Matteo Franceschetti – Modernizing Sleep – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 23]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This episode of Founder's Field Guide is sponsored by Klaviyo. Want to deliver marketing moments that last a lifetime? Klaviyo is the ultimate marketing platform for e-commerce. With targeted segmentation, email automation, SMS marketing and more, Klaviyo helps you create your ideal customer experience. See why more than 50,000 brands, like Living Proof, Solo Stove and Nomad, trust Klaviyo to grow their business. Keep your customers coming back. Get a free trial at klaviyo.com/founders.
That's klaviyo.com/founders. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn jobs. 2021 means new opportunities to grow your business. If part of your strategy is adding new members to your team, LinkedIn jobs finds the right person quickly. To make things better, your first job post is free. With LinkedIn, you get access to an active community of professionals with more than 722 million members worldwide. LinkedIn is the easiest place in the world to post a job and message qualified candidates. Getting started, it's easier than ever, and now you can do all this from your mobile device.
That's how LinkedIn jobs can help you hire the right person faster. When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn jobs. And now you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/fieldguide. Again, that's linkedin.com/fieldguide to post a job for free. Terms and conditions apply.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses.
I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. You can find more episodes at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:40)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Oshanose Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:05)
My guest today is Matteo Franceschetti, the founder and CEO of Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep builds mattresses with dynamic temperature control and a variety of biometric sensors and their goal is to make their customers get drastically better sleep.
We talk about why biometrics matter, how hard it is to start a hardware company and launch manufacturing overseas, how Matteo manages his own sleep and the massive potential preventative health companies like Eight Sleep may have in the future. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Matteo Franceschetti.
Okay, so Matteo, I think this is the first time that I can say that I am a nightly active user of the product of one of my guests. Your product is Eight Sleep, a mattress that does all sorts of interesting things. I'd love you to begin by describing the origin story of this business. What was the path that led you to found Eight Sleep?

**Matteo Franceschetti** (2:53)
Yeah, I was the typical entrepreneur working long hours and I started looking into sleep to see if I could sleep less, if you have more time to work and do whatever I wanted. And then I started wondering why Elon Musk is taking me to Mars, but I still spend the third of my life on a piece of dumb phone.
I mean, if I'm gonna live 100 years, I'm gonna spend 33 years of my life on a piece of dumb phone. That was now making sense to me. And so I thought maybe I can fix it.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:21)
What was the original journey of creating this product like? Because I imagine it's very complicated. There's a cool picture that we'll post in the show notes that shows like wires everywhere. And what was version one? Like how did you decide what should go into version one?

**Matteo Franceschetti** (3:35)
It's a cool story because my co-founder, Max, so we built the first version in his garage in San Francisco.
He just hacked a bunch of different sensors. And then he was also able to create a sort of heating pad.
And he did everything like three days, but obviously it was a real hack.
And then we invited friends to his place for a pajama party. And everyone came with their pajama and they tried the product and they gave us feedback. But at the time there was no company, right? It was a side project. It was like the third side project we were playing with. And one of the people coming gave us a check at the end of the pajama party and say, oh, I wanna give you 25K to start the business. And that is how Eight Sleep started.