The Pomp Podcast - #558 Alexandra Zatarain on How To Get Better Sleep

Episode Date: May 18, 2021

Alexandra Zatarain is the co-founder and VP of Brand and Marketing at Eight Sleep, the world's first sleep fitness company. Eight Sleep designs tech-enabled products, content and services that make people sleep fit. In this conversation, we discuss sleep science, creating a new category, marketing hardware, building a cult, turning customers into marketers, and building Eight Sleep from scratch.  ======================= Public Rec is where indoor comfort meets outdoor style. Their best-selling All Day Every Day Pant is a more stylish alternative to sweatpants, and a more comfortable alternative to jeans. From the couch to the gym to the grocery store, and everywhere in between, Public Rec has you covered. Comfort starts with a better fit. Free shipping. Free returns. Visit www.publicrec.com/pomp and use POMP at checkout to get 10% off! ======================= As one of the largest and oldest Bitcoin exchanges in the world, Kraken is consistently named one of the best places to buy and sell crypto online, thanks to our excellent service, low fees, versatile funding options and rigorous security standards -- but this is only part of the story. We’ve been on the forefront of the blockchain revolution since 2011: http://www.kraken.com ======================= Unstoppable Domains makes crypto easier by replacing your address with [AnyName].crypto. They allow you to send and receive over 70 cryptocurrencies, including BTC, ETH, and LINK with a single blockchain domain. Go to unstoppabledomains.com and get [YourName].crypto to make your crypto life easier. =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Alexandra Zatterine is the co-founder and vice president of brand and marketing at 8Sleep, the world's first sleep fitness company. 8Sleep designs tech-enabled products, content, and services that make people sleep fit. In this conversation, we discuss sleep science, creating a new category, marketing hardware, building a cult, turning customers into marketers, and building 8sleep from scratch. I'm a proud investor in 8sleep and I'm excited for you guys to hear this conversation. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our

sponsors. First up is Public Rec. Public Rec is where indoor comfort meets outdoor style. Their best-selling all-day everyday pant is a more stylish alternative to sweatpants and a more comfortable alternative to jeans. You know me. There's no way I'm reading about Public Rec right now to you unless they literally make the most comfortable clothes in the world. They seriously are that comfortable. From the couch to the gym to the grocery store and everywhere in between, Public Rec has you covered. Comfort starts with a better fit. You can get free shipping and free returns if you visit publicrec.com slash pomp. Again, publicrec.com slash pomp and use code POMP at checkout to get 10% off. Publicrec.com slash POMP and use code POMP to get 10% off the

most comfortable clothes in the world. Next up is Kraken. They're one of the largest and oldest Bitcoin exchanges in the world. Kraken is consistently named one of the best places to buy and sell crypto online thanks to their excellent service, low fees, versatile funding options, and rigorous security standards. But that is only one part of the story. They've been on the forefront of the blockchain revolution since 2011. Kraken.com. K-R-A-K-E-N.com. Kraken.com. One of the largest and oldest Bitcoin exchanges in the world. I've had Jesse, the CEO on the podcast before. They continue to support Bitcoin developers, so you know they've got a soft spot in my heart. Go to Kraken.com today and see why they've been around for so long and how they've

grown so large. Last but not least are my friends over at Unstoppable Domains. They've been longtime supporters of the podcast, so you should go support them because they support me. Unstoppable Domains has teamed up with OKEx to make crypto simpler by supporting .crypto domains on their exchange. Unstoppable Domains allows you to receive over 70 cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Chainlink with a single blockchain domain name. This makes it so much easier for millions of users to send and receive crypto by using their name like pomp.crypto that's the domain i have it's the stress-free experience needed for mainstream crypto adoption plus dot crypto domains are nfts that are stored in your wallet so you permanently own them and can

transfer to your other wallets as needed go to unstoppable domains.com and get your name dot crypto to make your crypto life easier again unstoppable domains.com and if you want us to get credit for it, go to unstoppabledomains.com slash R slash Pomp. Why do they have the slash R? I'm not sure, but make sure you type in unstoppabledomains.com slash R slash Pomp or click on the link in the description. All right. That's it for our sponsors today. If they support us, go support them. Let's get into this episode with Alexandra. I hope that you enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should

not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. We've got Alex from 8 Sleep here. Thanks for doing this. Yeah. Thank you for having me. You're living in Miami now, which is awesome. I feel like this is where everyone's moving. If you're not here, where are you? Let's just start with your story. So we've had Mateo on the podcast before. I feel like he

sits on Twitter all day long, does nothing, and just tweets nonstop about sleep is important, which it is. But you are one of the other co-founders of the business. So what did you do before 8Sleep? Yeah. So right before 8Sleep, I was living in New York and I was working at financial technology startup it was really a startup it was a really different business we were targeting building technology targeting independent wealth advisors so totally totally different space still working very much kind of like that side of you know marketing and i was kind of the right hand of the founder and ceo and then when mateo came over and you know we're married so we've been together for like 10 years pre-eight sleep and when he came over and said

well i've been thinking about this thing around sleep and he was talking to max or the co-founder around building the technology, they eventually thought, well, we want to bring this to market and we want someone who can build a brand and market it to consumers. Do you want to join us? And I don't know what was going through my mind. I think it was young and naive and I trusted them and I had never done consumer products or anything like that, even though that was my passion. It was something I definitely aspired to do. So I left my comfy job in finance in New York and we all moved to San Francisco to start the company. And so you guys moved to San Francisco specifically to start the business?

Yes. Yeah. We thought, well, it's like a hard work company. We want to be in the middle of Silicon Valley. Max, our other co-founder, was based there. And we thought, well, we want to be there. We want to network. We want to meet everyone. We want to have that experience. We thought we were going to be there forever. We're like, San Francisco is the thing. That's the place. Okay, let's pack our things. And we did a year there. It was very fun. We did a lot of amazing, very much Silicon Valley experiences. But then we ended up moving back to New York. What is the most Silicon Valley experience you had? I mean, going through YC. Oh, okay. That is literally this. Yeah, that is it. Like, you know, you're all grown up and you're like going back to the accelerator and whatnot. But that was great.

I mean, it was an amazing experience. It really changed the trajectory of the company. How was it being a hardware startup going through YC, which I think is mostly known for kind of being a software accelerator? Yeah, we actually had applied two times before and we had not gotten in. Okay, so two denials, third time's a charm. Yeah. And it was really because the third time at that point, YC was trying to get in more hardware companies. You know, so that was key because we really thought, well, we're probably not getting in because we have this business that first hasn't proven itself because we hadn't launched the product to market. And second, it probably doesn't kind of fit what most of YC investments look like.

But eventually we got in, which was great. And we got in after we had already launched on crowdfunding. So we did our first product on Indiegogo. That was a huge success. we did over a million dollars in pre-orders and so it was probably easier for them to take the bet on these people who had never built a hardware product because also like we were not really founders that had that background so there was a huge risk um but it was super fun to get in there was a small group i probably at our badge maybe 10 of companies were hardware so you know there were a few of us and we were pretty close and like there's still a bunch of us that are still alive and thriving and growing but um it was great it was really fun to be around other people who were

kind of building the same type of product how did you get a million dollars of pre-sales oh my god it was insane i figured it was all right so like this is a company with no brand nobody knows about it you have to convince people sleep is important like there's so many uphill battles there how do you do it yeah that was really the first big test i was super nervous because it was you know very few of us and we i was in charge of like launching this crowdfunding which i had never done and getting all these orders and so i spoke to as many people as possible who had done it before and you know at that time this was like early 2015 there were a bunch of companies in hardware that had found success in crowdfunding so there were people you can talk to you know and ask them questions

around like how do they do it what did they focus on and so we probably spent while max and like the like one or two engineers we had on the team were focused on building the prototypes of the product and testing and all that i was focused on building the campaign so it was probably four months that we spent doing that and that was just like 100 of my time just what's a strategy we knew we wanted to get to a million because there were a lot of companies that had gotten there so we thought we can make it and the first thing that we did was talk to as many people as possible about their sleep so we had this apartment in san francisco and that was our office it was on second street and soma this is not your apartment this is well no this was our apartment this is where mateo and

i were living so we were living in the office okay and then the the live the our bedroom was a demo room that's where we would put all of the new technology like god forbid that the engineers built something that would like i don't know shockers or something in the middle of the night we were trusting them they would put every new prototype on our bed so we were the first people to try it and then in the morning our team would arrive and we were like five people and they would arrive and everyone had a key so we had to be up and ready by like 7 a.m because we were arriving very early and then we would work in the living room so we just like moved all of furniture and like that was where eight sleep started amazing so that is where we launched our crowdfunding and

um we one of the things that we did before that was talk to as many people as possible about their sleep which is kind of funny because at the time there were no like sleep companies know that some of the beds in a box were starting and so there were some conversations around sleep but not in the way that we were approaching it we're like hey tell us everything about your sleep what are your problems what can we fix for you just you know we knew that from the reason why we started was because Mateo had his sleep problems, but we didn't know if other people had the same problem. So we had to discover that.

And so we would bring as many people as possible into that office, bring them into the bedroom, show them what we were doing, and then ask them questions. And then people would start opening up. It's like, hey, I have different preferences of temperature with my partner. And hey, I struggle with fall asleep

or toss and turn a lot. I don't like the comfort of my bed. Like whatever would come up, we were just like absorbing it. And then as we started crafting a pitch for our product, then we would bring it up to them and say like, hey, what do you think about this? And so we were basically doing our own like customer discovery and at the same time, like

this sort of market validation to understand how we should position the product we had at the time. So when we launched on Indiegogo, our pitch was we were making a mattress cover to make any bed smart. Got it. Which is, you know, super product driven, very techie, very different from what we talk about today. It was almost one of the biggest learnings actually that I've had in the process of building

eat sleep as a brand was that sort of transition between talking about it as a product like make your bed smart and more like hey achieve sleep fitness you know like what's the benefit in the end for the end user and not just like what's this geeky product which that worked amazing on indiegogo because the community definitely responded to it yeah yeah and what do you think drove that like change right was it just talking to people and then telling you like hey stop talking about like a smart bed and and something else or was it just over time as you guys kind of refine the pitch like yeah i mean it was two things one it was because that pitch stopped working so eventually like ourselves plateaued you know post yc we actually then um mateo and

max moved to china they built a team there we started manufacturing we had to ship all those pre-orders how long are they living in china oh my god they probably did like four months okay yeah um and we hired a team there and you know the people in our team um that started with us five years ago are still with us wow um there so they then ended taking took over in the process and they came back but all the while they were in china i was still in charge of continue to sell continue to bring in revenue for the company and it started becoming really hard because we probably went beyond that like super early techie adopter that supports something on indiegogo right and so we start struggling like and that's when you feel like you're pushing this huge boulder up a hill

right and like becomes really hard and eventually we um probably it was i don't know a year after we shipped our units we raced around with kosla so keith came onto our board and when he's back at kosla ventures yes and one of the things the first things that he told us is that we had to change the positioning of the company so he had that vision and and i think it was one of these other turning points for us. Good guy to listen to. 100%. And it's hard to take it because when you are so close to your company, you think you know how to talk about it. And you've also seen that work in the past. And so the ability to just take a step back and look at it from a different side and say, well, maybe that worked, but does that mean that this can actually continue to work

in the future? And it's kind of personal, right? It's like someone telling you, you should change your hair like you need to change how you talk about your company yeah otherwise you're going to fail and did you know exactly what to go change the positioning to or did you have to test that a million times so we didn't test it we went through a very interesting process where we knew that what was happening at the time is we had that product that we launched in crowdfunding and then we had launched a smart mattress version so we were kind of the first in the market to introduce a smart mattress and what started happening is the smart mattress started selling better than the accessory product because it was probably an easier concept to grasp right like people buy beds people go

online and they search for a mattress people don't go online and search for a smart mattress cover and so we had a very specific um place where we could land in terms of like just retail categories but then people started thinking was this a smart mattress company like oh this is a company that makes mattresses but they make them smart and there were a lot of companies building mattresses in the market, many of which at the time wanted to license our technology, wanted to acquire us, right? Because what we were doing was interesting, but we didn't want to get bucketed with them because that's just not who we were. We respect what they do and what they do. They do it really well, but we were born because we believe technology can help people sleep better.

We want to use deep tech to help people sleep better. Okay. So this is a good segue for a second. Right now, people see it as a mattress. You can buy either the mattress or you can buy what you call the pod, which is basically something that goes over an existing mattress. And people look at it and they're like, oh, this is amazing. I sleep on it. I can make it hot or cold. It's like this thermoregulation, which is a word I learned from you guys. I feel smart now. And it makes you sleep better. And when I first, I think the very first time I talked to Mateo, he told me, he's like, I'm going to make it so that you can literally sleep in six hours. I feel like you got eight. And I was like, you're crazy. And then as I've

kind of know you guys uh now i've invested in the business and kind of really understood it there's this whole vision of the mattress is just a starting point right so maybe kind of just walk through like if we fast forward 25 years from now like what is that thing that you're trying to build so that people kind of understand the difference between a mattress company and then this like sleep fitness company yeah yeah so that's why you say we're a sleep fitness company because we are building technology for sleep fitness and sleep fitness is you know how do we make you, get you to that state of overall health and well-being that is fueled by optimal sleep. So the way that we see it, if we think 25 years from now, we obviously want anyone in the world

to be sleeping on a pod on our technology. And what that technology will be able to do is to give you the best recovery possible every single night to the point where it's so optimized that you could potentially sleep six hours and get the same level of recovery you're getting now if you get eight hours, which is wonderful, right? Because the average American sleeps like six hours and 40 minutes a night. So most people are not making enough time for sleep anyways. So how can we compress it? How do we optimize it? And that can be done through a lot of things around the environment, right? Through the temperature regulation, through light, noise, oxygen control, et cetera. So there's a lot of things that like physical technology paired with real-time data

to personalize it around you can achieve. And then there's this other side of it, which is, well, sleep is a core part of health. You're spending a lot of time in bed, even if you're spending six hours every night what else can we do while you're sleeping to save your life and that's kind of what someone recently on twitter said eight sleep has this act one which is sleep act two is is health and that really is the long term like the future of eight sleep because while you're in bed there are many things that one we already collect about your health right now we track seamlessly without you wearing anything your heart rate at rest respiratory rate heart rate variability we could see with that data things like arrhythmia, sleep apnea, snoring. So any conditions that would show

in your respiratory biometrics or your heart rate. But there are other things we can add physically around your bed, around your bed frame to do other things. Can it scan your body? Can it do an ultrasound? Can it use radar technology to identify things that may be growing inside your body and your tissues and your muscles, inside your organs? So there's the technology that's being developed by many other companies not necessarily eight sleep right but like it's already there it's proven we can bring it into the eat sleep ecosystem and start doing health diagnostics or um building a blueprint of how your longevity is going how your health is evolving as you age which is kind of a really new concept for people to think about their beds and that's why we focus

on sleep now but that is going to happen eventually i think the two things that you know as i've thought more about it's like okay like what are you guys doing differently than most other people right? And I always joke that outsized returns come from literally doing something different and being right. We'll see if you're right. I think you are, but we'll see. And there's two different things are one, this belief that you can actually use the dead time, right? So if I sleep, let's say eight hours a day, right? That's one third of my life. I'm going to end up sleeping. All right. If I'm literally just sleeping, that's not very productive, right? It's productive for me from a health perspective, but there's nothing else happening. What you're essentially

saying is like, well, what can we do to you while you're sleeping? That is not disruptive to your sleep. It may actually enhance your sleep and also can provide other values. So this is the whole idea of, uh, can we scan your body? Can we, you know, do certain things that, uh, are health related that doesn't require you anything other than, Hey, go to sleep, but we'll provide all of this other, uh, kind of output. The second thing is in order to do that, you guys are thinking about kind of sleep environment, not as the bed, right? Most people think of it as just a physical bed that you lay on maybe they get really crazy and they think about like oh i should have some like blackout blinds to make it dark right but like that's pretty much the extent and and maybe

like the uh 401 level college course is like hey have like some music or something to go to sleep to right but there's just really not that much what you guys are really thinking about is everything from you know the oxygen in the room right and so when you start to think about like the nuance and kind of the intricacies of that you start to say like well what would it almost be like an elite athlete, if you were going to put them into an environment and say, this is the absolutely perfect environment for full recovery so that you can compete at the highest level with your physical performance, well, there's literally hyperbaric chambers, there's oxygen injections, like all kinds of crazy stuff that happens. But that is so expensive and so hard for anyone to

replicate at home. What if you can commoditize that and then bring it to kind of a mass consumer audience right exactly and to me like if that happens you literally change the way that humans are productive because you can literally drastically increase their output when they're awake yeah that's the bet exactly that's the bet is like people who embrace eight sleep right now are because they want to improve their performance whatever that they do there's a lot of pro athletes that sleep on it a lot of celebrities and ceos and investors but it's more than that right it's like there are a lot of say average people who are looking to feel better during the day and that they've come to understand that sleep is important for that and eventually what

eight sleep as a brand is building is a movement where how do we bring that same level of like knowledge and consciousness around sleep to other people who may not realize yet that sleep is that important how do we educate them how do we bring them to join this movement and eventually they will embrace our technology and that technology will give them great recovery and eventually could save their lives. Yeah. And, and it's pretty crazy when you start to think about this whole idea of like scanning the body. Right. And you could literally say, Hey, uh, there's something wrong. You should go get it checked out. Right. And then doctors can start to use this information and like all that kind of stuff. Um, all right. How the hell have you guys built this brand?

Right. So I think that most people, at least on Twitter have heard of eight sleep. Uh, you have a good fast-growing business but you're not some incumbent that's got you know multiple billions of dollars to deploy from a marketing campaign every year how do you kind of punch so far above your weight like how have you guys done this yeah so we go back to that story where it was I don't know 2017 2018 I got lost in the timeline but we bring in Kozla Ventures we bring in Keith he joins our board and he says you need to reposition the business and I go back to that point because that determines so much of what we do now as a brand. We went through this repositioning exercise with this approach that is this sort of like DNA-based approach where you go

and look back inside the company and you look at why you started. Now, there are many theories out there and like, how do you position a brand? How do you build that? And there may be the ones that go and test it and go and find the open white spaces and markets. And they put in different messaging statements in front of customers and they ask for feedback, right? For us, it was from the inside out. It wasn't from the outside in. And I think that has a lot of value. I really like that. I think that's very authentic. And so especially when you are a business that is still guided by the founders, that makes so much sense because there's a reason why these founders took the bet of starting that business. And so there must be something that's really strong

within them of like why they want to build this company. So what really came out of that exercise for us is Matteo's original kind of vision of what sleep could be and why technology can be valuable for sleep, which you just summarized, right? It's like the ability to use technology to personalize everything around the environment, what that means for sleep, so you could sleep better, you could be fully optimized, and that would mean better recovery. And because he had this past as an athlete himself when he was young, he was a competitive ski racer, competitive tennis player. He was a race car driver. There's always been this sort of a bit of like performance athletic edge to how he has built the culture of the company, not necessarily a company for

athletes. It's just the mindset of like thinking like an athlete, a person who always wants to be better, who invests in their body, who takes care of themselves, right? So with all of those thoughts in mind, then we came up with the category of sleep fitness. We defined that what we're actually building was not really something in just like the sleep space in general which you know if you look at that space there could be a lot of companies in bedding mattress pharmaceuticals and all those things a lot of services for sure but that we were in this sort of other space and we wanted to build our own space in the category of sleep fitness and we love the idea of building our own category because it makes it really fun to kind of set your own rules we then embrace that

concept and we brought it into everything that we do and how we talk about the company, right? We have a sleep fitness score and we defined what is that, how is it measured, and we work with our scientific advisory board for that and to understand and how to also like bring it into the fundamentals of how actually the science of sleep works. And it took a long time to get to where we are now in terms of, like you said, people on Twitter are knowing about eight sleep, but the biggest things um that drove that were our consistency staying very consistent in how we speak about the business we are a health and wellness company focused on sleep fitness we use technology to help you sleep better and just staying very on on brand right and like saying

the same message everywhere where we could and everywhere we were going to talk about the company how we were talking about on our website how we were talking about our products and the second is product love like there's not much you could do like if you're building a brand but people don't love your product, it's not really going to go that far, unfortunately. So you just want to make sure that you're also focused on that as you think about making something people will talk about. Yeah. And it feels like you've really leaned into this idea that turning the customers into the marketing team, right? Everybody who sleeps on it, they're screenshotting the app, they're posting it. I see Mateo every morning, he's going and commenting and kind of being

competitive of like, what was your sleep score last night? I know that you've posted many, many times about just like what people are actually doing with it and you have all these great customer testimonials how much of that is like you have to tell the customers to do this versus just like literally the product is so good that they love it and they want to go do this at the beginning when we first launched the pod which was in 2019 that was the first version of the pod and that was also another kind of turning point for the company um we we didn't have to ask people or we didn't really ask people but we had some early adopters who loved the product so much that would do it for us so they were kind of in a way because they had a personal connection to us

and maybe there's some of them were our investors right they were kind of those early advocates that really supported us out there and maybe they had a decent enough following that other people were listening and then what started happening which is interesting and i'm sure many other companies have seen that is that then other people catch on to that you know they see that there may be this influential person talking about it and so maybe they want to talk about it too because it says something about who they are i think that's one of the other very interesting things about building a brand as a movement is like you want to build something that people want to up themselves into they want to be a part of because it says something about who they are and that's

definitely how we think about eight sleep like if you sleep on a pod it says something about you um it says that you're a certain type of person that wants to achieve certain things take care of themselves um probably wants to perform better probably a little bit competitive probably somewhat athletic or into fitness into health and so that's why people are so open to share their sleep stats to say that they sleep in a pod um because they believe that they're part of something bigger than just the bed they sleep on it's almost this like identity um that they've been able to incorporate literally a physical product but it's not so much the product itself is what the product stands for.

Correct. Yeah. Okay. Now you supercharge this with, I'll call them marketing stunts that probably cheapens what actually you guys are doing. The one I want to talk about

is during Miami Tech Week, which I don't know what the official Miami Tech Week is at this point. I know there was a bunch of debate about this, but there was a bunch of parties recently. And one of them was at a house on the Venetian Islands. For those that aren't familiar with Miami,

it's literally an island that's 30, 40 houses on. and it was in the backyard which is right up against the water and we're all there there's i don't know a couple hundred people and next thing i know there's a float that floats on over and it just has a massive like lcd screen and literally there's an eight sleep ad that ends up being on this lcd screen uh that was cool but then later on there's a photo that starts to circulate uh on twitter and the photo is basically this person who hosted the party has like a neon sign i forget what it said exactly in their backyard but you somebody took a photo with

the neon sign and then behind it is his eight sleep at and it was like this like you know great photo that everyone wanted to share and be like hey come to miami miami's great whatever how does that come about like that is so such a good moment how did you guys do that it was it was fast it was one of those ideas that you're just like okay should we do it or not this is kind of crazy does it make sense does it distract us right you're a startup you're doing a million things every day bigger fish to fry every day or so you think but it was material he had this idea he was just yeah like driving around his Vespa in Miami like he does because he's Italian and we'll talk about the Vespa yeah and so he saw floating billboards on in the bay and um this party was

coming and you know it was kind of this this big thing and we knew that there were going to be a lot of interesting people there and he thought well what if could we put a floating billboard in front of someone's like private residence which is very different than just running them on the bay and we ran it by the organizers of the party and they said yeah do it do it like don't ask for permission just do it and we we did it and we did it i'm not gonna call who it is but i literally know exactly who said that and so that was the only person that knew that was going to come up and oh they were the only person yeah yeah no one else knew we're like we kept it secret and by the way this isn't the person who owns the house no no no so we thought about that we're like well is

the owner of the house is going to get kind of like mad at us because we're covering the view you know if you want to show of their homes yep and what view they have but ended up being fine people loved it and they remember it yeah and so one of the things i've heard people say before and i think it's fascinating it's almost like the reason why you would buy a billboard right just like let's say in times square or wherever it's not actually for the impressions of people in the bill uh in times square at the moment it's for the photos that then go online they get the virality online that felt almost similar here right is like hey there's this thing it's almost like a kind of like a party trick right where people like oh look at this thing you know whatever

they take a photo and they share it online and that's exactly what happened my question is who took the photo did you guys get the perfect photo no i don't know who took that original photo but yeah it was interesting and and that is the whole point is what you're saying there's a lot of brands that have done it very successfully where maybe they brand coffee cups yeah right and then people take like a photo of their cup like there's so many ways to do it we're like how do you insert yourself into culturally relevant moments because the other thing that we thought about is well what do we say in that billboard we are a brand that stands for sleep fitness i mean i go to bed every night by 10 p.m we were just talking about it right so i sleep my eight to

nine hours i don't stay up late i probably left that party at like 10 p.m that night which was like late for me so i'm not going to put a billboard there that's going to make you feel guilty for having fun right so it also has to play into something that's relevant for the crowd without it being like the party pooper brand that's telling you to go to bed now yep so there's a lot of considerations to have what did it say it said some nights are worth a late night ah so eight sleeps kind of giving you this a lot of people the party sleep in a pod so it's giving you permission to stay up late have fun some nights are worth it how many nights like there's they are going to have and you want to make the most of it and yeah maybe tomorrow you'll catch

on your sleep fitness so uh one of the first times uh plenty of myself you and Mateo go to dinner um we get I don't know about halfway through dinner I think we met around like 7 7 30 and all of a sudden I don't know Mateo very well at the moment I don't know you super well at the moment uh but I can just tell like Mateo's getting like like antsy right and I'm like is he excited about dessert like you're like what's going on and then I realize he's literally checking his he's like i gotta go because i gotta go to sleep yeah yeah and i just it it was amazing to me of like people who don't know you guys i think are like oh yeah sleep what like whatever but like you're very very regimented right you're really serious about this uh you test all of the products

right some people may have seen online like literally i think there was one where you were like hooked up to a bunch of machines before you went to sleep and so like how much of this is just you're building a company that serves yourself versus, oh, we think there's a need in the market or are those two things the exact same? They're kind of the same. So what was interesting is when I started in my early years with Eight Sleep, yeah, I was young. I don't know. I was 24 or 25 and I've always been a good sleeper. So it wasn't something that was solving my problem, right? Like I fall asleep in a second. I sleep pretty well. But the more I started learning about sleep and the science of it and you know you read the research and you read the books and you see it

in the data you realize really how valuable it is right and and you see that if you invest in your sleep now it's going to pay huge dividends in the future not just in how you're feeling today so you want to make that investment and so for me it's also kind of personal and that sounds like it's the best thing i can do to take care of my health i prefer to have a good night's sleep than working out if i have to sacrifice a workout for a whole week because i need to just get more hours of sleep for that week every single night that is actually better for you sleep should come first people don't realize that interesting you grew up in mexico yeah uh where i grew up in tijuana okay i can't say it like that so i'm gonna let you say tijuana is okay um for those

that don't know tijuana is not like the greatest place in the world uh you've told me some stories about some pretty crazy stuff like literally uh as a young kid people are trained to not go certain places or hey here's what happened if gunmen show up uh i think one time you told me like people would literally check twitter to see like where shootings are happening in streets whatever what about your childhood do you think kind of like prepared you for actually building a company right because i think what's so fascinating about uh you and mateo specifically i know you two best out of the company is neither one of you are from the united states yeah you both have very kind of distinct and different yet interesting backgrounds and kind of journeys to

starting the business. But when I look and I say, okay, like who are these people? It makes a ton of sense, right? So like, how do you think about like your childhood coming to the United States, like all of that in terms of like helping you build a business? Yeah, I grew up in Tijuana for 18 years of my life. So I left when I left for college and I honestly had a great childhood. I think I was just privileged that I grew up middle-class. My dad was an entrepreneur. My mom's a physician um and as i when i was young you don't realize when you're young you know your parents are kind of taking care of most things but as you start becoming older and you're a teenager you want to start going out with your friends right you kind of start learning the tricks and

what i'd say is certainly the part of tijuana i grew up in was great it was safe thankfully knock on wood nothing ever happened to my family but when you start growing up and expanding your horizons within your city um you realize that you always need to be cautious and so you learn a lot of these sorts of tricks right which i think what then it translates into as an entrepreneur is you become very kind of resourceful you have to figure shit out all the time like what are some of the tricks well i think there's there's things around making things happen right when you grow up in a country that certainly is plagued with corruption in general as it happens in mexico um there are there's no is never an answer there's always a way to get things done right so you learn that

And it's a way of life. It's a way of life. Yeah, yeah. And if you don't operate in that way of life, like you're never going to get things done. And so that just becomes second nature to you. We're like, there will always be a way for me to figure this out. Who else can I talk to? And to me, that's something that's so natural now where like when I'm faced with a problem,

I always think, well, there must be another solution. And I really think it comes from growing up in that environment. And obviously you see it in your parents too, right? Because that's the way they operate. That's the way they build their businesses and everything else. so that is one and then the other key trick obviously is around like personal safety which when you then start traveling when you start living alone as a young woman in many other places it just it's also second nature to you because that's how you grew up right from how do you

dress with things you carry showing off you know just all of these sorts of things are part of how you live when you live in places like this and Tijuana has gone through many different waves where you know the city has been great and maybe the city has gone through tougher times and so you just learn to adapt and you change your life as well which for us you know 2020 adapting to just maybe being at home not going out and not going out to parties not going out to dinners was normal actually my last year of high school was kind of like that because the city was going through a really tough time there were a lot of difficult situations with cartels fighting for territory and whatnot and so we couldn't really go out to like clubs you know you're legally you

go into mexico when you're 18 but like we couldn't do it and so you have to get together with your friends at home and you have to be careful which treats you take at night to go get back to your own home because there may be things happening so um you build the sort of resilience and ability to adapt to any circumstance because the world around you is really crazy it's kind of this magical surrealism that just occurs in places like mexico and a lot of countries in latin america as well but it's almost you know what's crazy to me it's like it's just again a way of life it's right of life like i think people the word cartel in the united states they think like narcos and uh what they've seen on television and they're like oh my god this is like horrendous and then when

you actually learn about it it's almost like wait a second this is almost like a shadow form of the police yeah right like to some degree right and it's its own business right it's its own operation it's a business that exists there certainly when you grow up in tijuana i remember very clearly when i was a child and my mom would ask like there's maybe a need kid in school and maybe like you're becoming friends like what do their parents do and at the beginning i would think my mom's just kind of being elitist or something you know but then i realized that she was doing this out of safety because you don't want to become friendly with anyone who may have any ties to you know which there are people like that in the city and they have money and so they end up putting

their kids in the good schools and so it happens and is it you don't want to become friends with them just because you could get caught up in something associations you may be you know there were a lot of stories growing up like you may be at the wrong party you may be in the wrong home as a kid if you're a kid and you go to somebody's birthday party for example and then all of a sudden there's bad situation yeah it's um it's just a very different life right uh the other thing is you and Mateo are married uh Polina and I work together a lot uh and we over time have learned how to do that well and enjoy it etc uh you guys not only work together you live together in the same house and the one of the first things you guys ever told us that i was like wait what like

how do they do that is you actually do your one-on-ones on zoom yeah so i want to pick on that specific thing because i think it is a perfect example of like the way you guys have structured the business right and so most people who know anything about remote work know that if you're going to do remote kind of optimized company everyone has to act like they're remote and so usually it's in an office right everyone should be on the computer don't have you know 80 of the meeting in person and then 20 of people calling in it's kind of it's this weird thing um but literally you guys are in two different rooms in the same house right doing this so walk through like how you think about operating the business uh being married also living together

and now everyone goes to remote within a year like there's just so many moving parts there and it could be super complex but it actually feels like you guys have not only navigated it well but actually have optimized the business you know in this new environment yeah so before starting eight sleep mateo and i had worked on a bunch of like things on the weekend like we never talked about it we never said well are we the type of people who are going to build a business together it just happened and we have different skill sets and so we were just kind of complimenting each other we were coming up with ideas it was usually him coming up with ideas because like his brain's just on all the time. As he drives around his Vespa in New York. Yeah. And he's just like

thinking about stuff all the time. Like, what do we do this? What do we do that? I love that we can make fun of him and he's not here to defend himself. But yeah, it's like us driving around the Vespa. I love you, Matteo. And so we were building things and we were just, yeah, having fun. It was like things that were going nowhere. And then eventually he had this idea of Eight Sleep. So when we started the company and I mean, it was him and Max are the co-founder and he invited me. They said, well, do you want to join? It was actually interesting. It was Max who invited me because it was different coming from max than coming from him right got it um so it's max who had the conversation with me and said like do you want to do this and we talked about it and

everything so i still remember that and did you appreciate that it was max or did i definitely appreciate it because you know it's it's hard if it's like it's the two of them you you may you may not know if it was mateo pushing to have me on board right so it was important for me to make sure that max wanted me on board that he didn't feel like he was compromising just because yep this was his friend i was exactly um and trust me i'm pretty sure they're very happy that you and i'm very happy to be with them and and that was one of the key things for me to join them actually and i was very honest with them up front i said i have never done what you're asking me to do i know i have certain skills to do it and i have a passion for it but i'm doing it because

i trust you because you're trusting me and if i ever cannot fulfill what we need out of this role I'll step aside right so and I talk about this often because I think a lot of founders get cut up in that sort of ego we're like I'm the founder I'm here I deserve to be in this role and I want to be the chief whatever and for us it's always been this very open turned relationship of like we're not here to take on the role we're here to build the business and whatever we have to do like we'll bring in the best people possible to do it yeah and that has happened many times in the company but one of the key things that now looking back I think we did really well Matteo and I in terms of bringing our doing this business together and that we have the relationship

was that we don't think about this company, and it certainly isn't. It's not a family business. So it's not our family company, right? And that reflects in a few things. First is the fact that even though now we very openly talk about the fact that we are a couple, it wasn't something we made part of the identity of the company early on, right? We didn't want people to just know us because of that. And we also had other co-founders.

And so having other people around certainly helped because it wasn't just the two of us. And then lastly, bringing other executives into the business as soon as they were needed and as early as possible. So that at that point, also one of the things Matteo talks a lot about is that there's no distinction between the founders and the executives other than potentially your ownership of the business and maybe have a seat at the board, right? But we're all executives here. We all have a function that we have to fulfill and we should all be judged in the same way.

We shouldn't get special treatment just because you were here earlier or you're the founder. And all of those things have certainly helped in terms of professionalizing the relationship Mateo and I have because at the end of the day, he's the CEO and I lead growth and marketing. So he's my boss. I report to him. And so then the other things we started doing was how do we manage our one-on-ones? How do we manage the conversations when they are easier or they're tough in terms of making decisions between the CEO and the head of marketing, right?

So as much as we can, just treating it in the same way that he does with everyone else. So you cannot bring those conversations to the dinner table because you're not having that conversation with someone else at their dinner table. When you talk to Joe Rondo, who's our head of ops, right? You don't go into his dinner table and start asking him things about work. Obviously, for us, it spills over into many more hours of the day because we love what we do. We talk about work all the time.

But there are certain moments where we try to keep it just separate because we have to. Otherwise, the relationship would suffer. Yeah. And I think you guys have said this publicly before. What is the saying like on WhatsApp? She's my wife on Slack. She's my co-founder. Right. We're separate channels, separate channels. And it almost is like you're putting yourself in a different mindset. Right. In terms of how you're going to talk to somebody. But it feels like that has been really beneficial and actually made this not only work from a work perspective, but also, you know, from a relationship standpoint. Right. it also like provides this environment that allows you to be husband and wife not co-founders all yeah i mean you know when you're building a business your business is everything so i'm also always honest about that like you're probably think both of us are thinking about business all the time so you have to think about your relationship too and like how you maintain that because it's just as important so they're both going to take work and for us it's been

very beneficial actually to do this together we always think like i don't know if we would still be here with the relationship we have if we're not building the company together because it's been a lot of years it's been a lot of ups and downs and that ability to understand each other right like if he needs to take a call like any second no matter what we're doing no matter how important it is for personal life i know exactly why it matters to the business right now i don't even need to ask i know what he's going through and he knows the same for me yep and so it's been an asset instead of a liability even though a lot of people talk about like oh you don't want to invest in people who are related and companies that are founded by people who are married,

because what if they break up? Actually, there's no plan B for people who are building things together. The whole family is invested in that. There's no one else's salary or no one else's company is the backup. That's it. And so you're giving it all. I work with my wife, obviously, and many of my brothers. And we joke all the time. Literally, my brother will walk in the room. we can talk shit to each other we can go at it and then two minutes later it's like yeah you want to go get lunch right and it's just like there's um there's this like uh there's no walking away yeah like no matter what we say to each other or do or whatever like you're still gonna be my brother and so what ends up happening is you almost like get over the like social

awkwardness and like when people first come around us and they see it they're like oh my god right like listen i've been i grew up with these guys like literally we have fist fought many many times over the years. Well, that's another thing too, is that these people know you better than anyone else. And so I find that to be one of the most challenging parts in a good way, because with Mateo as my manager, no one knows me better in the world right now than he does. And so he's able to push my buttons in all the right way, also in the wrong ways, but I find it to be a positive because I want to be challenged. I want to grow. And I can do the same with him. If he's facing a problem. I know what's going through his mind, what he's thinking, what worries him, what concerns

him. And so you become a great compliment because you know each other in a personal way, which is something you always want to get to know when you're working with someone, when you're managing someone, when you're developing them. And it's hard to do. Most people won't open up. So you have that already. You know your siblings. It's just honesty. You can be honest. And I feel like most people aren't honest with each other. Speaking of honesty, one of the investors that you guys have is keith raboy uh who by all counts is one of the best investors probably in history in uh technology i can't believe i'm saying this because he he might he might tweet that quote um but he's always honest right he's very direct uh and i think that that's off putting to some people

but actually founders that he works with um and people who really respect him see that as like one of the superpowers that he has uh what is it like working with him and like what have you guys learn from him oh yeah he was definitely honest i can definitely think a lot of times in board meetings when he has said things that you know it's always respectful so i appreciate that but i what i like about the honesty is similar to what i was describing with your manager knowing you is that it pushes you it challenges you to think right when someone tells you something's really good or something's mediocre and you are able to take that in in the right way and process it then you'll come out the other side doing things much better i think that's what we have seen um in our

relationship with keith in the past years which has have been quite a few and it there's been so many times when his feedback has been crucial in terms of just how we're approaching different sides of the business and it feels like uh you guys and keith work so well together because when he's honest you guys understand that he's being honest because he really cares about the success of the business right it would be easy for somebody to get forget keith for a second just anyone being you know honest with them and they get offended 100 right and instead it's like no actually we're all on the same team here right and so like we need that honesty right you and mateo have it you guys have it with keith other investors etc um last question before we get into

the rapid fire is miami you guys are here yes full time uh you moved in when august of last year september yeah we started like around a year ago we started coming here yeah and then permanent move was yeah like november okay november uh one pro one con of miami so far oh my god there's there's definitely a lot of pros i've been loving it i was worried that i would miss new york but it's been great um biggest pro i definitely have to say the sunshine because i had a lot of issues in new york when like you had gray days and it would definitely affect my mood and i feel like here i'm just much more energized i want to do things i work more just you know good or bad it just gives me more energy so i really really appreciate the sunshine that is here in florida

year round one con chinese food i haven't found really good chinese food so i am missing that and there are a handful but there are not as many as you would find in new york have you heard about the chinese food taste test that i did no i went to uh he posted this is fine uh shervin pishivar and i had lunch and uh he ordered a bunch of different chinese foods and literally it was like okay this is chinese food location a b c whatever and we tried them all we were trying to figure out what the best one is because nobody knows what is the best chinese food in miami so if you were out there and you know good chinese food in miami please let us know i have a whole group of friends that are looking for 100 um all right three questions then you could ask me one to

finish uh most important book you've ever read oh i'd probably say when breath becomes air oh that's a great one because when i read it my dad had just passed away and so it just became kind of like i was young when he passed away and i think it really shaped me and how i think about spending a bit more time with family and like people you love and like the process that people may be going through as they know they're going to die soon like it was just this very it just meant so much to me to read something from that other side and realizing i maybe should have made more questions and had more conversations and wanted to make sure that like that doesn't happen with other people in my life before they leave yeah that's a great answer i love that book uh

second question is your sleep schedule i usually ask people about their sleep schedule you said eight to nine hours yes uh what else do you do other than sleep on the mattress and pod uh in terms of trying to get good sleep yeah it varies so i don't drink alcohol um and then it varies kind of the tips and tricks maybe sometimes i'll do some cbd melatonin gummies if i'm just like feeling like i cannot unplug in the evening so i'll do that maybe an hour before i go to bed and it definitely helps relax um i use my phone up to the last second like i'm in bed so i you know it's hard to tell people not to do it so i do it but if you can avoid the tv i actually find the tv to be much more stimulating um so just you know try to turn off the tv 10 minutes before go

to bed relax read a book maybe read on your phone but um just the consumption of like media and shows and news can be very stressful in the evening got it and then uh the cbd melatonin is just like that's kind of like something that's soothing that then puts you to sleep yes got it uh third question is aliens are you a believer or non-believer oh god i'm definitely a believer i mean there has to be something else out there in the universe come on yeah do you think that we'll ever come in contact with them i think so really yeah oh see i think either because they're coming here we're going there i mean if we want to go and colonize mars like eventually you think there's aliens on mars well maybe somewhere else yeah the whole mars thing uh

i've said for a long time like that thing's so big like how do we know if there's water or not whatever and now like over the last two or three years like we've got a helicopter that people are flying there like they found some ice right like they're somehow being able to turn the air into oxygen like yeah there's just you can see like oh wait there's a lot more here than people really realized and so uh i'm much more bullish i think on mars colonization than people yeah and actually sleep's going to be a big challenge in mars why because the day length is different and so adjusting our circadian cycles to interest that and mars is going to be a challenge and then there's the other thing of like getting people there and there's like trying to get people into

a state of like sleep so like only putting you to sleep so that you make the journey and then like waking you up there like there's all these interesting things and they've been studying sleep nasa has been for a while now and see like it's going to be a challenge so apparently people who are the night owls are going to be able to adjust better interesting the sleeping on the way there is what it takes probably a couple days to get there yeah i don't know if a couple more but yeah or maybe weeks right so like would they like put like drug you to go to sleep or just like hey sleep wake up like screw around in the spaceship but it's hard right because like we are um our our cycle is is so much determined by the sun like we're creatures

of nature and so what happens when you get us out of there like you probably have to have some technology maybe a pod who knows that is getting into those cycles of light exposure that you need so that you can get in and out of waking and sleep cycles for the duration of the trip um yeah there's like a lot of those considerations but it's interesting that sleep is one of those unsolved pieces for humans to be able to adapt to mars because you could bring food you could do a lot of other things but how do you make sure that our metabolisms adjust is is a big one eight sleep sleeping for mars i've got a new tagline uh what question do you have for me to end this what are you most excited about for this year most excited for this year um i don't know there's so

much uh i would say just spending time with friends and family like i feel like after the last 12 months or so everyone is just like dude this was crazy right and some people still saw their family a little bit some saw them not at all uh some people literally like left wherever they lived and moved back home or whatever so everyone had different experience but i think just like getting back to normal a little bit of like whenever you want to go see somebody you can you don't have to worry about like oh is there a flight there oh do i have to wear a mask oh do i i have to make sure that i have a vaccination or like like once we get kind of past all this and it's just more of like okay alex like what do you want to do do you want to go somewhere do you want

to see somebody like you can do that you don't have to worry about the restrictions i feel like that'll just kind of like feel like okay like like we're past all of this yeah um and then you just get to enjoy life i agree i just saw my family after a year and a half so definitely felt that yeah it's been a while it's better i went back to tijuana to visit them so yeah it was do they have eight sleep pods uh my sister does because she's in la okay um but my my mom still lives in mexico so she was just asking me for one earlier oh we got mom converting as i was there and i was sleeping in her bed with her and i'm like this bed sucks you gotta get a pod i love it uh where can people find you on the internet or find eight sleep twitter twitter is definitely the place find

me i'm easy to find there and eight sleep.com if you want to know anything about our product go get it aids sleep i sleep on it every night it's amazing my brother actually i think yeah my brother has uh one of them for sure and uh the first night he slept on he sent me a screenshot of the app and it said 100 sleep score and he was like like you know i'm the best like whatever and i was like dude everyone says that the first night and then he was like wait really so i don't convince for a while that he wasn't a good sleeper that it was just like a uh a bug in the app but uh it was just to get you excited the first night oh and then you get into it and then you want to keep up. Then the next time it's 60%. All right. Eight sleep.com. Thank you so much for doing this.