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Matteo Franceschetti: The Ultimate Hiring Playbook: Five Questions to Ask Every New Hire | E1084

Matteo Franceschetti is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Eight Sleep, a company dedicated to fueling human potential through optimal sleep. To date, Matteo has raised over $160M for the business from the likes of Founders Fund, Ryan Petersen, Naval Ravikant, Kevin Hart, AROD and many more. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (00:50) Athlete to Entrepreneur Transition (03:00) Startup Challenges (08:03) Unit Economics & CAC Insights (17:11) Product and Pricing Evolution (20:38) Fundraising and Growth (25:32) Founder Advice and Investor Role (26:40) Sleep Tech Innovation (33:26) Execution and Product Strategy (43:46) Pricing and Differentiation (48:45) Hiring and Team Building (58:47) Workplace Culture Dynamics (01:23:09) Sleep Science and Health (01:44:16) Quick-Fire Round ----------------------------------------------- In Todays Episode with Matteo Franceschetti We Discuss: 1. Why Did Sleep Need “Solving”: Why did Matteo decide he wanted to spend decades of his life-solving sleep? If Matteo has known how hard it was going to be, would he do it again? What does Matteo know now that he wishes he had known at the start of the journey? 2. Hiring the Best Team: What is Matteo’s playbook for hiring? What are the five questions that Matteo asks in every interview? What are big red flags? What are strong signals of great talent? If people have been let go in a RIFF, is that a concern? How does Matteo construct hiring panels? What vote count is enough for an approved hire? What are Matteo’s biggest lessons on title and pay a new hire receives? What are some of Matteo’s biggest lessons when it comes to firing people? 3. Funding the Business: What was the hardest round to raise? Why? Are investors justified in their skepticism of hardware? What are the single biggest pieces of advice Matteo would give to founders on raising? How impactful has it been having Keith Rabois and Founders Fund as an investor? Do VCs really add value? 4. Mastering Health, Sleep and Nutrition: How does your diet impact the quality of sleep you have? How does exercise and the time of exercise impact your sleep? What are some common rules on sleep that are BS and myths? What are some of the most non-obvious truths about getting great sleep? ----------------------------------------------- Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3j2KMcZTtgTNBKwtZBMHvl?si=85bc9196860e4466 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twenty-minute-vc-20vc-venture-capital-startup/id958230465 Follow Harry Stebbings on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarryStebbings Follow Matteo Franceschetti on Twitter: https://twitter.com/m_franceschetti Follow 20VC on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/20vc_reels Follow 20VC on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@20vc_tok Visit our Website: https://www.20vc.com Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/contact ----------------------------------------------- #VentureCapital #MatteoFranceschetti #EightSleep #HarryStebbings

Harry StebbingshostMatteo FranceschettiguestGuest co‑host/interviewerhost
Nov 20, 20231h 53mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:000:50

    Intro

    1. HS

      In terms of sleep, what are one to two things that is really important for people to know?

    2. MF

      It depends. The two basic things are really, your job as an executive is not to be loved, is to help your people achieve more than what they believe it was possible. We want to detect cancer by using some of these technologies. Your bed will become the most powerful preventative health platform in the future and will save your life.

    3. HS

      How long does that take? Three years? Five years?

    4. MF

      No less.

    5. HS

      Really? Matteo, I am so excited for this. It's so nice to do this in person, so welcome to London.

    6. MF

      Yeah, thank you for having me, and I'm excited to be here.

    7. HS

      Dude, I wanna start with, we look at Eight Sleep now, it's this incredible brand, it's this incredible movement. Well, let's go back to the beginning. Why did you decide this was the problem you wanted to spend-

    8. MF

      Yeah.

    9. HS

      ... many decades of your life working

  2. 0:503:00

    Athlete to Entrepreneur Transition

    1. HS

      on?

    2. MF

      Yeah, so when I was a teenager, I was an athlete. I was playing tennis and doing a bunch of other sports at competitive level so I have always been in recovery. And so around 10 years ago, I started thinking, "Why Elon Musk is taking me to Mars but I still spend a third of my life on a piece of dumb foam," right? We have technology-

    3. HS

      (laughs)

    4. MF

      ... in two-thirds of our life, and then you suddenly go to sleep and you pretend to wake up eight hours later f- fully refreshed. That didn't make sense to me, and so that is when I started looking into sleep and decided to fix it.

    5. HS

      Can I... It's such a big problem to take hold of. What was your next subsequent step? Like, "I'm gonna fix sleep." Did y- what was the first prototype like? Like just-

    6. MF

      Yeah.

    7. HS

      ... walk me through that.

    8. MF

      Yeah, yeah. So two thoughts. The first one is why there is no technology enhancing my sleep, and that is what we are doing. Then even if I can compress your sleep, 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. Six hours is still a lot of time for people like you and I. And so I started thinking, "What else can we do?" And then I started thinking, "Oh, we can save your life." We should use those six hours to scan your body and become the number one platform for preventative health. You're standing still, flat on a surface for six hours. We have lots of space. How can we keep adding sensors to really become the preventative health platform? And we can talk about that, but now we are already working on technologies for body scanning. We want to detect cancer in the future by using some of these technologies. So think of almost of an MRI. It will not be an MRI technology because obviously you cannot have it in the home, but we're working on that kind of thing in our R&D lab.

    9. HS

      I, I absolutely love that and I totally agree with you in terms of six hours flat. (laughs)

    10. MF

      It's still a lot of time. And so how, how do I use it?

    11. HS

      Well, though not still, I think my girlfriend runs marathons in her sleep. You might have trouble scanning her. Uh, but (laughs) uh, question for you. I, I saw this Jensen Huang comment the other day about NVIDIA, and he said, "If I'd known how hard it was gonna be, I would never have done it." (laughs)

    12. MF

      I saw, I saw that tweet.

    13. HS

      I was quite saddened by it. I was like, "No, you're my hero-"

    14. MF

      Yeah, yeah.

    15. HS

      "... and I want to hear the inspiration."

    16. MF

      I shared it with my co-founders.

    17. HS

      Yeah. Is it the same for you?

    18. MF

      100%. If

  3. 3:008:03

    Startup Challenges

    1. MF

      I knew what we would have to go through, I don't think any human being would ev- wou- wou- would do that. You need to be naive, and you need to believe that it's 100x easier, and then you need to have the stamina, while shit comes, n- to handle it. (laughs)

    2. HS

      What was the hardest thing? When you look back and you're like, "Oh my God, I can't believe we went through that." What was that?

    3. MF

      So many things. I would say there are two major buckets. One, uh, uh, hardware. So I tell you this story that, that very few people know, but it was immediately after YC, right? We just closed YC, we had our seed round, so that part w- was, was going well. But, um, what was not happening was manufacturing. We, we didn't have any expertise in manufacturing, right? So we were really naive. And so certain point, I go to my wife, Alexandra, who is one of the co-founders and s- and I say, "Look, manufacturing is not happening. I need to go and fix it." And she says, "Oh, okay. And so what do you do?" "Oh, I'm flying to China." And she says, "When?" "Tomorrow." And she says, "When do you come back?" "Once I have fixed it." And so I came back a few months later, uh, after, yeah, being, being, being there with-

    4. HS

      Sorry, wh- and she was okay with that? I mean, that's not a normal thing to do.

    5. MF

      Well, my wife is y- you have to do what you have to do, right? And particularly for the company. And so if the company needs this, then you have to go to China, go to China, fix it, and then come back. (laughs) That, that is how it works (laughs) in our family.

    6. HS

      My word, that's patience, my friend. Can I s-... Was that seed round easy to raise? Respectfully, you weren't like Silicon Valley Stripe software engineer, and you were fixing hardware, not a popular investor category.

    7. MF

      Yeah.

    8. HS

      And like sleep, not an obvious category that investors invest in. Was it an easy seed round to raise?

    9. MF

      Yes, and I don't say yes easily because a lot of our rounds have been very, very, very difficult. The advantage we had at that time is that hardware was really hot at the time. There were a lot of campaigns on Indiegogo and other platforms. And so a lot of investors immediately after YC, because we already sold 6,000, 8,000 units in pre-orders, we were one of the hottest YC startup at the time. But that almost didn't happen anymore. (laughs) So after that, actually hardware became something that very few investors like, uh, in the Valley because it's very complicated, it requires a lot of capital, it's very easy to screw up. And so after that, uh, it became much harder to raise.

    10. HS

      Do you s- do you think investors are justified in their hatred of hardware?

    11. MF

      They are justified 98% of the times. But I think if you find the right company and the right team, no, because, I mean, look at Tesla and Apple. They are hardware companies. So if you wanna build trillion-dollar businesses, hardware works. It's really, really hard to get there.

    12. HS

      So when you are analy- I'm now purely using this for my investing business. (laughs) When you're analyzing a hardware startup and you're looking at the team, what is it that you want to see? Is it, "Hey, you've been in manufacturing before, you know how the sausage is made, and you can-"... build product? Like, is naivety good in building hardware?

    13. MF

      Number one thing you really want to analyze is how much they understand their unit economics. Meaning, as a company, we have been in trouble a bunch of times until when we really fix our unit economics. And so if those unit economics don't work, the faster you grow, the more you lose money. And then harder, you can have returns, replacements. So there are a lot of different factors. It's a very complicated business. And so you really need to understand, okay, do the unit economics work in this business or not?

    14. HS

      And so, um, sorry, I'm just, I want to understand that.

    15. MF

      Yeah.

    16. HS

      So when we say about the unit economics, is that in terms of like your bill of materials, which is obviously the cost it is to create the goods, your return? What, what, how do you break down unit econ? Because you've got also customer acquisition by channel.

    17. MF

      Yeah, yeah.

    18. HS

      You know, LTV, I guess, is a difficult thing to understand.

    19. MF

      Yeah. So you, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great question. You almost need your P&L at the unit basis. And so, okay, what is your gross margin, which comes after the BOM and the COGS, right? And what is included? And after that, that needs to really be above 50%.

    20. HS

      Above 50%?

    21. MF

      Yes. And probably best is 55, 60.

    22. HS

      Okay.

    23. MF

      And then after that, you need to have, obviously, you have CAC, you have a credit card, you have returns and replacements, you have all that. And then, okay, what is your contribution margin?

    24. HS

      Now, what would you say CAC is? Like, if you were to just kind of-

    25. MF

      Yeah. I think for great companies, I know our CAC is really, really good. It needs to be below 20% of the, of the price.

    26. HS

      Okay.

    27. MF

      Right? But a lot of companies, you will start seeing they are 30, 40, 50. And the reason is they postpone the payback period. So a lot of companies, they will tell you, "Oh, okay, I don't know, my gross margin is, uh, 30%. And then I spend 40% because then I have a subscription, and in 12 months, I get the payback." That most of the times doesn't work. And the reason is substantially, you need to have enough cash for 12 months to cover that delta in the CAC. While instead at Tait Sleep, we have an immediate margin on day zero. So the more you sell, the more cashflow you generate and you become profitable. And we have been profitable for two quarters now.

    28. HS

      Can you take me to a time... S- I did do this brilliant schedule. I'm loving this. Can you take me to a time when unit economics was off and what you learned from that?

  4. 8:0317:11

    Unit Economics & CAC Insights

    1. HS

    2. MF

      (laughs)

    3. HS

      (laughs)

    4. MF

      I can talk about that for, for hours. Um-

    5. HS

      Lucky Alexandre, date night with you is a riot.

    6. MF

      Uh, yes. There was a time where our gross margin was, uh, um, half of where it is now. And our CAC was 2X what it was now. And we were air shipping units because of the demand. And so air shipping for a product like ours, which is fairly big, uh, is extremely expensive. And so our units were upside down. And so what happens is you keep selling and you keep growing, uh, but it becomes a vanity metric because you're really burning cash for every unit that you sell. And so that is the moment where if there is, I don't know, a recession or the market slows down, you're in real trouble because you can't raise. This is the typical example of growth at any cost, where you just want to grow. Yeah, we are growing 3X year over year, but at what cost?

    7. HS

      The hard thing is you can also justify it in your head by saying, "Well, we can sell ancillary products to those existing customers."

    8. MF

      Yeah. This is always, oh, and, and then, uh, we'll-

    9. HS

      Word of mouth.

    10. MF

      ... reduce the BOM and the COGS, uh, and then, uh, things will change. Th- things will not change. What you need to do is you stop, you step back, and you say, "Now I take a hard decision, and I change the price, and I make this thing work, and I set a cap to our CAC," which is what I did. Then you take a hit because growth stops for some time. You just need to believe in your team that within six months you're going to fix it and you start growing again. But it's a shocking time.

    11. HS

      (laughs)

    12. MF

      I can tell you.

    13. HS

      How do you think about setting a cap to your CAC? A CAC obviously is customer acquisition cost-

    14. MF

      Yeah.

    15. HS

      ... how much it costs to acquire a customer. How did you approach setting a cap to that? It's a very hard thing to do.

    16. MF

      Yeah. So-

    17. HS

      Did you do it by channel?

    18. MF

      No. For... You start blinded. At least we started blinded. And I came up with a hard number, and I said, "From now on, we don't spend a penny above this CAC. I don't care about what, anything that is happening in the world. This is our CAC." Why? First, is, uh, uh, uh, is just an internal decision, right? But I tried to base it on a couple of things. First, okay, the top companies in the world, what is their marketing budget compared to their revenue? So you try to find a proxy. Second is also, what is the CAC that the, I can afford to have this contribution margin? And so you almost go top down. If I want to have 20% net margin on day zero, this is the CAC I can afford.

    19. HS

      Mm-hmm.

    20. MF

      And so you go to your marketing team, and at the beginning, they will complain, "This is absurd. It will never work. Growth will fall apart." Let it fall apart. I give you six months, and then you need to start growing again because you need to figure out channels that work at this CAC.

    21. HS

      Mm-hmm.

    22. MF

      And we have done this two times, and it worked every time.

    23. HS

      Do you think marketing teams are ready for that? They've been so trained on-

    24. MF

      No.

    25. HS

      ... a world of free cash, that just brand marketing-

    26. MF

      Yeah.

    27. HS

      ... this, this, this, those bo- I don't feel they're mentally ready.

    28. MF

      And, you, you know what is the biggest issue often? And it happened to us twice. So I, I, I'm, I'm the king of mistakes.

    29. HS

      (laughs)

    30. MF

      So I can talk about any mistake. But then most of the time so far, I was able to fix it. But where you struggle the most is with executives. So you can find executives that have been at previous companies that, and they grew them, but it was a different time in the market where it was growth at, at all costs. If you go to those executives and they're used to spend, I don't know, 100 bucks, and now you tell them, "You need to do it with 50," within three months, they're gonna quit or- because they think this is unreasonable, this will never work. You need to reach this scale before you can start thinking about optimizing unit economics and all that. And at the end of the day, it's all bullshit, you know? 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.

  5. 17:1120:38

    Product and Pricing Evolution

    1. MF

      and so when I wanna talk about pricing, I talk to Italian very successful companies that have been profitable since day one. I don't talk to many Silicon Valley guys. And the reason is these guys, they built... I don't know, one of our investors is the, the f- the founder of a major fitness company in Italy, right? They make almost a billion dollar in revenue. They're worth multiple billions. So big business, right? This guy started the company 30 years ago and never raised a penny until when they went public, blah, blah, blah. And so I talk to these guys because this guy is selling fitness equipment for 10K with a profitable business that generates 70 million in cash every year.And so I wanna talk to him because he knows how to make the, the bottom line work, not the top line.

    2. HS

      I was speaking to someone at Chanel the other day and they raise prices 11% twice a year and they see increased demand-

    3. MF

      Yeah.

    4. HS

      ... on goods.

    5. MF

      100%.

    6. HS

      I'm like, "Fuck, that's a good business."

    7. MF

      Because it becomes way more aspirational.

    8. HS

      Yeah.

    9. MF

      And people think that, correctly, that if you raise the price, the quality is higher than other competitors. So you don't wanna get in a price war. Once you get in a price war, particularly with a physical good, you're in real trouble because then the, the business will not work.

    10. HS

      I was debating whether to ask this, but I'm so enjoying our conversation and, uh, this relationship, so I'm gonna kind of put a thorn in the side. I always think mattresses, I know it's not just mattresses, but I always think mattress is a bit of a hard business because it's like and then what? And you don't replace the mattress very fast. It's not an Uber that you get three times a week or whatever. Like, how do you think about the LTV of mattresses and like whether it's actually a good business given you buy one every seven to 10 years?

    11. MF

      There has been another lesson. So now, substantially all our business is just the cover. We don't, 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 revenue.

    12. HS

      Of revenue.

    13. MF

      Everything is the cover. And the whole point here is use any mattress you want that is a commodity, is a piece down by foam, so buy whatever you, you want, right? They will be making a huge markup on whatever you buy so you, you might spend 2K, 1K, doesn't matter, and we just sell you the technology that goes on top of that, so it's this mattress cover which is a wrap.

    14. HS

      Was that always the case? When did that become the focus?

    15. MF

      So we started with the cover, then we switched to the mattress, and then we went back to the cover.

    16. HS

      Why did you switch to the mattress?

    17. MF

      We switched to the mattress because at the time we wanted first to test that, second because mattresses they have incredible unit economics. The main problem of mattresses are two. One, it's a commodity and so what happened with some of the D2C brands, it became a price war because anyone could sell the same product and unit economics didn't work. And the second is what you were saying that usually people don't buy a new mattress for eight years. Yeah. But with the cover, for us it's completely different, right? There are 30 million mattresses sold every year but there are just in the US 300 million people sleeping on a mattress every night, right? And so our time became immediately way larger, 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.

    18. HS

      Why do people return? Is it just a lack of knowledge around how to use it? Is it lack of knowledge around installation? When you analyze that with the team, where

  6. 20:3825:32

    Fundraising and Growth

    1. HS

      you're like, "Ah"?

    2. MF

      Particularly at the beginning, now the product improved a lot, in the early days, um, it w- it was all about comfort for sleep, right?

    3. HS

      Yeah.

    4. MF

      And so if you change even a little bit the comfort of the mattress, they might not like it, even because a large part of our users, they, they are two, you know, they have a partner, so you need to make two people happy, not just one.

    5. HS

      W- we're gonna get to principles. I do just have to ask, you mentioned, uh, rounds being hard to raise.

    6. MF

      Yeah.

    7. HS

      It's never a straight line. What was the hardest round to raise when you revert back?

    8. MF

      The A, the Series A.

    9. HS

      Series A. Why was that so hard to raise?

    10. MF

      At the time, we were receiving a term sheet but part of our business at the time was also, uh, licensing our technology to some mattress manufacturers, right? So it was a sort of, um, uh, intel inside concept, right? And so there was this investor, um, who already invested in the seed, they were interested in leading the A, but, um, part of the investment was subject to signing an LOI with one of the largest mattress guys in the world. And then these guys, they call me and they say, um, "We're out," th- the mattress guys. "Uh, we decided not to move forward." So I had to call the investor and the investor said, "Matteo, I told you, you know, this was a key for, a key thing for me so we're out too." And he was super fair, meaning I, I, I knew that that would happen and so I-

    11. HS

      Are you not a bit like, "Fuck you"? And I mean that in the nicest way but it's like, "Fuck you, believe in me. Uh, why do you need an LOI? It's a Series A. Like, we're not at the D, E stage. Why is your belief in me and the vision... come on."

    12. MF

      They were, uh, I mean, they have always been upfront that that for them was really important, right? The, the B2B business, they didn't believe in the B2C part. This is a really nice guy so I completely understood. Business is business, I, I, I think like that so I immediately understood but I still remember very clearly me and one of my co-founders Max, Ma- Max smokes, I don't, and so we were downstairs, uh, in front of our office with, with Max, uh, with Max, uh, smoking and talking about how much runway we had and that we had a couple of weeks to fix it or we were in trouble. And we fixed it.

    13. HS

      (sighs) A couple of weeks to fix it?

    14. MF

      Yeah.

    15. HS

      Who came in and led the A in the end?

    16. MF

      Uh, there was another investor that we had called, um, Yunxi, so it was, uh, is, is a very large investor that is also, they helped us with China to create the manufacturing. So we went through all that and then Keith led with Khosla and then Founders Fund and then Valor.

    17. HS

      I mean this totally respectfully, there was like a plateau in Eight's history in my mind in terms of brand perception and then it suddenly ramped.

    18. MF

      Yeah. Um-

    19. HS

      And I don't know why it suddenly ramped. Why was that from your viewpoint?

    20. MF

      So when, when Keith led the round with KV, with Khosla, that is when we really rethought, uh, many things including the brand, right? We've rebranded completely and we created this concept of sleep fitness. We decided to go up with prices and premium positioning which is part of what I was telling you. We created the pod, right? So the current product that is 100% of our revenue launched literally four years ago, twen- 2019.... right? So this thing went from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue in four years, which in hardware is really rare.

    21. HS

      Yeah.

    22. MF

      But the previous products were completely discontinued. And so if you look at the companies like-

    23. HS

      Were you scared to do that?

    24. MF

      Hmm?

    25. HS

      That's a big decision, discontinue.

    26. MF

      Yeah. I think yes. But at the same time, we wanted to, to play bold. I think having people like KV and, and Keith, and, uh, there was also Deleon behind your back and supporting bold decisions gives you a lot of confidence.

    27. HS

      Yeah.

    28. MF

      Right? Because it's not, "Oh, I'm, am I smoking something (laughs) about this vision?" No. If these people believe it...

    29. HS

      People are like, you know, do investors really add value? Do they really add value? Did having Keith, KV, subsequently Founders Fund, did that change your ability to hire, do you think?

    30. MF

      Yes. Yeah. And maybe it's not 100%, but I think there are multiple gems that we have in the company that joined because you have these people behind, and so they just say, "Okay. This vision must be real if these people are behind these guys."

  7. 25:3226:40

    Founder Advice and Investor Role

    1. MF

      think about the firm, meaning, "Oh, I'll, let me try to talk to Founders Fund to see if you can raise." But if you have a very bold vision and a very contrarian view of how (clears throat) the world will look, right? Because what we are saying is that Yerbette will become the greatest preventative health platform in the world. But if you go on our website, you could just say, "Oh, these guys, they sell some products for your sleep, to heat and cool." And so you really need to talk to the right person in the firm, and usually it's 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, uh, at our history, right, we, we have some of the greatest investors, right? We have Keith, we have, you know, Khosla Ventures, we have Founders Fund with Trey Stevens, we have Valore with Antonio Gracias, right? And what I realized recently is it's not a coincidence. Meaning, 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

  8. 26:4033:26

    Sleep Tech Innovation

    1. MF

      will dominate sleep a certain point. So I don't have to convince them on that, right? If you talk to Keith, he already knows. He, he has been talking about this for 10 years and so I don't have to convince him that technology wi- can enhance your sleep and there will be a trillion-dollar business in this space. At that point, it's a matter for these investors just to understand, are you the right team to do it or is there is someone that is better? Well 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.

    2. HS

      It's a very... I, I do sympathize 'cause I totally agree with you in terms of you don't wanna educate the investor. When you're educating investors, it's just, it's too hard to sell.

    3. MF

      Yeah.

    4. HS

      And I buy the long-term vision and I see that, but then you also have to be grounded in reality and grounded in unit econ and aware of ancillary products that you build out-

    5. MF

      Yeah.

    6. HS

      ... expanding LTVs, and that's where I think the dislocation can happen.

    7. MF

      Yeah. But I think some of the greatest investors, if they believe in you as a team, they know you will fix it. Fixing unit economics is possible. It's human. Uh, uh, it, it's just hard work of, you know, operational excellence. And so you just need to hire the best people and you will do that.

    8. HS

      Yeah.

    9. MF

      But will the world change and adopt a technology that improves sleep? Yes or no? That is something that they just need to have a gut feeling.

    10. HS

      I totally agree, and, uh, you definitely see it in those investors.

    11. MF

      Yeah.

    12. HS

      I, I love that. Okay, I wanna discuss the principles 'cause we kind of touched on them a little bit. You mentioned operational excellence there. I just wanna start on the first one. And by the way, these are the principles of world-class execution.

    13. MF

      Yeah.

    14. HS

      You're expecting a book coming out soon, I hope. Yeah, book deal in the works. Clarity of thinking, Matteo. How do you... what, what does that mean to you, and how do you ens- try and make your clarity of thinking as optimal as possible?

    15. MF

      It's something I'm really obsessed about. Um, and so f- first, 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. But clarity of thinking is this ability 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, right? So first, we're very data-driven. And second is, what is the clear outcome? Sometimes people are very not... uh, if, if they don't have clarity of thinking, they can write something that is very confusing, it's not data-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 Rabois, right? They are some of the greatest at, at expressing a very complicated concept with few words in something that, I call it the grandma rule, right? Something that my grandma could understand. Sometimes, you know, uh, my team writes me something and it's extremely complicated, and I just say, "Okay, can you explain this to my grandma?"

    16. HS

      (inhales deeply) Uh, it's a really hard one, I think, for you in terms of, like, the grandma rule and where you position the brand 'cause 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.

    17. MF

      Sure.

    18. HS

      Do you see what I mean?

    19. MF

      Yeah.

    20. HS

      How do you make something accessible but aspirational?

    21. MF

      I think y- you play, for aspirational, you use, uh, images.... right? And you try to position very premium, something that you really dream of. But in terms of worth and the value 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 gonna explain my product? And there is where now we keep tweaking and tweaking and tweaking to help you pitch our product tonight.

    22. GC

      What do you think has been the messaging or the wording when you've looked at it even like, "That's it for us"?

    23. MF

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

    24. GC

      But like, what do you put on a billboard then for that?

    25. MF

      "Never sleep hot again," or, uh, "Sleep comfortable for the rest of your life." Something that is very simple. Then obviously, our marketing team is way better.

    26. GC

      Do you ever think of like, for ... You have so much room to run on comedy. Like, your wife may be hot, but you are not.

    27. MF

      Yeah. (laughs)

    28. GC

      (laughs)

    29. MF

      Flatter her.

    30. GC

      Yeah, yeah.

  9. 33:2643:46

    Execution and Product Strategy

    1. MF

      time. Write it down. You, you, you shou- just say, "Oh, I analyzed five option, I recommend option C." Cool, can I read it? And I read really ... fairly fast and within literally five minutes, I can give you thumbs up, thumbs down. And even async, we don't even need to jump on a call if we're not in the same place.

    2. GC

      Do you find you lose tone? Like I have with my CFO in particular. There's some sensitive items, budget items I thought we were not tight as w- we could be. And there's some sensitive things. Do you ever pick the phone up and call people and say, "Hey," like, "I feel this one actually needed to be on phone?"

    3. MF

      I would say probably 20% of my meetings is impromptu.

    4. GC

      Mm-hmm.

    5. MF

      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.

    6. GC

      Speaking of bandwidth, another one is operational excellence. It's kind of a bandied around term, uh, very popular. How do you think about your own operational excellence and what are the biggest needle movers have been and what you've done to optimize it?

    7. MF

      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. The first one is quality, and the second is velocity. We'll talk about now velocity. And so you need to keep a very high bar in terms of quality at a very high velocity, and then you have this output. There is, uh, actually some example from, from Keith, Keith Rabois, right? And output usually is a function of how many barrels you have. Barrels are people in your company that can get everything done from zero to completion, right?

    8. GC

      Mm-hmm.

    9. MF

      And you have barrels and ammunition. Barrels can lead anything from zero to completion, ammunition support them. Usually the output is a function of this. You can do as many things e- based on the number of barrels you have. If you have five barrels, you can usually do five things. But the key of this operational excellence is how do you make sure that you keep moving really, really fast without compromising quality? And so they are opposite metrics, and you challenge them, uh, against each other.

    10. GC

      What's the biggest challenge of having them opposing each other?

    11. MF

      It's the best thing ever. Uh, 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, I don't know, call it 2X a year over year, right? At this CAC. There is a tension between these two, right?And, but this tension is exactly what they want, right? Because if you just give them growth, they could grow 5X year over year. They just spend 5X more CAC or 3X more CAC. If you just, if 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 matters. We don't do anything at Eight Sleep if there is not an opposite metric.

    12. HS

      How do you do that? If you ... I'm, I'm just intrigued. If you were thinking about building, like, a media company, how would you have an opposite metric?

    13. MF

      You just need, uh, I think there was this example from, from PayPal, right, where they were, they wanted to grow the number of users.

    14. HS

      Mm-hmm.

    15. MF

      But the counter-metric was to validate and make sure that they were, um, real users. And so the example of Keith on that was always that if you just wanna, uh, make sure that you wanna validate every user, you would just ask every user to come to your office and sign a piece of paper. Obviously the company wouldn't be scalable, right?

    16. HS

      (laughs)

    17. MF

      But you have 100% certainty that this is a real person that you can trust.

    18. HS

      Yeah.

    19. MF

      And so you always need to find this balance. And so for a media company, I don't know, for you is number of downloads.

    20. HS

      Mm-hmm.

    21. MF

      I don't know. Then you need to think, okay, what is the logical counter-metric that will make my business stronger or more efficient or, uh, more sustainable?

    22. HS

      I get you. What mistakes have you made with operational excellence? When you look back now, and go, "Ugh, I can't believe we did that."

    23. MF

      Most of the times, it's probably connected to the opposite metrics. Like you wanna ship, um, quality of software, right? Sometimes now 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, to ship a new feature. Or another example is focus, right? Sometimes my engineers or the head of engineering says, uh, "We cannot address a, a bug we fig- we found last night. This can happen in two weeks because the team is already focused on, on, on this pipeline of products." And my answer is, "No, we need to do it today." I, I give them a 48 hours, right? So usually if, if something come up, we need to fix it very, within 48 hours. If that doesn't happen, we must have a very strong reason and I wanna read about that, about that reason. You always want to find this balance between these two opposite parts of the business.

    24. HS

      You mentioned like the 48-hour turnaround there. I often think about speed of execution and velocity.

    25. MF

      Yeah.

    26. HS

      And part of me says it's the most important thing in a business, and I do think especially in zero-to-one, it really is on the testing and iterating side. And then part of me thinks actually some things need a lot more deliberation. How do you think about, well, first, number one, I guess foundationally, is speed of execution as important as everyone says?

    27. MF

      It is, uh, without compromising quality. So yes, and then you set the opposite metrics of quality.

    28. HS

      Is it possible to do it without compromising quality? If I can do it today for you and it's 80%, or I can do it in a week for you and it's 90%, which do you want?

    29. MF

      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 on, on his book, right, 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 a shitty app, then we don't go very far as a brand, right? But if it's 85% there and then you keep improving, uh, every single day for the next week and you take it to 100%, 100% we should do that. There was actually this point that, you know, they taught us at, um, YC where they, 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 that thing down in 30 pieces, and every day you make some progress." And so we really talk about progress at Eight Sleep, how can you do as much progress as possible only 24 or 48 hours?

    30. HS

      I do wanna just, like, dive into that 'cause I think Ramp actually did it very well in terms of velocity. They have like at the top of every doc, like, Day 628.

  10. 43:4648:45

    Pricing and Differentiation

    1. MF

      the concept is, is very similar. It's just that the bar is, is different, right? And so when you wanna ship hardware, you will never have 100% confidence when you ship a hardware that everything is perfect. You will always discover things that you didn't know. And so a certain point, you, where y- you need to flip, uh, 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 s- to the point where if you are too rigid with very long term roadmap, that doesn't work in a startup. Ship the thing. When we switch from the mattress to the cover, right, which now is 99% of our sales, we did it in three days. And 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 this thing immediately became 20, 30% of the sales even if it was hidden in accessories. And so I always push my teams, "Can this help us learn faster?" And if the answer is yes, go and be bold and take the risk.

    2. HS

      Can I ask, can you take me to a time on both sides, one where being faster has helped you, and another where being fast has hurt you?

    3. MF

      So the, the, where it helped us was the cover, right, one of the mass- biggest win of the business. Uh, now sometimes we, 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 launch it, and so we could have done it a month before instead of a month after.

    4. HS

      Can you change pricing? People are always like, "Oh, it's very hard to go up in pricing."

    5. MF

      You can change pricing. You can change pricing.

    6. HS

      So you disagree with the notion you can't go up and it's difficult and-

    7. MF

      100% d-

    8. HS

      Yeah.

    9. MF

      ... 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, even if, if you're growing well, uh, you know, you're not Apple, right? (laughs) And so th- don't fool yourself thinking that you are that big brand. You're just ... Then what you need to be aware is there is a lag, right? So if you change price, there will be customers that saw your product for the previous 30 days, 60 days, right, and they saw a certain price, higher or lower. Like, for example, in our case, we tested different warranties on the product, right? We have seen for X period of time people saying, "Oh, but what about that warranty?" Everything you do, you, you can do it, you can do it the same day. You just need to be thoughtful, which will, goes back to clarity of thinking, about thinking the second order effects. Will people ask this? W- 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.

    10. HS

      I, I, I agree with doing everything today. You mentioned, like, executive offsites, you mentioned getting everyone aligned in terms of moving 30% faster. Teams are the hardest (laughs) thing, always. Um, what have been your biggest lessons in terms of talent management?

    11. MF

      I mean, I think one of the biggest lesson is you really need to pay attention with when you hire executives from big companies. I think s- this is something really well known. I made mistakes there too. Uh-

    12. HS

      What, what are those mistakes that you would tell me as a young startup founder listening, who sees shiny logos from Apple and Tesla and SpaceX and goes, "Wow, that's great"? What would you tell me knowing what you know now?

    13. MF

      So first, even if these people were really the, the successful drivers of other, in, in other companies, right, which, which could be possible, you wanna make sure that first, uh, the historical time of when they were successful is still similar to yours. It 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 costs and they join your company and 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 at scaling businesses with a very efficient CAC. That is a different game. The second is, if they come from very large companies, their 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 wanna test it and be fine with the customer reaction. If they start thinking about the brand, the brand impact, and this, this, and that, obviously, you need to be thoughtful, but you need to take some risks to learn faster, and maybe they reach a point where they were n- 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. 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 at a different phase of their life. And instead in our company, again, we are pirates, man, if, we 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.

    14. HS

      As I totally agree with you, can I just start on the... how does your hiring process look as a result of that? Like how do you structure it then to test for those?

    15. MF

      Yeah. So we made a lot of mistakes in hiring too. (laughs)

    16. HS

      (laughs)

    17. MF

      So, you- you-

    18. HS

      I've never met anyone who's like, "Oh, we did it well from day one."

    19. MF

      No.

    20. HS

      Never. Never does that happen.

    21. MF

      Um, the first thing is we accept to be

  11. 48:4558:47

    Hiring and Team Building

    1. MF

      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, 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- the CFO of Amazon, if you want to join Eight Sleep, you have to do- do your homework and we give you few days and a very complicated project and you will present it. If you don't want to do it, it's fine. For us, it's a way of selection, right? Because it- it- it shows how committed you are.

    2. HS

      And just so I get an u- understanding of this, this is a task that you would do in that role that is...

    3. MF

      Yeah, usually it's a problem we currently have in the function.

    4. HS

      Uh-huh.

    5. MF

      So we also learn-

    6. HS

      Yeah.

    7. MF

      ... what is your perspective and it's, yeah, it's actually like your first day of work.

    8. HS

      Okay.

    9. MF

      So this is a f- problem you would face the first day of work, put it together, put your thoughts, put your strategy, show me the data and show me your clarity of thinking.

    10. HS

      Have you ever had anyone be like, "Pfft."

    11. MF

      Oh, yeah.

    12. HS

      "Are you kidding me? I was a principal engineer at Tesla."

    13. MF

      Yeah, yeah. Particularly, you know, sometimes executives then you're surprised, sometimes the recruiters say, "Oh, this person will never do it. Th- they are a senior executive at Tesla." Then the good people, 100% of them, they do it.

    14. HS

      Oh, yeah, they have the humility.

    15. MF

      Yeah. Yeah.

    16. HS

      Yeah.

    17. MF

      And they get excited, right? So that is one. And then we don't hire anyone... so y- when- when you talk to a person at Eight Sleep there are three ratings. There is pass, hire, and strong hire. We don't hire anyone if there are not three strong hires.

    18. HS

      So three strong hires on the voting panel for that?

    19. MF

      Yeah.

    20. HS

      And how big is the-

    21. MF

      Or across, yeah, the- the people they- they spoke to.

    22. HS

      How many touch points are there with the team? Is that three out of 10? Three out of five? Three out of 15?

    23. MF

      It's probably somewhere between three out of five, three out of six.

    24. HS

      Okay.

    25. MF

      Yeah.

    26. HS

      So it's kind of at least 50%, so it's strong hire.

    27. MF

      Yeah, yeah. And the other thing, and this is more mental, is we are a default no hire. The default is if you come to Eight Sleep we don't hire you unless you really blow our mind. And the reason why this is helpful is, I don't know, one of my executive recently came back and say, "Oh, there is this engineer has a great pedigree, I know work at this company and that company, uh, I'm not a strong hire but I think I can, uh, I can grow this person into the role." And I say, "No, we are a default no hire. So unless you are extremely bullish on this person that you believe we would be dumb to let this person go, we don't hire." So I'm- I'm... we just stop here the process and we move on.

    28. HS

      Y- you mentioned kind of just being slow there, I get it, but sometimes you just have to hire today 'cause you- 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 'cause-

    29. MF

      Yeah.

    30. HS

      ... they need to versus no, it needs to be the right perfect hire?

  12. 58:471:23:09

    Workplace Culture Dynamics

    1. MF

      I understand that some people, you just still wanna go home, you know, to your partner, to your friends, and, you know, have some pride of, you know, what- what is your title and particularly if you're moving. But I ha- we had experiences where when we were hiring bad in, uh, 2019, a certain point, the VP of engineering changed the title of an engineer. And this guy started coming in completely dressed like with, with a T-shirt and a tie the following day thinking of being a manager (laughs) . And he was managing like, I don't know, one or two people, so it literally made no sense. But so the, the, the story there is y- 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 IC to manager. You need to be a manager before you're formally a manager. The easiest way for us, we, our teams are structured in squads. So there's the engineering team, there is the product team, and all that. Then 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, so the person who is leading that micro business unit, right? I wanna 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.

    2. HS

      When can you play with titles?

    3. MF

      After multiple years, after, uh, an insanely great performance, so you need to be, you know, every s- six months or 12 months that you have the, uh, your performance review. You get rated on all these principles, for each of them, strong, medium, low, right? And if you are a top performer in the company, probably you are at the point you're now asking for a title change, but if you do, that is the only case, uh, when we consider it.

    4. HS

      I think a lot of people, I mean this respectfully to you, will be listening to this a little bit daunted because there's a lot of founders who are listening who 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?

    5. MF

      Yeah. I didn't have them since day one.

    6. HS

      Mm-hmm.

    7. MF

      I literally spent a lot of time studying o- on a weekly basis, right? I really studied the best. You will see that a lot of the- the- the things I share, for example, they come out from people like Keith or others. It- it depends on- on- on the subject matter. But it was developed o- over time.

    8. HS

      Yeah.

    9. MF

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

    10. HS

      Would you say the playbook's the most important one?

    11. MF

      Yes.

    12. HS

      Yeah.

    13. MF

      There is one we didn't cover yet, that is writing. W- we're obsessed with writing at Eat Sleep.

    14. HS

      Uh, w- we'll discuss writing after this. One other one that I just have to... Pay. H- what have been your lessons on pay, when to move, what it can indicate?

    15. MF

      So we do it every year for people. We have... I don't think we are very sophisticated on this, so whatever I say, I think it works for, I would call it early stage companies. I think we need to raise our bar on this. But what we do today is we have three levels of, uh, compensation increase based on you're a top performer, you're okay, or there is no change if you're a, a low performer.

    16. HS

      If you're a low performer, no change, should you not be moved on?

    17. MF

      Yeah, yeah. That would be the first thing I would, I would, uh, discuss with the executive, right? And the reason is, is not because you wanna be, you know... you don't wanna 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, right? Most of the times people are not that. And so maybe we're not the right fit, you know, as a culture, as a product. Maybe we're not the- the right fit for this time of their life, right? We are very intense as a culture. And so if you're not intense, if- i- if you have other things going on in your life, it's highly, you know, we- we should respect that, but at- at the same time, so you cannot be friends with everyone, I always tell my team, right? So you need to pick your friends. And so 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- we need to part ways. But treat them fairly.

    18. HS

      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 actually here, but we moved him to this other side of the business where he's actually quite good, and that- 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?"

    19. MF

      Correct. Yeah.

    20. HS

      And it's like, no, actually, he's not as good as the other community managers.

    21. MF

      Yeah. And the other typical mistake is people come back and what they say is, "I need three months, so I started looking for a replacement. I still need some help here." And at the beginning was, I was accommodating that. Now I became ruthless. I say, "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, right? You need to be respectful. You don't keep them hanging, and you already know that you wanna 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. So treat them fairly, give them an opportunity. If we can help them, recommend them in other companies where they think they're a good fit, we do. You need to find someone who is the top 90, you know, in the 99th percentile for the job.

    22. HS

      Writing. The only thing I write, Matteo, is tweets.

    23. MF

      Oh, you're very good at that.

    24. HS

      Thank you so much. Yeah, you know, I have, I've crafted it over many years. Um, let's just start with, like, you've said before about the importance of writing. You said it's so important for clarity of thought. Help me. Why is this so important and how the fuck can I do it? (laughs)

    25. MF

      I will not take a meeting with anyone in the company if I don't get an agenda/memo. We call them agendas, but they are memos. It could be from a one page or a half a page. It- it depends on- on... But an average meeting, it could even be five pages, right? Like we have a weekly growth meeting where we review all the data from the previous week, and there is, like, 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 gonna take any meeting, you can't schedule a meeting with me if I don't get an agenda. I get all the agendas the night before.

    26. HS

      Mm-hmm. What makes a good agenda versus a bad agenda?

    27. MF

      Massive difference. And usually probably takes at least six months to develop someone to write an incredibly good agenda. Because the best agenda, they're shorter, they go straight to the point, they are data-driven, and they're very clear. And so every, every-

    28. HS

      Do they posit opinions? Do they pos- like, do they say where they want to get to at the end? Like, how are they structured? I know it sounds weird.

    29. MF

      Yeah. So usually there is an executive summary at the top, which is obviously the summary of the key topics with the key data. Then there is, uh, points to be discussed, and then usually there is the- the real meat, right? And so this is usually based on OKRs and so... Or, or goals. Our goals usually are monthly. Uh, 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 CAC. You have three section in the agenda, you're, you tell us what is happening in each of them, what we are doing, what's working and what's not working. This is usually a good framework, right? Summary, what's working, what's not working. Summary, what's working, what's not working. And you support it with data. And then at the bottom, there is an area 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 that is how you enforce velocity, right? It's not, oh, a week. In my mind, if people talk to me and they don't set a deadline, it is the same day. That is how my brain works. And sometimes with junior people, it happened, like, two Sundays ago. I asked for something because I had a meeting, uh, early on, on, on a Monday and I asked this thing to the finance team. The person didn't... Say, "Oh, yeah, I'll get back to you." And then at 9:00 PM I didn't get the thing and I say, "Where is the thing?" And they say, "Oh, I was thinking to send it tomorrow." And I could have done a better job there because I, I should have set the deadline so I think it was my mistake. But usually on my mind, if I don't set the deadline, it's the same day.

    30. HS

      Is it wrong to ask someone to do that on a Sunday? I would ask them.

Episode duration: 1:53:23

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