lystn

In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten share their thoughts on sleep for founders. Being a startup founder can be very stressful, and It’s very common for founders to struggle with sleep. Not getting enough sleep can not only affect your productivity, but it can also be detrimental to your health. In this episode, Steli and Hiten talk about how founders tend to struggle with sleep and some challenges that keeps founders up at night, how there’s a science to sleep and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:32 Why this topic was chosen. 02:44 How founders tend to struggle with sleep. 02:57 Why some founders struggle with sleep. 03:11 One main challenge that keeps founders up at night. 04:07 Another challenge that keeps founders up at night. 05:42 How some founders feel like they need to outwork others 06:18 How there’s a science to sleep. 07:32 Tips for getting better sleep. 08:48 How everyone has trouble sleeping. 3 Key Points: Make sure you don’t rely on one big customer.When I’m unable to resolve an issue, I tend not to have proper sleep.Founders feel like they need to outwork others. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. And today on the Startup Chat, we're going to talk about sleep, and specifically we're going to talk about how to get more sleep because sleep is really about ... Usually when you talk about sleep, it's about how do you get more sleep. And so, I think even deeper than that, and this could be applicable to others, but we wanted to focus on basically thoughts on sleep for founders. I think could be really valuable to anyone who's not a founder as well. So that's the topic to just give you context on why a founder might not be able to sleep. [0:00:40] Steli Efti: Awesome. Well, before we go into it, I want to give a shout out to a sponsor of ours, Brain.fm. That's a music app that actually helps you focus, relax, or sleep better. This product uses science backed music and it actually does work. Both Heaton and I are customers. We love the service. We use it all the time. Don't believe us, just give it a try. You can go to Brain.fm/StartupChat to get a 20% discount, so that's less than six bucks a month or less than 40 bucks a year. Once you've given it a free trial and you notice its power and effect, Brain.fm/StartupChat. Make sure to check that out. Now back to sleep for founders. This is actually an interesting angle, right? Let's maybe highlight a little bit on, before we talk about the importance of sleep and why having good quality and quantity of sleep would aid a founder, I'll just for now assume that many people could just rationally understand why those things would be important. But what do you think are unique challenges when it comes to sleeping that apply to founders more so than other people maybe? [0:01:55] Hiten Shah: I think a founder can have more things in their head in general. Just so many different things that they have to worry about. At some point in a company at some scale, there's somebody in the company you're definitely looking to figure out whether you should let them go, figure out whether someone else, figure out whether you should move them around. So I think what ends up happening is at some point you have so much going on that there's a number of things that could be in your head that could be impacting your ability to actually get a good night's rest. And that's not exclusive to founders, but I find that founders tend to have more trouble with this then other types of folks in an organization because they're dealing with so many different factors that other folks might not be dealing with. And that usually has to do with people problems because those are the ones that tend to be less clear,