Alexandra Zatarain - Co-Founder of Eight Sleep

Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today we are joined by Alexandra Zadarain, the co founder of eight Sleep. Alexandra, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Of course. Thank you for having me.

So before we dive into eight Sleep one, not only have I been an incredible fan of the product and user and customer for the last three years, but a question I wanted to start this conversation with that I found myself saying a lot to people is instead of saying, how have you been? Like, how are you lately? It's how have you been sleeping lately? I think that's a great question before diving into the conversation today.

Well, if you ask me how I've been sleeping, I got back home, I live in Miami and I got back home on Sunday after like a week of travel. So the last couple nights have been glorious. Being back on my pod, that's just been so good. When I'm back to my settings and my pod and my pillow and my, you know, blackout room, it's been great.

Yeah. Even doing. I remember when I first got my eight sleep mattress traveling, it was sort of like I had fear of not only my home, but just like sleeping. People always miss their bed, but when you get an eight sleep mattress, I found myself just nothing compares. So love to hear that. And for people that are listening, I mean, you guys have built such an incredible brand for maybe the couple of people out there that are like, huh, what is eight Sleep? I'd love for you to just give a high level overview before we really dive into the story.

Yes, of course. So eight Sleep, the company is a health and wellness company focused on sleep fitness. We essentially build technology products that will help people achieve sleep fitness. So help you sleep better. We believe at eight Sleep that technology can help you sleep better. A lot of conversations out there say no and they say otherwise and say, you know, technology gets in the way and whatnot. But the reality is technology has helped us to do many things in our lives better, more efficiently, more effectively. So we started this company 10 years ago with that purview that if we innovate in the sleep space and we leverage the latest technologies, we can actually deliver better outcomes. We are best known for our product that you've been mentioning, the pod. And the POD is a cover you can add on to any mattress to add all these benefits that will help you sleep better. It does it primarily through temperature regulation, so it will cooler heat each side of the bed to the temperature that every individual sleeper needs. And through those interventions in temper, it will give you better recovery. So you'll fall asleep faster, you'll sleep deeper, you'll wake up more refreshed, you'll see a higher HRV score in the morning, you'll see lower heart rate during the night. So there's now all the clinical validation that we have behind the technology. And then most recently we've also introduced products that go beyond temperature. So also managing your elevation during sleep. So your sleep position, the elevation which allows proper breathing, which can reduce and mitigate snoring. So it does snoring in real time detection and then it'll mitigate it through elevation movements. And that's what we do, innovate day in and day out to solve all of sleep's biggest problems.

Such an incredible. I am so in love with the company and the mission you guys are on and on the new product that you just mentioned, because I've been seeing it. Is the pod 4 correct?

Correct. Yes.

Yeah. The elevation looks awesome. And just the innovation that you guys have brought to the table throughout the years is just again, incredible to see. And again, for context, I started sleeping on an EatSleep mattress in 2021, I believe. And I have a partner now, fiance. And the ability to not only fall asleep faster, but to individualize. I think in this world of everything is so individual from how you spend time on your phone to your apps and how they're laid out to now how 8 sleep to your sleep preferences. I remember when we first got the mattress, it was just a full 180 of how I approach sleeping and the individual process of falling asleep, staying asleep and of course tracking it. But before we dive into any of the science and the metrics, I'd love for you to take us back to what inspired 8 Sleep for you and your co founders. I know that you are a partner with your husband, which is I love to see and hear as someone that's worked with my partner in the past. So take us back to 10 years ago. You guys have been on this journey. What inspired the idea for eight Sleep and how did this even come about?

It was really a personal journey. So as you mentioned, Mateo's one of my co founders and he's the CEO of the company. He's my husband. He started struggling with his sleep. You know, we all hit that age where things start changing. Like you're no longer in your early 20s where you could just go out and then be sitting at class the next day at 7am so we all agent change and his sleep started changing. He started struggling with those changes. And given his Past as an athlete growing up and then being a lawyer and then being an entrepreneur. He's very much the person who tackles problems head on. And he realized that there was opportunity to solve these problems through technology. He famously says over and over, like, Elon Musk is taking me to Mars. But we still sleep on dumb pieces of foam, which when you think about it that way, right, we spend a third of our lives sleeping. So there is so much more that we should be thinking of doing to give us the best one third of our lives possible. That was the start of the journey. So that was sort of the, the, the first insight is the realization that there was an opportunity to bring technology into the space. And then after that we started looking into, okay, what was happening, what were the companies that were in the space, what were they doing, what was their approach? And we realized that there were three types of businesses in the sleep space. There were companies that were really great at building sort of comfortable surfaces to sleep on. So you can think of mattresses and bed sheets and pillows. And you know, these companies are many of them great at what they do and they've spent centuries doing that. But comfort is only a small piece of the puzzle when it comes to giving you good sleep. And those companies don't measure their success and you actually sleeping better. They just sell you something and that's it. And like, you figure everything else out. So they're sort of product driven companies. They're not like missionaries. The second type of company that we saw were pharmaceutical companies. So those are pretty well known, particularly in the United States. There's a lot of people who use prescription medications to aid them in sleeping, especially falling asle. But there's a lot of studies that show that that's not actually real sleep. It's completely messed up sleep architecture. It's not good for you. There builds dependency. So again, those companies don't measure their success and their ability to actually give you good sleep. You know, they're just helping you fall asleep faster and sort of get knocked out, but they don't care if it's actually good sleep or not. And the third type of company, which 10 years ago, when we started eight sleep were just starting. They were the wearable companies that were starting to get into sleep. There was Fitbit, there was Jawbone, there was no Apple, there was no aura, there was no whoop. A lot of these contemporary companies that we all love and use, they didn't exist yet. So there was starting to be some conversation around these fitness trackers, looking into tracking Sleep. But again, it was like, well, they didn't start from sleep, right? That's not like their primary goal here is not to actually help you sleep better, it's just to give you data. That has changed a lot in the last 10 years, right? There's been an explosion of innovation, but at the time, that was the. The insight that we had is, was there was a clear opportunity to be a company in the space that actually cared about the outcomes and that was going to use the latest technologies to deliver real results.

That is so great to hear and even to just you saying that no Apple watch, no Woob, no aura like brands and products that people all know and love. You guys really saw people always talk about you can't time the market, but your time in market, 10 years being a part of this innovation. Like back then, what were some of the hard conversations you guys were having in terms of perspectives you had to break through and perspectives you had to change, whether that's with early investors or even early employees. What were some of the big hurdles that you faced? Because now looking back, I always love saying the quote from Steve Jobs, you can never connect the dots. Looking forward, only looking backwards. It seems obvious in hindsight, but during that early stage, what were some of the objections and big problems that you were gleaming and looking at into the future when it comes to building this company?

Some of the main challenges in the early days were honestly that we just hadn't realized how big the space was, but at the same time how important it was for us to go very narrow. Everyone sleeps in the world, right? So when we are solving a problem that everyone encounters at some point in their life, every single person in the world, as an entrepreneur, you can make the mistake of just thinking, well, everyone is my target market, and let me just speak to everyone and let me try to acquire customers from anywhere. So I think more than challenges in the market per se, it was more how we were thinking of approaching the opportunity because the market is so big and it's still so big. 8 Sleep has only really scratched the surface. We will become the de facto way of sleeping for everyone in the world one day, but it'll take time, right? So I think that was one. It's more how we approached it. I think there was definitely less of an interest in general in anything, you know, biohacking and sleep and health. So the last five years, we've seen a tremendous acceleration into those conversations and also in our business, naturally, because we live and breathe in that space. But in the first five years it was different. It was more the conversation around wearables. There were smart devices right in the home. So the trend has really shifted to be in the space that we really want to be in, which is health and wellness through technology.

Yeah, no, that's, that's so powerful. And you know, I heard you say in, in another interview where, you know, the, the idea from taking what became the, you know, the pod was a four year journey, I believe, or from 2015 to 2018, to bring this product to the market. Let's talk about some of that R and D and like the true early versions of the product. Like, what were some of those? I believe, I don't think I was it Kickstarter. You guys did a campaign and talk to me about that phase of the business where you're getting product market fit or you're having proof of concept. Because I think even products today, like, there's so many great products out there, or excuse me, ways to go raise capital, ways to validate an idea, like bring us back to the product validation. And even I think what would be helpful is what did you learn through that phase of product validation? Like, was there any thoughts of, hey, we need to make a big change here, but just walk us through that process of validating the product in that early stage.

Yeah, it was a really, I think, exciting time for business, if you can call it a business, back in those days. But when we, when we first got together as founders and decided to pursue this, it was because Mateo and Max are my co founders, they had a conversation around the problem first. So Matteo shared with Max, who's our CTO and sort of the tech brains behind all that we do. Matteo shared with Max this problem and this sort of idea that he had. And Max said, I can build that. And, you know, he got enamored by the idea of using data to understand how each individual sleeps and deliver some outcomes. And so Max, like all those Silicon Valley legends, literally went back home and built a prototype out of off the shelf components, so sensors and like mattress covers that were being sold at like Walmart. And then he would plug it to his computer and you could see in real time the data coming in when someone lined the bed and you could see the heart rate. And like, he did all of that. And they decided to host a pajama party at Max's house in San Francisco and invite a few. It was like a dinner, but they said, like, come dress in your pajamas and we'll show you something. And out of that dinner, one of their friends after they demoed the product, said, well, if you guys decide to pursue something out of this and make it a business, I'll give you guys a check. And he handed them, like, $25,000 check or something like that and said, well, if you go ahead, cash in, and if you don't want to do anything, forget it. Just, you know, rip the check. And both of them being entrepreneurs, wow, that's bold.

That's so cool. It's like, hey, I'm your investor. If not, no worries. But here is my money. That is. He wanted to be involved. That's incredible.

Yeah. And he ended up becoming our first investor ever. Right? So I think that's. That's the beauty of. Of Silicon Valley and in America, where these things really happen. And that gave them that push. I think, you know, a lot of people talk about in their journey, whether it's as entrepreneurs or athletes or whatever, it is of this importance of someone believing in you and maybe making you see something in you that you haven't seen. And they had both built businesses before, and so for them, it was like, okay, they had both just exited their previous businesses. It was like perfect timing. You were talking about timing before and timing the market, but sometimes also timing it in your life. And they said, let's do this. And that's at which point they invited me to join them. And the way we went about developing the product from that point up until launching our first product on crowdfunding was talking to a lot of people. We got this small apartment in San Francisco that was sort of our office, but it was also where Matteo and I were living. And we would bring people in and just chat with anyone that we knew around their sleep. What do you struggle with? And, you know, how do you think about it? How do you solve it? And then we would show them the product. We would, as we started actually sort of refining our marketing and how we would talk about it in our crowdfunding campaign, we would show them. So, you know, it's like, very, very close to the potential customer and really learning from them directly to refine. And for us, crowdfunding was a way to validate it. So we launched on crowdfunding because we didn't know if someone else actually wanted this and if they would be willing to pay for it. And I think that was such a great tool that for many years was such a valuable platform for many entrepreneurs, particularly in the physical. A good space. And we launched. Crowdfunding was tremendously successful. And then from then on, it sort of entered another Type of face of validating and learning and refining. But that was the first one. That and how we approached it.

Wow. No, that's. That's so great to hear. Just even. Just like, the personal journey of, like, you know, the apartment is the office where you guys are living. Like, it's so integrated into your life and you guys are working on it together. And I think that's something that I really love to hear and even just to dive into that for a moment. I got engaged last year, and prior to that, my now fiance, she was the COO of my last business, a founding member. And that comes with so many challenges, but so many beautiful moments of growing together and being on a shared mission. Not to spend too much time on this, but I personally find so much value in it and I admire it. What has been some of the most beneficial parts of working with your partner, but also just, I don't want to say advice. It's very individualized, but, like, thoughts on working with your partner overall? Would love to hear your take on that, whether that's the challenges or the great things that come from it, because, again, I just have such an appreciation for it as it really takes just a unique perspective to really lean into that.

Yeah, I actually. Both Mateo and I get asked this often, so it's a very, very common question. I don't know if people are fascinated by it or people also wonder how they could make it work, but we always say that it's actually such an asset for us, I think, you know, I don't necessarily say that it'll work for every couple, but for us, it has been the case. It's made us so much stronger. First of all, when you look at it from the outside and earlier on, there were investors who passed in investing in AIDSlee because of it, which I think is pretty dumb. Being now an investor myself, I think it's such a dumb reason, but I actually think, you know, in our case, it's like there's no plan B. There's no someone else's job to take care of the household here. This is it. Like, we are invested in building this business and making it successful. So if anything, there's like, a much higher level of commitment from this family, from both of us, to just, like, make it work. And I think we've proven that commitment over the last 10 years and everything we've been through. So I think that's an important perspective for those who invest or, you know, join companies as well. From an employee perspective, which is a way of investing. I Think that when you work with your partner, or even sometimes it happens when you work with, like, a sibling or a really close friend, you know each other really well. So the way I see that relationship between Mateo and I, from a work perspective is I know his strengths and his weaknesses, and he does the same with me. So we're able to really push each other to be the best that we can be and to give each other feedback. Very honestly. We know that we have the best of intentions for each other's careers. Right? Like, you're partners, you love each other. Who else loves you more? Maybe your mom. So you really have that intention behind everything that you share with them, and you want them to be the best they can be both because you care about them on a personal level, but also you care about the business outcome. I do think in order for it to work in our case, we always made this very clear. Like, you have to professionalize that relationship at work, meaning it has to be very clear what the roles are. You have to be able to give that feedback and be honest and in that setting without bringing it over to your family life. Otherwise, it breaks down. So that is definitely the one advice that I would have, is you need to split the lanes, specifically when it comes to communication and feedback, because if you don't and you start bringing things over from one side to the other, it can hurt that side of the relationship.

Very well said. That's a beautiful perspective there. Thank you for sharing that. I want to zone in on something that I know your official role. VP of Brand and Marketing. And I'm sure as a founder, co founder, your role has changed so much in the early phases when it comes to where you spend your time today. But also just speaking on the brand overall, right. As someone that's loved the brand and has been a customer and user, you see guys now sponsoring these incredible races. And just you have Elon and Zuck tweeting about the product and how they love it and all these great scientific partners. It was not easy to get there. So talk to me about your role as VP of Brand Marketing and just how you went about building the brand specifically to what it is today. Because you could have a mattress that tracks sleep, but you guys are eight sleep. And what that means to customers and to people is very strong. And you see it and you feel it. And I have such an admiration for the brand as an outsider. So talk to us and the listeners about what it means to build a brand. Your perspective, but also where this began and how you really took the step to get it to where it is today.

So I have this perspective about the brand that I learned over the years because we made a lot of mistakes on this realm, that the brand, ultimately, for any business, and particularly for consumer businesses, is like the heart and soul. It's who you truly are as a business, and it's the DNA. And the DNA starts with like, why are you here? And so I think that the reason why, what you See now of 8 Sleep people see as successful and they are able to understand who we are, is because at some point, after four to five years of mistakes, because we were running away from who we truly were and pretending to be someone we weren't, we said, wait a second, this, this is not working. And we looked in words like therapy, and we completely repositioned the brand out of that exercise. So I think that that is the first, sort of the first step that we took at eight SLEEP to really, quote, unquote, build the brand. It was. The brand was there. That's who we were. That was the reason why we started the business. Everything I just talked about, right, what we saw in the market, what we believed, our core belief of where sleep should be and what we should do with technology, etc, was there. So we just grabbed onto that and then we started sharing that with the world. So everything you see now, it's because that's truly who we are as founders and particularly that's who Mateo is as a founder and a CEO. And that's where the business started. He was an athlete growing up, and he was competitive tennis player and he was racing cars and he was a competitive skier. And so when you look at sleep fitness and you look at performance and you look at our partnerships with athletes, because that's in our DNA, he actually believes sleep is a means to an end. He actually believes in optimizing every aspect of your health, right? So that's what I think ultimately led to it being successful. It's because it was grounded in that authenticity of who we are and why we started this company. Um, and it started compounding over time. So we repositioned the brand in 2019, when we introduced the first version of the pod that launched with this new sort of messaging and also visually, like the new aesthetic of the brand. And we started really focusing on communicating sleep fitness and the performance aspect of it. And it took time, but then it compounded, right? When you stick to that message and stick to your, your core and your heart and your soul, right? And you stay authentic over time, people see that and the People who see themselves reflected in that brand start wanting to associate themselves to it as well. And I hope that that journey continues and that we can extend the reach of like, bringing sleep fitness into more audiences and more individuals. That's basically my job of how I spend my time now. Leading brand is just continuously thinking, what else should we be communicating? What stories do we need to tell? Who do we need to tell them to to continue to spread the message of first sleep fitness as a lifestyle, and second, eight sleep as a company that is leading that space.

That's so great to hear. And even being someone that, you know, spends time in the brand and marketing. I know I mentioned it briefly on my last question, but would love to dive into it more is, you know, when you talk about amplification of a great product and you think about world leaders and people who are efficient, you know, I mentioned Zuck and Elon and I know there's, you know, they've had tweets or posts just like organically sharing the product. What did that do for you, the company? The. Just the perspective. Like, what is the, what was the internal perspective when you started seeing and feeling some of these just like publicly noted mentions of the brand?

Yeah, it's, it's interesting. And I'm sure all entrepreneurs can relate to the fact that when something good happens, you're already thinking about, wait, but there's this thing that's not going well or, you know, I need to hit the next milestone. So for good or bad, I think we all share that sin of nothing's ever good enough and you keep moving on and you keep thinking of the next thing. But in the moment, when we do look back and spend some time kind of thinking about how far we've come from where we started, it's pretty gratifying, particularly when you build in the consumer space and in the physical goods and hardware and you think about this product that you chose, every single fabric on it and every detail and the packaging design and every email that people get, like, there's, there's love behind each one of those touch points. And if you don't like something about it, tell me, because it's my fault. Right? So that's how you feel as a founder. And when someone like Mark Zuckerberg posted on threads that, oh, uses eight sleep, which, you know, sometimes we know about those, we just can't talk about them publicly. But when they do, it gives us so much pride that, that they feel. And not only do they love the product, but they also feel compelled to share about it. They know how public they are, they know how much that's going to be talked about. So them doing it organically just means so much to us. It means more than when you work with someone in like a transactional capacity. Right. And I think there's been a lot of stories like that. There's one very funny one for me personally when one morning one of the team members in my team sent a clip of the morning show with Kelly and Mark. So Kelly Ripa, who's someone who I grew up watching on tv and you know, she, at some point they're talking about something and she starts saying, well, if I had my eight sleep. And she sort of goes about for like 20 seconds or whatnot talking about the eight sleep pod. And it was just so interesting because, you know, you think about who you were growing up and watching this person who you admire and has had an incredible career and the fact that she sleeps in a product that you created, it's just wow, it's like mind blowing. And so those moments don't give you perspective of more than anything what's possible. And so it adds that fuel to the fire where you say, okay, well if I keep going, there's more and more of this that can be created as an outcome of your work.

Absolutely. That's so great to hear. And something so intimate, right? Like your sleep, something as you said that you spend one third of your life sleeping. Like having a product that is so intimate and personal is. Is so cool. Right? Like there's so many great products out there that I love and enjoy. Whether that's like the Ember mug or like things that I just love. Right. But where you sleep, it's so, it must be so cool to hear as a founder, you know, that's where you start and end your day on your mattress. And the ability to really, you know, start a day with a customer and end the day with a customer and to like be a part of their day to day life is so impactful and so cool. And that's really appreciate you sharing that story there. When it comes to the business, you know, there's different phases and you know, like growing up, you have your elementary school, you have your middle school, your high school, you go to college. When it comes to capital in the business, I know you guys have raised multiple different rounds. Talk to me about how your perspective and actions and abilities have changed over the years when it comes to bringing on bigger investors and just how you think about the business overall when it has come to these different stages of the business and also advice to founders. Right. Whether they've raised capital and they're looking to raise their next larger round, or if they're looking to go out there and raise capital from the jump. I'd love to just get your perspective on how the team, yourself and the brand has been able to move in these different phases.

It certainly hasn't been easy. I would lie if I said that it had been. People see We've raised over 160 million over the life of the company. It hasn't been easy because what we do, it sits at the intersection of a lot of things that not many investors touch. We do hardware with software, we're consumer product, we're in the health space. So that's what makes it more difficult because the pool of people who take on those bets is much smaller as nature. Businesses that have a hardware component also require different types of cash flow management. Right. So we've been extremely blessed with getting the attention and the backing from some investors, primarily in Silicon Valley, who are the types of investors who take those bets and who are very outspoken about the fact that they like to take those bets. From the team at Coastal Ventures to Founders Fund to Ballard to ABC to Craft. Obviously Y Combinator being very early as well. So I think if I had one piece of advice for founders who are looking to raise money is first make sure that, you know, your business is a business that should be going out there raising money. There's a certain level of returns that venture capitalists expect. So just make sure it aligns with that. And then two, finding the investors that back your type of business, they understand how things would work, they understand the risks implied and they also support your vision. They understand the journey you're going to have to be on. So that is what has made the biggest difference for us is working with those types of partners and having them on our corner. Because not many would be willing to step in and join that. But I think we've done a great job at bringing on the right ones.

Yeah, I know that that's incredible to hear. When you say Craft Ventures, is that what you're referring to? Yes, I'm actually this is just good for time frame wise. I'm having David Sachs on the show tomorrow.

That's fantastic.

So I love David. I actually interviewed him on his platform callin.com a couple years back. I was an advisor on there. Just loved hosting rooms on that. But that's super cool and just I think the context of someone like David and the fun a. I Want to point that out but b take a moment to ask whether that's David or other shows as someone that's in this business of tech and obviously we're taking time here today on a podcast I mentioned. David, what podcasts or sources of information do you tend to lean into as a founder to. Again, there's founders out there listening to this right now that want to learn from you and what you've built, what does your perspective and where do you go to to see information and knowledge on a daily basis, monthly basis like whatever it may be in terms of your content digestion.

Yeah, most of it is on X. So spend most of my like social media time there. And it's actually a funny story because now if you go on ax, you know Twitter, how ever people talk about it now but if you go there and search for eight Sleep, you'll see how much chatter there is from a just our user base in our community about eight Sleep there. So it sort of becomes. It has become that place where we also stay in touch with our member base. But I think it's such an amazing platform to curate like who you follow and what conversations you want to see. And in the tech space it's just the dominating platform. So also in marketing there's an amazing community of marketing and also design. So that's the space where I find so many interesting perspectives, varying perspectives too which I think is very important. People with different types of opinions that are not just like your own. A lot of things to read. We work as eight Sleep with a lot of podcasts as well. So I listen to lots of different shows because we are. They're also our partners. You know, some of them are our advisors from Andrew Huberman to Peter Attia. We work with podcasters in the tech space as well. Obviously listening to the all in since when they launched the show. So it's. It's part of my job to stay on top of what conversations people are having and what are the trends and it's a good part of the job I guess to just be on top of everything that happens.

Yeah. And I know that I've seen just like your interactions on X with customers and people that mentioning it has always been so awesome and I gotta just mention that. But it's so cool to hear and even too just as someone that spends like I have a company, it's called listener.com and we spend a lot of time just on all things podcasting from services from technology that we're building to the media efforts that we're putting out there. And a question that I always love asking founders is like, how has. How does podcasting play a role in your marketing efforts and how has that changed throughout the years?

It's played a huge role, particularly in the last, like three, four years that we started investing in it more seriously. And we started very small. You know, you first commit with one show and you see what happens and you take some time to understand how to measure its impact. And it has significantly ramped up the since then. And the way I describe it is that podcast is essentially a channel that allows us to do two things. It as a medium, we have sort of the. The airspace where through the ad, we can explain the product. You can't necessarily do that on a social media ad. You know, people have a very short attention span and, you know, if you just have an image versus a video, you don't get a lot of space to explain it. And for a product like ours that is like this new category is something maybe more complex. It's, you know, a beautiful pair of shoes. You need that space. And second through podcast, also working with someone who lends their credibility. That's why the right partners are so important, because when you listen to Dr. Andrew Huberman talk about the pod, you. You trust what he's saying and you trust him because being on the other side of the advertiser, we know that these individuals actually the right ones, they do vet the right their partners, they test the product. They take months, sometimes years to decide to work with you. Sometimes they ask their audience before deciding to work with an advertiser what they think of that brand or that product. So they have earned their credibility. And so when they speak on your behalf, the audience listens. And that is something that you can't get from other mediums of advertising. Podcasts is one of those, you know, some influencer partnerships as well. But yeah, for us, it's been a tremendously impactful channel.

That's so great to hear. And yeah, I think too just Huberman and how he has popularized in such a big way just like quality sleep and just the way he's put not only sleep on a pedestal, but yeah, I look at that as like the dream perfect partnership for a company like eight Sleep. So it's super great to hear. And I know I've heard him talk about it for a while now, so that's awesome. And I appreciate you sharing the perspectives on all things podcasting when it comes to the hardware side. And, you know, the Pod 4 just came out. There's been multiple iterations of this. What would you say, you know, when you think about the product that you guys just launched, right, like these, I remember you mentioned these two core specific functionalities of the ability to, you know, I don't want to misspeak on it, change the positioning of the mattress and also the ability to help with snore detection and you can tap the side to turn off the alarm. Things that when I saw them come out, I'm like, oh, wow, this all makes sense. This is perfect. This is great. When you guys think about different models and sort of that next generation of the pod, what has been the typical life cycle of updating and upgrading it as this is the fourth iteration of it. And talk to me how that has changed over the years in terms of how you think about Pod 5 and beyond.

Yeah, it's really the answer is it's always as soon as possible. So we have a perspective on iterating on hardware that is similar to software. It's just like keep it going, like there's no need to wait five years. Right. Even though we're a small company. So it's definitely a big challenge, but it's something that we've become pretty good at doing. And it starts from the user. So from the moment that the Pod 4, which we launched at the beginning of May, started hitting consumers homes and people started installing it, we start looking at every piece of feedback, every single piece of feedback. And anyone who has a POD and anyone who's been installing a pod for our podporal trust, probably getting a few surveys in the first 30 days, but we take that feedback very seriously. We have an internal squad that is focused only on all of our user feedback that we review with myself, with the CEO, with the VP of engineering, just like what is coming through. And so the journey to the next product starts with that. You know, we're learning what are the things that we can fix immediately or launch immediately to fix problems or to just delight our users with new features. And so that's usually software, right? So there's a lot of things that get released regardless of having a new generation of hardware or not. An example of that is our snoring detection algorithm. So that algorithm was actually released with our Pod 4 units, but also Pot 3 owners. So you know, we always say how when you own a pod, it does keep getting better over time because we're continuously improving it and releasing over the air updates. And you know, you bought a Pot three a couple years ago and now you get this incredible new feature. Like that's amazing.

Yeah.

So we start from that moment, you start seeing how people are using the product, you start getting the feedback and we start working on the next version. And there's always a way for people, obviously, you know, we want to be mindful of how they can upgrade and you know, how they can get into the latest version. But our goal as companies just run as fast as possible towards solving all of Sleep's biggest problems. Like that's our mission here. So how quickly can we run? How much can we innovate from the smallest things that may be just improvements from one generation to another to significantly new features that tackle any new problem that people have.

It's so great to hear. Yeah. As a Pod 3 owner, just seeing even two, I don't know exactly when this one was again, but the massive UI UX app revamp on the home screen and just always feeling like again like you guys are measuring tech and hardware and direct to consumer and all these things and the ability to buy something and just feel like it's getting better and it's getting better from the software perspective is such a magical feeling. And I think too, just on a separate note, I've evangelized so much about eight Sleep to friends and you know, we're all, we have like these group chats where we're sharing our data, we're comparing data, we're just, you know, trying to learn from each other, kind of have self awareness and just to be more of a conversation within friends and people that are active that takes sleep seriously. But no, it's really such a unique ability to be able to have something where you know, you're spending so much time on, you are cherishing but that it can feel and physically get better from the software perspective and everything that you guys touch. So very cool to hear. And this is something that I as a customer and I know you guys have talked about this in different ways and whatever you can share or not, no worries. But when you think about like the sleep ecosystem of you know, the mattress, but other future product lines, like are there things that, whether you can share today or that you guys think about as the future of eight Sleep, you know, like as someone that when I think about my sleep routine, you know, drinking magnesium, wearing an eye mask, you know, ensuring that, you know, the, the room is dark through the eye mask in a sense, like are there things that, you know, you guys think about or dream about to bring into the eight Sleep ecosystem or what does that look like in you know, the perspective of you know the customers wanted to hear about it and learn more.

There is first the part around sleep where we are very uniquely positioned and we would always want to lean into that strength as sort of our unique angle to launch new products. And that is the fact that we understand how you sleep. So anything that we could personalize through that data to give you better outcomes, that's what we will lean on. And that's some of the new products that you would see come out in the next couple of years. Because at the end of the day, there are many companies that do a lot of products that are ancillary to sleep, but we may not have any edge, you know, because there may not require or be able to be personalized. So sort of what's the point right now? Maybe eventually, but there's a second more long term vision for eight sleep that we've always had and many people are not aware of because it's not what we do today. But we are truly as we progress in our innovation, transforming the bed into the most powerful preventative health device. You sleep on it every night. You are on it for seven to nine hours every night. It is tracking your heart rate at rest, your heart rate variability, your respiratory rate. Now you're snoring, your sleep faces. Eventually there'll be more things that it can track. There's already a lot of incredible sensors out there in the fields that we can incorporate into our products to look at other things happening and developing in your body and be able to tell you that they're developing before it's too late. We've had cases of that already and people that do their own diagnosis out of their trended eight sleep data. We're not a medical device yet, so we can't do that. But the moment that we are with the data we already have, there could be a lot of things that we, we could already tell you. And when you pair that with the rise in AI and the ability to put on that layer on top of the data, and for someone who like you, has been sleeping on a pod for a few years, AI could already project well into the future what's going to happen based on what has already happened. So it's going to take time for people to sort of understand that shift, but that's the direction in which a product like the pod will go into is you'll get the immediate benefit on better sleep, which is very important. People buy it because of that. And that's something we won't stop delivering on. But then also it'll be a Product that one day may save your life.

Wow, that is really cool. And I wanted to touch on that, the aspect. And I know you just did. That's incredible. And even to like the polarity of, you know, for me as a. The whole reason I love the product on the surface is, you know, the heating and cooling and then the vibration. Like the two things that I know you guys speak about so much and is like really obviously core to the product, but, you know, all of the other things obviously make that so much more valuable, from the data to the brand to the community, to just everything that the product embodies. But, but on the note of AI, what. What do you guys think about that? You know, from the lens of there's so many ways you can implement AI into products. Whether that's through like, I know as a whoop user as well, you can kind of ask questions and go back and forth with it to obviously the data itself. How do you guys think about that as this is such an emerging category where, you know, even with Apple's announcements yesterday and how AI, Apple Intelligence is such a part of that as the next phase of iOS? I guess. Yeah. When you think about eight sleep and AI, what is important for people to know? As you think about the future, there's.

There's two sides. One is how the company uses it to do what we do faster and better. Right. So there's a lot of applications we're already leveraging around how we develop our algorithms and the speed at which you could do it because of AI applications. And that has already changed and will continue changing how things were done before versus how they'll be done in the future. Right. The access to the sort of the way that you train the models in order to spit out a very accurate snoring algorithm is different from maybe how we were doing things five years ago, more on what the user gets. We've always focused on anything technology, not just for AI, helping people do things, solve problems that they have or do things better. And I think that is the. With the Apple announcement that you were mentioning yesterday is they've done a great job at focusing on the use cases for things that people already do and just helping you do it more easily. Right. Because people don't want to have to do something else and take on another chore and learn how to use another tool. They want simplification at least to start while they get to understand the technology. And so if we're applying it to anything that's more towards the user, we'll want it to be so that it simplifies your life. And that's what we do with our autopilot algorithm. It's really AI that builds an understanding of who you are as a user. It's that sort of fingerprint like who are you as an individual? Sleep from the questions that it asks you, but also from how you're sleeping over time and from comparing that to other people like you. That profile of you as a sleeper is being refined continuously with any feedback that you give it or even just from how you're sleeping in different environments and conditions. And then in real time, it's making adjustments to your temperature and your elevation to give you the best sleep. So that's our key core application of AI that we've been developing for years and it's become easier to refine because of advances in AI. So imagine what we're going to be able to to do in the next 10 years.

Yeah, that's very exciting and appreciate the perspective there. Two more questions before we wrap up, Alexandra. One is, as a founder, you've been on this journey for 10 plus years. The industry has changed so much. The appetite for this product has changed and grown so much. If you were to go back in time and give your younger self a piece of advice, what would that advice be and why?

Oh, it's a good question because like you were saying earlier, it's so much easier to connect the dots looking forward. But I think it's always goes back to Vinod Koza, who's one of our investors, talks about how the team you build is a company you build. So I would definitely say to that me 10 years ago to spend more time refining like who, who is the right person at eight sleep and attracting the top talent. We have an incredible team today and we always had incredible people over the journey. They'd sleep, but we've also made mistakes. So I think just it was a learning that we had to experience. But I wish maybe it could have been compressed and we could have learned much faster, you know, to set that tone in our culture earlier on, to be much more decisive on who we believed was the right fit for us and to not fall in the trap of wanting to create a workplace for everyone, because I don't think it's the case. The world has many places where you can work and you need to have very, very clear, just like your brand, what is your type of organization? Who are the people that will succeed in it?

I love that. Great perspective there. And last question before we wrap up here. And I know we talked a little bit on it in just terms of what you guys are excited about in the future. But if I was to ask you what excites you the most about 8 sleep into this next decade? Yeah. What is that?

We want to get into millions of people's homes. And nothing excites me more than that, honestly. It's like you want to build something that is used by millions of people. So that's what's top of my mind. That's what my team does. Right. It's grow our user base. So I, I can't wait to see that happen. To have an even larger global footprint, to be in people's homes through different products, that may not be just the pod. Right. And to really bring that lifestyle and that message of sleep fitness and the importance of sleep to the forefront of the conversation around health.

I love that and it's such a powerful mission. So before we wrap up here for people, for the listeners that have made it this far, where is the best place for everyone to learn more about eight Sleep? Of course, to purchase the mattress if they're interested and just to stay connected with you, the brand and everything that that you guys have to offer.

Asleep.com you can find everything about the pod and the brand and also an X. Like I was saying, I spend most of our time there. So if you want to connect with me or any of my co founders or the brand, we're super active and X. So just follow us there.

Love it. Well, I will be sure to link everything down below. And once again, Alexandra, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it.

Of course. Thank you.