This Week in Startups - Oura CEO Harpreet Rai on improving sleep, NBA partnerships, hardware & more PLUS the Instagram Kids debacle | E1213

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

Jason gives his take on Facebook's Instagram Kids initiative (0:53), then, Ōura's CEO Harpreet Rai discusses how sleep & recovery scores are calculated (25:09), how Oura works with the NBA & enterprise to keep organizations healthy (50:49), and more! Pod Notes: http://bit.ly/e1213tnotes

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Terms and conditions apply. And Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR-C-O-WD.com slash twist. Welcome to this week in startups. We have an amazing show for you today. we have the CEO of the ORA ring. If you don't know the ORA ring, they're selling hundreds of thousands of these products.

It's making millions and millions of dollars. And the ORA ring tracks your sleep and your readiness, kind of like a fit bit, but probably a little more dope. It's an independent company, and we have the CEO on the show today. But before we get to that, I thought I would check in with the insanity coming out of Facebook yet again. Here we go again.

If you don't know, attorney generals from 44 states have urged Facebook not to launch a kids only, which means 13 years old and under, version of Instagram. And in a letter sent to Mark Zuckerberg on May 10, attorneys from these 44 states urge the Facebook CEO to abandon plans to launch a version of Instagram for kids under 13. The letter was submitted by the National Association of Attorneys Generals after the Facebook CEO to abandon plans to launch a version of Instagram for kids under 13. The letter was submitted by the National Association of Attorneys Generals after BuzzFeed News first reported in March that Facebook was planning to launch Instagram for kids. In the letter, pretty straightforward, Facebook has historically failed to protect the welfare of children on its platforms. I would argue, and adults will get into that. The attorneys general have an interest in protecting our youngest citizens and Facebook's plans to create a platform where kids under the age of 13 are encouraged to share content online is contrary to that. interest. It appears that Facebook is not responding to a need, but instead creating one as this

platform appeals primarily to children who otherwise do not or would not have an Instagram account. Facebook's response, a Facebook spokesperson said the company has just started exploring a version of Instagram for kids and said the company is committing today not to show ads in the product. Quote, we agree that any experience we develop must prioritize their safety and privacy, and we will consult with experts in child development, child safety, and mental health, and privacy advocates to inform it, the spokesperson said. We also look forward to working with legislatures and regulators, including the nation's attorneys general. Google actually owns a service YouTube for kids, and there are ways for children to lie about their age and access the main site. I actually

use the YouTube for kids in our household. It is incredibly well-groomed. I haven't seen anything. even close to being crazy. It's a whitelisted app. Yet in 2019, YouTube reached a $170 million settlement with the FTC and New York Attorney General over claims. It illegally earned money from collecting the personal information of kids without parental consent, allegedly violating COPA.

If you don't know COPA, that's a children's online privacy protection act. Following the settlement, YouTube said in a blog post that it will limit data collection on videos aimed at children, regardless of the age of the user, which makes total sense. And, you know, the situation here is, do you trust Instagram and Facebook? The answer to that is no. You should not trust this company.

They have been caught with their hand in the cookie jar over and over and over again. So it's a company you simply cannot trust. And there's a long list of fines that they've gotten that are absolutely horrendous. Cambridge Analytica, another scandal. The list goes on and on. their groups product, which outed gay people who were added to groups without their permission. Facebook has the worst track record of protecting privacy and, in general, thinking about their users.

And this will become an app for grooming children. You know that child predators will get on the app. It is a recipe for disaster. And children should not be on social media. In fact, anybody who uses any form of social media will tell you that it is a negative, more than a positive in many instances in their lives, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Clubhouse, etc. These are really gnarly places that can cause anxiety,

feelings of inadequacy. And I would say we'll look at this historically in 10 or 20 years, like the jewel. This is the jewel releasing pineapple, pinocalada, blueberry cheesecake, whatever flavors, those horrible individuals launch, targeted at children. This is the exact same thing. Arguably, worse, because kids, I guarantee you, will be targeted on this platform and attacked, and I guarantee you they will commit suicide. I know it sounds like I'm being historical, but the statistics are the statistics. Adults and

teens are killing themselves, are committing acts of self-harm, are becoming just tragically obsessed with their bodies to the point of eating, orders, you as a parent need only look at your own usage of social media and the detrimental impact it's had on your life, on our society, on our public discourse, to know that subjecting your children and our children to social media at a young age is insane and it's abuse. Now, I know, again, you're going to say this is hysterical, but for somebody to do this, like Zuckerberg, It is only in his self-interest. He's thinking, how do I prepare these users for a lifetime on social media?

And we, as parents, should be thinking, how do we prepare our children for a life off of social media? This grand experiment has gone horribly wrong. Facebook cannot even control the policing of Nazism, white supremacy, Holocaust deniers on their platform. Why on earth would we trust them with our? children's attention. The attorneys general, in this case, are 100% right. Don't trust Zuck. A retired FBI assistant director and NBC National Security contributor, Frank Figlazzi, I think I got it right. He said Instagram for kids. We can't even keep extremism off social media for adults. Why don't we just open a Las Vegas casino for children and call it a day? He's not wrong.

and the Massachusetts Attorney General, Maura Healy, Facebook has repeatedly failed to protect the health and well-being of children on its platform. Instagram for kids is a shameful attempt to exploit and profit off vulnerable people. I'm leading a letter to Mark Zuckerberg with 44AG is to demand. They abandoned this plan. Marianne Williamson, you may remember as the Crystal Lady from the Democratic debates. I mean, absolutely my favorite. I am a huge Marianne Williamson fan.

This would be up there with one of the worst ideas in the world. She is not wrong. Facebook had its messenger kids since December 27. Parents set up the accounts and have a suite of controls. They claim they don't collect data, no search visibility. And why would you trust Facebook? In 2019, the FTC imposed a $5 billion penalty and sweeping new privacy restrictions on Facebook,

the largest fine for privacy ever. That alone, of all the things we've discussed, should negate them from being able to do this, let alone common sense. In 2017, the European Commission fined Facebook 110 million for providing incorrect or misleading information during the Commission's 2014 investigation under the EU merger regulation of Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp in 2016. Cambridge Analytica scandal resulted in another huge fine. In 2009, they got fined $9.5 million for its beacon app program. I mean, I think there was double to 20, and they were under a 20-year audit. I'm searching for the most charitable take here, and I can't find it. You know, to claim that kids are signing up, and therefore we should make for Facebook anyway and make this, that is not a logical statement.

That's like saying some kids got, you know, paid some adult to buy them beer or cigarettes, and therefore we should let them smoke cigarettes. Sorry, wrong. The least charitable take. The science is clear. social media has a detrimental impact on people's mental health. Certainly that affects children and teens massively. I am not letting my daughters onto social media anytime, maybe when they're 16, I think, might be a reasonable time, 17.

But I don't care if I'm the last parent to allow my kids onto this. Zuckerberg, you're a disgrace. You should be ashamed of yourself. And you need to go meditate in the woods and take a deep, deep look at yourself. You have behaved horribly in your running of Facebook, and this is amongst the worst ideas I've ever heard in the technology industry. And it's an even horrible idea for you, Zuck. That's how bad it is. Okay, stick with us. Are you launching a new product, developing a new prototype? Maybe you're rolling out a new campaign. User testing lets you see, hear, and talk to your

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human decisions you need to make more informed business decisions at scale. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week. In Startups, my guest today, makes this ring I'm wearing. No, we are not changing the name of the show, too, this week in jewelry. This is the fabulous aura ring that I am holding in my hand. Just a miracle of hardware and sensors. It's incredibly light. It's incredibly cheap.

Or I shouldn't say cheap, affordable in price. it's well constructed and it is something that basically disappears when you wear it. So why would one wear a smart ring? Well, the ring lets you know how your body is doing. And instead of just giving you what my Fitbit or your Apple Watch might get you, the software is designed to give you an idea of your readiness and your restfulness and how prepared you are to take on the world. I started using these years ago.

The first version, I'll be totally honest, was pretty bad. The latest version, that's somebody, one of the advertisers who was recently bought ads on the program, sent me it as a Christmas gift. And I said, wow, I forgot about ORA. And I put it on, and I've had an amazing experience. It is a fan fricentastic product. And the CEO of ORA is with us today. His name is Harpreet Singh Rai. Did I get it right, Harpreet?

You got it right. You got it right. Oh, thank God. You know, it's like, almost as tough as your last thing. Exactly. Now you know what I go through. So you heard my little preamble. You weren't at the company when the product was very 1.0.

And in fact, it launched at the TechCrunch 50 event, which I co-founded back in the day when Mike Arrington and I were in speaking terms and friends, actually. Not for very long. In fact, he was a guy who started TechCrunch. But you joined as the president of the company four years ago in May of 2017, became the CEO in July of 2018. How did you come to become the CEO and president, then CEO of ORA? And then tell me, how is the company doing today? Yeah.

Well, look, thanks for having me on the show, Jason, and excited to be here. And I obviously appreciate the kind of words on the product. it's, you know, it definitely takes a village to, as they say. Yeah. Hardware is hard? Hardware is hard for sure. Oh, God, is it ever. No, look, I got to the company and probably, you know, on paper, maybe not a straightforward way,

but at least in my head, it still all makes sense. So I did study hardware in college. I went to University of Michigan, studied electrical engineering, and specifically studied mems. And so, you know, I was in school graduating around 2006. What are MEMs for the audience who don't know? Yeah, MEMs is microelectric mechanical systems. I like to think about it as basically censored design.

Most sensors today are made using, you know, principles of MEMS technology. Miniature machines, I think, is how it used to be explained. But now people use the word sensors. Yes, yeah. So, you know, my senior design project was an accelerometer or, you know, something that tracks motion that I think got more popular first than the Nintendo Wii before. Fitbit and step trackers. For famously with the tennis, right? The weak tennis, you would swing the arm and everybody was wondering, how does it know?

Is it doing it through the camera and was like, no, inside there, there is some mechanism, some machine that tracks it. An accelerometer, is it like oil in a tube or something back then? What was it actually doing it? So, I mean, yeah, I think how you fabricate a sensor like that, right? You have different layers in silicon, and you can make certain parts. parts of the layer, almost like think of Tetris. And so if you had like two blocks with one block going across,

and all of a sudden this one block is really thin like a piece of paper, if you move it, that paper is going to bend. And turns out when that paper bends, there's actually an electrical signal it outputs. And that actually is sort of the basis of an accelerometer. And there are many directions in how you actually layer these things in a semiconductor lab is, you know, I think a lot of fun. It's like tiny Legos.

And so that's what I studied in college, move or not. Yeah. And you then went to work where to put this degree to work? It was Oro the first job. No. Well, I had a lot of student that Michigan is actually expensive out of state, you know, and I actually decided, you know, to go.

I grew up in New Jersey. I think we were talking about a bit before. And so for me, I wanted to be, you know, in the city, right? All the cool kids are in the city. Oh, yeah. You got to get over that bridge or tunnel. Exactly. My sister is in the city, you know, older sister, so I had to be there.

And so, you know, I think for me, luckily, it was the finance boom. And, you know, investment banks are basically hiring, you know, all types of people. And so I got a job in banking, investment banking, one year, you know, my first year out of college and Morgan Stanley and the Mn A group. My first year, I got totally worked, you know, a lot like what you still hear the stories of, probably averaged over 100 hours a week. Would they pay you for that kind of sacrifice? Like, I heard people are getting now a Goldman 250K. out of school? So first year out of school back then,

it was like a 60K base, and if you were top of your class, it was 60K bonus. So like 120. Now you got to remember. 120 for working 80 hours a week. So you essentially got paid $60,000 twice. Yeah, right.

Yeah, or like $30 an hour or something like that if you run the math out. Yeah, no. So I did that out of school. And frankly, my first year, gained 50 pounds, about a pound a week. Oh, yeah, started losing some hair, you know, at the age of 21, 22. Now, I wear a turban, so not that bad.

Can't see it. And frankly, I remember my friends come and to see me, you know, that I went to college with and they're like, man, your skin is like looking like it's getting gray. Like, you know, you're just inside all the time. You're starting to look like a zombie. It is true. They lock you in a building and you're ordering up food and you're sitting at a desk, working on a spreadsheet, building models.

doing decks and it's a horrible life, but you learn a ton, right? Did you learn a ton? I did. I mean, look, and the MNA group especially, you know, you get to work on, you know, live transactions, you know, multi-billion dollar deals,

you know, big company buying X, Y, Z company. So it's definitely a seat, you know, at the table to learn. And, you know, but it was the first time ever my life that I'd get home from work. And it was my first time, you know, full-time work, did a bunch of internships and a lot actually in hardware as well.

And stuff like that. college, but it was my first time getting home and not being able to fall asleep. It'd be like 2.3 a.m. I'm coming home from work. You'd think you'd be exhausted and I couldn't fall asleep. And so I started developing like mild insomnia. That's probably like where my interest with sleep started. My interest with health was started way earlier, mainly out of just personal curiosity. I was bad athlete. Growing up, you know, wanted to fit in, went to big public high school. Sports was a way to fit in, you know, back then. And being smart wasn't necessarily cool. And, you know, so for me, I was just a bad athlete.

And I remember being so frustrated as a teenager being like, well, I tried this. I trained this way. I eat what these kids are eating, you know, but I worked twice as hard to be half as good. And so I always thought, you know, my dad was a double E. My grandfather was a double E. So I was like, oh, these sensors, you can take these sensors and learn about the human body and understand why I'm different. And then I can figure what to do for me.

So that's what always I sort of, you know, thought. And then I got distracted a bit with some student dad and, you know, went into banking. And then, you know, after my first year, I left, you know, basically, the week I got my bonus, like a lot of first-year bankers do that sign up for, you know, two-year program. And I went to a hedge fund. So I went to a $7 billion hedge fund called Eminence Capital. They've been around, you know, for 23 years now, still going strong, awesome team. And luckily, I just got to learn there and much more manageable lifestyle. You know, luckily, I'd say we were encouraged to work out, eat healthy, you know, get sleep.

Yeah. Yeah, no, we had a gym in the office, you know, everyone's... Did you see the whole Goldman, like, getting so many complaints from? from Gen Z and millennials joining the program that they know. Yeah. They're like, okay, you guys can take a day off a week. You can have Sundays off.

And they're like, no, we actually want weekends off. So I guess they're just going to have to roll with the punches, right? If this next generation does not want to suffer and advance quickly, they can advance at a more reasonable place and have a slightly less compensation and just double the number of people,

I guess. I don't know. What's your take on that? when you saw it. Man, I feel like the industry has been going through that for a bit. I do think they're doing things as banks to try to make it more tolerable. Like, you know, before even the idea of mandatory day off back in 2006, 2007, yeah, that wasn't going to happen.

So at least one, you know, they're getting in the right direction. Hopefully they can get there and be like, hey, if you work 24 hours straight, like we make sure you don't do that two nights in a row, right? I think that's when some, like, they call it all. You were working 24 hours straight, what were the last four to eight hours like in terms of productivity? Man, it's sort of hard, honestly, to assess it because you're so out of it. Exactly. It's diminishing returns.

I mean, listen, I like to work hard, but I find if I don't get my six to seven hours of good sleep, my performance is just not crisp, you know? And I think that's where the aura is just such a magical product in that you're not just telling people like their skin temperature or heartbeat. I think you have all that stuff included, yes? Yeah. But you start with this concept of readiness. So when you open the app, it's like here's your sleep score. And, you know, in the 80s is really good. And then here's readiness.

What is readiness? Well, you said it. You kicked it off right. you know, readiness is your ability to take on the day. And it's not just ready physically for the gym. You know, it might be ready for, frankly, doing a really, like, you have to host people on, right? You've been doing this for a decade, right?

You've got to be sharp on your or more. You've got to be sharp on your feet. You've got to be creative, right? If you're a PM and a software app, like, you're probably thinking about, oh, wait, should I dice the data this way and actually recut this? And I now I'm realizing the U.X flow is wrong, right? So I think, and if you're a financial analyst crushing spreadsheets, like, hey, you know, there's lots of mistakes you make.

There's like, you know, hundreds, thousands of columns and rows, right? And so I think, you know, ready is exactly that. That's the purpose, the idea behind readiness. Now, how we calculate it, you know, we look at not just one day of data, one night of bad sleep, you can sort of suffer through that and be okay the next day. We look at a two-week average of sleep, two-week average of activity, the prior night of sleep, the prior day of activity. And then we look at a couple physiological signals and how they change from your baseline.

What was your heart rate, you know, your lowest resting heart rate relative of your norm? What was your change in heart rate variability versus your average? What was your change in temperature and respiratory rate? And we use those, call it eight things. And we come up with this overall readiness score. And that's something we patented, something we found a lot of customer resonance in because just looking at one night's sleep, it's like, oh, what do you take? But then when you have three bad nights of banking, right? Like that you're going to go on a third all night in a row?

Right. And nope, no, you know, writing a score would probably show like your. you know, fail in that test pretty bad. Growing your business takes more than offering a popular product or service. That's important, but it takes more than that. It's essential to have the right people in place to ensure your company operates smoothly and has the potential to grow and expand. Or, as we say in our industry, scale.

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Things are blowing up. You know where I find these great candidates? I find them on LinkedIn jobs, of course. And you can get started by posting your job for free to reach LinkedIn's network of over 740 million professionals. And really, LinkedIn's got that global reach. You can fill out targeted screening questions to get your role in front of the most qualified candidates with the experience skills and motivation you need. Then, with simple filtering.

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Visit LinkedIn.com slash twist. Again, LinkedIn.com slash TWIST, and you can post your first job for free. No strings attached. They know you're going to. going to love it. Once you get that first hire and you see how easy, peasy, lemon squeezy it is, you're going to go for a second and third terms and conditions apply because they're giving you something for free. This was one of the things that was a little confounding for me and

disappointing when I first started using the ring, because I don't read the manual, nor do I read any of the tooltips. I just want to turn it on and see everything. But it took me a minute to be like, oh, they're going to give me a score later on. How do you know that readiness equals performance? Have you done study? do you have anything inside the company where you work with universities or do actual laboratory experiments to know that readiness is like actually a valid, you know, number? Yeah. And how do you do that?

I guess it's a big question. Yeah. And at some point we'll connect the rest of the dots and how it got to the company. But I think you're starting to see it already. Readiness, a couple things. One, you look at the theory, right? So there's lots and lots of good science papers in theory saying, hey, your HRV changes or your resting heart rate changes. Or if you get six hours of sleep, you know.

So resting heart rate is when I'm asleep. Correct. We look at it when you're sleeping. Got it. And your lowest resting heart rate. And then we look at that versus your average. Why is lowest resting heart rate so important? Physiologically and also a little bit with the autonomic nervous system, you know, the vagus nerve that connects your brain and your body.

your lowest resting heart rate is something that requires both physical and mental relaxation. So you typically reach like, you know, if you're, the research shows that if you're actually well recovered and well rested in sort of a, you know, normal pattern, you'll reach your lowest resting heart rate sort of midway through the night, right? Now, if you're super stressed, you're working super late or you worked out later, or you drank, or you ate a ton of food, your resting heart rate will actually happen much later, you know, it'll take you 78 hours to process that alcohol.

So digestion, alcohol, getting in a fight with your spouse, your boss yells at you or you got a big project tomorrow, that could actually keep you away from the lowest resting heart rate. Correct, yeah, it's just a sign of stress. And then same with heart rate variability, right?

I think heart rate variability is a great measure, the autonomic nervous system that's sort of showing this, you know, stress on your, you know, your central nervous system on your body and your brain. And so I think those two are really important to look at. And then sleep, you know, we, you know, we do think that it's not just one night of bad sleep. You know, it's that compounding nights of bad sleep that really hits you. And then also, you know, if you've been inactive, if you're less active than normal or even more active, right, you're going to be tired. Like, hey,

you just ran a marathon, you know, that's a lot. Yeah, it's just three or four days of your body feels like you got hit by a Mack truck. So the heart rate variability. That's something we've just been able to start capturing on these devices, whether it's an Apple Watch, Fitbit, or ORA. Correct. This is a new sensor or the sensors have become precise enough to pick this up? The latter, yeah. So heart rate variability is actually the variation in every single heartbeat.

So you and I are seeing. The time between them is how it's explained to me. Is that what it is? Correct. Yeah. The interbeat interval is, you know, think about it. Sort of, you know, your heartbeat over time is, you know, look like a sinusoidal weight pattern, right?

And so, you know, time is sort of on your X axis, right? And if you think about that, the space between each beat, if we're sitting here taping this podcast and are 60 beats per minute, that's the average over the minute. Now, the question is, what's the variability within that minute, right? And that is heart rate variability. Less variability and more consistency is better? Opposite. It's counterintuitive. Yeah.

So actually, you want more variability. What? That's still counterintechibed. Why would more be better? Or do we not know? So I think theoretically, maybe I can explain it physiologically speaking. So when you're in a high variation, a high heart rate variability, you can sort of adapt to any situation. So part of your body's functions is like imagine like we're sitting here and all of a sudden like, you know, a cheetah jumps in the room. What do you need to do? Right. Fight or flight. You need to drop everything. You know, you push, you know, nick to the ground and you need to make, you know, Hall for it, right?

So to get Nick, right, unfortunately, right? But for you to respond that way, you need to be in a little bit of a flow state. You need to have that variation. So high variability, right, allows you to react and adjust quickly from both your mind and your body and not freeze. Now, if you are, you know,

if you're really sort of anxious and stressed, it's like every little thing irks you, right? And that, like, you're actually, you feel like rigid, you feel like stuck. Your heart rate is actually very, very, you know, that interbie interval is very consistent. beat, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Whereas, like, heart rate variability, when it's different, it makes you more nimble.

It's got better cardiovascular ability, maybe more resiliency, because you're dealing with many different situations. Kind of like cross-training where a lot of different fitness theories are, you don't want to just do four exercises. You want to try 400 different exercises and get all different types of movement going on your body. Precisely, I think the best thing I heard on that. Do you know what the best exercise in the world is? Have you heard this one? No. No, it's the one you're not doing, right?

Oh, what a great way, yeah. Yeah, so you want that ability to adapt, but no. You know, it's interesting. There is a whole philosophy of working out, which is for guys who get older, or anybody who gets older, I suppose, but I was listening to do it on the, this is the, maybe we saw Tim Fabrice or something, that they try to get older men to try new exercises, crawling on the ground, moving, balance beams, just anything different. so that your mind and your body gets just better at adapting.

And when you don't, you get this negative cycle of totally being at your desk all the time. But at some point, the sensors were able to pick up heart rate variability. And is that how we know when heart attacks occur now or something is happening? Is it the heart rate variability, the one that gives some sort of indication something's wrong? There's a lot of things that go into that. I would say early research has been showing that basically lowered heart rate variability. you're right, you know, is a very good indicator of a heart attack or cardiac event. Now specifically, there's lots of different cardiac events and turns out like you're sort of getting,

why can we see heart rate variability now? That's a really good question. It's really the granularity of these sensors. And I can talk about sort of why it's a ring and why, you know, how we focused on that because there's a lot of key details in there that are pretty technical, but would be loved to dive into. You know, I think you can train these data sets on anything. So if you can actually get that raw pulse waveform, you can start comparing that raw pulse waveform to an EKG and then start looking at EKGs of, hey, what do people have AFIB look like? Well, what are people who look like, you know, some congestive heart failure look like before that event? And you can start to train, and, you know, we even show this with COVID, what are people who look like they're getting,

you know, who've gotten sick look like? What are, what are all there? What does that pulse waveform data and your temperature data and all the things we derive from our respiratory rate, heart rate, variability look like for this subset of people. And you can, you can train these data sets. You can train these models against, you know, reference data. And sleep became a driving force for you raising money, I understand, in the last round, or just the product evolving. I saw that also with our investment in calm. Yeah. When they went, you know, they owned meditation, but they also then started to own the sleep portion of that. Tell me about, you know, the impact sleep has had and also the anxiety produced during the pandemic and for many people, not all, obviously. Some people were thrilled.

But, you know, Trump's presidency here in the United States caused a lot of anxiety, caused a lot of insomnia, and so did the pandemic. So I'm curious during your tenure, did you see those things manifest in the aggregate data of ORA's data set? You must be able to have seen the pandemic and the shutdowns occurred many sleepless nights. Tell us about what you saw in the aggregate data. Obviously, you're not looking at individuals. Totally, yeah. So being able to see, you know, de-identified data, no one's name attached to it,

but across the whole database. Sure. Yeah, you know, very interesting things. I think counterintuitively when the pandemic started for sure. But we actually published us on our blog, The Pulse, where we actually showed that as the pandemic went on after a couple months, people were actually getting more consistent patterns. right

so they're actually sleeping better for most people now some people obviously were not now wait a second yeah

think through that theory why would people be sleeping better in a pandemic I think well less variation you're not going out you're not going to work

you're not going to dinner you're not going out drinking and partying and going to the movies or something like that you're leading a more sedentary

isolated lifestyle yeah consistent right consistent see. So more sleep, perhaps even more. I was doom scrolling to 4 in the morning. God, I look back at my, my pandemic was a complete mania.

We definitely saw that with a subset of, of people like that. Yeah, I'm in that subset of does not go to sleep, keep scrolling Twitter and looking at COVID stats. Now, we're trying to figure it out. We should look at it again. And in the election I want to get back to because we actually showed their collective, you know, loss of sleep to the U.S. on that. But on what's happening now, you know, we actually have a lot.

gone through it lately, we should probably do it as it's now dragged down for over a year. I bet probably most are probably like you now, you know, you were describing yourself early on. Like as this is dragged on, people are getting pent up, people want to get out. And so I think, you know, after this much isolation, I wouldn't be surprised if people's data has changed, but it's a good, something good and topical to do now. What we did see during the election, we actually, you know, publish us on our blog too, and we showed that, I think the average American got 45 minutes of sleep, less

sleep that night. So you start to multiply out like, you know, 300 million people. People are not going to be. It's actually people are not going to be. When people say it's not going to be a productive day at the office, they're right. Exactly. Yeah. So no, look, I think we saw fascinating data and getting back to sleep, you know, really

this idea of readiness. I think, you know, when we, when aura was launched at the launch festival, right, no wearables were really doing sleep, right? Fitbit had launched sleep. Apple now does time in bed, but they don't really do sleep. They don't do sleep stages. They don't do even heart rate variability. throughout the day or night.

But, you know, at the time, no one was really doing sleep. So it was just steps and just active heart rate was sort of the thing. Like, how high can you get your heart rate or, you know, when you're running? You know, just like chest straps. And I think for us, you know, the approach was like, hey, sleep's this whole other area of your life. And by the way, 99.9% of people, even invest in bankers, will try to sleep tonight. But only 10% of the U.S. is actually going to work out today. And maybe 15% to 20% will work out this week now, 40%.

pay for gym memberships or pre-COVID we're paying. But sleep is a consistent thing you do. It has an immediate impact on how you perform and feel physically, mentally, emotionally the next day. And frankly, if you look at it as a country or as a society globally, we're getting less sleep, you know, probably over the last time. Why are we getting less sleep? Is it just the, it's the devices?

It's got to be people taking their iPhones and doom scrolling and playing that last game of threes or listening to that last podcast. You know, Netflix, right? Netflix used to say their biggest enemy was sleep, right? Yeah, you're right. You know what? Man, binge watching is killing people. I mean, it's literally, people will start thinking about binge watching like they do social media.

Like, it's almost like the new cigarettes. You must get sleep to be ready for the next day. It's worse than, I think it's worse than cigarettes. You know, lack of sleep has been shown to early onset of Alzheimer's, in particular, great research out there showing less deep sleep is leading to the early onset of Alzheimer's. you know if you get four hours of sleep basically your your glycemic response your insulin levels are going to be nearly you know 50% as worse so you get fat you get fat so actually the hormones that's what was happening to you when you became a fat

investment banker investment banker it was because of lack of sleep yeah and there's no way to there's no way to diet or exercise out of that if you're you know if your body is physiologically just not this this one the hunger thing and insulin response So I actually more interested on the, I thought this was fascinating. So you have two, you have two hormones really that control your hunger and then how full you are. So, so, you know, so greelin, you know, determines sort of how hungry you feel. Leptin is determining actually how full you feel after. So if you get four hours or eight hours of sleep, your greelin levels double and your lefton levels go down by half. So you're going to be, you're going to crave twice as much food and you're going to feel half as full, right? So your, your body's training you. It's like, why would you, we're the only species on. earth. Matt Walker says it's such a good point. Only species on earth that self, you know, deprive themselves of sleep. And so your body is like, hey, you're, you're trying to kill me or, you know, something's trying to hunt me. I'm like, you know, so I need to eat a lot of food, right? Like, you're going through this spider flight response. Ah, that's fascinating. Yeah. If you're

not sleeping, it's like get more food in the system because you're, it's probably evolutionarily that you're being chased by a tiger or a pack or another village that wants to kill your village or something. It was that Cheetah. He's still chasing us. That was in the room earlier. It's time for Our Crowds deal of the week. Right now, you can join Our Crowds Investment in Launchpad. In Launchpad, according to the deal memo, does AI-powered autonomous manufacturing incorporating 3D printing to efficiently combined multiple materials into complex products.

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and Uber. With Our Crowd, accredited investors can invest directly and easily in startups early before they IPO or get bought. The investment professionals at Our Crowd have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in over 200 companies with dozens of exits. Again, the R-Crowd account is free. Just go to OUR-C-O-W-D.com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Let's talk about the business of this. Hardware businesses fail at a rate at least two or three times software businesses because you're not only in the hardware business, you're also in the software business.

And you're not only in the software and the hardware business, you also become in the retail slash distribution business. So you really have to take on three businesses concurrently, a software business and a hardware business and somehow getting them to be. people. The product is mainly sold direct to consumer. Am I correct in that? Direct to consumer online. Yeah. Yeah. Is that the only way to buy it or can you buy the stores? No, we haven't done any retail stores. You know, we haven't done any like, you know, wholesalers or anything like that. We've, you know, even not even Amazon. We've kept it on orring.com.

Wow. And explain to people how you do the ring sizing because this is a particularly delightful process. I thought it would be, you know, arduing. it turns out it's delightful. Yeah, look, I think just like Warby Parker, you know, if you want to try on glasses, right, like you get a couple sent to your house. So what we do is if you don't know your ring size, which most people don't, I didn't know mine either.

We send a, you know, sizing kit in the mail when you order a ring. And then you get to pick out which size you are. You get, you know, plastic set of sizes 6 through 13, figure out what size you are. And then you confirm the size. And you get a product that, you know, what we hear from customers is like, hey, this feels like it's just for me.

You know, it's not like I have to take link. What do you have 10 sizes or so? Eight, six to 13. It's really just in terms of aesthetics, you get a little box for people who haven't ordered one before. And it just has, you know, whatever, the Aplastic ones, you try it on. And whichever one you want, you go back online, say,

I'm a size 10 or whatever it is, and you get it. And then I guess you have to throw that away. It feels a little bit wasteful, but. Yeah. Or give it to a friend. You know, that's what it is a guest. You know, that's a smart idea. Yeah.

Now, the product is not cheap. $400, I think, is the going price. $299 to $3.99. We have a gold version and a stealth black, Matt black version that we charge $3.99 for. Got it. Now, when you get to this level of production, because you're selling, I understand, hundreds of thousands a year now. Am I your ballpark correct? Yeah. These things only cost $25, 50 bucks to make, so you've got a decent amount. Oh, I wish you were that low. Really? Oh, okay. It doesn't look like there's much to it, so I thought at scale, but you have some decent, cost of goods, enough that you don't charge a software subscription fee. Am I correct?

We don't charge a software subscription fee. That's correct. You bake into it. These things last. People wear them three, four, five years. We have a two-year warranty, which I think every other wearable is basically a one-year warranty, by the way. Yeah.

And then in my Fitbit, I'm ready to just throw it away right now for a decade of using it because they just break too often. And now they're charging for features. And I'm like, why am I paying a subscription and buying these off of you? It's just, I don't know, maybe I'll get the Apple. as well. But I wear both and I like to have two different things. And I have the eight sleep bed. And I'm an investor in eight sleep, which is kind of nice because you get to get different versions of your sleeve from different apps and then compare them. And it's pretty miraculous

how accurate it all is. Explain to us scientifically how the aura ring knows how I'm sleeping. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, the way that we do that is what's the, what's the ground truth. What's the reference data for sleep? Something called a polysynography, right, device. And so if you were to go in a sleep lab at, you know, Berkeley or Stanford, right, or UCSF, they'd strap you up to, you know, something that you'd have to wear in your head that typically has 16 wires coming off of it to your brain. And so what they're measuring is actually when you go to bed in that sleep lab is they're looking at brain waves in the frequency or the speed of the brain waves, right? And so, you know, they also look at, you know, heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate.

And so what we do is, you know, we have people in polycytonography labs, right, just like you would, and we've done work at UCSF and other places, right? And you then actually have them wear the aura ring, and we look at all the raw data coming off of it. And then you start to train an algorithm, right? And, you know, the more data you collect, I think the better you can get. And, you know, if you use machine learning techniques, you know, you can get pretty darn close. So is it my temperature of my body combined with my heart rate? Do you know my breathing through

the ring? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We see rest. How do you know my breathing through a ring? That doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah, or even like we've heard this before, like, how do you know my brain waves? Well, so breathing rate actually in the pulse waveform, just like an EKG, right? It pulse waveform looks pretty similar. You can you can actually see when you breathe in, right? Your chest compresses a bit. The heartbeat's a little bit, quicker and even the amplitude of that pulse waveform can be higher. And so you can actually see breeding rate pretty well. I think we published some stuff in our blog that probably within, you know, 93% accuracy, assuming you have no medical conditions, those people a little bit harder.

So we look at the breeding rate, we look at the heart rate, the heart rate variability. We look at the movement because we have an accelerometer and gyro scope in here. We look at the temperature sensors, as you mentioned. And then we look at that raw pulse waveform data. And you train all that data against the polycinography data and the rest. results. And, you know, I think most people probably don't know this, but polysypynography, if I took your data from that UCSF lab and showed it to, you know, a sleep score at Stanford and a sleep score at Berkeley, they disagree on probably 20% of data. Were you in REM sleep or were you really getting

a light or deep sleep, right? So the standard error on the gold standard is about 20%. I think wearables, you know, right now are probably 10% worse than that gold standard. But I think 20%. 24%, 22% variability or something. Yeah, probably like 20. Well, if the goal is it even, it doesn't even matter. It doesn't need to be perfectly accurate. It needs to be directionally accurate. Correct.

So I know if I'm having a bad day, you know, compared to my good days. That's right. Were you able to tell if people were having COVID or close to COVID? Because there's a connected thermometer that every time you take a temperature, it sends it to, I think, the CDC. and there was this concept of the CDC, if they just gave these out for free or severely discounted, they made them a dollar to buy them at schools or pharmacies, and all that data was collected, we actually could know where outbreaks were happening for COVID or future COVIDs. If everybody's data on temperature was known, what would that do to the world vis-a-vis pandemics,

colds, and just general health? I think it's huge. I think it's the future, right? I think you'd be able to see an outbreak happening, you know, way sooner, be able to have, you know, city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood type, you know, lockdowns to be able to quarantine and, you know, frankly, stop to spread a lot faster for the people that had higher risk in those areas. So tracking and tracing would be built in. You wouldn't need to add any software or anything. You just know people's temperature and sleep patterns. And it would be like, this is the sleep pattern and temperature and breathing of somebody with a COVID-like disease. Yeah, so we actually did a study on this. So we were the first wearable to announce a study with an academic institution during the pandemic in mid-March. We partnered with the UCSF. And so we launched a study called Temp or Dic in the app. And so we had over 70,000 ORR-R-R-R-R-R-Ring users join.

UCSF actually published the results, the first early results of that back in December. And what they showed was basically using the minute-by-minute, so we see minute-by-minute temperature data. And we have three temperature sensors in there. By the way, Apple watches, Fitbits, you know, Garmin don't have those temperature sensors in there. So we were able look at temperature, respiratory rate, heart rate, heart rate variability, and sleep patterns as you're mentioning to see if people are getting sick. And what that study showed was basically, you know, for 76% of participants in the first early results,

and we still have more coming out soon, that we could see a significant change in data three days before they felt symptoms, which is just incredible. So, you know, you could stop the spread. You could quarantine. You could not go out. You could quarantine three days before you have symptoms. For most people. Yeah.

For most people. If we have another outbreak like this in another country, you know, the cost of a pandemic is going to be, you know, this pandemic is going to be, I guess, $5 to $10 trillion dollars in a lot. Printed money and who knows about lost work and the impact of schools or whatever. We're talking to trillions of dollars in just one country. You could literally send everybody in the country. or a ring at scale, you know, for $50 billion or something,

it wouldn't be that expensive and relative to the actual cost of the damage. And the incalculable, well, I guess it's calculable. People don't like to admit that, but, you know, the tragedy of human death. And man, if the ring just told you, like, your ring turns red, you might have COVID, like, let's narrow your circle or just sends an alert. My God, that would have been great. How frustrating it was, was it for you as somebody in this field to watch our pandemic response and how ineffective it was.

And what do you think was most ineffective, which is another way of saying, if we put you in charge, what would you have done? Well, I think aura rings. So look, I think for us, was it, look, it was tragic, right? I think, unfortunately, way too many people lost lives, way too many people lost their jobs. And way too many people were infected.

But I think this shows the power of, you know, technology like this in the future. I think for us, well, you know, it was frustrating at the same time we sort of looked at as like, hey, last time we had a pandemic like this, the Spanish flu, none of this tech was around. You couldn't collect the type of data. So I think from a data scientist's perspective, you're looking at like, how do I train these algorithms now as a once in a lifetime opportunity so we can then prevent the next, you know, pandemic. And I think that's what we are focused on. And luckily, you know, I think that research, you know, from UCSF was so great. the DoD and MTEch, you know, actually funded, you know, over $5 million of it.

You know, MIT Lincoln Lab has been involved in the funding, you know, so I think, you know, some really good thought leaders in space step forward and did that. And luckily, we were able then to, frankly, you know, take that early research and findings, I create an algorithm, which we actually spun up into an enterprise application. And we call it health risk management. We were able to deploy it in tens of thousands, maybe more, you know, tens of thousands of people. and even places like the NBA. We announced a partnership with the NBA.

All the NBA have aura rings. I saw that in the bubble. Yeah, WNBA as well. What was that able to do for them? They just knew people's temperatures? No, well, I mean, look, I think with all these tests, even if people are getting tested every day like they were in both the NBA, WMBA and some of these other sports leagues, right?

You know, there's false positives. There's false negatives. And again, you could see from this data if you're getting sick even before you feel symptoms. So I think it gave people a sense. sense of security. You know, if there's false positives, false negatives, you have another set of data to look at, which is super helpful. And frankly, like, most organizations can't afford to test every day. You couldn't even get tests in the beginning, right? It was ridiculous. I mean, that was,

I think for me, one of the biggest tragedies is I had friends who were getting tests from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Finland, other countries, and had at-home testing kits that cost 20 bucks each that were probably marked up triple because they were being brought in here. And our FDA, for some reason, the FDA in the United States or whatever forces did not allow mass testing at home to occur because it wasn't perfect. And it's like,

it doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be directionally correct so that if you do have a positive, you go get the more perfect test. Yeah. It is just ridiculous. And look, I think it's a hard, it is a hard science, right?

Flues adapt. We're seeing variations right now. I think even the latest Indian version that's going through there, some of the mutations there, looks like, you know, the vaccines aren't having as high effectiveness as they would with some other strains. And that's how these flus evolve, right? They keep evolving. And so, you know, for us, as frustrating, obviously, as it is, we just thought about how can we help. And so I think being able to be, you know, forward there working with, you know, honestly,

frontline healthcare workers was the first group of Temperdick study. We, you know, actually donated 2,000 rings and had a sponsor come in to donate another a thousand rings to full-line healthcare workers, you know, that are out there in the hospitals across the U.S. to be able to do the study to then deploy a product and serve different organizations. But, you know, so we talked, NBA gets a lot of publicity. What did it was Las Vegas Sands. So we announced, you know, casino workers going back to work, right? You know, they don't want to be laid off, you know, so the Sands group was like, hey, we got to help reopen Vegas, you know, because otherwise we're going to have zero revenue and lay people off. And so, you know,

but they couldn't afford to test every day, right? every single person. And so, you know, using our data, they're able to prioritize testing to the right folks. Or if someone looked like they're getting sick, hey, maybe you shouldn't come in today. We actually made it so you could customize a notification as an admin. And you just saw aggregate data. So, you know, we got through all the privacy stuff, created some really cool frameworks to do that. And so now, you know, we're seeing interest from a lot of corporations as they go back to the office.

There's going to be variants. You know, every flu season, frankly. Do you see a time where a company could deploy these and say, hey, let's Listen, you're coming in as a doctor. You're coming in as a card dealer, blackjack dealer. We need you to have a score on your aura ring of readiness of 70 or better, or 80 or better, or your average has to be 80 or better. Now, I know this seems Orwellian, but for a bus driver or a pilot,

we already give them requirements of sleep. Sometimes they do it. Sometimes they don't. We give them requirements for how often they can fly. I would love to know that my pilot on the plane I'm putting my family on has an Oro-Welian approach to this, if I may, that they have to wear an aura ring, and we need to know they're ready to fly.

This must have come up inside your organization. What is the discussion like inside your organization and with other organizations about the line between personal privacy and being ready to do good work? I don't think office workers need to, I mean, obviously it would be great, but it would also feel Orwellian. But for a pilot or a brain surgeon or any kind of surgeon, this does not feel Orwellian. Yeah. For them to be wearing one, what are the conversations been like for you guys internally about doing something like this?

Because obviously you've talked about it. Oh, yeah. Look, we formed a whole ethics committee, a process, a framework. Frankly, we even joined the World Economic Forum has a panel that they put together on, you know, IoT and creating trustworthiness and IoT devices because how you shared this data. So a couple things we did. Everything has to be 100% opt in. We never want to have anyone forced.

Frankly, even in that pilot situation, I just think we're not there yet to take a stance on that. I think our big view is educated. I can tell you the passengers are. No, I know. But I mean, you know, at the same time, I think rather than force people, I'd rather see them educate and understand. If that pilot understood, or frankly,

you're Uber driver. Hey, you know, six hours or four hours of sleep, right? Yeah, it's dangerous. Yeah, it's dangerous, right? Your chance of getting an accident goes up 40%. Bus driver, train conduct. Truck driver, right? Truck driver, oh my Lord, no brainer. Yeah. And those are places where they're on, let's be honest, they're under pressure to do more. These, from what I understand, the Amazon drivers, there was a lot of controversy. Who knows how much of this is true in the fake news, but, you know, there was some controversy that maybe the freelancers were going a little too hard, trying to deliver packages a little too aggressively to hit windows and cause accidents. Yeah. And I don't know if it's sure or not, but okay, so opt-in is one. Opt-in is one. And then what are the others? So, de-identified, you know, figure out frameworks to

share this data on a population level and empower the end user. So for example, our health risk management, use the admin. I can't see that Jason's getting sick today. What I can see is, hey, of my group of 10 that's coming in the office, someone looks like they're getting today. What do you see, Jason? We want to empower you. You get a message in the app. Hey, got it. Go see Nick before you come in today. Give Nick a call. You can actually customize that message. So it would be the same thing with if I had an employee who was suffering for mental illness, they go see the HR department. I don't know what mental illness they have. I don't know why they went to see the HR department, but I do know they're taking a leave of absence for two weeks. It could be their, their mom

died and they're grieving. It could be they're having panic attacks. It's not my job as the manager to know what the element is, it's just to know that they're getting help so they can get back in the game. Correct. Yeah. So I think we were like de-identified, create frameworks in ways to empower the individual, you know, notify them first. Our team, I honestly credit off to our team through thinking all this stuff, even putting an ethics framework together. I think anytime we looked at where you can potentially, you know, be, if we even have put in our contracts, we're like, if this data is used and then someone is terminated because of the result of the data, right? Like, you know, we're going to, we have the right to cancel a contract because, you know, we don't want people.

If you think about it, that's how you create big brother. Now, I'm not saying, you know, eventually we're figuring this out as a company. We don't have all the answers. But we've talked to lots and lots of these different types of frameworks and different types of companies. And, you know, how are they? How are those companies? If you de-anomized a company that was in, you know, the business of, you know, one person's responsible for a lot of people's safety, you know, like, if the ring let you know the person

was on meth and on a bender every night or, you know, out drinking every night and just disregarded sleep, you kind of actually would want to reprimand or fire that person. So it's nice that you want to take this stand, but I mean, no, we've found more buy-in from companies because they don't want to get in trouble looking at this data either, right? So there's a concern about that. Exactly. So I think companies actually want de-identified and cool tools and frameworks like we've created to still empower the individual, right? They don't want to know what's happening to that in person, nor should they, right?

What they do want to know is, hey, empower that person and get help and get help faster, right? That's what they want to be able to do. So you would be okay theoretically. I love that you're willing to talk about this because it's just such a great moment. I don't know if I said I'm willing. You just started asking me. Well, right. We can make this hypothetical, right?

So in the hypothetical example, just thinking out the morality question here, if a person was struggling with alcoholism was not sleeping, and they were responsible for other people's health, and their Apple Watch, Fitbit, or other device, let's just say a device, not your device, would know that.

You wouldn't want them to be fired. You would want them to get a notification. I like this framework. They got a notification, hey, you're not, you're not, you don't have enough restfulness and sleep to do your job properly.

Please report to the HR department tomorrow. Yeah. And the HR department would tell them, we just need to check in on somebody's suitability for being on the job. They're not going to make their shift today or tomorrow. And then there's an intervention where they just discuss it.

Like, hey, listen, is the ring broken? Let's give you a new one. Or is the watch broken? We can give you a new one. Or is there anything we should know? Do you need a two-week leave of absence to kind of tighten this up. There is a way to do it that's compassionate, that doesn't embarrass the person, that doesn't

make them lose their job, but that does let them know your job is pretty serious. If you want to be at the yoke of that plane or that controller of that train, you cannot get this level of sleep. We need to get a sleep level that's to measure it with the risk of, you know, doing the job poorly. I think that's exactly how we've and our team has come up with ideas of thinking about it and frameworks. You want to empower the individual. What you want to do is, right, teach that person that, like, hey, getting four hours of sleep five nights in a row means like you're at a really high in risk for an accident. By the way, that's not just bad for the passengers. It's probably bad for you and your family. Yeah, because you're at the front of the train.

Conductor and the pilot die first. Most of the time. Most of the time, right? They generally go down with the ship. Let me ask you another tough question since we're at the end, and I always asked the hardest ones then when I got the guests warmed up and you're so good. you're so honest. I got an honest guess here. Apple is particularly sharp elbow, should I say, with people who compete with them.

They do it with a smile on their face, but the bane of my existence is that Fitbit and my health product Apple Health Kit or Apple Health and Fitbit don't play nicely. I bought a third party tool, I spent $10 on it, to try to get these things to sink.

It always breaks it. It doesn't work. your seems to work pretty good with Apple but you're not making a watch and I'm curious is your relationship really good with Apple because you don't make a watch and how do you think about your relationships

with the Googles and the apples of the world which have said hey we're going to own health they both have said that Fitbit's getting bought by Google apparently and they want to own health Apple wants to own health how does that how do you navigate that as a founder

I'm curious. So, I mean, one, I think we play nicely with both of them. You know, we distribute the apps on their app stores. We actually integrate with both, you know, Apple Health and Google Fit. So I think we were like, you know, let's be open and neutral. And in that sense, I think, you know, we're partners, right? Right. I think because of our view first really on sleep and our focus there as a company, you know,

we found it complementary, just like you are wearing a Fitbit and you have. have an aura ring. We see that with so many Apple Watchers, right? And so I think for us... What percentage of ORAWirers have a watchable Apple Watch? Don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head. It's got to be what? A third half? Probably I'd assume a third. Yeah. Maybe 20%. I would think so because, you know, when you're elite enough and well-heeled enough to afford a watch, that's $800 or $600 or you're going to be able to afford the aura for two or three or three or four. And they are complementary. They don't compete with each other.

Which leads me to the next question. Which is better overall to wear a watch or to wear a ring? And why? Is there some difference between what's being collected? Or are they both just really great ways to record? Is your ring finger better than your wrist? Yeah. So the pulse signal from your finger is about 100 times two orders of magnitude

stronger than the wrist. Really? I assume the opposite. That's so interesting. Well, every hospital, where do they measure your heart rate in your SPO2? Yeah, they do it on the tip of your finger. Yeah. So it turns out, you know how you can feel these arteries on the inside of your wrist?

Yeah. You know, it's a lot of blood there. You can't feel that pulse. You can't feel your pulse on the backside of your watts. Those arteries go to the palm of your hand. What's interesting there, your skin is super thin. Those arteries are close to the surface. That pulse signal then is, you know, 100 times stronger as a result.

So that's something I actually worked on in college got to mess around with some optics, right? And wearables. And so that's why I think for us that's so important. So when you start training this data, I'll give me an example. Right now, we record, you know, we've said this before on podcasts. We actually sample at 250 hertz. The 250 times we're finding our LEDs per second, right, to get the shape of that pulse weight form. We do that eight hours a night, right, for about six nights, right?

If you took the Apple watching, you put it at 250 hertz or a Fitbit or anything, it would die in about an hour because the pulse signal is so much weaker, right? And so the battery life would go kaput. And so as a result, we're able to capture higher fidelity data. You know, I think there's a reason why our COVID data stood out amongst so many, you know, why, you know, both the NBA, the WNBA, UFC, NASCAR, Red Bull Racing, Las Vegas Sands, you know, have chosen to use our product and our algorithm there. I think you'll see some new stuff coming on the road for us from, you know, from actually on just sleep staging itself, updating our algorithm to to even more accurate the best that's out there in the field. And I think, you know, we're going to show that with this high fidelity data, we can create algorithms. just a cut above the rest. And so, you know, while we started on sleep, and we think it's perhaps a most single important thing in how you start every day.

We all arise from sleep every day. You know, your day starts out of sleep. You know, I think there's a lot more we're going to be doing in total health as we get into the future. The ring right now is not super bulky, but it's not super thin. I have to take it off as an example when I type, because I'm a fast touch typist. do you see the ring getting thinner or staying the same and including more objects?

And then have you thought about any kind of embeddable technology? And if not, when do you think embeddable technology will happen? I'm not talking about, you know, a neural link in your brain, but it does seem to me that if this works this well, why can't I put something into the palm of my hand, have it surgically implemented and, you know, have a long life battery that, you know, gives me even more data. Yeah. So I think on the ladder, you know, that's an expensive procedure, more expensive than you think. Even if you go today to get a loop recorder, right, which a bedside can do, you don't need to go under to do that. And they implant a little, you know, a little chip and right underneath the skin, you know, on top of where you're underneath the skin on top of your heart. That's like a $4,000 or $5,000 cost. Really? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. If you look at, I think the Medicare reimbursement codes for that, it's been a while. different is that heart rate to everything else in the market like watches and rings and everything I mean much more accurate yeah I mean what we showed though is actually our heart rate and our

heart rate variability overnight for every single heartbeat we're 99 I think point six percent correlated with an EKG overnight so we're getting pretty damn close so there goes it's it's sort of like cameras you know people I remember talking to sergey brin about cameras 10 years ago and he was carrying a digital SLR and he asked me like what do you think a digital a phone camera is going to be able to do, or digital SR will be able to do their phone camera. And I was like, well, I don't think about this and this. And he was like, nothing. The software and the algorithms are going to make cameras in phones as good as, and they're

going to get rid of digital SLRs. Only people with digital SLRs are going to, you know, and he's right. I mean, you can do all these cool. I mean, every year we get like a couple of more low light, the blur effect behind you, all that stuff just gets better and better. So I guess that's what it is, right? The algorithms of the software make up for the lack of fidelity of the, sensor?

Yeah, I think it's, think about it this way. You know, in any given week at ORA, we see more data on sleep. You know, just take half million users and just throwing a number out there because we, you know, publicly said we've sold a half million rings now times seven, you know, seven nights.

That's 300, you know, that's a lot of nights, right? 3.5 million nights, right? So that's more than any, all the sleep labs in America combined in a given week in one single place, right? So that fidelity, that data that you're starting to get is you start to aggregate more and more,

is super helpful. And those insights then can be obviously really, really rich. So I think data, you know, data is the new currency, right? And so I think there's a lot there you can do and you can keep training and seeing, you know, patterns in that data. So, yeah, I think I want to get back, though, to one of your other questions. So, you know, do we think you can get thinner? Yes, and smaller, yes.

And, you know, I think also we've seen some people want bigger designs, more, you know, more fashion-looking designs. So I think, you know, I think you'll see us flux our muscles a bit there in both directions. Here comes the skew craziness. You know that Steve Jobs would be absolutely losing his mind over the number of Apple watch skews. It was like, oh my God, we got how many sizes, how many styles, how many crowns, it just got so crazy. But I guess in this world, you know, you are a fashion accessory and this. Do you have any brand partnerships with, you know, a Gucci or a Prada or some?

Tiffany or something and have people approached you about that yet or no? We've seen interest from all of them. Really? Yeah. So I think, you know, I think, you know, how we do that, how you figure that out as a brand, right? Apple went and partnered. Who was it with Hermes? Yeah, for the wristband.

Ormette. I think at one point did a partnership with like Tori Birch if I'm not? I can't even remember. Yeah, that's not like the handles. But I mean, I've really cool ring that I got the one with the flat top. I don't know what that's called. Heritage. Heritage. For some reason, I thought it looked cooler than just round.

Yeah. I like the flat top. I like the heritage, too. That's our most popular version. Oh, is it? Yeah. I wonder if people are going to use these as wedding rings, right? We've already seen it. We've already found. Oh, really? Yeah. In fact, we get a lot of angry wives because they're like, my husband won't wear his wedding ring, but now he's wearing an oar ring. Oh, boy. You're in trouble now. Just wear it on your wedding ring. It's the same thing. I mean, and can you get them engraved? I didn't notice. We haven't done it. No, we haven't done any engraved. engravings yet. You know, I think that's interesting one too.

Yeah, that could be pretty cool. The options are endless, but to your point, you know, Steve Jobs had a point. You don't want too many skew blow, right? So I think there's always those tradeoffs. You've got to figure out as a company. It definitely is a tradeoff. The engraving thing, I wonder how, you know, every time you check out at, every time you check out at Apple, like, when it's engraved and I'm always like,

not as much as I want the product here in two days. So, you know. I haven't pulled the trigger. What is it? It's like a $50 or $100 even on the AirPods. Yeah, and I'm just like, I have a Sharpie. You know, I'll put my initials on it. Thanks.

Label maker. Yeah, and then if I give it to somebody, do I want it to say add Jason on it? I'm not so sure about that. Hey, listen, continued success. Thanks for coming on the program. I know it's been hard and a struggle, and it's just great to see that you got to the other side. Any advice for hardware founders on, you know, as we wrap here, what the secrets are to running one of these companies or is it just

raise a shit ton of money? No, I think we were the opposite. I'd actually say the opposite. We started really small. Our seed was two mill. Our A, we did in a couple tranches about five, six million each. You know, and I think test and prove, right?

Test and iterate. Make sure you got product market fit. You know, and when you have that then I think you feel more confident to raise more capital. I think some of the hardware companies that went under, a lot of it was they raised too much too fast, right? Like, job bone raised a ton right there was like a billion i love my jawbone products yeah same i like i had the jam box you know i think there were some cool stuff i mean they were so early to so much yeah i love asan yeah

yeah i think even you know i don't know everything that happened obviously at any of these companies but you know some some of them i think you know jucerro raised a lot of money at one point you know i don't think it was completely bad there's clearly people who love the product but um you know i think there's there's a lot of examples of hardware i think you raised too much too fast you're investor expectations are too high, you know. So I think I'd actually say, just like software, be iterated. The unfortunate part about hardware is it takes more time, right? You got to get the product, you got to qualify, you got to test little components. You got to ship it. Then you've got to test the damn thing. Then you got to load firmware, middleware on it. So, you know, it is like

running three, four organizations in one. So be patient. But look, I think we're seeing it come back, right? Peloton, I think really helped. You saw it now with mirror and tempo, a bunch of these other companies. Tonal is incredible. Tonal. Yeah. I just, ordered the hydro. Yeah, the row machine. Yeah, I have the Peloton tread, which just got recalled. I think that was a little, all treadmills have sadly killed children and pets. I don't think this was unique to them.

I think they're just being super, super cautious, but I'm not sure any child or dog should be anywhere near a treadmill. This is like super dangerous. Yeah. So I actually think that they may have overreacted on their recall. I don't know, because I don't think many, I'm not recalling mine. I don't think, I don't know what they're going to do to make it safer. Like you put a bumper on the back or something?

I haven't gotten a clarity. I haven't spent that much time looking at it. So I thought there was an issue with like the screen dislodging on some of them. Like, no, the issue was, and there's tragic videos online, kids will play with the treadmill. So what does the kid do? They put their hands on the back of the treadmill. Then they get sucked under the treadmill that they move so fast. One kid's playing with the speed.

which is what I would do. And then my little brother, which is what he would do, we'd be trying to grab the back of it or whatever, and they get sucked under it, and then the wheel is burning them. So there's been a lot of gnarly things that happen with treadmills.

My rule is I unplug the safety key and put it in another location, and I unplug it. And what they really need is a pin key. Just put a pin key on this, and the issue's over. Then a kid would have to have the safety key, the power.

I mean, it would be three steps. You know, tech companies get held to such a higher standard. You deal with a lot of people ripping off the idea and like doing bogus versions on Amazon. I noticed when I searched one time, there were like lots of rip-off products. Are those? Yeah, we've seen that, but most of us have, you know, come and gone. I think, you know, really at least, you know, volume-wise, size-wise, or even capital now at this

point after we scaled, you know, been scaling. I think, you know, haven't seen that too much. Earlier on, we definitely did. But I know you guys have had multiple offers to sell the company and I'm sure SPAC. How do you think about that? Is it, is a SPAC interesting for a company at your scale now? Yeah, I mean, you know, we definitely get inbounds on it. I think for us, it's how do we figure out the right capital structure to deliver the most value for customers?

And I think, you know, SPACs can add a lot of pressure being public. So after a year of banking, I spent nine years of a hedge fund, by the way, before coming in Aura. And so, like, you know, seeing that world, I think there's a time that's appropriate for it. I do like the rigor, the financial markets give you. And, you know, I think, you know, there's something about a company. that operates well as, you know, when all lies are on it. But I think, you know, we're still pretty early in our story. So I think, you know, we've got a lot to iterate on, a lot more to prove and deliver more

value to customers. And I think if we do that, then the appropriate, you know, stay private next round, go public, you know, people want to buy you. I think, you know, all that's open. I will say the M&A side, if you look at it, just in the last year, you saw Google close on Fitbit, Amazon launch a wearable, and pretty significant rumors. Fair, you know, Facebook's trying to launch one too. Yeah.

So if you, if you look at the space, I think you sort of have Apple at like 50 million Apple watches in 2020 and then Fitbit, you know, at like 10 to 12 million units behind is the number two-ish, right? And so like, like, I think if you're everyone else in the space, you're like Google and Amazon, you're like, holy cow, this Apple Watch trend has continued. This is important. You know, health is a, you know, 10 trillion, 20 trillion dollar problem globally. Like, we're losing this battle and we need to catch up.

So I definitely think you're seeing, you know, people really. realize, like, consumers want more of this, especially after the pandemic, you know, wearables numbers globally, you know, accelerated and consumer demands accelerating and the use cases are expanding. So as you go from call it step tracking, wearables 1.0, to I think really understanding health, wearables 2.0. You know, I think we're in a really good spot and I think that's what consumers want and that's what, you know, we're trying to focus on as a company. I could tell you, ain't nobody wearing a Facebook wearable. Do not sell your company to Zuckerberg. Or if you're going to, please first talk to Kevin Sistram,

then talk to the WhatsApp founders because they hate Zuck after what he did to their products. Good to know. I mean, also think about his, they launched their own like video camera system, like their own version of a Zoom hardware device. And people are like, yeah, we already don't trust you with our privacy. Hell no, are we giving you our health data or putting a camera in your house? And people said the Facebook portal is like an incredible device. I was like, you have to be a.

maniac to put your kids on Instagram for kids, let Zuck have a camera in your house, or give him, I mean, I think that's why he didn't win Fitbit is I don't think he didn't pay the right price. I was going to say, I think you're right because there were some there were some like language in the merger docs

there that pretty much suggested that there was another buyer. I think rumors came out that it was Facebook. Yeah, it was 100% Facebook, yeah. And I mean, it's like really, you think that's going to pass scrutiny after you screwed up the election and, you know, can't keep hate speech or whatever, you know, if you're platform and you're throwing your hands up about

the president, like we're going to give you all this health data, probably not a good steward of data already. And health data is a whole different level. And just from this conversation, I feel great that you're actually the one who's anonymizing and keeping our data safe over at ORA. You've been a great guest, really honest. Appreciate the time. I know you're hiring right now. So where can people go to find out what jobs? Well, I think just LinkedIn. But, you know, O-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-N-G.com as well. Yeah. LinkedIn is just the best place to go.

You get the great screening system there, and they target all the candidates. I'm a huge fan of LinkedIn's job portal. All right. Listen, continued success. It makes a great corporate gift. So if you're doing corporate gifting in the fall, that's how I got mine. And I'm telling you, I give chocolates every year. I'm thinking, like, maybe for the big sponsors of this podcast, I'll start giving some aura rings.

Because when I got it, I was like, that's pretty sick. Like to give somebody a three or four hundred dollar ring for Christmas. I mean, listen, I know I'm important to a couple of the sponsors. But yeah, that was, I was blown away. And I trust me, I remember the name of the company. I wouldn't say here. I don't want to, you know, without their permission, say they sent me this. But it was just a very touching gift.

And it was like, aw. And it was just, it's so nice because when you send it as a gift, you actually send the sizing kit. Sizing kit. So it didn't feel personalized. And then they only, I'm assuming they only pay if they actually. buy it. Yeah.

Right? Like, if the person doesn't actually follow through, they don't follow through. All right, listen,

continued success and congratulations. Thank you, a great place to work. Yeah. And we'll see you all next time on this week in startups.