Name: Brainstorm Tech 2024: Don’t Sleep On It
Uploaded: 2024-07-16
Duration: 9 min 33 s
Description: Tim Rosa, Chief Executive Officer, Somnee Interviewer: Leo Schwartz, Fortune

Tim Rosa, Chief Executive Officer, Somnee Interviewer: Leo Schwartz, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: Don’t Sleep On It

Conferences

Good morning, everyone. I think Andrew might have taken my question, but I was going to start off. I know last night might not have been the most conducive conducive to a good night's sleep. There was arcade games, there was bowling. It was a busy night. But can I just pull the audience on average? Who thinks that they mostly get a good night's sleep? All right. That's a, that's a pretty good, pretty good section there. I know, especially among this cohort sleep apps and sleep tracking is incredibly popular from fitbit to eight sleep. Now, I've had a very interesting experience the past couple weeks of testing out the product offered by Tim's company here, Somny, which is very different. It's a headband that you wear with electrodes and it delivers electrical pulses to your brain. So you wear it for 15 minutes before you go to sleep. When you close your eyes, you can actually see lights flash before your eyes and you can feel like a warm tingling sensation and it plays music. So it's very different, I would say than probably pretty much anything that you're used to. And I want to start off with Tim, if you can really explain what somny is and how the technology works, how it differs from a lot of the other tools that are out there. Yeah. So somny was actually uh invented by four UC Berkeley professors and neuroscientists. Um One of them, Doctor Matt Walker, he wrote the book Why We Sleep. He runs the sleep lab at UC Berkeley. Doctor Robert Knight. Uh he runs the Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley and two others. And they basically pioneered uh this idea of using neuro stimulation to uh manipulate your brain to help you fall asleep. And the way it works is we have an eeg sensor that maps your brain. Um We then personalize the data sets to determine the right frequency to help you fall asleep faster. So we cut the time it takes to fall asleep in half. We also eliminate uh sleep disruptions by a third and we outperform sleeping pills and traditional defaults like taking Melatonin or C BT I. Um as Matt says, sleeping pills are really bad. They're like a baseball bat to the brain. They're addictive. There are a lot of side effects. Um So it's a new technology, it's a new category product. It is a closed loop product. So it's a diagnostic as well as a therapeutic, which is pretty rare and it's exciting and it works. So, yeah, so Tim, you were previously at fitbit and I mean, like you said, this is a really different product than probably most of the different tools that anybody in this audience has tested out instead of waking up the next morning. And it telling you, you know, you've got two hours of deep sleep and one hour of rem cycle, which doesn't really mean that much to most people. This you only wear for 15 minutes. And again, it's a pretty strong pitch, I think where you're getting electricity delivered to your brain, what made you decide to go from fitbit in this last cycle of wearables to SOMNY, which is really representing the next generation. Well, Fitbit, um and most wearables are general diagnostics at Fitbit. We pioneered sleep tracking and sleep sensors. Um I always knew, you know, the size of uh the population that is focused on sleep and the issues around sleep. Um I believe 70 million uh consumers have a sleep disorder in, in America. Um What we're trying to do is focus on the therapeutic side. We need the diagnostic. It's a clinical grade diagnostic. It's the gold standard EEG and PSG sensors. So bringing that into a wearable that you can use and wear for 15 minutes is something very powerful. But the unique thing about it is a therapeutic, I think with wearables, they're great obviously tools to help improve and monitor your overall health. But we're literally literally tracking sleep data sets at the source. So at the brain, as opposed to on the wrist and the finger. So you're getting really clear data sets and we need that in order to perform the therapeutic side of the product. Do you think the pitch has been harder to make to customers where again with something like Fitbit, you know, you wear it on your wrist, you get some data, you can do what you want with it, with this. You know, you're putting electrodes on your brain as you sleep at night. Is that a harder product to convince customers to adopt? I think there's, there's certainly education. Whenever you create a new category, there's a lot of education that comes with it. It's the same thing. And when we launch Fitbit, we had to educate the, you know, consumer market about what we're doing. Um Data was really important, owning your own data was incredibly important here. It's the same idea. Um Basically, we're trying to help you understand um how to improve your sleep. Sleep is a deeply painful and personal experience for a lot of people myself, I struggled with uh uh adult uh insomnia um until I started using uh Soni. And so the thing that's really unique and sets us apart is that there is education, there's more awareness, especially coming out of the pandemic. The great thing about the pandemic is we transition from Kardashians as influencers to scientists and doctors as influencers. So people like Andrew Huberman, certainly, Dr Matt Walker, Peter Tia provided a lot of research and validation around what was happening in just overall health. Um Sleep obviously is one of the most important things we call it. It's a, you know, sleep is your superpower, it affects your physical health, your mental health and certainly performance weight loss, etc. And so for us, it's really about how do we embrace the technology, how do we create education and awareness for what we're doing? How do we drive efficacy and certainly how do we improve your sleep overall? Do you think that this category of wearables which are more focused on therapeutic services than tracking data is going to replace the last generation? No, I think, I think wearables are great. They're really important, obviously, you know, I help launch Fitbit and, and, but wearables are very important because they give you an idea of what's happening and there's certain, certainly certain sensors depending on the that are more accurate. Um We know about, you know, the finger is an accurate uh placement for uh uh heart rate data, et cetera, but we're not looking to replace your, you know, your whoop or you know, your aura. In fact, we'll be partnering with a lot of the wearables. Um just given the, the clinical data sets that we're providing, but even at 50 it, we were always trying to figure out how do we close the loop? We were doing a lot of, you know, M and A looking at the reality is consumers are always looking for the silver bullet, they want to understand what's happening. But how do you drive to a health outcome? How do you improve a physical, you know, fitness goal or a weight loss goal or how do I improve sleep? So, again, the unique thing about what we're doing is the closed loop nature. The therapeutic side of actually fixing your sleep, it's very, very powerful. It's certainly unique. There aren't many products that exist like this on the market. Um One of my personal favorites is a company made a product that's made by a company called Eight Sleep. Um And they make um incredible uh diagnostic and therapeutic products to help regulate your body temperature as you may or may not know, in order to fall asleep, you need to reduce your core body temperature by three degrees. So a sleep makes an incredible product to help you improve your sleep through lowering that core temperature. So barring everyone going out and getting saw me tomorrow and by the way, you can test it out in the networking tent next door or getting one of these, I think the eight sleep mattress is something like $3000. So it might not be for everyone. Are there any other simple tips that you can offer? Maybe that Dr Walker shares on how people can improve their sleep on a nightly basis? Yeah, I think these are basic and all of this is out there at this point in fact on our soni website, we have all of math's tips. Um One of the most important things is being regular with your sleep hygiene and your schedule. So going to sleep at the same time, waking up at the same time, very important. Something that I learned. Uh Actually I didn't learn until I started working at Somny was, I always thought caffeine had a six hour shelf life, but it turns out it has a 12 hour shelf life, so, or shelf life. So if you drink, if you go to sleep at 10 o'clock, you need to stop drinking coffee by 10 o'clock in the morning. And so, um those are things that are really important again, regulating your core body temperature, uh reducing light. Um And certainly one of the other things is exercise. One hour of vigorous exercise does a lot to improve your deep sleep. Um And the single most important thing to not do is alcohol. We being here, we're certainly drinking a lot of alcohol. Alcohol is really bad for sleep, certainly bad for your, your rem sleep. Um So making sure you monitor your alcohol consumption during the evening before you go to sleep. So unfortunately, that's all the time that we have a reminder. You can go check out Somny in the networking 10. I also think that you have a 2.0 version coming out soon. So keep an eye out for that. Tim Thank you so much. For joining us here today. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.