Key Takeaways:
Matteo’s non negotiables:
- 8-9 hours of sleep a night
- Weekday fasting: 1 meal per day between 1,000 and 1,500 calories
- Weekend fasting: 2 meals per day
- Exercise 5-7 times a week
- Sauna
- Ice bath
“The reason why sleep is important is not because sleep itself is important but because sleep gives you the energy in the morning to achieve what you want in your personal and professional life”
Decision Making Framework:
00:40 Early Interests
Matteo’s interests when he was younger:
- Sports
- Motorsports
1:49 Sports Background
Gaining an interest in sports from his father, Matteo was a ski racer, tennis player, and a sponsored car racer.
“I always say that being the CEO of a startup is probably the closest thing to being an athlete. You need to always be at peak performance, there’s always something broken, you always need to raise your bar”
3:30 Around the Clock Training
Matteo considers exercise, nutrition, and recovery as time spent working because it is required of him to continue to operate at peak performance to build his company, Eight Sleep.
Matteo’s training:
- Working out in the morning
- Sauna for 15-20 minutes
- Ice bath
5:20 Non Negotiables
Matteo’s non negotiables:
- 8-9 hours of sleep a night
- Weekday fasting: 1 meal per day between 1,000 and 1,500 calories
- Weekend fasting: 2 meals per day
- Exercise 5-7 times a week
- Sauna
- Ice bath
9:00 Filtering His Attention
Matteo has cut out all social media except Twitter due to work and is very conscious of the media he consumes. He reads 1-2 books per week, listens to key podcasts, and spends time with people that inspire and motivate him.
10:20 Decision Making Frameworks
Decision making frameworks Matteo uses in his life:
- Reversible vs. Non-reversible decisions
- Assessing decisions and delegations based off of knowledge and impact
“Creating this library of frameworks in your mind than you can use all the time if you need them simplifies how you approach and make decisions”
13:02 Investing
Matteo describes his time in Italy, making angel investing, and his transition to the United States and how he started his company Eight Sleep.
“Whatever you invest in, they could change their business model, they could change what they do, but if the founders are great they will figure it out. If they don’t want to fail, if they’re hungry, if they’re smart, that is what excites me and just being a part of the journey with them”
Matteo breaks down a recent round of fundraising for Eight Sleep listing recent investors and how they are helping the company:
“What is important as a CEO is when you have access to all these great people is to understand quickly what they’re great at and then be able to leverage them in that dimension”
16:58 Leading a Startup
Matteo describes Eight Sleep’s culture as a sports team in the playoffs.
“At the end of the day, a startup is trying to achieve the impossible. Limited resources in a limited period of time, you’re trying to do what other companies that are massive with more capital and resources cannot do.”
21:36 Two Sides of the Confidence Coin
Matteo talks about what he says are the two sides of coin of confidence:
- Self-confidence
- Continuously checking and challenging his work ethic
24:11 Building Eight Sleep
Matteo’s obsession with efficiency of performance led to him creating his business, Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep is a sleep fitness company with the technology to heat and cool your body throughout the night of sleep. They monitor your heart rate, respiration, and quality of sleep and then provide you with the overview of your sleep scan.
“Our mission is two things: we want to compress your sleep and save your life”
Looking to the future, Matteo says that Eight Sleep will be able to control all of the environmental factors of your sleep and will be able to predict sleep’s correlation with health issues.
“The reason why sleep is important is not because sleep itself is important but because sleep gives you the energy in the morning to achieve what you want in your personal and professional life”
35:22 Asking Big Questions
Matteo is taking a new approach to old ways of thinking by asking big questions:
Can we compress sleep and how much?
Can we save your life?
“When you want to disrupt an industry you want people who don’t come from that industry on your team because they start challenging all of the assumptions of that industry”
39:15 Developing Company Culture
The people that Matteo says are successful on the team at Eight Sleep:
- They are passionate about the mission
- They work extremely hard
- They continue to raise their own bar
- They always ask for feedback
42:50 Eight Sleep’s Team
Matteo talks about how COVID-19 has impacted Eight Sleep and how the team stood up to the challenge.
“Sometimes when you have a crisis, there is this weird effect where priorities become crystal clear”
“What I have learned the most over the past year is when we hire, we just need to find people that have our mindset because you cannot be friends with everyone you just need to select the people who click with you and there are other awesome people that are not your friend, they’re still awesome, but they just have a different perspective and the world needs those”
50:46 Reading Recommendations
- Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
- The Almanack by Naval Ravikant
- The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh
- Only the Paranoid Will Survive by Andrew Grove
- The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
- Paul Graham Essays
52:10 Matteo’s Interview Choice
If Matteo could sit down and interview anyone dead or alive, just not a family or friend, he would choose Barack Obama.