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This week Harry talks with Matteo Franceschetti, founder and CEO of the Khosla Ventures-backed startup Eight Sleep. The company' smart mattress, called the Pod, is one of the latest (and largest) entries in the burgeoning market for home digital-health devices.

The Pod is designed to counteract body heat and provide a surface that stays cool all night, on the theory that people sleep better when it’s cool or cold. It includes four layers of foam topped by an “Active Tech Grid Cover” that includes sensors to detect body temperature, breathing patterns, heartbeat, and tossing and turning, as well as a network of tubes that silently carry water through the cover, regulating temperature for each side of the mattress. 

The New York, NY-based company  has raised more than $70 million from big Silicon Valley firms including Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, and Y Combinator and has roughly 60 employees around the world. Franceschetti, a former competitive ski racer, tennis player, race car driver, and attorney, has said that he thinks of Eight Sleep not as a mattress company but as an “end-to-end platform for sleep."

The Pod comes with a free smartphone app that controls the grid cover and aggregates data it collects—such as resting heart rate, respiratory rate, sleep stages, sleep time, and heart rate variability—into a daily sleep fitness score, which gets charted over time. The company aims to use the data to coach mattress owners toward healthier habits that maximize their quality sleep time. A smart mattress can do this better than a smart ring or smart watch, Franceschetti says, because it's got more space for sensors, and "there's nothing to wear and nothing to charge."

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TRANSCRIPT

Harry Glorikian: I’m Harry Glorikian, and this is MoneyBall Medicine, the interview podcast where we meet researchers, entrepreneurs, and physicians who are using the power of data to improve patient health and make healthcare delivery more efficient. You can think of each episode as a new chapter in the never-ending audio version of my 2017 book, “MoneyBall Medicine: Thriving in the New Data-Driven Healthcare Market.” If you like the show, please do us a favor and leave a rating and review at Apple Podcasts.

There’s a saying among startup entrepreneurs that sleep is just a symptom of caffeine deprivation.

But seriously, even software coders need a solid seven or eight hours of sleep every night, or else