Sleep Fitness, thermoregulation and wearables - Matteo Franceschetti, CEO of Eight Sleep.
A few months ago we spoke with Matteo about a range of interesting topics including the technology of Eight Sleep, the intricacies of sleep data, wearable technology, how to optimise sleep and what it takes to build an exceptional team. We decided to revisit that conversation and look at some of the key insights.
Matteo came up with the idea of Eight Sleep because he "couldn't understand why we spend ⅓ of our life on a dumb piece of foam whilst Elon Musk is taking us to Mars..."
He immediately understood that sleep regulation would be a huge product and there was a lot of demand for it with plenty of evidence that it would be successful. They launched in 2015, but really kicked off in 2019 after securing the funding to build the Pod, Eight Sleep's defining product.
The Eight Sleep Pod Pro and Pod Pro Cover improves sleep through temporal regulation and data
The device changes the temperature of the bed throughout the night and learns from your individual sleep quality and patterns to optimise based on how you're feeling. By tracking your tosses and turns, HRV, HR and sleep quality it can constantly learn and improve your sleep. The ambition for 3–4 years time would be to scan the entire body and be able to monitor your health with data from your performance throughout the day too.
Different sleep phases require different temperatures, and serve different purposes
Deep sleep typically requires a colder temperature whilst REM needs thermal neutrality. With Eight Sleep, people have seen up to 40% more deep sleep and a 30% reduction in tosses and turns. There is even meaningful evidence of an improvement in HRV by over 10% in the first 15 days with the Pod.
Deep sleep is for your body and physical recovery whilst REM sleep is for mental recovery and enables us to organise the information that our brain collects during the day. Light sleep is what we want to compress. Can we sleep for 6 hours but get more rest than an 8 hour sleep? This is what Eight Sleep is looking to solve.
How does thermoregulation work?
What most people don't realise is that day to day our bedroom can change significantly in temperature, enough to drastically impact our sleep. Eight Sleep engineers are working on understanding how to keep tweaking temperature to understand the ideal for deep sleep, and how it varies for each person. For example, if you trained in the evening and as a result, had an elevated body temperature when you went to sleep the Pod would be designed to optimise the temperature to enable you to optimise your deep sleep.
"We are developing a similar technology to Tesla, but not for driving a car. Instead we are building it for regulating temperature - temperature auto-pilot."
How does Terra help Eight Sleep?
By enabling Eight Sleep customers to connect their wearables, it can develop intelligent insights about activities throughout the day and the software can learn about "when you do x, then y happens." We don't know what is going on in our body and we don't know what has the best impact on us, the optimal time for when to train, when to eat could vary by each individual. By accessing health data continuously throughout the day, these insights can be unlocked.
The CGM is amongst the wearables that Matteo is most excited about
He mentioned that he noticed on himself that multiple times when he woke up in the middle of the night and was wearing his Levels CGM it was associated with a spike in glucose. He fasts all the time and cheats once a week with Pizza on a Friday night and always finds that his heart-rate was 10% overnight and took longer to drop in the morning. It would also be exciting to monitor heart-rate and HRV during the day + heart-rate recovery. To understand how fast the heart is falling after spiking is a could indicator into the efficiency.
Finally, body temperature is always an important metric, especially relevant for women as it can provide useful information about menstruation.
"The key to longevity is to spike the heart-rate above 80% of your max at least twice a week"
As expected, Matteo optimises his sleep by hitting 7–9 hours a night. He also focuses on HIIT and strength training and for nutrition sticks to the keto diet combined with fasting. The aim is to avoid sugar and decrease consumption of carbs, for glucose spikes are one of the main sources of a lot of complications
Whilst Matteo started keto 3 years ago, everybody is different and the optimal approach to nutrition will depend on a lot of factors including an individual's metabolic health.
How does Matteo deal with stress?
He practices stillness - spending 10 to 30 minutes a day in the morning doing absolutely nothing. He discovered this technique from Nadal, and whilst its similar to meditation the aim is not to do anything. Your mind starts off like a ball bouncing everywhere in the room, and then at a certain point it loses speed and slows down. This is when your "monkey brain" takes a break.
He also emphasises how important it is to sleep, he trains 6–7 times a week and takes care of his nutrition with the keto diet & fasting.
How do athletes handle their nutrition?
Matteo found that athletes tend to have a different diet based on the time of year. For example, his cousin, an elite skier, during the off season would follow a keto diet in order to keep weight low and reduce the impact on the body. However, if he had a race in the weekend he would fuel with carbs prior and then return to the keto diet afterwads.
How did Eight Sleep develop their exceptional branding?
Focus on the experience, rather than the technicalities. Matteo emphasises that given his background in sport he likes to focus on what is important to people - how can Eight Sleep generate energy for people in the morning?
"The biggest inflection point in branding was when we decided to invent sleep fitness"
That was when the team took the branding away from the traditional and towards a sleep performance brand. They had some internal pushback given it was a big jump into an undefined space but took the bold decision and went for it... obviously with a couple of sleepless nights! For Matteo it has always been about the energy you have in the morning, if people could reduce their sleep to 2 hours but still feel amazing when they wake up, that's what they would do. That's always been the vision at Eight Sleep.
Fundraising was challenging at first.
There was a moment in 2015 when a lot of successful hardware crowdfunding campaigns emerged, but a lot of them failed. So in 2017 nobody wanted to touch hardware. Matteo and his team just kept pushing, took risks and eventually found investors that wanted it as much as they did. They managed to raise from some of the biggest investors in the world including Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, and Founders Fund.
Bringing in the right people requires asking a few key questions, and understanding how much effort they put into the process.
The most impactful piece of the hiring process is looking at how people perform on a project that they are tasked with. The project depends on the department and over 90% of people don't pass because of their high standards. Potential team members are assessed on three ratings - pass, hire, strong hire and need at least 1 strong hire from the panel assessing them to make it into the team.
They also ask themselves the following questions:
- Are they adding value?
- If they started a company, would I invest?
- Am I enjoying spending time with them?
How do you invest?
The bottom line is to really just invest in the people. As long as you trust them, that is your best chance.
