#250: Matteo Franceschetti, Co-Founder & CEO of Eight Sleep, an Innovative Sleep Fitness Startup That's Raised $60M+ from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, and Other Top Investors

Dec 11, 2020

Matteo Franceschetti has always been obsessed with performance. Athletic performance, business performance, and now sleep performance.

An athlete from a young age—he was a competitive ski racer in his native Italy and played tennis and raced cars on the European stage—Matteo has always been focused on winning, and on winning in record time. That drive to succeed propelled him from sports podiums to the top tier of the international legal world and to start two clean-tech companies on two continents, all before age 30. Not surprisingly, sleepless nights were a way of life.

It was Matteo’s quest for more restorative sleep, in fact, that led him to quit his previous life and launch Eight Sleep, a New York-based company dedicated to fueling human potential through optimal sleep, and to turning the bed into a seamless health platform for improved health, performance, and longevity. The path he took to becoming CEO of Eight Sleep, however, is as circuitous as the tracks he raced in his youth.

Some of the Topics Covered by Matteo Franceschetti in this Episode

• What Eight Sleep does and how they got started
• Why Matteo decided to use Indiegogo to launch Eight Sleep
• The initial version of Eight Sleep
• The team behind Eight Sleep
• The challenge in manufacturing and fulfilling the first 8,000 orders of Eight Sleep and why Matteo booked a one-way ticket to China
• What happened after the Indiegogo campaign and how Matteo grew the business
• Matteo's advice around getting through difficult times as a founder
• The product lineup today at Eight Sleep today
• The future for Eight Sleep
• The tech behind the complexities of the Eight Sleep product
• Matteo's approach to growing Eight Sleep today
• Matteo's health stack - sleep, nutrition, and exercise routine - and why he moved from 8 to 9 hours of sleep
• Why you should go to sleep at the same time each night
• Matteo's opinion around naps
• Using a regret minimization framework to guide your decisions
• How Matteo structures his days and weeks

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