Levent Bas is VP of Product at Found, a modern weight care platform. After finishing his mechanical engineering degree in Turkey, he began his career working in strategy and business operations before moving to the United States. Levent then worked at Apple, where he led product development teams and worked with vendors to ship millions of Apple products worldwide. Before his role at Found, he served as VP of Product & Strategy at Dor Technologies and as Senior Director of Product Management at Carbon Health.
In our conversation, Levent discusses Found’s focus on leveraging individual insights to create a comprehensive health profile of each member. He talks about what differentiates Found from other weight loss programs, including its step therapy approach that relies on science and building sustainable habits rather than exclusively leaning on medications. Levent also shares his experience finding product-market fit in developing affordable, accessible urgent care at Carbon Health.
At Found, we are helping people reach their optimum health. Optimum health can mean many things. Our starting point is that obesity in the United States has skyrocketed. More than 70 percent of adults and 25 percent of the pediatric population are overweight or obese. This has never happened in the history of the United States. This matters because obesity is the root cause of many diseases. Unless you address obesity and help people get to their optimum health, you are not going to get away from these other health problems.
Our personalized approach comes from the fact that we have the right providers who deliver clinical care and behavioral guidance. Roughly 1 percent of the entire US provider population is trained in obesity medicine, and our platform increases access to this small network of obesity-trained providers. The second part is that there’s a behavioral health element of changing habits and making them last. You can’t just take a few drugs — lasting results require an approach that is much more holistic than that. We have coaches and an app that creates a wrap-around experience to ensure new habits stick, including things like reminders from your care team.
This is a very data-driven and personalized journey. We collect a bunch of information from members regarding their behavior throughout the digital interactions, as well as their discussions with the coaches and providers, and that makes our product smarter. There is a feedback loop integrated, so every interaction you have at Found gets gradually smarter and more personalized throughout the journey.
For anyone who may have gone through a weight loss journey in the past, it’s clear that there is no single path. Even if you do the same things over and over, your day-to-day weight can change based on how much water you drink. It is a long-term game even though many members start seeing some results in just a few weeks. Persistence and sticking through it over a long period is what matters, and a focus on short-term quick wins doesn’t stack up to the science.
If you’re following the weight loss industry these days, there’s this popular drug class called GLP-1s. Ozempic or Wegovy are the two popular brand names. These are specifically made for diabetes patients but have more recently been approved for weight loss in some cases. Some people took this narrative as a magic drug that you take and lose weight regardless of what you eat.
One of the worst outcomes of this narrative is that because these medications were made for a specific condition, the manufacturers were not prepared for this high demand. When there’s this shortage, the FDA allows compounded medications in the market — meaning you can change the dilution and the composition of the medication to create your own. Compounded GLP-1s are not the GLP-1s anymore, as the manufacturers of the active ingredient, semaglutide, have not approved compounding. This is a big risk because as a patient, I’m going to go with the least expensive, easiest-to-get medication without understanding the consequences.
Found is keeping a high ground on clinical principles and only prescribes non-compounded medications given the current context. If we think a patient needs a GLP-1, we take the step therapy approach to help them get there.
The most important thing that helps people stay on the program is the health outcome. The members who want to lose weight coming into the program want to see weight loss. We are seeing really encouraging results — that’s a big part of why people stay on the platform.
One of the biggest challenges is that people may come in with false expectations. They’ll say, “I heard about a GLP-1 that my friend is taking, it only cost them $200 and I want that medication.” They realize in their first week that we’re not that type of company. That’s one of the churn factors that we see.
Another churn reason is side effects. There’s a spectrum of different medications that Found providers can prescribe, and each medication may have different side effects to any individual. The biology really matters, and we are trying to do more to understand that. We have protocols in place to help members navigate side effects, but some members get turned off from having those initial side effects, while others stick through it until they start seeing benefits.
Cost is another factor for churn too. If you get to a baseline of losing 10–15 percent of your body weight and you think you can maintain the rest on your own using what you learned from our program, you’d likely leave. We are helping people understand that obesity is a chronic condition that necessitates long-term, personalized care.
There are compounded medications that are posing as magic drugs, which I think is an irresponsible narrative. If you look at society, more than 140 million Americans are suffering from a BMI over 27, so of course there’s demand for these compounded medications that are not clinically validated. What we’ve been seeing lately is people asking the opinions of medical professionals first. People are seeking a trusted doctor before they turn to getting themselves these medications from a less trustworthy source. That’s where we come in.
We are able to work in partnership with primary care providers to offer specialized obesity care. Other weight loss companies exclusively offer a cash-only, direct-to-consumer subscription model where you pay a $150 fee every month and you are part of the program until you cancel.
Because we are taking a more healthcare-driven approach, we work with insurers and commercial payers because we believe that’s one way to increase access to quality care. That approach also implies that we’re keeping ourselves accountable for the health outcome of the patient. We’re not just trying to take your money — we want to improve health outcomes for people living with a complex disease, so it makes sense for these partners to work with us.
At Found, when you join the program on our insurance-covered path, you pay a copay and the rest comes from your insurance. There aren’t many players in the market who make weight loss as accessible as Found. When you look at the healthcare companies, the product paradigm starts with optimizing for the administrative burden of the providers and how to satisfy payers first. At Found, we are much more member-centric. We start with how to create the right member experience and then we go backwards to optimize for the workflows and reimbursement paths.
We care about pediatric obesity, and we’re starting with adults and parents. If adults see the results, they’ll refer a loved one after that. It’s very natural. A key insight from our members is that when you are able to make a lasting behavioral change for an individual, it positively affects the entire household. There are these healthy recipes, meals, and grocery planning that one of the parents starts on, and then the other parent gets inspired and changes the entire life cycle of the household.
Found has an app that is available for members with smartphones, and every smartphone either has Apple Health, Samsung Health, or Android Health integrated with all these wearable devices. We collect this passive data from the members who allow us to do so.
The other part is active data, which members have to manually log. For example, they may log walking their child to school every day as a new habit. We are exploring other meaningful ways that technology can be helpful to the Found community and will have more news to share in the months to come!
The first component is to understand how a member engages with our app, how often they come back, and how long they spend on it. The second component is to understand how our members interact with Found care teams. What is really happening in these conversations? What are the members asking about? How long does a provider take to type this message or jump on a call with a member? This data helps us make better product decisions and ultimately deliver better care.
We’re also focused on segmenting our users in meaningful ways. For example, there could be some people who are pragmatists and they want a self-guided program with minimal interaction. Other people want accountability and hand-holding, almost like a white-glove approach. How are we going to identify these people so that the experience is actually created for them? We are really big on that segmentation and understanding the members at a deeper level. That comes with a lot of in-person research that our user research team conducts. A combination of quantitative and qualitative data help us inform our product decisions.
The third component that we’re lucky to have is that we have care teams who interact with the members on a day-to-day basis. Our frontline teams are the most critical piece that delivers the Found service. The partnership with these teams help us determine if something is not working for the members or if there are certain features that are going to make the members’ lives easier.
My role at Carbon Health helped me truly understand how complex and challenging healthcare problems are. For example, many healthcare companies start with, “I’m going to look at what payers need because I need the money,” instead of focusing on what the patient needs. Carbon Health’s patient-centric approach changed my understanding of that fundamentally.
In healthcare, it’s extremely difficult to access patient medical records at the time you need them the most. A patient may have gone to different hospitals in different geographies and gotten different lab services and x-rays. Bringing all of them together is a challenge. At Carbon, we cracked the code to personalizing patient experiences and we were one of the frontiers in launching a truly vertically integrated healthcare solution.
Our urgent care hit product-market fit before COVID. During COVID, we stepped up and said, “People need care. There are these zip codes in the United States that don’t even have pharmacies, and those people need COVID testing. We opened mobile pop-up clinics for testing services and, later, vaccinations. We then looked into expanding our total footprint, and that’s when we really pushed the growth button.
Our urgent care clinics replaced the need for people to go to the ER and spend thousands of dollars. We said, “Let’s match our prices to the lowest possible bound. For example, a laceration repair will cost less than $200, and if you are insured, your insurance is going to cover it. You no longer need to go to the hospital that’s going to charge you $3,000 for that service.”
People resonated with that experience, and it was so member-centric. It was easy to schedule, talk to your doctor, and get telehealth. I’m rooting for the paradigm that Carbon Health has created. It was a tremendous learning opportunity for me — to see this extraordinary growth in multiple verticals while creating these zero-to-one businesses within the same company.
Our vision is to become a healthcare service that is powered by a data laboratory. That’s the only way to make our service much more personalized and biology-focused. A year ago, we launched Found Assistant. Think of it as a coach who has access to your previous interactions, the forms you have filled out, and the lab results you have. Because Found Assistant has access to your health data and it is equipped with clinically guided care plans, the answers it gives to our users are getting more valuable over time.
The other side of the coin is that our providers, coaches, and dietitians are the ones who deliver the care. How do we make them much more productive by making their jobs even easier through the use of technology? Let’s say a coach would be responsible for a thousand members, which is a lot of work for a coach to manage. Or, say, the last time a member used the app, they connected with the support team complaining about something, but the rest of the care team members were not aware of it.
We are investing in AI tools that help the frontline teams to be more productive. We want to make sure we know exactly what is top of mind for each member every time they engage with our ecosystem, and that we create an immediate feedback loop for that engagement to drive truly meaningful experiences.
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