Special: "Why Now" for Digital Health (with Levels founder Josh Clemente)

**Josh Clemente** (0:00)
So I would get bran flakes and eat it by not only the bowlful, but also like dumping in smoothies and stuff. And it is probably like the single most reactive substance I was putting in my body. It was always way above the diabetes threshold. It was like, it was crazy.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:29)
Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

**David Rosenthal** (0:43)
And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:48)
And we are your hosts. Today, we have a special episode that dives deep on the dynamic digital health ecosystem, especially with the lens on the complete upending of the landscape happening with companies going direct to the consumer. Today's episode primarily centers around Levels, a new company that's on a mission to make all of us aware of our metabolic health, aka track your blood glucose with a real time wearable sensor, known as a continuous glucose monitor or CGM.

**David Rosenthal** (1:18)
Wearing mine right now.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:19)
Me too. We were introduced to the company by two of our LPs and members of the Acquired community. Shout out to Michael Mizrahi and Ben Grynol. One of our favorite things about the incredible community that has developed in Slack and on our LP calls is that we get to learn about some of the most interesting companies in our ecosystem today. We are joined on this episode by the founder of Levels, Josh Clemente. Josh has a fascinating background even before starting Levels from his days as an early engineer at SpaceX, where he worked on Dragon Capsule as the lead life support systems engineer, and then afterwards at another Elon company, Hyperloop One. If you are wondering how the business models behind these new direct to consumer health care companies work, why the time is now for this revolution? Or perhaps you just want to be one step closer to being a cyborg. This episode is for you. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:19)
So Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider, specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners, and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Crusoe's cloud is purpose built for AI and run on wasted, stranded, or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:44)
Yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (2:50)
The other element that makes Crusoe special is the environmental angle. Crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. And uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:08)
Yep. obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on costs since Crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:24)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the Internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:40)
Yep. If you, your company, or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusoecloud.com/acquired, that's C-R-U-S-O-E cloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. Now on to our interview with Josh Clemente from Levels. So Josh, welcome to Acquired.

**Josh Clemente** (4:04)
Super happy to be here. This is going to be so fun.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:06)
We're excited to have you. David and I are both right around the one month mark. David, I think just finished using Levels for his first month. I'm about to cross that threshold and so many insights, so much fun to learn all this really cool company you founded.

**David Rosenthal** (4:22)
I think you guys are maybe winning in the startup category for market share of acquired community members as employees. Super fun to do this with you.

**Josh Clemente** (4:36)