The World’s First Sleep Fitness Company Founders On Optimising Your Sleep - Eight Sleep
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By the way, in case you haven't heard, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity, is now out. It is available everywhere books are sold. And it's actually hit the New York Times and also the Sunday Times bestseller list. So thank you to everyone who's already got a copy of the book. If you've read the book already, I would love a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked it out, you may like to check it out. It's available in physical format and also ebook and also audiobook everywhere books are sold.

By the way, just a quick flag. We did have a hardware failure of one of our SD cards on the audio recording for this episode, unfortunately. So the audio for this episode is a little bit worse than the kind of high quality that we normally go for. I still think the episode is enormously valuable and I learned so much from the conversation. So I do hope you'll forgive the slightly choppy audio. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the episode.

What you're about to hear is an interview between me and

This is the first three-way interview we've done on the podcast, me and Matteo and Alex, who are the husband and wife co-founders of 8sleep, which is the world's first sleep fitness company. So this conversation focuses on sort of two main areas. Firstly, we talk a lot about sleep fitness. How do we optimize our sleep? How do we make sure we're getting the right amount of sleep? What is the 80-20 of what we need to know to really maximize our performance in the realm of sleep? But we also talk about how we maximize our performance in the realm of diet, like nutrition and exercise.

exercise as well.

And the other half of the conversation is around entrepreneurship, how he and Alex and the co-founders built this company to this valuation of over $500 million. What it's like building a physical product that is essentially a mattress that has sensors in it and circulates water around. Over 90% of startups and businesses fail. So the reality is there are safer routes to make money. If you want to make money, being an entrepreneur is probably not the easiest way either. The number one thing driving founders is they don't want to fail.

All right, so Alex and Mateo, thank you so much for coming on. This is very exciting because I've been...

You guys are the founders of 8sleep, which is now this $500 million company. I've been hearing about you basically every week on the Tim Ferriss Show. And I bought one of the products a couple weeks ago. And it arrived, I think, like last week. And my sister-in-law has been using it for the last several months and says it's completely changed her life. So really excited to be talking to you guys. And you're in the UK because you're sponsoring Mercedes' team for Formula 1. Which is just absolutely insane. I'd love to get started with...

Eight Sleep is apparently the world's first ever sleep fitness company. So I'd love to dig into what is sleep fitness and kind of the deal with that. But before we do that, you guys are co-founder of the company. You guys are married. How did you guys meet? What was the origin story? You want to tell it? Yeah. We met in Miami, actually. At the time, I was still living in Italy, but I was starting a business in the US, in New York. So

So I was in New York, I flew to Miami for a couple of days of vacation. It was Halloween night and we met actually in a club, which is not really us. I'm not a big clubbing guy and she's not a clubbing person. But that night, because it was Halloween, we both went to this club.

Our friends, they met and then we were like one next to each other and we sat there and kept doing it. No, no way. It was almost 12 years ago, so it's been a little bit. Oh, 12 years ago. Okay, that was a while ago.

Oh, yeah. The following night, I invited her out for dinner because then I was flying back to Italy. So it was bad for nothing. And she agreed to have dinner together. And then we stayed in touch. I came back to the U.S. and then that's when we started dating. Oh, wow. Okay. So you're originally from Italy. What about you? I'm from Mexico, actually. So I was in Miami just for school.

Oh, so you guys were both kind of in America, just visiting broadly. So then were you like long distancing? We did. Yeah. So I'm from Mexico. I grew up in Tijuana at the border. I was born in California. So I did a year of school in Miami. And so we sort of have this like weird, you know, background mix. And we were in Miami. Then eventually I went back to Mexico to finish school. We went back to Italy. Then we moved to the U.S. and I graduated. It's just been like a bit moving all around. Yeah.

But the bottom line is it was one year apart and then I moved to New York to start my previous business. Alex graduated and she came to New York with me. And that is how everything started. Oh, excellent. So I understand that you've got a background as like a pro athlete or something. What was happening there? Was that in Italy? Was that in the US? That was in Italy, mainly in Italy. And

And yeah, I was a tennis player when I was a teenager. I did a bunch of sports, but tennis was the number one. Then I also raced with cars. I did some ski races. But yeah, 90% of my focus when I was a teenager was being a tennis player.

And that is how I got into recovery, performance, all that kind of thing. Then I studied law. So I became a boring business lawyer. I worked for two of the largest law firms, actually British law firms, Allen, Overy, and Freshfields, Brookhouse, Denninger. And then I started my first company in Italy. Then I sold that, started another one in the U.S.,

And then I started it. What was the first company? They were both in solar energy, so clean tech and renewable energy. There was a big booming of clean tech energy, particularly solar in Italy. Probably the only big moment in the past 50 years to start a company from scratch in Italy. Right. And that is how I was able to shift and switch from being a lawyer to...

become an entrepreneur without funding. Okay, so pro athlete when you were young, then boring lawyer, and then entrepreneur in Italy, and then you moved to New York. Yeah, so I sold the Italian company, I moved to the US, I replicated the same business model in the US, we raised some money, and then our pipeline of products got acquired by a company owned by Panasonic.

And then I started the Instagram. Oh, wow. Okay. So by the time you would exit the second company, presumably you're super rich and don't need to worry about money at this point. I'm just kind of guessing. Yeah. I think we're good. You never know. Well,

What we are doing now is, I think, outside money. It's more just, I think, to help people live a healthier and longer life. If I look back at the career, one thing I'm really proud of is the first two companies were in cleantech, right? So to help the world to be a better place. And now something in health. And so we are helping human beings to live a longer and healthier life. One of the things I really like about speaking to founders is that

And I was reading this in one of these like CEO coaching books where it's like, usually the first company people start is because they want to get rich. And then once they've gotten rich, then they're like, cool, I want to get rich and have fun. And then once they've gotten rich and had their fun at that point, the rest of their life is about actually being service driven and impact driven. And I feel like that was very much the case for me where I started off doing like the first business at university, helping people get into med school,

Because I enjoy teaching, but really I want to make money. Because it's like, you know, I've got student loans. I don't want to be broke. Let's try and make some money. And now sort of seven years down that this YouTube channel is doing well, I feel like my own internal focus is shifting from how do I actually try and help people? And that seems to be the arc that a lot of people go down. Like genuinely being impact driven. Yeah. I think probably most of that comes to like depending on your background. I think most, in both of our cases, come from families that...

the pre-normal and sort of, you know, the middle class and they have jobs, but like, you don't live in wealth. And so a lot of your first jobs are like, yeah, you need to pay back your student loans. You have to make money. You need an income.

an income, maybe you want to buy a house. And so like, it's, it's sort of that path. And then eventually you realize maybe you have more stability than your parents ever had. And you're like, okay, now I can, you know, the pyramid of Maslow and you're like, okay, now the self-actualization actually kicks in. Um, and I think it's pretty common for entrepreneurs that are sort of coming from those, those types of backgrounds to just eventually get rid of that guilt and be like, okay, now I can focus on something else. Yeah. So this is something I wanted to ask you guys about. So, you know, Simon Sinek talks about start with why and all that stuff. And,

I've spoken to a lot of young people who want to start businesses, but they all want to like, you know, go and go into a particular career, but they're often, they often feel like,

I don't really know why I'm doing this. I don't know what the core purpose is behind this other than to make money. And I always thought that, hey, you know, to make money is a reasonable first goal. And then once you get past that point, then you can worry about the self-actualization. Is that how you guys think about it as well? Or do you think it is important to have that kind of impact-driven focus from day one when you're starting businesses? I think it can come over time. And I think it's really nice. We were actually talking about that last night while we were having dinner about this concept of legacy. Right?

So if you can reach a point where you really want to build a brand that is here to stay and is a global brand and you have this legacy where you're helping millions of people to live a better life, that is really fulfilling. Because I think you will never go through the pain of entrepreneurship just because of money. I think money is just probably an evidence of the size of the result you deliver. But

After a couple of months, it's not about that. Actually, there is Paul Graham who talks about that and says that the number one thing driving founders is they don't want to fail.

because of, you know, how would you explain to your mom, to your friends and everyone else? And so avoiding failure is the number one driver of most founders. Yeah. Actually, at White Combinator, we went through a Combinator program, which is pretty well known around the world now, a few years ago. And they talked about the fact that there's easier and better ways to make money, more money than being an entrepreneur. It's true because...

probably over 90% of startups and businesses fail. So the reality is there are safer routes to make money. And if you want to make money, being an entrepreneur is probably not the easiest way either. You know, it's very time consuming. So it definitely starts for some other reason, even though there is that big lofty dream of like, you could become wealthy if you actually struggled.

Okay, so at this point, you moved to New York to start company number two in solar energy. What were you doing at the time? Yeah, so when I moved to New York, I had just graduated. So I actually started communications in school, which is why now I focus on marketing and the brand for 8sleep. And then I was just having normal jobs. I graduated from school. I'm like, who's going to give me a job in New York? Move me there. Get me started. So at the time, before starting 8sleep, I was working at a financial technology company in New York.

And so you guys at this point, what year are we in when you, when you both moved to New York? That was 2011. Yeah. 2011. And then you started eight sleep in 2014.

So for those three years you were working on solar energy and you've done normal jobs. And then, so where did the idea for 8sleep come from? Yeah. Well, I would say in those three years we were also always like packing things. That's how we started like working together. We would have like ideas. We would like do things over the weekend. So during the, yeah, during the weekend we were doing our own hackathons between the two of us. So we were building stuff together. What kind of stuff did you build?

We were trying different kinds of business models, but it was just for fun. Then we started involving Max, who is our third co-founder and our CTO. And he was not the one with the strongest technical skills. And we started playing on a couple of different projects with him. And then at a certain point, we came up with the idea of 8Sleep.

I pitched it to Max, Max built the prototype and then we organized a pyjama party where we invited friends and Alexandra, she designed the whole presentation and we put together a quick logo. And that is how everything started because after the pyjama party, one of our friends came to me and he gave me a 25K check.

And so there was no company, there was no name, there was nothing. And so at that point we said, okay, so maybe now we should incorporate and cash the check. And from there we decided to start the crowdfunding campaign. What were the dots that connected to lead you to the idea of, I guess, cooling mattresses?

A couple of different things. The most obvious one is I started wondering a couple of years before I sleep why Elon Musk is taking me to Mars, but I still spend a third of my life on a piece of dumb foam, right? There is technology in everything we do. And then for eight hours a day, you go on this piece of dumb foam and you pretend to wake up fully refreshed. And that was making no sense to me as an athlete, as an entrepreneur working really long hours.

And so I pitched this idea to Max and we started brainstorming about all the different types of technologies that we could bring to your bed. And then Max built the prototype.

What else was around at the time? Was there any other, I guess, smart bed stuff? There were not smart beds. But I think one of the interesting things, when I remember Matteo kind of having this insight and starting to go through the process of understanding sleep and the landscape, there were, Jawbone was a company that was around doing wearables. There was Fitbit. And both of those companies were starting to track sleep through wearables.

you know, at the beginning they were just on fitness and steps and they were going into sleep and you were using both. And you were sort of trying to figure out, well, what, what can I discover with my own sleep in this, in this, with this technology, there were apps, you could put your phone on the bed and it would like track your movement. It was like very early on back in 2014. Um,

And you started meeting with some of your friends who were, like, you would have calls with friends who were athletes back in Italy. There was that friend who, like, sailed around the world alone. And I remember that friend connected you with a doctor who would help these sailors train for sleeping in intervals of, like, 15 minutes because they're alone on the boat. And so you started discovering, like, the science of it. You're like, oh, wait, like, sleep is actually, like, pretty complex. And, like, there's all these...

things that have been learned around sleep. And so like, that is how the radical really started to understand that technology could influence some important factors of sleep.

And the foundation of it, and it's really still what we do today, is saying, well, the first thing is we believe at 8Sleep, and now as we did back then, that data is very important. You can't improve what you don't measure. So what is the most seamless way in which we can measure? And that was sort of seeing, well, wearables, we're not really cutting it for us, and the phones, we're not really accurate, and that's where Max, our co-founder at CTO, said, well, we can put sensors in the bed. But then from there, all of those conversations with the scientists that knew more than us

and guided us to say, well, with that data, there's a lot of personalization you can do with the environment and that's how you unlock the optimization of sleep. Nice. Okay, so a couple of questions before we dive into the technology. Firstly, to high performers, athletes and stuff, how obsessed are they with tracking things and what...

What is that world like, you know, recovery and performance and stuff? Yeah, there is almost a gap because they are obsessed with sleep and performance, but at the end of the day, they don't track much. And they don't even know much about what you can do to actually improve your sleep, like thermal regulation. So one of the most surprising things for me, now that we work with some of the best athletes in the world, is really this gap where thermal regulation is the big elephant in the room if you want to improve your sleep.

Maybe what they know is just, "Oh, I should sleep at 78 degrees. My bedroom should be at 78 degrees," which is not even right because the temperature should change during the night, right? So 78 degrees could be right for one hour, two hours of the whole night, but the rest of the time you need a different temperature.

And sometimes they don't track themselves, right? Even on a daily basis with an Apple Watch, maybe they just track themselves while they're exercising. But other than that, they don't track themselves too much.

Actually, a big surprise, I would say, when we go to dinner with athletes is food. Yeah, because I'm a kind of bio-acarish, meaning I like to play with all that stuff. Usually I have a CGM, I track everything, right? And so I'm on a keto diet, I fast, I do all these kind of things to optimize my performance. And most of these times, I remember we went to visit a really famous swimmer.

And we were asking him, "Okay, what do you eat now?" The night before the Olympics, things like that. And we were surprised by the fact that he was joking about eating a pizza the night before just because that's what he likes and he was going for that. And this is a multi-medalist, you know? You're like, "Okay, well..." That's it. You're really talented because if you could win without paying attention to nutrition, it means that, yeah.

Just a quick message from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode. And this episode is very kindly brought to you by Heitz. Heitz is a brain care smart supplement. It is two capsules that you take every day. I've been taking it for the last 12 months and it contains over 20 evidence-based micronutrients that you need to keep your brain and body healthy.

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gains do you get in terms of, I guess a lot of people listening to this might be thinking, you know, I sleep well enough. I eat well enough. I'm not overweight. Like beyond the basics, how needle moving is it to start optimizing things and like, you know, doing the continuous glucose monitoring and the ice bath and like all the sleep stuff. Like,

Are we talking kind of final percentage point optimizations or is it actually surprisingly bigger than that? No, it could be pretty big. Maybe I'll just give a bit of a background. People say, we hear very often, it's like, oh, I sleep well, right? And what you realize and the stats show you is really at least a third of the world is probably sleep deprived. And you often hear people say, well, I sleep six hours or some people say I sleep four hours. But it becomes a normal. People think that the way they feel is normal because you're sort of like used to it. My body is amazing. It has this capacity to adapt.

But Matteo always talks about the fact that if you just try for a week sleeping one hour longer, especially if you are sleep-deprived, you'll see how much better you can feel and all your potential will be unlocked. That's my test to people. And sometimes even when people say I need a vacation, I just say, no, you just need to sleep one hour longer every single day. Because if you think over a week is seven hours of sleep, you're getting one night of sleep.

And so just try that. If you need a vacation but you cannot go on vacation, sleep one hour longer every day for seven days, then come back to me and I'll give you a hundred bucks if you don't feel better. All right? Okay, that's a good test. But going back to your question, I think it depends, meaning sleep. Sleeping the right amount of hours in the proper way is going to be...

disruptive in a positive sense for how you feel. Then the second biggest one is definitely fitness, right? Working out is going to make a massive impact

difference in how you feel and also in how you eat, right? Because if you train in the morning, it's unlikely that you will create junk food, you know? It's almost like a sequence and you will start taking care of yourself more and more. And then I would say in terms of nutrition, there are a couple of things that are the 80-20, right? Okay, avoid this or just

I don't know, try to skip one of the meals and just eat within an eight hours window. And then you can take it to the next level where you are on a keto, you just eat once per day. But that I think is the last word, 2%. Okay, great. So when it comes to sleep, let's say for normal people,

What is the 80-20 of what we can do to improve our sleep? Consistency. So go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, sleep seven to nine hours, take care of your temperature. So thermal regulation. With these three things, you're 80%, probably 90%. I've read Why We Sleep and I've read some rebuttal online about why we sleep is bullshit because of all these things. And there seems to be a lot of like,

Controversy in the literature around like seven hours eight hours nine hours six hours like what what's the kind of normal person take away from it from this? So the interesting thing and that is also part of the reason why we are called a sleep is I don't believe you need eight hours of sleep and This is how everything started. So before I sleep I started looking into okay, can I sleep less? So I'm a people work holiday sometimes and so I wanted to work more and work out more and

And I discovered that there is no reason why we say that it should be eight hours. It is just an average. And so everyone is different. The bottom line is you need a certain amount of deep sleep and a certain amount of REM. And at eight sleep, we believe we will compress your sleep. So in the future, you will be able to sleep only six hours and get more rest than when you were sleeping eight hours. Then going back to your question is in general, an approximation is that you need between seven and nine hours to get that amount of deep and REM.

Everyone is different. In our case, we tend to sleep at least eight hours and a half every single night. At the end of the day, you need to do what makes you feel good. But the important thing is that you don't oversleep, for example, during the weekends. A lot of people say, okay, during the week, I go to sleep at 10, I wake up at 6, but then during the weekend, I try to recover and I sleep until 10 again. That's wrong because, substantially, you're jet lagging yourself.

Because it's not that your body knows that it's the weekend. It says, why now you're waking up three hours later? Maybe you are in a different time zone. And instead, that consistency will train your body to wake up naturally at that time, and you will feel more refreshed when you wake up. Why is that?

You have a biological clock and you have your own circadian cycle and that is how your body operates, right? So this internal clock is setting all your physiological needs including sleep. And so you just want to be as consistent as possible so your body goes into a sort of autopilot and knows that I need to feel asleep at this time and I need to wake up naturally at this time.

So what time do you guys sleep and wake up? What's that? Yeah, we go to bed around 10, 10.30 and we wake up anywhere between 6, 6.30, 7 at the latest. Okay. So one of the issues that I have, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners will be feeling the same, is that, you know, I always have an intention. I'd love to go to bed by 10.30. But, you know, I might be watching something or I might be on my phone or I might have some friends over or dinner might be going on late.

And I'm always thinking, huh, how important is it really that I sleep at 10 30 today? Uh,

How do you guys do that consistently with a busy and social lifestyle and how much leeway do you give yourselves to not do that? Yeah, so we are pretty regimented on that I would say. So first of all, I think we are like in the US you can have dinner, social dinners quite early. So you can have dinner at 6, 6.30 in Italy, we've never had that. In Pakistan it's like 11pm is dinner. Yeah.

So we go for, if we have a social dinner, we try to set it early, let's say at 6, 6.30, and then we can be home by 8.30 and start decompressing. But it's really important because if you care about your performance the following day, it's really important that we wake up at 6.30, 7, 6, whatever, that we feel energized so that we can work out and then kick off the day in the proper way. So almost you should think of sleep like the most...

the strongest enhancement drug on earth, if you will, right? And I think there is Matthew Walker in the book that you were mentioning that talks about that, right? If you knew there is one thing that you can do every single day and will enhance your body performance, it's natural, and it will help you live longer and a healthier life, what is that? That is sleep. And so if you want to raise your own performance bar, the number one thing on earth you can do is sleep.

Sick. And it's free. Yeah. Yeah. That's so good. Everything is consequential. Meaning if you want to work out, right? So first of all, I don't know if you know it, but you will sleep, you will die sooner from sleep deprivation than from, uh, from food. Right. Okay. Hopefully none of them is going to happen. But the other important thing is there are three pillars in health, right? One is sleep. One is a fitness and the other is nutrition.

But the foundational piece is sleep. If you don't sleep, you're not going to work out today. You feel too tired. You are unable to perform. You will start craving junk food and probably you will start eating carbs and everything else, right? So the foundational part is sleep. Sleep well, 79 hours. You wake up feeling great and refreshed. That will drive you to work out and eat properly. Should you... So if you know you've got your sleep... Okay, now I'll rephrase that.

Some days I wake up feeling refreshed and I'm like, yeah. And a lot of other days I'm like, if you have the sleep thing dialed in, do you always wake up feeling like, yeah, is that, is that like the aim or is it, is it normal to feel tired when you, when you wake up? I don't think it's always the same, but,

the part that Mattel was mentioning before, it really is true. When you become very consistent, that's why consistency is such an important factor. Like that's where you can start with improving your sleep. You will wake up more naturally. And just the fact that your body wakes up on its own, and that's because of that circadian clock, you will feel better. The probabilities that you will feel, maybe not ultra energized every morning, but just wake up on your own are much higher when you stay consistent. And that already makes a difference in the perception you have of how you feel when you wake up. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I've definitely found like anytime I read a sleep book or have a conversation with someone who's into sleep, then I'm like super consistent for the next five days or whatever. And I'm currently on a consistent thing where every morning I wake up at half seven. But last night I had a slightly later night and I said the alarm for half past eight. But I just woke up at half of seven anyway. I was like, oh, I actually feel awake. Cool. Let's just get out of bed. And it's almost been nice these last several days, like turning off my alarm when it's like iPhone's like, oh, it looks like you're awake. Do you want to turn it off? I guess I'm awake. Yeah.

And there is another trick. I was recently interviewed by Fortune and I spoke about that. That is the napuccino. Do you know the napuccino? No, what's a napuccino? So the napuccino is this. Let's say you wake up, you don't feel great. You can try to take a nap during the day. But the best thing you should do is you should drink a coffee before the nap. The reason is the coffee will kick in 30 minutes later. The nap should be no longer than 30 minutes. Usually they recommend that.

amount of time is 20. And so you have an espresso, you try to take the nap. By the time you wake up from the nap, the coffee will kick in and you will feel like a super, super. Did you guys take naps? Yes. When we can. Yes. I mean, I think it's what you were mentioning with like, you know, your social life and work, it happens. So like you can't maybe be taking naps every day, especially if you're going into an office physically. Um,

But examples were like we're in London. We don't live here when you're deadlocked, right? Like what is the right way to do it? Well, you want to stay consistent when you wake up wake up early in the morning Don't try to oversleep but then maybe you'll need a nap later in the day We take that up and then do the nap Chino thing you wake up and then you keep going but a lot of athletes are NBA athletes but a lot of athletes that play at the night they try to take nap and afternoon to

recover because it's a matter of adenosine right so the the nap will help you to reduce the amount of adenosine in your brain and you will feel more energized and refreshed and like okay so this is a very specific question on this but anytime i've tried to take a nap i'm always like all right cool 20 minutes 30 minutes and then it takes me like 15 minutes to even fall asleep and then i'm like was that even worth it like do you guys fall asleep immediately when you're

No, because your mind is probably racing like mine, so I struggle with that. So first you start learning, yeah, probably it's going to take me 15 minutes to fall asleep. But the key thing is usually you don't need to and actually you don't want to fall into deep sleep or REM. So you want a very light sleep that is just going to relax your brain and reduce the amount of adenosine. And so sometimes, yeah, you feel bad like, oh, I didn't really fall asleep, but that is already helpful for you.

brain yeah there's a type of sort of like this sleep dr andrew he even talks a lot about like the non-sleep deep rest and so you can enter that sort of like this like kind of meditative state and where like your brain is resting and maybe you didn't fall fully asleep like it's still valuable for your brain to just really try to try to fall asleep and give it that moment of rest yeah if anything it's just a relaxation thing even if you don't fall asleep

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Okay, so we've talked about seven to nine hours, we've talked about consistency. Can you talk to me more about thermal regulation? What do we mean by that? Yeah, so the other big elephant in the room to really improve your sleep unless you have disorders is temperature.

And so your body temperature changes during the night and as soon as you fall asleep your body temperature drops and then a couple of hours before the time you want to wake up your body temperature will rise. Which if you think it does the same thing of the sun, right? So at night it gets colder and colder and then a couple of hours before the sunrise it starts warming up and the sun comes out and it's warmer. Right? So your body does the same exact thing.

So what we do at A-Sleep is we didn't reinvent the wheel, we just help your body to actually do in the proper way what it's supposed to do.

And so your bed will have a certain temperature by the time you go to bed. It could be hot or cold anywhere between 55 and 110 degrees. Each side of the bed can have a different temperature. Sorry, what is that in Celsius? Do you know? Forgot. It's something like ranges between 10 and 35-ish. Something like that. So really cold to really warm. It's unlikely you go to this extremity.

But the bottom line is you get in bed, it's a certain temperature that you like. As soon as you fall asleep, the temperature will drop because what you want in the first part of the night is a colder temperature because in the first part of the night you tend to get more deep sleep.

In the second part of the night, when instead you tend to get more REM, you want a warmer temperature, it's called almost thermal neutrality. And the reason is when you are in REM, your brain deactivates a lot of controls. In REM is when you're dreaming, right? And so in REM you're not moving at all. Because the body wants to protect itself because you're dreaming, right? And one of the things that deactivates is temperature control.

And so you want to be in this neutral, thermal neutral environment so your body doesn't think that you could die during that. Okay, because if the temperature changes a lot, it's going to be like, oh, what's going on? But the bottom line is, based on the different sleep stages, you need different temperatures, and that is what we provide. The results are that you get up to 34% more deep sleep, you

You get up to 32% more sleep quality and you get up to 19% better recovery. So pretty meaningful numbers. That's pretty sick. Okay, so is there like an optimum temperature for people that don't have an eight sleep? Like...

The reality is no, there is an approximation which is what usually you hear saying, "Oh, you should sleep at 68, 70 degrees," which is what? 18, 19-ish. Yeah. But the reality is that's wrong because again, your body temperature changes, your sleep cycle is changing, and so temperature should adjust accordingly. Okay. So we talked about sleep.

What's the 80/20 of exercise and nutrition as well? Yeah, for exercise is heat, so high intensity interval training and strength training. So with heat what you want to do is you want to spike your heart rate and you want to let it drop. You want to do this three to five times a week at least 20 minutes each time. This is what it would be up to.

The other big thing is strength training, right? And so you should do that a couple of times a week as well, from deadlift to chest training that will help hormones like testosterone and other things. And both of them, they will help you. There is plenty of medical studies that they will help you live a longer and healthier life.

Because you are taking care of your cardiovascular system and you're also making sure that all your muscles are strong. Okay. Working out in the morning versus the evening versus the afternoon. Any consensus on that? So on that, you can be flexible, whatever works best for you. My recommendation is don't work out three hours before going to bed. Otherwise, you will accelerate your heart rate and it will be harder to pulse it. Okay.

Okay. So do you guys do workouts in the morning? Yeah, morning usually is the best. Yeah. But I think one of the interesting things that Matona and I talk a lot about because he experiments a lot with all these things and then he ends up dragging me into it is that the difference is just biologically amongst, you know, like even male, female bodies and like our hormones. And so even the example of working out a lot of the things now that people talk about in the health space is that personalization for women throughout the month.

Because as we go through different hormone levels throughout our monthly cycles, there is different recommended ways to work out for your body because your body may need to utilize the energy for different things throughout the month, especially while you have your actual menstruation during the month. It's really fascinating that it's becoming more and more towards personalization, which is the same thing we folks today sleep with sleep. Personalization is really key. Everyone needs a different temperature. Everyone has different needs throughout every day and every day of their life.

That's the same for working out. And nutrition is another big, big one. When we've used continuous glucose monitors and we've tested it, it's just so incredible that we have such different response to foods. But at the end of the day, when you're cooking in a household, you're cooking the same meal for both people, right? And so how do you start understanding that actually diets are not like a blanket fits all, but people actually have very different needs and hormones play a big role into that. And in the case of women, hormones actually change on a daily basis. Yeah.

So it sounds like a lot of the, a lot of the sort of approximations, like the whole 90 degree sleep, the whole, you know, the way we exercise, the way we eat, a lot of it is just sort of broad brushstroke things that people can decide. I suppose it depends.

You know, some exercise is better than no exercise, but if you're going to optimize a bit more than, okay, let's not do it three hours before bed. And there's always more levels you could go down if you really wanted to. It's like, you know, with skincare as well, there's like three main things and everything else is sort of last five, five, 10%. Yeah. So, okay. So we've talked about exercise. Um, finally nutrition. What's 80, 20 before we dive into the sleep tech stuff. So the 20 is about sugar. Hmm.

Right? You don't want sugar, it will create a group of spikes. The sugar can be, you know, the regular sugar that we all know, but it also comes through carbs.

So that is the number one thing that you should try to avoid. Then if you want to take it to the next level, there is what is called fasting, right? And you can do what is called the 16/8, so try not to eat for 16 hours, or you could even avoid eating the whole day. You just have one meal a day. But that to me is the extreme. I do that, but I don't think it's really needed. The best thing is if you could just have a 16 hours window without eating. The reason is digestion is very consuming in terms of energy for your body.

then you want to leave your body alone for 16 hours so it can be focused on repairing cells instead of the digestion and that should in theory help you to avoid cancer over time.

Mediterranean diet is the other big thing that is recommended. The other thing you need to pay attention is alcohol. There is plenty of medical evidence that alcohol will have a very negative impact on your sleep quality. So you could have a drop of even 20% in terms of HIV and deep sleep.

quality if you have alcohol at night. And so usually you should stop drinking three to five hours before going to bed or at least you should limit the amount of alcohol that you drink. Nice. Okay. Yeah, I started doing 16:8 like last week-ish. So yeah, doing a feeding window is like 12 to 8.

Yeah, I think your tip about just the social dinners at 6pm is just such a game changer because in my mind, dinner equals 8pm. There's just completely no reason for that because then by the time you order it's 9pm and then it's like obviously you're going to hang out there until 11pm and you're like, ah. You go to sleep at me 9 by then.

Probably had some alcohol and so you just had a drink and then you go to bed and then you wake up and you're really happy. Yeah. So do you guys train when fasted as well in the morning? Yes. Okay. So any pre-workouts, caffeine, pre-dine, any of that? The caffeine, yes.

There are some debates about that. I think Picaratea and also Tim Ferriss, they talk about that. Some people like to eat something, particular proteins before training. Some people do it immediately after, which should still be fine for your muscles. In my case, because I fast all day, I never eat. But actually, I think it would be better if you, if I remember correctly from Picaratea, that you intake some proteins within a couple of hours after training.

Okay, nice. So we've talked about the age 20 stuff that most people can do. The actionable thing that I will take away from this is the social events at 6 p.m. That is the same one. This completely changes the game. Okay, so I would say eat at 6 p.m. and 6.30 if you can. Sleep seven to nine hours. Train two, three times a week. Just be active, right? And try to go for a Mediterranean diet.

This is the simplest way that is now 200%. Amazing. Okay. So what is sleep fitness? So the backstory in sleep fitness is that when we started working on Eight Slave now, you know, seven, eight years ago, we found that the way that just in general, the media and people were talking about sleep was mostly in the context of illness. So you would hear a lot about sleep deprivation and insomnia and sleep apnea and like all the bad things. But there was no way to describe what it meant to be healthy in your sleep.

And what we realized is like, if you don't have the language to say I'm healthy in my sleep, then what are people sparring to? How are they measuring it? Right. How are we talking about it? And that's how the concept of sleep fitness came about. Why sleep fitness? Because we believe that sleep is just like fitness.

It is not just an end. You're constantly working on it. It's okay if you don't sleep well tonight, but you're just going back to sleep and you go back to working on it, go back to the gym. It's something you need to be optimizing. You need to be actually prioritizing in your life. You can be measuring. And so it follows a very similar pattern to your physical fitness.

So we came up with this word and it was a concept that we thought describes it really well. And we made it a key part of our business and our brand and ultimately describes that state of being healthy in your sleep and the energy that you get from it. It's the same mindset of going to the gym, right? You need to put the effort. You need to put the effort to go to sleep at 10, 1030, even if there are other things that you might want to do because it will make you feel great. Yeah.

It's like going to the gym. Yeah. And if you have like one or two nights where it's like you're traveling or whatever, then it's like... It's fine, right? It's like not going to the gym for X days because you didn't have the time. But you want that mindset where this thing matters to me. It matters for my health. It matters for my performance. So I'm going to go to bed now because tomorrow I need to be at my peak performance. Okay. So...

Where 2014, you guys have come up with the idea of connecting these dots of like, "Okay, why are we sleeping on a random dumb piece of foam?" And your friend Max realizes we can put sensors in the bed. What are the sensors doing? Yeah. So, essentially, the device is becoming a clinical-grade device, right? We just reached 99% accuracy at tracking your heart rate compared to a medical-grade device, an EKG, right? Which if you think is pretty...

from the fact that I'm one of the founders, but it's pretty shocking, right? So you're bad. Without you wearing anything, charging anything, you go to bed and this bed now is able to track your heart rate. It's the same degree and level of accuracy of a medical grade device. Yeah. Right? So if you just think from a technological standpoint, it's pretty, I mean,

So how does that compare to Apple Watch or Oura Ring or these other wearability type things that allegedly claim to do the same? Yeah. So there are almost all these devices reaching almost the same level of accuracy. The key difference with our devices, you don't need to wear anything. You don't need to charge anything. You don't need to change your habits, right? It's annoying. I'm wearing a watch. Just

when you charge it go to bed as you did for the rest of your life and when you wake up if you want it you can see all the stats about your cardiovascular health right and this is just the beginning the next algo that we're going to release will be about respiration and our respiratory rate has 99 accuracy as well which means we'll be able to see things like snoring and sleep apnea without you wearing anything again you just go to bed the

The other key difference between eight sleep and most of the wearables is that the data for us is not the end point, it's just the beginning. Based on the data, then we take action for you. So based on your sleep stages, we change the temperature of the bed. In the future, we'll take certain actions if you're snoring or if you have sleep apnea to reduce the snoring and the sleep apnea. And so we really use data as the step zero to then do the work for you while you are unconscious and improve your sleep performance.

Why should we care about what is our heart rate during sleep? What's going on there? Yeah. So first, the most basic thing is a couple of days before you get sick, you have fever, your heart rate at rest will change and will go up.

And so nowadays I'm able to predict when I will be sick. My team knew that I was getting COVID before I had COVID because my biometrics started changing. Respiration, heart rate. The other important thing is cardiovascular health. So heart rate and heart rate variability are a proxy for how rested you are and how stressed you are. Right? And so, for example, if you stop training or going to the gym for a couple of months, your heart rate and rest will probably go up. Right?

right, because you are not training your heart. On the other side there is this method called heart rate variability, I don't know if you have ever heard of that, but it's substantially a metric that tracks the space in between the heartbeats.

and you want this pace to change all the times because it means that your heart rate is more reactive. Things like a boxer, right? When the boxer is really fresh, the boxer is moving and adjusting to every little tiny detail. As the boxer gets higher, it starts becoming at a lower pace, more constant. So this proxy is very indicative of how rested you are. So to give you an idea, let's say you have a certain number as baseline, call it 60.

If tomorrow you go and you run a marathon, the following day, this number will go down because your heart rate is higher. Right. Well, instead, if you rest for a couple of days, this number will go up.

Oh, okay. Can you look at heart rate variability on like a watch and stuff? Yeah. Yeah. It has become a really popular metric because it is a proxy for recovery. And so athletes have used it for a long time. Now all of these consumer devices use it as well. And what we do is obviously you don't have to wear anything. It's tracking it for you as well. Now, the reason why all of these things exist is first, because if you go to a sleep clinic, uh,

Um, you would be using these same metrics to do that reported sleep clinic. So we sort of like took the sleep clinic and just like brought it home. And the only thing we're missing is those brainwaves. Right. But like, we are taking the same metrics and saying, well, the same things you would discover at a clinic that you probably, you know, at least in the United States, you have to pay a lot of money for and have to find insurance to pay for. You do it at home. You do it every night.

And then on top of that, as I was describing, you also get this benefit that not only do you get all of the sleep staging classification and sleep quality, but you are getting that same metric that you would get in a wearable without the wearable heart rate, breast, respiratory rate, heart variability, which like you mentioned, there's the disease sort of like the intervention of like one man getting sick and like getting stressed. We also see, you know, women during pregnancy, like their heart rates change, carrying like two heartbeats in your body, your body is more, is sort of doing extra work, but

But you can also see the trends over time. Like we have a lot of our members who they tend to reach out to Matteo personally through DM him on Twitter and say, hey, I either like was getting sick and was able to notice it on my AIDS sleep pod because I've been sleeping for so long. So you have trended data that maybe before the wearable era, before the AIDS sleep product type era, you would only get it when you were going to the doctor, right? You go to the doctor, they take all your biometrics. Now you have them at home. A few weeks ago, we saved the first life. Oh.

So a customer reached out to me and he said, look, I was not feeling great. I checked my data on eight sleep. I saw that the biometrics were all over the place compared to my usual baseline. I went straight to ER and they found an issue. I had a surgery and it saved my life.

life. A cardiac surgery. So that is an example. And then other people wrote me because we help them with COVID both by measuring their biometrics and through temperature. We see people with cancers using our product both because of temperature, because they have hot flashes, and also because we measure their biometrics, women in menopause. At the end of the day, what you will see happening in the next

Three to five years is medical devices and consumer devices are merging, right? Apple Watch is not competing with Rolex. This is not really a watch. Yeah, of course, not the time, but at the end of the day, it's a medical device to continuously track your health. Our device does the same, but the advantage is you use it every single day because you go to bed every single day, right? And what you will be able to build is you are building a database of your health.

that you will be able to share with your doctor so the doctor will have a snapshot immediately of anything that is happening in your body knowing what the baseline is and you will also know how you're aging because your heart rate today is different from your heart rate in three years from now and ten years from now and we'll be able to let you know how you're doing compared to other peers and then machine learning and AI will be able to predict the likelihood you develop a certain type of disease

All this is coming. The step zero is always to collect the data in an accurate way, which is happening across the board. And then is when technology will really deliver the next value. Think of computers in the 70s when they were not connected to the internet. People would say, why do I need this? How can this be helpful?

But then once everyone in the world started having a computer and then there was the internet and then the mobile innovation, and now everyone has a phone in their hands, which is a computer. That's right. Yeah. So even when I was working as a doctor, there was a lot of talk around personalized pharmacology, personalized medication, because it's just a bit weird that we take the same dose occasionally for a drug that's like, if you are between 30 kg and 150 kg, take this dose.

That's such a huge range. And people are like, yeah, at some point we're going to be able to have more personalized therapies. And I guess this is just that, except for all of your health data. Correct. It would be like getting a physical exam every single night. You know, in the past, to our clients, they used to say, oh, you should go to the doctor once a year to do the basic exams. This thing is going to happen every single night.

And the data can be compared across millions of people at the same time. So medicine will just move faster, right? We have an advisory board with some of the best sleep professors in the world, people from Harvard, Stanford, Japan, Columbia. And the reason why they joined the board is in one night, we collect more data than what they have seen in their whole career. Yeah. A friend of mine at university who's also a doctor was having some issues with sleeping. I was like, oh.

have to sleep like 11 hours a night doesn't work and so she did this kind of sleep clinic study thing at like one of the local hospitals and it was such a huge like song and dance she had to take like three days off it was like a whole thing they could only do like two patients at a time ridiculously expensive obviously the nhs paid for it so she didn't have to pay and then she had to like she was ill one of the days so she had to cancel the appointment and we were just thinking my god like how much did it cost the

to cancel that appointment. And all they were doing was cameras and heart rate and put a thing on a head and like... That will be replaced by devices like us. But let me tell you also this. There is, you know what is sleep apnea, right? So it's this difficulty to breathe during...

during the night and this is going to impact your sleep quality and can also have a negative impact on your brain. And definitely it will make sure that you don't feel good when you wake up because you didn't have proper sleep. So there are a billion people in the world with sleep apnea.

Do you want to know how many? A billion. Yeah. Do you want to know how many don't know they have sleep apnea? 90% of them. And the reason is simple. A lot of people, they guess they have it because usually it's the partner noticing it, but they don't want to go through the same experience of your friend. They don't want to go to the doctor, get the recommendation, the prescription for a sleep study, go in a hospital, sleep there, covered with sensors. No one wants to do that.

And so they say, you know what? Yeah, maybe I have sleep apnea, maybe not, but who cares? Let's move on. And 90% of people with sleep apnea gain a billion people. Darn it. Why is sleep apnea bad? Sleep apnea is bad because substantially oxygen is not properly circulating in your body. It doesn't get to your brain. Usually, you know, when you have sleep apnea, you tend to do the...

Right. Right. It's like snoring. Yeah. It's like snoring 2.0. Yeah. But to a point where oxygen doesn't get to the brain and this is going to impact all of your, your whole sleep staging. And so you're not going to get the proper amount of deep sleep and you're not going to get the proper amount of rest. Even if you sleep 11 hours, you have the sleep quality of someone who slept a couple of hours. Yeah.

And it's, it degenerates, right? So it is a disease and a condition that like, we'll just get worse over time. We'll get worse with aging. It is highly correlated with being overweight or obese, but it's just not because of that. Right. So like, there are also people who may be like good with their weight, but they have it. Um, and so it's really hard to catch. Like it's, it's such like, sort of like a silent killer.

One critique I've heard of this whole data-ifying, all of our health data, is similar to what some people say around blood tests. So in the US, there seems to be a culture of like, see your doctor every year and get biomarkers, et cetera, et cetera. In the UK, it's a bit more like,

Don't see your doctor unless you have a problem and then you'll do a blood test because what's the point of doing a blood test every like maybe you'll catch an incidental thing, which is like wasn't affecting your life anyway. What's the point of doing an MRI every year? Because a lot of the incidental tumors you might find will never cause a problem. And so you're wasting a lot of health care resources in doing these pointless tests and you're making people feel anxious about their health because now they have all the data all the time.

How do you guys deal with that? Well, before you go, I know you have a very strong principle, but I'd say I would pay attention to who is saying that, right? Like, obviously, depending on the health system in every country, the recommendation will be different. But like when it is the government who needs to provide all the services and that's based on your taxation and all that, well, they're going to try to keep you away from going into the system because it costs money. But the reality is you care about your body. And so who should you be listening to?

And wouldn't it be better if you knew, even if that tumor or that cyst or that muscular issue was there, would you prefer to know than not know that something is happening to you? I think the answer to me is, I don't know how many people know that, but if you have pancreatic cancer and you detect it early, you have 90% chances to live. If you detect it late, you have 90% chances to die.

And so assuming you want to keep living your life, you want to spend time with your loved ones, knowing what's happening in your body and optimizing your health, I just think is in the best interest of all of us.

This will help you not just to extend your life span, but to extend your health span. My grandma, I think she dies in the 90s. I mean, when she was nine years old in 1995, but she spent the last 20 years of her life really sitting on a chair. She had a nictus. It was one night that this happened, right? So she had an arterial problem. And since then, she couldn't move no part of her body.

that could have been avoided and she could have lived 20 years of her life being dynamic and spending that time with her children. Yeah, a few years ago I discovered just the world of anti-aging and longevity and stuff and before then I just hadn't considered it. I always just thought, you know, I guess we die, whatever.

And then I started reading the stuff. I was like, oh my God, of course we want to live longer and healthier. Like, why wouldn't you? Because sometimes people tell me, oh, I don't want to live longer. Fine. But do you want to enjoy your life after the last day? Right.

Right. I don't think you want to sit on a chair in front of the TV for 20 years of your life. Right. From 65 or 70 to 90. Right. So this is why this matters. Then you don't have to look at the metrics every single day. Some people, even some customers, few of them, but say, oh, I feel anxious with the data.

And that is an advantage of our product because you don't see it, you don't wear it. Right? And so the data is there. Whenever that is needed, share it with your doctor and the doctor will be able to take better actions. Even if you go for the more UK approach that you were describing where, oh, look, I don't want to know anything until when I need to know. Until I have a problem, yeah. That day, having the baseline of your data from the past 20 years will become relevant. Yeah.

And so let these devices do their job in the background, even if you don't open the app. But that day when something happened, because it will happen, then your doctor, you will be able to provide your doctor more information to help you live longer and healthier life. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing just how often we used to have this issue with patients. They would come in, have some like chest pain or something, and you do an ECG or EKG. And you would see something weird, like, oh, there's a bit of STI there. Like, I'm not really sure. And you're like, okay, what's their baseline? Yeah.

No one knows. It's like, have they ever had an ECG before? Maybe, but like, maybe it was a different hospital. Systems don't talk to each other. They probably never had one before. I'm like, oh shit. Okay. Well, how bad is this thing? Okay. We should probably just keep them in overnight for the next five days. Anyway, put them on cardiac monitoring just in case. And then there's a cost to that, right? So like it's still going to cost something to the system. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm massively bullish on knowing the health data for myself because like, yes, if I was trying to run a government funded healthcare system, I wouldn't want to do it for all 70 million people in the UK because that's a lot of money and maybe the ROI of that's not great. But as an individual, I'm sure I'm going to do whatever I can to kind of maximize this. Okay. So heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate,

Presumably the sensors in the mattress are looking at those things and figuring out what stage of sleep you're in. Is that fair to say? Yeah, together with movement and temperature.

Movement temperature. Okay. So for someone who doesn't know much about space like what are the different stages of sleep? And what are like how how do you know that we are in set stages of sleep? Yeah, so I always say there is a medical explanation where I could be more technical And probably not the most helpful but the bottom line is you have what is called light sleep This is the pitch of give to my drama. Okay, so you have the light sleep and then you have deep and then you have right

Okay. Right. What you really care about is the amount of deep and the amount of REM. Okay. Both in terms of time, like an hour plus, whatever, depends on how long you sleep. And then it's also percentage, right? So for me, if I, for example, specifically anything below 18% deep sleep, assuming I sleep eight hours, I will wake up feeling terrible. Between 18 and 21, I feel pretty good. And above 21, I'm a superhero.

And you figure that out for yourself by looking at your stats and being like, "Why do I feel so good today?" And it's like, "Oh, sure, I have 20, 25 cents." Exactly. Usually the range recommended is anywhere between 15 and 25. And then it can be... Deep sleep. So what percentage of your sleep time you are in deep sleep mode?

Okay. Recommended is anywhere between 15 and 25. Okay. And then the REM is very similar in terms of ranges, usually slightly higher, so more in the 20 to 25, but it could go as low as 15. Then things change because, for example, if you're sleep deprived, let's say that tonight you don't sleep for whatever reason because you're in the hospital, you can't sleep, and tomorrow you finally sleep.

The first thing that your body will prioritize is deep sleep. Okay. And so tomorrow night you will get way more deep sleep than last night. Okay. Deep sleep is usually the physical recovery for your body.

Well, instead, the REM is the mental recovery. REM is when you're dreaming. REM is when your brain is reassessing all the information that collected during the day and it's putting the information in the library. So you're developing memory and all that kind of thing. But the number one thing that your body will always give priority to is deep sleep because it's the physical performance that your body physically needs to recover first and then your brain will

Right. So is light sleep important at all or is that just a gateway to deep and REM? In reality, it's not that important. It's just that your body is inefficient and you end up with 50% of the time asleep being light sleep or awake. And that is why we have this hypothesis where we can compress your sleep because we believe we can make you more efficient by helping you to fall asleep faster, get more deep sleep faster, and we can compress the amount of light sleep you need.

Love it. And so, okay, so deep sleep and REM sleep, what is, and I guess light sleep, in these three stages, what is happening to the stats that help you figure out what stage we're in? So REM is the easiest to detect because you're not moving, but your heart rate is accelerated because you're probably dreaming or anyway, you're in a certain physical... Yeah, and that's where if people wake up, they have sleep paralysis because they're like, oh shit, I can't move and...

What's going on? Exactly. Because your brain deactivates the movement of the body because you are dreaming. Otherwise, you could start walking or you could start moving your arms. Are you like dead still? Yeah. So on the sensors, there's like no movement? Yeah. But the heart is accelerated. Okay. Right. Because something is happening in your brain, right? So that is the easiest way.

Then you have deep sleep, well instead usually is when your heart rate goes to the lowest point and so certain type of biometrics like respiration is really slow and heart rate is really slow and usually if you're not moving you're not

completely still, but obviously the amount of movement of your body, you're not tossing and turning. Instead of light sleep, your heart rate and respiration have a different behavior and pattern. Then the best way to track your sleep would be also to combine these biometrics with brainwaves.

which is not they tell you about your electrical activity in your brain. But customers don't want to wear a band, right? So there were a couple of startups that tried to develop these bands to try to be more accurate at detection, but the reality is they failed because customers don't want to wear this device every night.

Yeah. Okay. So gold standard would be with the brainwave monitor, which is what they do in sleep studies. But realistically, no one can be asked. But the reality is all devices like us will be medical grade at heart rate and cardiovascular diseases, right? So heart rate and HRV will be medical grade at respiration, which means snoring, sleep apnea. Yeah.

can be medical grade at temperature, and that is valuable because you can see pregnancy, obviously if you have fever, hot flashes, things like that. Sleep, even if you go in a sleep clinic, usually the average accuracy is around 80%. So medical grade accuracy is 80%. And that can be achieved by devices like us by combining all these different metrics, even if you don't have brainwaves.

Nice. Bit of a random question. Let's say someone's listening to this. They can't afford the eight sleep mattress, but they're a bit of a, you know, I like computers, like stuff. How hard is it to build a smart mattress in your bedroom? Like what do you need? How did Max do it? Yeah. Eight years ago.

Max would probably talk more about that, but the hardware is probably not the hardest part, like putting together some sensors. And we slept on the very first prototypes when we started the company. We moved to San Francisco for the first year. We used to have all the first prototypes. Our office was an apartment, so in the bedroom where we slept, it was all the first prototypes. And so if someone could put it together, it's the algorithms.

We've spent now so many years of the company collecting that information, training these algorithms, working in partnerships with universities or with companies that do medical grade devices to actually feed that sort of gold standard information into the training of our algorithms. And that just takes a long time. And it's really hard to do it with this like contactless, right? Yeah. Sensors. Like that's not easy. Hmm.

We challenge anyone to do it. Yeah. The other big challenge is usually when you want to start scaling, right? If you want to build one device, you can build it probably at home. It's very hard, but you can try. The biggest challenge, the hard lesson that we have learned is once you start moving thousands of units per month, getting a level of quality that applies in an equivalent way to all the units, that is really hard. Yeah.

Yeah. So I guess the first prototype, so you're like hacking together Raspberry Pi with some random ass sensors and you're like, all right, we've got this data. What the hell does it mean? It's like, maybe you graph it like roughly, but over time it becomes a more sophisticated system. And the other challenge is like everything in life, right? Going from zero to 80,

You can do it, but the last 20% is really, really hard. So in terms of accuracy, getting maybe to 70-80%, you can get there, but getting to 99% is really hard and 80% accuracy is not that valuable. Yeah, fair play. Okay, so we've got the device, we've got the sensors, and we can now tell with 99% certainty, are we in light sleep? Are we in deep sleep? Are we in REM sleep? Why is that good? What action are we taking from that?

In our specific case, which is the main difference compared to wearables, is we adjust temperature, right? Because each sleep stage needs a different type of temperature. As we were saying, deep should be colder, REM should be warmer, neutral. And that is how we give you up to 34% more deep sleep and up to 32% better sleep quality. So is it like...

liquid nitrogen going through the mattress, like what's going on in a prototype V1 that you could make in your backyard? You can use water. That is what we use. So you need to build the thermal engine. The thermal engine can heat and cool this water. And so the algo is detecting the different stages and based on the stage can automatically adjust the temperature and warm you up or cool you down.

Yeah. So my sister-in-law got an eight sleep mattress as a birthday present a few months ago, and it came with this little tank thing. And she just swears by it now. And she's like, last night, my brother switched it off because I'm married. And she was just livid. She was at work in the morning. She was like, why did I sleep so badly? And he was like, oh, sorry, I switched it off. And she was like, oh my God, you switched it off. So she is now a massive supporter of eight sleep. So, okay. So you figure out what stage of sleep you're in.

and then you modulate the temperature of the bed accordingly. And I guess you can see before and after, and you can run, I suppose if you wanted to, you could randomize a group of people to not do that, like one of the nights or something, and see what difference does it make to these times. Yeah, so we had several hundreds of people where we tracked their sleep data before using the pod and after using the pod.

And what we saw was up to the 34% more deep sleep, up to 32% better sleep quality, up to 19% recovery. And there was another interesting discovery. So we are able to slow down your heart rate

by up to two heartbeats per minute. To give you an idea, that is the equivalent of three months of intense training. And we give it to you in the first week. The other thing is we are able to improve your HRV, we're talking about HRV, to an equivalent of what your HRV was 10 years earlier. So we make your HRV stats 10 years younger.

Sorry to interrupt you. Just to be clear, it's not that we reinvented the wheel. There is plenty of medical evidence that proves that thermoregulation improves sleep. So this was already proven before I ate sleep. And sleep was just the first device to really bring this to consumer on a large scale and making sure that people like you, like us, like your sister can just get better sleep. Heart rate variability. So I was interviewing someone yesterday who's a...

neuroscientist who talks about like performance and leadership and stuff and talked a lot about heart rate variability as being like a marker of stress. What's going on there for people that might not be familiar? Like why is it a marker of stress? It's a market of physical stress, not of mental stress, right? If you're stressed or not, that is not going to be reflected. It can be directionally reflected, but the number one thing is physical stress. So the example I always make is the one of the marathon.

So if you do a marathon today, tomorrow will be reflected in your HRV and your HRV will be worse than what it usually is. But instead, if you are fully rested, your HRV will go up and up usually is a positive sign for HRV.

Okay, so you want a low heart rate, but a high heart rate variability because that shows that your heart rate is more reactive to the things that you're doing, which shows that you have just more, like your boxer analogy, being a bit more reactive. Yeah, correct. And so heart rate variability, is that a stat that changes throughout the day, the heart rate variability, or is it like...

It changes during the day and it changes during the night. So also a way to look at that is to look at the delta of what your HRV was in the first deep sleep and in the last deep sleep. And that is a proxy of recovery. But the bottom line is, yeah, it changes during the day and during the night. Okay. And so if it's high during the day, that means... In the morning. When you want to measure it is when you wake up. Okay. That is the most important. And the higher, the better. The higher, the better when you wake up.

And the 8 Sleep mattress does that because it tells you what it was just before you woke up. Yeah. Imagine that it's like a tank of energy. This is just an analogy, right? From a medical standpoint, it's not like that. But imagine that it's a tank of energy and the higher the better because it's full, the lower the worse because it's empty. If you have a marathon the previous day, it will be empty. Okay.

Now, an important thing that a lot of people that we see, especially on Twitter, where our community shares their stats is they say, well, you have a really high HRV, but my HRV is not there. It's like it varies with age, right? So there's different ranges that are considered to be healthy versus if you're like an athlete, like athletes tend to have it higher. But also it's important to build your personal baseline. It's very personal. Yeah, it's very personal. And you want to compare it to your own baseline and how it trends over time.

We cannot compare mine and yours. Well, instead for HR, for heart rate arrest, you can more or less do it. For HIV, it's completely personal. You need the baseline, and then it's above or below your baseline. Okay. Is there anything we can do during the day to affect your heart rate variability? Okay, so is heart rate variability more like a lagging indicator? Or if you were to just change it magically, would it actually make you feel better in any kind of way?

It's usually imagined that it's a proxy for how recovery is your body. So the way you can increase it is by resting today and tomorrow will very likely be higher. It's proven that through meditation you can help HIV as well. So it's really rest and recovery.

And the other thing you want to pay attention is if you're training a lot, you want to measure it because if it's too low, it's when you might risk injuries. Because the tank is low and that means you're less recovered and so you need a bit more rest. Could be overtraining. Exactly.

But there is a bit of a lag. Like if you begin doing training, especially the types of training that I was describing earlier with like high intensity interval training, like strength training, you should start seeing an improvement in your HRV over time. It's like your body really is becoming that more reactive. You're becoming more athletic physically with your body. And so there is some lag in some of these influential factors into your HRV. Nice. This is a bit of a

a bit of a long shot potentially, sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. How does that tie into this sort of stuff, if at all? They are connected and they are connected in the way you sleep, but even those are super personal and they can change over time. But they are also connected to metrics like HRV and HR.

Yeah. So this is what I was talking to about with this neuroscientist yesterday. She was saying that a lot of people who are in high stress jobs, like traders and things, will be in sort of stress mode, i.e. sympathetic activation for most of the day. And then they get home, you know, and even more stressed because they haven't spent enough time with the kids and all that kind of stuff. And you can see that reflected in a high heart rate.

and presumably a low heart rate variability because now they're in like kind of cortisol high blood pressure mode. Which is why I eat sleep healthier, right? Because we can reduce your heart rate, as I was saying, by up to two heartbeats per minute and we can increase your HRV.

making you 10 years younger. So temperature is an intervention to potentially get you from that, like, fire flight to the state where your body says, okay, now I'm in a protected space, I can rest. Yeah. Temperature can have that effect. It's sort of like when you think very basically, right, evolutionary, we used to sleep outdoors in caves and temperature was such a big indicator of our ability to, like,

is there fire? Animals are going to stay away. I'm going to be protected. What's that heat like? Right. And so it's just like so fascinating how our bodies have evolved to use temperature and light as just an indicator of like, if I'm protected, I can fall asleep. I can rest. I can go into that room where I'm not moving versus no, I'm not protected. I need to stay inside of life.

I'll give you a hack for sleep. It's really hard to be able to do it because unless probably you're in a hotel. But if you want to improve your sleep quality, another way is to do a sauna, a cold plunge, a sauna, a cold plunge, and go into bed. And so this thermal shock...

helps you relax and fall asleep faster and get better sleep. And the reason, so Peter Attia talks about that as well, and there is plenty of evidence. The reason why I'm mentioning this is thermal shock. So playing with your body temperature is proven in different degrees to have a massive impact on your systems and sleep quality.

So if you are in a hotel where they have a sauna and a cold plunge, you should try to do that and you will sleep like a baby. You can also try bath, right? You can do bath in a cold shower. So to an extent that could be helpful. Yeah. Nice. Okay. So I have been talking to a few people about, about 8sleep and they look at the website and they look at the price tag and then they think, Oh my God, like,

It's complete non-starter. But also, in fairness, people would have looked at the price tag for the Tesla Roadster and thought, what the fuck? How do you guys think about pricing? It's a very premium product that most people can't afford, and yet presumably your impact, the mission is to help more people. What's going on there? I have two answers. And I start from the consumer answer and then why we are pricing it like that. If you finance our product, I think it's around $60 a month. That is $2 per night.

It's less than a coffee. So if you care about your sleep and you assume that what we are telling you is true, that we improve your sleep, which is true, clearly, are you going to pay two bucks a night to get better sleep and improve your health and improve your daily performance? That is the question I would meet with. Then the reason why it's priced like that is because the type of technology that we use is really advanced.

And for the time being, it's still expensive. It's not that we are having any different margin from what an average company would have. So we're just running a business and we need to be able to sustain the business so we can keep evolving that. As you were saying, we always make reference to Tesla. Our largest investor was the first investor in Tesla. So this is our roadster. Price will go down over time. But at the end of the day, you're using one of the most sophisticated technologies on Earth.

and for now the only way to run a business is to run it at that price. Yeah, fair enough.

What's the what does the roadmap look like if you can share some details? There will be more than less coming and arriving going back to the Tesla analogy Over time the price will become more and more affordable, right? We want to democratize health and sleep But then there are another bunch of products that we are working on some of them still focus on thermal regulation Because there is plenty of medical evidence that it helps but the end goal is a device where

where Alexandra and I were already sleeping in, where we control light and noise. In the future, we will control oxygen, air quality, and air temperature, and we will do a full body scanning every single night. So, expect in three to five years from now to do a substantial MRI every single day and potentially detect things like cancer, kidney stones, and cysts.

Sick. How do I get on the beta tester list? Everyone wants that. It's co-founders. The only ones who are allowed for that. One of the things that I read was that you had some difficulties building the company initially and both of you being, I guess, foreigners in America. What was that experience like in the early days?

Yeah, so, I mean, first, none of us graduated from the big Ivy League universities in the US. In my case, I also had this weird background as a business lawyer, and I was coming from a different industry.

So any, I would say, credibility I had built before was not really applying to Silicon Valley because I didn't know anyone in Silicon Valley. And I think it was very similar for you. And so I think it's just part of the game, right? In Silicon Valley, a lot is about reputation and trust. People are giving you money because they believe that you're a great founder and you can make

something happened that no one else could build. And so they always try, the best investors, to find data points about you. But they do it in a positive way, right? And so usually going, I don't know, to certain universities or talking to other people that know you is really important in the valley. We didn't have that at the beginning. But then I think over time,

Hopefully, their reputation through Y Combinator, then Cosl Avengers investing with Keith Ravois and then Thunderstein. So one little step at a time. I think now we probably there is enough data points as well.

But yeah, I think it's so incredible. And we hear often, you know, Mito being from Italy, our co-founder of Maths is also from Italy and he has actually, he dropped out of school and Italy started building businesses pretty early on, which is a rarity, I think, in Europe in general for people who drop out of college and he did it. And so none of us had any of that sort of that pattern match that Mito is describing, but then it's incredible to think that

It may have taken us a little longer, but once we launched our crowdfunding campaign in 2015, who actually we, that was available internationally. So there may be some people listening to this who got our very, very first product. Once we launched that, that campaign was really successful. It quickly made over a million dollars in sales and ended up closing closer to a million in pre-orders. Then that was that pattern that people needed to see to say, well, these people were building this thing that maybe we didn't think they could deliver. Actually, our building is something people want.

And that's when things really started changing for us. And it's incredible that there's still that opportunity. And especially we see it in Silicon Valley where trust can be built through that hard work and through actually proving that you are building something people want to pay for. And you can kind of get into the network that you're looking to get into just through that form. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And we ended up then raising 160 million over time, right? From...

most of the best investors in the ballet. And so I think coming from Italy and coming from Europe, that was one of the most impressive things I have learned about the US, where if you work hard and if you prove yourself, then the opportunity will come. So yeah, maybe the first years we had some challenges, others didn't, but then at the end of the day, the opportunity was still there and we have proven it, which means that anyone else can have access to the same. Nice.

Any advice for budding entrepreneurs that love kind of the story? Yeah. It sounds sick. You take an idea, you literally invent a thing and then it's worth $500 million. Like,

Any top tips for people who want to get into the entrepreneurship thing? I mean, keep going, keep building, right? That is what I always say. Running a company is like a roller coaster. There are ups and downs. And you should then fool yourself when there are the ups, but you shouldn't be depressed when there are the downs, right? At the end of the day, you need to just find the medium and the average and stick with that. What sort of downs have you guys had?

Every down you can think of. Multiple times, not even a single time. But you go, particularly with hardware, right? There was a big hype at the beginning. Then there was a time where a lot of hardware companies failed. So it was really, really hard to raise money unless you were having incredible metrics. We were able to raise that money at the time. But again, particularly when you raise money, you should always think that you meet 100 investors, 99 will say no, and one is going to say yeah.

And so if you just think mentally, getting 99 no's is tough because you have a dream, you have a vision, you believe in that, you know how hard your team is working and how great they are. It's just being hit in the face, punched in the face with no, no, no. And at the end of the day, it sounds like,

It's not about you from the investors, but it's something like saying, look, you know, maybe this could be a good business, but maybe it's not going to be a billion dollar business. But you just need one yes. So just keep going.

What other downs have you had maybe outside the realm of fundraising? I think I would say probably that after building the first product, right? Like when you're early on, and the reason why capital is talking to a lot of our investors is so important is because we are innovating. So there's a lot of like R&D investment in building the product, but the ultimate process of successful business is whether people are buying it.

And how much are they willing to pay for it? Right? So that's where you keep a lot of your focus on the day-to-day. But in the early stage, that first year, we did a crowdfunding campaign and we put out the concept. We have to build prototypes of this product. And we had shown it to a lot of people. We put it out there. There's all these people who want to buy it. And now we're like, well, we have to build this product. And we went through Y Combinator. We had this amazing opportunity after getting rejected twice to get in. So again, the no, no, no. And then you finally get a yes.

And after we finished Y Combinator, they said, well, now you need to go and build these products. And Matteo and Max moved to China to build the team there to actually manufacture these products. And those months are really hard because even though maybe now you raise money, money is not the end goal. You need to build, start, and ship it. And we'll need to love it. And there needs to be more people buying it. And so there were a lot of challenges to figure it out there. It was a completely new space for us. None of us had built hardware products before. Then you get that product, and you need to ship it.

And then maybe you start seeing issues. Or maybe it's not the product that you ultimately want to build. Because what we discovered very early on when we built that product is that that product was tracking your data, but it didn't have the cooling functionality, which was key to do full thermal regulation. And that was the number one request that those early backers of the company that built the

but funded us with our crowdfunding campaign requested, right? They said, give us cooling, give us cooling. And so in the back of your mind as an entrepreneur, you say, well, I don't have that yet and I don't have the money to build it and I don't have the team to build it, right? And so it was sort of the thorough sorrows of what a company talks about. It's like, you're going through this period of time and it's really, really hard and you want to get to the next milestone. You want to prove that then you can raise capital to then build the product that now you know people really want is the next step. Yeah. It seems like hardware is just super tough. Yeah. And especially when you're like,

You had not moved to China? What's the story there? The story is I go to her and I say, look, things are not happening in manufacturing. I need to go to China. And so she says, oh, cool. When are you going to go? And I say, tomorrow. She says, oh, cool. And when are you back? And I say, once I fix it.

And so I came back three, four months later. So were you trying to remotely manufacture from factories in China initially? Yeah, we had another person who was there, but he needed some help there to make sure we could accelerate things. And so I just moved there. We rented an apartment in Shenzhen and we lived there.

So, actually, it was a great experience for me, right? Now I can look back and say, like, I lived for some time in China. But hardware is really hard for a couple of reasons. First, you need a lot of capital, right, both to develop it. Second, it's really slow compared to software. Software, you can't release a feature in one night. That thing, usually, if you're really fast, you can't release a new product every year. The average company needs 18 to 24 months.

to release a new algorithm. You need more departments because you need obviously people for supply chain, people for quality, people for manufacturing, all the logistics, while inside a software company doesn't have that cost. So even the fixed cost of personnel and employees is way higher. And more than anything, you need to be able to forecast demand.

Because right now the holidays are coming, how much are we going to sell? You need to build that unit. If you underbuild, then you don't sell. If you overbuild, then you have this inventory and you abolish it.

And so the complexity of the business is very different. As a CEO, it's exciting, but at the same time, it's also demanding. It's very rewarding because then people do use it at home. And that is, I think, something fascinating. We talk about this a lot, Matteo and I, because hardware is really hard. It has the word hard in it. It really is really complex.

But it's fascinating when you go to a restaurant, we were there a few months ago in San Francisco at a restaurant with part of our team. And some of us were wearing swag from the company. We had the logo and the waiter who was serving our table said, oh, I see you'll work at eight sleep. And

And he said, I have a pod and I love it. And it's just so incredible. And it happens just often. We have people on the team who are boarding a plane at an airport and be like, oh, you work at 8 sleep. And so it's just really cool to think that you go through all the hardships, which I think any kind of business goes through, even a small business, right? Even non-venture backed.

But then you're building something in our case that helps people sleep better, live healthier. It's like the physical product. They get to use it every day. And I think it's part of what keeps us here is such a unique journey.

Yeah, that's really cool. Like I, we're kind of dabbling with working with a company to try and make some hardware stuff now, like productivity accessories and like trying to manufacture our own mechanical keyboard for computers. Just something about physical product that seems really cool. Cause it's like always with you in a way that software isn't, even though software is way easier. That's pretty cool. Yeah.

So team would have grown from the three of you to now 100 plus. What were the challenges in, I guess, scaling up the team over time? Challenges is always at the end of the day, culture, meaning, you know,

When you build a company, it's like you cannot be friends with everyone, right? You have your own culture, you have your own attitude. I come from sports, so we call our culture demanding and supportive. I'm really demanding in expectations that if things don't go as planned, I will be supportive and I will have your back. But I expect you to give 100%, right?

And so you need to find people that share the same values, not because they are right or wrong, but because this is how we are as founders and as a founding team.

And so in the early days, probably we made also a bunch of mistakes in hiring. We never hired bad people, but maybe they were not the type of people that were the perfect fit. I think now we became way better at that. But in the past two years, the quality of people that we have hired is really impressive. If you guys think of like, you know, the...

Like, okay. So in, in every company, there are some people in your team that you think, if I could clone you a hundred times over, I would press that button a zillion times. What are the characteristics of those sorts of people? And I'm asking because someone listening to this, it's probably got a normal job and they probably want to be an A player in the normal job.

But they might not know, like, what does an eight player actually look like? So for you in Eight Sleep, like, what are the things that make someone just absolute rock star where you're just like, I want to clone this person a million times over? There's one indicator. We talked about this, like, last week. I told you I identified. This applies for people who start with us when they're a little bit earlier in their career. Because then executives are different and you can talk about that, which is really fascinating. But for people who are earlier in their career, what you notice in what we have seen at Eight Sleep is that

Every six to 12 months, this person is different because their rate of growth and learning is so steep and they're just changing. They're becoming better at a rate that is just outpacing anyone else. And so when we look at these people, you know, you have these sort of cohort of employees that maybe join the same year, you say, wow, this person right here is completely different. They're just mature. They've changed. This other person hasn't. They're not growing at the same rate.

That to me has become the quickest way to see how there's a real rock star versus just someone who could be really great and solid. In the 80s and 20s, usually they care, they have high intensity, they have velocity, and they grow.

But we have five elements that I measure particularly on executives. The first one is what is called clarity of thinking. So the quality of setting the priorities and the order at which you will attach them. So what to do and what to avoid. The second is what I call managerial efficiency. So the ability to do more with less.

If you think what we are doing, where we are in revenue, no more than nine digits run rate, being 100 people in AdWord is very small. We're really, really efficient. And that is reflected in our bottom line and how much we burden everything.

So managerial efficiency. The third is velocity. I'm obsessed with velocity. If you tell me that something takes you a month, I will ask you to break it down in 30 pieces. Okay, what can you do tomorrow? The last one is obsession for talent. We really believe in the quality of talent, finding the talent and developing them. And the last one is Budraiser, which is this concept of growth,

What are you doing today you were not doing last quarter? Why? How can you give me data points, measurable data points that you are better at something? And if you're an executive, I want to see the same in your team. So who is doing something they were not doing before? How did you grow them?

What are some things that you guys have learned over time as you evolved as leaders and as executives? I'm asking very selfishly because now I'm managing a team of 13 people and I'm always just like, shit, I feel like I'm bad at this. Yeah, for me it was really a journey because I mean, when we started the company I was relatively pretty young and I had never really managed people. So Mateo is a testament to, is a, is a, a,

a witness to my process there. It's a very, I would say emotional journey. And if you don't learn to sort of understand the emotions that drive you in the decisions, in your analysis of your team, in the day to day, what motivates you, what gives you energy, what doesn't, and to tame and manage your emotions, um, you can't really grow as a leader. Um,

And I think that was something, you know, Matteo is the CEO of the company. So he is my manager. I report to him that we've worked a lot on together. And so it really is an emotional journey more than you think. It's just being productive and working and working more. And then the second thing that I really learned in that journey is all about the people.

When you hire the right people, when you're able to attract the right people to your team, you can make a huge difference as a leader. If you don't have the right people, you can't, you know, post on this one of our investors says, uh, the team he builds is the company he builds at the end of the day. So that is really key. But then in my case, and I think for anyone listening who is maybe not experiencing what they're about to set themselves to do or very young, you can also, and you have to compliment yourself with people that maybe don't even work for you, but there are like advisors or mentors outside. And that's been really valuable for me.

learn from other people who have done what you're looking to do and you have to learn really fast you need to be able to go into those conversations very humbly and ask a lot of questions and then bring that knowledge back into your own practice as a leader there is an emotional trait that is really at the end of the day to you

In error, what I was telling me at the beginning is you always second guess yourself sometimes in, okay, how you approach this and what is our culture. And then it goes back to what I was saying earlier. You need to know who you are and you need to build the company around that because again, it's like friendship. You cannot be friends with someone who doesn't share your own value. You can force yourself, but it's not going to last.

And so again, at the end of the day, you need to understand, okay, what really matters for me? It goes back to this concept of, you know, a culture of being demanding and supportive. You think like a sports team, we're not a family. Sometimes in the early days, we'll say, well, we are a family. We're not. There is a bench here. And top performance needs to be rewarded more than anyone else. We are in the playoffs and we want to win the title, the championship. And so that is the intensity that is required. We work hard, extremely hard. We value velocity.

And this is how you will always know what you should expect, which doesn't mean it's universally good. Just be aware before you join us because then if there is not a match, you will not be happy. And we're not going to compromise on some of the things, right? So probably this word compromise that before, oh, maybe I should compromise here. Maybe no, I shouldn't push for that. Instead, no, velocity is key for us. I will always push you to get things done in half the time. Yeah.

How do you balance the striving for to achieve the big goal and the big mission and the metrics and stuff versus enjoying the present moment and enjoying the ride as you're going through it?

So that is not my strength. That's not there. They coach me and they give me advice. I think everyone is different, right? And it's also based on your age, the state of your career, what you're doing. But at the end of the day, the key thing is to working on a project that you believe matters. And so there is always this distinction sometimes in the startup world between missionaries and mercenaries.

And definitely if you talk to our people, they are missionaries, right? We have a vision where we want to get to potentially detect cancer. We want to save lives and we want to help people live a longer and healthier life. And so that is very, from a motivational standpoint, is massive for a lot of people compared to going to a company where you sell ads and you just monetize by selling Coke ads on the digital platform. Here you're really helping millions of people

to live a better life or save them. And so that's what I think is the number one driver and also the reason why a lot of people at our company, they have been with us for so long, even if it is such an intense place, right? Because it becomes hard to find another company where you as an engineer, an ML engineer, you're saving lives. There are a lot of ML jobs.

But if you're working on the cart for an e-commerce startup, just to convert more purchases, it's not that people are interested in the life. Yeah. I think on the enjoyment on daily, yeah, it's something that...

I think the way we compensate that is that we are different as founders. And I think that's why also a lot of people say, well, it's great when you have a partner in business because you try to seek like that complimentary conversations, right? Where, how do you remind each other of sort of the journey you've been through and like what you still have to achieve. And there's a balance like Mateo is definitely as a CEO and the vision setting person in the company, the one that's always pushing us forward, like pushing people to achieve more. And then maybe I play a role of like, Hey, look at, look at this and like, look at what we've done. But

But for eight sleep, I think for companies that are really selling amazing products to consumers, the best way to remind yourself of the journey is every day when you wake up and you see, in our case, we see a lot of this on Twitter, people talking about how much they love your product. Because, you know, maybe last day you had like a terrible day or, you know, you lost a candidate you wanted to hire or today you're about to have like a really complicated day. But when you wake up and you see that, that reminds you of why you're about to go through that day.

Amazing. Um, final thing I wanted to ask is that, um, what's the, what's the dynamic between you guys? You're married, you're running a company. A lot of people say that you shouldn't go into business with your spouse, but you guys have been doing this for eight years. Like what are the, what are the secrets? What have you learned? Yeah. A couple of drinks. Uh, and it was, uh, mainly because, uh, of, uh,

that she has set some boundaries because otherwise in my case I could just keep talking about work forever because I'm passionate about that. So first we use WhatsApp for personal stuff and we use Slack for business, right? And so sometimes I might be

on Slack asking for something to be done faster or to raise the bar. And in the meanwhile, I'm WhatsAppping her saying, oh, what do we have for dinner tonight? But then the other rule she has set is that after a certain time, like call it 9.30 p.m., I cannot talk about work because her point is you need to treat me like you would treat any other colleague. And it's not that you call them at 10 p.m. unless it's really, really urgent.

And I say, fine, but I can still slacker the other colleagues at the end if I have an idea. And so sometimes we are on the couch watching TV and I start slacking her and there is her phone vibing and I know it's me, but I cannot talk about the topic. Or...

Sometimes we are in Zoom calls and we are just in a room next to each other, but we are both on Zoom. For example, Sheila posts to me and we do a one-on-one at least once a week, sometimes also on Saturday. But my chief of staff joins the one-on-one and the chief of staff is in New York, we are in Miami. And so we do our one-on-one remotely, even if she's like in the other room.

So I think you need to professionalize the working relationship. You can't treat each other as, oh, you know, we're just family. And most importantly for us, because this is not a family business.

You know, we've been together for longer than we've done the company, but this is not a family business. We have business partners. We have investors. I'm an executive in the company. He's an executive in the company. We can be fired from our jobs. We can be replaced. Right. And we need to earn our spot. Even though we're founders, you need to earn your spot. You need to grow. You need to be able to manage. And so I think professionalizing is like step number one and that has made things easier. And so what that means also is that if you have a discussion of professional setting, you can bring it to personal and vice versa, right?

And the other big thing that we have learned, I think this applies to any working relationship, regardless of whether you're related or married or not, is that you need to understand how you are different in the approach that you have to very key things. And one of them for us is

How do we solve problems or gain clarity? Mateo and I are very different in that sense. And so he has, I think, probably part of your lawyer trained brain. Like he has this amazing capacity to focus and he can really focus on one specific thing and subject for a very long time and to

keep for hours thinking about it, thinking about it until he finds the solution. And his brain performs really well at that level. For me, it's very different. My brain sort of like has the more like creative side. And so I get my best ideas when I'm not purposefully trying to solve that problem. I sort of go outside of that world and then suddenly things just click.

I'm a big dreamer, for example, connecting to sleep. I dream every night and my brain is sort of putting together all of these things during my sleep. And then sometimes I wake up and I'm like, okay, now I feel clarity. And so finding these things over the years have helped us because then I, when I tell him, Hey, I cannot talk about work anymore today. It's Saturday. Give me my day. He understands that as long as I'm being lazy, right? As a founder, you're on, but my brain needs it. And then maybe I come back to you later. And suddenly I have a solution for what we're talking about.

Great. Um, finally, I wanted to ask is, uh, any books that you guys would recommend that have changed, um, your thinking or impacted your life or business in any way? There was two and actually I gifted them to everyone in my team, um, that I, I always kind of go back to one is shoe dog. I feel night and, you know, my team takes care of all marketing and brand and building a sleep as that iconic company is a really important part of

what we do day in and day out. And I think Nike is a great example of a company that has done that. And the other one is the score takes care of itself. We focus on the fundamentals and like the most basic inputs of how you're structuring your business and how every single person in your team is doing their job. You should be able to win the championship book is from all of the, the frameworks built by Bill Walsh. Um, and he was this incredible coach of the 49ers that was able to take a team that was like struggling into winning multiple championships. Yeah.

There is high output management, which is highly recommended for any manager. It was the former CEO of Intel. It's really like the Bible for management. If you are in hardware build, from the former CEO of Nest. There is the almanac of Naval Ravikant, who is also one of our investors now.

And if you are a bit more philosophical, there is Meditations from Marcus Aurelius, which is really cool to see how people were thinking 2,000 years ago. And that thinking still applies to us today.

Amazing. Guys, thank you so much. This has been absolutely wonderful. So great having you here. Thank you for all of the insights on all of that. Optimizing sleep, diet, nutrition, exercise, all of those things. Definitely I'm going to take away the 6 p.m. social event thing because there's just no reason not to. Trying to do some interval training as well. And yeah, I've got my king size eight sleep in a box at home and I will install it in my new place like next week. So I'll report back and let you know how it goes. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for coming on.

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