20VC: The Ultimate Hiring Playbook: Five Questions to Ask Every New Hire | What Makes Truly Great Leaders and How They Give Feedback | Do VCs Really Add Value; Lessons from Hard Fundraises with Matteo Franceschetti, Co-Founder @ Eight Sleep

23:46Will you advise founders having been through? Will you have been through? Yes. Sometimes you just think about the firm, meaning, oh, let me try to talk to Funders Fund, to see if you can raise. But if you have a very bold vision and a very contrarian view of how the world will look, right? And so you really need to talk to the right person in the firm. And usually is senior partners or people that know fully understand what you're trying to do. And the other big thing is this, if you look at our history, right? We have some of the greatest investors. Right? We have Keith. We have no causal adventures.

24:22We have funders fund. stress events, we have valor with Antonio Gracius, right? And what I realize is not a coincidence. Hundreds of people passed on us, but not these guys. And the reason is these guys, they have a vision that someone will master sleep. Technology will dominate sleep at certain point. So I don't have to convince them on that, right? If you talk to kids, he already knows he has been talking about this for 10 years. And so I don't have to convince him that technology will can I hands your sleep and there will be a $3 billion business in the space. At that point is a matter for these investors just to understand are you the right team to do it or is there someone that is better?

24:59Well, instead when you talk to some other investors, they don't have this belief of how the world will change. And I have to convince them that this will happen, and that is where I lose them. I do sympathize because I totally agree to you in terms of you don't want to educate the investor when you educate the investors It's just too hard to sell. And I buy the long -term vision, and I see that, but then you also have to be grounded in reality, and grounded in unity, and aware of ancillary products you build out, expanding LTVs, and that's where I think the dislocation can happen. Yeah, but I think some of the greatest investors, if they believe in you as a team, they know you will fix it.

25:37Fixing unit economics is possible, it's human, hard work of an operational excellence. And so you just need to hire the best people, and you will do that. But will the word change and adopt a technology that improves sleep? Yes or no? That is something that they just need to have a gut feeling. Okay, I want to discuss the principles because we kind of touched on them a little bit. You mentioned operational lessons that I just want to start on the first one. And by the way, these are the principles of world class execution. You're expecting a book coming out soon. I hope. Clarity of thinking, Matteo.

26:07What does that mean to you? And how do you try and make your clarity of thinking as optimal as possible? If something I'm really obsessed about, first the best way to develop clarity of thinking is writing, right? You need to write. 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. But clarity of thinking is disability to distill in very few words a complicated concept. There is an area where I challenge my team and myself a lot because are you supporting your thinking with data? Second, what is the clear outcome?

26:39Sometimes people are, if they don't have clarity of thinking, they can write something that is very confusing, is not the driven and you don't get to the end point. And so it's just a matter of practice. And you see people like Paul Graham or Keith Robois, right? They are some of the greatest at expressing a very complicated concept with few words in something that I call it the grammar rule. But it's something that my grammar could understand. Sometimes my team writes me something and is extremely complicated and I just say, okay, can you explain this to my grammar? It's a really hard one, I think, for you in terms of the grandma rule and where you position the brand because you want this, like, we turn everyone into a superhuman, but you don't want it to be too aspirational that it's out of reach.

27:21You see what I mean? How do you make something accessible but aspirational? For aspirational, you use images, right, and you try to position very premium, something that you really dream of. But in terms of worse and the value of proposition and the benefit, you need to be very simple. And so there I always think of you having dinner with a friend tonight. How are you going to explain my product? And there is where now we keep tweaking and tweaking and tweaking to help you pitch our product tonight. Why do you think people might mistake some Clashier thoughts? Because they didn't think enough.

27:51They believe they have a thought but they didn't develop it properly and they don't have enough data to support it. They're confused. At the end of the day, the opposite of Clashier thinking is confusion. You have a blur concept that you're unable to express. Oh, we want to try this channel. Why and why and why now the five wise keep going deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper And do we need to test it now think of this right they just happened right they were suggesting okay Let's test these other channels and my point is why right it was in an international market We didn't test it in the US.

28:22Why would we go there? Oh because then we I don't know we can grow faster But can we grow faster with all the current channels and just kill them more? Yeah, maybe and did you spend enough in these channels and do you already know that there is no margin for incremental cuck? You keep making questions as a team you need to help each other meaning you will never start with clarity of thinking in anything So I need help myself. This is just an example Whereas a group we develop our clarity of thinking but after you debate this write it down and send me a blurb or I want Pager about this topic Mine is like a focus.

28:54I always hope you like right a list of the top three and then just start from one And then also it's like understand what success is in each. I find some of you people try things and say I don't know if it's actually what we thought it would be and it's like what did you want to achieve? I don't know we didn't set that. How do we know whether we should keep going? It was a great point to the other way is yeah, maybe this increases your revenue to this new channel But is there a faster and simpler way to achieve the same that works for now? Sometimes people come to me and they just give me one option.

29:21I suggest we do a doesn't matter if I'm in favor or against a I never like to see one option. I want to see multiple options. Are you telling me why we are not pursuing the others and we are pursuing these? I want the picture portfolio pick one based on impact and effort. I get you, but I also want speed of execution And so I quite like it when someone says hey, I analyzed all the options and I realized that actually this is the most efficient Are you okay for me to proceed? I like that because the speed of execution means I don't have to go oh well We've got five we should debate. Well, I disagree with that one actually.

29:52Yeah for us everything happens in writing a sink. So we don't look at time. Write it down. Just say, oh, I analyze five option, I recommend option C. Cool, can I read it? I read really fairly fast and within literally five minutes, I can give you a thumbs up, thumbs down. And even a sink, we don't even need to jump on a call if we're not in the same place. Do you find you lose tone? Like, I have in my CFO, in particular, there's some sensitive items, budget items. That's what we were not tight as we could be. And there's some sensitive things. Do you ever pick the phone up on cool people and say, Hey, I feel this one actually needs to be on phone.

30:27Yeah, I would say probably 20 % of my meetings is in prom too. 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. Speaking of bandwidth, another one is operational excellence. It's kind of a bandied around turn, very popular. How do you think about your own operational excellence and what the biggest needle movies have been and more even done to optimize that. Operational excellence to me means output, right? So what is the output and the efficiency of this output? And so there are a couple of factors behind that.

31:01The first one is quality and the second is velocity. You need to keep a very high bar in terms of quality at a very high velocity. And then you have this output. And the output, there is actually some example from Keith, Keith, Rebois, right? Output usually is a function of how many barrels you have. Butters are people in your company that can get everything done from zero to completion. Then you have butters and ammunition. Butters can lead anything from zero to completion. A munition supports them. Usually the output is a function of this. You can do as many things. Based on the number of butters you have, if you have five butters, you can usually do five things.

31:37But the key of these operational accidents is how do you make sure that you keep moving really, really fast without compromising quality. So they are all positive metrics and you challenge them against each other. What's the biggest challenge of having them at home in each other? It's the best thing ever, and actually this is a mistake a lot of companies do when they pick only one metric. I give you an example in growth. In growth my team has a goal to grow, call it 2x a year over here, at this crack. There is a tension between these two, but this tension is exactly what they want, right? Because if you just give them growth, they could grow 5x a year over here, they just spend 5x more crack or 3x more crack.

32:11If they just use CAC, then they're not challenged to figure out how to unlock new channels that can push our growth. And so opposite methods, we don't do anything at a sleep, if there is not an opposite metric. What mistake is if you made with operational excellence? When you let back now, I'm gonna, oh, completely did that. Most of the times is probably connected to the opposite matrix, like, you want to ship a quality of software. Sometimes, no, we wanted to improve the quality of our software to make our software more reliable. But then what happens is it starts taking months to ship a new feature or another example is focus right sometimes my Engineers or the head of engineering says we cannot Address a bug we figure we found the last night.

32:51This can happen in two weeks because the team is already focused on this pipeline of products And my answer is no, we need to do it today. I give them a 48 hours, right? 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. You always want to find this balance between these two opposite parts of the business. You mentioned the 48 hour turn around there. I often think about speed of execution and velocity. Part of me says it's the most important thing in a business. I do think especially in zero to one, it really is on the testing and iterating side.

33:26And then part of me thinks actually something needs a lot more deliberation. How do you think about speed of execution as important as everyone says? It is without compromising quality. So yes, and then you set the opposite matrix of quality. Is it possible to compromise in quality? If I can do it today fee and it's 80%, I can do it in a week fee and it's 90%, which you want. So I want the 80%. And so there is where you need to be clear. It's also one of the points of the Elon algo and his book about simplifying the requirements. So it's the definition of quality. Quality to me is not perfection, but there is a threshold where if you just ship tomorrow shitty app.

34:02Then we don't go very far as a brand, right? But if it's 85 % there and then you keep improving every single day for the next week, can you take it to 100%, 100 % we should do that. So it was actually this point that now they taught us at YC where the... if you were going to the YC partners during the YC program saying, oh I'm gonna launch, I don't know, this website in 30 days. Some of the partners they would tell you, no, you start shipping something tomorrow and you break death thing down in 30 pieces and every day you make some progress. We really talk about progress at 8th slip. How can you do as much progress as possible on the 24 or 48 hours?

34:35I do want to just dive in fact because I think RAM perhaps you don't very well in terms of velocity. They have at the top of every door like day 628. How do you think about the liberating building velocity into a company? I think it's literally part of the culture. We call it 8 -slip speed, 8 -s speed. When we do something really really fast we celebrate that and I immediately jump in and I also hashtag 8 -slip speed. We want to do what any other company does in half the time. 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.

35:12Well instead you want to be bold and just ship something 80 % take their risk and move on and you need to create a culture. Have you ever had it where it's not been good enough and you're like, hey, this is shit worth. I've already done that. I am about this last Sunday to all my executives. And I say, I want to increase our pace by 30%. And tomorrow we're going to discuss this. We had our internal executive meeting. Everyone reads the memo. They read the memo before the meeting. We debated the memo by the end of last week. So last Friday, everyone took action in changes with their team to increase velocity 30%.

35:45How did they respond? Well, I don't know, Mateo, that's a lot, I did. Where do we're pushing our hardest now? How's the response? At first, it was mixed. Right, some people say, okay, this guy just keeps pushing for velocity for the sake of velocity. But by the end of the week, 100 % of them, they were 100 % in. What are the most significant things you think the team will do to reach that 30 % speed increase? The bigger thing is what I told them is they need to stop being too rigid on bi -weekly or monthly goals. 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.

36:24So let's say we discover a bag today. That bag needs to be fixed tomorrow. And it cannot be, oh, but we have this roadmap and we are shipping this engineering feature and we can do it in two weeks. No, they do it tomorrow. And so you need to talk to your engineers and they need to understand the importance of fixing this, right, for a brand that is premium and is positioned at 2000 bags. That is the number one thing. We are sometimes too rigid with our schedules. Did they resonate with that? After I explained and gave examples, because then what I did in the memo, I gave good examples and bad examples.

36:55We had an executive meeting, sorry, an executive of site four weeks ago. I created another memo about a product that we're gonna launch. This was new. But I think the case is pretty strong and it's pretty obvious. So everyone understood, okay, no, this this makes sense. It's not just material idea. Let's say when do you want that? And they set a very aggressive deadline. The first answer for the first five minutes is, oh, it will take us a month to validate all these things if this is possible with our data. And I say, that doesn't work. We don't have a month to validate. How can you validate it in three days?

37:29Then they started thinking and say, it goes back to the Elon algos of simplifying a reducing requirements. Okay, we don't need 100 % certainty on that thing. Maybe we need 80 % and for 80 % certainty, we can just do AMB tomorrow. The same across all the different teams. And by the end of the week, we had a full plan and we have validated everything. How does the requirement for perfection or close to perfection change when you're comparing needs in hardware versus software? Software is obviously retraceable. I have fuck bug. Let's replace it. Hover. Ah, yeah. Yes. How does that change? It changes.

38:05You will never have 100 % confidence when you ship an hardware that everything is perfect. You will always discover things that you didn't know. And so a certain point where you need to flip the narrative is about learnings. The whole reason of velocity is not velocity for the sake of velocity. It's you need to learn as fast as possible so then you can adjust things as fast as possible, which goes back to the point where if you are too rigid with very long term of roadmap that doesn't work in a startup. When we switched from the mattress to the cover, which now is 99 % of our sales, we did it in three days.

38:37And we didn't have a cover, but we had the wrap for the mattress and we had the cover, and we wanted to see how customers would react to that, and the thing immediately became 23 % of the sales, even if it was hidden in accessories. And so I always push my teeth, can this help us learn faster? And if the answer is yes, go and be bold and take the risk. It can take me to a time on both sides. It's one webbing faster has helped you, and another webbing fastest, ha -e. Where it helped us was the cover, one of the most biggest wins of the business. Now sometimes we have a subscription. We could have launched the subscription in a way where we could have tested more things before and could be more sophisticated, but there we did it immediately after we launched it.

39:17And so we could have done it a month before, instead of a month after. Can you change pricing? People were like, oh, it's very hard to go out. You can try pricing. So you disagree with the notion you can't go up and it's difficult. 100 % disagree. I think we overthink because the whole point is your start. How many people really know your brand? Even if you're big, you're not Apple. Don't fool yourself thinking that they are that big brand. Then what you need to be aware is there is a lag, right? So if you change price, it will be customers that saw your product for the previous 30 days, 60 days, right?

39:49And it's a certain price. How you're lower. Like for example, in our case, we test a different world. on the product, right? We have seen for an X period of time people say, oh, but what about that warranty? Everything you do, you can do it the same day. You just need to be thoughtful, which will cause back to clarity of thinking about thinking the second order effects. Will people ask these? What do you answer? Did you train the customer support to have an answer? So there is where you just need to be thoughtful, but you can do everything today. You mentioned like executive offsights. You mentioned getting everyone aligned in terms of moving 30 % faster, that teams the hardest thing always.

40:23What have been your biggest lessons in terms of talent management? I mean, I think one of the biggest lessons is you really need to pay attention with when you hired executives from big companies. I think this is something really well known, but I made mistakes there too. What are those mistakes that you would tell me as the young startup founder listening? Who sees shiny logos from Apple and Tesla and SpaceX and goes, wow, what would you tell me knowing where you know now? So first, even if these people were really the successful drivers of other companies, right, which could be possible. You want to make sure that first the historical time of when they were successful is still similar to yours.

41:02It goes back to what I was telling you, right, if you find people that were able to scale a business from 100 million to a billion, but at the time where it was growth at all cost and they joined your company, your company is designed around CAC efficiency, it will be really hard for them, right? They have already been successful, probably they already made money, they have their own playbook that playbook doesn't work for you. So you need to find people that were really successful scaling businesses with the very efficient CAC. That is a different game. The second is, if they come from very large companies, the requirements compared to a startup are very different.

41:33We are pirates, they are the Navy. These people need to be able to launch new products in two days, just because they want to test it and be fine with the customer reaction. If they start thinking about the brand, the brand impact and this, this and that, I was you need to be thoughtful, But you need to take some risks to learn faster and maybe they reach a point where they were not anymore because that company was way bigger And it's really hard to reverse back if they have been there two three four five years And then sometimes some of these people what I have seen is if they have already been successful if they made money You know, maybe they are a different phase of their life instead of now our company again We are pirates man if you need to work on Saturday and Sunday to ship the thing and test it and and it's a bold move you have to do it.

42:15How does your hiring process look as a result of that? Like how do you structure it then to test for those? So we made a lot of mistakes in hiring too. I don't know if anyone is like, oh we did it well from day one. So the first thing is we are set to be slow at hiring and slow not in terms of the process in terms of the steps but we have a bunch of steps. The second thing is everyone has to do homework. Anyone who joins the company, we give them a project, they need to work on that atom and they will present to a panel. I don't care if you are the senior executive and you are the CFO of Amazon.

42:50If you want to join a 8 -slip, you have to do your homework and we give you a few days and a very complicated project. And you will present. If you don't want to do it, it's fine. For us, it's a way of selection, right? Because it shows how committed you are. And just so I get an understanding of this, this is a toss you would do in that role. Usually, it's a problem we currently have in the function. So we also learn what is your perspective and it's actually like your first day of work Okay, this is a problem you would face the first day of work put it together put your thoughts put your strategy Show me the data show me your clarity of thinking have you ever had anyone be alive?

43:26Yeah, I was a prince blanger. Yeah, yeah, particularly in all of sometimes executives then your surprise Sometimes recruiters say oh this person will never do it. They are a Senior executive at Tesla the good people hundred percent of them they do it and they get excited So that is one when you talk to a person at a sleep there are three ratings or is pass higher and strong higher We don't have anyone if there are not three strong hires is hard rule So three strong highs on the voting panel for that. Yeah, the people that they spoke too. How many touch points are there with the team Is that three out of ten three out of five three out of fifteen is probably somewhere between three out of five three out of six So it's kind of at least 50 % size.

44:07And the other thing, and this is more mental, is we are at the fault of no hire. The default is if you come to a sleep, we don't hire. You. Unless you really blow our mind. The reason why this is helpful is, I don't know, one of my executives recently came back and said, oh, there is this engineer, has a great pay degree. I know work at this company, that company. I'm not a strong hire, but I think I can wrote this person into the role. And I say, no, we are at the fault of no hire. So unless you are extremely bullish on this person that you believe it would be dumb to let this person go We don't hire it.

44:41We just stop here the process and we move on You mentioned kind of as a being slow there. I guess it but sometimes you just have to hire today Because you need a seat filled and you need to actually start doing something How do you determine just kind of rush the hire and just get someone in the seat because they need to versus now? It needs to be the right perfect time. We hire really fast in 2019 I would say we probably screw up large percent of the people we hire because we had that approach. What we learn is The pain that you go through if you hire the wrong person is probably ten x bigger than Delaying the hire by a couple of months and so the way I look at this is in different Backpacks one I measure the top of the funnel of each executive and I see how many interviews they do per day per week And now I start having a baseline on my mind of how many they should do, how many people they should interview.

45:34But more or less we hire a person every hundred. If they start telling me, oh, I'm struggling. I don't find this engineer in San Francisco for mechanical engineer blah blah. And I see that it just did three interviews. It's just math. On an average, we hire one of every hundred people. If you didn't see hundred people, you're not gonna, hi, it's not gonna happen. That is how you create velocity. And then also I measure the steps. How long does it take to go from step one to step two? Is it 48 hours or is it taking you a week and if it's a week, why were you so late? It's so slow. So that is where I create velocity.

46:04But then in the selection of the candidates, man, the bar needs to be incredibly high. If you as executive are not strong higher, why are we higher in this person if you're not bullish? Would you take a flight to China with them and spend a week with them? Would you have fun? If no, what's the whole point? Would you be excited about having a one -on -one with them? If no, what's the point? That is one. Second, are there other people in the company that believe what you believe? And so they have two more strong hires? If not, I love you, but we are at the full no hire. And so I assume no. And then there is my final step, which is still 50 -50.

46:36And 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. Does that cause dissent? If I'm working for you and I go through all of these steps, because you're the panel, that great. I need this in my function and he is great and then I you don't click. I mean the definition of click let's expand it so I send you a bunch of bullets with pros and cons. I try to be very detailed because I don't want this to look like oh Matteo was in a bad mood and he just said to pass right. I have my pre -made playbook of how I run these interviews right 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?

47:21And so I can identify certain red flags faster. What was the playbook? I go through each of your previous jobs and I ask you five questions. How did you find the job and what did they hire you for? So that helps you because in how you fund the job if they had five, six jobs, you want to see if they were recommended by anyone or the previous managers. That is a great sign, right? If it never happens, it's not a red flag but it's not a positive sign. So I can biggest achievement. Biggest achievement seems a stupid question, but it's one of the greatest questions because if you start talking to me about, oh, I bonded with my people, my team, I assume that you bond with the other team.

47:57I'm talking about what has been the biggest achievement, your biggest contribution, you, not your team. And the best people come back with data. I improved the CVR of the website from 8 % to 9 .2 by doing A, B and C. That is a great thing. If they're fluffy, the third question is, what has been the lowest point? And this is another great one because a lot of people they start complaining. And you see what they complain about. Or my manager, they never gave me the right task and this and that. Or they didn't give me enough freedom to operate blah blah blah. Then you ask, who was your manager? And what are they gonna say about you in the next reference check?

48:33But you wanna say in the reference check, because they can lie. Because they know that you will do the reference check. And so there you immediately see certain people becoming rigid. You know, I mean we had a good relationship, but it was not really perfect. My manager. And the last one, why did you leave? And there is a soft way to know, did they push you out? Was a riff? And when you start doing four, five jobs, five, six jobs, you start seeing patterns. And so when I go back to you as an executive, it's not my tell us opinion is I come back with the list because I take notes and I saw X of red flags.

49:05And at that point, they trust me. How long does that take? This is another great question was the great people in 20 25 minutes I can go through five jobs there Pass there are some people where you go through two jobs in 30 minutes and that is another Red flag because I have it sometimes half an hour and they're like and then I went to Stanford and you're like oh Yeah, so we have that I hate Bounces I call them which is as you said a couple of times five six jobs I'm like if you're at somewap for a year and a half and another for two years and another for a year and a half With ramp time and leaving time you basically did six months of work Correct.

49:42I look at that a lot that this way is really important to understand how they found the next job Meaning if it was your former boss that gives you the opportunity of a lifetime You live after 18 months and understand right? It's there was a reef fine thing if it's a riff fine I know this is gonna be very unpopular if it's a riff to that not show you that you aren't crucial I think of that definitely. I think even there you want to see a partner. I see sometimes people that have been part of three Reef as a But you know what what you need to think there is how did let's say there is a reef after a year or even six months and as you see it And you see this happening multiple times in their career like three or four times Then what I start questioning is how did you judge the company?

50:23Why did you pick this company right? There is that part of judgment that is keen their career because it means they are thoughtful about what company they're joining and why? Then the company can fail. If you tell me, oh look, I want to join a space company and it was forget space act, right? And then they fail. But I have been a dreamer of space for all my life. I get that. But if you got a company that is a bit debatable and it was really tiny and you came from Amazon and you went to, you know, it just makes no sense. There is another area that I judge a lot. How do you feel about title? What are your lessons on how successful the hire is?

50:57Correlated to the negotiation on the title they want to have. So usually it's bad. Some of the best people that don't really care about title. I understand that some people you just want to go home, not to your partner, to your friends, and have some pride of what is your title, but you're very very firm. We had the experiences where when we were hiring bad in 2018, a certain point, the VP of engineering changed the title of an engineer. And this guy started coming in a completely dressed with a t -shirt and the tie the following day thinking of being a manager. And he was managing like, I don't know, one or two people.

51:33So it literally made no sense. So the story there is you need to pay attention, meaning sometimes you can play with titles. I don't like it 80 % of the times. You can do it. But it's less about the title and making it clear that you're still an IC versus a manager. and 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 ICT manager. You need to be a manager before you have formally a manager. The easiest way for us, we, our team starts structuring squads. There is the engineering team, there is the product team and all that.

52:06Then they work in squads, so maybe there is a PM, there is two engineers, and there is a designer, right? And there is a squad lead, the person who is leading that micro business unit. I want to see you leading one of those things or at least be part of the leadership of that squad successfully Before we ever talk about you being a manager when can you play with tiesals after multiple years after an insanely great performance So you need to be know every six months or 12 months So you have your performance review you get rated on all these principles for each of them strong medium low And if you are a top performer in the company probably you're right upon you're not asking for a title change But if you do, that is the only case when we can see the results.

52:49I think a lot of people, I mean this respectfully to you, we'll be listening to this a little bit daunted, because there's a lot of founders who are listening, they'll go, shit, I don't have any of these frameworks or playbooks. Did you have them from day one? And can they be implemented halfway through? Yeah, I didn't have them since day one. I literally spent a lot of time studying on a weekly basis, right? I really studied the best. You will see that a lot of the things I share, for example, they come out and not from people like Keith or there's it depends on the subject matter. But it was developed over time.

53:21But it makes the difference. Would you say the play books the most important one? Yes. Is there one we didn't cover yet that is writing? Obsessed with writing it is. But a discussion of this one other one that I have to pay. What's been your lessons on pay when to move, what it can indicate? So we do it every year, for people. I don't think we are very sophisticated on this. So whatever I say, I think it was for or the stage companies, I think we need to raise our bar on this. But what we do today is we have three levels of compensation increase. Based on your top performer, you are okay, or there is no change if you are a law performer.

53:57If you were a law performer, no change, you know, yeah, we've done. Yeah, that would be the first thing I would discuss with the executive, right? And the reason is, it's not because you want to be, you know, you don't want to be fair. Actually, you want to be fair. So what you need to do there is first you need to talk to the person, right? because if things are not working, there is always a why. Most of the times people are not bad. And so maybe we're not the right fit, normally as a culture, that maybe we're not the right fit for this time of their life. Right, we are very intense as a culture.

54:25And so if you're not intense, if you have other things going on in your life, we should respect that. But at the same time, you cannot be friends with everyone. I always tell my team, right? So you need to pick your friends. Talk to them, give them an opportunity to improve and raise their bar. If they do it, that is success to me. If they don't, then we need to put ways. I think one of the big mistakes I see a lot of founders make is they're like, you know, Matteo, he's not great at she here. But we moved him to this other side of the business, but he's actually quite good and that works. And I always ask the question, forgetting the existing relationship with Matteo, if you were hiring for that new position that he was in, would you have hired him against the other candidates?

55:03Correct. And the other thing we got mistaken is people come back Second, what they say is, I need three months, so I start looking for a replacement, I still need some help here. At the beginning, I was accommodating that. Now I became ruthless. I said no. 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. And the reason is, first, you need to let these people move on and find the right job. You need to be respectful. You don't keep him hanging, and you already know that you want to look for someone else. And second is, if you don't let the person go, you will never move on to really find the right partner.

55:39Treat them fairly, give them an opportunity. If we can help them, recommend them and other comments where they think are if we do. You need to find someone who is the top 99, the 99th person title for the job. Writing, the only thing I write, Matteo is tweets. It's very good of that. I think he's that much. I've crafted it over many years. Let's just start with, like, you said But before about the importance of writing, he said it's the someone of a clarity of thought, help me, why is this so important? I will not take a meeting with anyone in the company if I don't get an agenda slash memo. We call them agenda, but they're memos.

56:15It could be from a one -page or half -page, but an average meeting could even be five pages. We have a weekly growth meeting where we review all the data from the previous week, and there is multiple pages with all the data, obviously they come from the dashboard, and there is a bunch of thinking about what is happening and why. So I'm not going to take any meeting. You can't schedule a meeting with me. If I don't get an agenda, I get all their agendas the night before. What makes a good agenda versus a bad agenda? Massive difference. And usually probably it takes at least six months to develop someone to write an incredibly good agenda.

56:49Because the best agenda they're shorter, they go straight to the point, they're data driven and they're very clear. Do they pause it opinions? Do they pause it? Like do they say when they want to get to the end like how they structure it and it's something weird. So usually there is an executive summary at the top which is the summary of the key topics with the key data. Then there is points to be discussed and then usually there is the real meat. And so this is usually based on OKRs or goals. Our goals usually are monthly four to six weeks. And so let's say you have a goal to grow 1 .4X, grow to improve CVR and go to reduce the pack.

57:25You have three sections in the agenda. You tell us what is happening in each of them, what we are doing, what's working, and what's not working. That is usually a good framework, right? Summary was working, what's not working. Summary was working, what's not working. And you support it with data. And then at the bottom there is an idea for action items that the team takes live. And so when we discuss something, we put the action item, the DRI, so who is in charge and the deadline. And the deadline gets discussed, meaning there is how you enforce velocity, right? And my mind if people talk to me they don't set up deadline is the same day.

57:54That is how my brain works. And sometimes with junior people it happened like two sand days ago. I asked for something because I had the meeting early on a Monday and I asked the thing to the finance team. The person didn't say oh yeah I'll get back to you and then 9 p .m. I didn't get the thing and I say where is the thing. I said oh I was thinking to send it tomorrow and I could have done a better job there because I should have set the deadline so I think it was my mistake but usually on my mind if I don't set up deadline is same day. Is it wrong to us someone to do that on a Sunday? It depends, meaning if it's just because, oh, it's just Mattel, yes, why do I have to bother you on a Sunday?

58:29If I have a major massive meeting that could drive a multimillion dollar fundraiser at 7 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. So, game back to the agendas. Do you train people on how to write this list? What does that look like? I come into eight sleep. One more thing and then I answer the other thing we do in the meetings we don't go through the agenda We just go through the comments so everyone had to read the agenda in advance We do Google docs everyone leaves comments and you just go through the comments the rest We assume that you have read it you're fine and there is nothing to be debated and so sometimes our meetings can be very Short even if the agenda is very meeting three pages for pages of an agenda Maybe there are three things to discuss we discuss those 12 minutes and then we are all free the way you do it is by giving comments.

59:18Oh, this is not clear. What is the data supporting the thing? What's happening here? What is the second order effect? What is the other option that you can see there? What is the effort and impact of these? How did you pick it? Smart people. At certain point, they will start understanding not the question that will come. And then usually executives, particularly in the early days, they try to prepare and work on the agenda before the agenda gets shared with me or the rest of the executive team because usually the first mistake at the beginning is people are very long, they'll be confusing, they don't use the thing enough, these are the typical mistakes.

59:52And so even there I start having a pattern right, the speeder which I can read in agenda is indicative of how good is the agenda because I can go through it really quickly. I'm really sorry, I've got twins, it's been a fucking manic week and I have my own in marketing campaigns too, I didn't get to the agenda matter, I'm really sorry. Should I come to the meeting? Should I not come to the meeting? No, we cancelled the meeting, but you know, I'm going to be happy. It didn't happen because you didn't plan accordingly, and so then I'm not happy. If you were shipping the newly designed of the app and you were monitoring all these metrics, and then there wasn't an unexpected bug, right?

1:00:28All these things that you couldn't expect, but those were a P0, of course. At that point, do we need the meeting or you need to stay focused on that stuff because it's a P0, right? We call them P0, P1 and P2. So, is there a p -theorous we cancel the meeting and maybe we go a sync or maybe we have the agenda? But if it was because of lack of thoughtfulness in how you plan your schedule, that doesn't work. Does it happen often? No, I would say. But even there because I think sometimes what I try to coach is just be smart. If you were really busy, just send a very brief agenda, but literally triple the points.

1:01:01The point of the agenda is now about being long, no one wants to read long documents, you can give me time back, right? I say usually an hour every day before I start working just to review all the agendas of the day. Right through Bullet Pots, if you were boy, be easy doing a P0. I'm sure there is a lot of value in that P0. Just write a bullet about what happened, right? We shipped the app to 95 % of the customer yesterday. We found this bag. We sold it within three hours. Thanks to engineer X. I'm very happy. So we never not read it. Going back to the training. What does that look like? So I join A sleep.

1:01:32Thank you for hiring me. How do you train me to reach Agendas and Mammoths. The only thing is, writing a lot of Agendas, you start and you give me case studies, his time. Oh, let's say there is a weekly meeting for growth, there is a weekly meeting for art, or there is a weekly meeting for product, right? So, this is recurring meetings. Again, you go back to the executive summary and then the OKRs and you might write your KR, or if you are the lead of the squad, you write everything. 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.

1:02:04but it's trial and error. And so we have trial and error there, on the writing itself. Do you worry about impacting velocity? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you want an agenda, but just get on the cool with me and talk because we need to talk about this, CAC. It's not acceptable. That is the typical answer of someone who didn't write a agenda. It's something like, uh, the, think of 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?

1:02:39Preparing for questions. 90 % of the value of the board meeting is in creating the board deck. Not the board meeting. It's the same for the agenda. I don't want to come in a meeting where I don't have the information about that CAC. Right? If we need to discuss that CAC as you are saying. I want to read your thought, I want to read the data, I want to sleep on it, I don't sleep on it because it's the same day, right? but I want to rest a little bit thinking about that topic. You can expect me to come into a meeting. I'm not a genius who just shows up and have a magic answer. I need to digest it.

1:03:10I need to read other data maybe a one more day and I'll leave you the comment before the meeting so you add the data. And so then we can run a meeting in 12 minutes instead of three hours and get to a better conclusion. Given the amount of sleep you get, you could sleep on quite a lot. But I can ask you, do you use them historically? Oh, we did this last week. We did this 100%. So we have an executive meeting every Monday. There is a section in my agenda called lessons. And I talk to all the executives about lessons that I learn with other executives. This is happened with this candidate. It didn't work because of AMB.

1:03:44Here happened that we didn't achieve what we had achieved because we did this mistake. I create a cross pollination in those moments. And so there is the executive that experienced the thing with me. And then there are all the other executives so they can make questions. And that is how you really create the culture because they see first they accept mistakes something that is really accepted in our executive meeting We have no problems with mistakes. I screw up multiple times and I say guys I apologize. These are the mistakes I did this week or this month or this quarter And we do also post mortem and a prepareit every quarter.

1:04:16I don't know if you know this. I can't from Sequoia the prepareit So substantially you celebrate the quarter this quarter will be successful this next quarter will be successful if I you've write it down. And then when the quarter ends, you see the preparate and you do the postmortem. And you do it one on one, we do it as a team. Everything is shared. I don't care about anything. And then you discuss it with them, because I think one thing that people will always do, is they'll try and make it. This will be successful if we increase by 25%. No, we should increase by 75%. People will set the goal lower because they want it to be as successful.

1:04:46And no, this is another rule from Keith, or anything from the his time at Square, where essentially everything is public in our company except for a comp. Usually company don't want to share it, but everything else is shared I leave you the comments, verify, disagree Even because I want to incentivize the fact that we can disagree This is something that is really stronger funders fund, right? It's good to disagree Then I think the DRI still needs to take the decision that they put the DRI The right responsible individual, so the one who is the owner of the project or the topic is still their call We use the thing that comes from Amazon that is disagree and commit And I do sometimes in product, right?

1:05:25Not always. But sometimes I decide to disagree, but I raise my hand and I say, I disagree and commit, but I'm disagree. Do you agree that I don't like disagreeing, Command? It's like I'll marry, but no, I'm tea. Yeah, but sometimes it could be, I don't know. Usually I use quadrants, right? And so, the reason why it is called city and knowledge. And so, if the impact is really high, something that can kill the company, This is another rule where you understand when to delegate and not to delegate and so you have impact and you have knowledge If this is a thing that can kill the company and has I don't know illegal background.

1:06:00I used to be a lawyer I'm not gonna delegate the thing and probably if you can kill the company I'm not gonna delegate that thing right I want to be very very involved But if this is a thing that has very minor impact and I don't even know it well That is not the good use of my time and so it falls in the bottom left quadrant and so I delegate. And so here is how I decide all the times. If I want to take the final decision, no, we are not going to do that. Even if everyone else disagrees with me, versus something that I think, look, this is minor, they might be right, they might be wrong. I don't have way more experience than them.

1:06:34Sometimes you also want the team to feel empowered, right? So there is the tricky line as a CEO, because if you always take the final decision, then people say, okay, if I have to come here and just do what you say, find someone else. the best minds, they wanted to feel empowered, but they also sometimes want to feel depression to say, I'm fine, I'll follow you, but this is your call. Have you always had a good culture? When was the time when the culture was broken and you were like, we need to be a lot more deliberate? Yeah, I think when we hired a lot really fast, the culture broke a little bit, and it was because of the quality of the people.

1:07:06How did it break? How does that show up in organisation? Speed and quality, which goes to a parishioner excellence. What we realized is we were becoming slower as we were adding people and the quality was going down, which is really the worst. What happened is there was COVID coming and so they require multiple changes and I think those changes push us to real just thanks for the good. But if you ask me as a CEO, yeah, that was one of the times where if I look back, I think I should have done a much better job. Before we move on to sleep itself and fitness and health, is there anything that you haven't discussed today, that you think is cool to driving eight -sleep success.

1:07:43I think the other thing which we experience that too is not politics, no ego. I think from my side this approach where again I can talk about anything, even if I disagree with you with respect, but as a group, as an executive team, and our executive teams are the executives, but now we have a bunch of second lines that I start bringing in, so they learn by osmosis our culture, right? And so our executive meeting on Monday I expanded it now we have a lot of second lines and we have this culture where I Call it demanding and super we are demanding and supportive that that is my style And it's something I learned from from Sequoia.

1:08:20Sequoia is not one of our investors But I still respect them a lot demanding means I'm extremely demanding as you probably have seen in this But I'm very supportive. I really care about my people I'm the type of guy who's gonna do anything for you and supportive outside personal reasons, right? In business or in this case means as long as you were thoughtful, as long as you know we're operating with excellence and you care, it doesn't matter if the result doesn't come. I will support you. Move fast, try the thing. If it fails, I'm there with you. It's something I was discussing actually yesterday with one of our executives about velocity because he said, look, I'll try to go for velocity.

1:08:59I believe it's the right thing to do. We risk to compromise quality here and there, what happens if something goes wrong. And I say, be bold. I'll be next to you. We are into this together. And so that is something that I think is really important. The other thing is this, always tell my executive, your job as an executive is not to be loved. Your job is to help your people achieve more than what they believe it was possible. That is what will make them great. That is what will help them achieve more. If you look back when you go to school. Most of the times the teachers you remember were the tough teachers that you push you outside your comfort zone.

1:09:36That is a great leader to me. But as a leader the way I think is if I believe you have a certain potential, my job is to help you fulfill your full potential. Not to keep you a 70 % pace in a comfort zone. I'm hosting your career. And this is a mistake a lot of executives do because they want to be loved, they want to be sometimes soft or too nice, you know, they don't want to stretch you. The best players, the A players, think of the ocovich, the tennis player, right? What he wants from his coach is to get the most out of him to improve every single detail. But it assumes that everyone is world class town.

1:10:12That's my any problem. World class town always wants to be stretched. Yeah. Okay. The truth is, how many people are in 8 seat now? It depends who we include up to show 100. But like, when you reach 100, 200, 300, it's not possible to only have A players. by definition. Sorry, everyone has B players and B players don't necessarily want to be pushed that much. I might agree that not everyone can be an A player, but I think every person deserves to fulfill their full potential. And if they don't want to get there, then we're not the right fit for them. I think everyone at A sleep right now, largest, largest majority are A players.

1:10:46Then A players can be shaped in different ways. There are some that they push really, really hard, they go above and beyond, and there are some others that just master what they do, and they want to stay within those boundaries. But everyone has a partner, everyone has a family, everyone, they go home and they want to be proud of what they do. They don't want to just do some basic things for the sake of doing it. There is where you need to help them raise themselves, so they are proud and excited about what they do. If you just let them be and they just do a repetitive job, these people will leave.

1:11:15I just think it's very easy to let people... To be honest with you, some people don't care about being proud about that job. They just want to take the box. Yeah, but at that point they can be a slip. Exactly. That's the point and then when you get the men you need to get them out fast Yeah, exactly. Have you got anything about firing? Yeah quite a bit. As you can imagine I do that everything good I have an agenda If I think for you and I or at least for me I come from a college I'm Italian right I come from a culture where the Inital is almost you don't fire when I moved to the US was really shocking to me the thing that How you can let people go then the way you do it you need to be first.

1:11:49I believe in radical candor One thing I always challenge the executive is if I call person X that reports to you. Do they know if you rate them incredibly good, good or bad? 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 think of their performance. Because this is how you avoid problems in the future. And second, this is how you give them the opportunity to course correct. You can put them in a peep, which is no substantially when you tell them that they need to improve their performance But when you are there the relationship it kind of broken right because I'm telling you that you have a month or two to fix things It's very brutal the bad thing is this concept of course corrections some people that report directly to me like chief of staff and so on I give them feedback like real time the same day and they know when I'm unhappy in a week or if I'm very happy another week Forgetting the weekly thing, at least on a monthly basis, two people know how happy you are and what do you think of their performance?

1:12:48Where are they stronger or not? If you do that, the best, they will keep growing. If you should tap and you expect to wait 12 months, didn't share your opinion, and at the point you're even kind of soft, because if you don't share your feedback constantly, because we are harder to share a harsh feedback in 12 months. Because you didn't even develop a relationship of feedback. But Gilles, you're shit and you feel guilty about it. Yes, I do. Which goes back to my radical candor if I have a problem I tell you. Immediately. Do you warn people about that? G say listen Mateo, when you are with me, I will be very direct with you.

1:13:20Don't be too alone, but I will let you know how I feel in real time. Yes. Just say I will be very direct. I'll share what is on my mind. I don't pretend to be always right, but this is what is going on. And if you have to push back because you have a case, build your case. But I'm real time feedback guy real time. If there is a presentation I don't know in the lens and one of our people is running the lens and I see something I don't like in the lens, I might select them in one minute after the lens with feedback about how to improve the lens for the following week. Do you ever get told you too much?

1:13:53I get told them too much sometimes. I just... I run a lot in David Guggins because the difference in passion obsession is when everyone's Yeah, he passionate about it. Well done Mateo. And obsession people like, oh, you need to like stop that. And it's this interesting difference and obsession is actually where you want to be. Yeah. You need to start controlling yourself. But I think if people understand first that you have always the best intention, if they see the point, it's way easier for them to understand it. Then sometimes they might not. But I think it is an error where I improved, but you don't want to compromise velocity and feedback.

1:14:27I think the feedback is still in the the best interest of everyone. Dude, I'm enjoying it somewhat. I do have to touch on just like the fitness and health. In terms of sleep, let's start there, why not? What do you want two things that you think are non -obvious that is really important for people to know? The two basic things are really how much you sleep, which is pretty basic and consistency. Because you really train your biological clock to fall asleep at the time and to wake up at that time. Your circadian cycle can so stashly be trained. So consistency and amount of hours you sleep and amount of hours there is we have 25 euros this and we have 50 euros this and they need different amounts it depends so usually as you get older they're just harder for you to sleep 8 -9 hours a rule of time is between 7 and 9 hours for everyone except very very few people that have a genetic modification and can sleep only 3 -4 hours I said what non obvious stuff should we know should we do one thing is usually playing outside But playing with your own body temperature before bed is really impactful.

1:15:31So let's say you're in a hotel or you have a larger home and you can have a sound in a nice bath. If you do that before going to bed, it's going to help you sleep better, meaningfully. Right, it's one of the biggest things. Even if you listen to people. You need the contrast, sauna and a spot, or can you just be sauna. You can also do the only sauna. So that is why also people recommend just doing a hot bath or a hot shower. The way it creates is it starts to warming up your body. Then your body needs to dissipate the heat from the bathtub and so the core body temperature goes down. So it's actually counterintuitive and that is when your body prepares for sleep.

1:16:07Because the second you fall asleep, your body temperature drops and so you want to try to create that system. We want to have a cold room as well when we sleep. Yeah, you want to be in a cold room. The thing there which is a typical mistake is you hear a lot of people say, oh, you should sleep at 68 degrees. That is wrong. And the reason why is wrong is 68 degrees my work I don't know in the first part of the night but not in the second part of the night. Your body temperature changes during the night. That is why sometimes at 4am, 5am you start feeling a bit cold and know you bring back your blanket and you cover yourself.

1:16:38It's because your body temperature is changing and your body is preparing to wake up. How much does it change throughout the night? Not significantly but enough for you to really feel that. The temperature drops at the beginning of the night is like a u -curve. It drops to the beginning of the night, so immediately as you fall asleep it goes down. And then two, three hours before you wake up, the body temperature rises. And so your body is preparing to wake up. Which if you think, if you go back to thousands of years ago, it just follows what happens in the night with the sun, right? If you were sleeping in a cave, right?

1:17:09The temperature drops because there is no sun and the night comes and then a couple of hours before sunrise, the temperature starts rising again because the sun starts coming out. You said beforehand that you sleep nine hours a night, which is fantastic. There's many people who have three kids. That change is a lot. I don't have children, but I imagine that change is a lot. What advice do you have for them? It's just a physical impossibility. You see that. I don't have kids, so I don't know, and they might disagree, and they will likely disagree. We have executives, which have kids. There is one who just had a kid, I think, in March.

1:17:44And we have an internal competition with the 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 day. And this guy is always in the top 3, 4, 5. And he was able to, I mean, organize his schedule with the kid to sleep enough. Then obviously it depends particularly when the kids are based on what I know. When they're not small, they wake up in the middle of the night and so there are a bunch of interruptions. by I think once they cross probably that threshold, I guess the kid is gonna sleep eight hours, I don't know.

1:18:18I have this food impact sleep. In a lot of ways, the most impactful thing of everything is alcohol. Alcohol is massively, it's gonna disrupt your sleep massively. You feel that you are probably more relaxed mentally, and you think, oh, I will have a great night of sleep, but in reality, all your biometrics, heart rate will accelerate, HRV will drop, and in general your sleep architecture, so the sleep phases will change. usually you lose probably somewhere around 20 % sleep quality without Then carbs, they help you fall asleep based on a bunch of studies so you tend to feel more sleepy if you had the carbs but then the quality of sleep in particular if you had quite a bit of carbs is fairly impactful.

1:18:59Quite a bit of carbs, just with people listening, is that a bowl of pasta? Yeah, it's probably around the bowl of pasta. Then sleep is very subjective, right? So there are all these a rule of tons, but the point is there is very little knowledge about sleep at scale. And there is where I think company like Huzz will make a massive difference, right? Because today if you really want to know about your sleep stages and everything, you need to go to a sleep clinic. Well they cover you with sensors and you are in this clinic, which is a foreign environment. Well instead, A is sleep. Now I know we have 100 ,000 of customers sleeping on these devices every single night in their home.

1:19:32We are discovering things literally no other professor or scientist can know just because of the scale And so it's very subjective even the alcohol there are certain people that react to alcohol in a certain way versus others I said to a young girlfriend about this in she said I want to ask me tell you why can some people drink coffee before bed and sleep well and I can't Yeah, it's very subjective in general the rule of thumb is you shouldn't because I It takes around 8 hours for the coffee to really leave your body. I don't have a lot of coffee, but if you have coffee you should stop drinking coffee at least 8 hours before bed.

1:20:09How much does sex impact sleep? There is very little date on that. I think there is a lot of mental relief and relaxation that helps you. There will be a problem in an hormonal impact across different dimensions, but the knowledge is very limited. Final one I promise. Exercise. How does that? I do a lot of running of these 30, 40, 50K. Does that help me see better or not? My body is very tired. So first, depends when you exercise. I stop exercising after 5 pm. I will never exercise, but I exercise every morning. Why? So two things. First, you rise your heart rate. Right? So it depends on what time you go to bed.

1:20:48I go to bed early, early, 930, 10. 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. You create a bunch of changes inside your body and then your body needs to go back to baseline and then needs to get into the phase of preparation of sleep. And so the best of the best is if you can train in the first part of the day, so there's plenty of time for your body to go back to baseline and then going to sleep preparation. So if I play, I don't know, paddle or tennis, which I just pause that I like at 7 pm, There is no way I fall asleep at 10 everything in my body is still too active compared to usual Do you have a like a late one step to let one or two a .m.?

1:21:29No, unless it's for work I almost never do it. Oh, there is a crisis at work exercise sleep food Which one do you slip up almost? I mean sleep I sleep nine hours right every single day training I train substantially every day when I'm in Miami where I'm based I do an hour and a half in the morning 10 is paddle something like that. What is your training routine like? So it's usually 80 % cardio, 20 % strength. And cardio, I range between Don't You and Don Don 5. Do you have a monitor on? I use this guy, I use Apple Watch, so I try to monitor that. Usually you wanna be, based on what Peter at the SAC recommends, 80 % of the cardio in Don't You and 20 % in Don 5.

1:22:11So you can really train your heart rate to spike and drop. There is a couple of metrics that a few people know but they are very helpful, that is heart rate recovery. but essentially you can use an app called Dones that gets the data from your Apple Watch. You want to see how much your heart rate drops after a spike if you rest. Well, let's say you spike your heart rate to 170 and then there is one minute and two minutes. How much does it drop? So from 170 to 130 and then from 130 to 110. That speed is indicative of how good your heart rate is. Which one is the bubble most? Probably between the three nutrition a little bit more, But even that I'm on a keto diet, I usually eat once a day just for dinner.

1:22:52I cheat on Fridays I have a pizza with my wife on Fridays, so they tell them part of me comes out So you just have dinner and usually I have a little dinner or at least I do there what is called the 16 -8 fasting What is the dinner like normally? Yeah, it's usually some form of meat I don't eat a lot of red meat, but just because of preference and not for other reason sometimes we have a soup Was, was veggies? You know a bit pissed off, mate. I mean, you just fasted 20 hours and you get souped with veggies. Yeah, so I tested a bunch of that thing until when I found something that they really like, so I either know I could pair it with wakamoli, which I really, really love.

1:23:29Yeah, I played with that. Cast a bit of a weird one and then we'll do a quick fire. I listen to you and you just sound a bit perfect if I'm honest. Yeah. Do you ever know anything that's just a bit weird or no? I think the challenge is I try to do all the things and so you... You put this pressure on yourself. Yeah, exactly. So that is probably the hard part of it always pushing yourself to this limit. And so this sometimes impacts your mood. You have just a, oh, fuck. Can't do this. Yeah. And at the point you have like no equivalent of the cheat day, right? It's not that you can always be like these or that, but you shouldn't be perfect every day.

1:24:04This is something I learned from a video of Tom Brady, but what you want is the consistency. It's less about cheating one day or another day, But if you zoom out and you look at how you manage your things, are you consistently enough in all these different dimensions? And it's less about one day or two days. It's more really a look at the at the year, at the month, at the years. And can you sustain that? That to me is more important than anything else. Even alcohol, right? You and I, we had this, you know, this episode a few years ago. And since 2018 is when I stopped drinking. Can you drink from time to time?

1:24:35Yeah, you can. But are you consistently, in my case, avoiding alcohol? Yes, and the reason why I do it is just because I feel bad. I totally get you and agree. You said about sustaining every year's final, final, final, one I promise. Your co -founder is also your partner. What's the secret to a successful marriage? I tell you a story first. You're like... So probably as a new filler, you have understood this. I'm always on unless when I'm sleeping about the business. But my wife sometimes she wants first time where I don't bother her about the business, right? She wants to be in her own world.

1:25:07That is how she, you know, they just things and develop ideas. And so sometimes, you know, it's, I don't know, 9pm and I want to talk about some stuff for a sleep. And she said, look, after this time, you need to treat me like any other executive and colleague. So you can't bother me all the time. And so you can talk about work after 9pm with them. You're like, right, sleep time. You can't wait. But so I say, okay, fine, I need to treat you like any other executive. And I can't talk to them because I wouldn't call them a 10pm. But I would slack them and so sometimes I just lack it and we are both on the couch and like 9 p .m And there is something on my mind about growth.

1:25:46She leads growth and marketing And I start lacking her as it is the phone that vibrates that makes to me back not talk about the topic Did she answer in real time or did she wait until tomorrow? It depends if it's urgent whenever she looks at that then she will answer But that is funny because sometimes also without actually oh, can you ask this thing to we call her easy because it's Alexander and we call her AC. And okay, you asked these two ACs and I said, no, you asked her because I treat her like literally any other executive, even if we are in the same house and Jason, her office, and I mean, it's difficult to retain the romance.

1:26:22I was hit for 90 % of the couples probably. In our case, I don't know, we clicked, and so that works really well, and she's really good at setting boundaries. Even on a Saturday and Sunday, we talk about work quite a bit, but a certain point, she said, enough. A point I just need to live in my world, and I can't talk about that. Was that ever a moment where it was challenging? And what did you learn from that moment? Yes, in the earlier days, because Alex leads growth, which is something very measurable. Driving you, cack, through his nodi -bait. And in a company growth is not that it is always gonna go great.

1:26:58My job as a CEO is to push, particularly when things are not going great. And so for error, you need to pay attention to not create some resentment and you need to understand when they are going to a lot of pressure because growth has this problem the first is daily every day the first thing I look at right or wrong probably wrong But it's revenue of the previous day. I receive a look at dashboard, right? That's the first thing I look at and so that immediately sets your mood and the other brutal thing is you do a great year And then generally first comes and is you need another great year and everything starts from zero It's really hard for growth people and there are a lot of pressure and then that comes immediately after black Friday for us Which is another big moment and so at the beginning I think we had to fine tune that part of the relationship because yes Sometimes I was too much, but I think there is where she's been great.

1:27:45Did she say that? Yes The other funny thing is we use slack at work and then we use WhatsApp for personal stuff And so sometimes I might be writing about growth and we need to accelerate the thing We need to do this this this and that and then on what's up and saying oh it's Friday night I can't wait for our cheat day of pizza. Right? And so we have two channels for communication. Listen, I want to move into a quick far round. So I say, it's a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. That's not okay. Let's talk with this one. What others not know that you know to be true. Your body will become the most powerful preventative health platform.

1:28:17In the future, I will save your life. In what timeline? We already saved the life. Multiple lives. Because some people say that the biometrics were upside down. Can you tell me is actually one of your investors told me ask about how it has saved the life? Is the one that sticks to mind? Yeah multiple stories, but there is this one was the first one we got So a customer writes me and he said I just wanted to say thank you guys saved my life He or she didn't get into the specifics, but the the biometrics were off compared to the usual baseline This person went straight to ER. They found there was a major health issue He had an immediate surgery and that saved his life It was a big deal.

1:28:54And that is when you really realise that you're really proud of what you're doing, you understand why we're working so hard and not putting so much effort in what we do. One of our goals is we want to track how many lives we say. But how long do you think it is before you are having prevented bodies can't in your sleep? Three years, five years, ten years, no less. And then who owns that data? Consumers? Yeah. I mean, what is the standard market practice of like an Apple Watch or like a... Well, no, I'm just thinking like if you have an 8 -seat that's prevents your health and scans you every night, and then you actually have like the anonymization of data that can correlate your body to my body or my mother's got multiple cirrhosis and they can tell that temperature correlates to relapse is in multiple cirrhosis and you could actually have this incredible global data set that learns from each other.

1:29:39Yep. That's really cool. The power of discovery is insane because the advantage we have at a T -Sleep are three. Why we have a lot of space, right? So we can literally add any sense so you can think of the wearables can't Second, we have you for eight hours each every day. It's a lot of time and you're standing still and third Once you install our product you don't remove it And so we have very longitudinal data Which is one of the biggest issues right a lot of wearables people stop using them within three to six months Now our case they keep the product there just not because we are geniuses but because it's the type of form factor.

1:30:14And so if you fast forward even just now for us understanding what happens across a million nights, it happens in less than a week. See of any other company for day, which would it be? Tesla. No, actually you know what I was thinking of this. It would be the CEO of Mercedes F1 or Ferrari F1. Why? I'm really into F1. If you ask me if I was not an entrepreneur, what else would I like to be? Is to be an F1 driver? I raised with GoCars with NoWazaki and all that and so I think there's a there's a man in the machine high performance high engineering a lot of technology but applied to sport and I used to be an athlete and so that kind of competition and challenge with excitement so much.

1:30:55What's your favorite consumer brand? True that I respect a lot one is Tesla and the reason why is because of how says they are with the customer experience, right? They are minimal, they are simple, the product evolves with software. And so we use Tesla a lot as an example at 8th slip. And the other one I really like is Nike because they honor great athletes. And so there is this respect for the customer in the way they honor it. It's really the word honoring your customers that I really love. It's not customer obsession, not just business mention, I call it customer session to me is honor your cast.

1:31:33Tell me, you can have dinner with anyone that are alive. He'd use his sub -denotes and why them? Three people, really pushing the blade I had. I hear Tom Senna, a famous Formula One driver who died in 1994, but one of the greatest. Winston Churchill, because I love history and when I read about Winston Churchill and how he handled a lot of different things in the second world war or that, I find it fascinating. And then Barack Obama, just because he was one of the youngest U .S. Presidents and not because I'm with this political outside or the other one I'm pretty agnostic It's just people I would like you know to have a dinner and make your bunch of questions How did you handle that?

1:32:10I wonder how what happened here? How did you and your wife handle what you asked me? But to these guys have you met Peter Till I met him very briefly tell me what single piece of advice have you been given the most stuck with you? I think that you never have a second chance to make a first impression and so always try to be now very thoughtful when you meet the person, particularly if it's a person on your respect to prepare it and to be knowledgeable and to go into the meeting very well prepared. What is the strongest belief which you had that time not to be wrong? I have this contrarian approach to rest that I call it active recovery.

1:32:48It's pretty weird but if I go on a vacation or if I take any time off, everything is designed around me recovering as fast as possible. I almost think of that still as a part of my daily performance, right? I think of myself like an athlete, even if I'm a CEO of a company. And everything I do, I try to do it to increase my performance as an athlete, my professional performance. And so my wife and I, we A, B test vacations where we A, B test different things and see what help us recover the particularly mentally and what are the things that the help has? What is he tested? From the lengths of the vacation to what we do in a vacation, right?

1:33:26If you want to go to a vacation in a resort and stay at the pool every day or you want to do nature and just work, what do you want to do? What's the lessons on length and then type fee? Yeah, so usually four days is more than enough. We almost see no incremental value. After that, the key thing is to disconnect from socials. Sometimes if it's for a few days I even don't learn or listen to podcasts I really try to recover and I just do what I call stillness. I try to spend as much time as possible doing literally nothing I let my brain go and just think about everything. I need to train so if I just stop training and I just eat a lot Then I just feel guilty with myself.

1:34:05The other thing for me is I don't disconnect completely because what I realize is good or bad sometimes I like to know what is happening and is there is any urgency and so if I just try to put my phone away it just gives me more anxiety and so I'm always on, I'll always on vacation, you will never find me off and people say why you do that and to me is actually the thing that helps me the most. Final one we have a show in 2030 you further increase your productivity to all new heights, where's eight sleep antennas? We have saved a million lives We have an improved millions of lives right between sleep and preventative health where a public company Hopefully by then and the reason is why I think that will set the right structure to build a long -term business and a word I use a lot is building an iconic global company Meaning if I think of legacy and leaving a mark in the world to me is not about not the money Is really helping this million of lives and doing it with the brand that is iconic and globally recognized?

1:35:07If you ask me if you have the magic stick what you want your life to be spent on that's it helping millions of lives With a brand that is iconic and well recognized globally you really stand with that brand You care about those guys that you know that that brand cares about you and that brand is doing something well for the world It's very rare. I actually do a show and I'm like, oh shit I need to change a lot of how I manage teams This was like absolutely that. Thank you for doing this. This has been amazing and you're a star. Well, thank you so much for having me. As I said at the beginning, I think that is one of the most granular and action packed and an advice -filled episode that you will ever hear as an early stage founder hiring and retaining teams.

1:35:51If you want to see more from us, of course, you can on YouTube by searching for 2 -0 V -Seen. But before we leave you today, did you know that every 20 V -Se episode you listen to is recorded with Riverside. Riverside is insanely good, like I would pay $1 ,000 per month for Riverside, it's that good. Why? Well first off, E's. Your guests do not need an account, one click, and they're in the recording room with you. It is fantastic, especially for high profile guests. Second, they record your video and audio track separately, and in the background, so they're not only higher quality, but the guest does not need to record their end, and then send after which is a total nightmare, but for me honestly what I love so much is how much thought they put into the product.

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