Eight Sleep

“So before the lockdown, people tend to sleep very differently during the weekend and during the weekdays. So they were waking up on average at 6:45 a.m. Now they are waking up at 7:15. So on average, our users are sleeping 30 minutes more per day.”

“We, on, on, on, on an average, we hire one out of every hundred people.”

“So usually if something come up, we need to fix it within 48 hours. If that doesn't happen, we must have a very strong reason, and I want to read about that reason.”

“We don't make anyone a manager unless they already led a bunch of squads successfully. So my step is you will never become manager immediately, right? Going from IC to manager. You need to be a manager before you are formally a manager.”

“If you just let them be, and they just do a repetitive job, these people will leave.”

“We use the thing that comes from Amazon that is disagree and commit, and I do sometimes in product, right? Not always, but sometimes I decide to disagree, but I raise my hand and I say I disagree and commit, but I'm disagreeing.”

“By forcing my team, our team, With this structure, we were able to unlock channels that we were not using at the time, and now we can deploy millions of dollars in these channels at an extremely efficient CAC.”

“We have an internal competition with sleep data inside the company, so there is a sleep fitness workup that is just inside the company, and so we compete with the sleep score every, every day”

“And at the beginning, you will write something that is long, that is not clear, is not data-driven, and the executive will help you. But it's trial and error.”

“Everyone has to do homework. Anyone who joins the company, they have to, we give them a project. They need to work on that at home and they will present to a panel. I don't care if you are the senior executive and you are the CFO of Amazon. If you want to join…”

“The blended CAC is around 50% lower. So this is the fourth year in a row where the company keeps growing, and we're growing really fast, and the CAC is at the lowest it has ever been.”

“The board deck, the biggest value of doing a really good board deck is not for my board, it's for me. It pushes me to think about creating a story of why this quarter was so good. What were the reasons? What really happened, right? Preparing for questions. 90%…”

“I mean, sleep, I sleep nine hours, right, every single day.”

“What we do today is we have three levels of compensation increase. Based on you're a top performer, you're okay, or there is no change if you're a low performer.”

“And so if you fast forward, even just now, for us, understanding what happens across a million nights, it happens in less than a week.”

“If I have a problem, I tell you immediately. It's also my character. I learned that if I don't do it, then I almost keep the thing inside for too long and it's actually negative.”

“With the great people in 20, 25 minutes, I can go through five jobs there. Fast. There are some people where you go through two jobs in 30 minutes, and that is another red flag because you can't.”

“We are a default and no hire. The default is if you come to a sleep, we don't hire you, unless you really blow our mind.”

“If I knew what we would have to go through, I don't think any human being would do that.”

“We don't do anything at eight sleep if there is not an opposite metric.”

“And we have been profitable for two quarters now.”

“Everything is, everything, this is another rule from Keith, I think, from the, his time at Square, where, so essentially everything is public in our company except comp. Usually comp, you don't want to share it, but everything else is shared.”

“I say usually an hour every day before I start working just to review all the agendas of the day.”

“The key usually with senior executives where You really need to push them because, in particular, if they come from big companies, they are more skewed towards quality and reliability, while instead you want to be bold and just ship something, 80%, take the ri…”

“So essentially, all our business is just the cover. We don't sell the mattress. If you go on our website, there is just the pod cover. You can add as an accessory, the foam part, which is the mattress. But you're talking about single digit percentage of our re…”

“The point of the agenda is not about being long. No one wants to read long documents.”

“Because they didn't think enough. They believe, they know, they believe they have a thought, but they didn't develop it properly, and they don't have enough data to support it, so they're confused. At the end of the day, the opposite of clarity of thinking is …”

“If I have a major massive meeting that could drive a, Multi-million dollar fundraiser at seven a.m. On a Monday, I think is not debatable. I'm doing the best for the organization and for the job of hundreds of people.”

“The current product that is a hundred percent of our revenue launched literally Four years ago, 2020 19, right? So this thing went from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue in four years, which in hardware is really rare.”

“I will not take a meeting with anyone in the company if I don't get an agenda slash memo.”

“If you spoke to the person, if you gave them the time to adjust, and if that didn't happen, Now you pull the plug.”

“When we had to readjust our unit economics, we had to increase prices. We did it in 20, 21, and the impact was minimal.”

“We had a couple of weeks to fix it, or we were in trouble, and we fixed it.”

“We do also post-mortem, and a pre-parade every, every quarter.”

“I would say probably 20% of my meetings is impromptu, and so I just randomly call, and so I actually allocate time in my daily calendar to make sure that I have bandwidth to just randomly call my team and discuss things.”

“A hundred percent disagree. I think we overthink because the whole point is you're a startup. How many people really know your brand? Even if you're big, if you're growing well, you know, you're not Apple, right? And so don't fool yourself thinking that you ar…”

“Every day, the first thing I look at, right or wrong, probably wrong, but it's revenue of the previous day. I receive a looker dashboard, right?”

“That is the typical answer of someone who didn't write agendas.”

“I think there are, Multiple gems that we have in the company that join because you have these people behind. And so they just say, okay, this vision must be real if these people are behind these guys.”

“We have no competition and our customers, many of them, they buy literally every new generation that we sell. So repeated purchase for us is pretty high.”

“And so we are discovering things That literally no other professor or scientist can know just because of the scale.”

“If this is a thing that can kill the company and has, I don't know, a legal background, I used to be a lawyer, I'm not gonna delegate the thing, right? And probably if it can kill the company, I'm not gonna delegate that thing, right? I wanna be very, very inv…”

“Meaning as a company, we have been in trouble a bunch of times until when we really fix our unit economics.”

“The biggest thing is what I told them is they need to stop being too rigid on Bi-weekly or monthly goals, because if they're too rigid on that, when things happen and in a startup things happen every day, they are not agile enough to fix them.”

“I think you play, for aspirational, you use images, right, and you try to position very premium, something that you really dream of, but in terms of words and the value proposition and the benefit, You need to be very simple.”

“And I run all the interviews with the same playbook, and that helps me because now I have seen thousands of candidates with the same playbook, the same questions, right?”

“You need to start controlling yourself, and so even in, in measure, you know, how you share things. But I think if people understand first that you have always the best intention, and if they see the point, it's way easier for them to understand it. Then somet…”

“So, we hire really fast in 2019. I would say we probably screw up a large percentage of all the people we hire, because we had that approach.”

“And usually probably takes at least six months to develop someone to write an incredibly good agenda.”

“I never like to see one option. I want to see multiple options, and you tell me why we are not pursuing the others, and we are pursuing this. I want a picture, a portfolio, and then we pick one based on impact and effort.”

“If they come from very large companies, the requirements compared to a startup are very different. We are pirates. They are the Navy, right? These people need to be able to launch a new product in two days, just because they want to test it and be fine with th…”

“If you find people that were able to scale a business from a hundred million to a billion, but at the time where it was growth at all costs, and they join your company is designed around CAC efficiency, it will be really hard for them, right? They have already…”

“Now, now we have 100,000 of customers sleeping on these devices every single night in their home.”

“So usually, so we have an executive meeting every Monday. There is a section in my agenda called lessons.”

“I mean, for us specifically, word of mouth is the most incredible, right? Because you start having 30, 40% of the revenue just coming through word of mouth, and that is insane at our scale.”

“One is Tesla, and the reason why is because of how obsessed they are with the customer experience, right? They are minimal, they are simple, they, the product evolves with software, and so we use Tesla a lot as an example at Eight Sleep”

“We want to detect cancer by using some of these technologies.”

“But so you don't want to do exercise or it's not recommended to do exercise in the second part of the day because you accelerate your heart rate. You accelerate your body temperature, right? So you create a bunch of changes inside your body, and then your body…”

“In my mind, if people talk to me and they don't set a deadline, it's the same day.”

“I think even though you want to see a pattern, I see sometimes people that have been part of three RIFs. But you know what you need to think there is, let's say there is a RIF after a year, or even six months, sometimes you see it, and you see this happening m…”

“Yeah, I think when we hired a lot really fast, we didn't, the culture broke a little bit, and it was because of the quality of the people.”

“You need to be naive and you need to believe that it's a hundred X easier, and then you need to have the stamina while shit comes to handle it.”

“We have saved a million lives. We have and improved millions of lives, right? Between sleep and preventative health. We're a public company, hopefully by then.”

“So when you talk to a person and they sleep, there are three ratings. There is pass, hire, and strong hire. We don't hire anyone if there are not three strong hires.”

“But it makes the difference. I can guarantee you that is time that is well spent.”

“And the reason why I think is wrong to just be obsessed with price reduction and time is often your CAC will not change linearly with the price. Meaning if you reduce the price of our product by 20%, the CAC is not going to go down 20%.”

“For us it's temperature, right? It's the game changer. And so I have this device that I can install on my bed that heats and cools each side of the bed and improves my sleep by 20%.”

“Because we already sold 6008 thousand units in pre-orders, we were one of the hottest YC startup at the time.”

“The best way to develop clarity of thinking is writing, right? You need to write, because once you start writing your thoughts, you understand there are many things that are not clear, or that You still don't know you didn't develop.”

“For us, everything happens in writing async, so we don't lose time.”

“So we call it the rule of the seven touch points. So it's another rule I came up with, which is substantially you want to surround your customers and you want them to see your brand seven times before they pull the trigger.”

“And so I don't have to convince him that technology will, can enhance your sleep, and there will be a trillion dollar business in the space.”

“Because I believe we will compress your sleep over time. So you might, Be able to sleep only six hours and get more rest than when you were sleeping eight hours.”

“Facebook or Google CAC now is probably, I think it's like, 75% lower than what it used to be two years ago.”

“And then there is my final step, which is still fifty-fifty, and sometimes I feel so bad as a CEO, but if I don't click culturally with the person, I still pass, and I'm close to 50% pass.”

“If I call person X that reports to you, do they know if you rate them incredibly good, good, or meh? Yes or no? And if the answer is, I don't know, then you're doing a poor job as an executive. The most important thing is people should always know what you thi…”

“If you are a top performer in the company, probably you're at the point you're not asking for a title change, but if you do, that is the only case when we consider it.”

“In general, the rule of thumb is you shouldn't because I, it takes around eight hours For the coffee to really leave your body, right? So usually I don't have a lot of coffee but if you have coffee, you should stop drinking coffee at least eight hours before b…”

“When we were 30, we had, like, a 30 people. We had like a, what we call a surge, like a pretty aggressive, like two week sprint. And as part of it, I got everyone on the team eight sleeps, like fully free, whatever, 3000 dollars per person, like, you know, the…”

“And so the Eight Sleep Inc will probably own three, four, five, 10 different businesses, which if you think, and if you look at companies, Chinese companies, it's something they have been doing forever.”

“When people, sometimes it's still happening today that sometimes people say, oh, I'm at the final stage with Anthropic and innate sleep, and to me, that is a really bad red flag, Not even for the salary, but it means you're confused. There is no way that these…”

“If it's urgent, I call you at midnight, two a.m., three a.m., like, trust me, I'm gonna come to your door at five a.m. I'm that type of guy.”

“We start seeing the likelihood you develop diabetes in our data, hypertension. We are becoming a medical device for sleep apnea.”

“Our revenue per employees is way higher than Apple.”

“Is in the single digit low single digit yearly churn. Even if you compare to other companies that in the wearable space that are going public, we are better than them.”

“In our case, word of mouth keeps compounding. We are around 40% of our revenue, even at our size, which starts being really big is 40%.”

“The amount of learnings that you get from being an investor is insane, because it's essentially you build your own intelligence. As you receive investor updates, you understand how the market is moving. What are the valuations? What are the multiples? What kin…”

“In the hundreds of millions.”

“Well, there's two conditions for any deal now. First, they need to be, to use the product. If they already use it, they bought it on their own, perfect, now we can talk about not doing a deal. If not, they need to try it, and then we want to hear the feedback.…”

“We introduced a new channel that now we monitor that is literally what we call AI SEO.”

“In F-One we have probably 80% of Formula One drivers sleeping on the product, including the people that are winning.”

“He, the company was paying him way more giving him RSUs, so liquid stocks, plus paying him probably three X more, but he loves so much what we do, how we work, And what we want to build that at the end decided to stay”

“Within three days, she was able to build multiple bots that now run all our email marketing. And so now we have a team of zero and email marketing makes Close to a hundred million.”

“Charles already had our product for two years before we met, and we didn't even know.”

“No, it's lower than that, but it's still in the millions.”

“And so we are focused more and more in on hiring in Europe and outside the US.”

“And so here is not just you committing to this life. If I give you the job, I expect you or I would like you that everything equal, you stay with us for the next two, three, four years, right? Otherwise I'm not going to bet on you. So go and talk to your wife.…”

“We want to democratize sleep, so the way I always say is, imagine if we were Tesla, we are the Model S. There will be the roadster, so there will be something even better, but you will also see us coming out with the model X and Y and three.”

“A very famous person that everybody knows has 55 for his houses, but then there are other people that buy through embassies, and they bought in the hundreds.”

“We have two different channels, so one is Slack for work, and one is WhatsApp for private communication, so our life, and we never mix them”

“We created a truck now that goes around Silicon Valley, and so you can book the truck, and it comes to your home, and you can try the product live, so this truck has a bedroom built in, in, in the back of the truck, but now the truck also goes to specific even…”

“To the point where I think Delian and Keith, when they invested for the first year, they, I, I'm not sure that they were not even, they didn't even know we were married. Obviously, you disclose it when you do a round, so it has been disclosed in every round, b…”

“Two 50 people making a billion.”

“I didn't even speak English until when I was. 24.”

“I think people that join a startup, they should be driven, and it's important that they are motivated by, you know, potential financial success, and I agree, but that success will come by, you know, increasing the equity value from X to X. That is also why, to…”

“Well, our engineers stopped coding around a year ago, so since then they didn't code.”

“So like right now, our paid media team makes hundreds of millions and there are two people. Like two, three hundred million, just a group.”

“I never took a vacation since when a sleep started. We didn't even have a honeymoon because we set the date of our wedding to be exactly one week after the end of the crowdfunding campaign.”

“If you look at the CAC on Meta, It's probably 20% lower than what the true CAC is”

“Well, in our case, we look at the immediate payback period. This is actually something where Keith was really pushy and he was correct since day one. So he wanted us to have an immediate payback period.”

“Pogacar was installing our product every single night at each hotel of each stage of the Tour de France since last year. We didn't even know. He won last year and then he won this year. So they reach out after the first year and say, look, Pogacar did everythi…”