Well, our engineers stopped coding around a year ago. What they have is hundreds of AI engineers, and that is how we can achieve what we are achieving at scale.
How much do you spend on Claude a month?
In the hot seats today we have Matteo Franceschetti. What a fantastic surname. The joys of doing a second show with someone is you get to ask questions that no one else can answer. That's what happened today. We have a totally off-the-cuff, very unfiltered discussion with probably one of the most impressive founders in hardware, having scaled the business to multi-billion dollar valuations, single-digit churn rates, incredible global businesses, now open even in China. This is one of the most unfiltered versions of Matteo and Eight Sleep that you have seen yet.
Great brand with a shitty product goes nowhere. I'm extremely demanding. I'm a weirdo, and so I can be a husband on one side, but business-wise, no mercy. Sometimes people say, 'Oh, I'm at the final stage with Anthropic and Eight Sleep.' And to me, that is a really bad red flag. There is no way that these two jobs are any way similar. Our revenue per employee is way higher than Apple's. Kids that are being born now will never work. At least for money. Ready?
Matteo, it is so good to have you in the hot seat, dude. You know, last time we did this show and you had like a hiring playbook, and I remember it went like insanely viral afterwards, and so many people talked to me about that ever since we did it. So I'm really excited for this as a second discussion. Thank you for doing it, dude.
Yeah, thank you for having me. I think that hiring today is harder than it's ever been, just because of the prizes on offer at OpenAI, Anthropic, and some of the other places, even the shiny new hot startups.
How do you think about that? Am I wrong? Has it changed in terms of talent competitiveness?
We are back to 2021, and that I think is becoming a problem in the US, meaning salaries are going out of control.
Competition. What makes you say that, like engineer salaries?
Any salary, even for product managers, are out of control right now. They get insane offers from any company. There is a lot of money going around, and so we are focused more and more on hiring in Europe and outside the US, because the other problem is not even the salary and it's not even attracting them on day zero, but it's retention, because then they keep receiving offers. If you are a cool company with a cool brand, then they keep receiving offers over and over at a higher valuation — I mean, a higher salary.
Have you lost people to OpenAI and Anthropic? I'm invested in many companies and they're just like, 'God, we're getting eaten alive by OpenAI, Anthropic, Cognition, you name these hot companies.'
Yeah, a couple. The other ones could be AI companies that are doing extremely well, or they just raised money, and so it's normal competition. But sometimes the delta in salary and in comp is so big that at that point there is nothing you can do.
We mentioned Cognition a couple of times. We were talking earlier about your angel investing as well. Can I ask you, how has being an angel investor changed how you think about operating?
It's a game-changer for me, and I think that is something that is not shared enough, particularly on X. The amount of learnings that you get from being an investor is insane, because essentially you build your own intelligence as you receive investor updates. You understand how the market is moving, what are the valuations, what are the multiples, what kind of profiles they're hiring, what channels might be working. And I receive this from companies that are not competitive with Eight Sleep, but as a founder you just get a sense of the market, and I find that super valuable.
What's been the biggest lesson from angel investing?
The biggest learnings is always on fundraising, right? You see how much they're raising, at what valuation, what multiples, with what investors — that's one. The other biggest lesson is for other companies that are still consumer, to see channels, what channels work for them.
What do investors not understand about hardware that they should? You're advising me. I'm your buddy. I have a fund and I want to invest in hardware. What are you like, dude, before you do it, you should know this?
That probably the founders in the first year of the company, or in the first probably let's say three months, they don't fully understand what the cost of producing that device will be. They don't understand the return rate, and so everything they tell you about BOM and COGS will probably be off by at least 50%.
Does CAC go down over time?
It really depends. And so that is another thing you want to assess, which is word of mouth. In our case, word of mouth keeps compounding. We are around 40% of our revenue, even at our size, which is starting to be really big, is 40%.
40% of your revenue is word of mouth. What's your second biggest channel?
Then you start getting into paid media.
Yeah. And that's just Meta.
Yeah. Then it becomes Meta, Google, TikTok, and all those channels.
Can I ask how do they compare? I'm a content specialist at this point. No one that I speak to has managed to make TikTok work. Have you?
We did actually this year, in the past six months.
It's usually a matter of amount of content that you can generate with TikTok influencers.
So it's about getting a UGC program in place.
Is there a big budget for you tied to it?
The way we usually approach these channels is we start unlocking a small budget per week. We start looking at the CAC. We set a cap to the CAC, and then they can deploy as much as they can within that cap. But then as they prove it, they can deploy more money. So to me, they could deploy $100 million if they're within the cap of the CAC. The important thing you need to do regularly, probably every six months, is an incrementality test. And so we might turn off TikTok in certain states in the US or in certain geos, and we start A/B testing what is the growth rate or the revenue rate. So we want to see how much each channel is incremental, because we don't look at the CAC from the platform. We have our own models now that determine the CAC of each channel.
Sorry, can you tell me about that? You have your own models to determine the CAC from each channel. Why is that?
Well, because you cannot trust there will be an excess of attribution from the same platform. We do the same with Meta. If you look at the CAC on Meta, it's probably 20% lower than what the true CAC is. And the only way you can do it is by doing these incrementality tests. And so let's say you pick two geos that deliver, that perform similarly. Let's say you pick Texas and, I don't know, California. That is not the right example, but...
Dude, you're speaking to a Brit. That'll totally work for this example.
And so then you turn off Texas and you start seeing what is the delta in performance of that state versus the other. So how much revenue you lose. So if they were both growing 50% year over year and you start turning off Meta in one or the other, you can immediately calculate the value of Meta for that state.
Does every brand need to have their own models to accurately...
Oh, 100%, because otherwise they just fool themselves.
When did you start? Because it's one of those ones which you can't do from day one.
Yeah. And you will screw up multiple times, and the point is you need to keep doing it, because as you add more channels, the incrementality of each channel will not be the same.
How did you think about that channel addition? Because I see so many founders try and be everywhere to everyone. And how do you think about that?
I disagree with that. So you need to go one channel at a time. I was even talking to a common friend recently who was asking me about that and said, 'Okay, can I go in all these channels? How much money should I put? Should I start putting 100k in each of them?' And I said, 'No, no, no, you go one by one. You start with Meta, it's probably the biggest and the one that you should prove the fastest.' And you start with, based on the size of the company, a certain amount per week. You set a cap to the CAC you want to achieve, and then from there you start scaling only if you are within CAC, because otherwise you start throwing money out of the window. Your growth people, they will always want to grow faster, and so they will always want to spend more, and then you start losing control. And what happens then, let's say by the end of the year you realize you screwed up, and so you start pulling back, and then the following year you're not growing year over year because you're spending less. And so you need to be disciplined now if you want to be successful next year and keep growing year over year.
It's really interesting about how you kind of gamify growth numbers, because you're right, you spend, you get 400% growth, you pull back hard and you get 70%. Good luck fundraising when you're going from 400 to 70.
We could be growing 50% more if we wanted year over year this year just by spending more. But then next year you're in trouble because your CAC is upside down.
Do we care about economics from day one? You said there about start with Meta. Do we care about economics from day one in terms of optimization, or actually is it like, hey, customers are engaging, they're liking the product, if we're doing a one-to-one, you know, for every dollar we spend we're getting a dollar back, great, or should we be looking for optimal returns early?
Well, in our case we look at the immediate payback period. This is actually something where Keith was really pushy and he was correct since day one. So he wanted us to have an immediate payback period. And then we have what we call contribution margin. So it's what is the margin on day zero. Then we have a subscription, and the subscription will compound on top of that. But we want to have that contribution profit on day one to be really healthy. If we were compressing that, we could be growing 50% more. But then the business wouldn't be public-ready or as healthy as it is today.
What would you most like to do if economics were not a part of your business? It could be like massively increase the quality at a certain point. It could be pour fuel on the fire on Meta like never before. Take economics aside.
Well, you could reduce prices, and I think we will see an acceleration. Or you could just deploy probably more into marketing, which is probably what I would prefer. I'm never a fan of compressing prices. You know what Andre says, that if you have a great product, people will pay for it. But at our stage as a company, even if we start fairly large, brand awareness is still probably the biggest bottleneck.
You have a subscription business as well, which obviously really provides a lot of juice to your margins, because you have an upfront cost in the thousands. It's a relatively expensive product for a lot of people. Do you just inherently have very low churn rates on your subscription product because you have the buy-in of multiple thousands invested up front?
Yeah, it's world class. Our churn is the lowest of any company you can think of.
It's in the single-digit, low single-digit yearly churn. Even if you compare to other companies that are in the wearable space that are going public, we are better than them.
Who could that be? Who could that be? I don't know, dude. That's absolutely hilarious.
But it's world class. It's like unseen.
Going back to the channels, and I'm sorry for focusing on channels. I'm a real nerd about channels. Has your Google spend changed in the wake of, bluntly, AI and AI-driven search impacting so much?
Yes. And so we introduced a new channel that now we monitor that is literally what we call AI SEO. And now in the report that I receive weekly, twice a week, there is also AI SEO. And so we see how we rank in AI searches.
What percent of traffic today, broad strokes, is from AI searches?
I don't have a number for that. I can check, but it keeps growing.
But is it like 1% or like 20%?
Probably somewhere in the middle. But then we start seeing an impact on Google.
Google is behaving differently because of AI searches. What was your biggest channel mistake? Where did you spend money that you shouldn't have done, and you're like, ah, I learned a lot of lessons from this?
Out of home, and everything depends on the scale of the business in that country. So we tried to do a campaign, an out-of-home campaign in the Middle East, but we're not ready yet. So if we were doing an out-of-home campaign in New York, where we are decently known, it would perform very differently than the same campaign in the Middle East, where we just launched a year ago. And so those are the things I'm learning that I didn't know.
When are you big enough to do out of home? Because I think one thing that we've seen in the last, you know, two years, so to speak, is tech companies realizing the importance of brand marketing, out of home, football shirt sponsorships, you name it. And it's supposedly performing well. How big do you have to be to do out of home?
I don't think there is a hard number, but you want to be a brand that is decently well known. And so I make it up: if 100 people see that ad on the street, I know 5% of them knows the brand. And so that is one of the other things that we monitor, which is this aided and unaided brand awareness, to understand how many people know the brand, and if they know the brand, they know what the brand does.
How much did you spend on out of home?
Nothing now. But we created a truck now that goes around Silicon Valley, and so you can book the truck and it comes to your home and you can try the product live. So this truck has a bedroom built in the back of the truck. But now the truck also goes to specific events or to specific areas during the weekend where there are many people. And we are seeing pretty good success because there are a lot of people that wanted to try our product but they couldn't, and now when they see the truck they just get into the truck and try the product and buy.
That's a phenomenal channel, and you're going to have like high conversion rate on there.
Yeah, it's doing pretty well.
That's fascinating. I'm also really impressed that TikTok works for you, because TikTok is freaking hard.
Yeah, it was not working in the past. Then we kept iterating, and it just started working six months ago.
How big is the marketing budget today?
In the hundreds of millions.
In the hundreds of millions.
But the story I can tell you is, for example, before we had an email marketing team. Now we have zero. Everything is done through AI, and email marketing makes a very large amount for us. And everything is run by AI.
So what happened is we were forced to that, meaning the person leading — we had a team of two — then the person leading the team was leaving, and at that point my co-founder Alexandra jumped in and said, 'Okay, let me see how I can use AI to really make this work.' And within three days she was able to build multiple bots that now run all our email marketing. And so now we have a team of zero, and email marketing makes close to 100 million.
And I just want to understand, because we have an email newsletter and there's people that do it and it's still pretty average, I think. When you say bots, what do you build? Your own?
So for us, obviously there is a calendar of what emails need to be built and created and sent. This is based also on history, so we have historical data, and our AI suggests, okay, when to send what email with...
And when you say your AI, it's like your models, it's using...
We probably — I mean, we should check, but I would imagine we are using Claude for that. And then internally we have probably by now hundreds, if not thousands, of agents that we use internally at Eight Sleep. So now I started measuring what I call the human employees, but then there are also the AI employees, and probably the AI employees are — I mean, without probably we are probably 3x, 4x bigger if you start including all our AI employees.
Where is it most significantly impacting the company?
Growth, because email is like that now. Also all our digital marketing, our team receives a report every morning from our AI agents suggesting what changes to do or not to do, and they approve, move, or reject. And so also our marketing business is run — our growth is run by a few people right now.
I worry that in a world of infinite content supply, discovery becomes impossible and we just get flooded. Do you worry about that too?
Definitely. But at the same time I think that the personal agents will look for the best product, and so if you are the best product you will still win. So yeah, it will be probably — for humans, right, the amount of content will be too much, and so we will need to think about how we show up to humans where humans go. That is how I think. But then you need a different strategy for the agents to make sure that their agents find you and recommend you.
We said there about kind of the amount of agents that you have. Engineering is one where consistently across the board everyone's engineering teams are being changed unbelievably. How is AI changing your engineering team at Eight Sleep? What are you using? What are you not using? How do you think about that?
Yeah, well, our engineers stopped coding around a year ago. So since then they didn't code. What they have is hundreds of AI engineers that they code for them, and that is how we can achieve what we are achieving at scale in 35 countries, including China, including Middle East, including Europe, where there are a lot of regulations in all of them, with a fairly tiny team.
Mainly Claude, yeah. How much do you spend on Claude a month? Give or take.
I don't know. It keeps growing so fast that I don't know.
No, it's lower than that, but it's still in the millions.
And the thing I'm trying to understand is Mark Benioff said that they spend 300 million a year on Claude and they have a 6 billion budget for engineering. It's 5% of engineering salary is being spent on Claude in particular. And my question as an investor is, will it stay at 5%? In which case, yeah, we can justify the $2 trillion IPO, but it doesn't have massive expansion from there. Is it a case of the 5% is just the start, baby, we're going to go to 25%, in which case, Matteo, let's load up on Anthropic's IPO? Or is it the case that actually we're going to see the commoditization by open models, most of workflows are going to get taken by them, and that 5% could go down to 1% as we see efficiency?
Yeah, I think there will be two vectors in the opposite direction. The usage will increase, and so the 5% will become 50%, but the cost will go down, and so net that I think it will go down. I was listening to an interview with Sam Altman recently, and he was saying that in the early days to pay for one hour of electricity at night you had to work five hours, just to give you a sense of how expensive electricity was in the early days. And now nobody cares about — I don't even know what's the cost of electricity at night now in Miami where I live. And so I think the same thing will happen.
Do you find it a bit scary that intelligence is now free and like entirely distributed?
Yeah, it's something I think about all the time, right? And how businesses will change, how our business will change once that intelligence is semi-unlimited. I asked this morning to do an in-depth analysis of three of our biggest competitors' Instagram channels, because I want Instagram to be a real driver for us moving forwards. What works, what doesn't, what themes work, what hooks work, what layouts work, what doesn't, what captions work. It was incredible. And I said, 'Can you suggest three stories every single day for me at 8 a.m. to do?' First one starts tomorrow.
Yeah. I mean, the amount of productivity will explode. It's probably like when we went from no computers to computers, but or probably even bigger, industrial revolution or agricultural revolution. I think we are facing one of those moments. Knowing what you know now as a consumer and customer of Claude, would you buy Anthropic at the IPO?
I would probably buy. I still think there is so much upside in all these companies. I'm really bullish on SpaceX personally.
Well, I think — so here is another theory that I have, and this is just my opinion, but I think with AI companies will — the right companies will transform themselves into holdings. And so what it means is that whatever Eight Sleep is doing today will be one of the businesses that we do, but as we build tools for ourselves we will discover other opportunities, business opportunities. And so Eight Inc. will probably own three, four, five, ten different businesses, which if you think and if you look at Chinese companies, it's something they have been doing forever. If you look at Xiaomi, Xiaomi does 15 different things. I just watched their latest presentation from their CMO. I look at a lot of Chinese companies because they are geniuses, right? They never stop themselves. So Xiaomi, instead of being just like Apple, they also do cars, for example, right? They do so many other things.
And fridges and ovens and...
Literally anything hardware related, anything that is smart home. But then they also get into components, like some of the components — like BYD develops certain components well outside the car and automotive. So these companies have already proven that the concept of focus is not, oh, you keep doing the same thing forever. It's just, I have certain capabilities, then how can I use these knowledge and capabilities in any form? And with AI we will all do that.
I'm loving this conversation, and the joys of like doing second shows is like they're much more casual, which is much better to listen to and also much more fun to do. Do you worry when you see the excellence of these Chinese manufacturers, specifically the kind of automotive industry, that it's just going to hollow out the European car market?
Yeah, I think Chinese, they really nailed particularly automotive. And based on my understanding, what happened is around 10 years ago, or whenever exactly that was, they understood that they didn't want to compete with European manufacturers on standard engines, and that is when they decided to double down on electrical technology. And since then they started developing their cars. But I go to China often for work now. We sell in China, but we also manufacture in China. And when you see the quality of their cars — because in the past we used to think that some of these products were just cheap and ugly. Well, instead now they design cars. Sayi, if you go to their stores, it looks like an Apple store, but there are cars. There are no other devices for the home. These cars, they literally look like a Ferrari aesthetics, or they have these seats that turn so you can just sit and then...
Dude, I've seen the TikToks. They look so cool. Incredible. Screens come down, screens come down on the ceiling.
Massage, everything is voice control. So they're really focused on the customer experience, and it's incredible. And I think a lot of other manufacturers around the world, they don't focus enough on the user experience.
I completely get you and agree with that. But as your wonderful accent denotes, you are Italian. And a huge amount of the European industrial economy is rotating, centered around cars. Do you worry about that?
Well, I worry even more about another factor. I think all the Chinese manufacturers, they will become robotic companies. I think all these automakers should transform themselves and start building humanoids, because the humanoid will be what cars were in the 60s. If they don't do that, they will not lose only cars. They will lose also the humanoid market, which is trillions of dollars.
Are you seeing the advancement with humanoids in China in a way that you really didn't expect?
Yes. I don't know if you saw the — I don't know what was the formal name — the Olympics of robots.
The humanoid games, I think.
Yeah. It's insane. And the way I look at that is, okay, you look at this thing, it looks a bit funny, they look a bit clunky, but they start doing these things. Knowing how fast AI is moving, if you — next year those same games will be mind-blowing. That is what worries me. What I saw today, right, if you just look at that you say, oh, look at this thing, like these robots, no, they are not really good at walking, even if they did the records in the 100 meters. There was a robot that ran faster than Usain Bolt. So they know how to...
There was — I did a video on this. There was a robot that beat the high jump.
Yes, I saw that. And then there were the fighting, and no, the fighters...
But tennis, like real time.
The tennis was really cool.
Yeah. But in one year from now, we will be blown away at this speed of AI.
Did you see the paper last night, or essay, or post last night from someone at OpenAI? Sam promoted it, that basically said we actually need to put a slight pause on this. It is getting too far, too fast.
Yeah. So there is the — I think the part that is worrying everybody is the part of self-learning from these models. And so they are getting to the point where they train themselves, and that is when we start losing control. There is a point even in our...
You think we're already there?
I think we are. Then I think there is a big delta between what we see as users and probably what the frontier model companies have in house, and I think they have already seen it behind the scenes. You have seen some of these things that are happening already in terms of cybersecurity in these civilizations — there were three attempts of civilization, I think, in an OpenAI model where agents were building their own group.
I'm going to go there. You sell in China, you spent a lot of time in China. A lot of your investors, including Keith Rabois, who's a friend of mine, hates China. How do you reflect on that? Is it as evil and CCP-driven as it seems? Are we in a deglobalized world that should hate China? How do you think about that?
Yeah. I don't have a specific opinion on that, so I cannot really comment. I can just tell you for us it's a key market, it's a big opportunity, and we decided to sell there, and it's doing really well for us.
Is it very different selling in China?
Yes, because you cannot sell on eightsleep.com. Like literally you don't sell on a website. They don't use websites, and so for us it was literally learning everything from scratch.
What do you mean they don't sell on a website?
Chinese don't buy on websites. There is no e-commerce as we know it. They only buy on their super apps. So on WeChat, RedNote, and equivalent. And so we had to learn all that.
What the... So where do they land? Like you send a referral link to your friend. Where's the referral link from? I'm confused.
Imagine that everything — the equivalent, oversimplified, is like if you were buying everything on WhatsApp. They don't go on any website. Websites are at the most just literally like if you just want to scroll and see some picture and read a bit more about the product, but all the purchases, all their credit cards are on RedNote or kind of Amazon equivalent and WhatsApp equivalent.
Or TikTok, obviously. Does that impact how you think about how we should think about security for these AI assistants? Like everyone now is like, oh, never put my credit card in Instinct, or what if it gets hacked?
Yeah, I think the solution for that to me is — so for example, my Grokbot is buying things for me already, but it's using Amazon on the browser, and so Amazon has my credit card, and so there I feel confident because I'm not sharing my credit card with AI yet. I think in AI we are where we were with credit cards on — when spending and buying things on the internet 20 years ago, where people, particularly European and Italian — I was still living in Italy — they literally didn't want to put their credit card on any website because they thought it was a scam, and sometimes there was a scam back then. I think we are at the same point with giving our credit card or information to these bots. It's still a bit — sometimes you feel uncomfortable, but I think in a year or two from now our bots, particularly bots from frontier models like from X, OpenAI, and Claude, you will start trusting them soon.
What seems crazy today that you think will be very common in five years? I totally remember I wasn't allowed eBay when I was young because my parents were like, no way are you putting credit card details online. I remember when it was like, 'You think you're going to find a partner online? These apps are ridiculous.' Now 60% of relationships start online, and I think we live online transaction-wise. What?
Probably your bot buying a Cybercab that will start making money for you. So you will buy a Cybercab that makes money for you with a bot, and the bot runs the Cybercab.
That would be pretty sick. I mean, it's not that far off happening now.
No. And then it will be the health part. That is another area where I hope that cancer can be solved within 10 years. I think companies like Eight Sleep will be able to save your life, save the life of millions of people.
Does the sleep product actually change that much, with the greatest respect, in a completely AI-driven world?
100%. We start seeing the likelihood you develop diabetes in our data, hypertension. We are becoming a medical device for sleep apnea. So your bed will become the most advanced medical platform you ever had.
You said about retail earlier. I bet retail has been a question for you for years, and I bet there's been different board conversations had. How do you think about when's the right time, because you're still DTC? How do you think about when's the right time?
Yeah. Well, let me step back for a second. One thing I'm learning as an entrepreneur is there is a time for things, right? Similar to what I was telling you about the out-of-home campaign. Nailing the timing of what you do. So when you do what is actually really important for CEOs, because it's not that it's binary that I don't know, retail doesn't work or out-of-home doesn't work. No, it works. But there are some second or lower-level conditions that are required to make that project work. And so I think for Eight Sleep that is happening now. And so you should imagine retail to become a meaningful part of our channels in the next months, years. But before it would have been too early. Same for China, right, launching in China. One thing I spoke to a lot of Chinese founders, and what they told me is sometimes when they start their consumer products, they actually start selling outside China first. And I say, why? You have such a big market and you know the market. And they say because the Chinese market, they love to buy products that are already well recognized in the Western world. And so you want to build the product and the brand first in the rest of the world, and then you come back to China. Otherwise in China you would be one of many knockoffs, and it would just be a price war. And so I didn't know, we just decided to launch China, and so we were just doing it, but I didn't understand that for us was the right time to get into China, because now we're already selling in 35 countries, we are well recognized, we sponsor Charles Leclerc and work with Ferrari through Charles, that is a very well recognized brand, many athletes use us, Elon spoke about us, Mark Zuckerberg spoke about us. Elon is really big in China, right? And so you have a level of trust where you command a certain price. But if we were doing the same thing five years ago, we would be destroyed by a knockoff that is 500 bucks cheaper.
I had Hugo Barra on the show, who was a former exec from Xiaomi, and he taught me something very important in hardware, and I'm intrigued if you agree with it. He said you need to be one of two things. You either need to be price king, which is I'm the cheapest, or feature king, which is I'm the best. Do you agree with that?
So I agree and disagree. I agree that you can be the best price — it's not what we want to be — or I would call it the best product and brand, not so much about features, but the brand is really important. And so being a brand that is associated with, again, Charles Leclerc, with Elon Musk, people they really respect, they want that. And the same happens in Europe, right? I grew up and I remember when I bought my iPod — it was impossible, and I was buying a secondhand iPod on eBay back then, but because Americans were having this product and it was not being sold in Europe yet. There is that kind of form.
I completely agree. Listen to a thousand songs in your pocket. Yes. In a beautiful poster, dude. Samsung and all the others did a thousand songs in your funky device, too. It was the same in many ways.
100% the same. And Steve Jobs has always been a genius because he was coming with a great product after everybody else. Sometimes one, two, three years later, but he was nailing the branding, the packaging, and the pitch, and everybody wanted it.
What do you think people don't consider about consumer brand enough?
The brand particularly, I think in Silicon Valley — I think in Silicon Valley we understand really well building the best product, but I think we underestimate the importance of brand. Then a great brand with a shitty product goes nowhere. So first is product, but then you need to be able to build a brand that is aspirational and can command a certain price.
Charles Leclerc is a phenomenal talent, for those that don't know, in the racing world, one of the best. How does that come to be? You get a DM from Charles saying, 'I love Eight Sleep, do you want to sponsor me.' How does that come to be?
Yeah. Well, it's pretty incredible the story. So we got connected. So Charles already had our product for two years before we met, and we didn't even know. And that is the best way obviously for us to start the relationship. Then I'm an F1 and motorsport obsessed fan, like obsessed. I know everything since when kids race in go-karts. So I knew about Charles six, seven years before he got into F1. And three years before F1, he was racing — two years before he was racing in F2. And at the time I reached out to his team in F2 and I said, 'I'm a huge Charles fan. I think he will make it big. Is there any way where Eight Sleep can sponsor him?' But at the time Eight Sleep was very tiny, and so we couldn't find any real deal. But when I met Charles, I still had the email where I was going back and forth with his team, and I wanted to sponsor him before he even made it to F1, not to Ferrari, before F1. And then I shared with him our vision, our medical vision. He really cares about that, and he's actually really into AI. He's incredible. Super sharp guy, super into AI. And we had dinner together. I think it was the Wednesday of the GP in Miami. And before the end of the dinner, we said we're going to do — we're going to work together. And the deal since then was done in a matter of days.
Can I ask how much did it cost?
No. I'll share. What I can tell you is that Charles invested in Eight Sleep, and I was honestly first really happy because he was one of my heroes, but second I think that proves what I was telling you, how smart he is also as an entrepreneur and a businessman.
Can I ask you — I think a lot more celebrities and athletes are obviously trying to be investors and wanting to invest today than ever before. What would be your biggest advice to other founders on how to get them and how to get the most out of them as a founder of a company?
Well, we made a lot of mistakes in that too, and now it's probably four or five years that we invest in sport, because obviously we have Charles, but we were sponsoring the UAE team with Pogačar. Pogačar was installing our product every single night at each hotel of each stage of the Tour de France since last year. We didn't even know he won last year, and then he won this year. So they reached out after the first year and said, 'Look, Pogačar did everything on his own. We bought the product, now everybody in the team wants it. Can we do something together?' So we sponsor the UAE team this year. And then we are in paddle with Arturo Co and Federico Chingotto, number one and number three in the world. We are in tennis where we sponsor a lot of coaches, including the coach of Sabalenka and many others. And then there are a lot of top athletes that use our product. It's not public, and because...
But what would you advise founders on lessons from how to get great talent, and then it can be celebrity ambassadors too, pop stars, DJs, you name it, and how to get the most out of them, or do they just not add value?
Well, there are two conditions for any deal. Now, first they need to use the product. If they already use it, they bought it on their own, perfect. Now we can talk about doing a deal. If not, they need to try it, and then we want to hear the feedback. They need to know the product. Otherwise it's just a pure business transaction. I don't like it. Second, I want to have a direct relationship with them. Usually, sometimes managers, they don't want that and they want to try to be in the middle. But if I don't have the direct relationship with the athlete, we're not going to do the deal, because then it's just a financial deal. And at this point, we don't care. I want to be connected to the athlete. I want to know that they love our product. And if they don't, it's fine. But then the relationship will never work. Particularly in a product like ours, where these people, the biggest value they do is just by talking to their friends about how good our product is, right? And so they really need to be bought in. If they just have a stake in our company because they put a few million dollars, you don't go anywhere.
Who would you most like to have on the cap table who you don't have? Probably... Do you have Cristiano Ronaldo?
