Hi everyone, and welcome to this week's edition of CEOs You Should Know. This is Steve Dolesant, your host, and I'm thrilled to be joined by Matteo, the CEO and founder of Eight Sleep. Matteo, thanks for being here today.
Oh, thank you for having me. I'm really excited.
Absolutely, I'm excited too. So Eight Sleep is the world's first sleep fitness company focused on optimizing sleep to enhance human potential. So tell us a little bit about that and how you came up with the idea for Eight Sleep.
Yeah, sure. So we invented technologies. We use AI and technologies to improve your sleep. Everything started because, first, I used to be an athlete when I was a teenager. So I played a lot of tennis, almost any sport that you can think of, at a competitive level. And then around 10 years ago, I started wondering why Elon Musk is taking me to Mars and I still spend a third of my life on a piece of dumb foam. There is no technology in my bed. I go to bed every single day and I pretend to wake up eight hours later fully refreshed. And there is literally nothing. The last invention in foam was in 1966, I believe, when they invented memory foam. Other than that, there was no improvement in our bedroom and no real technology.
And so we came up with an idea, and that idea now is based on three pillars. One is temperature, and so we have what we call full immersive temperature. So we change your body temperature during the night based on your sleep stages to improve your sleep. Second, we invented what is called zero-gravity elevation. So we invented a technology that raises your head when you're snoring, or it helps you sleep in zero gravity, releasing pressure on your back. And the last one is surround sound. So we are able to play certain sounds before you fall asleep or while you're asleep to improve your sleep performance.
That's incredible. Who would have thought that there's been no innovations there since then?
Yeah. And you know, with our lives, lives have become more and more hectic. We have very intense jobs and you just go to bed and you pretend to wake up fully refreshed, but your body sometimes needs a little bit of help, and technology and AI, particularly right now, they are the perfect fit for all of this.
That's awesome. I know you mentioned that you were a competitive athlete. I know you did skiing, tennis, car racing, you name it. Was there a particular moment that it clicked to you that this was needed, like that this update to the way that you were sleeping was warranted?
Yeah, I would say there were two times. One, when I was a kid, right, and I had to recover. I was playing a lot of tennis tournaments and I immediately understood the importance of sleep. And then it sounded like I had a pause on my brain and I woke up again 20 years later. And as I started aging and I was in my early 30s, I started wondering why is there no technology? And how can I compress my sleep? How can I sleep faster? And at the same time I started having sleep problems. I have restless legs. And I say, why there is nothing helping me and there is no one studying the problem? And that is how everything started.
That's awesome. Well, I know Eight Sleep's seen tremendous growth since 2020 and you're unveiling a new next-gen Pod 5. What do you think is the key to maintaining innovation in this category? And how do you ensure that new products are constantly pushed out?
Well, we tend to release a new product almost every year. So we have a very intense schedule and sometimes my team complains with me, but at the same time customers are really happy. And in a matter of five years we went from Pod One to Pod Five, the latest generation, and it's really good for us because with each generation we can learn from our customers what they like, what they don't like. At the same time, when you release a new hardware product, you don't want to introduce too many features at the same time because you need to support them, and so if you can just sequence them at a high pace, that's the best way to evolve as a business, as a company. And then obviously the company grows so you generate more profit and you can invest more in R&D.
Sure. What are some of the new advancements in Pod 5?
There are a couple that are really cool. One is what we call immersive temperature. So the previous pods were just a mattress cover that you could install onto any mattress and it would control the temperature of each side of the bed. Now Pod 5 comes also with a hydro blanket which is thermoregulated, and so it really becomes an immersive temperature that surrounds you like a microclimate, top to bottom. So you have temperature above you and underneath your body. Second, there is an evolution of the elevation which becomes more intelligent for snoring mitigation and zero gravity. And then we have surround sound. So we are able to play these soundscapes that help you to fall asleep or stay asleep.
We also have a partnership with Dr. Andrew Huberman, and so there is a list of NSDR files. NSDR is non-sleep deep rest, a sort of meditation with his voice that you can play to fall asleep.
And the last innovation connected to AI, we are introducing new sensors and what is called Healthspan, which is a software feature, and this software feature will be able to detect if you're getting sick a couple of days before you are sick. And we'll be able to track any anomaly in your heart rate and respiration. And so it's almost like having a full picture of your health in your app and you can just check it every day.
That's incredible. Very, very cool advancements. I know you mentioned the partnership and I know some of your other partnerships is your collaboration with professional athletes. Obviously yourself a former professional athlete, kind of the reason behind Eight, but you guys currently work with over 300 different professional athletes. How do you see that intersection between the sleep optimization and the athletic performance really shaping the future of health and wellness?
Yeah, so first of all, we have hundreds and hundreds of athletes. We have a couple that are very close to us, real brand ambassadors like Charles Leclerc, the Formula One Ferrari driver, and Taylor Fritz, who is I think right now number four in the world, the number one American tennis player. So pretty cool stars.
And all the times that I talk to them, athletes nowadays are so aware of the importance of sleep, and for a couple of reasons. First, for their performance, physical and cognitive performance, but second also for the risk of injury. And so it's incredible how aware they are. And one of the things sometimes I share when I get interviewed is also, even for the average customer, the awareness around sleep is completely different than 10 years ago when we started. And I would say sleep deprivation is the new smoking.
Meaning if you go back 10, 15 years ago, there were, you know, the mattress CEO who would say, I sleep only three hours a day. I sleep when I'm dead. I don't need to sleep anymore. But now if you start conveying that message to your team, you are perceived like almost like the type of person who is smoking and eating junk food and not taking care of themselves, right? And so there is almost this limit where, yeah, maybe you want to still push in your career, but you need to take care of your health. You need to take care of what you eat, how you sleep, and how much you train. And we are just leveraging that topic.
That's awesome. And I know that the importance of sleep is in a lot of different factors, right? To your point, it helps you live longer, it helps you stay healthier, it helps you be more productive in your day-to-day. How do you really envision that continuing in the next decade and continuing that message to be top of mind? Like you said, it's kind of like if you have bad sleep, you're the new smoker. How do you plan to continue that positivity around getting the right amount of sleep?
Yeah. So the interesting thing is almost 80% of adults, they have to some degree some sleep problems. The point is until a few years ago, sleep was not a topic and people were not talking about their problems. And these problems might be very simple. You just had a kid. I mean, you just had a baby and so you can't sleep and you and your partner struggle.
I relate. Trust me. I have a one-year-old who's getting all four of his molars right now. So I did not sleep between midnight and 3:00 last night. So I hear you.
Another thing we see with our product, 70%, 80% of couples, they struggle because the two different partners, they have different temperature preferences. Women in menopause, or women during their pregnancy, or during their period with hormonal changes. And so at the end of the day, each of us, I mean, you can walk on the street and probably 99% of the people you see around you, they're struggling with their sleep. But before they were not chatting about that, now they talk about that. And I think there is an explosion of wearables, which for us is really good because they educate customers at scale.
But the problem of wearables is that they help you understand if you're sleeping well or not, but they don't actually fix the problem, and that is when we come in. And so the best case for us, 80% of our users, they have a wearable, so they are already educated, they already understand that their sleep needs to be optimized, and then they look for the only product in the market that actually improves their sleep, and then they buy Eight Sleep.
That's awesome. Yeah, makes a lot of sense because I myself hear about it all the time, hey, I wore this ring or I have this app and it told me I got a bad night of sleep. But to your point, there's nothing that's really fixing that, correct, until you guys came.
And the best thing for us from a marketing standpoint is they already have their metrics and they start using Eight Sleep and they see the change in their metrics, and it's reported by another wearable or another app, which is the best way for us to prove that we are real, right? It's not our metrics saying you're sleeping better. It's someone else proving you before and after using our device that your sleep is now better.
That's awesome. They actually get to see the results live. Yeah. Which is probably really rewarding.
