Alex, welcome to Valley 101.
Alexandra Zavershinskaya
3:47 ↗
Yeah, thank you for having us.
I am really excited for this. Great to meet the people behind a product that I sleep on every night. I was really excited when I unboxed the product. A lot of my friends have been telling me about it. I feel like you guys have really made the brand known not only in the tech circle but also just in general. But for the viewers who are not really familiar with Eight Sleep, tell me a little bit more about what you guys are building here.
Yeah, we invented a technology that improves your sleep. Everything starts with a mattress cover that you can install on top of your mattress, but then we added other technology that will help you mitigate snoring and also help you fall asleep. But in general, we have this vision about really enhancing sleep performance. What if you could sleep only six hours and get more rest than when you were sleeping eight hours? And in the meanwhile, we also want to track everything about your health so you can live a healthier and longer life.
So I guess the core technology here is temperature control. You mentioned that it was so cooler. Tell me a little bit more about how that idea came about for you guys when I guess when you guys started building that. That was like when you guys are 20, 24, 25.
We started working on this in 2014 the first time and we had this vision about the ability to track everything about your health and respond. The big difference between what we do and wearables is that the data is not the end point for us but is just a means to an end. The end is the ability to respond. Temperature is one of the ways we respond and is one of the most effective. So each side of the cover, each side of the bed can have a different temperature and that temperature will dynamically adjust based on your biometrics, sleep stages, preferences and whatever you did during the day. So sort of activities. So temperature is the first big one and through temperature we can give you up to 30% better sleep. Then there are other technologies. There is one for snoring mitigation. This is a base that goes underneath your bed and if you're snoring, we are going to raise your head and that should mitigate your snoring. And then we also have a speaker in the base and we are able to play certain sounds at certain moments of the night to help you fall asleep.
Alexandra Zavershinskaya
5:50 ↗
And all of it is really personalization. So as you saw, it's all these different factors about your environment. But when we started working on what is now Eight Sleep, it was because of this clear vacuum in the market where, like Matteo said, wearables may give you data. There are pharma companies that create drugs to help you fall asleep and help you stay asleep. But the reality is that no one was using technology to solve this problem of humans struggling to sleep well. And modern ways in which we live are getting a bit in the way of our ability to sleep really well every single night. So we wanted to solve that. And we realized that we have to personalize the night for every human in order to do that and that's what we do.
I wanted to talk a little bit more about just sleep in general. I feel like we're kind of in like a sleep maxing world. Everyone suddenly started to care about sleep a lot more. Was that the case when you guys started the company?
Alexandra Zavershinskaya
6:37 ↗
No. No one was talking about sleep back in 2014. And I mean the world was so different in terms of health and wellness. You know the trends have really accelerated I think over the last six years. But no one would talk about it in public as well, like it wasn't something you discuss with your friends or it was sort of very private. There were no technologies that were really tracking sleep. Wearables were starting to do it. There were a few companies, you know, Apple was not even in the wearable space at the time. So, it was a very different world. And as you're saying now, everyone cares about their sleep and people are talking about sleep maxing. People are talking about recovery as a key component of performance and health. So, the world has really changed.
I feel like previously there was this grind culture. Everyone is proud of not sleeping, you know, waking up at 4:00 a.m. and all that. And that has really changed. What have you noticed, you know, over the years of building this product in terms of the cultural reception of this?
Alexandra Zavershinskaya
7:27 ↗
Yeah. Well, I think a lot changed since 2020. I think that there have been also just social media has given us the ability to discuss in depth so many topics about health that maybe previously were not. The explosion of formats like podcasts and YouTube vlogs and you just have so many great individuals who are sharing some of the science behind why you should be sleeping and you know why it matters for your longevity. We have people who are friends of the brand like Brian Johnson who are out there experimenting with all these things around how can you live longer. That has fueled the conversation for the average consumer where they are seeing that media and then they're also thinking well what does that mean for me. Obviously technology companies like Eight but many others that are providing that data every day has sort of opened the eyes to people of wow actually I do feel better when I sleep more. So it's been a combination of factors but it has changed significantly I think post 2020 to where we were before in the first years of the company.
I would almost simplify saying look 10, 10, 20 years ago, sleeping 8, 9 hours was seen as weak, as like you're wasting your time. You know, you're not probably driven enough. Well, instead now it's literally perceived like going to the gym. Okay, you're a healthy person and then probably during the day you will be also a top performer because you will be sharp.
And so this shift is because of the reasons Alexandra just described. And it's pretty incredible and true, which is the most important thing, it's literally what science proves. How does it fit into you know the biohacking culture? I was you know in SF a lot. I went to a lot of the peptide parties where people inject stuff into their own bodies also to like optimize sleep. Have you seen examples of people kind of biohacking their own sleep?
Alexandra Zavershinskaya
9:07 ↗
I think we're a bit past that which is interesting. Like I do think that biohacking as a movement was very strong in that 2020 to 2022 and then it really just blended with general wellness and what we're seeing now around the world when we travel to all these countries where we sell Eight Sleep is that everyone's talking about wellness in the sense of they want to live healthier longer. So the sense of longevity and so I think that sleep has become more quote unquote mainstream compared to say peptides that are sort of more right now on the edges and they're being adopted by people who are in the early adopter circles. Definitely in Silicon Valley you see a lot of that because people tend to have appetite to take risk and experiment and they're doing all sorts of things.
You mentioned wearables. I feel like right now we use so many technologies to track how we sleep. I have a Garmin on my wrist right now and I feel like we have so many metrics like REM, deep sleep, HRV, like all of those words. What do you think are the most important things when it comes to sleep metrics or you know just holistically are metrics important?
Well, a couple of things. So the first one is people obviously like metrics but at the end of the day what they pay us for is to do the job for them. That is what we do through this form of responses, temperature and elevation. At the end of the day, another metaphor I like to use is we built a sleep butler for you that will do continuous adjustment while you are unconscious to deliver better sleep. So this is an AI that is behind the scene. It looks at the data for you and in real time adjusts temperature, elevation, noise and in the future other factors. So number one thing is you shouldn't even look at the metrics. We just need to make sure that when you wake up you feel great. Then if you want to look at the metrics because we all want, I'm a metric geek. I think the key thing is to simplify things and highlight when there are what we call internally anomalies. So at the end of the day what you want to know is is everything on track? Yes. And then most of the people are fine. Then if something is changing in your body and our AI or our intelligence is able to detect that you have a certain likelihood to be sick within two, three days, that is what we should surface. And then there are people like me and maybe you and we really want to go deep into the data and that is when you should have a dashboard with HR, HRV, deep sleep or REM and so on.
How does it predict, you know, when you were sick?
We have models that look at a bunch of different biometrics. Usually the most relevant are HR and HRV. And so you start seeing a trend where your heart rate at rest starts going up usually three, four, five days before you get fever and your HRV starts going down. And so those are what we call anomalies and that is how we are training our models to be able to detect some of the shifts in your biology.
Yeah. And I wanted to talk a little bit more about you know why you guys chose mattress cover. I know that you guys pivoted a little bit, cover then mattress and back to cover, and then there are so many variables which seems to be the usual way that people are going about like with sleep tracking. Why did you guys choose mattress cover in particular?
Well first we wanted it to be seamless. So for us when we think of sleep, we didn't want to have to ask you to do something else, right? Even wearing something while you're sleeping or having to remember to charge your Garmin or your wearable every x days and remember to do that or activating it or anything like that was out of the question. We don't believe that that's the right way to go, especially when it comes to sleep. When you feel tired, you should just be able to go to bed. And like Matteo said, this sort of sleep butler takes care of you. So embedding something on the surface that you're sleeping on felt the most natural design option. And so that's why the mattress cover, that's the form factor we've had since our very first product before the Pod. And we've sort of gone back and forth in whether we sell it integrated to a mattress or not. But in the end, consumers wanted the flexibility to put it on top of any bed they already had at home. So it turned out to be the right bet.
I would love to talk a little bit about the technology that allows us to do that. And what are your proprietary technologies that you know kind of optimize this temperature control and help us feel comfortable?
We have filed many many patents. I think we have over probably 40 patents in that range. I mean we really reinvented the technology from the ground up. We came up with this technology that is liquid based and the science behind what we do and the fact that temperature will improve your sleep is something that has been proven for probably I don't know 50 years by now. So we didn't invent that. That was already proven. What we did is we were the first company that was able to create a consumer device at scale that could deliver this value to the average user. And another thing we noticed was the need for couples. What we see is 80 to 90% of the couples they have different temperature preferences and different needs. And that is where we immediately found the product market fit. So people like to joke saying that we saved their marriage because they were fighting with their partner about different temperature needs. I want it colder, I want it warmer and so on. And so we built this technology that has a device that sits next to your bed and that is where the whole intelligence lives and then there is this cover where liquid cooling is circulating. So think of having the most sophisticated liquid cooling technology ever built, but instead of being maybe for your top car or supercar, it's just for your bed and for your sleep.
Yeah, I was actually quite surprised how easy it was to assemble. Like I kind of just poured water in and it worked. Was that like a conscious decision between like liquid cooling and I guess other methods?
Yeah, I mean ultimately because water is the best material to actually absorb the body heat. Our bodies are quite hot. They're dissipating heat throughout the night. You're in bed for 6 to 9 hours every night and so the water can absorb that and remove it from the surface of the bed. So it's much more successful at achieving and maintaining cooler temperatures than air would be for instance. So that's why liquid was important to achieve our goal. But then like Matteo said it's really sophisticated because we had to also make it comfortable. When you're speaking about being on the surface of the bed you need to make it comfortable. You need to make it reliable. We wanted it to like disappear so that it wouldn't bother you going to bed and it just feels like your regular mattress that you had bought previously, but now you have these added benefits.
And going back to that couple point, I thought that was really interesting. As you said people have different temperature preferences. Is there any scientific evidence proving that you know how like sleeping with a partner kind of like affects your sleep, like your partner's sleeping habits would like change your sleep quality?
Yeah, I think we have data.
Yes. Yeah, there's definitely like a very close connection. One because of habits. So couples who are going to bed or not, like are keeping the same bedtimes or wake up times, like they will influence their sleep significantly. But even while you're in bed one thing that we have seen in our data is that women are actually heavily influenced by having their partner in bed and their HRV, so their recovery tends to be much better when they have their partner in bed than when they don't. And so you start seeing all these sort of physiological effects of having your partner with you that are very interesting. And so you would hear anecdotally women would say like, 'Oh, it's much easier for me to fall asleep with my partner with me or like I sleep better.' But then we actually see in the data that it's true. The challenge is that when you're sleeping with someone again, their bedtime routine, their wake up can bother you, their temperature preference can bother you. And those are some of the things that we're solving here by giving each partner the ability to define their own side of the bed, their microclimate, their own conditions, their own silent alarms so that they interrupt each other's sleep as little as possible.
To build on that, I wanted to talk a little bit about women's health as well because you guys launched the pregnancy mode. Tell me a little bit about you know how you guys discovered that use case and you know with like pregnancy and postpartum how the sleep quality differs you know in those periods of their life.
Yeah. Well, I think everything that we're doing in women's health is really fascinating because you know there's a lot of conversation about how little women are really studied and anything related to our health and wellness. It's sort of harder to run clinical studies for women because of the variations that we have in our hormonal cycles. And we said, well, that doesn't make sense to us. Like, let's just figure out, given that we have this incredible scale of being in consumers' homes, let's figure out a way to recruit women who want to participate in studies with us. They're already part of our user base so that we can learn how women sleep. Let's actually start contributing back to science and like sharing some of this data. So, women anecdotally would say that as they go through pregnancy, they start feeling warmer. They start feeling sometimes even sort of hot flashes or night sweats that they wouldn't have before pregnancy. And then as they go into postpartum, they have those effects again, which almost feels like a little bit of a perimenopause moment because their hormones are starting to go back down to where they were pre-pregnancy. And we saw that in the data. It was very clear. So as the pregnancy advances and every week of pregnancy, you do have different needs in terms of what environment temperature is going to keep you comfortable at sleep. So we said, well, why don't we build that? Let's actually use AI to create this algorithm that's just going to run automatically. If you tell our product what week of pregnancy you're in, what is your due date, it will just manage the temperature of your bed for you automatically. You don't have to do anything. And beyond that, we have the value that we have the data. So, we can also tell you here's how your heart rate is looking compared to pre-pregnancy benchmarks. Here's what your HRV looks like, your breathing rate, which all of those biomarkers change as a pregnancy advances. And we can benchmark you. We can tell you for the week of pregnancy you're in whether those metrics are looking quote unquote normal which also gives women some peace of mind which is so important in that phase of life.
Yeah. When you train the algorithm what is the kind of training data? Do you think like we have enough data from you know like pregnancy and just like women in general to train this algorithm to make sure it's accurate?
We do because the thing that we have is obviously all the people that sleep on the Pod we recruit from our user base. So we have women opt in.
That's what's amazing. So we don't need to go and like get that data from any external source which obviously as you said sometimes there's not enough or there's not enough of the same quality of data for us. We have this incredible product in people's homes and our user base is excited because we're going to build something that's going to actually benefit them because they end up using it.
What kind of feedback have you been hearing?
So those two cohorts, it's incredible but they're some of our like highest engaged cohorts. They just love the features. We're building something that no other technology company has done for them because it's beyond tracking. So, it's not just the data, but we're actually solving a problem for them through this response. And so, that's just amazing for them. It's like someone's finally building what I needed and that is giving me a pregnancy that means I can sleep better, a postpartum that, you know, where I can recover better. And when you think about it, in those moments in your life, sleep is so fundamental to your well-being. It really is critical. It's probably the most critical thing that you have to do.
Yeah, that's awesome. So, I guess it has been over 10 years. Looking back, are there versions of product that failed and what did you learn from that experience?
Well, it's not that there was a version that failed. I think over the years, we always kept improving what we had both because technology became better in general through AI and sensors, but every iteration now for example with the Pod, we are Pod 6, with each iteration of this device is better than the previous one.
And when it comes to the algorithm, how large is the data set behind the algorithm? What specifically is hard to replicate about those data?
Well, it's billions of hours of health data and so we collect multiple terabytes of health data per day and the only way you can do that is to be at scale. So even if you were starting a company today with a large amount of cash in the bank, it's literally something you cannot buy even because in our case we don't have off-the-shelf sensors but the sensors have been developed in house by us and so to train your algos on this specific type of sensors there is only one company in the world that can do it which is us.
And I do also want to talk a little bit about the end goal here. You know, in a podcast I think two years ago you mentioned that you wanted to solve cancer with this technology. Tell me more about just that connection. How do we get from tracking sleep data to you know solving one of the hardest diseases?
So first of all recently like probably six months ago there was a paper published by some scientists at Stanford and what they proved is that with the data of one night of sleep they can detect 130 diseases and we started seeing that in our back end meaning we start seeing correlation between sleep and diabetes and hypertension and other diseases and we start seeing an accuracy that based on an early test is close to 90% accuracy. This is something that is happening just because of AI. It's fairly incredible how AI is triaging different amounts of data and finding correlations that maybe us as humans we wouldn't have found. Then specifically for cancer we have a vision for full body scanning. We believe that while you're asleep we could scan your body and detect certain types of health conditions including certain types of cancer.
Yeah, it's really cool. At the end of the day, if you think you're standing still in the same position for six hours and you are on a surface, lying down on a surface that is really big, we have space underneath your body and potentially, you know, above your body, then you start thinking first principles in terms of technology. Okay, what can you do to a body that is standing still when you have all this space, Wi-Fi connection and electricity?
And I guess to follow up on that, you are also pursuing FDA clearance for this product, you know, as part of the preventive care and you guys published an independent study. Tell me just more about that process and why did you decide to pursue this route?
We are moving towards what we know internally we call Eight Medical. And so how can we pursue our medical mission? How can we help millions of people to really extend their life or at least maybe even save their life? One of the first steps will be through sleep apnea. Step one of a journey that hopefully will last many decades and we have a technology that is able to detect if you have sleep apnea while you're asleep sleeping on the current technology so it's a software update and then we also developed a technology that mitigates sleep apnea and we're pursuing FDA approval for both of them.
Got it. Has there been any examples of anyone you know benefiting from seeing like signs of diseases early from using your product even like in your own experience because I assume like you guys are the first users of the mattress cover. What has kind of surprised you while you were using this product in your experience like if I'm looking at your data and everything?
Well the most unexpected case is for people going through cancer. We didn't expect that, but we discovered that when they're going through chemo, they have hot flashes and the body also becomes less accurate in temperature management. And so we started seeing a lot of people with cancer buying the product. We didn't expect that. We didn't know anything about that and now we fully understand the why. And our goal is to start helping people with those conditions as well.
And there have been cases too of people who have written to you where they say, you know, I've been sleeping on the Pod for a while. And so they have their data, right? So it sort of builds this repository of what's happening while you're sleeping to your body and they were not feeling great. They checked their metrics on the Eight app and they saw that it had been a few days where something was off. I think in this case specifically it was their heart rate at rest and they decided to go to the hospital. In the case of this one person I remember, he said that he ended up needing heart surgery. And so I think that's an example of what data is doing and sort of empowering us where it might not be something that you're interested in checking every day, but the fact that you can passively track your biometrics, it becomes such an important signal when something does feel off or when we can flag a certain trend like Matteo was saying earlier and then people can go and do something about it.
Yeah. I wanted to move on to, you know, you guys building this company. Being a consumer hardware company, I think, you know, we can all admit it's pretty tough. When you guys were in YC back in 2015, I assume there weren't that many hardware companies in your batch. What are the biggest challenges of building a hardware company, a consumer hardware company in particular?
