Take a Break: Matteo Franceschetti on Breaking Sleep Cycles and Turning Rest into a Competitive Advantage with Eight Sleep
In this episode of Breaking Precedent, host Leah Solivan sits down with Matteo Franceschetti, the visionary founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, to explore how sleep is becoming the most critical, and most overlooked dimension of human performance. From growing up in an Italian town to revolutionizing sleep technology in Silicon Valley, Matteo shares a remarkable journey of grit, ambition, and innovation. He opens up about the transformation from competitive athlete to tech entrepreneur, and why he believes the future of sleep lies in compression, personalization, and AI-driven health scans. The two dive into topics like sleep fitness, temperature regulation, global expansion, and even how sleep training parallels child development.
Guest Bio and Links:
Matteo Franceschetti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, the sleep fitness company.Eight Sleep developed a proprietary technology which is redesigning sleep by developing cutting-edge AI and machine learning models to track bio signals during the night and optimizing body recovery and rest while asleep. The end goal of the Pod is to compress sleep and scan your body while asleep to monitor your health. Eight Sleep is currently used by pro athletes and top performers across multiple industries and was recognized as one of TIME’s “Best Inventions” in 2018 and 2019, was named one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies” in 2018, and has raised over $150M in funding from leading investors, including Founders Fund, Softbank, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, Valor Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Naval Ravikant, and Patrick Collison.
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Connect with Matteo Franceschetti on X @m_franceschetti
Show Notes:
(0:00) Intro
(1:30) Leah introduces guest, Co-Founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, Matteo Franceschetti
(2:00) Q: If you could sleep anywhere in the world, where would it be?
(3:00) Matteo’s early life and career as lawyer
(9:00) The Birth of Eight Sleep
(10:30) Innovations in sleep technology
(13:30) Redefining sleep as performance
(16:30) Full-body scanning - the future of preventative health
(19:00) Contrasts between italian and Silicon Valley cultures
(26:00) The discipline of survival in hardware
(30:00) Jet lag strategies and biohacking sleep
(33:30) Early challenges in manufacturing
(37:00) Sleep’s role in the health tech movement
(40:00) Eight sleep's operating principles and startup discipline
(40:30) “ I always push the team to think in terms of hours.”
(42:30) Closing thoughts
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Leah Solivan is the host of Breaking Precedent, a podcast that explores the stories of innovators who are pushing societal boundaries and setting new precedents in their fields. Leah is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, education, marketplaces, and retail. Leah has 15 years of experience building and creating technology products that have reached millions of people around the globe. She started her career at IBM as an engineer in the software group, working on Lotus Notes and Domino. In 2008, Leah founded TaskRabbit, the leading on-demand service marketplace in the world.
Connect with Leah:
Website: breakingprecedent.com/
Instagram: @labunleashed
