Tom Hale, CEO, ŌURA
Eurie Kim, Chairperson of the Board, ŌURA; General Partner, Forerunner Ventures
Moderator: Phil Wahba, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Sleep Lab On Your Finger

Conferences

Brainstorm Tech 2022: Sleep Lab On Your Finger


Good afternoon. I'm here with the ceo of aura, tom, hale and yuri kim chair of the company's board. So let's get right to it. Can you walk the audience through what an aura ring is and what it's for and give them a bit of fomo. Yeah, we all have our rings, don't we? Actually, just by show of hands, how many people in the audience have an aura ring right now? Yeah. Looking around last night at dinner, I saw probably like it felt like three and 10, something like that. So good. Well, what, what is your ring for those who don't know, it's this little ring, it's made of titanium. It's got about four g of weight, maybe seven day battery life. You just put it on and it's practically invisible and it tracks all these signals that come off your body. Think of it as like, um I don't know, an eighth sense or something like that. It's telling you what's what your body's doing and giving you that feedback every second you can look at it on your phone and see what's happening. That's that's really what it is. It's a health tracker. It started in sleep, right? Started in sleep. Why sleep? Why is sleep important? Wow. Well, you know, sleep is something you want to see when, you know, you're, you're anxious. You know, if you get sleep, your mood is gonna be higher, you're gonna have better immunity. You're gonna not eat as much sleep is like this universal positive thing for you right, like sleep really helps you. And so if you think about um the value of sleep, it also has a long term value, right? Because if you sleep well, uh turns out you have a lower risk for Parkinson's disease, you have a lower risk for type two diabetes, you have a lower risk for Alzheimer's disease. And actually the american Health Association, just put sleep as the eighth factor in cardiovascular health. So sleep is really, really important to you now, that's why sleep. Um I think you guys can kind of imagine what what we're doing here is we're expanding into health. And I just want to tell a little story, personal story about, about the ring, which is about me because in the fall of this last year I was um I was pretty stressed out and I wasn't sleeping. And in fact, I had the aura ring and it was telling me kind of that it was gonna be okay. It was giving me some quick support. It was telling me I was sleeping three hours and 45 minutes, not long enough. Um, but I was really starting to say, what can I do to improve my sleep. And so I started testing different interventions to see if I could prove my sleep. I made the room colder. I stopped watching netflix right before I went to bed. I stopped fiddling with my phone, you know, and getting anxious about what's going on. I made some really strong behavioral changes and each day my sleep score kept getting better and better and better. I felt better now. That's all the positive things that I learned. That's all really good. But I also learned some negative things and I think maybe some people in this room might relate to it. Um I drink coffee in the morning, I worked really hard, hard, hard all day. And then um at night I might have like maybe a glass of wine, maybe maybe a second glass of wine. And what I learned was that second glass of wine killed me. You can see the screen on the right here, basically it ruined my sleep. I thought I was relaxing actually, it was ruining my sleep. So I stopped drinking coffee, I stop drinking wine. And let me tell you something, it was a huge improvement. You can see it in my scores here. These are the details I'm getting in the app. It's telling that my resting heart rate below 50 which is great for me. My HR V or heart rate variability was kind of a measure of your stress is 81. My um my overall readiness score was climbing from the low sixties into the eighties and that kind of reinforcement, That kind of data is really key. So that's the gist of it. And I know you've got one, I know you've got one, there's there's stories behind this whole thing. I call it the or a story or the or effect. So I don't know, you know, what's your story? So my journey started back in 2019. Um It was maybe 18 months after I'd had my first kid and obviously I was sleep deprived and I was trying to get healthier and I thought I need to do something to help my sleep, talk to a friend who is a sleep therapist, he's like, you should try ordering my husband at the same time, a physician talk to his physical therapist, he should, you know, you should try and ordering what is this thing. So I tried it actually, if you go back to the other side, this is interesting because when you look at tom's number on that average H R V H R V is heart rate variability, basically, if your heart rate doesn't drop low enough at night, it doesn't have enough time to have variability. Mine last night was nine, might as well have been dead, but evidently this altitude is pretty bad on me and I didn't drink that much. So it wasn't the alcohol, it was definitely the variability on the altitude, But more interestingly, so I saw how much I was using this ring and getting so involved in the data, this was the Gen two ring. So, before this ring that we all have now. And um so of course I'm a venture capitalist, I reach out and I say, what is this company like? Where is it from? I've never heard of it before. Look on crunch base of course. And uh it's a Finnish company has been around for seven or eight years, Never heard of it. And they didn't have a U. S. Website at the time. And uh and so I thought okay it's a Finnish company out of my focus area, I'll move on. And the next day a founder reached back out to me and said, hey do you wanna do you wanna meet or a ring? And I thought that's the world. Conspiring to say I need to talk to his company so fast forward. I started doing diligence on the company. Um I talked to a UCSF professor who was doing uh fertility research of all things and I was just trying to understand like why would a professor, a researcher be using the ordering because it was all about the quality and the accuracy of the data. That was the entire pitch that it was about sleep. So why are we talking fertility right now? And so she talks about it and she said, look, you know of all the things that we can use to track body temperature uh and and ultimately hormonal cycles for women. Um The ordering was the most accurate, not only because it was easy to use, but it also had the best sort of um sensor sensor quality and I'm listening, I'm learning I'm now you know whatever. Thinking about having a second kid anyway in our family and I'm and I just say, oh, well, that's really interesting. I wonder if I could track my body temperature too. So it's really awkward to be in front of like an entire group of people, half of, more than half of our men. But this chart here is my body temperature chart and you can see that there's like a natural curve on the sort of left half of that chart where it dips is essentially where a woman is supposed to ovulate. And the right half of that chart is when I got pregnant And literally I knew that information within what is that three days And it took a pregnancy test 5-6 weeks before it turned positive and you can't go to the doctor until you have a positive pregnancy test. So that was all before we even had the women's module. This was just the data that was in there and I was, you know, a user, a customer just trying to like figure out how to improve my health and and really knowledge is so empowering. Um And so as tom said, everybody who comes in gets Sonora's, you know, you you come for a reason, you're maybe running a marathon or doing a triathlon, like Phil, or you're trying to figure out your sleep and stress and for me it was my overall health and, you know, it's just really exciting to see the level of data that's captured on this little ring. Yeah, so um I did very much appreciate the accuracy of the sleep data, the heartbeats. Uh Sometimes I thought there was a bit of overkill like seven p.m. Every day. I get a notification saying you've got to start thinking about going to bed soon. I live in new york at seven p.m. I mean I do go to bed at 9 30 but still uh a few times I said to my phone yes mom. Um But by the way so um you know it's it's uh I never uh sorry I'm never a an early adopter. Um And because of the sports I do I already have a few wearables. And so for me you know what what I think you guys will, I know you're working on something we're gonna talk about a second. It's sort of like making the case for yet another uh device. But also and this is my obsessive neurotic side. Like I'm almost afraid of having new KPI to track every day because that can feel like that. So there so I think you know um uh there there are refinements and there are new things coming in. So actually why don't we talk a little bit about that like what is next for you guys? You have a sport, Same thing, you've got a fashion thing thing. So. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah so I mean we're just actually releasing spo2 So that's overnight spo2 so you can track your your breathing regularity, the amount of oxygen you get in your brain as you sleep. And that's really important, particularly people who might have sleep apnea. Um, we're also, we just completed a collaboration with Gucci, which is pretty exciting. We Gucci ring is a really, you know, kind of high fashion ring. It's black and gold. I'm wearing it here. That's not the thing I thought I would be doing. You know, it's in a tech ceo job, but it's been pretty fascinating working with Gucci. But in terms of sports this week, this thursday actually we're releasing stratas integration and that allows the data from Strabo workout to make its way into or idle track, you know, against your activity score. It'll it'll be tracked as correlation against your sleeve all the things. It just is really great. So we're super excited about that. That's gonna be a great positive. We look beyond that. We're thinking about health. I mean, you look at the fall, what's gonna happen in the fall, We're all going to get, you know, some version of the flu or something like that. Being able to detect your illness and give you notifications about that is really important to us. Obviously, women's health and reproductive health really critical, especially right now. I mean, even when Covid hit, we ended up doing a big study called the temperature study with UCSF And it was amazing how many people in the community offered their own data to be able to support covid tracking and the net of all of that was that anyone who was using an aura could tell if they had covid up to three days in advance of any test. And that is incredibly powerful to be able to say, hey, my numbers aren't looking great. Maybe I'll self quarantine, maybe I'll do something to make sure that I don't continue to spread this to my family. So these are all the things that we're trying to get at and really it always goes back to, you got to be good at one thing first and for the last eight plus years it's always been about sleep and you know, it's kind of cool now for other companies to get into it because they realize how important it is. But back then I remember this one stat in the pitch deck, you know, this is like the series b pitch deck, but 95% of people sleep every night, Only five or 6% work out on a regular basis. So when you think about how applicable this is to all of our lives and all of our health, there's one thing you can do and all I said was you had to sleep better. I feel like that's a, that's a good way to start. Um and that's certainly why I was like all in on it and you know, I haven't taken it off, I kind of joke, like I've got my wedding rings in this ring and most of the time I have this ring on and I don't have these rings on. I literally never forget my darling. I will panic and go back home. Thank you for this and I think later, we will all meet for at the reception for drinks and wreck our sleep tonight. So thank you for the introduction.