days, let's say you leave it for like two years,

the probability of there being other engine failure is a lot higher than if that light wasn't on.

And if you would have just addressed the light being on within a reasonable amount of time, like it's probably your car is going to have decent maintenance. Well, the idea that we don't have a check engine light for our bodies is insane, right? Like it really is. Totally insane. And so to your point about observability, what can you do when you start being able to analyze and create or generate data around molecules, like many different molecules in your body, how

How cool is it when other people can start doing really, really long tail things? And when I say that, I don't mean academia can come out of the woodwork and say, cool, we've got funding to do other things. Where it gets interesting is some

11-year-old hacker playing around with a data set that is accessible, an anonymized data set that is accessible, and all of a sudden uncovers some new arm of research that everyone's like, I had no idea. That is where building on top gets interesting.

insanely cool because the discoverability for the world and how much better, how much better off we can be from a health perspective gets really neat. We start to talk about being able to truly expand people's life, like have a longer lifespan and health span. It's like Apple and, you know, the iPhone and the app store, right? Like both in terms of the

opportunity and potential for you all at levels. But also, I think, and I think maybe this was some of the motivation of this whole discussion and topic in general, of like, you guys couldn't, when you started, couldn't have come out and be like, yep, we are this thing. Like we are, you know, the iPhone and the app store for your body. Like, cool, people might have gotten excited, but that's not how you build platforms, right? Like, you got to start with the

product itself and a narrow use case just like the iPhone right like there was no app store when the iPhone launched they launched the app store once they had millions and millions of people who owned iPhones and similarly I don't think you can or it's incredibly hard to just like

launch right into platform status. It takes years to get there. Yeah. And I mean, relevant example that has been going on for, gosh, when did he drop the

Sweeney episode, Tim Sweeney from Epic. Oh yeah, that was last year. Lost track of time already, but great, great episode. Very relevant where Sweeney, to recap it for anyone who hasn't listened, you have to check out, is it called Epic or is it? Yeah, I think it's called Epic, right? I think, yeah, we just called it Epic Games. Yep. Epic Games on Acquired. So basically Tim Sweeney is fighting for everybody else because Epic is one of the

biggest contributors to Apple's success because of the entire ecosystem that has been built around that. So without Apple, Epic couldn't exist. But without Epic, Apple, like Apple needs Epic more than Epic needs Apple. And that's sort of the summary of that episode where Tim Sweeney's like, I don't really care. Like we don't need you. But the exposure that Epic got through Apple is quite significant. And that's back to that

symbiotic relationship as these platforms or as these ecosystems develop where everyone sort of gets locked into them in some way, shape or form with the more scale they get individually.

Yep. Well, then, you know, I mean, shoot, Epic, and maybe this is a roadmap in some ways for you guys, too. Like, Epic's an interesting one, because they, you know, started as a game. Well, shoot, because it's been a year and a half since the episode. I forget the early, early history of Epic, if I remember right.

They actually were making like Tim was making like word processors and stuff like text editors. It wasn't originally that he wanted to get into gaming, but then, you know, they started making games, right? You know, Unreal Tournament being the most successful one. And then they made Gears of War for Xbox. So they were just game developer, right? And then, you know, participating on other people's platforms, whether that was PCs or Xbox or, you know, the like. And then they realized, oh, we can kind of become a platform business ourselves too and

open up the engine and let other game developers use that. So you get these like nested platforms, you know, and that's good. That's as it should be. Like, you know, that's the standing on the shoulders of giants thing. I mean, back to Amazon, that is what, forgive me, I'm going to forget the name. What's the company, Thrasio? The one that's... Thrasio, yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, they're...

Gosh, they must be a couple billion in valuation right now. I can't remember what their last... Yeah, they're rolling up Amazon third-party sellers that they're buying and putting together into one organization. Yeah, so it's almost like...

The granular level of retail arbitrage is you and I go to the store, we find a bunch of Barbie dolls on sale for $9. We think we can sell them on eBay for $14. There's our margin right there. And Thrasio is saying, cool, we're going to arbitrage third-party sellers where we think that we can get economies of scale and scope by aggregating all these third-party sellers under one umbrella. And if you said that idea 10 years ago,

people would think it was nuts. There would be no room for that. Now, I mean, they're not the only company that's doing this. And not only are they not the only company, but they've got a decent enough valuation. Like, I can't remember what it is after the last round of funding, but I want to say it's somewhere around two or three, at least. Yeah, certainly. It's large. I think it's that or higher. I don't know exactly, but yeah. Let's look it up right now. I don't know enough about them to know if...

they and their sort of constituent brands are only selling on Amazon or if they're selling elsewhere too or how they're thinking about that. Yeah, I don't know that either. I'm just looking at Crunchpiece from April. $100 million Series C and it doesn't say exactly what the valuation is but it's potentially between $3 to $4 million.

So one at, we'll call it one at four, but still aggregation of third party sellers. Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, the reason I bring it up, you know, in this whole sort of platform discussion is, you know, canonically and every rule is made to be broken. But if you are billing only on aggregation,

If you have existential risk on one platform, that can be a hard place to be. Amazon could change the rules on them. And maybe they won't because they're worried about antitrust and all that. But that's a key strategic point of dependency. And I think also PayPal is instructive here. While PayPal needed eBay to grow, ultimately, eBay was the sword of Damocles hanging over them. And they had to sell to eBay for...

way, way, way less money than the potential of PayPal. It was a billion and a half dollar acquisition. And now that eBay spun out PayPal, and it's fully Optimus Prime transformerized business, not dependent at all on eBay, it's what, a $300, $400 billion market cap company? Yeah. And in those cases, there's so much

leverage asymmetry. Like the asymmetry is so far in favor of the one of the platform that you are on. Extrapolate this to content creators. And this is probably a little bit Gary V, but where anyone who talks about it goes deep and says, do not go all in on

Instagram or one platform, like make sure that you are diversified in your presence. If you have it as we'll call it, your content creator, Instagram is your sole source of income. That's actually not great because then you hear of people who are, I mean, I've got a friend who is a YouTuber and he's approaching just under a million. He's okay as far as diversification goes, but he realized it was important when he was like, oh, I'm

I'm kind of handcuffed by the algorithm here. Yeah, right. When it changes... Yeah, when it changes, it's not just my AdSense revenue coming in. It's that I don't get as many brand deals because they only care about your last few videos and their performance. And so there are all these trickle-down effects where you're like, oh, you have to make sure that you have the distribution channels. You have to have a lot of breadth in what you do. And then...

deep enough roots in in all these different platforms that it's like okay cool you're relatively covered you can weather the storm no matter what and you're never really relying on one point of exposure or failure yeah oh what great illustration an example of the the resiliency concept right like if you're you know look at the people that do it like mark you know marquez and mkbhd and plenty others you know are um

their primary or only channel is youtube but like wow that is a big strategic point of dependency maybe there's a point of critical mass too though right like yep epic so tim sweeney is a good example where he's not overly reliant on apple he's not overly worried about them yeah he's got steam he's got android he's got the consoles like there's plenty of places where all

All of Epic's businesses, both their own games and people who develop on the Unreal Engine where they exist on lots of platforms. Yeah, and maybe, and let's make up this example because why not throw in a hypothetical, but without knowing Tim Sweeney personally, let's make us some assumptions.

Tim Sweeney, we know that he is a bachelor. We know he's in his 50s. We know that he basically just codes and works and enjoys that. Just walks in the woods in North Carolina. Exactly. That's what he enjoys doing. And so he's probably fighting a lot less for Epic and his own wealth creation or adding to his wealth than he is for every other developer, everybody who is

who feels this sense of tension between what happens with Apple and what happens when you're building products, especially at this point in his career, right? Like he's got so much diversification that he's, he's basically like fighting for the little guy, if you want to put it in air quotes, you know, and that's that there's something to be said about that because that is,

That is where he's got enough leverage in everything else he's done because of diversification. Back to this whole ecosystem platform conversation. It's like when you get that wide, when you get that deep in all these different streams, that's where you can start to actually take big bets because you're never so reliant on one stream that you become risk adverse. And then it's sort of you hit the top of the maturity curve and you can't figure out why things are just going down.

It's kind of like the original name and concept of acquired tech acquisitions. You know, a lot of times I think acquisitions happen because you've lost your strategic leverage to be independent. You know, PayPal being a great example of that, right? Like PayPal was on fire in a good way. Even, you know, post tech bubble, like the business was doing incredibly well. The growth was incredible, right?

But eBay had all the leverage. So, you know, there you go. Look at what happened. But in a case like Tim and Epic, nobody has leverage over him. And part of that is strategic business. But also it's like you were saying, he controls the company. You know, he could go sell Epic today to Apple or anybody else for 20, 30, 40, 50 billion dollars. He doesn't care about that.

Like, you know, why would he do that? He values independence and being able to use Epic as a platform for what he thinks is right and how he the direction he wants the world to go. Yeah, it changes. It changes the dynamic a lot. And that's what I mean, jumping into the innovators dilemma. This is it's funny because it's something that we'll call it disruptive innovation slash the innovators dilemma hat tip.

The late Clay Christensen. It's super funny because it's probably one of those core concepts that is taught in every business school at this point, I would assume. But so many people get the idea or the concept of disruptive innovation wrong and the innovator's dilemma. So...

When you, if you talk with someone and they say, oh, that's so disruptive, that's disruptive innovation. It's better, faster, cheaper. And it's actually like, that is the opposite of what the innovators dilemma is. It's that you're, it's more expensive. Yeah.

it's worse where this came up. Hat tip, Tom, Tom's part of our team. And we were just talking about AirPods. And he said, I don't understand why everybody uses them. If they complain about them and they say how much worse they are than wired, he's still on wired headphones. I know Sam uses wired as well. Cause exactly this reason I said, it has nothing to do with like wired are objectively better. They're more reliant. The sound quality is better, but it's,

The reason AirPods are disruptive is because they're unlocking a completely new value prop for people that wired headphones can't solve for, which is, and there are actually a lot of value props, depends on the person. So for some people, it's hands-free. For other people, it's not having to carry their phone in their back pocket while they're cooking dinner. Like hands-free being, hey, you can use Siri, which again, like,

digressing for a second, a great piece of tech built on top of this other product, which is depth in itself, right? For getting stickiness or lock-in. But that's where it's really funny because yes, AirPods are absolutely disruptive and you see all of these Me Too products come out on the market as soon as you see the success of Bluetooth headphones. But they're more expensive. They're worse. The battery doesn't last for that long. There are all these frustration points, but people put up with it

because it is completely different than Wired. That is to the innovators dilemma point and to your point about these large companies that sort of fizzle off and they end up not having a lot of leverage in some of the exits that take place.

They're at a point where they're like, well, I can't really focus on something else instead of my cash cow. I have to keep focusing on my cash cow. How could we ever invest in these things called AirPods? Because wired are just selling so well. And so then you don't really want to go for it. Large companies don't have the appetite for risk. And then you get to the point where it's all downhill and really hard to recover. And no one wants to, in the funding environment, provide you with funding. Yeah.

yeah, yeah, totally. Well, and you know, Apple is, um, one of the just greatest of all time at understanding this dynamic and, uh,

or at least old Apple was, you know, I guess the jury's a little out on new Apple, but on understanding this dynamic that like, yeah, you know, the Mac is our cash cow. And if we put OS 10 into a mobile device and sell it as a smartphone, it might cannibalize a lot of Mac sales, but you know what? It's going to be worth it to do that. And absolutely it was. Yeah. Apple's really funny because I think you got, you and Ben have talked about this a lot where,

Apple could have kept their network closed, like their dev network, so that only Apple can build Apple apps on top of their platform. But that would have been a terrible strategy because there would have been less, and not to use the cliche word innovation, but less products created from scratch. There probably wouldn't be an Instagram because they wouldn't have any need to create anything better than the photo app.

photo sharing would be Instagram. But, and this is another, just a great example of adaptability and how important that is. It's like, that wasn't the strategy at the beginning. Jobs didn't want third-party developers to use the iPhone and to access the iPhone. You know, it was a year or two after the iPhone launched when there

There was so much demand for it. And it was clear that the potential was so big for this as a platform that then, you know, he and Apple changed their minds and released the SDK and created the App Store. But that was not the original plan. That's sort of what I was saying in the beginning about like, you know, sort of platform strategy. It's like platforms tend to be much...

I think a much better strategy is an emergent strategy versus a top-down, like, we are going to architect this platform and drop it onto the world. You got to pay attention to what's going on and adapt. Yeah, so here's a question is, do you think companies can actually build

A platform with like, maybe reframe it. Do you think companies fully? Yeah. Like, do you set out? So you're an early stage company and you're like, we are going to be a platform. I actually, I would argue, and I'm interested to hear what you think. I'd argue that you can't.

The reason you can't is back to the original point you made right at the beginning, which is you can't predict events. So two years ago when Levels was starting, it would be really hard to predict. You could have a vision, but it'd be hard to predict that there'd be this thing called the wearable challenge built on top of our platform, which is what's happening right now. It's a small team. Aaron Hansen based out of Austin leads it, but it's this challenge where people can pay money and,

to enter in a 30-day weight loss challenge. And every day that they hit their target, like their glucose target, they get paid back $25, the money that they put in to participate in this thing. So there's like all these incentives and I mean, much deeper conversation. But the point is, this is independent of levels.

Somebody said, not only can we do something interesting from an intrinsic perspective in helping people, but there is an economic incentive to be able to do this. There's an economic reason for wanting to do this. And if you can scale it, so be it. And so that is like.

A small, small example, well in beta, where somebody has independently started building on top. We couldn't have done that because we don't have the time or the capacity as our team. Now, assume that we did. This is where things are from a platform perspective. Are you guys embracing that and supporting them and encouraging more of this? 100%. Yeah. So we're on...

wearable, might be wearable 11 by now. So I mean, pretty cool to watch all the cohorts go through it and the community engage with each other. But assume our team had bandwidth for this. Where, and this is back to the Apple idea of

opening up the entire ecosystem. You can't imagine what you can't imagine. Like it's a little bit Walt Disney, Bob Iger, but you have to have this creative lens of, well, what does it look like when other people start to imagine these really long tail things? That's how true ecosystems unfold is when all of these people come together and they start to say, well, what if it was this on top of that? And you're like,

Would have never thought of that. Yep. You know, so you're to like ask the question again after that long rant, do you think you can actually go out and say, Hey, we're building a platform or is it sort of a by-product of once you get traction? You know, it's funny. I was, I was,

Thinking about this as well from the beginning of this conversation, but as you're talking, asking the question there, I actually I would have said no. And I think I said no in the beginning of the conversation. But I actually think there is at least one area, maybe more where you can do this and where it actually makes sense to have goals to be a platform from the beginning. And that is developer tools like Stripe or like in protocols in the crypto world, like

Ethereum or Solana. In those cases, I think it makes sense. Like the whole point, let's take Solana, right? Like the whole point of Solana is for, as a protocol to have people, developers build various applications on them, you know? Yeah. The whole point of Stripe is for, you know, internet-based applications to accept payments on it. So yes, in that case,

Yes. But in sort of consumer, consumery stuff that ends up becoming platforms, I still think it's a lot harder. I think it's much better to have it be an emergent thing based on a product. Let's go into 23andMe again, because that's something that after we had that conversation in, call it January or February of 21, we're at.

September 14th, 21 right now. So that was eight or nine months ago. I started thinking more about how could 23andMe still, or how could they have become deeper in their network effects? And there are all these ways that they actually could have done it around connecting people. Assume like data is anonymized, but there's still ways that you can create network effects. That's an example of a consumer company where

Maybe they had the opportunity to become a platform and they didn't. And now they're in this single threaded product stream where I don't know how, like, I just don't have the answer for how they ever get past this.

And again, not that valuation is everything, but if we look at things through a capitalistic lens, because they've got the responsibility by putting up their hand and saying, hey, we're taking venture money, we're taking venture money, we have to provide returns to our shareholders. Like, that's just the reality of the game they decided to play. And that's great. But I don't know how they get past this situation.

this point of being, gosh, I want to say they're at like 4 billion in valuation. So even if they're doing amazing things for the world, it will be a lot harder for them to get exponential growth past this point as a single threaded company. Well, and I think, let's see, I just looked at it because they went public via SPAC earlier this year, which is also why I was thinking of them. $3.3 billion market cap right now. They

I don't know how well it's gone, but I think they would say that

their platform that they wanted to build. They would say they did want to do this and maybe they are doing this, but around drug researchers and drug discovery, not consumers. And that the consumer test that they sell is really just the, that's the data collection mechanism for them. But what they really are is a genomics data platform for drug discovery researchers to use.

I don't think that's gone super incredibly well. But yeah, I'm not sure exactly why. I don't know if it's execution or if it's just these things are so separate from one another. You know, like the nice thing about like, let's take the App Store and iOS and the iPhone.

It's so tied together, you know, who the various players are in that platform ecosystem. Like you've got the consumers that buy the phones and use the consumers that buy the phones and want to use apps. You've got developers that make apps.

experiences for the consumers. Well, the consumers use them directly. Like, that's awesome. You know, whereas with 23andMe, it's like, oh, great. Like, I'm interested and I want to learn more about my genetics. I take this test and then I get a flat set of results and I'm like, okay, cool. And then the drug developers get to use my data, but there's not like a one-to-one connection there. Like, maybe someday, 10, 15 years in the future, some drug might be developed using 23andMe.com

data that that drug then becomes relevant to my life. But like that feedback loop is really weak and long. Yeah. Maybe what it comes down to is they're divergent paths. So if you decide that you're building a consumer company, it's inherent that you're going to focus on brand. Like I can't think of an example where there's a consumer company that doesn't focus on brand.

TSMC is a great example where it's like, there is zero brand. No, that's my point. Like there's, they're just like, we don't, I mean, they, they could do everything they want to create a brand and it wouldn't make a difference at all.

If you are, so assume 23andMe goes down this drug discovery path, like went down, not where they are today, because they only ever launched as a consumer brand. If they went down that path, they might have like a TSMC brand where it's, hey, we don't really like, what's the point? Who cares? We're not trying to put out

content and create market awareness. We're just going down this drug discovery path, trying to do what is best for research of progressing health in the world. And so because they didn't launch that way, this is sort of into like the innovators dilemma on execution. It's like, if we choose to do that, we're going to spend less time building our brand. If we don't build our brand and

then no one's going to know us and we're a consumer brand. Use the kids. Yeah, exactly. So they're serving these two masters at the same time, which is like, oh, we're trying to create this great product for consumers and this brand that people want to use. But if they really like,

If the mission was like accelerate drug discovery, you would architect a very different type of company, right? If the mission was like create this, you know, genetic consumer product for consumers, you would, you know, that's different. Like, but trying to do both because they really are very unrelated to one another. Very much so. Very much so. I mean, I'd be hard pressed to find anyone even like within like our friend group that

that could name one of the top drug discovery companies.

like non-pharma, like a startup. It's just, we wouldn't, right? You wouldn't have a clue. Not until Moderna, right? Yes. Yes. But it's just not something that comes up. That's the example that proves the rule or the exception that proves the rule. Exactly. Exactly. But you would, you just wouldn't know on average that this exists. And so by being a consumer brand, you make these, you have these trade-offs in choice. So you

As soon as you go down that path, you have to stay down that path. And then everything that you do becomes a touch point. It's down to user experience. It's down to all these things. Like if you're that deep in drug discovery, you actually don't even care what your logo looks like for the most part because you just slap it on top of everything.

like an investor update it's just there's no real smc logo yeah it's it's amazing hilarious it's amazing it's like encyclopedia britannica clip art from 97 it's just awesome it's so great it's people people often ask us hey are you going enterprise and

That comes with a trade-off in itself because not just because sales cycles are longer, there's a lot of value capture because you can start to go, you could pick a vertical within enterprise. Let's say you picked professional sports or corporate wellness or like name a vertical. There are so many avenues that you can take, but that approach becomes

a trade-off as far as like opportunity cost of time you're just spending less time on the consumer aspect now you're building a professional services organization to go you know sign up procter and gamble or a bunch of large companies to get their employees to use your level right like that's that's not exactly exactly it's i mean look at

competitors to Apple. So when Apple rewind a bunch of years, so Apple went through this phase where it was like consumer B2B, John Foley's in a CEO, then jobs comes back and it's consumer again.

That was like a very, there were very, very different companies when Jobs left, went to go build Next and did everything else that Jobs did. But the idea that Homebrew Computer Club started as this like underground consumer movement, it was like built around community. And then... I remember Scully. Scully was the CEO of a place. I was like, John Foley, John Foley. Oh, John Foley. John Foley. I didn't even... Now, that would be interesting if he were CEO of Apple. Yeah.

That's hilarious. That's a good catch. Because in my head, I was picturing John Scully's face and I said, John Foley. That's hilarious. So great. But yeah, so then they go to, Apple went to this B2B route. They're trying to sell into education. And that's when PCs were the predominant computer from a consumer standpoint. You try to play different games and you're going to get different outcomes. Like there is a world, I'm glad it doesn't exist, but there's a world where Apple actually was

the B2B player and Dell was the consumer facing, like the predominant consumer facing hardware or Lenovo, right? Late, it came a lot later on, but those are realistic outcomes. And so that's where it becomes, you have to be really careful about which path you're going to take and what your intent is, as far as how you want to build a company and what kind of impact you want to have.

Peloton is an interesting case too. Do you guys look at them or think about them? I've been thinking about them a lot more lately. There are a couple of companies that really tie into this ecosystem thought process. So Peloton is one, but I'm trying to decipher in my head, like they're all different aspects of what companies are doing. So let's dissect these four examples for a sec.

When you start to think about these companies that are getting deep, one of them just came up actually from Ferris, an episode that Ferris did the other day where he was talking to James Dyson. Very interesting company, which you guys got to do an episode on. Peloton builds hardware, creates content. They've got a community. Apple, hardware, software, not really community. It's still a cult brand, but it's not this...

It's not like community is this core part. No, Apple does not have a community. No, I mean, maybe you could call it like some underground dev community, but we'll just... Yeah, maybe. I mean, at some point, maybe the developer community, but like... Not... Now with how they're behaving in the Epic trial, no, they do not have a community. No, exactly, exactly. But their hardware, software, and they actually...

manufacture things at the base level now, right? So it's not just like Peloton does assembly manufacturing. Apple does invention manufacturing, very different with some of the parts and processes. So that's interesting. Then you look at Tesla. Well, Tesla's core competency is

Yeah.

The TSMC episode, as a side, is actually what got me thinking a lot more about this, where I think Ben had said TSMC is the alchemist, where they are designing the machines that design machines.

the semiconductors. Like we're talking about things that are just so deep down the chain. Of course, it becomes hard to disrupt them. Well, they do that in partnership with ASML as the company that makes the Dutch company that makes the machines that are hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah. Very, very deep partnership. Like we were talking about the episode. It's not like you can just go, hey, you can't buy a machine from ASML because TSMC and Samsung are buying them all. But even if you could, you

And you could get one delivered to your house. It's not like you could use it. There's so much complexity involved in operating this that it's only within a TSMC or a Samsung fab could you drop one of these things in and have it work. Well, exactly. And so you look at companies that are getting to that level. Apple, we talked Tesla. The last was Dyson. So Dyson...

And I didn't even realize, but there's like the James Dyson Institute of Engineering. It's called something like that. And it's the whole point is that people can go and they can become many different types of engineers, whether it's mechanical, software, civil, like name some practice of engineering, which is very cool. But they're designing products. So they're designing products. They're inventing parts, like inventing new processes. And then they're selling this commoditized good at retail.

in a highly competitive environment, selling at high price, still trying to maintain high volume. Like it's a very interesting business model. So these are all interesting companies, but back to your original question of Peloton, do we think about them?

Yes, in some senses, because they've created this movement or this really cool community around what they're doing. But if you think about what they're doing from a hardware perspective, they're actually just assembling off-the-shelf parts with industrial design. Like they're not really inventing anything. Their core competency is content creation, right?

Yep. And community engagement. And that's what's giving them network effects. And so they're probably like, let's assume they didn't have hardware for a sec. They're an analog almost to like a Netflix where it's like Netflix is in the business of creating content. That's what they do. And they're sticking with it. But like, that's Peloton. You know, Peloton is...

Peloton's not a hardware company. Like they just sell this thing to try to create enough lock in that the community never wants to leave. It's a hard game to play. Now, it'll be interesting to see how they evolve, though, because they have announced they are they are building their

their own from the ground up manufacturing in ohio that it'll be interesting to see what they do with that is that like is that just to get better economics on producing essentially the same thing or is there going to be like true r&d involved in that that like they're going to start really innovating on their own hardware tbd the jury is out but but thus far totally agree yeah they're using off the shelf stuff you know the bike as far as i know

I assume like the bikes run Android and like, you know, it's, you know, they're not their bike. They're, they're really nice, but like their bikes, I actually like, I love Peloton. I've only recently gotten turned onto it, but I just have a cheap bike on Amazon and I use the digital, uh, you know, subscription, which is way cheaper and it's just as good. Like,

Yeah. And it's when they start to think about how they're going to evolve their company. I mean, they've never had to think about it until they went public, right? Because you can get away with things. Now they're like, oh, we have to grow every year and it gets harder and harder. There's only so much of the market that you can capture where you hit part of the maturity curve and then there is a slow evolution of getting there.

growth and market share. So you have to open up new revenue streams. So is going deep. Assume you're John Scully. We'll call John Foley John Scully now. Assume you're John Foley and the leadership team and you're making a decision right now. So you can go deep into manufacturing and create these products. Maybe you get economies of scale. You get better margins. You're further down the value chain. Cool. One avenue. Another avenue is

We're going head to head with SoulCycle. So everything that we've preached for the past like 10 plus years, I guess we'll call it 10 years, is at home studio convenience. You don't need to go brick and mortar. We realize that like we pay attention to the community and you've told us that you want studios and what you actually want is multi-use studio. So you want to be able to run and do yoga and do like go biking on a Peloton. So you do that. Like that's one different route you take.

Or you go, and this is to the innovator's dilemma, you're like, we have to figure out something so different than we're already doing. Where do we even start? We can't just go farming tomatoes. That's really far outside of our core competency. But we kind of need diversification that is similar. I don't know. It's such a good brand. They probably could sell Peloton tomatoes. Right. But that's where it's like getting into diversification. It's

okay, you're going to have to do something really different if you're going deep into manufacturing when you make commoditized hardware like that. Unless they're able to invent something that us being outsiders, we can't think of like what the next thing is. Maybe it's like at home football studios and people are able to like pass with Tom Brady or something like that. There's a, you know, I'm just like making it up, but

Well, that's, you know, the theme of this whole platform discussion. I mean, A, I think two things. One, you don't have to be a platform. Dyson. Dyson. Right there. Yeah, Dyson or like Netflix, like you said. Like, it's probably a stretch to call Netflix a platform. Still a great company and still very valuable. You can still address huge markets without being a platform. So it's not a...

It's not necessary. And I don't think it's necessary that Peloton has to go become a platform. But it'd be interesting if they do. What would that look like? Ben and I have been contemplating doing a Peloton episode. So they're also on my mind for that. And I was just thinking, oh man, how cool would it be

We did a Peloton episode. Dan Primack at Axios did, I think still does every year, Axios Peloton rides together with his readers for charity around Thanksgiving. And like, super cool. We could do that. But like, that would just be like all of us taking a class together. And that would be cool. But like...

What if we were leading the class? Like it was an acquired episode, like on a biker's like, I don't know, that sounds crazy, but like that would be a platform, right? Like if they have Peloton opened it up and they're like, anybody can use the network. That would be like, that would be pretty cool. Now there are probably a million reasons why they wouldn't want to do that, but that would be moving in a platform direction. What's funny is, so let's look at Dyson for a sec. So Dyson last reported, I think it was 2019. It was like 7.3%.

So $7.3 billion in revenue, annual revenue, privately held, not a platform, commoditized product. That's just wild to think about. You think of other companies, Netflix was referenced, where it's like, okay, let's say Netflix is not a platform. It's just a great company. Large market cap. What are they at now? Five, maybe? What do you think they're at? Oh, Netflix? I guess they're probably $100 or $200 billion market cap. Let's see.

To 55.44 B. So not a platform company, significant valuation. Like there's a point where when you are, the difference is when you are a platform company, let's say Shopify. I think Shopify is at like 260 something right now. But there is a world where Shopify hits a trillion. That's not out of question. It's going to take some time, but it's not out of question. I think it would be very hard for companies

a non-platform company to ever get to that Amazon or like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, any of these companies that are trading at trillion plus market cap, then again, now like, let's just say who else is at the trillion mark TSMC, right? Like making semiconductors also used in like everything in the world, but

it's just it's really funny tsmc is totally a platform it's just i guess a platform yeah true like i mean anybody can design anybody can become a you know a customer of tsmc and design whatever chips they want and use the yeah it's it's i mean i don't know i think there's i think you're right like if becoming a especially in a in technology like platforms can get

Very, very, very large. And many of the best businesses tend to...

become them. But, you know, they're also... This is kind of what I was saying about Netflix. You don't have to be... It's just a question of how big of a market opportunity are you addressing and how good is your product? How much of that market will you capture? Look at the oil companies, right? They used to be the biggest companies in the world. They're not platform companies. They're just producing oil. No. Commoditized product. Yeah. Totally. And Netflix is...

So again, I don't know, maybe people would argue with us here and say they are a platform in some sense. I think that's a stretch. But, you know, they're making video content. Well, the market for the global market for watching video is very large, you know, very large. You know, YouTube is a platform, right? And it's addressing it.

oh well Netflix you know by our definition here is not but it's just like it's just so big like there are a lot of billions of people that watch a lot of trillions of hours of video every year so I don't think they have to become a platform and can probably

Well, I don't know. I don't have a view on Netflix of whether they can get larger or not. I don't know how much of the world they address right now. I mean, I think the reason that they've become so valuable relative to some other video rather than film or movie or TV companies, studios is the globalization. Like they really early on in streaming, like made a big push to like, no, we're going to be, we're going to enter lots of countries. And that's, that's been like a huge story for them.

Yeah. And it's when you talk about best companies, like the best company to build, maybe best is defined by resilient, right? Like best is because best can become subjective in that sense. Like is 23andMe the best because of what they're doing from an intrinsic standpoint? It's more a matter of the best being what companies are the most resilient. When you look at Netflix and what they're doing from a global perspective, maybe there's a counterpoint to what you're saying about

The total addressable market of video. And then maybe it's not actually large. It like, we know it's large because a lot of people watch video, but maybe it's actually, maybe there's some stat on this, but maybe it's actually shrinking for the type of content that Netflix index is on, which is highly produced content. Because what we know objectively, what we know is that recently. TikTok.

surpassed YouTube in the most consumed video platform by hours of consumption in the world. Dang, I missed that. That's crazy. Not just low time length, limited time length, lowest possible production value. Let's say there are three tiers of video.

There is Netflix, highly produced. Like there's a barrier to entry to even get on the platform. YouTube, moderate production value because moderate is what's going to get you more views. If you don't have great production value, you'll probably not get as many views unless the content was like inherently interesting or different in some way. And then there's TikTok where it's just like,

production value actually makes it worse. Like you'll get lower views, the better the production is because it doesn't feel like some genuine off the cuff 15 second video. And so that is,

an example in itself where it's like back to Netflix, how do they grow? Maybe they're okay being what they are. And I full caveat, like I love what Netflix does from a long tail documentary, highly produced content perspective, but it's a lot harder to consume than it is some of these shorter videos and where Gen Z is going, especially is short, fast bites. That's it. And so like, they might have to think about how are we, uh,

What do we need to do so that we don't get fully disrupted where there might be a day that generation alpha, I think that's what our kids will be classified as or generation. I think that's what it is. Generation alpha. I think that's what it's called. Like maybe there's a world where they're just like, you guys are nerds. You used to watch two hours of video that was like, people would actually take lighting and they would go with these hundredths

like cameras that are hundreds of thousands of dollars and you would have a movie set and there'd be like 60 to a hundred people there and craft services. What world did you guys live in? You know, like it's that maybe that's actually something that could happen in the future. It's possible. So how does Netflix like index against that? Well, the great thing about YouTube and TikTok as being platforms is,

They just, you know, they let the emergent behavior on the platforms, you know, drive where they go. They don't have to... Neither of them has to say like, this is our vision of what the future of video looks like. It's like, no, we provide a platform and like creators create on it. And...

audiences tune in to what they find compelling, you know, whereas Netflix has to constantly make all these decisions about like, this is what we think is going to do well. And that's driven by data and all that. Right. But like, no matter how good you are at that, you're never going to be perfect. So Netflix, let's do the thought exercise.

Right now, it is 2000. What year did the iPhone drop? 06, was it? 07. It's 07. Your jobs, you've got this biased lens that like Apple has to control every single touch point, including which apps are released. And so you keep it closed for two years until you can actually open up the ecosystem. That was the curation lens. So thought exercise being,

What would happen in Netflix if they removed the curation lens? Like there was still an approval process to get onto Netflix, but it was as easy as getting an app into the app store. And then basically the public can decide whether or not they want the thing that you made. And it's not so highly curated that it's like Netflix original. I mean, that can still live on there because there's going to be lots of great like Apple core apps that still exist.

get a ton of use. Apple Maps, right? Like people use that. I think YouTube does this, right? Does it? YouTube produces some content itself, right? They do. But what would happen to Netflix if, see, because they're different platforms. So the talk is just always, for the most part, going to be short, crappy UGC until they change their business model. YouTube is this weird mix of crappy stuff, vlogger stuff, highly produced stuff.

But when you go to Netflix, your heuristic is, I know I'm going here for commitment. Like I'm sitting down and I'm watching something basically through. There's not a place for... Which to your point is an increasingly rare behavior, even for me. Yeah. And so there's not as much of a place on YouTube because YouTube is basically search and discovery. That's what it's good at. Netflix is...

There's, I guess, a lot more intent when you sit down with Netflix. You make a decision to watch something. It's not just random discovery rabbit hole doom scrolling. So what would happen if Netflix opened up to all the content creators that want to create highly produced content because they love it and they want to do these hour and a half docs? It doesn't really get traction on Vimeo or YouTube.

YouTube. Like would Netflix be a stronger platform? Yeah. Maybe. It might be. Yeah. That actually would be cool. Like they should do that. Maybe they'd be double, like double market cap. Like they'd get to like 500 bill because they would have so much stickiness and lock-in that people stopped uploading. And this is like such a

Like rabbit hole of a thought exercise, but people who make that type of content have never had an outlet. So they start making it more and more. That's a possibility. There are more jobs created from it. All of these things. Cool. Get brand deals from creating these docs. Cool.

Maybe these people and granted, there's probably a small portion of YouTube. They stop uploading this like longer form content to YouTube that they were trying to find an outlet for. And they're just like, oh, I'm all in on Netflix. And they become a notable creator for the Netflix platform in the way that somebody is like an IG creator.

entirely possible world. Yeah. That's back to platform, you know, platform conversation. So it's like, maybe that's this takeaway is like have an open ecosystem, have a place where people can build and you'd be surprised. It creates optionality for you. I think if you're able to do that. Yeah. It's better for the consumer. Yep. You know, better for the consumer and it's better for you. Like you don't have to be right all the time. Exactly. And reliant, like you're not, you're,

Netflix is has a huge team of people that are their day to day job is to curate content for certain categories.

As soon as you get rid of that, like that becomes a lot smaller portion of people's jobs because you're like, oh, the world's going to decide. And like to give a hat tip to Seth Godin, people like us do things like this. You don't actually know what documentaries or what nerdy videos are going to get produced because the ecosystem is wide and open. Well, sounds like the podcasting ecosystem. Very much. Which is great. Well, I think that is a good place to wrap. So where can people find you?

people can find me and my uh partner in crime with acquired hopefully not crime that would be bad part well although we tell stories we're working on uh you can find us at acquired the acquired podcast podcast player of your choice or acquired.fm is our website you can listen to episodes there but we're uh in the middle of we just recorded part one of um our

our standard oil series, which is, uh, Oh my God, it was so fun. Talk about crimes. I didn't think they were committing crimes. Other people felt differently, but we don't usually talk about crime. We are not a true crime podcast. That's where folks can find me. I'm also on Twitter at D J R O S E N T on Twitter.

Twitter or probably if you just search like David Rosenthal acquired or whatever, they'll find me there. Question though, back to you for folks listening. One more thing. One more thing. The other Benji isn't here. So, Oh yes. The other Benji. Yes.

So Ben Gilbert, this is normally where Ben G steps in and says, and if you'd like to join the Acquired LP community, you can do so at acquired.fm or join our Slack where there are 9,000 other smart people just like you to enter into the conversation about everything going on with Acquired. Oh man, I'm glad we're recording this. We can just splice you into our...

Something along those lines. That's pretty close. Yeah, you can find what is Ben's Twitter handle. I think he's at Gilbert. Yes, he is at Gilbert. I didn't get at Rosenthal. That would have been a little more. Well, I don't know. Gilbert's a pretty common name. Good for him. Strong flex there. Strong flex. Back at you, Ben.

where can people find more of these discussions for folks who are listening on the Acquired LP feed?

Yeah. So we have a podcast. We actually have three of them with levels. One of them is called... Oh, you guys have three podcasts now? That's awesome. Yeah. We've got three. We launched all three at the exact same time too. Three different ones. Metabolic Insights is aggregation of all the audio recordings of exactly the articles on our blog. So it's deep scientific education about metabolic health.

A good way of keeping up with audio on the blog. And then we've got one called Levels Live Session. So it's any book club, clubhouse, anything where there is even a conference where Casey or Josh or any of the founding team would participate in those sessions. So we put those out through different feeds. Oh, that's awesome. I didn't realize you guys recorded all those and put them out there. I love that.

Yeah, because the production's a bit different and then the nature of the content and it just made more sense. And then we've got our core podcast is called A Whole New Level. And we have conversations with...

early team members about everything around being remote and async, about how we build culture. We have on different guests like David Rosenthal, or we actually had one about culture a couple episodes ago with Mark Randolph, co-founder of Netflix. So it's a pretty interesting podcast. Slumming it with me on this episode. Not at all. It's awesome. You guys get great guests. Yeah, it's fun. It's a lot of fun. So it's

an interesting place where the idea is to not just talk about levels and metabolic health, but to have these open-ended conversations where they go where they go and they're completely unedited. So if you want to check it out, a whole new level, and you can find it on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And on Twitter, I'm at bgrenel, also in the acquired Slack. Dude, this was awesome. Thanks for suggesting it. And it's a blast to get it. ♪

This is like actually funny because this is all the BTS stuff that is us figuring out what we're going to do with this audio. But depending on the use case, it can dictate, it'll dictate a whole bunch of things. So let me know what you were thinking first and then I'll go through a bunch of stuff.

Oh, no particular thoughts. Totally happy to throw it on the LP feed. I mean, we're not precious about production quality or anything on the LP feed. So as long as there's a final MP3, like whatever it is, then I can just add a little bumper on it in the beginning, explaining the show, what we're doing and directing folks to the whole new level podcast and just pop it in. Sweet, sweet.